Too Secret Too Long, page 63
On re-examining the evidence compiled by the Fluency Committee, the small group of K7 officers was quickly convinced that there had been substantial penetration. It could be argued that there had been a succession of different spies but that seemed unlikely. After all possible allowances had been made for the activities of the known spies, like Blunt, Philby and Blake, there was a mass of evidence of penetrations which could not possibly be attributed to them, for the leakages and the case-deaths had continued long after they had ceased to have access to secrets. The officers found it hard to avoid the belief that, throughout those damaging events, there had been a single guiding hand. To whom did it belong?
They re-examined the Mitchell case, listening to the tapes of his interrogation, and agreed with the clearance given by the majority of the Fluency Committee. They then turned to the Hollis case and it was soon agreed that it was strong enough for a hostile interrogation of the former Director-General, especially as the penetrations appeared to have ceased after his retirement. For this it was necessary to secure the agreement of the new Director-General, Sir Martin Furnival Jones. As expected, he hated the thought of dragging from retirement in Somerset the man who had recommended him as his successor, especially when he knew that there was no intention, anywhere in MI5, of pressing for the prosecution of Hollis, whatever he might confess. Even the most forceful members of the Fluency Committee had convinced themselves
THE TOO INCREDIBLE ARM OF COINCIDENCE
In the early 1930s Hollis and Sonia were in Shangai and other Chinese cities simultaneously and had mutual communist friends.
Sonia was ordered to move from Switzerland to Oxford at exactly the time that Hollis was due to go there when MI5 was evacuated from London.
She secured lodgings close to where Hollis worked at Blenheim and then close to where he lived in Oxford.
Sonia’s father, who was one of her agents, also secured an address and occasional lodging in Oxford.
In the autumn of 1942 Sonia moved nearer to Hollis’s address in Oxford.
Any of Sonia’s messages that were intercepted were passed to Hollis in MI5, where he held responsibility for ordering the location of her transmitter. It was never located.
Sonia was a G.R.U. officer sent to service a G.R.U. spy. If Hollis had been recruited in China it would have been on behalf of the G.R.U.
Sonia’s brother was omitted from an MI5 list of communists considered dangerous and prepared by Hollis’s department. He was allowed to operate as a spy and communist activist unhampered. Hollis was responsible for overseeing the subversive activities of such communists.
Serious mistakes by MI5 over the clearance of Fuchs enabled him to pass crucial atomic bomb secrets to Russia. Hollis’s department was responsible for most of them.
The defector Gouzenko was interrogated in a most unsatisfactory manner by Hollis who did all he could to discredit his claim that there was a G.R.U. spy in MI5 called ‘Elli’. The best fit for ‘Elli’ was Hollis.
Sonia’s cover was blown by the defector, Foote, yet MI5’s attempt to interrogate her was farcical. She was not put under surveillance and no attempt was made to interfere with her continuing espionage activities. Hollis was involved in the decisions.
When Hollis was sent to Australia, following code-breaks of K.G.B traffic to and from that country, the K.G.B. quickly changed the codes.
The Cambridge Ring of spies operated throughout the war without hindrance. Hollis was responsible for countering such agents.
The leak that Maclean was to be interrogated on the morning of 28 May 1951 almost certainly originated from an MI5 source in London. Hollis was one of the few who knew it.
While Hollis was Director-General cases fell apart with suspicious regularity and clear leads to traitors were never properly investigated.
The defector Golitsin gave a lead to a high-level Soviet agent in the Navy. Hollis frustrated all attempts to pursue it.
Philby was almost certainly forewarned that he was to be approached and interrogated in Beirut in January 1963. Hollis was one of the few who knew about it.
The way the Profumo affair was handled inflicted great damage on Britain’s reputation and that of the Tory Government. Next to Profumo himself, Hollis was the key figure in the mis-management.
Blunt and Long were Soviet agents. Hollis did all he could to ensure that they could never be prosecuted and their immunity extended to anybody else they named as agents or assistants.
Blunt seems to have been warned about his exposure and the coming offer of immunity. Hollis is a possible source of that leak.
When there was strong suspicion that MI5’s Deputy Director-General, Graham Mitchell, might be a Soviet agent Hollis would not allow him to be interrogated when he could have cleared himself.
Suspicions against Michael Hanley, a senior MI5 officer, were almost certainly planted by the K.G.B., which must have received details of his career from an inside MI5 source. Hollis was one of the only two with access to them.
Many Canadian cases against Soviet penetration collapsed because they seemed to have been betrayed. The culprit could have been in MI5 and Hollis had knowledge of almost all of them.
that the results of such a prosecution would be disastrous both for the Government and for the Service and would discourage others from confessing. At that stage, of course, there had been no publicity about the immunity offered to Philby and Ellis and granted to Blunt. ‘The last thing we were after was retribution,’ a member of the Fluency Committee has told me. ‘We wanted a confession so that we could make a damage assessment and we would have pressed for immunity to prosecution had we thought it would help.’
Furnival Jones could not reject the urgent requirement of the independent section which he himself had created and, after accepting it, he called a meeting to discuss arrangements for it. He proposed to invite his old chief to headquarters at Leconfield House to talk to him privately before handing him over to John Day, head of the K7 inquiry, who was to do the interrogating. While appreciating Furnival Jones’s embarrassment, K7 opposed his proposal on the grounds that the invitation to attend would be a warning to Hollis to take advice on what to do if, in fact, he was guilty. The investigating officers wanted to pick Hollis up from his home without warning and subject him to interrogation without delay. This view was supported by Michael Hanley, who had organized the setting up of K7 and who attended the meeting.
When Furnival Jones insisted that he must see Hollis first privately the officers suggested that as soon as Hollis had received the request to attend headquarters he should be placed under surveillance, with telephone and letter checks because, though he would, almost certainly, be out of touch with any Soviet controller after nearly five years’ severance from secrets, he might still be able to re-establish contact and might then be caught doing so. The Director-General, understandably, was horrified at the suggestion because it would mean that so many more people, such as watchers, Post Office officials, bugging technicians, as well as the Home Secretary, would have to be told of the suspicions. He forbade surveillance of any kind. As a result, the K7 officers felt that the best opportunity for proving the ‘Drat’ case – panic contact with a Soviet controller – had been denied to them and, with so much warning, a professional with as much experience as Hollis would be very unlikely to confess. Their dissent from the Director-General’s requirements was recorded in the ‘Drat’ file.
Furnival Jones wrote to Hollis asking him to attend MI5 headquarters on a day convenient to him. Several days later he received him in a friendly way in the privacy of his office saying that there were certain allegations which needed to be cleared up and which, he was confident, Hollis would easily do. This conversation was not recorded and no written report of it was provided to K7.
Hollis’s agreement to submit to interrogation rather surprised the investigators because, in his position, he could have treated the request with contempt, as some of his supporters believe he should. They remembered, however, the standard advice of Soviet Intelligence under such circumstances – to admit nothing, deny everything but to keep talking to discover how much the interrogators know. It was thought that if Hollis was guilty he would realize that he might have been identified by some recent defector. In short, his readiness to undergo interrogation was not necessarily evidence of his innocence, as some apologists have contended, any more than it was in the case of Fuchs and Blake.
In a safe microphoned house in South Audley Street, John Day, whose suspicions that Hollis had been a long-term spy were very strong, led his subject first into the details of his early life and especially about his friendships with left-wingers like Maurice Richardson, Claud Cockburn and Tom Driberg, while Wright listened in through headphones. Hollis claimed to have had no political interests at Oxford and said that he must simply have forgotten to put a note about his friendship with Cockburn in the office files. As he had not been positively vetted there were no previous answers to statements about communist connections which they could check. It was noted that this situation appeared to have been contrived by Hollis through his failure to introduce positive vetting until immediately before his retirement.
When asked why he had left Oxford without taking a degree and why he had been so determined to go to China, Hollis explained that it was ‘to get away from the Church and from the family’. While admitting that he had first earned his living in China by journalism he was not forthcoming about his work in that field, though quite keen to talk about his later employment with the British American Tobacco Company. He said that his friends and associates in China had been mainly journalists and others in the Press world, diplomats, members of B.A.T. and golfing enthusiasts.
He did not hold back on his known friendship with Agnes Smedley and admitted that he knew she was an ardent communist but denied that she or anyone else had tried to recruit him. When asked about Sorge, who was a journalist, he said he thought it probable that he had met him at various functions but could not remember him. He did not volunteer information about his friendship with Arthur Ewert, the senior communist revolutionary, and was not asked about it because his interrogators were not aware of it. It would seem unlikely that at the age of sixty-four, as he then was, Hollis would have forgotten such an outstanding character as Ewert and the MI5 officer’s failure to follow up the Ewert lead, as already recorded, or leave mention of it in the records deprived the interrogator of a formidable weapon.
Similar deficiencies applied to Hollis’s possible association with Sonia. Though Sonia’s activities in the Oxford area, in connection with Fuchs and others, were on file, though virtually ignored, it appears that any link between her and Hollis through China, and Agnes Smedley in particular, was not appreciated at all. I can find no evidence that he was ever questioned about her, though I and others have previously assumed, or have been told, that he was and had denied knowing her.
The implications of Sonia’s presence so near Woodstock, the location of MI5’s wartime out-station, and later in Oxford, close by, were not appreciated either. So Hollis was never questioned about this remarkable coincidence or about any other part he might have played in ensuring that her transmitter was never located and in the ludicrous confrontation with her in 1947 when some action had become unavoidable. As a professional counter-intelligence officer who has studied the case put it to me, ‘The gut issue of the Hollis case is the possible relationship with Sonia and the interrogators were not properly aware of it.’ Had they been so, Hollis’s interrogation would have been more searching and probably more hostile.
The failure to interrogate Hollis on the peculiar facts of the Sonia case meant that he was not questioned about her brother, Juergen, who has also escaped serious attention. This in turn meant that certain suggestive aspects of the Fuchs case were neglected as well.
According to a high-level C.I.A. source Hollis was friendly, while in Shanghai, with a ‘particularly brutal recruiter for Soviet Intelligence’, implying a person prepared to use threats and blackmail. An MI5 officer was also to refer to this ‘brutal recruiter’ though he might have heard of him from the same C.I.A. source. If this person existed, Hollis made no mention of him during his interrogation.
He was closely questioned about the visit he had made to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railway while serving in China and which he had occasionally mentioned to colleagues. The K7 interrogators, and others who have listened to the Hollis tapes and read the transcripts, feel certain that he told them that he had made this visit in 1936 on his final journey home from China, as this was the quickest way when he was ill. It has since transpired from letters, however, that he paid a visit to Moscow in the early autumn of 1934 on his way back to China after leave in Britain and that he made the final journey home via Canada.[6] The truth can be determined by those with current access to the MI5 records of his interrogation. If Hollis did say that he visited Moscow on his way home it could have been a device to cover his journey while in the middle of his stay in China, which intelligence officers might have interpreted as being more suspicious.
It is possible, though I have not been able to establish it, that a search of the Shanghai Municipal Police records had been made before the 1970 interrogation. If so, then it would seem that nothing against Hollis was found and this has been held as proving that he could not have been actively associated with communists. As I have stated, however, the records had, by that time, been thoroughly weeded.
Hollis was particularly reticent about his residence in Switzerland for treatment at a tuberculosis sanatorium, being so reluctant to speak of it that his son recently believed that his father had never been treated there.[7] In fact, there is little doubt that he was, though the place and date remain in question. As Sonia spent at least two years in Switzerland, and may have visited the country previously, that connection may possibly have been responsible for the reticence.
He was vague, claiming poor memory, about the whole period of his life soon after his return from China. There were letters and diaries which could have clarified the situation but he did not mention them. As he was in reasonable health his interrogators were puzzled by his inability to recall the address of the first house in London where he had lived after his first marriage. Inquiries showed that a former Oxford friend, called Archie Lyall, who had worked in MI6 and was well known in intelligence circles, had lived only four doors away. Yet Hollis denied that he had ever known that Lyall was a neighbour. Being a huge man, fat, flamboyant, moustachioed and very amiable, Lyall would have been difficult to miss. He had been a close friend of Burgess, and the interrogator felt Hollis was lying about Lyall – who had died in 1964, to the great sadness of his friends – in order to avoid a possible connection with Burgess.[8]
Hollis was particularly obscure about his reasons for being so determined to find employment in MI5 or, failing that, in MI6. He agreed that MI5 was the prime target for a Briton recruited by Soviet Intelligence but, rather lamely, suggested that he must have wanted to join because he thought the work would be interesting. The interrogators were working on the supposition that Hollis had been contacted by a Soviet controller on his return to London and had not only been given instructions but had been directed towards people who might help him. Without being told the names of people in MI5, or associated with it, Hollis would not have known who to cultivate, as he cultivated the major at the tennis club. It has been suggested that Hollis’s wife had a relative in a secretarial capacity in MI5 but no such person was involved in the account of his recruitment to MI5 given to me by an MI5 officer intimately concerned with it and who claims to remember the details well.[9]
MI5’s ignorance of Sonia’s close conspiratorial links with Richard Sorge and other proven G.R.U. agents in China meant that Hollis was not questioned about ‘Elli’, the MI5 spy named by Gouzenko, in the context that he himself might have been that spy. Because of the certain knowledge that the Cambridge ‘Ring of Five’ had been recruited by the K.G.B., the K7 investigators had continued to work on the supposition that if Hollis was a spy he, too, had been operating for that agency. Hollis was simply asked why he had treated the ‘Elli’ allegations so dismissively in his report of his interview with Gouzenko. He replied that he could not recall the details and had simply taken the view that such a penetration of MI5 was impossible, an attitude, he pointed out, which had been taken by everybody else in the Service until the Blunt case.
As Chapter 52 will show, the investigators missed a major opportunity to grill Hollis deeply about highly suspicious discrepancies in his report on his Gouzenko interview because they had failed to take the precaution of consulting Gouzenko first. He was readily available in Canada, his memory was excellent and he had notes available for reference but no attempt had been made by MI5 to talk to him since Hollis’s brief interview in 1946. My inquiries suggest that Hollis had told senior colleagues that he had seen Gouzenko several times, but Gouzenko denied this to me personally, as does Mrs Gouzenko today.[10]
Hollis was questioned about his relationship with Philby, especially in the light of remarks which Philby had made in his book My Silent War, published two years previously. He agreed with Philby’s statement that the two of them had exchanged information about their investigations of Soviet and communist affairs ‘without reserve on either side’ but insisted that it was his duty to do just that with his MI6 colleague responsible for Soviet counter-espionage outside Britain. He assured his interrogators that, at that stage, he, like everyone else, had no suspicion that Philby was a Soviet spy and that Philby never gave him any indications to that effect.
