Too Secret Too Long, page 11
The transfer of Sonia would have been in line with Soviet practice if, as I contend, she was already acquainted with a spy inside MI5. When Donald Maclean knew that he was to be posted to Washington he informed his controller, the K.G.B. diplomat who called himself Anatoli Gromov. Gromov was then switched to the Soviet Embassy in Washington so that he could continue to service such an established source.[26] The transfer of Alger Hiss to the U.S. State Department coincided with the arrival in America of Boris Bykov to direct the unit of Soviet military intelligence being run by Whittaker Chambers.[27]
On the evidence so far adduced the likeliest candidate for an MI5 spy serviced by Sonia in Oxford is Roger Hollis.
chapter ten
In Post at Blenheim Palace
While the MI5 Registry and some of the officers were housed inside Blenheim, most of the accommodation was anything but palatial and Hollis’s office was in a Nissen hut in the grounds.[1] Soon after his arrival MI5 was asked for a secret list of the foreign communists residing in Britain who were considered to be dangerous security risks because of their allegiance to the Soviet Union. The request had come from the U.S.Embassy in London, where the Immigration Department had received warnings from a Briton who had been dealing with communist refugees that some who were no longer anti-Hitler, following their approval of the Nazi-Soviet pact, might apply to enter the U.S. A letter, declassified from ‘Secret’ by the U.S. authorities in July 1983, shows that the request for the list was sent to Guy Liddell, then head of B Division responsible for counter-espionage. Liddell’s reply, dated 26 December 1940, included a list of foreign communists whom, to quote Liddell, ‘we do consider to be dangerous’.[2]
The MI5 department responsible for overseeing the dangerous activities of all such communists was Section F, headed by Hollis, and there can be little doubt that it sent the list on to Liddell. The list contained only twenty names and they all appear to have been Germans, including some Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. At least three had become well known to the security authorities through their public pursuit of pro-Soviet interests – Heinz Schmidt, Wilhelm Koenen and Hans Kahle. As published documents have shown, these men, and some of the others, were Soviet espionage agents.[3] Several of them had openly associated with Juergen Kuczynski and had been interned, as he had, as dangerous security risks. Kuczynski, however, was noticeably absent from the list though he had been released from internment only nine months previously and had lost no time in resuming his pro-Soviet activities. The fact that he had been released from internment under the pressure of communist propaganda should not have influenced MI5, had it really been alert, particularly as most, if not all, of those on the list were also to be released.[4]
Evidence presented by Dr Anthony Glees in his informative book Exile Politics During the Second World War shows that MI5 had to make some effort to oversee the activities of German communists sheltering in Britain if only to satisfy the requirements of the Foreign Office which needed reports on them from time to time. Hollis’s section was involved in the production of a dossier about the attitude of left-wing German exile groups towards the question of uniting themselves. In a second attempt MI5’s inquiries appeared to support the view that the communists, of whom there were about 300 known in London, were taking over the leadership of the German anti-Nazi exiles. As regards the German Social Democrats (the S.P.D.) MI5 ‘could not convey the significance which the party had possessed and was determined to possess again’. Dr Glees suggests that information favourable to the Social Democrats may have been suppressed by Philby and others attached to the Foreign Office, or in it, who wished the German communists to prosper.[5] It is also possible that such information was withheld by people with similar interests in MI5.
At Blenheim, Section F remained small and Hollis was extremely fortunate in being promoted to the rank of Assistant Director after only two years’ experience and with his health still in doubt.[6] His position as acting head of the section was to be of some significance in view of information which was to reach MI5 later.
The speed of Hollis’s promotion throughout his career continued to be a subject for comment among his colleagues, who attributed it mainly to the influence of Dick White. It was not the result of any display of insight or leadership on Hollis’s part, nor to general popularity because most of his colleagues known to me regarded him as shy and dull or disliked him as being suspicious and shifty. One who watched him over many years described him as ‘terribly self-effacing – the sort of man who would hide behind a mushroom. He had little to say and it was difficult to hear what he did say.’ Derek Tangye, who knew him well at Blenheim, found him ‘austere, remote. I did not think him very bright.’[7] Colonel Sir Eric St Johnston, who knew Hollis at Blenheim and later at Curzon Street, described him as ‘stooping, rather lop-sided with a permanent half-smile and no aura of leadership whatever’.[8] Colonel ‘Tar’ Robertson, godfather to Hollis’s son, was more complimentary in describing him as ‘very round-shouldered’, while Mrs Betty Morris, another Blenheim contemporary who later knew Hollis socially, called him ‘shrunken and always looking older than his years’.[9] As already mentioned, from an early age Hollis suffered from a progressive spinal problem which may have been associated with his tuberculosis. His friend Commander Courtney, who once accompanied him on a trip to the East German border, described him as ‘dark and stooping so that you might almost have thought he had a slight hump-back’, while other later contemporaries, like John Drew and Colonel Noel Wild, referred to him as ‘a hunchback’.[10]
Apart from Sir Dick White I found one wartime contemporary who is said to have admired Hollis – Sir Roger Fulford, the writer who had been with him at Worcester College, but my efforts to secure an appraisal produced only a brief letter stating that he would ‘be ashamed to write anything that was disloyal to him’.[11]
Hollis was essentially a desk operator, the field work being carrried out by officers who were running penetration agents. The most productive of these, and the one about whom most is known, was Maxwell Knight, who was a distinguished naturalist and broadcaster. Knight, who used the code-letter ‘M’, from which his friend Ian Fleming may have derived his initial for James Bond’s chief, operated in secrecy and considerable independence from a flat in Dolphin Square, which meant that his agents and assistants did not have to visit headquarters. One of these assistants, Miss Joan Miller (now Phipps), has told me of Knight’s relationship with Hollis before and during the war.[12]
The results of Knight’s efforts in discovering evidence of suspicious activity by communists eventually filtered to Hollis, and both Knight and Miss Miller found that very rarely was anything done about it. ‘Once a report ended up on Hollis’s desk that was usually the end of it,’ she told me. Knight was deeply concerned – rightly as it proved – with the activities of agents of the Comintern whom he believed to be operating in Britain not just against Germany but on behalf of the Soviet Union. He submitted a two-page report to Hollis entitled ‘The Comintern Is Not Dead’. Miss Miller typed it out and she remembers that it recommended a course of action against suspected Comintern agents. Hollis rejected the report as being ‘exaggerated’ and took no known action on its suggestions. Miss Miller dates the report as having been submitted to Hollis in 1942. There may have been personal reasons why he was opposed to any hunt for Comintern agents, especially those of German origin, when Sonia, who was one of those who should have been on his list of suspects, was operating round the corner from his home. Knight repeatedly voiced his belief that MI5 itself had been penetrated by Soviet Intelligence agents but no effective notice was taken.[13]
After Miss Miller married in 1943 she left MI5 and took a job in another secret department located in Bush House in the Strand. Her job was to read incoming telegrams and ensure that they were passed to the relevant departments. She noticed that an army major was copying some of the telegrams and reported the fact to her old colleague, Knight. An inquiry showed that the contents of some of the telegrams had been leaking to communist sources, but when Hollis was told of the situation he was prepared to do no more than have the major transferred, without any interrogation, to a post in Germany.[14]
Miss Miller remembers Hollis, at that stage, as being ‘withdrawn, dull, uninspiring and already quite hunched’. While compiling a book in the late 1970s about her experiences, Miss Miller claims that she had concluded that he must have been a Soviet agent.[15] This was before I had revealed the official suspicions concerning Hollis, about which she had heard nothing. Miss Miller’s view is currently held by at least two other women who worked with Hollis at Blenheim, though I have been unable to establish when they reached that opinion.[16]
Whatever the truth about Hollis’s loyalty there is no escaping the fact that the efforts of his department against Soviet espionage during the war were lamentably ineffective. The Cambridge Ring operated by the K.G.B. is now known to have been more numerous than the original Ring of Five, with many ancillary supporters, and there were other K.G.B. spies and agents whose activities were never seriously hindered. Prominent among these was Philby’s estranged Austrian wife, Lizi. After travelling back to Vienna to bring her Jewish parents to the safety of London, she lived in London, or close by, throughout the war, cohabiting with a German communist called Georg Honigmann.[17] Both were open communists and Lizi served for some time as a courier between Burgess, Blunt and the Soviet Embassy.[18] MI5, and Hollis’s section in particular, seem to have had no knowledge of this or even of Lizi’s relationship with Philby.
There is still much to be learned about the G.R.U. network in Britain, as the large C.I.A. handbook on its general activities indicates. Sonia is listed as a member, but there is little else. The C.I.A. may have been limited by objections from MI5 against further publicity, as the British security authorities have complete power of veto regarding the release of information concerning British security affairs, even when the U.S. Freedom of Information Act is invoked. But my inquiries suggest that the G.R.U. has been able to conceal most of its wartime work in the U.K. because MI5 discovered so little about it. Dark hints that MI5 had splendid triumphs against Sonia and other G.R.U. operators which must remain concealed for ever have no substance in fact.
chapter eleven
A Dubok in a Graveyard
Some time late in 1942 or possibly early in 1943 a Red Army cipher clerk called Lieutenant Igor Gouzenko, then in his early twenties, was on the night shift in the Moscow headquarters of the G.R.U. on Krapoykinskaya Boulevard. The cipher room of the Special Communications Division was located in half of the ballroom on the second floor of a palace, which had formerly belonged to a millionaire called Riabushinsky, the other half being used as the office of the Chief of Main Intelligence. Beneath a ceiling decorated with nymphs and flowers were rows of tables where cipher clerks, most of whom had junior officer rank, were busy throughout the night with coded dispatches from the various fronts and with information from intelligence agents.[1]
Gouzenko, a short, stocky, fair-haired student of architecture who had been drafted into the Red Army and then selected for training in the deciphering of secret telegrams, shared a table with a pre-war friend, Lieutenant Lubimov. To further the security of valuable spies it was strictly forbidden for one officer to share any information about his work with another, but because the work tended to be so boringly routine, Gouzenko and Lubimov somtimes did so. Gouzenko, who was later to defect and impressed Western security authorities with his powers of detailed recall, told me on more than one occasion what happened on a particular night when Lubimov was handed a telegram from a G.R.U. source in England: ‘Lubimov leaned towards me and said: “This is material from a spy working for us inside MI5. He has the code-name ‘Elli’ and he is so important that he must never be contacted personally but only through duboks.” A dubok is the G.R.U. name for a hiding-place – what you call a dead-letter box. Lubimov then passed the deciphered telegram to me. I read it and saw the name “Elli” in it with my own eyes. I cannot remember all the contents of the telegram and they might not have meant much to me as I never handled “Elli” messages, but Lubimov went on to tell me about the spy. He said that the favourite dubok was a split between the stones of a certain grave. The name on the headstone was Brown.’[2]
As various authorities, apart from Gouzenko himself, have confirmed, all duboks suggested for use by Soviet agents and agent-runners must first be approved by Moscow and the fact that the details had been sent to the G.R.U. Centre indicated that the agent-runner or courier supplying them was a G.R.U. person and that ‘Elli’ was a G.R.U. recruit.[3] At that time the G.R.U. tended to use ‘illegal’ agent-runners and couriers for servicing spies as well placed and as valuable as ‘Elli’, rather than using officials with diplomatic status. And they tended to be non-Soviets, a precaution which limited the diplomatic damage if they were caught. It was essential for the Centre to know all the details of a dubok in the case of a lone ‘illegal’ so that somebody else could be sent to empty it in the event of illness or an accident. To leave a package in a dubok for any unnecessary length of time could endanger the spy because somebody might find it accidentally and hand it to the police. A ‘legal’ agent operating inside the Soviet Embassy could always make local arrangements for such an emergency without involving Moscow.
Gouzenko went on to tell me: ‘Lubimov also said that “Elli” had something Russian in his background but this could have meant no more than that he had visited Russia, had a wife with some Russian relative or had a job to do with Russia. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that there was a Soviet agent inside MI5 during the period 1942–43 and probably later on.’[4]
According to an informant eventually concerned with investigations into the identity of ‘Elli’, Lubimov had also told Gouzenko that the spy was able to bring out MI5 files about Soviet Intelligence officers serving in London so that those officers could see exactly how much MI5 knew about them.[5] In 1942/43 those files were located in the Registry at Blenheim Palace, so the person with ready access to them must have been based there or have been a regular visitor. As will be seen, no visitor fits the requirement and if ‘Elli’ was located in Blenheim the odds are that the G.R.U. agent who serviced him would be lodged not far away, particularly in wartime when petrol was rationed and transport services, especially those from London, were subject to disruption from bombing.
As will be established more fully in Chapter 14, the person who best fits the known information about ‘Elli’ is, unquestionably, Hollis. He had regular and authorized access to the files mentioned by Gouzenko. He had been to the Soviet Union at least once and at the time when Gouzenko saw the ‘Elli’ telegram he was in charge of anti-communist and anti-Soviet security. He also had previous associations with Soviet agents such as Arthur Ewert, which would have been reported back to Moscow and be on record there. His known and likely associates in China were all linked with the G.R.U.
The person who best fits the requirements for the agent-runner who serviced ‘Elli’ is unquestionably Sonia. She is a self-confessed G.R.U. agent-runner and clandestine radio operator working throughout the war in the Oxford area close to Blenheim. When Gouzenko saw the ‘Elli’ telegram she was installed in Avenue Cottage and Hollis was in Garford Road, only about a mile away. She was an ‘illegal’ with independent means for transmitting most of her material. As her memoirs testify, she had wide experience of servicing duboks and describes several which she selected, such as ‘under a protruding root of the fourth tree on the left-hand side, after a railway bridge over the Oxford–Banbury Road’.[6] Further, there is no evidence of any other Soviet agent-runner or controller operating in the Oxford area in the 1940s.[7]
As regards the particular dubok mentioned in the ‘Elli’ telegram – a split between the stones of a certain grave, the name on the headstone being Brown – one would imagine that there must be scores of such graves in the Oxford area belonging to people called Brown or Browne. Nevertheless I thought it worthwhile to investigate any graveyard which could have been mutually convenient to Hollis and Sonia late in 1942 or early in 1943. Before doing so I rechecked my records of telephone conversations I had had with Gouzenko. Originally Gouzenko had described the dubok as a split in a tomb. He had then told me that the grave had belonged to somebody called Brown and I recorded this in the paperback edition of Their Trade is Treachery, published in 1982, long before I made any searches in the Oxford area.[8] In a further telephone conversation, however, Gouzenko said that the name had been on the ‘headstone’, suggesting a grave rather than a tomb. In a letter dated 6 March 1983, Gouzenko’s widow Svetlana confirmed that her husband had told her in 1945 that the name Brown was in the telegram and that he had seen it.
The map on p.85 and the general size of the City of Oxford would suggest that there must be several graveyards in the area, but investigations carried out on my behalf by my son, who is a professional researcher, showed that there is only one, and this was also the case in the war years. The graveyard is called St Sepulchre’s Cemetery, situated off Walton Street, and before it ceased to be used shortly after the end of the Second World War it served six churches, none of which had a functional graveyard of its own.[9] From Hollis’s house it was one and a quarter miles; from Sonia’s a mile and a half. When it is remembered that Sonia had only a bicycle for transport and that Hollis was working six days a week at Blenheim, such convenience would have been essential if visits to the dubok had to be frequent.
