Too Secret Too Long, page 28
Philby’s first move was to contact his Soviet controller to alert Moscow to make every effort to prevent Volkov’s defection. He then drew the attention of his chief, Sir Stewart Menzies, to Volkov’s offer, suggesting that it was a promising development worthy of his personal attention. Menzies, who seems to have been unusually compliant in his dealings with Philby, agreed that Philby himself should be the man to travel to Istanbul to meet Volkov and make the arrangements for his departure to Britain.
To give the Soviets plenty of time to deal with Volkov, Philby delayed his arrival in Istanbul for more than a fortnight. Meanwhile, the hapless Russian, heavily bandaged on a stretcher, left by plane for Moscow where, it is believed, he was interrogated and executed. When Read asked Philby why he had taken so long to leave for Turkey, he stammered, ‘It was a question of leave arrangements.’
As treachery was not in anybody’s mind, apart from Philby’s, Read attributed the failure to secure Volkov as nothing more than inefficiency. Since then, he has felt some guilt, not only at the loss of a defector who could have stopped British traitors before they did so much damage, but for Volkov’s fate. Read’s reminiscence in this respect is illuminating: ‘At that time the official attitude was that we must, at all costs, accommodate the Russians and do nothing to precipitate East-West hostility. Indeed, any reference to ulterior Soviet intentions was likely to provoke the accusation of “fascist tendencies”. It was a very unhappy time for anyone who had served in Moscow and shed any illusions.’
It would seem that the Foreign Office made no use whatever of the preliminary information which Volkov had given them. No notice was taken of his allegation that the Soviets were able to read diplomatic ciphers because of the incredibly complacent belief that no Briton with access to them could possibly betray them. Yet Donald Maclean had continuously done so, especially at the time of Volkov’s disclosures, when he was serving in the British Embassy in Washington.
The MI6 inquest into the failure of Philby’s mission seems to have been a perfunctory affair and must have strengthened Philby’s belief that his risk of being caught in such an inefficient organization was small. He was even permitted to keep the Volkov ‘shopping list’ in his own safe instead of in the central Registry, thereby limiting the number of people who might see it and become suspicious.
Philby’s handling of the Volkov case is an excellent example of the advantages a spy enjoys through being inside an organization which is responsible for detecting spies. It also illustrates the self-preservation syndrome – that espionage inside an intelligence or security agency is self-perpetuating in that it forces a spy to continue his treachery, whether he wishes to or not, when he gets wind of a potential defector. He has to supply the information to his alien masters with all speed, not just to satisfy their requirements but to protect himself.
All the members of the Cambridge Ring seem to have led charmed lives, but while they probably had more than their share of luck there were two other factors which helped to preserve them: appalling inefficiency, or worse, by MI5, and rigorous control by K.G.B. professionals. While Philby and some of the others, like Blunt, may appear to have been ‘super-spies’ they essentially did what they were told to do by their controllers who, in turn, received considered instructions from the Moscow Centre. The Volkov case is also an excellent example of control and co-operation by the Moscow Centre to resolve an emergency.
The news of the intended defection of Volkov in Istanbul had overlapped with the actual defection of Gouzenko in Ottawa. Though MI5 was not to realize it until much later, this was the reason why Philby had not dared to go to Canada and interrogate Gouzenko. His Soviet controller had advised him to remain in touch with the Volkov case, which appeared to threaten him more immediately, and as a consequence the Gouzenko case had been handed to Hollis.
After the MI6 chief, Sir Stewart Menzies, was informed of the joint suspicions in MI5 and in Washington, Philby was recalled to London for questioning by Menzies himself. At this brief meeting Philby took the initiative and, more or less, dismissed himself when Menzies asked him, ‘Concerning your position, Kim. What would you do if you were in my place?’
‘I should tell me that I had to leave, Philby replied.
‘That is what I think,’ Menzies said, relieved that the embarrassing situation, which of course was intended to remain secret for ever, had been so easily resolved.[6]
Within MI6 several of Philby’s friends regarded this treatment as entirely unjustified, as had Maclean’s friends in the Foreign Office, and as would the friends of Blunt and Hollis in MI5. It was pointed out that while Philby had been in Washington he had known the details of fourteen important cases, including that of Fuchs, which had been brought to a successful conclusion. But, as Philby was to reveal in his own book, he had forewarned his Soviet masters about them all. It was only for reasons advantageous to the K.G.B., including the protection of Philby himself, that no action had been taken by the Soviets.
Philby was out of the Secret Intelligence Service by July 1951 and after that he never had any official access to secret information, though at intervals over the following twelve years he was to meet with old colleagues who still believed in his innocence and from whom he almost surely gleaned professional gossip of interest to the K.G.B.
MI5 proceeded with its investigation into Philby and, to keep it as secret as possible from the staff, who might see documents, he was given the internal code-name ‘Peach’.[7] Hollis must have been questioned at length about Philby because the two had worked so closely overseeing Soviet and communist operations. As Philby was to recall, ‘We both served on the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee and never failed to work out an agreed approach to present to the less well-informed representatives of the Service departments and the Foreign Office.’[8]
Whatever Hollis may have contributed, the inquiry made no substantial progress until the autumn of 1951 when MI5 was informed that a K.G.B. agent with the code-name ‘Stanley’ in the Bride traffic might be Philby. Against the wishes of MI6, which would have preferred to allow the Philby case to lie fallow following his removal from access to secrets, the MI5 management secured agreement for Philby to be subjected to interrogation in the hope that he might break down and confess his guilt. This interrogation, in November 1951, has been referred to as a ‘secret trial’, but it was a routine operation. Philby was told that a judicial inquiry into the Maclean and Burgess defections had been ordered and that he would be required to give evidence. He duly appeared, though he could have declined. Both he and the K.G.B. must have been keen to know just how much MI5 had discovered. Of course, if Hollis was a spy they would have already known details of the plans for the interrogation since he would have been privy to them, especially in view of his previous close involvement with the suspect.
The chief interrogating officer was Helenus ‘Buster’ Milmo (now Sir), a wartime member of MI5 who was to become a judge. He was assisted by Arthur Martin, who prepared the brief for the interrogation and sat in on it. Some authors have given the impression that Milmo made a hash of it, trying to bully Philby into making admissions which he cleverly avoided doing. The tape-recordings of the interviews reveal a very different picture.[9] Milmo conducted it with great skill and soon had Philby making excessive use of his stammer to gain time to answer awkward questions, such as the source of his finances when he went to cover the Spanish Civil War as a freelance. Astonishingly, nothing was made of the fact that it had been firmly established that Philby’s former wife, Lizi, was a Soviet agent. Perhaps this had been withheld from Milmo on the grounds that it would be too embarrassing to involve a former officer’s wife.
Philby’s performance nevertheless convinced both Milmo and Martin that he was guilty, but the interrogators lacked hard evidence or reliable witnesses and Philby knew that he was safe so long as he continued to deny everything and admit nothing.
Philby maintained this stone-walling when questioned by the MI5 interrogator Jim Skardon, but though he has been almost admired for his bland evasions his performance was poor compared with that of the fragile-looking Blunt, who was to withstand eleven interrogations far more persuasively.
What would have happened had Philby confessed? In view of the previous handling of Maclean and later events involving Blunt, Long and others, and eventually Philby himself, I very much doubt that he would have been prosecuted. This view is shared by former officers of both MI5 and MI6 who are in a better position to form a judgement. It is just possible that at that time American pressure for a prosecution might have been irresistible, but every argument would have been mounted against it, allegedly in the interests of securing the maximum information from Philby but really to minimize damage to the image of the Fifth Estate.
While Martin, White and others in MI5 were convinced that Philby was not only the Third Man, who had been involved in warning Maclean of his danger, but a long-standing Soviet agent, Hollis took a legalistic line when the case was discussed at a directors’ meeting. ‘Prove it,’ he challenged, in support of his view that Philby should be given the benefit of the doubt unless and until hard evidence should emerge.[10] This view prevailed. Martin regarded the case as open to proof if actively pursued, but he was not permitted to spend money on it developing leads. This suited MI6, which did not formally accept that Philby had been disloyal. Not only were inquiries discontinued there but no damage assessment was made to establish the injuries which he might have inflicted.[11]
Meanwhile Philby, who had been given his commuted pension in a lump sum of £2,000 plus a further £2,000 to be paid in instalments, remained outwardly cool, nourished by the sympathy of his friends, both in MI6 and MI5, and the knowledge that the K.G.B. would contact him again when it was considered safe to do so.
Those officers in MI5 who were convinced of Philby’s guilt included the Director-General Sir Percy Sillitoe, who told the C.I.A. that Philby’s debits outnumbered his assets, meaning that while there was no proof the circumstantial evidence had persuaded him. This attitude was so unwelcome in MI6 that one of Philby’s former friends there remembers asking him, late in 1951, why he did not leak the MI5 allegations to the newspapers so that when they were published he could deny them. Philby made a rather lame response.[12]
Early in 1952, as part of the inquiry into the identity of the Third Man, Dick White, then MI5’s Director of Counter-Espionage, decided that another look should be taken at Gouzenko’s allegation about the spy in MI5 with the code-name ‘Elli’. On 6 May Superintendent George McClellan of the Security Branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked Gouzenko, on MI5’s behalf, to submit a memorandum giving as much detail as he could remember of the circumstances in which he had heard about ‘Elli’. Gouzenko produced the document to which I have already referred and which is reproduced in Appendix A. The memorandum was classified Secret, and while Gouzenko was adamant that the spy had existed in 1942/43, and probably still did, it led to no result, much to Gouzenko’s disgust. He heard no more about it or about ‘Elli’ until 1972 – twenty-seven years after his original lead!
The memorandum became public only through a leak, through Gouzenko himself, to the Toronto Telegram in September 1970. Again, though given publicity then, and since, it led to no known result. Gouzenko, who had proved himself a completely reliable informant, was certain that ‘Elli’ had been in MI5 and therefore could not have been Philby, who had always worked in MI6. Further, as already pointed out, ‘Elli’ was unquestionably a G.R.U. spy in 1942/43, while Philby always operated for the K.G.B. Nevertheless, there seems to have been no serious effort to discover which MI5 officer might have been ‘Elli’ until 1972, in the strange circumstances described in Chapter 52. Until then it would seem that somebody at high level had decided that it was in MI5’s interest, or possibly in the interest of some other agency, not necessarily British, to ignore the information.
During the early 1950s investigative reporters continued inquiries into the Burgess and Maclean defections; there was little doubt in my mind concerning Philby’s implication. During a lunch with Cyril Connolly, who had known both defectors, he gave me the names of Philby and Blunt as prime suspects, but such are the British libel laws that no Fleet Street lawyer would permit speculation concerning either of them.
Meanwhile the K.G.B. was having doubts about Philby. The easy way he had been allowed to leave MI6 and the ‘golden handshake’ made the Soviets fear that he might have been successfully ‘turned’. In July 1954, Dr Otto John, who had become head of the West German counterpart of MI5, was closely questioned by the K.G.B. after being abducted behind the Iron Curtain, according to his account. He has told me that the K.G.B’s sole purpose was to discover from him whether Philby had become a double agent.[13] An old friend and fellow-spy of Philby, Peter Smolka, then living in Austria and whose loyalty to the Soviets was never in doubt, was also interrogated and was able to convince the K.G.B. that there was no danger that Philby would ever become a British ‘plant’.[14] As a result the Soviets contacted Philby again in late 1954 or early 1955 by what Philby was to describe as ‘the most ingenious of routes’. The probable nature of this route is described in Chapters 36 and 45.
The Potential Value of Oversight
There are many aspects of the Philby case, both before and after his departure from MI6, which suggest that the existence of oversight by an independent body could have been highly beneficial. Philby knew that the complacency inside MI6 was such that his lame excuse for taking so long to reach Istanbul to deal with Volkov would not be seriously questioned. Would he have been so confident had he known that he might be questioned by others likely to be less accommodating? It would seem unlikely that either MI6 or the Foreign Office would have been so cavalier in ignoring the leads given by Volkov in his ‘shopping list’ had they been subject to outside examination on the matter. The same applies to MI5’s lack of action on Gouzenko’s 1952 memorandum regarding the MI5 spy called ‘Elli’. Indeed, my analysis of defector cases in general suggests that there is urgent need for independent oversight. While agencies may wish to deny it, there is an undoubted tendency on the part of some counter-intelligence officers to discount or decry the evidence of defectors when it exposes their past incompetence. Excessive denigration of a defector would be likely to be more apparent to an independent observer than to a superior, and the motive behind it might be questioned.
I suggest, too, that an oversight body might have been less likely than the MI6 management to accept the alacrity of Philby’s agreement to virtual dismissal without wondering why he had not objected if he were innocent.
chapter twenty-two
Second-in-Command
On 1 September 1953 Sir Percy Sillitoe was replaced by Dick White as Director-General of MI5. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, let it be known in Whitehall that he had been greatly displeased by the publicity which Sillitoe had attracted to himself, and Fleet Street editors were told in confidence of White’s appointment and their co-operation was sought in keeping his identity secret.[1]
White immediately appointed Hollis as his deputy, a promotion which astonished the MI5 rank and file and was resented by many officers, though some were not surprised because the two men had been close ever since White had helped to bring Hollis into MI5 in 1938.
If Hollis was a spy the K.G.B. must have been delighted because, as Deputy Director-General, he suddenly achieved far greater influence and much wider access to information. His duties included responsibility for overseas security problems in such countries as Rhodesia, Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, as well as for liaison with allied security organizations like those of the U.S., Canada and Australia. The post entailed much travel abroad – an ideal situation for safe meetings with Soviet controllers.
As a headquarters liaison man with the American F.B.I., and to some extent with the C.I.A., Hollis could hardly have been a happy choice, in view of his known anti-American attitude. What could be construed as evidence of Hollis’s anti-Americanism frequently came my way during my long and close dealings with Rear-Admiral George Thomson, when he was Secretary of the D-Notice Committee. Whenever MI5 complained to the Admiral about security leaks in newspaper articles which I had written he almost invariably assured me that he had been told that I would hear nothing further provided I was prepared to say that the information had come from some American source, even when that was not so. At that time the Admiral dealt, through an intermediary, with Hollis, who may have been able to use the allegations to counter F.B.I. complaints about the weakness of British security.[2]
One of Hollis’s first routine visits was to the Canadian security organization which was then run by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A former officer in the R.C.M.P. Security Branch remembers a lecture given by Hollis and describes him as ‘a dowdy little man – very unimpressive and disappointing’.[3] Photographs of Hollis taken in the early 1950s while on a visit to Germany support this description.[4] During his visits to Canada Hollis was treated to what the Solicitor-General, Robert Kaplan, was to describe as ‘confidences of security’.[5] I shall present new and seemingly relevant information concerning MI5’s dealings with the R.C.M.P. in Chapter 42.
An unexpected development in Australia resuscitated the Maclean/Burgess/Philby case which might, otherwise, have remained suppressed for many more years. As the former security adviser to the Australian Government and the existing chief liaison officer, Hollis became involved. On 13 April 1954 a K.G.B. officer called Vladimir Petrov, working under cover in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, defected to the Australian Secret Intelligence Organization (A.S.I.O.) and was soon joined by his wife, who was also a professional K.G.B. officer. Among the material he provided was the fact that his assistant, Fillip Kislytsin, had previously been in charge of the section in Moscow which had processed the information and documents provided by Maclean and Burgess, whom he knew to have been long-term spies, recruited in their student days at Cambridge. Petrov further revealed that the defection of the British traitors had been planned in Moscow and directed by the K.G.B. in London, France and elsewhere. He said that the reason they had been forced to flee was that they knew they were being investigated by MI5. Kislytsin also told Petrov that the K.G.B. had been responsible for organizing the flight of Melinda Maclean from Geneva to Moscow.[6]
