Too Secret Too Long, page 49
The interview was overtly recorded on tape by Martin and was played back to Blunt for his verbal agreement that it was true and accurate. As Blunt no doubt realized, if he had not already been told so, such a record was then inadmissible as evidence in any British court.
It was left to Blunt to decide whether he should engineer some excuse to resign from his Royal post. He suggested that if he did so the Russians might deduce what had happened. Martin agreed, knowing that Hollis had already secured the Queen’s agreement that the traitor should stay on because MI5 wanted him to do so. He was to remain in the Royal appointment until his retirement in 1972 when, amazingly, he was given another which lasted until 1978.[29]
Why did Blunt confess within minutes of being offered immunity? That remains an intriguing mystery, especially as Blunt was not supposed to know that MI5 had already found out about his accomplice, Long. The explanation favoured by some sources is that he was fully informed about his position by surreptitious means before the formal approach to him was made.
Their suspicions that this had happened were first aroused when they realized that Blunt had been quick to fulfil the condition that he had ceased to spy after 1945, though no mention of this had been made to him officially. Further, as his own account of the meeting with Modin to discuss his defection indicates, it would have been more in keeping with his cautious character had he required a day or so to consider his position. On professional grounds, had he really been taken by surprise, he should have stalled to give himself time to take K.G.B. advice, as Philby. had done so recently in a similar circumstance. It was also out of character for such a methodical and pernickety man to refrain from asking for a written guarantee covering all the details of the deal.
Some of his confidence could conceivably have stemmed from a belief that his secret mission for the Royal Family gave him an edge over his interrogator if, in truth, the mission had been that sensitive, but the fact that he confessed so readily on a verbal promise strongly suggests that he already knew the details of the arrangement and of Whitehall’s determination to honour it and to conceal it in its own interests. He could have learned of them through the K.G.B. or through some surreptitious meeting with Hollis.
One of the people closest to Blunt in his later years believes that the circumstances of the immunity deal, which he has studied, conform with the probability that he had been given advance notice of it.[30]
Nobody at the Courtauld Institute seems to have been questioned about Blunt’s visitors, who had included Philby and Burgess. This may have been a necessary omission because of the immunity guarantee and the requirement to keep it secret from the staff there but it might also have been required by Hollis to conceal a connection with Blunt which might have raised suspicions at that point.
Martin, who had no knowledge of any advance arrangements with Blunt, expressed surprise at how easily and quickly Blunt had been ‘broken’, or appeared to have been. There is also the odd fact that it had been so readily assumed that Blunt would accept the immunity offer that no thought had been given to the attitude which should be adopted if he rejected it. Yet acceptance was contrary to all his previous behaviour. Later, an MI5 analysis of what he had said and not said at that first interview concluded that he had probably been warned of the confrontation and advised what to do about it.
If Blunt was warned and advised who was responsible? As I have indicated in Chapter 20 the person most strongly suspected of having warned Philby, through the medium of K.G.B. controllers, was Hollis. If he was responsible for that warning in the Soviet interest then he would almost certainly have warned his controllers about Blunt, being one of the few who knew the relevant information.
It has not been possible to establish with absolute certainty that Hollis was still on friendly terms with Blunt in 1963. They were likely to have been meeting on occasion at the Travellers Club and, possibly, at the Courtauld Institute. A warning from Hollis could conceivably have been direct or could have been accomplished through a Soviet controllers. Since the decision had been taken in MI5 that Blunt should not be placed under physical surveillance no clandestine meeting would have been detected. Blunt assured a close confidant that he did not know whether Hollis was a spy or not and that if he was Hollis would have been under instructions not to reveal it to anyone else. But if Blunt really did know that Hollis was a spy he is most unlikely to have admitted it, just as he did all he could to protect his other friends who were in prominent positions.
If Hollis had alerted Soviet Intelligence about Blunt he would have done so soon after hearing about Straight’s confession to the F.B.I. in the autumn of 1963. The K.G.B. would then have wanted time to consider its requirements and dispositions and this could account for some of the delay in MI5’s action on the case. Any trips which Blunt made abroad at this stage could be significant.
It is not impossible that the K.G.B. learned of Straight’s statement through its own resources or even that Blunt was told directly about it by some source. In the latter case Hollis might have learned of the development from Blunt! Inquiries into that possibility were never made by MI5 but some are in progress at the time of writing.
After the interview at which Blunt’s confession was secured and immunity granted, Martin was determined to subject him to long and penetrating debriefing. As there seemed to be some reluctance on the part of his immediate superiors to provide the resources and back-up for the action he proposed, Martin saw Hollis, who also took the view that there was no need for haste and that Blunt should be handled gently. An argument ensued and Hollis responded with the unusual step of suspending Martin from duty for two weeks.[31] Martin suggested that if the Director-General did not want to see his face at headquarters he could, nevertheless, go ahead with the interrogations at Blunt’s flat. Hollis told him that his suspension was total and that he should leave Blunt alone.
As a result Blunt, who must have expected to be qestioned without delay unless someone had surreptitiously told him otherwise, was left free without surveillance for a fortnight during which he could have sought advice from his Soviet friends or anybody else. He could also have warned friends who might be at risk, thereby nullifying Hollis’s claim that an approach to Blunt without immunity would deprive MI5 of the element of surprise when investigating other people he might name.
When Martin returned to duty he prepared a very short brief of Blunt’s confession for the Queen’s private secretary. In 1979 Mrs Thatcher was to tell Parliament that ‘The Palace duly followed the advice which had already been given.’[32] There can be little doubt that in this instance the Palace was the Queen. I have established to my satisfaction that the Queen was told and asked if she still wished to follow the earlier official advice. Perhaps with some natural reluctance she did so. Blunt told a close associate that he did not know whether the Queen was told or not and that he was never able to discern any difference in their relationship.[33]
The ploy proposed at the highest level by Hollis and executed so as to conceal Blunt’s treachery, and that of anybody whom he might expose, looked like succeeding totally in 1964 when any leakage of a matter so secret seemed extremely remote.
On Hollis’s instructions the highest degree of secrecy was imposed inside MI5 so that, for many years, very few officers knew about Blunt’s proven treachery and those who did were forbidden to discuss it with anyone else. This was reasonable security practice but Hollis probably appreciated that some of his officers would be appalled when they discovered that a colleague who had betrayed them and disgraced the Service had been virtually excused. ‘I must belong to a different school,’ was how one officer expressed his disgust to Hollis when, eventually, he did hear of it. Not unnaturally, some officers recalled that Vassall, the lowly clerk, was serving an eighteen-year prison sentence while Barbara Fell, who had been little more than stupidly indiscreet, was still in prison when the decision to ‘immunize’ Blunt had been taken. Hollis’s critics feared that the concept of offering immunity to traitors would flout the law and inevitably lead to the charge that the secret services were prepared to support its full application to those outside while giving total protection to those inside. While Blake, an MI6 officer, had admittedly been prosecuted, he was a foreigner, half-Jewish and not a Fifth Estate figure like Blunt or Philby.
It can be argued that inequitable as the Blunt case may seem when compared with the treatment of other offenders, the course of action over which Hollis presided was in the national interest. The counter-argument can be developed by asking which course of action better suited the K.G.B. – the prosecution of Blunt and his collaborators or secret immunity?
The supporters of MI5’s action claim that Blunt gave greater co-operation when he knew he was safe than he would have done had he been imprisoned for many years, but this is by no means certain. Fuchs, Vassall and Blake all gave confessions as reliable as Blunt’s without being offered immunity and continued to oblige while in prison. So, more recently, did Prime. As the reader will see, when Blunt knew that nothing could happen to him once he had been granted immunity he became highly selective about what he was prepared to tell and his interrogators believe that he lied to them on many issues.
Michael Straight visited London in September 1964 and with Hollis’s consent confronted Blunt, having been ignored by MI5 during a visit in the previous November.[34] Straight says that the meeting, held in Blunt’s flat after a previous discussion with Martin, was cordial. Having just been told that Blunt had confessed there was little he could do in the way of accusation. Blunt claimed to be grateful but he was a consummate dissimulator. The few questions he asked may have been to satisfy his Soviet friends as much as his own curiosity.
On 17 June 1964, two months after Blunt had been granted immunity and had confessed, Hollis informed his political chief, the Home Secretary Henry Brooke, what had happened, saying nothing whatever about Long.[35] Brooke failed to tell the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as did Hollis, who had the right of direct access to him. This omission mystified some MI5 officers when they learned of it and one of them, who had been involved in the Blunt interrogations, was so concerned that he dissented in writing in a minute which, presumably, is still in the MI5 files. Hollis responded to the minute verbally, claiming that ‘he had done all that was necessary in alerting Brooke.’ It was suspected that Hollis had presented the facts to Brooke in such a way that he would consider it unnecessary or inadvisable to tell the Prime Minister, in spite of the involvement of the Queen. It could be more than coincidental that, after discussions with Hollis, Brooke had not warned the previous Prime Minister, Macmillan, about the security aspects of the Profumo affair. Such is the mystique attaching to the office of Director-General of MI5 that a pliant Home Secretary or Attorney-General may be induced to take advice he would reject from anyone else.
There was a further factor which might have affected Hollis’s and Brooke’s behaviour: in January 1964, while Martin was in Washington securing first-hand information about Blunt, Sir Alec Douglas-Home had announced the establishment of a Standing Security Commission, headed by a judge, to carry out independent studies into breaches of security with a view to recommending improvements in security precautions and, if necessary, to apportion blame for the breaches.[36] If Sir Alec had been informed of the immunity proposal it is not impossible that, being the kind of man he is, he might have felt it incumbent on himself to refer the case to the Security Commission, which opposition M.P.s would surely have demanded had they known about the case. In that event Hollis’s plans for immunity would have been torpedoed because the opposition leader, Harold Wilson, would have had to be informed under the rules of the Security Commission, and some report to Parliament would have been required. To a man as secretive as Hollis the establishment of a Security Commission, with powers to obtain information from himself and other MI5 officers must have been anathema.
When the Labour Government was installed in October 1964 Hollis should have taken steps to ensure that the new Home Secretary or the new Attorney-General was informed about the sensitive Blunt situation which, still being recent, might leak with particular embarrassment to ministers who had ridiculed Macmillan for being ignorant of the Profumo affair. Again he remained silent. George Wigg, the security ‘watchdog’ appointed precisely to prevent such ignorance, was also uninformed and so, as a result, was the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.[37]
While the full truth behind these omissions may never be known, one thing is certain: another extremely sensitive situation involving a Soviet spy, fraught with political considerations and dominated by Hollis, never reached the ears of any prime minister so long as Hollis remained Director-General of MI5. Was the similarity to the Profumo affair due only to the ham-fisted way Hollis handled such issues? Or was it due to the direction of Hollis’s behaviour, in both cases, by an outside Soviet influence?
chapter thirty-eight
The Interrogation of Leo Long
The precise date when Long was approached by MI5 after Blunt had confirmed Straight’s statement that he had been a Soviet agent has not been revealed officially. It must presumably have been after the fortnight during which Martin was suspended from duty and may have been weeks later. If it was deliberately delayed by Hollis it could have been for the purpose of enabling him to see the Home Secretary, as he did in June, without the necessity of telling him about Long, who had not then been given the chance to confess. All that Parliament and the public have been told is that he was approached after Blunt had been granted immunity.[1] The circumstances of the approach, which are known, are extraordinary even by the standards of the secret world. The first that Long is supposed to have known about his exposure was a telephone call from Blunt who said, ‘Something has come up’, meaning Straight’s statement, and that he should make his way to Blunt’s flat for a drink and a chat. Martin, who had arranged the visit with Blunt, was not present when Long arrived. The sitting room was ‘miked’ but it would seem likely that the co-conspirators would have talked briefly somewhere else off the record. According to the tape-recording, Blunt told Long what had happened and, without mentioning that he had told MI5 that his own work for Soviet Intelligence had ceased at the end of the war, he urged him to agree to see the security authorities and, as he put it, ‘come clean’. With Martin’s previous agreement Blunt then assured his former agent that if he agreed to co-operate it was very unlikely that he would be prosecuted.[2] In fact it was absolutely certain that, whatever he might confess, no action would be taken against him.
Blunt then telephoned Martin saying that Long was ready to talk and the MI5 man, who had been awaiting the call, went round to the flat. The master-spy remained in the room, sipping his gin, while Martin conducted his first interview with the pupil-agent in the comfortable atmosphere provided by the Professor of the History of Art and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures.
According to Mrs Thatcher’s eventual statement to Parliament about Long, seventeen years later, Long asked Martin for immunity from prosecution in return for information. ‘This was refused,’ Mrs Thatcher said, giving the impression that the authorities had taken a tough line with this traitor.[3] In fact, the real reason why immunity was refused was that only the Attorney-General could have granted it and Hollis had not told the Attorney-General, then Sir John Hobson, anything about Long. Nor did he ever do so.
Hollis may have been motivated by the disgrace of having to admit that there had been yet another Soviet spy in British Military Intelligence throughout the war, when it had been his responsibility to detect and counter such people. But he could also have been concerned about Hobson’s likely reaction to the revelation that a possible witness against Blunt had been to hand and had been concealed from him. As will be seen, Mrs Thatcher had only just been made aware of this – in November 1981 – when she made her statement on the Long case. The information had been withheld from her when she had made her statement about Blunt two years earlier.
Being unable to offer Long official immunity, Martin did the next best thing and confirmed Blunt’s assurance that he was unlikely to be prosecuted if he co-operated. The possibility that Martin might be required to give this assurance, which would be binding in British law because it was an inducement, must have been discussed previously by MI5’s legal department and agreed to by Hollis. In any case, as already mentioned, Blunt’s immunity would automatically cover Long because any prosecution of Long would inevitably lead to the exposure of Blunt and the fact that he had been exempted from prosecution himself.
Hollis’s argument for giving the assurance to Long, which was supported by some of his senior colleagues, was revealed by Mrs Thatcher when, following a brief supplied by MI5, she told Parliament, ‘Mr Long could not have been expected to co-operate in the Security Service’s inquiries if he believed that he was likely to be prosecuted if he did so.’[4] What a way to treat a dangerous criminal! Long was later to admit that his wartime activities had been ‘frankly treasonable’.
In approving the assurance to Long, Hollis had been in breach not only of Government requirements but of MI5 practice. To quote a former long-serving MI5 officer, ‘It is not in the gift of any official or officer of the Government, other than the Attorney-General, to distribute bonanzas among malefactors.’
Long has insisted that when he was first questioned by Martin he did not know about Blunt’s immunity but, as they were together in private, this seems most unlikely for Long would surely have asked Blunt about his position. Had he not known about Blunt’s position it is doubtful that he would have requested immunity because he would not have known that Hollis had changed the rules regarding the treatment of Secret Service traitors.
