Too Secret Too Long, page 4
The Ewerts returned to Germany where he became a prominent member of the Communist Party of Germany (K.P.D.) and, eventually, communist member of the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic. In 1923 he was elected to the K.P.D. Politburo and began his career with the Comintern. He was seconded to Moscow where he was one of a specially selected group of multilingual international instructors with plenipotentiary powers to guide the various sectors of the Comintern working to Moscow’s orders after the Comintern had been ‘Bolshevized’.[5] Ewert was considered senior enough to be an instructor in the International Division of the Communist University of Leningrad. The communist agent, Richard Krebs, has described how Ewert was ‘popular because of his robust warmth and rollicking humour’ and that he taught ‘aspects of class war and the struggle for communism’ leading to the seizure of power through revolution.[6] Known in the Soviet Union as ‘A. Braun’, Ewert was particularly close to Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Bolshevik who was nominally head of the Comintern.[7]
In 1927 Ewert, who spoke good English, was sent to the U.S. under the pseudonym ‘Grey’ to give guidance to the quarrelling American Communist Party, in which various groups were struggling for control. He remained there for only a few months, chairing a commission detailed to settle the dispute in Stalin’s interests.[8] After the implementation of an agreement he returned to Germany, where a similar dispute had developed in the K.P.D. There he tried to resolve the difficulty by securing the leadership for himself, using a scandal about the mishandling of Party funds to bring down the leader, Ernst Thaelmann. In this bid for power Ewert was abetted by Gerhardt Eisler, another ‘international socialist’ who was to have an equally colourful career as a communist subversive.[9]
In the following year Ewert and Eisler’s handling of Thaelmann was overruled by Moscow and, to the misfortune of both of them, Stalin began to undermine their protector Bukharin, who was expelled, first from the Comintern and then from the Soviet Politburo. Ewert, too, was expelled and exiled from Germany by the K.P.D. but, early in 1930, he acknowledged his errors and was readmitted to Comintern work.[10] He was summoned to Moscow to work for the Comintern’s Latin American section and was sent to South America, under the name of Harry Berger, with his wife.[11] Then he was posted to China. After a sojourn in Peking, where he was friendly with Hollis, visiting the latter’s apartment on several occasions, he was recalled to Moscow and sent to Montevideo to bring out a Brazilian revolutionary called Luis Carlos Prestes, who had angered the Kremlin by attracting more loyalty to himself than to the Party.[12] Prestes was to remain in Moscow for four years while Ewert and his wife returned to China and the company of Miss Smedley and of Sonia. In 1932 Sonia records that she spent three days ‘during a nice trip to the country’ with Arthur Ewert, Mrs Szabo and Agnes Smedley.[13] By that time, according to former employees of the British American Tobacco Company, Hollis was working in the advertising department and had moved more permanently to Shanghai where, it seems likely, he and Ewert continued to meet.
Part of Ewert’s task was to end the Chinese Communist Party’s revolt against Stalin’s pact with Chiang Kai-shek, which the Kremlin was still pursuing in spite of the massacre of communists. In this connection Ewert’s activities were recorded by Otto Braun, who contacted him within days of his arrival in Shanghai, and recalled that he met him in the presence of Agnes Smedley.[14] Ewert remained in Shanghai, with occasional visits elsewhere, until July 1934, when he moved hastily to Moscow via Vladivostok.
In April of the following year it was decided in Moscow that Prestes, the revolutionary whom Ewert had pulled out of South America to be disciplined, should return to Brazil surreptitiously and that Ewert would join him to stage a revolt against the Vargas Government and replace it with a ‘Soviet government of workers and peasants’. A woman member of the Red Army, an ex-German who happened to be a friend of the ubiquitous Sonia, and went by name of Olga Benario, was detailed to accompany Prestes, posing as his wife but acting as his bodyguard, prepared to ‘sacrifice her life for him’, though she had never met him before. Her main function was probably to serve as his political officer and report back to Moscow on his activities and real attitude to Stalin. The pair arrived in Rio de Janeiro under the name Mr and Mrs Antonio Vilar and were soon joined by the Ewerts, using the name Berger.[15]
The revolt, staged in November 1935, was a fiasco and the main participants, including the Ewerts, were arrested. Prestes, described in The Times on that occasion as a pathetic figure lacking in leadership, was sentenced to sixteen years’ imprisonment, and Ewert to fourteen.[16] Ewert was tortured in gaol to induce him to incriminate the Soviet Government and disclose his contacts. According to a letter in The Times written by his sister, Minna, who was then living in London, he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, and given electric shocks.[17] He certainly became mentally deranged and never fully recovered his sanity.
Ewert’s wife and Olga Benario, together with Olga’s baby daughter who had been born in Brazil, were deported to Germany and incarcerated in Ravensbrück concentration camp, where they were eventually exterminated. Ewert was freed in May 1945 and arrived in East Germany by Soviet ship in August 1947, living there in various medical institutions until his death in July 1959, in his seventieth year. The Central Committee of the East German Communist Party paid tribute to his work and the funeral oration was delivered by his old co-conspirator, Gerhardt Eisler.[1]8
Ewert’s record of extraordinarily dedicated service to the cause of Soviet communism shows him to have been a far more formidable and politically important revolutionary figure than anyone known to have been associated with Philby, Burgess, Blunt or Maclean, all of whose previous links with communism had been grossly underestimated by the security authorities. Ewert’s association with Hollis should, therefore, have been of high significance when MI5 came to examine the suspicions against him, but it was missed entirely, in a way which seems all too typical of the inquiries made into the background of former members of the secret services.
While trying to secure evidence of Hollis’s left-wing affiliations during his years in China, an MI5 officer involved in the case in the late 1960s discovered that while Hollis had been in Peking in 1930 and 1931 he had shared a flat with a British army officer who had been posted there to learn Chinese. This soldier was still alive and living in retirement in the Cotswolds where the MI5 officer, whose identity is known to me, interviewed him. The MI5 man learned that most of Hollis’s friends whom the officer was able to list had been diplomats and businessmen, with some of whom he played golf. The army man expressed concern about one of them, whose name was Arthur Ewert and whom he described as an ‘international socialist’. He remembered meeting Ewert, a big, shambling man with powerful shoulders, a large head and red hair, and said that Hollis saw him frequently, so that they were more than casual aquaintances. He said that he found the relationship difficult to understand because Hollis’s politics appeared to be so conservative. He did not suggest that Hollis might have been seeing him for journalistic purposes, which presumably he may have been doing.[19]
Unfortunately the MI5 man noted Ewert’s last name as Ewart, believing him to be British. After failing to find any trace of him in the MI5 records he took no further action, having convinced himself that the army officer would probably have considered anyone with even moderate left-wing views as being dangerous.[20]
Because of the fortuitous way in which the information about the friendship between Hollis and Ewert reached me, there can be no doubt of its authenticity. In 1982 I acquired a copy of Sonia’s memoirs, which had proved very difficult to obtain outside East Germany. I showed translations of relevant extracts to certain people with specialist knowledge, including Sonia’s references to Arthur Ewert, of whom I had never previously heard. Among the comments I received was the information I have recorded, together with an admission by the officer who had failed to follow up the Ewert lead that he had ‘certainly missed something’. My researches into the Comintern literature soon showed that what the officer had missed would have completely altered MI5’s attitude to the Hollis case. A routine check with the F.B.I. or with Canadian records should have produced enough on Ewert to have sounded louder alarm bells and have led to more rigorous inquiries.
There can be little doubt, especially in view of Ewert’s visits to Moscow, that he would have reported on his association with Hollis, because such reports were a routine requirement for Comintern officials. As a result, if not previously on his own initiative, he would have been required to try to recruit Hollis who, as the son of an important cleric and likely to return to Britain one day, could have his uses. Hollis’s journalistic activities would have been likely to have reinforced that requirement.
With Ewert, Smedley and probably some of their friends such as Sorge and Sonia, Hollis was in touch not only with zealous communists but with professional Soviet agents and inveterate recruiters. The allegation that Hollis never associated with communists and left no ‘spoor’, as the Cambridge Ring did, therefore has no substance.
Supporters of Hollis, including a most senior MI5 officer, are prepared to admit that he may well have been friendly with Ewert, Smedley and even with Sonia, but they claim that such associations would have been entirely out of journalistic interest. ‘Wouldn’t you, as a journalist, have tried to cultivate such people?’ the officer asked me. It would seem to be a fair question but the documentary evidence shows that neither I nor Hollis would have had much success in interviewing Ewert or cultivating him as a usable source. Ewert was in China surreptitiously on subversive Comintern business and in considerable danger of arrest by the Chinese authorities or the Shanghai Municipal Police. As Harold Isaacs has stated recently, whenever he saw Ewert it was ‘conspiratorially’, meaning for Comintern purposes with all security precautions being taken.[21] The odds are that the same circumstances applied to Hollis’s meetings with Ewert and perhaps for the same reasons.
There is an even more potent factor which vitiates the assumption that their relationship was entirely innocent. When Hollis was questioned about his Chinese days during his interrogation in 1970 he avoided any mention of Ewert.[22] As he was then only sixty-four and in good health it would seem to be most unlikely that he could have forgotten such a forceful and larger-than-life figure who impressed his personality on so many others. The much older Harold Isaacs, whose memory for most of his Shanghai comrades has dimmed, remembers Ewert: ‘A stout man with a florid complexion I knew as a representative of the Comintern. We met conspiratorially from time to time…’[23]
There can be no doubt that if the MI5 and MI6 officers who were eventually to investigate Hollis had known of his association with such a powerful Comintern official as Ewert they would have delved more deeply into his past and interrogated him in greater detail. With people like Ewert and Smedley, whom Sonia describes as a recruiter for the G.R.U., Hollis was not in contact with just communists but with Soviet agents of the highest calibre and strongest determination to secure recruits.
Hollis’s friends and supporters have asked, ‘How could a young man with his stable, ecclesiastical background and being so English have been recruited as a Soviet spy?’ Had Hollis ever written his memoirs then the following extracts from the account by Sonia’s fellow-agent, Alexander Foote, of how he became a Soviet agent could possibly have flowed from his pen: ‘A psycho-analyst would be hard put to find anything in my early life which would indicate that one day I should be running part of a Soviet network. My upbringing was as ordinary as that of any child of middle-class parentage brought up between the wars. It was not really political sense or political education which shaped my decisions, leading me from the Industrial Midlands to Switzerland to post-war Russia and ultimately back to England again. From a restless sales manager to a Russian spy is a difficult game of Consequences. However, it was almost inevitable that my early discontent, restlessness and desire for something new and preferably exciting would lead me towards the Communist Party. While still in business I had attended Communist Party discussion groups and gradually was led to believe that International Communism was the panacea for all the world’s ills. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War crystallised my somewhat inchoate thoughts on the whole matter. I was convinced that the Rebels were inspired and supported by the German-Italian Fascists with the idea of their gaining control first of the Peninsula and ultimately of Europe.’[24]
For the ‘Industrial Midlands’ read ‘Somerset’: for ‘Switzerland’ read ‘China’: for ‘the Spanish Civil War’ read ‘the savage conflicts in China’: for ‘German-Italian Fascists’ read ‘the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese’.
Whittaker Chambers, the American communist traitor who achieved notoriety as the main witness against Alger Hiss, the State Department official imprisoned for perjury, described in his testimony why he became a communist and Soviet recruiter: ‘Marxism, Leninism offers an oversimplified explanation of the causes of world economic crisis and a program for action. The very vigor of the project particularly appeals to the more or less sheltered middle-class intellectuals who feel that there the whole context of their lives has kept them from the world of reality.’[25] Hollis was no intellectual but neither was Foote. Regarding such people, Alexander Orlov, the Soviet diplomat who defected during the late 1930s, put the Soviet position more directly when he wrote that the recruiters ‘based their appeal to young men who were tired of a tedious life in the stifling atmosphere of their privileged class’.[26]
Hollis’s possible susceptibility to recruitment to communism and the Soviet cause appears to have been closely parallelled by that of Whittaker Chambers. Both were university drop-outs. During Chambers’ university days he became friendly with aspiring writers and followed their example. When he quit before taking a degree he had a wanderlust. His decision to become a communist came during a period of personal failure. If Hollis was ‘getting away from the Church’ by going to China, as he was to claim, communism offered some kind of faith, of which the Hollis family seemed in need.
The recent case of the MI5 officer, Michael Bettaney, showed that continuing Christian belief can co-exist with dedication to pro-Soviet communism. His background was similar to that of Hollis. He was an unremarkable Oxford student with strong religious belief and found himself, in his early twenties, in the turmoil and violence of Northern Ireland, where, if he is to be believed, the seeds of his conversion to communism were sown.
Shanghai in the late 1920s and 1930s was more conducive to the recruitment of a young man to the apparent cause of social and political justice than anywhere in Britain or the United States. It was a city of appalling poverty for the Chinese masses who made it the sixth largest city in the world. Many of them were driven to make a starvation-level living as pack-animals. The streets thronged with beggars, some of whom were found dead on the pavements almost every morning. By contrast, the Shanghai International Settlement, where Hollis lived, was an enclave of prosperity, a major centre of commerce and, with the French Concession, had a night-life which gave the city a scandalous reputation. There were splendid hotels and exclusive clubs, including four golf clubs where Hollis played. Outside the European settlements organized labour and the communists in particular were brutally suppressed by various secret societies and by the troops of Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang had gangs of special police called Blue Shirts who behaved more atrociously than Hitler’s Brown Shirts. About 100,000 communists and alleged communists are said to have been killed by the Blue Shirts.[27]
Jack Tilton, in the 1930s a Detective Inspector with the Shanghai Municipal Police, which he served with distinction, has written to me describing how he witnessed executions in the streets and saw severed heads in trees. The tough shoot-to-kill methods which the Municipal Police found it necessary to use against subversives in the International Settlement itself could have generated resentment in a young man’s mind. The later Japanese atrocities against the whole Chinese nation were appalling, and Hollis may well have witnessed the direct attack on the Chapei district of Shanghai made by the Japanese in January 1932, when there was furious fighting and a curfew had to be enforced in the International Settlement. Some of the Cambridge recruits to the Soviet service have explained how they were incensed by their reading of the distant cruelties and injustices of the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s repression of the Jews. The effects of on-the-spot observation of the cruelties and injustices in Shanghai are likely to have been more urgently persuasive.
Throughout Hollis’s nine-year stay in China the country was in a continuous state of ferment which was eventually to lead to the post-war communist victory. He was there during the Long March of the communists which seemed, and indeed was, heroic. He was there during the student revolutions in Peking in 1935 and 1936 and, in the latter year, wrote to his parents expressing some sympathy with the Chinese communist cause: ‘One can’t really help but sympathise with them in a way, though really they are playing into Japan’s hands.’[28]
Such ferment was, inevitably, exploited by Soviet intelligence officers and political activists using the cosmopolitan population of the Settlement as a recruitment pool. Many books and records testify to the extent of this activity.
