Too Secret Too Long, page 55
Watkins, then aged sixty-two, was interviewed in Paris by Bennett, who induced him to continue the talks in London away from the curiosity of French security. Watkins confessed his homosexuality and the K.G.B. attempt to involve him in treachery but denied any disloyalty. Through a friendship with a Soviet Foreign Office official he knew as Oleg Gorbunov, but who was really General Oleg Gribanov, the K.G.B. officer in charge of internal intelligence operations in the Soviet Union, he was given access to areas of the U.S.S.R. normally barred to foreigners and on one of these trips became involved with a Soviet poet and a labourer. It also transpired that Watkins had been friendly with a Professor Nikitin, of the Moscow Institute of History, who was none other than Anatoli Gorski, the K.G.B. controller whom the Ring of Five had known as ‘Henry’!
Bennett prevailed upon the suspect to return to Canada for further questioning and the interrogation continued in a suite at the Holiday Inn in Montreal.
Watkins confessed that shortly before he was due to return to his influential post in Ottawa, ‘Gorbunov’, still pretending to be friendly, warned him that the K.G.B. had a file about his homosexual exploits, complete with incriminating photographs, but that all would be well if the Ambassador was prepared to be helpful once he was in Canada. It was suggested that he should do this by being specially friendly to the Soviet Ambassador in Ottawa and by ‘liberalizing’ procedures for Soviet citizens resident in Canada, meaning spies and subversives, especially those using Canada as a point of entry to the U.S.
The records showed that Watkins did not serve as an agent of influence and had actually been party to reducing facilities which assisted the K.G.B.[15] He had also carefully avoided meeting the Soviet Ambassador. After twenty-six days of interrogation Bennett and his co-interrogator, Harry Brandeis, were convinced of his innocence. Arrangements were made for Watkins to return to Paris, and he agreed to submit to a further short session of questioning before he left. While talking in a seemingly relaxed way about his career he fell dead in his chair.[16]
The Montreal police were induced to hush up the circumstances of the tragedy and details have emerged only recently following inquiries and a long-delayed inquest which appeared to be, at least partly, consequential to the publication of Their Trade is Treachery.[17] Bennett submitted a 325-page report on the case which was cut to eighty pages on the instructions of the R.C.M.P. Commissioner who feared that the interrogation would otherwise seem to have been too long and too tough. The pathologist who signed Watkins’ death certificate was unaware that he had been under interrogation and claimed that, had she known the circumstances, she would have performed an autopsy.[18]
Brandeis, who became chief of R.C.M.P. counter-intelligence in 1980, claimed that the exact circumstances of Watkins’ death had been covered up ‘for reasons of national security and to protect Watkins’ reputation’. It would seem more likely, however, that it was to cover up the fact that in 1954 the Canadian Foreign Office had appointed a homosexual, who later admitted to ‘cruising’ round Ottawa to pick up partners, as Ambassador to Moscow, where the K.G.B. had compromised him. Further, the R.C.M.P., which was already suffering from the publicity about the suicide of another Canadian ambassador, Herbert Norman, had known that Watkins had a heart condition though Bennett, fully aware of this had treated him as gently as possible.[19]
Anthony Blunt reluctantly admitted, during his interrogation in 1964, that one of his former Cambridge associates, a Canadian called Herbert Norman, had been a member of a communist cell and had been recruited to Soviet Intelligence. On learning this the R.C.M.P. renewed its inquiries into Norman who was a known homosexual.[20] Norman had first raised doubts in the minds of Western counter-intelligence officers through his friendship with a Japanese Marxist who lived in Washington. After this man had been hurriedly deported, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Norman had tried to gain access to his apartment claiming, falsely, that he was there on Canadian business. When the flat was searched by the F.B.I. secret reports about American defence production were discovered. Later, at the end of the war, an American called Elizabeth Bentley confessed to the F.B.I. that she had served as a courier for Soviet agents and she named Norman, who became publicly identified with communism in 1951 during American hearings which were conveniently branded as witch-hunting.[21]
Norman escaped serious investigation mainly because he was protected by his friend Lester Pearson, a Canadian Foreign Office official who became Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister.[22] Norman was sent to Japan as Ambassador, was later High Commissioner to New Zealand and, in 1956, Ambassador to Egypt. There seems to be little doubt that he worked for the K.G.B. in all three postings. One recent biographer, for example, is convinced that his K.G.B. activities while serving in Tokyo in 1950, ‘went far to contribute to Moscow’s decision to give the North Koreans the green light to invade South Korea in June 1950’.[23]
Following increasing suspicions, Norman was recalled to Ottawa in 1957 for ‘discussions’, but prior to his departure, which had been arranged on a pretext, a C.I.A. man in Cairo imprudently encouraged him to speak of his links with the Russians. Norman is then said to have remarked, ‘I can’t go back to Ottawa because, if I did, I would have to betray too many people.’ That night he jumped from the roof of the apartment block where he had a flat and killed himself. Either he had guessed the purpose of his recall or he had been surreptitiously told of it.
The Norman case was one of the first to be analysed in detail by the Featherbed team which concluded that he had been a long-serving Soviet spy who had faked his break with communism to gain entry to the diplomatic service as a ‘mole’. New evidence to be published soon will confirm this.[24]
In the early 1960s Golitsin also gave a lead to the R.C.M.P. that strongly indicated the existence of a K.G.B. agent able to penetrate the Canadian Foreign Office and under the control of the Soviet agent-runner, Victor Bourdine.[25] This is now believed to have been Hugh Hambleton, since convicted of spying, but no progress was made with the case at the time.[26]
From 1964 onwards the R.C.M.P. security service became increasingly disinclined to reveal details of its cases to MI5. There were two reasons for this. There was growing realization that Canada’s security interests were more closely bound with those of the U.S. than with Britain’s and liaison with the C.I.A. and F.B.I. was becoming more intimate. More importantly, there was a growing fear that MI5 had been penetrated at high level by Soviet Intelligence agents. This fear had originated from indiscretions by MI5 liaison officers either attached to the R.C.M.P. or visiting Ottawa from London. At first only hints had been dropped concerning the alarming number of cases and double-agent operations which had gone sour in London, but Mitchell and Hollis were soon named as the prime suspects. Then, when the Mitchell case was still active, Hollis himself briefed the R.C.M.P Commissioner about the suspicions concerning his Deputy, as he had previously briefed the chiefs of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.[27] The Fluency Committee was under the strictest instructions not to mention the case against Hollis to anybody, but Bennett and a very few other senior R.C.M.P. officers were told that the inquiries were being concentrated on the Director-General, who would soon be visiting Ottawa on a leg of his farewell tour before retirement. This knowledge made the dinner given in his honour in Ottawa, in 1965, so embarrassing for those who knew the facts that one of them was to describe the atmosphere as ‘hellishly awkward’.[28]
The fears concerning Hollis had become so strong inside MI5 by 1969 that senior R.C.M.P. officers were told about them more forcibly, but still unofficially. This led to a further embarrassing incident when John Starnes, a civil servant who was about to be appointed Director-General of the R.C.M.P. security service, was indiscreet enough to tell Maurice Oldfield of MI6 that he knew of the suspicions against Hollis. It must be assumed that Oldfield reported this to his London headquarters but the information was to remain unconfirmed officially until the mid-1970s.[29] By that time R.C.M.P. liaison with the C.I.A. had become closer still, at some expense to MI5.
Once the R.C.M.P. had reduced the flow of information about their cases to MI5 more of them succeeded. There were examples of such successes in Hollis’s time when MI5 had been given details only after the operations had been completed. They resulted in the expulsion of Soviet Intelligence officers either quietly or, when the R.C.M.P. wanted it, with publicity.
When Hollis was visiting Ottawa in 1965, James Bennett asked him to explain MI5’s failure to follow the R.C.M.P.’s lead in inducing the Government to impose a ceiling on the number of Soviet ‘diplomats’ and other officials posted to the country – a move which the Canadians had made seven years previously and which had been effective in limiting K.G.B. and G.R.U. operations. Although the question was posed in a friendly manner during a drive to a convivial lunch, Hollis reacted by bridling, losing his temper and dismissing it without explanation.[30] As recorded elsewhere, the number of Soviet Intelligence officers under diplomatic privilege and other guises in London was to go on mounting, saturating the counter-espionage resources.
One of the R.C.M.P. officers who witnessed Hollis’s behaviour on that occasion told me, ‘He was a grey man, rarely animated and under a high degree of personal control but, on that day, he lost his cool. I wonder why.’
The eventual interrogation of Hollis as a suspected Soviet agent was to offer a possible explanation. It was to be followed by an event almost as traumatic to the R.C.M.P. as the Hollis affair was to MI5 – the interrogation of Bennett as a suspect ‘mole’.[31]
chapter forty-three
Hollis’s Last Cases
The perturbing pattern of events in which damaging British traitors were detected only through chance leads provided by foreign security agencies continued into Hollis’s last year as chief of MI5. Late in 1964 a Soviet source told the American F.B.I. that information concerning British naval missiles had leaked to Moscow and the news was passed to MI5. At first it was feared that another Admiralty spy might be involved, with consequent embarrassment for that department, but the details supplied by the Soviet source indicated that the culprit was an officer called Frank Bossard who worked in the Guided Weapons Branch of the Aviation Ministry.[1] Examination of Bossard’s record showed that thirty years previously the tall, tubby and well-dressed officer, who affected to have had a public school education, had served six months in prison for buying watches with worthless cheques and selling them in pawn shops. After joining the R.A.F. in 1940, then aged twenty-seven, he had falsified his educational record to secure a commission, which had been granted. Leaving as a flight-lieutenant in March 1946, he had joined the Ministry of Civil Aviation, and had then been seconded to the War Office as an intelligence officer. In 1956 he had been transferred to a branch of the Joint Intelligence Bureau at the Bonn Embassy in West Germany, his main task there being the interrogation of East German scientists who had defected to the West. He had been positively vetted in 1954 since his intelligence work had involved access to Top Secret information. He failed to mention his criminal record and, when this was discovered, the vetters accepted his excuse that he had forgotten about it because it was so old. In 1958 he returned to London to an important intelligence assignment in the Defence Ministry and in January 1960 he transferred to the Naval Guided Weapons Branch of the Aviation Ministry, becoming a project officer on the air side in July 1964. Though his job enabled him to witness highly secret missile tests off the Welsh coast, he was not subjected to any further positive vetting because the documents to which he had access were only classified Secret or less. And because the Aviation Ministry did not need to know of his criminal record it was not told of it.[2]
Bossard had almost certainly been talent-spotted by the Russians while working in Bonn where he had demonstrated enjoyment of an extravagant lifestyle. On his return to London, where his allowances were drastically reduced and his enjoyment thereby curtailed, he was approached by a Soviet recruiter in a public house on the pretext that he shared his interest in coins. Bossard was to date this approach as taking place in 1961 but suspicion remains that he had accepted money from the K.G.B. and was working for the agency before that. Bossard was a completely mercenary spy, having no communist ideals or connections. His record showed that, by nature, he was unable to resist easy money to the extent that he was not deterred by the heavy sentences imposed, with much publicity, on spies like Blake and Vassall, though it may well be that he was already firmly in the Soviet net then with no chance of escape.
Until 1964 Bossard had used his interest in numismatics as a cover, having a small room near his office said to belong to the Coin and Medal Association. There he had carried out his illicit photography of secret documents in safety. Later, he hired nearby hotel rooms for the day, under false names, keeping his photographic equipment in the left-luggage office at Waterloo Station and taking it out only when required.
He was kept under surveillance for several months in the hope that he might be seen meeting with some other member of a spy-ring or a controller, but he proved to be a lone operator, communicating with the K.G.B. through dead-letter boxes, such as drainpipes and hollow trees, located for the most part near his home at Stoke D’Abernon in Surrey. There he left his rolls of film and picked up his reward, on one occasion £2,000 in notes.[3]
One essential part of his communication system was discovered by MI5 when his suitcase was inspected after he had re-deposited it at Waterloo Station. It contained five gramophone records of popular Russian tunes, such as ‘Moscow Nights’ and the ‘Volga Boatmen’, which all spelled a different message to him when he listened for them being broadcast from Moscow at prearranged times. A combined effort by G.C.H.Q. and surveillance officers confirmed that Bossard was tuned in when the broadcasts were made.[4]
On 12 March 1965 Bossard was followed during his lunch-hour, first to Waterloo Station where he withdrew his suitcase, then to the Ivanhoe Hotel, where he had hired a room for the day. Special Branch officers burst in as he was in the act of photographing the contents of four secret files. He pleaded guilty at his trial in May when, then aged fifty-two, he was sentenced to twenty-one years in gaol. The judge stated that had he not been co-operative with the security authorities after his arrest he would have received more. That a traitor with access to only secret data can still do enough damage to warrant such a Severe penalty suggests that the positive vetting system is inadequate in applying only to those with Top Secret clearance.
The Security Commission’s report on the Bossard case revealed serious failures of security procedures in the War Office and Aviation Ministry but went out of its way, yet again, to exonerate MI5 from any blame whatever.[5] Admittedly, Bossard had been a difficult spy to detect because he had carefully carried out K.G.B. instructions. Appreciating his limitations more astutely than the British authorities, his Soviet controllers had forbidden him to secure any files to which he was not properly entitled or to pump colleagues for information outside his field. He had not lived obviously above his means and had banked his reward money in different accounts. Nevertheless, he had met with a Soviet controller on at least two occasions without any surveillance of those controllers by MI5 and the positive vetting procedure laid down by MI5 did not stipulate that anybody with a criminal record should be denied access even to secret material, as it does now. Further, Bossard had spied on a regular basis for at least four years without raising any suspicion.
Although Bossard would almost certainly have gone on spying successfully but for the tip from the U.S., Hollis must have regarded the case as an MI5 triumph because he took his son, Adrian, then twenty-five, to witness the trial at the Old Bailey.[6]
Because of the American source of the initial information and the heavy involvement of Aviation Ministry officials, there was no way that any Soviet agent inside MI5 could have seriously interfered with the Bossard case. He was, in fact, such an expendable spy that the K.G.B. would never have prejudiced an inside MI5 agent in order to protect him. The Soviet bloc has never made much effort to safeguard purely mercenary spies once they have become suspect, preferring to reserve its strenuous care for those who are ideologically committed.
The Security Commission’s report on the Bossard case was unprecedented in naming certain civil servants whom it considered as deserving of criticism for departmental failures to prevent the espionage, and the Whitehall mandarins – the so-called Permanent Secretaries Club – reacted with alacrity. An independent inquiry under a former mandarin, Sir Henry Wilson Smith, exonerated the civil servants and overruled the Commission, Smith’s findings being quickly published as a White Paper.[7]
The Potential Value of Oversight
The Bossard case gave the Security Commission its first major chance to show its value and it exposed many weaknesses and inefficiencies in the security screen. These were rectified in what was another stable-door-locking operation. The Security Commission is limited by the fact that it is called into action only when an event, such as a serious spy case, indicates the existence of yet more deficiencies. An effective oversight body, such as that currently operating in the U.S., would have the advantage of being in continuous touch with security issues and should therefore have greater opportunity to detect weaknesses before they cause so much damage. My experience as adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence while it was dealing with positive vetting showed that Whitehall departments have come to lean on the Security Commission, awaiting its recommendations before making changes in security procedures. This means that little tends to be done in the way of improvements until there has been another security disaster requiring the Security Commission’s attention.
