Too Secret Too Long, page 5
The newly established fact that Hollis began as a journalist in China and remained an active freelance is of the greatest significance in any consideration of the possibility that he was recruited to Soviet Intelligence there. The common belief that he had quickly secured a post with B.A.T., and might even have gone there having already been appointed, led to the reasonable question:‘Why would the Soviets have any interest in a young Englishman working for a tobacco company?’ The question becomes irrelevant in view of Hollis’s journalistic interests and connections. Not only did these bring him into contact with communist recruiters, as described, but at that time both the G.R.U. and K.G.B. were making a point of recruiting journalists. Sorge, Smedley, Sonia, Ozaki Hotsumi and several highly suspect Americans in Shanghai were journalists. So were Philby, Burgess, and others in Britain. Journalists are a sound investment because they tend to secure access to important people, who do not always guard their tongues, and because the nature of their work provides an excellent cover for any clandestine activities.
If Hollis was recruited, his B.A.T. position would have been helpful in improving contacts. It is known, for instance, that he was friendly with several young diplomats both in Peking and Shanghai.[29] His B.A.T. work would also have been useful in any courier tasks he was asked to perform as it regularly gave him a reason for moving about in China, with all expenses paid. His letters, together with some evidence supplied by B.A.T. show him to have been in Peking, Chungking, Hankow and Dairen as well as Shanghai, where he was certainly based in 1932.
Even with MI5’s limited knowledge of Hollis’s activities in China – for, as will be seen, the efforts made in that direction were feeble – the officers who investigated him were in little doubt that Smedley or one of her entourage would have tried to recruit him on ideological grounds, which have always been preferred by Soviet Intelligence as being more reliable and more durable.
Confessions by proven Soviet spies confirm that the recruitment procedure is well established. A target like Hollis would be asked by a communist friend, such as Ewert, Smedley or Sonia, to work on behalf of ‘peace’, a Soviet euphemism for subversion. Having agreed to do that he would have been passed to a professional controller, like Sonia in her later days, or someone like Ewert, who as both a friend and a recruiter could have served both purposes. The recruit would then be told that the work would not only be secret but dangerous, exciting factors which increased the appeal for many young people. He might be told that he would be working for the Comintern to encourage the rule of the proletariat throughout the world, bringing peace and goodwill everywhere. Only later, sometimes much later, when irretrievably committed, would he learn that his real master was the Soviet Intelligence Service. One of the controller’s first tasks was to secure some form of written, preferably handwritten, commitment through which the recruit could be blackmailed later, if necessary. This could be a receipt for a small payment as expenses or for a token gift.
A senior C.I.A. source, who seems convinced that Hollis was recruited in China, has referred to the presence there of a known and particularly brutal Soviet recruiter who was active then, suggesting that Hollis might have been put under pressure through sexual blackmail or bribery. Hollis was certainly susceptible to women, but sex seems an unlikely lever with Hollis, save for the possibility that it could have brought him into closer contact with a recruiter like Agnes Smedley or Sonia. If Hollis arrived in China almost penniless, as he alleged, and then had to scratch a living mainly as a freelance journalist for a year he might have been open to bribery, but all the signs from his subsequent behaviour suggest that, if he was recruited, it was as an ideological spy.
Whatever method might have been used he would have been warned, if recruited, to keep away from the Communist Party and not to display any overt affiliations, but to present a right-wing image. It is also crucial to appreciate that if Hollis was recruited by any of his known or likely pro-Soviet friends in China it would have been to the service of the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army, the G.R.U., and not to the organization which became the K.G.B.
To Soviet recruiters Hollis would not have been any less of a candidate than Blunt who, in 1934, looked like spending his life as an academic. The Soviet practice was to recruit as widely as possible and then to insinuate those with qualifications into positions where they would have access to information. Sonia herself had no particular attributes, apart from unflinching loyalty to the Party, and when she attended an espionage course in Moscow she found the other recruits were unqualified people such as a German seaman and a Czech labourer.[30] It was not, of course, by chance that Soviet Intelligence preferred to recruit foreigners as agents. If they were caught, any direct link with the Soviet Union could be denied. Hollis fits easily into the pattern of young people of little or no immediate value who were eventually to secure of little or no immediate value who were eventually to secure positions with access to secrets of the highest value. There would have been nothing unusual about such an overseas recruitment. Sonia, a German, was certainly recruited in China, as were several of the Sorge spy-ring which was to operate in Japan, while Philby was recruited in Vienna.
The improbability of Hollis being recruited as a Soviet agent, which has been greatly stressed by most of his friends, is therefore no greater than that applicable to many proven spies, while the circumstances surrounding Hollis were more conducive to recruitment.
chapter four
Fully Trained Agent
An event which brought the Smedley galère even closer was the arrest, in June 1931, of the ‘organization secretary’ of the Comintern’s Far East Bureau in Shanghai. He called himself Hilaire Noulens and evidence that he and his wife were Soviet agents had reached the Shanghai Municipal Police from two sources. Noulcns, who had arrived in the city in 1930, first insisted that he was a Belgian engaged in straightforward trade union work and was earning his livelihood as a teacher of French and German, but he was found to have several passports and several addresses in Shanghai. The police established that he was a communist who had lived in Switzerland under the name Paul Ruegg, and that he and his wife Gertrud, also a communist, had established ‘legends’ there supporting their claim to be Swiss citizens. A search of Noulens’ apartment revealed three large boxes containing the accounts of the Comintern’s Far East Bureau; this and other evidence convinced the police that he was the head of the Comintern branch in Shanghai, which was controlling pro-Soviet subversive activities in other areas of the Far East as well. It helped to fund the Chinese Communist Party, recruited students for training in Moscow, liaised with the Chinese Red Army, and operated a regular courier service to Europe.[1]
Noulens was later shown to be a Russian Jew called Luft, who had previously been on the staff of the Soviet Embassy in Vienna as an intelligence officer, while his wife was a Russian from Leningrad and had been a secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Rome.[2] Both were Soviet as well as Comintern agents. They were handed over for trial by the Chinese Government in Nanking. A communist lawyer, Dr Jean Vincent, who was later to reappear in Sonia’s clandestine life, was sent from Switzerland to help defend them.
In standard Soviet pattern the prisoners lied and blustered but were unable to account for their activities or their aliases and were handed over to the military authorities for trial by court martial.[3]
The Comintern had an apparatus for defending important members whose cover might be broken and, under the guidance of a clever European communist called Willi Muenzenberg, it was brought into action. A Noulens Defence Committee was established to secure their release and worldwide sympathy was drummed up for the two ‘trade unionists’. Agnes Smedley and Sonia assisted behind the scenes but, like all others directly associated with the G.R.U., they were not permitted to be involved publicly.[4] They and other clandestine organizers did not sign the numerous petitions which appeared in issue after issue of China Forum, the left-wing paper produced by the American journalist Harold Isaacs.
Examination of the enormous publicity generated on behalf of the two Soviet agents manifests the extreme gullibility of the left-inclined. ‘Intellectuals’ in America, France, Germany, Australia and Britain lent their names to petitions demanding the release of the couple. In the British Parliament left-wing M.P.s urged intervention by the Government and asked why it condoned political conditions in the International Settlement in Shanghai which made it necessary for a trade union official to have several aliases![5]
Sonia records how she and Smedley quarrelled over who should have custody of the Noulens’ five-year-old son while the parents were in prison. It seems that Smedley won, apparently because Sorge objected to any involvement by Sonia which might become overt while she was serving as a Red Army agent.[6]
After a hunger strike by the accused, the case came to trial and they were sentenced to death, which was quickly commuted to life imprisonment. Later they were released. For many years it was believed that the Chinese authorities had bowed to the international outrage and to pressure from Moscow.[7] The truth is more sordid, as the Soviet agent Otto Braun has revealed. He learned that the prisoners would be saved and eventually released only if a Chinese judge was bribed with $20,000. Moscow provided the money, which Braun took to Shanghai where he handed it to Sorge, who succeeded in bribing the judge, while sedulously avoiding public involvement with the affair.[8]
The deportation of the couple to the safety of the Soviet Union was not fortunate for them. Noulens had been a supporter of Trotsky and he was almost certainly liquidated in Stalin’s purge of G.R.U. agents. As one of his former associates, Elizabeth Poretsky, has recorded, none of his friends ever heard of him again.
Hollis’s name does not appear among those of Shanghai journalists who openly supported the Noulcns campaign but Jack Tilton, the Shanghai Municipal Police Detective Inspector who was involved in the Noulens case claims to recall seeing Hollis lunching with Isaacs in a Shanghai restaurant at the time. Tilton was lunching there with a friend, Harry Lee, the British owner of a tobacco concern who had met Hollis through business and told Tilton who it was sitting with Isaacs.[9] Isaacs cannot remember Hollis but says that he may have known him under a different name and that if they were having lunch it would have been ‘conspiratorially’ and ‘not to talk about golf, as he put it.[10] It is possible, or perhaps even likely, that Hollis wrote under a different name in deference to his employers, B.A.T., who may not have known of this extra-mural activity. Isaacs, who admits that he was something of a notorious character because of his political activities, concedes that if he was lunching with Hollis it is likely that the event would have been noticed by the Municipal Police because they kept him under some degree of surveillance.
In December 1932 Sorge was ordered to Moscow, where he discussed Sonia’s future with the Red Army Intelligence Centre. Clearly, he gave a good report on her because shortly afterwards she was invited to visit Moscow for six months’ professional training. She accepted, though this meant leaving her small son because of the danger that he might learn to speak Russian and so reveal her Soviet connections at some later date. To such a dedicated communist as Sonia even her children came second to the Party, and the boy was left with her husband’s parents in Czechoslovakia.[11]
She was received with great enthusiasm and was instructed in wireless telegraphy and in the techniques of repairing and constructing ‘music boxes’, as radio transmitters were called then by the G.R.U. She was also taught micro-photography. She learned that she was on the regular strength of the Red Army with the rank of captain, and was to use the code-name Sonia in her future radio contacts with Moscow. As far as is known, she continued to use that code-name throughout her long career.
While in Moscow Sonia met Agnes Smedley, who was there on other business, and they resumed their friendship, though Sonia claims that she was never to meet Agnes again because after her course was completed she was posted to Mukden in Manchuria at the beginning of April 1934, being seen off from Moscow by no less a person than General Davidov of the G.R.U. Working under a new controller, whom she knew by the code-name ‘Ernst’ and by whom she was to have a second child, a daughter, she continued her espionage activities, paying visits to Shanghai and elsewhere.[12] Her marriage to Rolf Hamburger had already been in difficulties, perhaps because of her closeness to Sorge, for whom women were a weakness.
It is worth recording, in view of her possible relationship with Hollis, that Sonia goes out of her way to remark that it is not improper to break the rules of conspiracy occasionally by more intimate association with a fellow-agent as human relations are also important.
In Mukden Sonia secured a job as representative of an American firm of booksellers as cover for being there and for visiting Shanghai, where the firm had its Chinese headquarters. Her G.R.U. purpose was to use her transmitter to maintain contact between Moscow and Chinese partisans fighting the Japanese, who were occupying Manchuria. It could be of significance that the British American Tobacco Company and its subsidiary, the British Cigarette Company, owned a factory in Mukden. Hollis may have visited there, as it seems to have been part of his duties to visit other factories.[13] Sonia was posted to Peking in May 1935, where she could certainly have met Hollis because he was often in the capital city on business.
In the meantime, Hollis had moved about in China visiting many other cities in the course of his work. The army officer with whom he had shared a flat in Peking said that Hollis had worked as a freelance writer for the Peking Times, which he regarded as very anti-British, and this may have increased the interest of Arthur Ewert in Hollis.[14] Hollis’s letters home show that he bought a Leica camera in Shanghai and during his trips in China he took many photographs. One letter is of particular interest because it dates a visit he paid in the latter half of 1934, to Moscow while travelling back to China on the Trans-Siberian Railway after spending the summer on leave in England. It describes how he and a schoolmaster called Tebbs, who was making the same journey, were met in Moscow by a representative of Intourist who drove them to the National Hotel in a ‘very luxurious Lincoln car with a charming young lady as a guide’. Hollis told his parents that Moscow depressed him ‘unutterably’ and his description of it as a ‘huge drab slum’ has been construed as evidence that he could not possibly have been a communist.[15] In fact, such comments were common among Soviet supporters who visited Moscow at that time, and since. Even Sonia, who could never bring herself to criticize the Soviet system, described the deplorable condition of family homes in Moscow, even those belonging to high-level people.
Hollis’s visit to Moscow was an event of considerable interest to those who were eventually to investigate and interrogate him about his possible recruitment to the Soviet cause. It was standard procedure for those recruited elsewhere to visit Moscow for personal appraisal and instruction, if that ever proved to be feasible, and Hollis would have needed an excuse like an Intourist trip. The records show that Ewert was in Moscow during Hollis’s visit and, if they had remained in touch, it is not unlikely that Ewert may have met him. It may or may not be significant that Sonia had been in Moscow on one of her instructional visits to G.R.U. headquarters a few months previously that year.
Further letters home written from Chungking reveal that in December 1934, shortly after his twenty-ninth birthday, Hollis suffered a haemorrhage, his second, which X-ray examination revealed to be due to tuberculosis of the left lung. One of his letters stated: ‘I’m now resting in the Canadian mission hospital before being shipped down river…’ When the doctors decided that he needed urgent treatment he was flown to Hankow. Having recuperated in the mountains he subsequently went to Dairen for a holiday.
Hollis’s prosaic letters home have been construed as denoting a typical English public school product who could not possibly have been a communist, much less a Soviet agent.[1]6 However, with ecclesiastical parents sheltered in a cathedral close in Somerset, it is unlikely that Hollis would have been prepared to write about such known friends as Arthur Ewert and Agnes Smedley or to proclaim any untraditional political interests. On 22 October 1935 Hollis wrote to his mother, Meg, requesting her to send him two Old Cliftonian ties because it was difficult to get decent ties in China and he was in the habit of wearing an ‘OC tie almost continuously’. This has also been put forward as evidence that Hollis was so English that he could never betray his country, but Guy Burgess, whose terrible treachery is known, sported an Old Etonian tie when living in Moscow and often drew attention to it. Hollis also wrote home about golf and this, too, has been taken as denoting a solid Englishman, but Philby had been keen on cricket and, in exile in the Soviet Union, has said that one of the things he misses most is Lords!
On 28 November 1935 Hollis asked his mother for a statement about his British shares, suggesting that it would be a good idea if some of his Chinese earnings could be invested. This has been taken as a capitalistic move hardly compatible with communist leanings. There are many known communists, however, who are not averse to exploiting the system they profess to detest to their own advantage. I have been assured by a B.A.T. official that as a young employee Hollis would not have earned much and his investments must have been modest, even counting what he made from journalism.
Hollis’s description of Russians in China in a further letter home as ‘blousy’ and ‘flamboyant’, wearing attenuated bathing costumes on the beach, has been construed as suggesting that he did not like them, but that is thin evidence of any attitude to the Soviet Union as a whole and his main invective was reserved for the Japanese, whom he described as ‘filthy little people’ who would move the British out of north China unless something was done to stop them.
Hollis told his parents that in addition to writing for Chinese papers he was doing freelance articles for The Times of London. He wrote to his mother, with some pride, urging her to look for an article which appeared on 14 December 1935. This was a column-length report about widespread flooding of the Yellow River, the refugee problem it created, and the privations of those made homeless. Despite a search on my behalf by Times staff, no record of any contribution by Hollis then or at any other time could be found in the paper’s very substantial archives.[17] Hollis may have been misleading his parents in a Walter Mittyish way, as he did his friends about his half-blue for golf. The special correspondent responsible for the Yellow River report may have been one of his journalist friends for whom he may have worked as a researcher.
