Too Secret Too Long, page 40
Philby was also ideally placed as a feedback agent to keep the K.G.B. continuously informed of the progress of its own counter-intelligence operations. This is one of the major functions of any penetration agent inside a secret service. Even more important to the Kremlin was Philby’s capability to angle intelligence reports for submission to the Foreign Office – and eventually, when processed, to the Cabinet – so that they reflected the Soviet Union’s interests. The most effective channel for misleading an adversary government is through its intelligence service on which it depends for information to guide its foreign policy decisions.
While the K.G.B. allowed Philby to lie fallow for a few years after his departure from MI6 the use it made of him once he had arrived in Beirut, his base for Middle East operations, has been under-estimated. He took part in major K.G.B. activities in Syria, Iraq, Jordan and North Yemen and contributed to Soviet subversion in general in those volatile areas.[34] For such damage as he then inflicted on Western interests those who organized his ‘clearance’ in 1955 bear heavy responsibility.
Philby’s defection confirmed the long-standing suspicions in Washington that the British secret services had been responsible for enabling a K.G.B. spy to be privy to some of the C.I.A. and F.B.I.’s most sensitive secrets, all of which he had systematically betrayed. The effect on individuals who had trusted him, like James Angleton, was corrosive for future co-operation and the fears of those, like Hoover, who had always distrusted British security were shown to have been justified. This regeneration of suspicion damaged the Anglo-American relationship on intelligence and security that is so essential to the containment of the Soviet assault on Western freedom.
On arrival in the Soviet Union Philby was not welcomed as the hero he has since become there. Being rightly judged an alcoholic he had first to be ‘dried out’, as Maclean and Burgess had been, and was then held outside Moscow for many months while being thoroughly debriefed and while further inquiries were made to ensure that he was not a double agent.[35] Eventually he was given K.G.B. office work in Moscow under various cover guises, with no public references whatever to the fact that he was in the Soviet Union.
As the long debriefing of defectors from the K.G.B. has indicated, Philby’s must have been of considerable value to the Soviets and he was on hand to help to interpret and analyse new intelligence being received from the West and especially against MI6 and MI5, knowing all the weaknesses there and, possibly, the names of officers and agents susceptible to recruitment.
With the growing emphasis on disinformation, forgeries, the planting of ‘scandals’ and other K.G.B. ‘dirty tricks’ Philby’s expertise must have been very welcome. He undoubtedly displayed it in his biography My Silent War, with many parts of the text angled or faked to protect spies like Blunt, and possibly Hollis, then still unexposed publicly. The book was worthwhile to the K.G.B. if only for the number of man-hours MI6 and MI5 spent trying to analyse its every nuance. Though fifteen years have passed since its publication various officers and former officers of MI6 still dread the next instalment, which Philby is alleged to have written. The new look at the Philby case, in progress at the time of writing, is believed to be connected with the preparation of a counter-document.
According to Philby’s former wife Eleanor, he also ghosted the memoirs of the K.G.B. spy Gordon Lonsdale, published in 1965, which was certainly a mine of disinformation.
It is known that Andropov, when head of the K.G.B., encouraged Philby to write My Silent War as a way of projecting the organization as an elite force. British Intelligence also has reason to believe that Philby was influential with Andropov in improving the status of membership of the K.G.B. and the general sophistication of its officers, which has made them more acceptable in their efforts to penetrate foreign institutions and society when operating abroad.[36]
Philby has been allowed to meet the odd British visitor to Moscow, where he claims to be ideally happy, and he is permitted to correspond with selected old friends such as Graham Greene, who wrote the foreword to My Silent War. It has been reported that he has been allowed out of the Soviet Union to visit Cuba to advise Castro on espionage and propaganda but this is most unlikely to be true. Graham Greene has been prepared to meet Philby in Vienna, Prague or anywhere else convenient to him but such a meeting has never been permitted up to the time of writing.[37]
What would happen if Philby touched down in Britain on some flight to Cuba or for some other reason? The likelihood that he would be arrested and tried would seem to be remote. Even though he declined the offer of immunity, the fact that he was offered it might enable a good lawyer to insist that whatever he might have said in Beirut in 1963 had been under duress and was, therefore, inadmissible as evidence. Whenever I have discussed this alluring possibility with former secret service officers they have dismissed it as a nightmare which they prefer not to contemplate.
The Potential Value of Oversight
Of all the proven espionage cases Philby’s demonstrates most forcefully how, in stage after stage of it, secrecy has been the enemy of genuine security. Secrecy for secrecy’s sake has also been responsible for damaging the reputations of politicians who, sometimes knowingly and sometimes through being misinformed by officials, have misled Parliament and the public.
Hopefully an alert oversight body would have prevented those responsible for the Maclean and Burgess White Paper, which led to the first publicity about the Philby case, from deliberately including misinformation. Knowing that an independent body responsible to Parliament was aware of the true state of the circumstantial evidence against Philby might have prevented any prime minister from effectively clearing the traitor in 1955. The more one studies the record of statements to Parliament on security matters the more apparent becomes the need for oversight to prevent ministers from being misled by security officials.
The judgement of those in MI6 who strenuously protested that Philby was innocent, thereby enabling him to continue to serve the K.G.B. in Beirut, without MI5’s knowledge that he was still operating for MI6, might have been subjected to more objective criticism, a matter of some importance, as some of them continued in important office. Others in high places might have been more reluctant to support Philby had they known that their views might lead to inquiry. One such was the late Sir Richard ‘Otto’ Clark, a Cambridge contemporary with considerable power and influence in Whitehall, who gave an assurance that Philby was ‘a calm, dependable social democrat’, when he almost certainly knew otherwise, having been an ardent left-winger himself, urging revolution to strip the privileged classes of their power.
It remains a matter for conjecture whether, with effective oversight, Hollis, White and the Attorney-General would so readily have taken the unprecedented step of granting Philby immunity to prosecution so that they could carry out a damage assessment of his crimes which should have been attempted years earlier, had not MI6 prevented it. They might have been aware that, to an independent oversight group, the secret services would look as though they were behaving like the mythical backwards-running tribe of Africa, which does not mind where it is going but likes to see where it has been. They might also have been more aware of the domestic political dangers of allowing a traitor and accessory to murders to remain ‘respectable’ into old age, rejoining his old clubs and posing as a patriot, unless tongues wagged audibly enough for some writer to expose him when, even then, he would be immune to penal punishment.
The handling of the final stage of the Philby case, as with that of Maclean, will continue to generate suspicion that its purpose may have been to encourage and secure defection as the most certain means of disposing of a situation embarrassing to the secret services and to ministers. An oversight body, without necessarily exposing details, could have reassured Parliament regarding that point.
It would seem that although the entire Philby case was disastrously handled nobody at any stage suffered any professional censure within the secret departments. An oversight body might have required some internal inquest so that lessons could be learned and individuals disciplined, as happened following the far less damaging but more public case of Commander Crabb.
chapter thirty-three
The Mitchell Case
Those MI5 officers who had been apprehensive for some time about the probable penetration of the Service by Soviet agents were convinced by the circumstances of Philby’s defection that there must still be an informer operating at high level. The two who had become most suspicious, working independently and without reference to each other, were Arthur Martin, then second-in-command of the counter-espionage section, and Peter Wright, who had been a scientific adviser, putting his major effort into the Soviet espionage problem.
Martin made a short-list of all those in MI5 who had known the secret of Elliott’s visit. It comprised five people – four men, including Martin himself, and one woman who was Martin’s assistant. A separate survey of all the penetration leads by another MI5 officer, Ronald Symonds, reduced the main suspects to two – Hollis and the deputy whom he had appointed, Graham Mitchell.[1]
Aware that Hollis was super-sensitive to any suggestion of disloyalty in his organization, Martin sought advice from his former chief, Sir Dick White, who could not bring himself to believe that Hollis, whom he had helped into MI5 and had consistently promoted, could possibly be guilty. Having no particular views on Mitchell he advised Martin to see Hollis and tell him of his fears about the Deputy Director. It was understood that White would say nothing to Hollis concerning Martin’s suspicions about the Director-General himself.
On the evening when Martin told Hollis of his suspicions and that in his professional opinion Mitchell should be investigated as a start, Hollis seemed devastated and, without making any effort to defend Mitchell, suggested that they should continue the discussion without delay over dinner in the Travellers Club. Describing the experience to friends, later, Martin said that Hollis’s behaviour was bizarre. Normally ice-cool, he was nervous, avoided talking about the issue they were supposed to be discussing and, in Martin’s eyes, behaved ‘like a broken man who had been found out’. At the end of the meal he declared that he would think about the Mitchell problem and let Martin know his views.
Shortly afterwards Wright was chatting in Martin’s office about his fear that the agency was penetrated and suggested that it had to be Mitchell or Hollis. Martin then revealed that he had already seen Hollis about it and urged Wright to do the same. He did so and after Hollis had agreed to a limited investigation into Mitchell Wright was seconded for six months from his usual work to assist Martin with it. Both were told that nothing should be done that would enable anybody outside MI5 to hear about the inquiry.
Meanwhile, in March 1963, at the invitation of MI5 and with the promise of financial reward, the K.G.B. defector, Anatoli Golitsin, had come to Britain for an indefinite visit and possibly to settle in the country. In his debriefings he indicated the presence of a high-level spy in MI5 by claiming that, while in the British Department of the K.G.B. in Moscow, he had seen an index which had a section entitled ‘Material from the British Security Service’. It was recent material, secured long after Blunt or any previously suspected spy had left MI5.[2]
Golitsin also said that there had been great excitement in the K.G.B. about a document describing British technical methods of intelligence which had been acquired from England. The document was almost certainly a paper produced by MI5 in 1960. He also revealed that the Soviet Embassy in London was almost unique in having no S.K. (Soviet Kolony) department, a group of security officers whose function is to ensure that there are no defections. Golitsin suggested that the Russians must have such an excellent source inside MI5 that they could be confident of being warned of any coming defection, so they could safely dispense with S.K. officers. To be so dependable an inside MI5 source would have to be at high level and in regular touch with a Soviet controller.
Defectors are very rarely able to give the true name of a Soviet agent, as identities are so closely guarded in Moscow, and are usually limited to providing leads and occasionally code-names. At no time did Golitsin point a finger specifically at Mitchell or at Hollis. This disposes of the specious claim that the suspicion against Mitchell and Hollis was the result of a ‘mole-hunt’ touched off by Golitsin who, his critics claim, was obsessed with the belief that Soviet agents had infiltrated every Western intelligence organization, including the C.I.A.[3] The suspicions were ‘home-grown’ and existed before Golitsin’s evidence, being brought to a head by Philby’s defection. Nevertheless, Golitsin’s allegation of a high-level agent in MI5 helps to dispose of another claim, repeatedly made by Hollis’s supporters, that there was no defector evidence against him.
While Hollis may have been shattered by the suggestion that his deputy might be a spy, Martin felt sure that the Director-General himself was the culprit. He lost no time, therefore, in initiating the inquiry into Mitchell, which had to be completed before Hollis could be investigated.
To avoid damage to morale at lower levels of MI5, and to reduce the risk of tarnishing the reputation of the Service in other areas of Whitehall, the inquiry was kept as secret as possible and Mitchell was referred to only by the code-name ‘Peters’. The case was to last several years and I shall report it in some detail because it illustrates MI5 methods of inquiry, demonstrates the belief inside MI5 that the agency was deeply penetrated and, as I shall show later, proves the falsity of an essential element of Margaret Thatcher’s statement to Parliament in March 1981 – namely that the leads which pointed to Hollis could be attributed to Blunt, who severed connection with MI5 in 1946, or to Philby, who had no access to secrets after 1951.[4]
Beyond Mitchell’s record of service there was little about him on file because few inquiries had been made when he had entered MI5 in 1939 and because Hollis had declined to introduce positive vetting, which would have required Mitchell to provide details of his past, while the routine private inquiries would have revealed more. Born in 1905, Mitchell had been a contemporary of Hollis at Oxford, though at a different college, Magdalen, where he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Unlike Hollis, Mitchell obtained a degree. He worked as a journalist on the Illustrated London News and then as a statistician in the research department of the Conservative Central Office, which was regarded by the K.G.B. as a useful jumping-off ground as it provided agents with a right-wing image.
Mitchell entered MI5 through the recommendation of Sir Joseph Ball, who later also assisted Burgess to enter as an agent-runner, and was assigned to the same section as Hollis, running the desk responsible for overseeing fascist subversion and other far-right activities in Britain. Remembered by colleagues as totally humourless and even more withdrawn than Hollis, he was evacuated to Blenheim in 1940 and spent most of the war there.[5] Some of his activities with respect to the British Union of Fascists, and Sir Oswald Mosley in particular, have recently become public with the release of wartime documents.
Since Mitchell was well established in MI5 by 1942, he was a possible candidate for the G.R.U. spy ‘Elli’, for while most of the known Soviet agents recruited at British universities were K.G.B., it is now certain that the G.R.U. also recruited there.[6] If he was ‘Elli’ he could have been serviced by Sonia and could have been the reason why she was posted to the Oxford area, but there is no known previous connection between Sonia and Mitchell, as there is believed to be between her and Hollis. Further, the information to which Mitchell had access throughout the war could hardly have been responsible for the excitement created by ‘Elli’s’ reports at G.R.U. headquarters, as recorded by Gouzenko. The last three letters of Mitchell’s name suggested a possible relationship with ‘Elli’, but Hollis also had three mutual letters, as did Guy Liddell and possibly others.
In the late 1940s, when Hollis was made Director of Security (Section C), Mitchell succeeded him as head of Section F, which was responsible for overseeing subversive activities in the U.K. So when positive vetting was introduced into other departments following the Fuchs, Burgess and Maclean cases, he was involved in much of the spade-work as he was responsible for overseeing communist activities, which had become much more significant. There is evidence that he suffered agonies of conscience when anyone who had previously been associated with communism was dismissed from the Civil Service or moved to non-secret work.[7]
Mitchell returned to London after the war and eyebrows were raised over some minor involvement in the Pontecorvo case. In 1953, however, under White’s reorganization, Mitchell was made head of D Branch responsible for counter-espionage, in which position he would have been of great interest to the K.G.B., especially as he was concerned with the British investigations of the K.G.B. intercepts deciphered in Operation Bride which, by that time, was known as V-(for ‘Venona’) material. He displayed such little interest in these intercepts that he was in favour of shutting down G.C.H.Q.’s work on them as being wasteful of manpower, a suggestion which may have been based on a genuine belief that there were more pressing priorities but would certainly have had the whole-hearted approval of the K.G.B. Analysis of the V-material was, in fact, put on a care and maintenance basis only and was not restarted with vigour until Martin took charge of Soviet counter-espionage in 1959, after which it continued to yield results. Mitchell’s behaviour in this respect, however, looked less suspicious later when it was discovered that Hollis had strongly supported Mitchell’s recommendation and may have initiated it.
