Too Secret Too Long, page 62
Stonehouse later reappeared under an assumed name in Australia and was repatriated to Britain where he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment in 1976 on theft and fraud charges.
Since his release he has begun a new career as a novelist and when I lunched with him in 1983 he suggested that we should write a joint book after interviewing Frolik in the U.S.!
Statements made by August and Frolik to official committees in the U.S. and published there did further harm to American trust in British security, especially when coupled with Stonehouse’s reappearance and disgrace. Doubts created in the minds of Parliament and the public, in spite of Wilson’s clearance of the former minister, further damaged the image and integrity of Parliament.
When M.P.s urged the Prime Minister to request the security Commission to investigate the Stonehouse affair and report to Parliament, nothing was done. Examination of the incident by an oversight body could have reassured Parliament while at the same time taking a critical look at the extent to which the limitations on inquiries into M.P.s had affected it. Both Frolik and August were to express their anger at the way their information had been treated. An oversight body could have satisfied itself on the extent to which Wilson’s statement that there was no evidence referred to evidence that could be brought into a court, as opposed to intelligence evidence.
During his debriefings by the C.I.A. and by MI5 Frolik named several British trade union leaders as having been helpful to Soviet bloc intelligence and later went into some detail about these on a tape-recording, of which I possess a copy.[18] On this and other evidence, Stephen Hastings, then Tory M.P. for Mid-Bedfordshire, raised the matter in Parliament in December 1977 and mentioned certain names. He called for an inquiry, preferably in public, but again the attempt came to nothing.
The penetration of the British trade unions by communists and Soviet bloc intelligence is an integral part of the ‘long march through the institutions’ to secure communist control in Britain in the absence of any possibility of achieving that by democratic means. MI5 was not allowed to develop Frolik’s evidence concerning the subversion of trade union leaders, actual and attempted, because of the embarrassment factor. An oversight body might have caused a more robust action to be taken or at least seen to it that the leads were properly pursued and the results made known to successive prime ministers.
It was Frolik and August who revealed the treachery of Karel Zbytek, the filing clerk who betrayed the operations of the MI6-financed Czech Intelligence Office in London, which is covered in Chapter 25. They revealed a great deal more about the extent to which Czech espionage and subversion had continued, virtually unchecked, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of it is on record in U.S. Senate and Congressional hearings, such as August’s statement that during the recurring Berlin crises he assisted in preparing a list of British counter-intelligence facilities and individuals to be liquidated in the event of an invasion of Britain. Much of it was deleted from the published American reports, however, to spare Whitehall and Westminster embarrassment. The deletions included a clear lead to a former Board of Trade official alleged to have supplied the Russians with information which enabled them to secure better deals to the detriment of Britain’s interests. This man later achieved a most important position in Whitehall and was subjected to investigations which came to no conclusion.[19]
After withholding information for a while because he was angered by the dismissal of his evidence against Owen and Stonehouse as ‘hearsay’, Frolik did eventually give MI5 the evidence for his firm belief that that agency was penetrated by a Soviet agent. In October 1965, a Soviet bloc intelligence officer, a Hungarian called Major Lazlo Szabo who was posing as a diplomat in the London Embassy, had defected.[20] Though he defected in London he chose to go to the C.I.A., which he achieved by walking into the American Embassy. MI5 was given the opportunity to debrief him, once he was safely out of Britain, because he said that he had been specially trained in Moscow to penetrate a British department, which has not been named. Frolik claimed that ‘within days of Szabo’s debriefing by MI5, the K.G.B. had a full account of it’, the inference being that it could only have come from an MI5 source.[21] The incident had occurred during the last month of Hollis’s tenure of office, so, if he was the source of the leak, it would have been his last service to Soviet Intelligence.
Successive governments have responded to Parliamentary requests for inquiries into the extent of Czech penetrations by attempting to undermine the credibility of the defectors’ evidence and in this they have been assisted by the ‘liberal’ Press. In all Western countries there seems to be an ingrained dislike of defectors, who are traitors to their own countries, and this hostile attitude has been reinforced by the writings of left-wing journalists who deplore their disservice to the Soviet Union. Gouzenko, for instance, has been accused in Canada of being partly responsible for the Cold War, when all the aggression in that respect had come from the G.R.U. activities which he exposed. My researches suggest that much of the dislike and disparagement originates in the security and intelligence services which have to deal with the consequences of defections. Their disclosures inevitably rebound to the discredit of the Service when a defector gives leads to spies who should have been detected years previously. Gouzenko, for instance, has not been forgiven by the R.C.M.P. for providing evidence about twenty Canadian spies.[22] Frolik’s naming of British Labour M.P.s and trade union leaders was derided by Labour governments for reasons which are obvious.[23] By a similar token, Golitsin’s lead to Philby was not welcome to the Conservative Government, which had cleared him in Parliament. In the mid-1960s Golitsin also became unpopular, and even suspect in the U.S., for reasons which had originated in MI5 in a way which has not, I believe, been explained before.
MI5 had been so impressed with the information and advice it had received from Golitsin that it paid him $100,000, then worth about £50,000, for his services up to and including his visit to London.[24] Before his unfortunate flight, MI5 officers had sounded him out on a number of minor mysteries to see if he could help solve them. The first, and most intriguing, of these concerned the death of Hugh Gaitskell, the right-wing Labour Party leader who was succeeded by Harold Wilson, who was then believed to be of the left.
On 4 December 1962 Gaitskell, then aged fifty-six, returned to London from Paris where he had made a speech about Britain’s entry into the Common Market. He felt unwell, complaining of rheumatic pains, but worked on until the 14th when he was admitted to the Manor House Hospital in Hampstead and found to be suffering from virus pneumonia. He was discharged, after treatment, on 23 December and his doctor pronounced him fit enough to accept an invitation from Khrushchev to visit Moscow.[25] To obtain his visa Gaitskell had been required to visit the Soviet Consulate and, though he had gone there by appointment, he had been kept waiting for half an hour and had been given coffee and biscuits. That same evening he suffered what appeared to be a relapse.
On 4 January he entered the Middlesex Hospital and died there on the 18th. The cause of death was given on his death certificate as pulmonary oedema (fluid in the lungs), carditis (inflammation of the heart), and renal failure (failure of the kidneys). The disease responsible for these fatal symptoms was diagnosed as being, not virus pneumonia, but a condition called systemic lupus erythematosus, a rare complaint caused by the victim’s own antibodies.
One of the doctors who treated him was so puzzled by the fact that the disease is not only comparatively rare in temperate zones but is particularly so in males over forty, that he contacted MI5. It transpired that Gaitskell himself may have had suspicions because he had told the doctor about the coffee and biscuits. Accordingly a scientific security officer was sent down to the Microbiological Research Establishment and then to the Chemical Defence Establishment, which are both at Porton on Salisbury Plain. The visits were negative because nobody could offer any information suggesting that the Russians knew how to induce the disease.
When Golitsin was presented with this information for comment he said that he remembered something very relevant. Shortly before defecting he had heard from the chief of the Northern European section of the K.G.B. that the organization was planning to murder a leader of an opposition party in his area. The MI5 officers did not take this too seriously, suspecting that Golitsin might be stretching the truth to enhance his status and his earnings.
On his arrival back in the U.S. Golitsin gave this same information to Angleton, as though it was something he had just remembered, and it seemed so far-fetched that it was to cast doubt in the minds of other C.I.A. officers concerning his general credibility. Angleton, however, took the information seriously and commissioned a thorough search of all the published medical literature on systemic lupus erythematosus and came up with the intriguing information that Soviet medical researchers had published three academic papers describing how they had produced a chemical substance which, when administered to animals, produced the fatal symptoms of the disease.[26] As Angleton, Golitsin and the MI5 officers were quick to realize, the demise of Gaitskell was the prime cause of the Labour Party’s shift to the left and to moves which enabled communists to penetrate the party more deeply and more openly. Khrushchev’s particular hatred of Gaitskell was to be recorded by the Polish defector, Major-General Jan Sejna, who wrote that the Soviet leader ‘pronounced the name with disgust’, remarking, ‘If Communism were to triumph tomorrow Gaitskell would be the first to be shot outside the House of Parliament as a traitor to the working class.’[27]
Hollis showed no serious interest in the inquiries about Gaitskell but the view remaining in MI5 and in MI6 is that his death remains a mystery and that the possibility of K.G.B. involvement cannot be excluded.
The doubts about Golitsin’s credibility following his return from Britain were intensified by a further development which had also arisen out of talks with MI5 officers. The decipherment of some wartime K.G.B. radio traffic had revealed the existence of a spy referred to as ‘Agent 19’, who had been present at some highly secret talks, code-named ‘Trident’, which had been held in Washington between British and American delegations led, respectively, by Churchill and Roosevelt. An MI5 officer had suggested to Golitsin, rather imprudently, that ‘Agent 19’ could be the distinguished American diplomat and former Governor of New York, Averill Harriman, who had also been U.S. Ambassador to Moscow. Golitsin gave this ‘information’ to the C.I.A. as though he had recalled it. As a result the C.I.A. mounted an operation, code-named ‘Dinosaur’, to investigate the ‘suspect’ and it was quickly shown that Harriman did not fit the details alleged by Golitsin.[28] The ‘Dinosaur’ farce did much to increase the influence of those in the C.I.A. who were beginning to be convinced that Golitsin was a fake defector.
Golitsin had already caused deep concern in the C.I.A. by alleging that a K.G.B. ‘mole’ had penetrated one of the agency’s most sensitive departments – the Directorate for Plans. He was able to describe the American officer, knew the contents of some of the reports he claimed he had betrayed, and also knew that he had visited London on a certain date. A full inquiry produced no further evidence apart from confirming the London visit and this gave rise to a fear that Golitsin had been sent deliberately to spread suspicion in the agency, especially when, later, he alleged the existence of other C.I.A. ‘moles’. Nevertheless, the C.I.A. management decided that so long as there was a doubt the benefit of it had to be given to the agency. The suspect officer was quietly dismissed.[29]
In a discursive way Golitsin’s debriefers in London had discussed with him the possibility that the political split between the Soviet Union and China was a fake – part of a massive disinformation exercise to lull the West into believing that the enmity was real but which would be seen to be false when it suited the two communist powers to combine for an assault on the West. Golitsin also peddled this speculation as a concept of his own when he returned to Washington, attempting to back it up with evidence that he knew of K.G.B. officers still assisting China. He has since promoted this and other controversial theories in a book.[30]
Such follies were to lead to the formation of anti- and pro-Golitsin factions inside the C.I.A. with serious consequences for morale, which were to be reflected, later, in MI5 when supporters of Hollis took refuge in the false belief that the suspicions against him had been generated by Golitsin. An objective study of Golitsin’s record, however, shows that, with respect to the evidence of his own experience inside the K.G.B., the ‘assets’ he yielded greatly outnumber the ‘debits’, which were due to later exaggerations and fantasies arising from his desire to prove that his information was not exhausted. Discussing Golitsin and other defectors over a dinner to mark his retirement as head of MI6, the late Sir Maurice Oldfield, a wine connoisseur, remarked to me that the first pressings from any defector almost always have the most body, while the third are always suspect.
It is the view of those MI5 officers who dealt with Golitsin, as it is of James Angleton and others of the C.I.A., that he was easily the most important defector since Gouzenko in alerting the Western powers to the scale of the effort being mounted against them by the K.G.B.[31] Unfortunately for Golitsin, as for Frolik and August, much of his information was unwelcome to those officers of security and intelligence agencies whose inefficiency or treachery it exposed.
I have been unable to establish whether or not the MI5 officers who had been unwittingly responsible for the fantasies which Golitsin took back to Washington have ever explained the truth about his ‘debits’. The evidence suggests that they preferred to remain silent rather than admit to the C.I.A. that they had been the fount.
chapter forty-eight
The Interrogation of Sir Roger
Hollis
By 1970 the activities of the Fluency Committee had swept several suspects out of MI6 following a re-examination of the Philby case. One of these was an officer who had had an affair with Lizi Philby and had failed to report it when Philby had defected. A senior member of the diplomatic service was also found to have been involved sexually with Lizi, and had also been very friendly with Philby himself, but he survived the suspicions and went on to become an ambassador. An MI6 agent who was a British subject resident in Sweden was also found to be a spy for the K.G.B., as already recorded, but nothing, beyond a damage assessment, could be done because under British law, he could not be extradited.[1]
Strong suspicion attached to a quite senior MI6 officer who waited until he retired and had received his retirement honour and then announced, with some gusto, that he had long been a practising homosexual and had denied being so when positively vetted. He taunted the security officials about their failure to discover his secret which should have been obvious from the man’s lifestyle.[2]
Peculiarities in the professional behaviour of a quite senior MI5 officer of foreign origin led to his interrogation by a Fluency Committee member as a possible Soviet agent. Nothing could be proved but as he could not be positively cleared he was forcibly retired. When his full background was investigated it was realized that he should never have been recruited to MI5 because he had relatives behind the Iron Curtain who occasionally visited him in London.[3]
The removal of suspects from MI6 was unpopular with the remaining officers, even with Maurice Oldfield, the future chief, who believed it to be ‘disruptive to the Service’.[4] Nevertheless it was decided in 1970 that the Fluency Committee’s efforts warranted the setting up of a small but permanent section inside MI5, to be called K7, with the full-time function of investigating and analysing possible penetrations of MI5, MI6 and G.C.H.Q. It was not, however, tasked with the responsibility for preventing them through anti-penetration operations and moved only when leads were passed to it. Unless there has been a very recent change that is still the situation.[5] Under the new arrangements MI6 and G.C.H.Q. were to remain responsible for their own security but MI5 was to have right of access to MI6 files for the first time.
The chairman of the Fluency Committee recommended that no former members of the Committee should be included on the staff of K7 who would then be able to re-examine the evidence of past penetrations without prejudice and with new eyes. He was particularly keen to counter internal criticisms that some of the investigators had become ‘too emotional’ about penetrations.
From its inception it was also agreed that K7 should work on the principle that the benefit of any grave doubt should always be given to the interest of the Service concerned and not to the individual under suspicion. If a case against an individual could not be proved but, nevertheless, looked black, he should be removed as a safeguard by some contrived means such as premature retirement or transfer to employment depriving him of access to sensitive information.
