Too Secret Too Long, page 41
As I have described, Mitchell was involved in drafting the misleading MI5 brief for the 1955 White Paper on Maclean and Burgess. He also prepared the draft brief for Macmillan’s statement to Parliament which effectively cleared Philby.
In spite of this modest performance Mitchell was appointed Deputy Director-General when Hollis took over the top post in 1956. The Home Secretary almost invariably accepted the recommendation of the incoming Director-General so Mitchell was virtually appointed by Hollis. In his new post he became responsible for liaison with the security departments of Allied governments but, until he fell under suspicion, he seems to be little remembered by his foreign counterparts on whom he made scant impact, perhaps because Hollis did most of the travelling.
Former colleagues recall that in addition to being withdrawn, Mitchell had a habit of talking to himself, even when others were present, which gave him a reputation for being somewhat eccentric.
There was one factor which seemed to be in Mitchell’s favour from the start of the inquiry into his loyalty. Before he had fallen under suspicion he had decided to retire prematurely on a reduced pension being, apparently, weary of the job after twenty-four years. Hollis had agreed that he should leave in September 1963, shortly before his fifty-eighth birthday, the normal retiring age being sixty. Those who suspected him realized that if the K.G.B. had an agent in such a superb position he would have been pressured into remaining there as long as possible.
The circumstances of Mitchell’s premature retirement would seem to merit closer study than has been given to it. Long before he fell under any suspicion he was complaining that Hollis was making his life a misery by giving him too little to do, which implies that Hollis had taken responsibilities away from him, as the Deputy is normally busy. What were those responsibilities and why was Hollis fulfilling them himself? He could hardly have been restricting Mitchell on grounds of incompetence when they had been so close for so long.
While Hollis was most anxious to restrict all knowledge of the ‘Peters’ case to MI5, it was pointed out to him that this was impossible because Mitchell, being in charge of the MI5 watchers, knew them all and so they could not be used to keep him under surveillance. Reluctantly, Hollis agreed that watchers from MI6, who were unknown to Mitchell, should be called in. For this purpose Stephen de Mowbray, an able officer, who was in charge of the MI6 watchers, was seconded to MI5 to control the surveillance. The operation therefore became a joint MI5/MI6 exercise, which meant that Sir Dick White, as MI6 chief, was officially kept informed of developments.
By mid-June 1963 it was decided that to dispose of the case as quickly as possible Mitchell should be given the full technical treatment. Martin and Wright therefore needed the assistance of the head of Technical Operations and asked Hollis for permission to involve him. When Hollis refused, Martin felt that the investigation was being so prejudiced that he threatened to go over Hollis’s head to the Prime Minister. To resolve the difficulty, Furnival Jones, who was in overall charge of the case, agreed that White should be consulted in the hope of obtaining his support. Martin and Wright met White by appointment at his residence, a house in Queen Anne’s Gate which backed on to MI6 headquarters in Broadway and was connected to them by a passage. White had, meanwhile, learned that Nicholas Elliott was convinced that Philby had been forewarned of his visit to Beirut, probably by Mitchell or Hollis. So, after listening to Martin and Wright, White agreed to see Hollis the following day and, as a result, secured the immediate support of Technical Operations.
A mirror in Mitchell’s office was removed and a see-through type substituted so that a television camera could be hidden behind it to allow watchers to see if the suspect was in the habit of copying secret documents.[8] A check was kept on his office telephone but when Hollis was asked to request the necessary Home Office warrant for Mitchell’s home telephone to be tapped and bugged he refused on the grounds that this would mean informing the Home Secretary, Home Office officials and the Post Office. His objection could be interpreted as being due to the embarrassment of admitting to the Home Secretary that the man he had urged him to appoint as Deputy Director-General might be a Soviet spy. In that case, he was putting his personal considerations above the interests of the Service. With the aid of a Post Office team, the MI5 officers did, however, manage to insert a microphone into Mitchell’s home, a procedure which did not need a warrant then but does now, so that they were able to listen to his part of any telephone conversations.
Meanwhile it was discovered that Mitchell, a chess enthusiast, was in the habit of playing correspondence games with chess masters behind the Iron Curtain, including some in the Soviet Union. The investigating officers wondered if the moves might be a method of communication and called in the British chess master, Hugh Alexander, who was working in G.C.H.Q. He examined the moves in intercepted letters to and from Mitchell but could discover nothing sinister. It was realized that this international chess interest might fit with Gouzenko’s statement that the MI5 spy called ‘Elli’ had ‘something Russian in his background’ but, without asking Mitchell, it was not possible to discover if he had been playing with Soviet correspondents prior to 1942, when Gouzenko had learned the details about ‘Elli’.
Harold Macmillan has told me how he was kept fully informed of the progress of the Mitchell case including the details of the one-way mirror.
A search of Mitchell’s office carried out at night showed that there was one locked drawer in an antique desk which had been unused for years. Unlike the other drawers, the edges of which were dusty, the locked drawer had been in recent use. Mitchell’s office connected by a door with that of Hollis, whose permission was sought by Peter Wright for the drawer to be opened on the following evening with a lock-pick after Mitchell had gone home. When the drawer was eased out it was empty but marks in the dust showed that some flat object with four button feet had been in the drawer on more than one occasion and had been hurriedly removed from it, probably within the previous twenty-four hours, because the scratch-marks in the dust were very fresh.
The marks were photographed and shown by Wright to Hollis who made no significant comment. It was thought that the marks could have been made by a battery-driven tape-recorder, the purpose of such a device being obvious. A weekly meeting was held in Mitchell’s room to decide where MI5’s limited number of watchers were to be used and a recording of it would be of the highest value to any Soviet Intelligence agent.
The only person who had known that the desk drawer was to be opened, apart from Peter Wright, was Hollis and nothing was ever put into the drawer again. Mitchell, almost certainly, had no knowledge of the suspicion against him at that stage. When Wright discussed the desk evidence with Martin they began to wonder if they had made an error in investigating Mitchell first.
Some false information was passed in routine documents to Mitchell to see if they would reach Moscow, which might then play back further instructions to the K.G.B. office in London indicating that they had received it.[9] G.C.H.Q. examined their deciphered K.G.B. traffic for telltale signs but never found anything of relevance.
The possibility that Mitchell might have warned the K.G.B. about the imminent interrogation of Maclean and Philby was carefully examined. It was decided that Mitchell had not had access to the Maclean information in time to betray it. He could have betrayed the information about Philby’s interrogation, but if he was responsible for that then the investigators were dealing with two spies, not just one.
The ‘candid’ camera in Mitchell’s office revealed that when he was alone his face looked tortured, as though in despair. He talked to himself and, on one occasion, looked towards Hollis’s door and muttered, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’
He never copied any documents but the officer monitoring the camera was excited when he saw Mitchell drawing a crude map which he eventually tore up, putting the fragments in the paper liner of his wastebasket. Normally the liner would have been taken in the evening for burning or shredding but the investigators pieced the map together and found it was of an open area near his home at Chobham. There was a point on it which Mitchell had marked R.V., meaning rendezvous. The watchers staked out the area for several days but nobody ever arrived at the rendezvous.
The watchers reported that Mitchell was behaving as though he knew that he might be being followed. He wandered about in parks, repeatedly turning round, and would peer in shop windows as though looking at the reflections of passers-by.
The team decided that as Mitchell might have learned that he was under suspicion, possibly having spotted the watchers, they were unlikely to get any further without interrogating him. The torn-up map had given them a fair reason, so Hollis was approached for permission. Hollis told Martin that he had been to see the Prime Minister to secure his permission for the interrogation, which he was not required to do, and that this had been refused because Macmillan thought that Mitchell might defect, with terrible political consequences, especially as regards the exchange of secrets with the U.S. The MI5 officers suspected that Hollis was lying and my conversation with Macmillan on that subject suggests that they were probably right. While he was willing to go into details about the Mitchell case and remembered Sir Dick White in that connection, he seemed unable to recall Hollis. Further, he told me that he had always thought that Mitchell was only ‘unbalanced’ from the effects of being in MI5 too long and was not a spy. So it is most unlikely that he ever feared that he would defect.
In July, while Mitchell was under intensive investigation, he was involved in an episode concerning Golitsin which savoured of pantomime, had it not been so damaging to MI5’s interests. Because of the real fear that Golitsin might be assassinated by the K.G.B. his presence in Britain was kept as secret as possible within MI5, yet in spite of this the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Colin Coote (later Sir Colin), learned that there was an important defector in Britain. Being determined to print an exclusive report, he demanded to know the defector’s name but was given no official assistance by Whitehall. Coote managed to enlist the personal help of Lord Home, then Foreign Secretary, and pressure was brought to bear on MI5 to give the Telegraph the name. As Hollis was absent from the office at the time it fell to Mitchell, as deputy, to ask Golitsin’s case officer for the true name of the defector, whom Mitchell knew only by the MI5 code-name ‘Kago’. The case officer, who happened, again, to be Arthur Martin, advised most strongly against releasing the name but Mitchell, who was not prepared to stand against the Foreign Secretary, insisted on knowing it. Martin wrote down the name as Anatoli Dolnytsin, which was the name of a Soviet diplomat who had served in Britain previously and, having K.G.B. connections, had been marginally involved in the Lonsdale case. Mitchell then arranged for this name to be given to Coote through the D-Notice Committee, which was the official link between MI5 and the newspapers. Instead of giving the name exclusively to Coote, the D-Notice Secretary, Colonel L. G. ‘Sammy’ Lohan, was instructed to release it over a news-agency tape so that every newspaper learned of it.[10] I was in the Daily Express office when the information surfaced on the tape-machine. While giving Dolnytsin’s name it urged newspapers to avoid mentioning it, but it was obvious that with worldwide distribution of the tape some papers would ignore the request, and in fact most did so. Years later I was informed by the Chairman of the D-Notice Committee that this had been foreseen and the issue of the name was a ploy to deprive the Daily Telegraph of its scoop.[11]
The following day, when the name Dolnytsin appeared in the newspapers, Golitsin took fright and returned to the U.S. on the first available aircraft, thereby depriving MI5 of his further services.
Martin has since claimed that ‘Dolnytsin’ was a slip of the pen but I find it easier to believe that it was a deliberate ploy to protect Golitsin’s real name from both Mitchell and Hollis.
The considerable loss of Golitsin’s personal services was due to a dangerous leak by whoever it was who told Coote of the defector’s presence in Britain. It is possible that the information was leaked to a Daily Telegraph reporter who told Coote. However, while once again coincidence could be at work, Coote was a golfing friend of Hollis, who was one of the very few who knew of the defector’s presence yet did not know his name.[12] Coote had no connection with Mitchell.
It was in the interest of any spy inside MI5 that Golitsin should be frightened out of Britain before his debriefings, which, it was hoped, would be spread over several years, produced any more dangerous leads. Incidentally, Golitsin’s precipitate flight back to the safety of the C.I.A. is evidence that he was not a K.G.B. plant, a false defector, as his detractors have claimed. Had he been under K.G.B control he would not have been in such fear of his life.
Mitchell retired from MI5 in September as planned, still unaware, so far as is known, that he was under suspicion of being a spy. Shortly before doing so he remarked to his old colleague, Colonel T. A. Robertson, that in retirement he would be ‘playing about with his wireless sets’.[13] When Robertson, who knew of the suspicions, reported this there was immediate interest because the investigators had not known that Mitchell was knowledgeable about radio transmitters and receivers, a valuable attribute for an agent. The information was investigated but was found to be harmlessly connected with his interest in yachting.
A report to Hollis and to White, written by Martin, stated that though the interrogation of Mitchell had been forbidden, the suspicions against him remained so strong that under the Anglo-American agreements on security the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. would have to be informed because of the damage he might have done to their interests. At first Hollis insisted that the Americans should not be informed because the case was not proven, but when he was told that White would then have to consult the Prime Minister, because of the Anglo-American aspects, he suddenly announced, ‘Right, I’ll go and tell them myself.’
To Martin, who had expected to be chosen for the task, being at the right level to talk to his U.S. counterparts, this seemed like a panic decision by a desperate man determined to precede anybody who might suggest to the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. that Hollis himself might be the culprit. Hollis then reinforced this suspicion by announcing that he would be making the journey alone.
Normally, under such circumstances, the Director-General would have been accompanied by an officer who knew all the details of the case so that he could be on hand to brief him. So why was Hollis so determined to go to Washington alone? One possible answer was the urgent need for long discussions with a Soviet controller, which could not be safely conducted in Britain. By that time Hollis must almost certainly have been aware that Martin suspected him and, if he was a spy, he may have felt the need to seek guidance from Moscow about possible defection. It would not have been safe to meet a controller with Martin, or anyone else, by his side in the same Washington hotel. Alone there, he could be absolutely confident that whatever the suspicions in the minds of those like Martin, nobody would dare to arrange the surveillance of the Director-General of MI5.
Hollis flew to Washington and saw the F.B.I. chief, J. Edgar Hoover, and the head of the C.I.A., John McCone, thereby raising what was a fairly thin case to a matter for discussion at the highest level. He also took the unusual step of explaining the purpose of his mission to the British Ambassador, Lord Harlech, thereby suggesting that MI5’s case against Mitchell was stronger than it really was.
Hollis bluntly told Hoover and McCone that he had reason to suspect that one of his most senior officers, Graham Mitchell, was ‘a long-term agent of the Soviet Union’, but when the Americans asked for details he was unable to supply them, saying that Martin would be arriving with them later. They tended to disbelieve him and their feeling that he was exaggerating the case was strengthened when Martin eventually arrived, following Hollis’s return to London, and told them that Mitchell had never been interrogated because Hollis would not allow it.
Having made something of a fool of himself, Hollis returned to London in a calmer and different frame of mind. He ordered a new analysis of the evidence of Soviet penetration by an officer junior to both Martin and Wright. He insisted that the officer must not consult either of the two previous investigators and indicated that he did not believe that MI5 had been penetrated by anyone.
What had changed Hollis’s mind about the seriousness of the situation? Was it calming advice from the Moscow Centre that he had panicked unnecessarily and that in his position as Director-General he had the power to defuse the danger?
After several months the officer detailed by Hollis produced a report which exonerated Mitchell but, in view of all the circumstantial evidence, could not deny the possibility of penetration. Supporters of Hollis have claimed that by encouraging the exoneration of Mitchell he was fearlessly pointing the finger of suspicion at himself as the only other candidate, but they are probably unaware of his immediate response to the report. He drafted a letter to the heads of the F.B.I., C.I.A. and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police declaring that Mitchell had been found to be innocent and that there was no longer any evidence of any penetration of MI5.[14] Under intense pressure from his staff he deleted the second part about the penetration but insisted on sending the first, which Martin and others opposed because no suspect could be regarded as cleared until he had been interrogated.
At the final meeting on the Mitchell case, a few weeks before the October 1964 general election, Hollis declared that he was closing it because, even if Mitchell was guilty, he could do no more damage now that he was retired. He also said that the whole issue of the past penetration of MI5 was to be regarded as dead, the Blunt case having been disposed of secretly.
