Too Secret Too Long, page 33
With the Czech Intelligence Office in disarray, Zbytek, who had acquired British citizenship and changed his name to Charles Charles, ‘retired’ and ran a boarding house in Folkestone, where he died from a heart attack in 1961. Nothing was known of the treachery of this Soviet bloc agent, later known as the ‘Czech Philby’, until 1969 when two defectors from Czech Intelligence revealed it to the C.I.A. and then to MI5.
My inquiries among former MI5 officers show that in the late 1950s and continuing into the 1960s there were many cases which collapsed because they had apparently been ‘blown’ while investigations were in progress. A Soviet spy in a factory in Luton had begun to confess to an MI5 case officer when the case was suddenly and unaccountably called off on instructions from the MI5 management.[13] The same officer claimed that inquiries into penetrations responsible for these collapses were ‘swept under the carpet’.
Fears continued that leaks of most secret information were reaching the Russians at great speed from a source connected with the watchers. It seems that whenever the watchers were about to be staked out to carry out surveillance the Russians knew in advance and were able to avoid it.
As the watchers used radio to keep in touch with each other and with headquarters they varied the frequencies in the hope of avoiding being overheard by Soviet counter-surveillance men. The Russians retuned to the new frequencies so quickly that it was felt that they must have been informed of them in advance.
On one occasion the MI5 management had been deluded by ingenious K.G.B. disinformation into staging a major operation in the Midlands which involved switching most of the watchers out of London. On the day that they departed the Russians switched off the radio listening equipment on the roof of the Soviet Embassy and did not switch it on again until the watchers returned from their fool’s errand. It was deduced that the purpose of the disinformation had been to remove the watchers from the London area so that Soviet Intelligence could have a free run in the capital for a few days to conduct an operation which was never discovered.[14]
Another operation which is believed to have collapsed owing to an MI5 betrayal involved the use of a new device called a probe microphone, which could be inserted into a party wall to overhear and record conversations. MI5 technicians were required to use it to tap a certain room in the Soviet Consulate in Bayswater Road. They bored a very narrow hole so that it came out behind a moulded leaf in a high frieze in the target room of the Consulate. The microphone operated for only a short time because the hole behind the leaf, though completely hidden and no wider than a pin, was plugged with plaster by the Russians.[15] If this was the result of another MI5 leak it is unlikely that it could have originated from the Watcher Service, suggesting that if the Russians had only one source, it was someone with wide and rapid access to a broad spectrum of secret information.
As Director-General Hollis was informed of these suspicious events as they happened but did not seem to be unduly disturbed, a feature of his character to which Sir Dick White was probably referring when he eventually wrote in Hollis’s obituary notice in The Times: ‘The hotter the climate of national security, the cooler he became.’[16]
Serious suspicion that the Director-General himself was a source of the leakages to the Russians did not arise until 1963, but there were some people, both inside and outside MI5, who were uneasy about him. One of those outside was a senior Southern Rhodesian security officer. While visiting London in the late 1950s Special Branch showed him disturbing evidence of Soviet interest in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and he asked why it had not been made available to Rhodesian security before. He was told that such information had to be channelled through MI5, which had declined to transfer it. The security officer then visited Hollis and suggested that a Rhodesian security official should be placed in Rhodesia House, in the Strand, to liaise with MI5 regarding information about Soviet activities with Z.A.N.U. and black insurgency movements. The officer records that Hollis rejected the suggestion with a show of temper. His department received no information from MI5 in its struggle against the insurgents and the officer never trusted Hollis again. Later, when Hollis was invited by the Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister, Sir Edgar Whitehead, to check the efficiency of the security service there, the official ensured that his access was limited to the minimum.[17]
In June 1960 Hollis provided his staff with further, and well remembered, evidence for their feeling that he demanded standards from them which he was not prepared to apply to himself. His son Adrian, then nineteen, was invited to take part in a chess tournament in Moscow. There was a long-standing rule that members of MI5 and their close relatives should not be allowed to travel behind the Iron Curtain for fear that they might be suborned by the K.G.B., and contemporaries of Hollis are convinced that if they had applied for permission for such a visit on behalf of a close relative he would have forbidden it on security grounds. In his own case he evaded the rule by writing to the Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Sir Patrick Reilly, to ask if it was wise for his son to go. Reilly replied on 15 June: ‘I can see no reason to advise against your son’s visit. If the Russians take note of his parentage, it is, if anything, more likely to make them treat him with the extra respect due to the son of an important, if hidden, member of the Establishment.’
As Hollis must have appreciated, this was a specious reply. There could be no doubt that the Soviets had taken note of his parentage and there is no evidence that the K.G.B. has ever been impressed by rank in its subversive activities.
Hollis wanted to break the rule because it suited him, and the letter from Reilly, who could hardly have replied otherwise, was his cover if ever he was faced with any problem concerning the visit at some later date.
It has been suggested that had Hollis been a spy he would never have bothered to write for permission but simply allowed his son to go, knowing that he would be safe. On the contrary, he had his own colleagues to think about and needed an answer to any objections they, or even the Home Office, might make. To have broken the rule without a fall-back position could well have increased suspicions that he had special reason for being supremely confident that there was no possible danger.
During the early years of Hollis’s rule the damage to Anglo-American relations caused by the Maclean/Burgess/Philby affair remained very severe. When Hollis took over, there was minimal liaison between MI5 and the F.B.I. and virtually none between MI5, or MI6, and the C.I.A. But in spite of his known anti-American attitude, relations did slowly begin to improve after Hoover invited Hollis to reopen liaison because the F.B.I. needed assistance on certain technical problems and an MI5 technical officer was sent to Washington.
The Potential Value of Oversight
Irregular sexual or marital relations are listed among the ‘defects of character’ which can be exposed when a candidate for access to top secret information is subjected to positive vetting. There is no evidence of which I am aware that Hollis’s long affair with his secretary harmed British security interests but it was unfitting for a Director-General of MI5 and especially for one who objected to such liaisons by his staff. It would therefore seem to be doubtful that he would have continued to indulge himself in that respect had he known that his behaviour was likely to come to the notice of an oversight body.
Extra piquancy could have spiced the situation had independent observers responsible to Parliament appreciated that MI5 was compiling information about the sexual activities of M.P.s, including ministers, which was being supplied by inside sources such as Tom Driberg as well as by members of the public.
The degree to which oversight would be permissible would depend on the terms of reference given to the oversight body but if it covered operations, as I understand it does in the U.S., then much more might have been done about the quite dramatic information about the penetration of MI5 provided by ‘Arago’. An oversight body could at least have satisfied itself, on the nation’s behalf, that such leads were not being deliberately stifled in the interests of a well-placed spy. The other case-deaths and disasters might also have generated more concern than appears to have been the case inside MI5 itself until a few anxious officers could tolerate them no longer and demanded action, as will be seen.
The fact that some officers had begun to suspect Hollis and were unable to express their feelings suggests that an oversight body could serve some purpose in that respect. While such a system for reporting on superiors could be abused by disgruntled officers, security is of such supreme importance that there might be a case for it. Events to be described will show that with a person like Hollis in command, suggestions to the senior management about possible Soviet penetration served no purpose. The powers of patronage of any Director-General are so great that few subordinates are likely to challenge his actions, or lack of them, directly for fear of prejudicing their own positions.
chapter twenty-six
A ‘Pig’ Called ‘Lavinia’
Hollis received the routine knighthood for his appointment in 1960. The honour was to be followed by the exposure of a series of security disasters, which was to continue until his retirement.
Two years previously a high-ranking Polish Intelligence officer with close liaison links with the K.G.B. in Moscow had begun to write letters, in German, addressed to The C.I.A., c/o The U.S. Ambassador, Berne. They were signed with a word which translated as ‘Sniper’ or ‘Sharpshooter’ and gave the names of Polish agents operating against the West. In a total of fourteen letters, ‘Sniper’, whose name proved to be Michal Goleniewski, gave so many leads to K.G.B. operations that a perceptive C.I.A. officer correctly deduced that he was a member of the First Department of the U.B., the Polish Intelligence Service, which worked in such close collaboration with the K.G.B. that it was virtually an offshoot of it.[1]
Late in 1959 Goleniewski, who was given the MI5 code-name ‘Lavinia’, reported that the K.G.B. was running a highly productive spy in the British Admiralty. He described the spy as having first been recruited by Polish Intelligence while serving in the Naval Attaché’s office in the British Embassy in Warsaw and having a name like ‘Huton’. MI5 quickly identified him as Harry Houghton, a clerk in the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, Dorset, where he had easy access to highly secret information about anti-submarine warfare and performance details of nuclear submarines. He had been spying there for years with the help of his mistress, Ethel Gee, a filing clerk, who also had access to secrets, handing over copies of documents and information to a Soviet Intelligence officer in return for money.
Once more, MI5, under Hollis’s leadership, was to learn officially of the existence of two most damaging Soviet agents, who proved to be part of a ring, only because a chance Iron Curtain defector had warned the C.I.A.
A search of Admiralty records showed that Houghton’s chief, when he had been in Warsaw had submitted an adverse report about Houghton’s reliability, but this had been ignored and the spy had been posted to one of the nation’s most secret defence establishments. Houghton was placed under surveillance, particularly on the first Saturday of each month when he usually visited London by train accompanied by Miss Gee. In June 1960 he was seen handing a package to a man who, from the number of his car, was identified as Gordon Lonsdale, a Canadian who ran a business leasing jukeboxes to cafés, pubs and arcades.
A massive surveillance operation, said even to have included helicopters, was mounted by Jim Skardon, who was, by then, in charge of the Watcher Service. In August, Lonsdale, who soon proved to be a Soviet ‘illegal’ spy called Konon Molody operating under the name and passport of a dead Canadian, was seen to deposit a briefcase and an attaché case at a bank in Marylebone. Permission was secured by Special Branch to examine these and the attaché case was found to contain a cigarette lighter, the base of which was hollow and contained one-time pads of the type used by the K.G.B. and a schedule for radio contacts. MI5 officers photographed all the pads and returned the case to the bank.
Lonsdale’s flat on the sixth floor of the White House, a residential block in Regent’s Park which had been under sound-observation from the flat next door, was searched. A radio capable of receiving morse messages from Moscow and headphones for the purpose were found, but there was no transmitter, though as an ‘illegal’ Lonsdale would often need to radio material to the Moscow Centre, as Sonia had done. The surveillance was therefore continued to uncover the whereabouts of the transmitter and to reveal any other members of the group, which was to become known as the ‘Navy Ring’ or the ‘Portland Spy-Ring’.
Lonsdale left Britain in September and there were doubts about whether he would return, but he did so in the following month when he was seen visiting the bank to pick up his belongings from the safe deposit. He was successfully shadowed through London crowds and on the Underground to a private house in Ruislip, occupied by two American citizens calling themselves Peter and Helen Kroger and posing as booksellers.
MI5 officers, using probe microphones in their observation flat in the White House, had been able to log the times when Lonsdale was listening to messages from Moscow. By entering his flat when he was out and opening the base of the cigarette lighter they were able to sec which pads he had used to decipher the messages. G.C.H.Q. had records of the messages so they could be deciphered there. The results provided further confirmation that he was an active ‘illegal’ and must have access to a transmitter, which the security officers guessed must be in the Krogers’ house in Ruislip.[2]
In January 1961, after patient surveillance, Houghton and Ethel Gee were arrested by Special Branch, having just passed secret material to Lonsdale, who was also arrested. The Krogers were then detained on suspicion and, after a difficult search, the Soviet-made transmitter was found, along with false passports and other incriminating evidence. The Krogers were soon identified as Morris and Lona Cohen, wanted by the F.B.I. for being accomplices of the Rosenbergs, who had been executed for espionage ten years previously. All five were convicted and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.
The case appeared to show that while MI5 and the rest of the Whitehall security apparatus was slow to discover spies, it could work very professionally once it had been alerted. There was truth in that but MI5 officers concerned with the case, headed by Arthur Martin, harbour strong suspicions that, once again, they had been betrayed by some colleague, almost certainly at high level.
Because of the complexity of the Lonsdale-Kroger set-up and the K.G.B’s long-term investment in it, the officers felt sure that they were servicing other agents apart from Houghton and Gee. During the trial Houghton, in the hope of being allowed to turn Queen’s Evidence and secure a lighter sentence, had alleged that he knew of three other Russians serving as undercover case officers in Britain but his offer was not pursued, probably because it was felt that anyone so smoothly professional as Lonsdale would never have allowed Houghton to know any other members of the ring.
For technical reasons, which remain secret, the MI5 officers believed that the K.G.B. had been alerted to the fact that Lonsdale’s one-time pads had been photographed. The radio traffic from Moscow to Lonsdale suddenly slackened and only messages concerning ‘Shah’ – Houghton’s K.G.B. code-name – were sent to him. As one MI5 officer put it to me, ‘There was definitely a leak to the Russians about the MI5 examination of Lonsdale’s possessions.’
Hollis and a very few others in the top management knew that the investigators were keen to run the case for three months longer than they were eventually able to do in the hope of identifying other British members of the ring. If the K.G.B. had been made aware of this by an MI5 source monitoring the case for them, it would have felt that it had plenty of time to withdraw Lonsdale and the Krogers to safety, as they had withdrawn Maclean at the last minute. When Lonsdale was asked in prison, ‘Were you taken by surprise when we arrested you?’ he replied, ‘We did not think you would do it so quickly’ – a fair indication that he and the Centre knew that the ring was under suspicion.
A complete cessation of K.G.B. messages from Moscow to Lonsdale would have exposed the existence of the source of the warning, so a diminution, restricting the messages and their content to those already prejudiced, was in keeping with K.G.B. practice. From what the K.G.B. apparently knew, Houghton and Gee would be finished as spies anyway and, as they had worked only for money, there would have been no plans to withdraw them.
Lonsdale and the Krogers were arrested before they could have been spirited away because an unexpected event required MI5 to bring the operation to a premature close. In December 1960 Goleniewski, who had supplied the original lead, had suddenly alerted the C.I.A. to his urgent need to defect physically. On Christmas Day, when he was least likely to be missed, the 58-year-old ‘Lavinia’ arrived in West Berlin, complete with his mistress, and was quickly transferred to the safety of the U.S. He said that he had been driven to defect because someone in the West had warned the K.G.B. that there was a spy in the Polish U.B. acting for the C.I.A. He said that he believed that he was not under personal suspicion, at that stage, because the K.G.B. had asked him to seek out the spy, saying, ‘We have evidence that there is a “pig” in your organization.’ Goleniewski had been warned about the ‘pig’ – the K.G.B. jargon for a traitor – only a few weeks after the MI5 officers had identified Lonsdale.[3]
