Too Secret Too Long, page 42
Later the investigating officers came to believe that Hollis took this course so that he would not have to inform the incoming government, whatever it might be, of the penetration issue. The new Prime Minister, or Home Secretary, might have wanted to know who was responsible for the obvious penetrations if Mitchell was innocent. George Wigg, who was appointed security overseer by Wilson as soon as Labour came into office, would certainly have wanted to know the whole story and would have informed Wilson, because it was his brief to do so, but he was told nothing. This belief is supported by the fact that in the following year, 1965, Hollis discussed Mitchell with the R.C.M.P. chiefs in terms suggesting that he did not think that he had been cleared.[15]
Martin was later to accuse Hollis of having destroyed material evidence concerning the Mitchell case, an accusation which Jonathan Aitken, the Tory M.P., mentioned in a letter he sent to Mrs Thatcher in 1980, warning her of the dangerous political implications of the Hollis affair.
The Mitchell case was to remain in its unresolved condition until after Hollis himself had retired, when it was reopened, as described in Chapter 41.
chapter thirty-four
The Profumo Affair
While certain MI5 officers were weighing the eventual political consequences of the possible proof that either the Deputy Director-General or the Director-General himself was a spy they found themselves involved in an issue of immediate political importance – the so-called Profumo affair. After long study of this complicated case, close professional involvement at the time and discussions with well-placed witnesses, including MI5 officers, I am convinced that only blind reluctance to criticize the Security Service by the leading Establishment figures concerned enabled Hollis to escape severe public censure and even suspicion.
The official account of the Profumo affair is a long report by Lord Denning which has been hailed as a brilliant tour de force and a model of its kind in bringing to the general reader the intricacies of a complex case in an easily understandable way.[1] My inquiries, however, have satisfied me that it was one of the most misleading official documents ever foisted on the public. Lord Denning was repeatedly misled by witnesses and especially by the chief MI5 witness, Hollis.[2] To quote an MI5 officer who was involved in the case, ‘Denning had wool pulled over his eyes’. As a result he made judgements which were flawed and excused officials who should have been censured.
For anyone interested in the activities of Soviet Intelligence against the West, and against Britain in particular, the Profumo affair offers illuminating insight into how the Moscow Centre seizes upon opportunities and exploits them.
The most contentious issue concerns a character whose activities Denning’s witnesses and Denning himself were at pains to under-estimate. This was Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet naval officer who arrived in Britain on 27 March 1960 ostensibly for duties as Assistant Naval Attaché at the Soviet Embassy but, in reality, for intelligence operations because he was a professional G.R.U. official.
Ivanov took over contacts established by his predecessors but was also required to establish his own through the diplomatic social network, which included journalists. Among the latter was Coote, editor of the Daily Telegraph, who was a patient of an osteopath called Stephen Ward, a strange character so sympathetic to communism and to the Soviet Union that some of his distinguished patients appear to have reported him to MI5 as an agent of influence. Ward was also a capable artist and had told Coote of his desire to visit Moscow to draw some of the Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev. Coote had offered to help and a little later, on 20 January 1961, hosted a lunch with Ward and Ivanov who said that he might be able to arrange a visit to Moscow. Following this lunch Ward and Ivanov became close friends.
The circumstances of this lunch, held at the Garrick Club, are odd. Fleet Street editors do not usually know Soviet defence attachés and there is evidence that Coote did not know Ivanov very well, if at all. He had invited his correspondent for communist affairs, David Floyd, to be present on the grounds that his knowledge of Russian would be useful but Floyd has told me that Ivanov’s English was so good that he was no more than a spectator. A possible explanation for the lunch stems from Coote’s friendship with Hollis, with whom he played golf. After being sounded out by Coote about the wisdom of putting Ward in touch with the Soviet Embassy, Hollis may have suggested the lunch with Ivanov for a highly irresponsible reason which will become apparent as the Profumo affair unfolds.
Ward was a sexual deviant and procured young women for friends and contacts of similar interest. Among these girls was nineteen-year-old Christine Keeler, then a hostess at a night club. She denies having been a prostitute but admits granting sexual favours in return for ‘a good time’. Ward had the use of a weekend cottage on the Thames-side Cliveden estate belonging to Lord Astor, who was one of his patients and was also a sexual deviant, taking advantage of girls whom Ward provided. As a friend of Ward, Ivanov visited his London flat and the weekend cottage.
Ivanov may have been subjected to some degree of routine surveillance by MI5, which was alerted again to his true profession in April 1961 by the Soviet defector Oleg Penkovsky.[3] On 8 June 1961 an MI5 officer, who used the name ‘Woods’ but whose real name was Wagstaffe, warned Ward that Ivanov might use him to gain access to his high-level patients. Ward promised to be careful and to keep MI5 informed of any interesting developments. This response has been wrongly interpreted as meaning that Ward was recruited by MI5 and served as an agent. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact ‘Woods’ noted that ‘he is obviously not a person, we can make any use of’, especially as his political ideas were ‘exploitable by the Russians’.[4] From that first interview, if not before, MI5 knew that Ward was a committed communist sympathizer and probable agent of influence. The information was submitted to Arthur Martin, who was then in charge of the investigation section. At that stage Hollis may not have been informed because the situation had no particularly serious overtones.
As a result of Ward’s occasional information MI5 became aware that Keeler had had sexual relations with Ivanov. The extent of these relations are of some significance and witnesses are at variance about them. Miss Keeler herself, with whom I have had recent conversations, claims that she had sexual intercourse, which she described as ‘marvellous, passionate love’, with Ivanov on only one occasion after he had driven her home from Cliveden.[5] This is not the recollection of an MI5 officer who has told me that he received information of a more regular relationship between Keeler and Ivanov from a woman who was a frequent informer on such matters. This officer reported that the woman who informed for patriotic motives, was concerned about the security aspects of Keeler’s relationship with Ivanov and Ward. So the MI5 management was alerted to this from an early stage.
The MI5 officer’s recall of events is supported by Michael Eddowes, a solicitor who interested himself in the case long before it became public.
Eddowes, who made contemporary notes which I have seen, claims that he was told by Keeler that she had been ‘the lover’ of Ivanov. He says that he received confirmation of this from Ward and from Keeler’s associate, Mandy Rice-Davies.[6]
Eddowes, who gave evidence to Denning for two hours in the presence of his own lawyer, has assured me that he included this information which, on his own initiative, he supplied to the Special Branch police. His existing copy of his long statement to Special Branch confirms this, yet Lord Denning, in his report, went out of his way to state that while Ivanov may have had ‘some kind of sexual relations’ with Keeler on one occasion he was never ‘her lover’.
The phrase ‘some kind of sexual relations’ would seem to be calculated to suggest that it was something short of intercourse, diminishing the importance of Ivanov in her life, which, on Keeler’s evidence, is a false impression. The entire Denning Report, in fact, seems intent on minimizing Ivanov’s significance, thereby softening the security aspects of the situation. In this process the influence on Denning of Hollis’s evidence was crucial, as will become apparent. It was in the interests of MI5, as well as of the Government, that the direct link between Ivanov and Keeler should be made to appear as tenuous as possible to play down the security implications, which were far more dangerous politically than the moral aspects.
It has even been suggested, with gross naivety, that Ivanov’s sexual relationship with Keeler was part of an operation organized by Ward on MI5’s behalf to ‘entrap’ Ivanov and perhaps induce him to defect by the blackmail threat of revealing the fact to his Soviet superiors. The evidence would suggest that Ward did organize the relationship but to entrap somebody else on Moscow’s behalf. The really serious security aspects arose from Keeler’s simultaneous sexual involvement with John Profumo, who had become Secretary of State for War in July 1960.
On the evening of Saturday, 8 July 1961, Ward, Keeler and some other girls were bathing in the pool at Cliveden, which Lord Astor had given them permission to use. After Astor had finished dinner he took his guest, Mr Profumo, to the pool from which Keeler had emerged naked a few moments previously. She seized a towel and was reasonably decent by the time Lady Astor, Mrs Profumo and others arrived. It would seem that Astor knew that the girls were likely to be in the pool and took Profumo down for devilment. Keeler records that Ward had dared her to remove her bathing costume and he hid it behind a bush so that she would be discovered naked. It is therefore quite possible that Keeler was set up by Ward in this way to ensnare Profumo, as Keeler herself now suspects.[7]
Profumo responded to the sight of the half-naked Keeler by helping Astor to chase her round the pool and then showing her over the house so that he could flirt with her. As she remarks in her book, ‘If it had rained during the weekend of 8 July 1961 many lives might have been different.’
Ivanov was not at Cliveden on that Saturday evening but on the afternoon of the next day there was a formal bathing party attended by the Astors and their guests, including Profumo, and by Ward and his guests, who then included Ivanov. Knowing that Profumo was there for the weekend Ward may well have summoned Ivanov down to take advantage of the situation. According to Keeler, Ward was serving as an intelligence agent for Ivanov. She witnessed the delivery of several bulky packages to the Soviet Embassy and records that Ward was in receipt of payments from Ivanov, albeit of small sums.[8]
During a convivial afternoon, during which Profumo and Ivanov swam races, the War Minister secured Keeler’s telephone number from Ward who then encouraged Keeler to see him on the grounds that he was both distinguished and important.
A sexual liaison developed lasting, on and off, until the end of 1961. Keeler was later to tell various people that she would be in bed with Profumo and Ivanov on the same day, but she now insists that she had sexual intercourse with Ivanov only once, on the evening of Sunday, 9 July, when he drove her back to London. That was also the information she gave to Lord Denning when questioned by him.
Whatever the truth, and repeatedly in her book Keeler claims that her memory of the events is bad, it was in the Government’s interests that the story about being in bed with the War Minister and a Soviet Intelligence agent on the same day should be branded as a lie, as it was by Denning.
During the period of Profumo’s affair with Keeler, the U.S. Government was planning to arm the West German army with a medium-range ballistic missile known as Sergeant.[9] The nuclear warheads were to be kept under American control in West Germany until an emergency, when the German troops would be empowered to use them. This plan was common knowledge but the date when the missiles were to become operational was secret. For general intelligence reasons the Soviets would want to know this date because of the extreme sensitivity in Moscow to any access by the Germans to nuclear weapons. There were also more pressing reasons for Soviet interest in the date. Khrushchev had already taken the decision to build the Berlin wall and N.A.T.O. reaction could conceivably result in war. He had also decided to install medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba which was certain to provoke angry American reaction. If Moscow could prove that the Americans were about to station nuclear missiles on the West German border the case for missiles in Cuba would seem more reasonable.
In such political contexts it is important to appreciate how Soviet Intelligence officers operate and Ivanov’s career in Britain is an excellent example of how an apparently ‘legal’ defence attaché can be utilized in the Kremlin’s interests. There can be little, if any, doubt that when Ivanov met Profumo at Cliveden he quickly reported the details to Moscow. Further, once he reported the establishment of Profumo’s sexual liaison with Keeler, about which Ward informed him, there would have been high-level meetings in Moscow to consider how advantage could be taken of it. Ivanov was a G.R.U. officer but by 1961 the K.G.B. had secured control of the G.R.U. and would almost certainly have taken over the Profumo operation because of the political potentialities. There was, in fact, quick evidence of Kremlin interest, including that of Khrushchev.[10]
From the evidence there can be no doubt that Ivanov was instructed to use his relationship with Ward and Keeler to discover the delivery date of the nuclear warheads to West Germany. It was a reasonable assumption that in view of the close operational relations between the German forces and Britain’s Rhine Army, the War Minister might know the date, which turned out to be the following year, 1962, according to official German sources.[11] It has been suggested that a professional officer like Ivanov would not be permitted to prejudice his diplomatic position by trying to secure information, even indirectly, from a minister but the behaviour of other Iron Curtain attachés, before and since, shows this view to be ill-founded.
Keeler told several witnesses that she had been asked to discover the date from Profumo, though she had never done so. The most reliable of these, in my opinion, is Mr Eddowes, who interviewed Keeler for reasons of personal interest on 14 December 1962, two months after the Cuban missile crisis and, of course, long before she gave evidence to Denning. Eddowes’ records show that Keeler told him that Ivanov had asked her directly to ‘obtain from Profumo the date of delivery of nuclear warheads to West Germany’.[12]
Keeler has since insisted that it was Ward, acting on Ivanov’s behalf, who asked her to secure the information and that it was done rather flippantly. But it is difficult to explain why Eddowes’ notes show that it was Ivanov, which would make more sense because a professional intelligence officer would always prefer to state his requirements directly rather than through a third person and Keeler admits that she continued to see Ivanov at Ward’s flat. Eddowes has assured me that he gave this information about Ivanov to Denning during their two-hour discussion, when he appeared as a witness.[13]
If I appear to labour the point about the nuclear weapons request there are two important reasons for doing so. Firstly, the Denning Report went out of its way to deny that Ivanov had made a direct appeal to Keeler, even suggesting that she may just have overheard a conversation between the two men. Secondly, the fact that, according to Eddowes’ notes, Keeler used the term ‘nuclear warheads’ also suggests that she heard this technical expression, which was not then in common usage, from a technical man, namely Ivanov. The use of ‘West Germany’ also suggests a direct approach from Ivanov because a nineteen-year-old, fairly ignorant girl was unlikely to have known the difference between West and East Germany in those days.
Keeler now claims that Ward simply said, ‘Why don’t you ask Jack when the Americans are going to give the Germans the bomb?’ but I find the existence of the phrase ‘nuclear warheads’ in Eddowes’ contemporary notes most convincing because he is not a technical man and he had no knowledge from any other source that missiles, not bombs, were to be delivered to West Germany. He insists that his information originated only from Keeler who was repeating what Ivanov had asked her. Whether Ivanov or Ward did the asking is somewhat academic for the original request – to Ward or Keeler – must have come from Ivanov and, further back, probably from G.R.U. headquarters in Moscow.
It is important to appreciate that before Keeler gave evidence to Denning she was grilled in a hostile manner by men she believed to be from MI5 but were probably Special Branch or Metropolitan police. They questioned her repeatedly about her relations with Ivanov, with Ward and about the request for atomic information. She became very frightened of being involved in an Official Secrets Act prosecution and she would have been less than human, at the age of nineteen, had she not wanted to minimize the security aspects by claiming that the request had come from Ward more or less as a joke.[14]
In the several hours that Hollis spent as a witness with Denning he, too, did what he could to play down the security implications of the Ivanov-Profumo-Keeler relationship. As a result, Denning’s report presented the evidence in a way which ridiculed the idea that the Russians would try to discover a military secret through a girl like Keeler. In fact it is common Soviet practice to use both women and men in this way to secure information. Even a Russian chambermaid was used to compromise a British ambassador.
As will be seen, the American security authorities were to take Ivanov’s interest in their nuclear weapons most seriously and clearly thought it possible that his association with Keeler and hers with Profumo might have been used. Further, at that time Hollis must have known of the American concern because U.S. security officials were making specific inquiries about American servicemen who might have known Keeler not only at the N.A.T.O. base at Ruislip but at nuclear bases in Suffolk.[15]
The Denning Report also presented the evidence in such a way that, as the document progressed, the information sought by Ivanov ceased to be the date on which the West Germans would be receiving nuclear weapons and became ‘atomic secrets’. As Profumo had no access to atomic secrets, a phrase which suggests technical know-how, this device enabled Denning to declare that the importance of the atomic episode had been ‘greatly exaggerated’. It also enabled the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, in his memoirs to suggest that the idea of using Keeler as an intermediary was fatuous because Profumo knew no ‘atomic secrets’.[16] He might well, however, have known the delivery date which Ivanov wanted. Whether intentional or not, this change of phrasing by Denning, which seems to owe much to the influence of Hollis’s evidence, watered down the security implications to the advantage of MI5, and of Hollis in particular, when the part played by that organization came to be summarized in the report.
