Too Secret Too Long, page 32
In Control
While the appointment of Roger Hollis as Director-General did not surprise most MI5 officers who knew of his closeness to Sir Dick White, they were appalled by it, as were other more junior members of the staff. The extent of his responsibility and the power, for good or ill, which went with it, was to be stated publicly by his successor as ‘the defence of the realm as a whole from external and internal dangers arising from attempts at espionage and sabotage, or from actions of persons and organisations, whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged to be subversive of the security of the State’.[1] In 1956 such dangers were springing mainly from the ambitions of the Soviet Union, which was then believed to be ‘flexing its muscles’ for possible conflict, and Hollis was regarded as MI5’s expert on communism and international communism. If MI5 agreed with the Conference of Privy Concillors’ foolish belief that the main threat came from British communists rather than from professional K.G.B. and G.R.U. operators then he had a special qualification. To many of his colleagues, however, Hollis lacked the qualities of leadership required to direct a team responsible for such a remit. To one of them, who had no particular animosity towards him, he was ‘absolutely without the panache a leader of such an organization should have. He was dull, shy and dreary.’ A woman who worked with Hollis in the headquarters at Leconfield House described him to me as ‘an appalling D.G. He moved like a wraith; looked through you. I could never understand how he got the job. It was a standing joke that everything would go wrong – and it did.’ In a joint appreciation two other female former MI5 employees described Hollis as ‘not very bright but dangerous because he looked as though he could be manipulated’.
Nor did Hollis show any signs of growing into the job as he grappled with the challenge, as some apparently mediocre men do. A later Attorney-General, who had reason to survey his record, was to describe him as a ‘blundering buffoon’. This performance came as no surprise to those officers who had become aware of his previous failure to counter the communist and Soviet threat and, on that score alone, found his promotion both bewildering and frightening.
As Director-General Hollis’s salary was substantially increased but remained modest considering the responsibility. Though not a civil servant, the D.G. was rated by the Treasury for salary purposes as a Deputy Permanent Secretary in Whitehall, entitled to some £3,250 a year.[2] This rank was maintained so that the D.G. was junior to the Permanent Secretary of the parent ministry, the Home Office. The increase must have helped with outgoings such as school fees for his son, Adrian, who was at Eton, though family money may have assisted there. The appointment inevitably involved more entertaining, especially of visiting security officials, for which a rather meagre expense allowance was provided. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who experienced the hospitality of the Hollis household recall it as ‘austere – with very little to eat or drink’.[3]
According to visitors to the Campden Hill Square house it was dark, unwelcoming and very untidy. For some years, including the time when Hollis was D.G., the first Lady Hollis ran a second-hand clothing business from it to raise money for her charity, a club in Bermondsey. Her enthusiasm clearly overcame her house-pride for customers remember rooms being ‘littered’ with second-hand women’s and children’s clothes, the narrow hallway obstructed with old trunks. ‘The sitting-room was awful,’ one of them recalled, ‘full of old clothes and there were people in the house trying things on. I don’t see how you could have asked anybody there.’[4] The same person remembers that Lady Hollis told her that her husband had objected to the trunks but would have to put up with them. Lady Hollis was described as ‘domineering and looking rather frigid’, while a professional colleague recalls her as being ‘mousey and someone to avoid being cornered with at an office cocktail party’. While this is probably unkind to the late lady, the picture does perhaps help to explain why Hollis sought solace with his secretary.
His illicit relationship with Val Hammond was widely assumed to be the reason for his habit of staying late in the office after other colleagues had left but there seem to have been many occasions when Miss Hammond too had departed and he remained until 8 p.m. or later. Case records show this to be a necessary habit of agents in place who need time and complete privacy for the removal, copying or photographing of documents.[5] As D.G., Hollis had right of access to any documents he wished and, having his own safe, could keep them overnight while other officers would be required to return them to the Registry.
If Hollis was a spy his high-level associations with officials from other Western security agencies would have been of the greatest benefit to Soviet Intelligence, as would his visits abroad to them. Hollis had appointed Graham Mitchell, an even more reserved and inscrutable character, to succeed him as Deputy Director-General and overbore him on most issues, including overseas travel, Mitchell doing relatively little of it. The advantage to any spy of opportunities for travel can hardly be exaggerated. As many cases show, Soviet Intelligence prefers to restrict meetings between controllers and important agents to overseas locations, when practicable, to reduce the risk of surveillance. As Director-General, Hollis’s almost complete immunity to investigation and the aura attached to the position practically guaranteed his safety, especially as he required immediate notification of any defector or other eventuality which might threaten his position.
Hollis was already a member of the Reform Club in Pall Mall in 1956 when he joined the club next door, the Travellers’ Club, which had long been the first choice of officers from the Fifth Estate, and still is. He was proposed by the former Deputy Director of MI5, Guy Liddell, and seconded by Walter Bell, an MI5 officer who had formerly worked in MI6. Bell had been in line to go to Washington as ‘Security Adviser’ in the British Embassy there, meaning MI5 liaison man with the C.I.A. and F.B.I., a post for which he was extremely well qualified, not only through experience but because he was married to the daughter of a senior American general. But Hollis had countermanded the posting and insisted that Bell should be his personal assistant in London. Membership of the Travellers Club enabled him to keep in social touch with White, who also joined in 1956, and with Blunt, who was a regular attender at the bar there, having been a member since 1948.
While Blunt and Hollis appeared to be poles apart in their general interests, they remained friendly. According to Derek Tangye, Hollis had not been a member of Blunt’s ‘clique’ when at Blenheim, but Blunt was an occasional dinner guest at the Hollis home in London later in the war.[6] Such meetings were, presumably, the result of their professional association, for there is no evidence that Hollis had much interest in art or its history, and suggestions that he was a member of the Management Committee of the Courtauld Institute, as several of his Whitehall colleagues were, seem to be groundless. Blunt, however, had a reputation for being an interesting table guest on other counts and both were ‘good bottle men’. When Blunt was questioned about Hollis in the late 1960s he claimed that he had seen him only occasionally, ‘mainly at public functions’, after 1951, the date when Blunt had first become suspect. MI5 accepted this assurance but mutual friends of both men have told researchers, such as Dr Anthony Glees, that they continued to meet. A visitors’ book for the Campden Hill Square house is said to exist and could be revealing.
There were other, more tenuous, connections. Hollis’s son was taught by Blunt’s elder brother, Wilfrid, a drawing master at Eton, and Hollis seems to have been friendly with Blunt’s other brother, Christopher.
Hollis’s long affair with his secretary, Val Hammond, made further inroads into a social life already limited by the restrictions of his calling and he had few other close friends when he became Director-General. It also decreased his popularity inside the organization where some employees recall his puritanical attitude to the danger of sexual liaisons with some bitterness. One officer has told me, ‘He would lecture the staff on morality saying that all his officers had to be above suspicion,’ while a secretary recalled, ‘We all knew about his affair with Val Hammond yet if we had been in a similar position and he had known about it we would have been out, smartly.’
When one MI5 agent-runner had an affair with one of his female agents Hollis insisted that he should be dismissed and he was, in spite of pleading by the head of Personnel. One officer who was particularly incensed by this was Courtenay Young, the highly intelligent and experienced head of the Soviet counter-intelligence section from 1956 to 1960. One of Young’s colleagues told me, ‘Courtenay was not a strict person but what enraged him was that Hollis penalized other members of the staff for the offence he was committing.’
Hollis is also remembered for his parsimony with the money allotted to ‘The Firm’, as MI5 is sometimes called internally. He always liked to spend less than the Government had voted him so that he could return a sizeable sum at the end of the financial year. This meant that agents were not paid as much as they could have been, and in this context one officer recalls that a Rumanian woman agent whom he was running was improperly rewarded for the information she was providing at some risk. This man also said that he suspected that Hollis was a Soviet agent from the late 1940s so strongly that he would never reveal the names of his agents to him, for fear that it would lead to their betrayal.
He and other officers think that Hollis’s cheeseparing was intended to ingratiate himself with the Treasury but it did the reverse because Treasury officials thought him foolish in that it enabled them to resist any further demand for an increase.
Another characteristic for which Hollis is remembered in his early days as Director-General was his occasional display of temper. At the time of the Suez crisis in 1956 one of his officers had developed four agents inside the Egyptian Embassy in London, one of them having access to ciphers. When Hollis discovered this he made him drop them all, angrily asserting that if the Egyptians found out and made it public, the Foreign Office would be embarrassed and he would then be held responsible.[7] Information from such sources could have been of the greatest value had the expedition to seize the Suez Canal not been abandoned, and it was Hollis’s responsibility to obtain it if possible.
Several former officers whom I have consulted recall Hollis’s preoccupation with avoiding any embarrassment to Government departments, at the expense of MI5’s efficiency. This may have been behind his decision in the late 1950s to discourage his officers from keeping in contact with Professor R.V. Jones who had been Director of Scientific Intelligence in the Ministry of Defence from 1952 to 1953, when he was ousted as a result of petty in-fighting there.[8] As Professor Jones’s outstanding wartime career testifies, maintaining a relationship with him could only have been to MI5’s advantage, but Hollis appeared to prefer to avoid upsetting the anti-Jones faction then in charge in the Defence Ministry.
Such moves would, of course, also have been in the interest of the K.G.B. had Hollis been a Soviet agent, for negative action can be almost as effective as positive espionage in reducing the efficiency of a security or intelligence agency. Political embarrassment was used so often as a reason for inaction by Hollis that it began to look more like an excuse.
The first espionage case in Hollis’s nine years’ reign as Director-General resulted in another embarrassing defection behind the Iron Curtain and, but for circumstances outside his control, would have been written off as a total disaster. In March 1956, a 22-year-old R.A.F. Flying Officer called Anthony Wraight was seen visiting the Soviet Embassy by routine watchers, and when his letters were intercepted as a consequence he was seen to be in dangerously intimate communication with a G.R.U. officer called Solovei, who was working under cover of being a Soviet film representative at the Embassy. When questioned by MI5 and R.A.F. military police late in October, Wraight, a fighter pilot, claimed to know nothing about an R.A.F. rule requiring all personnel to report any contacts with Soviet officials, but it was found that he was lying. After being warned that he might be court-martialled, Wraight, who had virtually become a communist, flew to Berlin and defected early in December. He was thoroughly debriefed regarding all he knew about secret R.A.F. matters and was used in a propaganda broadcast. Nothing was then heard about him for three years, when he decided to return to Britain of his own volition. After admitting that he had been debriefed by Soviet bloc intelligence he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.[9]
When one of Hollis’s supporters was listing the MI5 triumphs under his leadership he included the Wraight case!
MI5’s operations continued to fall apart, seemingly because the K.G.B. had advance information about them, and in that context there is no more dramatic example than the so-called ‘Arago’ affair. In the autumn of 1957 a cipher clerk in the Czech Embassy in Washington, called Frantisek Tisler, who had been recruited by the F.B.I., provided some information which was quickly passed to MI5. The clerk, who was given the code-name ‘Arago’, reported that while in Prague he had spoken with Colonel Oldrich Pribyl who was Czech Military Attaché in London, where he had already served for three years, and was on a visit to Intelligence headquarters in the Czech capital. Pribyl confided that Soviet Intelligence must have a spy inside MI5 who was a wonderful source and could be tapped at short notice. As evidence he described how he had needed to debrief one of the British traitors he had managed to recruit and, to avoid being watched or overheard, had talked to him while driving his car through London. He realized that he was being followed by what he suspected to be an MI5 car but managed to shake it off in the traffic.[10] Fearful that MI5 might have discovered the identity of his agent, Pribyl consulted the Soviet Military Attaché, a professional G.R.U. officer with whom he had regular contact. The Russian said that he could normally have found out quickly whether or not MI5 knew the name of Pribyl’s agent but as the meeting was on the Friday of a Bank Holiday weekend it would take him a few days but that he expected to have an answer by Tuesday.
On that day the Russian contacted Pribyl and told him that while MI5 did not know the agent’s identity, its watchers had indeed been following him but had decided that he was simply giving driving instruction to another Czech and so had broken off the surveillance.
There was deep concern in certain quarters of MI5 at this information from ‘Arago’ because it was entirely correct and could only mean that the Soviets had a source able to supply details of watcher operations.
‘Arago’ also revealed how the Soviet G.R.U. officer had warned Pribyl about a change in the tactics of the MI5 men who followed cars used by intelligence officers of the Soviet bloc in London. Previously they had waited close by the communist embassies to detect cars with numberplates they knew to be used by known or suspected spies. Now they were to make themselves less conspicuous by waiting near certain Thames bridges that the spies were most likely to use. This ruse, which had been code-named ‘Cover-point’, must have been betrayed to the Soviets almost immediately for none of their cars used the bridges and the project had to be abandoned within a fortnight.[11]
The assumption in MI5 was that someone in the Watcher Service was responsible for the leaks but, as Chapters 33 and 44 show, they could have originated from a higher source. Though the evidence of serious penetration of MI5 by the Soviets – and by the G.R.U. in particular – provided by ‘Arago’ was compelling, nothing effective appears to have been done about it.
At the time Pribyl spoke to ‘Arago’ the latter was high in Czech favour because the F.B.I. had provided him with some true ‘chickenfeed’ information to supply to Prague headquarters to improve his position in Czech Intelligence. This may explain why Pribyl spoke to him so freely. During their conversation Pribyl broke a golden rule and was indiscreet enough to name one of his British spies as Brian Linney, an electronics engineer, who was providing secret information about a new R.A.F. missile being produced at a factory at Shoreham, Sussex. Once again, through ‘Arago’, MI5 learned of the existence of a dangerous spy by pure chance from a double agent working for the F.B.I. who was, eventually, to defect to the U.S., taking a mass of documentary information with him.
Linney was placed under close surveillance and MI5 learned of a projected meeting with Pribyl, when it was intended that Special Branch officers should pounce and catch the spy in the act of handing over documents and information. Linney went to the rendezvous and was followed, but Pribyl never even left his London office, strongly suggesting that he had been warned by someone who, in view of ‘Arago’s’ other information, was almost certainly in MI5.
Linney was eventually bluffed into confessing his treachery by a particularly persuasive interrogator, who taped his confession, and was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment.
It may be significant that ‘Arago’s’ information to MI5 all derived from the G.R.U., via the Soviet Military Attaché or from the comparable Czech organization via Pribyl, which liaised closely with the G.R.U. The suspected source inside MI5 to which the Soviets had access, either directly or through an intermediary, was therefore likely to have been recruited by the G.R.U. This clue would later be regarded as fitting Hollis rather than any other suspect.
Pribyl eventually returned to Prague, covered by his diplomatic immunity, but not before he had been involved in a monstrous act of treason by a Czech refugee enjoying freedom and hospitality in Britain. This treachery, which continued for several years without detection by MI5, resulted in the loss of more than 100 agents working overseas for MI6, some of whom were executed. It was perpetrated by Karel Zbytek, who had been in England during the war with the Free Czech Army. He had returned to his native land but defected to Britain while visiting Wales as a member of a choir in the early 1950s. Zbytek secured a job as a filing clerk with an organization based in London called the Czech Intelligence Office. Its purpose was to recruit Czech exiles in Britain and Europe to counter the communist regime which had seized power illegally in Czechoslovakia. MI6 financed it and was involved in planning its operations, which until 1956 were highly successful in penetrating areas of interest in Czechoslovakia. In the spring of that year Zbytek, who was greedy for money, wrote anonymously to Pribyl giving information about several MI6 agents operating at high level in Czechoslovakia and offering more for payment. The truth of his material was quickly established with the secret arrest of eight of the MI6 agents, two of whom were sentenced to death. Pribyl contacted Zbytek, who was given the code-name ‘Light’, and from then on the traitor met with controllers regularly in London, gradually revealing the entire British operation in Czechoslovakia and also receiving some £40,000 in the process.[12]
While the appointment of Roger Hollis as Director-General did not surprise most MI5 officers who knew of his closeness to Sir Dick White, they were appalled by it, as were other more junior members of the staff. The extent of his responsibility and the power, for good or ill, which went with it, was to be stated publicly by his successor as ‘the defence of the realm as a whole from external and internal dangers arising from attempts at espionage and sabotage, or from actions of persons and organisations, whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged to be subversive of the security of the State’.[1] In 1956 such dangers were springing mainly from the ambitions of the Soviet Union, which was then believed to be ‘flexing its muscles’ for possible conflict, and Hollis was regarded as MI5’s expert on communism and international communism. If MI5 agreed with the Conference of Privy Concillors’ foolish belief that the main threat came from British communists rather than from professional K.G.B. and G.R.U. operators then he had a special qualification. To many of his colleagues, however, Hollis lacked the qualities of leadership required to direct a team responsible for such a remit. To one of them, who had no particular animosity towards him, he was ‘absolutely without the panache a leader of such an organization should have. He was dull, shy and dreary.’ A woman who worked with Hollis in the headquarters at Leconfield House described him to me as ‘an appalling D.G. He moved like a wraith; looked through you. I could never understand how he got the job. It was a standing joke that everything would go wrong – and it did.’ In a joint appreciation two other female former MI5 employees described Hollis as ‘not very bright but dangerous because he looked as though he could be manipulated’.
Nor did Hollis show any signs of growing into the job as he grappled with the challenge, as some apparently mediocre men do. A later Attorney-General, who had reason to survey his record, was to describe him as a ‘blundering buffoon’. This performance came as no surprise to those officers who had become aware of his previous failure to counter the communist and Soviet threat and, on that score alone, found his promotion both bewildering and frightening.
As Director-General Hollis’s salary was substantially increased but remained modest considering the responsibility. Though not a civil servant, the D.G. was rated by the Treasury for salary purposes as a Deputy Permanent Secretary in Whitehall, entitled to some £3,250 a year.[2] This rank was maintained so that the D.G. was junior to the Permanent Secretary of the parent ministry, the Home Office. The increase must have helped with outgoings such as school fees for his son, Adrian, who was at Eton, though family money may have assisted there. The appointment inevitably involved more entertaining, especially of visiting security officials, for which a rather meagre expense allowance was provided. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who experienced the hospitality of the Hollis household recall it as ‘austere – with very little to eat or drink’.[3]
According to visitors to the Campden Hill Square house it was dark, unwelcoming and very untidy. For some years, including the time when Hollis was D.G., the first Lady Hollis ran a second-hand clothing business from it to raise money for her charity, a club in Bermondsey. Her enthusiasm clearly overcame her house-pride for customers remember rooms being ‘littered’ with second-hand women’s and children’s clothes, the narrow hallway obstructed with old trunks. ‘The sitting-room was awful,’ one of them recalled, ‘full of old clothes and there were people in the house trying things on. I don’t see how you could have asked anybody there.’[4] The same person remembers that Lady Hollis told her that her husband had objected to the trunks but would have to put up with them. Lady Hollis was described as ‘domineering and looking rather frigid’, while a professional colleague recalls her as being ‘mousey and someone to avoid being cornered with at an office cocktail party’. While this is probably unkind to the late lady, the picture does perhaps help to explain why Hollis sought solace with his secretary.
His illicit relationship with Val Hammond was widely assumed to be the reason for his habit of staying late in the office after other colleagues had left but there seem to have been many occasions when Miss Hammond too had departed and he remained until 8 p.m. or later. Case records show this to be a necessary habit of agents in place who need time and complete privacy for the removal, copying or photographing of documents.[5] As D.G., Hollis had right of access to any documents he wished and, having his own safe, could keep them overnight while other officers would be required to return them to the Registry.
If Hollis was a spy his high-level associations with officials from other Western security agencies would have been of the greatest benefit to Soviet Intelligence, as would his visits abroad to them. Hollis had appointed Graham Mitchell, an even more reserved and inscrutable character, to succeed him as Deputy Director-General and overbore him on most issues, including overseas travel, Mitchell doing relatively little of it. The advantage to any spy of opportunities for travel can hardly be exaggerated. As many cases show, Soviet Intelligence prefers to restrict meetings between controllers and important agents to overseas locations, when practicable, to reduce the risk of surveillance. As Director-General, Hollis’s almost complete immunity to investigation and the aura attached to the position practically guaranteed his safety, especially as he required immediate notification of any defector or other eventuality which might threaten his position.
Hollis was already a member of the Reform Club in Pall Mall in 1956 when he joined the club next door, the Travellers’ Club, which had long been the first choice of officers from the Fifth Estate, and still is. He was proposed by the former Deputy Director of MI5, Guy Liddell, and seconded by Walter Bell, an MI5 officer who had formerly worked in MI6. Bell had been in line to go to Washington as ‘Security Adviser’ in the British Embassy there, meaning MI5 liaison man with the C.I.A. and F.B.I., a post for which he was extremely well qualified, not only through experience but because he was married to the daughter of a senior American general. But Hollis had countermanded the posting and insisted that Bell should be his personal assistant in London. Membership of the Travellers Club enabled him to keep in social touch with White, who also joined in 1956, and with Blunt, who was a regular attender at the bar there, having been a member since 1948.
While Blunt and Hollis appeared to be poles apart in their general interests, they remained friendly. According to Derek Tangye, Hollis had not been a member of Blunt’s ‘clique’ when at Blenheim, but Blunt was an occasional dinner guest at the Hollis home in London later in the war.[6] Such meetings were, presumably, the result of their professional association, for there is no evidence that Hollis had much interest in art or its history, and suggestions that he was a member of the Management Committee of the Courtauld Institute, as several of his Whitehall colleagues were, seem to be groundless. Blunt, however, had a reputation for being an interesting table guest on other counts and both were ‘good bottle men’. When Blunt was questioned about Hollis in the late 1960s he claimed that he had seen him only occasionally, ‘mainly at public functions’, after 1951, the date when Blunt had first become suspect. MI5 accepted this assurance but mutual friends of both men have told researchers, such as Dr Anthony Glees, that they continued to meet. A visitors’ book for the Campden Hill Square house is said to exist and could be revealing.
There were other, more tenuous, connections. Hollis’s son was taught by Blunt’s elder brother, Wilfrid, a drawing master at Eton, and Hollis seems to have been friendly with Blunt’s other brother, Christopher.
Hollis’s long affair with his secretary, Val Hammond, made further inroads into a social life already limited by the restrictions of his calling and he had few other close friends when he became Director-General. It also decreased his popularity inside the organization where some employees recall his puritanical attitude to the danger of sexual liaisons with some bitterness. One officer has told me, ‘He would lecture the staff on morality saying that all his officers had to be above suspicion,’ while a secretary recalled, ‘We all knew about his affair with Val Hammond yet if we had been in a similar position and he had known about it we would have been out, smartly.’
When one MI5 agent-runner had an affair with one of his female agents Hollis insisted that he should be dismissed and he was, in spite of pleading by the head of Personnel. One officer who was particularly incensed by this was Courtenay Young, the highly intelligent and experienced head of the Soviet counter-intelligence section from 1956 to 1960. One of Young’s colleagues told me, ‘Courtenay was not a strict person but what enraged him was that Hollis penalized other members of the staff for the offence he was committing.’
Hollis is also remembered for his parsimony with the money allotted to ‘The Firm’, as MI5 is sometimes called internally. He always liked to spend less than the Government had voted him so that he could return a sizeable sum at the end of the financial year. This meant that agents were not paid as much as they could have been, and in this context one officer recalls that a Rumanian woman agent whom he was running was improperly rewarded for the information she was providing at some risk. This man also said that he suspected that Hollis was a Soviet agent from the late 1940s so strongly that he would never reveal the names of his agents to him, for fear that it would lead to their betrayal.
He and other officers think that Hollis’s cheeseparing was intended to ingratiate himself with the Treasury but it did the reverse because Treasury officials thought him foolish in that it enabled them to resist any further demand for an increase.
Another characteristic for which Hollis is remembered in his early days as Director-General was his occasional display of temper. At the time of the Suez crisis in 1956 one of his officers had developed four agents inside the Egyptian Embassy in London, one of them having access to ciphers. When Hollis discovered this he made him drop them all, angrily asserting that if the Egyptians found out and made it public, the Foreign Office would be embarrassed and he would then be held responsible.[7] Information from such sources could have been of the greatest value had the expedition to seize the Suez Canal not been abandoned, and it was Hollis’s responsibility to obtain it if possible.
Several former officers whom I have consulted recall Hollis’s preoccupation with avoiding any embarrassment to Government departments, at the expense of MI5’s efficiency. This may have been behind his decision in the late 1950s to discourage his officers from keeping in contact with Professor R.V. Jones who had been Director of Scientific Intelligence in the Ministry of Defence from 1952 to 1953, when he was ousted as a result of petty in-fighting there.[8] As Professor Jones’s outstanding wartime career testifies, maintaining a relationship with him could only have been to MI5’s advantage, but Hollis appeared to prefer to avoid upsetting the anti-Jones faction then in charge in the Defence Ministry.
Such moves would, of course, also have been in the interest of the K.G.B. had Hollis been a Soviet agent, for negative action can be almost as effective as positive espionage in reducing the efficiency of a security or intelligence agency. Political embarrassment was used so often as a reason for inaction by Hollis that it began to look more like an excuse.
The first espionage case in Hollis’s nine years’ reign as Director-General resulted in another embarrassing defection behind the Iron Curtain and, but for circumstances outside his control, would have been written off as a total disaster. In March 1956, a 22-year-old R.A.F. Flying Officer called Anthony Wraight was seen visiting the Soviet Embassy by routine watchers, and when his letters were intercepted as a consequence he was seen to be in dangerously intimate communication with a G.R.U. officer called Solovei, who was working under cover of being a Soviet film representative at the Embassy. When questioned by MI5 and R.A.F. military police late in October, Wraight, a fighter pilot, claimed to know nothing about an R.A.F. rule requiring all personnel to report any contacts with Soviet officials, but it was found that he was lying. After being warned that he might be court-martialled, Wraight, who had virtually become a communist, flew to Berlin and defected early in December. He was thoroughly debriefed regarding all he knew about secret R.A.F. matters and was used in a propaganda broadcast. Nothing was then heard about him for three years, when he decided to return to Britain of his own volition. After admitting that he had been debriefed by Soviet bloc intelligence he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.[9]
When one of Hollis’s supporters was listing the MI5 triumphs under his leadership he included the Wraight case!
MI5’s operations continued to fall apart, seemingly because the K.G.B. had advance information about them, and in that context there is no more dramatic example than the so-called ‘Arago’ affair. In the autumn of 1957 a cipher clerk in the Czech Embassy in Washington, called Frantisek Tisler, who had been recruited by the F.B.I., provided some information which was quickly passed to MI5. The clerk, who was given the code-name ‘Arago’, reported that while in Prague he had spoken with Colonel Oldrich Pribyl who was Czech Military Attaché in London, where he had already served for three years, and was on a visit to Intelligence headquarters in the Czech capital. Pribyl confided that Soviet Intelligence must have a spy inside MI5 who was a wonderful source and could be tapped at short notice. As evidence he described how he had needed to debrief one of the British traitors he had managed to recruit and, to avoid being watched or overheard, had talked to him while driving his car through London. He realized that he was being followed by what he suspected to be an MI5 car but managed to shake it off in the traffic.[10] Fearful that MI5 might have discovered the identity of his agent, Pribyl consulted the Soviet Military Attaché, a professional G.R.U. officer with whom he had regular contact. The Russian said that he could normally have found out quickly whether or not MI5 knew the name of Pribyl’s agent but as the meeting was on the Friday of a Bank Holiday weekend it would take him a few days but that he expected to have an answer by Tuesday.
On that day the Russian contacted Pribyl and told him that while MI5 did not know the agent’s identity, its watchers had indeed been following him but had decided that he was simply giving driving instruction to another Czech and so had broken off the surveillance.
There was deep concern in certain quarters of MI5 at this information from ‘Arago’ because it was entirely correct and could only mean that the Soviets had a source able to supply details of watcher operations.
‘Arago’ also revealed how the Soviet G.R.U. officer had warned Pribyl about a change in the tactics of the MI5 men who followed cars used by intelligence officers of the Soviet bloc in London. Previously they had waited close by the communist embassies to detect cars with numberplates they knew to be used by known or suspected spies. Now they were to make themselves less conspicuous by waiting near certain Thames bridges that the spies were most likely to use. This ruse, which had been code-named ‘Cover-point’, must have been betrayed to the Soviets almost immediately for none of their cars used the bridges and the project had to be abandoned within a fortnight.[11]
The assumption in MI5 was that someone in the Watcher Service was responsible for the leaks but, as Chapters 33 and 44 show, they could have originated from a higher source. Though the evidence of serious penetration of MI5 by the Soviets – and by the G.R.U. in particular – provided by ‘Arago’ was compelling, nothing effective appears to have been done about it.
At the time Pribyl spoke to ‘Arago’ the latter was high in Czech favour because the F.B.I. had provided him with some true ‘chickenfeed’ information to supply to Prague headquarters to improve his position in Czech Intelligence. This may explain why Pribyl spoke to him so freely. During their conversation Pribyl broke a golden rule and was indiscreet enough to name one of his British spies as Brian Linney, an electronics engineer, who was providing secret information about a new R.A.F. missile being produced at a factory at Shoreham, Sussex. Once again, through ‘Arago’, MI5 learned of the existence of a dangerous spy by pure chance from a double agent working for the F.B.I. who was, eventually, to defect to the U.S., taking a mass of documentary information with him.
Linney was placed under close surveillance and MI5 learned of a projected meeting with Pribyl, when it was intended that Special Branch officers should pounce and catch the spy in the act of handing over documents and information. Linney went to the rendezvous and was followed, but Pribyl never even left his London office, strongly suggesting that he had been warned by someone who, in view of ‘Arago’s’ other information, was almost certainly in MI5.
Linney was eventually bluffed into confessing his treachery by a particularly persuasive interrogator, who taped his confession, and was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment.
It may be significant that ‘Arago’s’ information to MI5 all derived from the G.R.U., via the Soviet Military Attaché or from the comparable Czech organization via Pribyl, which liaised closely with the G.R.U. The suspected source inside MI5 to which the Soviets had access, either directly or through an intermediary, was therefore likely to have been recruited by the G.R.U. This clue would later be regarded as fitting Hollis rather than any other suspect.
Pribyl eventually returned to Prague, covered by his diplomatic immunity, but not before he had been involved in a monstrous act of treason by a Czech refugee enjoying freedom and hospitality in Britain. This treachery, which continued for several years without detection by MI5, resulted in the loss of more than 100 agents working overseas for MI6, some of whom were executed. It was perpetrated by Karel Zbytek, who had been in England during the war with the Free Czech Army. He had returned to his native land but defected to Britain while visiting Wales as a member of a choir in the early 1950s. Zbytek secured a job as a filing clerk with an organization based in London called the Czech Intelligence Office. Its purpose was to recruit Czech exiles in Britain and Europe to counter the communist regime which had seized power illegally in Czechoslovakia. MI6 financed it and was involved in planning its operations, which until 1956 were highly successful in penetrating areas of interest in Czechoslovakia. In the spring of that year Zbytek, who was greedy for money, wrote anonymously to Pribyl giving information about several MI6 agents operating at high level in Czechoslovakia and offering more for payment. The truth of his material was quickly established with the secret arrest of eight of the MI6 agents, two of whom were sentenced to death. Pribyl contacted Zbytek, who was given the code-name ‘Light’, and from then on the traitor met with controllers regularly in London, gradually revealing the entire British operation in Czechoslovakia and also receiving some £40,000 in the process.[12]
