Too Secret Too Long, page 45
While the Profumo and Mitchell cases were at their height, an opportunity to improve the public image of MI5 was offered to Hollis in 1963, as it had been two years previously, by Sir John Masterman. He had been deeply involved in the highly successful MI5 Double Cross operation during the war, which turned German spies against the Nazis so as to feed them with a mass of misleading information and was a major contribution to the Allied victory.[4] Masterman, an MI5 ‘amateur’ who was keen to return to Oxford as soon as the war was over, remained in the Service for a few weeks to write the official history of the triumph for MI5’s records. In 1961 he had suggested that his report should be published because it would benefit MI5’s reputation, which had been tarnished by post-war spy cases, but Hollis firmly declined. In 1963, after Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who was Prime Minister at the time, agreed with Masterman that publication would improve MI5’s image, which by then had been further blemished by the Vassall case, Masterman approached Hollis again. Once more he rejected the proposal, assuring Sir Alec that he had the backing of his legal advisers.[5]
As a result, Masterman had to wait until 1972, after Hollis had retired, when he took matters into his own hands and avoided the problem of official agreement by publishing his book in the U.S. It was then republished in Britain and gives credit to MI5’s wartime effort against the Germans.
It is possible that Hollis was motivated by a passion for total secrecy, especially in the middle of 1963 when so much was going wrong, but the fact remains that publicity for those sections of MI5 that had functioned with such brilliance against German agents would have underscored the abject failure of his wartime section against agents of the Soviet Union.
Masterman’s personal views about the competence of Hollis are unknown to me but the book which Hollis suppressed was critical of his performance in counter-espionage against the Russians and particularly of his failure to recruit double agents.
Round about 1963 evidence became available that a former Conservative minister, who is now dead, might have been subjected to blackmail by Soviet agents and, as he had been in a sensitive post at the time, the MI5 officer who produced the information suggested an investigation. Hollis forbade any inquiries saying that the implications were potentially far too embarrassing to the Government, as they undoubtedly were. Later, when further independent evidence became available, an interrogation of the suspect was suggested but Hollis again forbade it. The Government was not told of the development and the suspect eventually received a high honour for his past services.[6]
Knowing the identity of the former minister, it seems most unlikely to me that the Government would have taken any action against him as the circumstances would have been particularly difficult for the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, but it was Hollis’s duty to inform the Home Secretary of the situation in case it suddenly became public and caught the Government unprepared. Instead he preferred to remain silent, probably because he did not wish to be the bearer of what would have been extremely frightening news.
Other promising MI5 investigations continued to founder in ways which the frustrated case officers could attribute only to internal leakages from high level. One case, which is well remembered by these officers, concerned Mr Reuben Falber, a prominent member of the Communist Party who is still alive at the time of writing.
It had been known for decades that the Communist Party of Great Britain was supported with Soviet money. Because the Kremlin wanted to continue its pretence that it was not involved the money was always provided surreptitiously by the Soviet Embassy to paymasters, such as the late Bob Stewart, who received it, often through cut-outs, in wads of notes, usually in shoe-boxes.
Since the receipt of such money was no crime under British law, MI5 could not attempt to interrogate any of the paymasters to find out details of the sums involved and what happened to them and whether any was funnelled to agents for espionage or subversion. It was assumed, however, that the Communist Party would keep ledgers, which would provide the answers if they could be examined.
In the early 1960s MI5 suspected, wrongly perhaps, that the man who might have the ledgers in his possession was Mr Falber who lived in a two-storey house divided into two single-floor flats. When it was noticed that he was advertising for a tenant for the lower flat MI5 secured it through an agency and installed a woman collaborator, known in the jargon as a ‘granny’, though she was quite young. She used the name ‘Miss Taylor’.
Soon afterwards, at Christmas, Falber spent a couple of days in the country with Lord Milford, the communist peer (formerly Wogan Philipps), so MI5 decided to search his flat. The ‘granny’ had organized a Christmas party for ‘friends and relatives’ and various vans supplying food and drink were parked outside. Under this cover some of the friends and relatives were about to break into the flat when a radio message from watchers staked round Milford’s house told them that Falber had left suddenly by car and might be returning to London. The search was therefore called off, unnecessarily as it transpired, because Falber, having been lost by the watchers, returned to Milford’s house.
As soon as Falber did return home, after Boxing Day, he gave the ‘granny’ a week’s notice without any reason. The MI5 management, including Hollis, had been informed of the proposed operation only two days in advance of it because approval had to be obtained before the flat could be entered. The officers suspected that Falber had been told the true nature of the ‘granny’ and her ‘friends’. When I spoke to Mr Falber recently he commented, ‘I soon sussed out Miss Taylor.’ When I asked who ‘Miss Taylor’ was he replied, ‘You’d better ask your ‘friends.’
chapter thirty-six
The ‘Blunden’ File
In the autumn of 1963, with the public scandal of the Profumo affair still fresh and the Mitchell case unresolved, Hollis was suddenly faced with evidence he could not ignore that his old colleague and friend, Sir Anthony Blunt had been a Soviet agent during the whole of his five years’ service inside MI5 and possibly afterwards. The situation was exacerbated by Blunt’s position in the Royal Household as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Before Hollis’s treatment of this case and of the chief investigator concerned with it can be dealt with, a brief survey of Blunt’s activities inside MI5, where he came under no suspicion while he remained there, is necessary.
In Chapter 19 I have described how Blunt was recruited to Soviet Intelligence at Cambridge by Burgess and how he, in turn, had recruited others before being appointed Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. In 1940 Blunt managed to insinuate himself on to the wartime staff of MI5 where he employed Burgess as an agent-runner in penetrating the embassies of neutral countries. Blunt operated for the K.G.B. under the code-name ‘Johnson’ and his Soviet controller when he joined MI5 was the highly professional ‘Henry’, the K.G.B. officer posing as a diplomat in the Soviet Embassy in London, where he was listed as Anatoli Gromov though his real name was Anatoli Gorski.[1]
Blunt had long discussions with ‘Henry’ about the organization of MI5 to decide where he should try to secure a permanent position. After talks with the Moscow Centre, ‘Henry’ told Blunt to avoid F Branch, which handled Soviet espionage and the activities of communists in Britain and was headed by Hollis. Blunt was later to agree that ‘Henry’s’ instruction was odd and suggested that it implied that the Soviets already had a source there.
Blunt began his MI5 service in the Military Liaison Division, as he was still in army uniform, but he soon secured a transfer to B Division, which was responsible for security, intelligence and counter-espionage operations of the greatest interest to the Soviets. For part of his time he was personal assistant to the Director of B Division, Guy Liddell, and was also in the MI5 Secretariat, assisting the Director-General, Sir David Petrie. Documents of the highest importance and secrecy crossed his desk and he never failed to report their contents to the K.G.B., usually taking them out of the office by the easeful so that the Soviets could photograph them. Pressure of work could always be claimed as an excuse for taking secret documents home, especially when bombing was causing extra difficulties, but there can be no escaping the fact that in MI5, as in MI6, internal security was appallingly ineffective.
By the time Blunt was installed in MI5 one of the Apostles whom he had recruited at Cambridge, Leo Long, a fluent German-speaker, was working in MI14. This was a separate section set up in May 1940 to provide a running estimate of the strengths of various Germany army groups and continuous assessments of future German actions.[2] Long had access to information supplied by Bletchley and must have known of the existence of Ultra. It follows that Blunt must also have known about it, even if he had not discovered its existence from his own sources, and that the Russians were informed about it from an early stage. MI14, which was renamed the Military Intelligence Research Section in 1943, also had access to U.S. Army Intelligence.[3]
When Long joined MI14 the Soviet Union was not in the war and was virtually an ally of the Nazis, being keen to see the defeat of Britain and the enforced dissolution of the British Empire, yet, when Blunt told Long that he must supply him with all the secret information he could for onward passage to the Russians, Long obliged. When eventually exposed, Long indicated that Blunt did not ask him for information until the Soviet Union was Britain’s ally, but that proved to be false. Long was providing secret information for the Russians before they were forced into the war and there is every possibility that, with Stalin anxious to pacify Hitler and keen on the defeat of Britain, the K.G.B. passed some of it to German Intelligence, though they would not have revealed its source.
Blunt passed all of Long’s information to ‘Henry’ and so served as Long’s controller as well as being a spy in his own right. There is no evidence that Long was in direct contact with Russians during the war. K.G.B. orders for Long were transmitted by Blunt, who worked his friend hard. Over the three years when Long was based in London he met Blunt about once a fortnight, usually in pubs, to pass him detailed information which crossed his desk from agents operating in Europe. Blunt pressed him repeatedly to ensure that he was handing over everything of possible value to the Russians.[4]
‘Henry’ specifically told Blunt not to try to recruit anybody from inside the MI5 office as this would be too risky. Anybody in the office whom he considered recruitable would have to be weighed up by the K.G.B. Centre and possibly approached through different channels. It seems possible, however, that ‘Henry’ introduced Blunt to another Soviet agent operating in London throughout the war – Juergen Kuczynski, Sonia’s brother. Kuczynski records in his memoirs having been on terms of close and open friendship with ‘Henry’, whom he visited at the Soviet Embassy.[5]
Another German refugee who might have provided a link between Blunt and the Kuczynskis, had MI5 been minded to question him, was Baron Wolfgang zu Putlitz, a homosexual who was also a close friend of Burgess, whom he had known at Cambridge. Between 1934 and 1938 zu Putlitz was a First Secretary in the German Embassy in London and had access to secret information of great interest to both MI5 and MI6. Klop Ustinov, the German father of Peter, the actor, was a friend of his and, being opposed to Hitler, he contacted the well-known anti-Nazi Robert Vansittart and offered to work for Britain. As evidence of his value and good faith he said that he could bring zu Putlitz with him. The offer was accepted and the Baron worked as a British spy both during his time in London and later when posted to the German Embassy in Holland. He was extracted from Holland with great difficulty when he fell under suspicion and then spent some time in New York.[6] In his memoirs he claims that he heard of the formation of a National Committee of Free Germany and wrote to Moscow, wishing it all success.[7] As a result he was approached by the Soviet Consul in New York, the predecessor of the notorious Anatoli Yakovlev, the spymaster for Fuchs and other Soviet agents operating in the U.S. Zu Putlitz was already communist-inclined and may well have been recruited as a Soviet agent, as his subsequent behaviour was to indicate. He returned to Britain, probably on K.G.B. instructions, and secured a job with the secret ‘Black Propaganda’ team headed by Sefton Delmer at Woburn Abbey.[8] It would seem most unlikely that zu Putlitz would have failed to contact the Free German Movement in the U.K., in which case he would have met Kuczynski. He certainly made contact with Blunt, for in the preface to his memoirs he pays tribute to that traitor’s ‘kindness and understanding’, while making no reference to him in the body of the book.
Zu Putlitz went back to Germany in 1946 and Blunt is said to have accompanied him but he was not allowed to go to Berlin.[9] After returning to London zu Putlitz renewed his friendship with Burgess and attended the party which the latter gave before leaving for Washington in 1950.[10] In 1952 the Baron crossed into East Germany, where the family estates were located, and became an East German citizen.[11]
In the early part of the war Lord Rothschild, a distinguished Cambridge scientist who had joined MI5 and specialized in the study and dismantling of German booby traps, had rented part of a house at 5 Bentinck Street, where he lived with his wife. They offered accommodation to two former Cambridge friends, Patricia Parry (later Lady Llewelyn-Davies) and Tessa Mayor (later the second Lady Rothschild). When Lord Rothschild was posted out of London he wished to dispose of the lease and offered it to the two girls.[12] They could not afford the rent so it was agreed, as the accommodation was on three floors, that they could sublet to friends. One of these friends, well known to Lord Rothschild and then entirely above suspicion, was Anthony Blunt. He suggested that the fourth occupant should be Guy Burgess. Number 5, therefore, came to house two Soviet spies though this was unknown to the other occupants or to Rothschild.
Various members of MI5, such as Liddell, and of MI6 are said to have visited the Bentinck Street establishment. It is unlikely that Hollis did so but he is believed to have been a social friend of Blunt during the war and afterwards at least until 1951, when, according to Blunt’s ‘confessions’, they ceased to meet except casually at places like the Travellers Club.
It has been said that the Bentinck Street house became notorious as a drinking den and a scene of riotous orgies but the two ladies, who lived quite separately from Blunt and Burgess, have no recollection of such activities. Naturally they saw both men but neither gave any indication that they were working for MI5, Blunt being particularly circumspect about his work.[13] Rothschild himself, who has been criticized for giving house-room to two spies, was remote from the scene. Innuendoes about his loyalty are completely groundless as his part in the exposure of Philby alone showed. He was awarded the George Medal for gallantry in dismantling booby traps, and Tessa Mayor, who became his assistant in MI5, and later his wife, received the Military M.B.E. for similar dangerous operations.
While Blunt betrayed the name and function of every MI5 officer, he could not easily discover the identities of agents run by some of the officers but he did his best to do so. One such agent was known inside MI5 headquarters only as ‘M8’ because he was being run by Maxwell Knight, whose code-initial was M.[14] ‘M8’ was the code-name for Tom Driberg, a journalist on the Daily Express, who had been recruited by Knight to penetrate the Young Communist League and, eventually, the headquarters of the Communist Party. One of ‘M8’s’ reports, which Blunt happened to see, concerned information about a secret aeroplane and revealed that the Communist Party knew about it. Blunt gave a copy of the report to ‘Henry’ who asked him to discover ‘M8’s’ identity. Blunt tried for six months but failed. ‘Henry’ then told him that he had discovered it was Driberg. The K.G.B. made the error of informing the British Communist Party leadership headed by Harry Pollitt, who summarily expelled Driberg from the Party. This action angered Blunt because he was subjected to questioning about the leak but managed to lie persuasively yet again.
Since Knight’s reports were regularly fed to Hollis it has been suggested that the latter’s failure to ‘blow’ Driberg to the Russians is evidence of his innocence. My inquiries show that Knight, who operated independently from MI5 headquarters from an office in Dolphin Square, did not reveal the names of his agents to Hollis or to anybody else outside his unit.[15]
The eventual interrogation of Blunt by MI5 revealed that another of the most secret documents which he saw resulted in the loss of probably the only senior Soviet official ever to operate on Britain’s behalf inside the Kremlin. Before the war MI5 had employed an officer called Harold ‘Gibby’ Gibson, who had the advantage of speaking Russian fluently because he had been brought up in Russia and had been at school there prior to the revolution. Among his former Russian schoolfriends was a Soviet citizen whom he met later in life and who had become disenchanted with communism and the way it was being manipulated in the interests of pathological power-seekers. At that time he was in the private office of Anastas Mikoyan, the small, moustached Politburo member once aptly described as having a face like ‘an agonized parrot’.[16] Gibson’s Russian friend agreed to help the West by supplying information on as regular a basis as possible concerning the Politburo’s intentions, the hardest of all intelligence to acquire. Blunt handed a copy of one of the agent’s reports to ‘Henry’ who told him, a few weeks later, that the source had been eliminated, which probably meant executed. What is certain is that no further reports were received from him.
For several months Blunt was the officer in charge of the Watcher Service, the men and women who carried out the surveillance of foreign agents and suspected spies. Not only was he responsible for allotting their tasks to them each week but he knew details of every case in which they were involved. This, of course, was invaluable information to the Russians because it enabled their controllers to avoid meetings which might be dangerous. When interrogated, Blunt recalled how, at one stage, he was giving ‘Henry’ such detailed information that he was warned against overdoing it because it could arouse suspicion in any alert organization. In MI5 it did not do so.
