Too Secret Too Long, page 1
TOO SECRET
TOO LONG
Chapman Pincher
First published by Sidgwick and Jackson Limited in 1984
Copyright © Chapman Pincher 1984
This edition published in 2021 by Lume Books
30 Great Guildford Street,
Borough, SE1 0HS
The right of Chapman Pincher to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
To my helpers, overt and covert,
and to my wife, family and friends
who have sustained me
in the long haul
Table of Contents
author’s note
Introduction
chapter one - A Soviet Agent Called Sonia
chapter two - A ‘Good Bottle Man’
chapter three - An Unsuspected Communist Connection
chapter four - Fully Trained Agent
chapter five - A Strange Appointment
chapter six - The Dangerous Dr Kuczynski
chapter seven - Swiss Interlude
chapter eight - Target – MI5
chapter nine - A British Bonus for Soviet Spies
chapter ten - In Post at Blenheim Palace
chapter eleven - A Dubok in a Graveyard
chapter twelve - The Two-faced Dr Fuchs
chapter thirteen - The Kuczynski Parachutists
chapter fourteen - A Mole Called ‘Elli’
chapter fifteen - The Return of Klaus Fuchs
chapter sixteen - The ‘Blowing’ of Sonia
chapter seventeen - The Rise of Roger Hollis
chapter eighteen - A Highly Suspect Escape
chapter nineteen - The Cambridge Conspiracy
chapter twenty - The Great Defection Legend
chapter twenty-one - Chief Liaison Officer – for the K.G.B.
chapter twenty-two - Second-in-Command
chapter twenty-three - The ‘Whitewash’ Paper
chapter twenty-four - Momentous Escapade
chapter twenty-five - In Control
chapter twenty-six - A ‘Pig’ Called ‘Lavinia’
chapter twenty-seven - A ‘Real Outsider’
chapter twenty-eight - A Defector in Place?
chapter twenty-nine - A Spy in the Labour Party
chapter thirty - The Numbers Game
chapter thirty-one - A Defector Called ‘Kago’
chapter thirty-two - Philby’s Defection
chapter thirty-three - The Mitchell Case
chapter thirty-four - The Profumo Affair
chapter thirty-five - A Clutch of Curious Incidents
chapter thirty-six - The ‘Blunden’ File
chapter thirty-seven - The Fixing of Blunt’s Immunity
chapter thirty-eight - The Interrogation of Leo Long
chapter thirty-nine - The Interrogation of Sir Anthony Blunt
chapter forty - Big Fish Escapes as Small Fry
chapter forty-one - A Committee Called ‘Fluency’
chapter forty-two - The Canadian Dimension
chapter forty-three - Hollis’s Last Cases
chapter forty-four - The ‘Drat’ Inquiry
chapter forty-five - The Ellis Case
chapter forty-six - The American Secret Behind the D-Notice Affair
chapter forty-seven - Presents from Prague
chapter forty-eight - The Interrogation of Sir Roger Hollis
chapter forty-nine - A Belated Purge
chapter fifty - Operation Gridiron
chapter fifty-one - The First K7 Report
chapter fifty-two - The Second K7 Report
chapter fifty-three - An Ultra-Secret Warning
chapter fifty-four - A Secret Verdict of ‘Not Out!’
chapter fifty-five - The Public Exposure of Sir Anthony Blunt
chapter fifty-six - An Aladdin’s Cave
chapter fifty-seven - A Flawed Announcement
chapter fifty-eight - Aftermath
chapter fifty-nine - G.C.H.Q.’s Billion-Dollar Spy
chapter sixty - Payment Deferred
chapter sixty-one - A Minor with Major Access
chapter sixty-two - Another ‘Good Bottle Man’
chapter sixty-three - The Outlook for Oversight
appendix a
appendix b
author’s note
Since this book was completed, Peter Wright, the former MI5 counter-intelligence officer, has not only confirmed publicly much of what appeared in Their Trade is Treachery, but has provided a 140-page document confirming and extending the rest. Entitled ‘The Security of the United Kingdom against the Assault of the Russian Intelligence Service’ the document, which deals with the Hollis case, the Mitchell case and several others, including those of Ellis and Watson, was delivered to Sir Anthony Kershaw, the Conservative M.P., in his capacity as chairman of the all-party Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. Wright’s purpose was to secure an official inquiry into the past penetration of MI5, MI6 and G.C.H.Q. to ensure that the possibility of current and future penetration is reduced to a minimum.
An examination of the document was requested by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, and, as Sir Anthony Kershaw felt that he needed the Prime Minister’s opinion before he could form a judgement on the issue, he handed it in. There can be little doubt that a copy was quickly passed to the MI5 management for its views and a statement as to whether there was anything new in it.
It seems likely that MI5 will claim that Wright’s document contains nothing of consequence that was not already in Their Trade is Treachery, and that Mrs Thatcher will be advised that any further inquiry is unnecessary because the facts have already been examined by the Security Commission in 1981. As readers of this book will appreciate, however, the Security Commission did not examine the accounts of past penetration.
While other M.P.s may not be allowed to read Wright’s dossier as such, I have been assured that this book contains his main points plus facts of which he has been unaware. So it should be possible for Parliamentarians to decide whether an inquiry into past penetrations would serve a useful purpose, and to press for it if that is their conclusion.
Prime sources have told me that the MI5 management will continue to oppose any inquiry because it would lower the morale of the serving members. For some years recruits have been assured that the service is ‘clean’ beyond all doubt, but the Bettaney case has demonstrated the complacency of that assertion. A full and honest statement on past penetration is likely to be far less damaging to morale than the exposure of further ‘moles’ who, according to Wright and other officers, are more likely to gain access to secret departments if the current attitude to the Soviet assault, past and present, is allowed to continue. If M.P.s feel sufficiently aggrieved by what has been exposed and are really concerned about the public disquiet, they could mount a demand for an inquiry and for future oversight which the Government would find irresistible.
Introduction
The recent conviction of the MI5 officer Michael Bettaney for actively volunteering his services as a Soviet ‘mole’ demonstrated that the so-called ‘climate of treason’, the circumstances which are said to have induced Cambridge undergraduates and others to become traitors to their own country, persists after half a century. This book is much more about the ‘climate of security’, the even more peculiar circumstances that permitted so many men, and some women, to betray their country for long periods before being detected and, in too many instances, without being brought to justice when they were detected.
The reputations of the British Intelligence and Security Services between the two world wars were legendary and were, justifiably, held as examples of undercover efficiency throughout the world, so much so that any apparent failure was regarded as being more probably a hidden success by the wily British. During the Second World War the performance of both the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5) against German, Italian and Japanese enemies was outstandingly brilliant. MI6, which is essentially an espionage and intelligence-gathering service operating mainly overseas, was responsible for the operation known as Ultra/Enigma, which broke the ‘uncrackable’ German codes and made an enormous contribution to the Allied victory.[1] MI5, now essentially a domestic counter-espionage agency operating in Britain, though formerly with colonial responsibilities, ran the incredibly successful ‘Double Cross’ operation, which detected German spies as fast as they were intruded and turned them against their own country.[2] Since the Second World War, however, the reputations of both services have plummeted, not only in Britain but abroad, and particularly in the U.S., as well as – one would imagine – in the Soviet Union, following a succession of disgraceful spy scandals.
What is the reason for this apparently sudden change in performance? The basic answer is straightforward: the Germans and their allies were almost totally unable to penetrate the British secret services.[3] Against the Soviets, who became the main adversary almost immediately after the Allied victory, performance has been pathetic mainly because both MI6 and MI5, and associated departments like Government Communications Headquarters (G.C.H.Q.), the Foreign Office and the defence establishment, have been deeply penetrated by Soviet agents.
Secret ser
After each security disaster, improvements which seemed obvious were supposed to have been put into effect, but with little impact on the Soviet assault. In 1981 I published a mass of formerly secret information that had been given to me partly to expose the magnitude of the Soviet threat to security but mainly in the hope of forcing some action to counter it.[4] As a result, the Prime Minister set up the first independent inquiry for twenty years to examine all the precautions currently in operation to prevent the penetration of the secret departments.[5] The security situation was found to be sufficiently wanting for many new recommendations, some too secret to be published, to be put into effect by the Government. Those security measures that were not changed because it was believed they had been working well were quickly shown to be ineffective by the chance discovery of a major Soviet spy, who had easily circumvented them, inside G.C.H.Q., the most sensitive secret department of all, responsible for intelligence-gathering by electronic means. Those who wonder whether spies really matter should know that the cost of the damage inflicted by that one G.C.H.Q. spy, Geoffrey Prime, has been officially estimated by the U.S. Defense Department as $1,000 million.
After the Prime case, further piecemeal measures, missed or ignored by the previous inquiry, were introduced; yet Michael Bettaney had been working right inside MI5 and had been subjected to positive vetting and all the other safeguards which are supposed to be applied in such a super-sensitive organization.
A Government machine may be powerless to do much about an international political climate which promotes treachery, but surely it should be more effective than the British Government has been in creating a climate of security to prevent it, even in a libertarian society? I believe it should. With that in mind, and being in receipt of much new and formerly secret information, volunteered to me since the publication of my last book or secured by the acquisition of many declassified documents or by further inquiries, I undertook an intensive survey of all the major incidents of Soviet penetration in a way that has not been attempted before.
The survey, which has taken three years of continuous endeavour, has driven me, reluctantly at first, to the confident belief that in a free society such as ours there is only one way of bringing about a really substantial and continuing strengthening of security: the setting up of an independent body with powers to oversee certain aspects of the work of the secret services and to report on them in detail to the Prime Minister and, in secure terms, to Parliament.
Such a supervisory or ‘oversight’ body, to use the current term, has been frequently advocated on the grounds that the secret services should be more accountable to Parliament mainly to ensure that they do not excessively infringe civil liberties. I advocate it in the conviction that it could greatly improve the efficiency of the secret services and reduce the risk of their being penetrated by more traitors. I make these claims having critically examined each serious incident of espionage, penetration and suspected penetration and weighed the advantages and disadvantages of oversight had it then been in existence. In this examination and in the analysis of the cases, which has not been attempted publicly before, I have been assisted by highly experienced security and intelligence officers. If I am accused of just being wise after the various events then I simply ask the security authorities to follow suit. Meanwhile, with the aid of brief summaries entitled ‘The Potential Value of Oversight’ appended to each case, readers can form their own conclusions about the virtue or otherwise of independent supervision of the secret services.
Previous proposals for oversight of the secret services have been summarily rejected on the assumption that it would inevitably decrease security – a view which I formerly supported. In fact, a degree of oversight far more embracing than anything likely to be accepted in Britain has been operating successfully and safely in the U.S. for the past seven years.
Effective oversight also offers the only deterrent to another outrageous situation – the extent to which Parliament and the public have been systematically misled by official statements and reports on security and espionage affairs. As part of my survey I have examined every relevant Parliamentary statement, debate and official report and, as the reader will see, the truth has been repeatedly suppressed, distorted, manipulated and, on occasion, falsified on spurious grounds of ‘national interest’, while the real purpose was to prevent embarrassment of departments and individuals.
When a secret department is in difficulties and questions have to be answered in Parliament or a report has to be published, the information can only come from the department itself because it is secret. The opportunity and the temptation for misrepresentation or deception are, therefore, unrivalled and are uncontrollable save by the department itself. On a security issue any minister or prime minister is only as reliable as the brief provided by officials. While they are within their rights in denying information which would genuinely damage national security, it is iniquitous that they should distort and falsify history by producing misleading documents or providing misleading statements for Parliament which then become the historical record through Hansard. British governments hate to be accused of cover-ups, but there is nothing of which they are more consistently guilty, largely because of their dependence on the advice and testimony of officials over whom there is no effective oversight. If this book is an indictment of the past behaviour of the Whitehall and Westminster machinery it is also a plea for more honesty, not only in the interests of the public and Parliament but additionally in those of the secret departments themselves.
The evidence shows that the security-intelligence ‘establishment’ has enjoyed so many privileges and concessions for so long that it qualifies to be called the Fifth Estate, and I shall refer to it collectively by that name.
The new light which this book sheds on Sir Roger Hollis, the former Director-General of MI5, and his communist associations will, no doubt, result in further accusations that I am attacking a dead man who cannot defend himself. In fact, the Official Secrets Act would prevent him defending himself if he were alive. Ministers, prompted by Whitehall officials, would have to do that for him, as they already have, with scant regard for the facts. Hollis was such a key figure in the tapestry of the security world that his activities before, during and after his entry into MI5 have to be examined in any serious survey, and the fact that he was involved in almost all the major espionage disasters over twenty-seven years until his retirement has contributed to the growing belief in his guilt among past and present MI5 staff.
