Too Secret Too Long, page 15
I disclosed Gouzenko’s evidence on the English ‘Elli’ in Their Trade is Treachery. Those who found it difficult, or inconvenient, to believe that Soviet Intelligence would ever have used two agents with the same code-name, even in different rings, were confounded when, later in 1981, the Canadian Government unexpectedly released Gouzenko’s original evidence to the Royal Commission.[19] It showed that Gouzenko had been very clear indeed about the existence of the two ‘Ellis’ – one being Miss Willsher, the other being in England.
Hollis returned to England in time to meet the Queen Mary when the ship docked at Southampton on 7 October 1945 bringing the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, and his chief civil servant from the Foreign Affairs Department, Norman Robertson.[20] Hollis went aboard with a telegram from Washington which said that President Truman was in favour of delaying the arrest of Nunn May until more could be discovered about the spy-ring affecting atomic secrets. Hollis had brought back from Canada the translation of a document provided by Gouzenko revealing the arrangements whereby Nunn May was to establish contact with the Soviets on his return to London so that he could continue his espionage. Nunn May, who had already returned to take up his academic appointment at King’s College, London, was to meet an unknown agent in front of the British Museum, having exchanged the usual ‘conspiratorial’ recognition signals and passwords. Neither Nunn May nor the contact kept any of the proposed meetings, indicating that both had been warned of the danger. This could have been the result of a tip-off or of Soviet wariness following the disappearance of Gouzenko. At that stage, however, the Soviets could not be certain that he had defected, as the Canadians were pretending to know nothing about him – unless, of course, they had been told that he was in R.C.M.P. hands by an informer. Nunn May’s arrest was delayed until 4 March 1946.
Early in 1946 Gouzenko was taken from Camp X to the Justice Building in Ottawa where he gave evidence to the Royal Commission over a lengthy period.[21] Hollis then made a further visit to Ottawa and personally questioned Gouzenko there on behalf of MI5. For reasons which will become apparent, the apologists for Hollis have done all they can to suggest that Hollis never interrogated Gouzenko, but I have proof from several prime sources that he did so. Those MI5 and MI6 investigators who became involved in the inquiries about Hollis and have seen the records are in no doubt that he did see and speak with Gouzenko. A former Director-General of MI5 has confirmed to me in writing that Hollis saw Gouzenko and reported on him. After consulting the R.C.M.P., Robert Kaplan the Solicitor-General of Canada has stated publicly that Gouzenko was interrogated by Hollis.[22]
Finally, in talks with me Gouzenko described his interrogator in terms which could apply only to Hollis: ‘When he interviewed me in the Justice Department he was introduced only as a “gentleman from England”. He was only about forty but he was so stooped that he approached me in a crouching way as though anxious that his face should not be seen. I was surprised that this man, who seemed almost afraid to talk to me, asked me very little when I told him that the G.R.U. had a spy inside MI5 in England, known by the code-name “Elli”. We talked in English but for such a short time that we did not even sit down. He behaved as though he wanted to get away from me as quickly as possible.’[23] Later, Gouzenko was to say that the interview lasted only three minutes.
As several witnesses have testified, Hollis was already hunched at that time. Later, after realizing that his interrogator had been Hollis and that he was under suspicion of being a spy, Gouzenko believed that he understood his anxiety and need to keep the encounter short. ‘I wondered if he was worried that I might recognize him from some photograph he thought I might have seen in Moscow but, as a cipher clerk, I had no opportunity to see photographs of G.R.U. spies.’[24]
Mrs. Gouzenko has assured me recently that ‘the gentleman from England’ was definitely not Dwyer. ‘Igor saw newspaper pictures of Dwyer later when he took a public post in Canada. “The gentleman from England” was definitely Roger Hollis.’[25]
Because of subsequent curious events it is important to any assessment of the Hollis case that his interrogation of Gouzenko and its brevity should be firmly established in the reader’s mind. One of Hollis’s former colleagues told me that he saw Gouzenko several times, but Gouzenko vehemently denied this, insisting that he was interviewed on behalf of British security only once by the man he later recognized as Hollis. It should also be appreciated that if Hollis was a Soviet agent when he was sent over to Canada he would have been under control and would have been advised on how to conduct the inquiry with minimum damage to the Russians and minimum risk to himself.
Hollis’s first cabled report after seeing Gouzenko suggested that he did not believe that ‘Elli’ existed and that if he did he was not in MI5 but in some related organization. For no good reason he suggested that ‘Elli’ might be a member of the Double Cross Committee, the group chaired by the late Sir John Masterman and responsible for turning captured German agents into ‘doubles’ working under British instruction.[26]
A note of Hollis’s dispatch, together with one about Peter Dwyer’s original telegram about ‘Elli’, was recorded by Guy Liddell in his office diary, which he wrote up conscientiously each evening. The entry recorded Liddell’s belief that there might indeed be a spy inside MI5 with speculation as to who ‘Elli’ might be.[27] The subsequent treatment of his collection of diaries, known by the code-name ‘Wallflowers’, will be seen to be of some significance.
Hollis spent much of his time in Canada assisting the Royal Commission inquiry and it was only after some interval that he lodged a more detailed report of his interrogation of Gouzenko in the MI5 files. The content of that report was later to intensify the suspicions concerning Hollis, as will be described in Chapter 52. Its immediate effect was to damage Gouzenko’s credibility inside MI5 and to ensure that nothing of any consequence was done concerning the allegation about the existence of a spy called ‘Elli’. This was exactly what the G.R.U. would have wanted. So if ‘Elli’ was sent out to resolve the ‘Elli’ problem in Moscow’s and his own interests, he succeeded.
In contrast, Gouzenko greatly impressed the Canadian Royal Commission by the manner and certainty with which he gave his evidence and it had no reservations in accepting him as a completely truthful witness.[28] By establishing the extent of Soviet duplicity with documents which could not be refuted Gouzenko did supremely important service to the free world. He could have done more had proper notice been taken of all his information and especially of the lead about ‘Elli’.
It has been suggested that Hollis could not possibly have misled MI5 headquarters over Gouzenko’s evidence about ‘Elli’ because the conversations which Norman Robertson, the Canadian Foreign Affairs man, had with members of MI5 would have ‘caught him out’.[29] I have established that Robertson did meet two members of MI5 on about 24 October and later was to become friendly with others, including Dick White. One of those members was almost certainly Hollis himself. As the main concern was Nunn May, the implications of the other identified spies and the need for tighter security in Canada, it is unlikely that the ‘Elli’ allegation would have been raised by Robertson. It was a British domestic matter and it would have been out of normal practice for Robertson to have raised it when Hollis was already supposed to be dealing with it. This view is supported by the fact that the ‘Elli’ allegation was omitted from the report of the Canadian Royal Commission on the Gouzenko revelations, though present in the secret evidence to it released in 1981.
It is convenient at this point to examine alternative candidates for ‘Elli’ who have been put forward by apologists for Hollis. Some have tried to suggest that ‘Elli’ was not in MI5 at all, but the facts refute this. According to original testimony, Gouzenko located ‘Elli’ as working in ‘department 5 of MI’ and in several conversations with me he made it clear that he meant MI5 and not Section 5 of MI6 or any other department.[30] This is supported by a recent statement by Mrs Gouzenko to me in which she said that her husband told her that ‘in the same telegram with instructions for the transfer of a message, Elli was referred to as in MI5’.[31] A memorandum which Gouzenko submitted to the R.C.M.P. in May 1952, when there was no suspicion against Hollis and Gouzenko had never heard of him by name, is quite clear. It begins: ‘Regarding your request for information about the person in British MI5 …’ Gouzenko provided the memorandum at the request of R.C.M.P. Superintendent George McLellan, who had been asked to secure it by the branch of MI5 making inquiries into the Philby and Blunt cases following the defection of Maclean and Burgess in the previous year. The memorandum is so revealing that it is reproduced in full in Appendix A.
In his original debriefing Gouzenko also claimed to have seen evidence of a leak to Moscow concerning a forthcoming visit to Ottawa by British counter-intelligence officers, referred to in G.R.U. coded parlance as ‘the Greens’. This information had been sent to Gouzenko’s chief, Colonel Zabotin, by the Moscow Centre in late 1944 or early 1945 and he had deciphered it for him. It warned Zabotin that ‘the Greens’ were to visit Ottawa to assist the R.C.M.P. in operations against Soviet agents.[32] This almost certainly referred to a secret visit paid in 1944 by Guy Liddell of MI5, making it likely that the leak originated from that agency.
After examining the numerous papers left by her husband, who died in July 1982 aged sixty-three, Mrs Gouzenko told me: ‘Without any doubt “Elli” was in MI5.’[33]
The exposure of Anthony Blunt as a spy active inside MI5 has led some writers to assume that he must have been ‘Elli’, but Blunt and the rest of the Cambridge Ring were all recruited by the K.G.B. and worked exclusively for that organization throughout their espionage careers. ‘Elli’ was, beyond question, a G.R.U. spy whose reports were submitted by his G.R.U. controller to the G.R.U. Centre in Moscow where G.R.U. cipher clerks, like Gouzenko, dealt with them. The G.R.U. and the K.G.B. operated quite independently in 1942, as Gouzenko’s detailed evidence to the Canadian Royal Commission clearly showed. They may have shared information once it had been received and processed but they did not share agents or raw intelligence, a fact confirmed to MI5 by several sources.
Further, Blunt was not able to bring out MI5 files about Soviet Intelligence officers serving in Britain. These files were located at Blenheim during the relevant period and Blunt was based in London, though he visited Blenheim on occasion. When Blunt was eventually interrogated in 1964 he said that his Soviet controller had specifically instructed him not to ask for files on Soviet Intelligence officers unless he needed to do so for his genuine MI5 duties, otherwise he risked drawing attention to himself.[34] The MI5 Registry records show that he obeyed this injunction.[35] Hollis, on the other hand, had daily reason for consulting such files as he was responsible for countering the activities of these Russians.
In 1945, when Gouzenko defected, Blunt was still attached to MI5 and was told about the ‘Elli’ allegation by his MI5 friend Guy Liddell. Blunt wondered if ‘Elli’ might be himself, as he had never been told his cryptonym, and later admitted that he had discussed the possibility with his Soviet controller, who was non-committal, not being prepared to discuss code-names with anybody. Blunt also speculated with Philby as to who ‘Elli’ might be since, as members of the Cambridge ‘Ring of Five’ they knew of each other’s espionage activities, but if Philby suspected that Hollis was a spy he did not admit it to Blunt and it would have been his professional duty not to do so.[36]
During his long interrogations following his confession in 1964, Blunt became convinced, as did his interrogators, that he could not possibly have been ‘Elli’, and neither could Philby.[37]
In their efforts to dismiss the ‘Elli’ evidence Hollis’s supporters have suggested that Gouzenko must have been referring to Philby or to another self-confessed spy called Charles ‘Dick’ Ellis, but both of these were in MI6. Ellis seems to have been put forward as a candidate for ‘Elli’ on the grounds that the names are so alike, but in 1942 and 1943 he was working in New York at British Security Co-ordination Headquarters and could not possibly fit the information detailed in Gouzenko’s evidence.
Some have even suggested that ‘Elli’ was another MI5 officer called Graham Mitchell, whose case is considered in Chapter 33, simply on the grounds that ‘ell’ were the last three letters of his name! But Hollis also had three letters figuring in ‘Elli’, and Mitchell, who was concerned with overseeing fascist activities during the war, had no easy access to files, or to anything else of much interest to the Soviets.
There is no doubt in the minds of MI5 and MI6 officers who eventually investigated Hollis that he is the best fit for ‘Elli’, particularly given the G.R.U. connection, Sonia’s presence in the Oxford area and ‘Elli’s’ ability to bring out files and supply other information of vital interest to Soviet Intelligence.
In the last respect some new and recent information supplied by Svetlana Gouzenko would seem to be significant. Her late husband’s papers recall the arrival of his replacement from Moscow, which was the reason for Gouzenko’s decision to defect as he realized that he might never have another chance to live in freedom. The new cipher clerk’s name was Koulakov, and when he remarked to Gouzenko that his new job should be an easy post after Moscow, Gouzenko replied that he would soon find that the amount of information being supplied by the G.R.U. Canadian spy-ring was so staggering that there was enough to keep three cipher clerks busy. Koulakov then boasted that it was ‘just a trickle’ compared with the amount of material reaching G.R.U. headquarters from agents in Britain and America. ‘They do not have a healthy spot left in their security agencies,’ he said. ‘Moscow has everything, including secret files of agents. I decoded these myself.’[38]
After reading her husband’s notes on Koulakov’s statements Mrs Gouzenko feels confident that the reference to ‘secret files of agents’ could have been, at least in part, files on Soviet agents operating in Britain. Clearly, these were being supplied to Moscow by G.R.U. agents in Britain, of whom ‘Elli’ was one.
In my opinion there can be little doubt that ‘Elli’ existed, that he was in MI5 and probably at Blenheim in 1942, and that inquiries into his identity which might have led to his exposure were smothered. The ‘Elli’ evidence alone goes far to dispose of the claim that no evidence against Hollis ever accrued from defectors and that the deficiency is a great weakness in the case against him. As will be seen, the evidence that ‘Elli’ could have been Hollis was to be strengthened years later when information from other defectors gave further evidence of the continuing existence of a Soviet agent at high level inside MI5.
Gouzenko’s evidence and the ensuing prosecution of so many Soviet spies and agents in Canada, the U.S. and Britain gave a clear indication of the size of the G.R.U. espionage effort. In his book This Was My Choice, Gouzenko claimed that there were ‘thousands of agents in Great Britain’, and while this was probably an exaggeration the total was surely substantial. Few of them were ever detected because MI5 too readily assumed that the ‘Red Orchestra’ had been disbanded at the end of the war. Old hands had retired but new G.R.U. agents were being recruited and some old ones were kept in play with continuing advantage to Moscow, as the ensuing chapter shows.
The Potential Value of Oversight
If MI5 had known that its activities could be subject to independent examination by an oversight body its treatment of Gouzenko’s information about ‘Elli’ might not have been so superficial and it might have been deterred from smothering of the information, which undoubtedly occurred not only in 1946 but, as will be seen, in 1952. If the suppression had still been accomplished an alert oversight body would have required an explanation. Oversight could also have countered the complacency which prevented any serious attempt to discover whether there were active G.R.U. and K.G.B. rings in Britain. Gouzenko’s evidence showed the existence of such rings operating quite independently in Canada and made it clear that they existed in other target countries. They had their own resident chiefs, their own case officers and agents, their own cipher machines, ciphers and cipher clerks. The K.G.B. and G.R.U. Centres were separately based in Moscow, as Gouzenko’s evidence proved. While he was able to inform Canadian security about the G.R.U. in great detail, he knew nothing about K.G.B. arrangements and operations beyond their undoubted existence and the names of some K.G.B. personnel working under cover in the Embassy in Ottawa. MI5 should have assumed that such a situation must have existed in Britain and should have taken more effective steps to counter it. Effective oversight might have required them to do more in that direction than they did. As will be seen, their discoveries about the K.G.B. ring were the result of fortuitous events, and they learned virtually nothing about the G.R.U. ring. ring.
The arrest of Nunn May was to count as an MI5 success, though it derived entirely from Gouzenko’s disclosures. As will be seen, MI5 was to depend for its further apparent successes on the evidence of defectors. Nevertheless, the same deprecating attitude to defectors which showed itself in Canada made itself felt in MI5 and still exists. Perceptive oversight might have detected this negative approach and done something to remedy it.
chapter fifteen
The Return of Klaus Fuchs
After the final defeat of Germany in May 1945, the previous tenant of Avenue Cottage in Oxford required its return and Sonia had to find new accommodation. Some time in the summer of that year, after she and her children had attended the Victory street-party organized by Mrs Laski, she found an empty house in the Cotswold village of Great Rollright, near Chipping Norton.[1] The house, called The Firs, which still exists unchanged, is some thirteen miles from Blenheim Palace.
Sonia’s husband was still serving in the army in Germany and was not to be demobilized until early in 1947. So it would seem that The Firs was stop-gap accommodation until Moscow decided what further work Sonia and, eventually, Len should undertake. Again, luck favoured Soviet Intelligence. Great Rollright was only about thirty-five miles from Harwell, the site of Britain’s new nuclear research establishment, which Fuchs joined in June 1946.
