Too Secret Too Long, page 64
Hollis could offer no explanations for the long series of case-deaths, the way the Russians always seemed to have been given advance warnings when their officers or agents were in trouble, or for the lack of successful defections to MI5. He was not questioned about similar events in the Canadian security service because any connection had not then been appreciated.
When asked about the marks in the locked drawer of the antique desk in Mitchell’s office, which appeared to have contained a tape-recorder, Hollis admitted that only he and the investigating officer who opened the drawer knew of the intention to do so and, while agreeing that the photographs which had been taken of the marks in the dust suggested that something had been recently and hurriedly removed, he disclaimed all knowledge of any explanation.
Questioned about his dismissal of Martin from MI5 he claimed that he had been the ringleader of a ‘Gestapo’ intent on investigating every failure. This did not impress his chief interrogator, Day, who knew that it had been Martin who had been most consistently suspicious of Philby and Blunt and had been proved right in both cases.
Hollis was not asked to explain his nosiness about G.C.H.Q.’s secret information concerning the Petrov defection because the investigators did not know about it.
Hollis returned to Somerset after the first session of interrogation. Following further inquiries he was brought back to London for more questions but he never broke or showed any signs of doing so.
If he was guilty he would have been aware of his unassailability so long as he kept his nerve and declined to confess. As with Fuchs, Philby, Blake and Long the law was powerless without a confession and he, above all, would appreciate the stupidity of confessing anything.
He may have been assured that nobody outside a small circle in MI5 and MI6 was being informed of his position and, in any case, he could be confident that no government would put a former Director-General of MI5 on trial because it would be deemed to be ‘against the national interest’. The effects on the continuing interchange of information with the U.S. could always be pleaded as an overriding consideration.
The possibility of offering Hollis immunity to prosecution in return for a confession, as had happened with Philby and Blunt, was not open to the interrogators. While they would have liked the option it would have meant an application to the Attorney-General and Director of Public Prosecutions for permission and Furnival Jones had insisted that nobody outside the secret departments was to be informed of the case. The interrogators were denied that weapon, and another which could have been applied in the Blunt case – threat of publicity. Hollis must have been aware of the total disinclination on the part of the MI5 management, and even of the hostile investigating officers, to take any action against him that would lead to publicity affecting the Service so seriously.
The total interrogation time was about ten hours – a short time for a case of such potential significance. The sessions were all recorded with other MI5 officers listening in to them and making notes of hesitancies and discrepancies.
Section K7 then began a detailed study of Hollis’s responses, and lack of them, especially for the period 1936-8 when he might have been reactivated, and undertook various additional inquiries before making a formal report on the case to the MI5 management. Various witnesses were questioned including Hollis’s first wife, who was asked about his early life and other personal matters, an inquiry which produced small result. I understand that Hollis’s second wife was not questioned.
It would be easier for an MI5 officer to spy for a foreign power without his wife realizing it than for any other professional man. The sudden telephone call or assignation can always be attributed to line of duty as can the sealed lips about any peculiar event. Even a meeting with a Russian could be explained away as a duty contact with an agent or an attempt to secure a defection.[11]
In 1971, while K7’s further deliberations were in progress, the possible danger of Hollis’s illicit relationship while he had been in office was made public. One of his former friends, Commander Anthony Courtney, who had been defamed and professionally ruined by the K.G.B. exposure of a casual sexual adventure, claimed that Hollis had laid himself open to the possibility of K.G.B. blackmail.[12] My previous inquiries indicated that the blackmail danger was reduced because Hollis’s mistress was a member of MI5 and because so many in high office knew of the relationship but Courtney’s argument had some strength because ministers did not know of it and some of them might have considered it a cause for resignation had they been told of it, as might some M.P.s and members of the public.
The Potential Value of Oversight
It might be presumed that an effective oversight body might have been informed, or would have learned, of the suspicions against Hollis and of his interrogation. In that case, such an independent body might, reasonably, have been critical of the limitations imposed on the circumstances of the first interview. Indeed, such limitations might not have been imposed at all had oversight been a possibility.
Hollis’s lapses of memory, at the age of sixty-four, might have occasioned more curiosity than they appeared to do in the minds of the MI5 management and it might be imagined that his failure to introduce positive vetting would have called for more comment. It would also seem likely that an independent oversight body would have been less enthusiastic about shelving the case. If the great value of granting immunity to Blunt lay in the disclosures he was expected to make about his past activities and especially about his Soviet contacts, as successive governments have accepted, then it was even more important to pursue the Hollis case more resolutely because the suspicions attaching to him were more recent and, potentially, far more consequential. On the basis that the benefit of any doubt should be given to the Service, an oversight body might reasonably have required a thorough investigation into those officers whom Hollis might have recruited personally or whose entry he had supported.
chapter forty-nine
A Belated Purge
By 1970 the number of Soviet spies and subversive agents operating in and from London had reached such alarming proportions that the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, were determined that it should be substantially reduced.[1] Over the preceding years the operation called Movements Analysis, which had been invented by James Bennett in Canada and imported and improved by MI5, had proved that more than 300 of the so-called diplomats, trade officials, cultural delegates and journalists sent to London by Moscow were active professional intelligence agents of the K.G.B. and G.R.U. This had been brought to the attention of the previous Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, by MI5’s Director-General Furnival Jones, but no action had been taken. The Labour leaders were loath to take any steps which would disturb Anglo-Soviet relations and were supported by some Foreign Office officials and, to some extent, by MI6, which feared reprisals against the much smaller number of its agents making use of diplomatic immunity in Moscow.
Heath and Douglas-Home also wanted to avoid any public disturbance of Anglo-Soviet relations so the Soviet Foreign Secretary, Andrei Gromyko, was approached by Douglas-Home on a number of occasions and asked to take some action which would avoid damaging publicity.[2] Possibly Gromyko tried to secure some amelioration of the situation but nothing was done, his influence being far less than that of the K.G.B. chief, Yuri Andropov.
In the spring of 1970 MI5 recruited a K.G.B. officer who was to become its most important defector since the war. His name was Oleg Lyalin, a 34-year-old ‘trade delegate’ in the Soviet mission in Highgate and really a member of the K.G.B. assassination and subversion branch formerly known as Smersh.[3] A ban had been imposed on the use of sex by MI5 to recruit possible defectors but in Lyalin’s case it had been ignored, without reference to the Home Office, as his potential was so great. MI5 had been watching Lyalin’s weaknesses and was in touch with his Soviet secretary, Irina Teplyakova, with whom he was having an affair, their respective spouses being in the U.S.S.R. Under her influence Lyalin had been recruited as that most important of all spies – an agent in place inside the adversary’s intelligence service. He had been due to return to the Soviet Union and said that he was prepared to continue to serve MI5 there provided arrangements were made for the defection of himself and Irina, should he believe he had fallen under suspicion.
For six months he supplied most valuable information about K.G.B. operations in Britain to his MI5 case officer. He was able to confirm many of the names of the agents which had been deduced from Movements Analysis. It was his knowledge of what some of them were doing which spurred Douglas-Home and Heath into action. He confirmed the existence of subversion units in Britain tasked to commit sabotage in the event of a surprise attack by the Soviet Union. This included flooding the London Underground, blowing up the missile early-warning station at Fylingdales, North Yorkshire, V-bombers on quick-reaction pads and other military targets.[4] Then in the early hours of 31 August, Lyalin was picked up drunkenly driving his car. After being kept in a cell, following his refusal to undergo an alcohol test, he induced the police to alert MI5 and he and his girlfriend were taken to safety.[5] His usefulness as an agent in place therefore ended since he would be recalled to Moscow and probably dismissed from K.G.B. service. There was nothing, therefore, standing in the way of a public expulsion of the most dangerous of the agents on MI5’s list and, as the Russians had not responded to Douglas-Home’s warning, the Soviet Ambassador was called to see him at the Foreign Office. He was told that ninety Russians were to be declared persona non grata and that a further fifteen, who were out of Britain, mainly on leave in the Soviet Union, would not be permitted to return. In addition, the Kremlin would not be allowed to replace those being expelled.[6]
Furnival Jones had supplied the Foreign Secretary with details of the illegal activities of all 105, so that if the Ambassador questioned the expulsion of any of them reasons could immediately be supplied. The Ambassador was warned that if there were reprisals in Moscow Douglas-Home had a list of more Soviet agents who could be expelled. MI5 had provided him with more than 200 who could form a ‘second strike’. Staggered by the unprecedented British action, the Kremlin’s reprisals were minimal.
Lyalin was unable to name British traitors who had been recruited to the subversion units as he did not know them. Nor was he able to give any lead to the G.R.U. network which he knew to exist.[7] His leads led to the arrest of three of his agents, whose names he did know – two Greek Cypriots, sent to England by the K.G.B. and working under the cover of being tailors, and a civil servant, of Malayan origin, who was a clerk in the Greater London Council’s motor licensing department. The clerk had access to the numbers of the surveillance vehicles used by MI5 and Special Branch. This had enabled the K.G.B. to detect counter-espionage operations.
Lyalin also told MI5 that one of Harold Wilson’s personal friends, Lord Kagan, was on close terms with a senior K.G.B. officer, Richardas Vaygauskas, who was among those expelled. MI5 put Kagan under surveillance and witnessed meetings with Vaygauskas. In an interview with me Kagan confirmed his friendship with Vaygauskas but claimed that it was purely social. He agreed that Vaygauskas probably cultivated his friendship in the hope that he might use him as a source of information from Wilson but claims that the Russian never reached the point of suggesting that he should question the Prime Minister.[8]
Lyalin was not brought to trial for drunken driving because of the assassination danger. He underwent plastic surgery to change his features, insisted on earning his living – he spoke excellent English – and is believed to have settled to life in Britain.[9]
The fact that Lyalin served as an agent in place for six months and then successfully defected is excellent evidence that there was no spy at high level in MI5 in 1970–1. Several former MI5 officers are convinced that had he been contacted during Hollis’s time he would never have survived.
The success with Lyalin was to lead to the long-overdue establishment of a properly organized defector programme to encourage Iron Curtain defections, especially of intelligence officers, something which Gouzenko had been advocating for more than twenty years.[10] Hollis’s reluctance to encourage defectors as an active part of the counter-espionage effort was understandable if he was a spy. Defectors who might know about his activities or those of any other Soviet agent could hardly have been less welcome.
The Potential Value of Oversight
The mass expulsion was the most salutary action ever taken by the British Government – or possibly any other – against Soviet Intelligence. It reduced the number of spies and subversives at a stroke to a level with which MI5 could cope more readily. It showed the world the extent of the Soviet treachery at a time when the Kremlin was preaching detente. The size of the problem also publicized the extent to which it had been allowed to grow under both Labour and Tory administrations. The agents who were expelled, and many before them, had inflicted severe damage, much of which might have been prevented had their numbers been kept at a more reasonable level. The Heath Government was also tough enough to make it clear to the Kremlin that any more Russians expelled for spying could not be replaced, and this has enabled the total to be reduced still further, for the K.G.B. and G.R.U. have not lessened their total effort.[11]
An oversight body might have thought it prudent to find out exactly why the Russians had been allowed to play the ‘numbers game’ so effectively for so long, if only to ensure that it could not be repeated. They might have found that MI5 had made insufficient complaint during Hollis’s time because he was so averse to causing embarrassment to the Foreign Secretary. A weak Director-General could always be a danger in such respects and a properly constituted oversight body might prevent damaging delays. An oversight body could also satisfy itself as to the extent to which warnings from MI5 had been ignored or side-tracked by Whitehall officials. If properly constituted, its own on-going records would assist it in such inquiries.
chapter fifty
Operation Gridiron
The collapse of so many Canadian operations against Soviet bloc espionage and subversion, coupled with the MI5 investigations of Mitchell and Hollis, induced the R.C.M.P officers involved with the Featherbed inquiries into Soviet subversion to fear that there might be a traitor within the R.C.M.P.’s own ranks. A special review of the files showed that one man in particular had been involved with the cases which had ‘died’ – James Bennett, the Welshman and former G.C.H.Q. officer who had been responsible for R.C.M.P. operations against both the K.G.B. and G.R.U. The top management agreed to a thorough investigation into Bennett but, first, he had to be moved out of counter-espionage work in a way which would not arouse his suspicions. This was achieved by promoting him to head the biggest section of the whole security organization.[1]
The search for the R.C.M.P. ‘mole’, with Bennett as prime suspect, was called Operation Gridiron and was to continue until 1972. The Featherbed team found that because of Bennett’s previous employment with G.C.H.Q. there had been no real check on his background when he joined the R.C.M.P. When the British authorities were asked to supply details there was nothing on file either in G.C.H.Q. or MI5. To induce Bennett to give his own account of his early life, and possible communist connections, the R.C.M.P management decided to introduce positive vetting for everyone in the security service.[2] Just as Hollis had avoided the introduction of positive vetting into MI5 while insisting that other secret departments must be subject to it, so the R.C.M.P. chiefs had resisted it for themselves and their staff, in spite of recommendations by Bennett himself that it was essential.
Bennett was among the first to be positively vetted. He was forthcoming about his early life and working-class origins in Wales. Nothing incriminating was found. He identified a communist whom he had met while in the army in Egypt and it was on record that when he had learned that this man had become a major involved with secret signals regiments he had reported him to MI5.
Meanwhile, at the R.C.M.P.’s request, MI5 had undertaken a backtrack into Bennett’s early life and had reported that it could find no evidence of attraction to communism or any other factor which might have induced him to become a Soviet agent. His work at G.C.H.Q. had given no grounds for suspicion. Section K7 of MI5 had examined the possibility that Bennett might have been responsible for some of the British case-deaths but found that he had never been told anything about them while they were active. The flow of information about current counter-espionage cases had all been one way – from Ottawa to London. MI5 had always considered that the R.C.M.P. had not needed to know about British cases which had no Canadian interest but was always keen to know about Canadian cases in the hope that it might be able to assist.
The suspicion against Bennett caused concern in MI5 because he had been told about a new development in the analysis of foreign radio traffic and an investigation suggested that information about it might have leaked to Moscow, though, if so, it could have happened from MI5. If there had been a leak it had occurred while Hollis was Director-General.
Clearly Bennett, through his knowledge, could have betrayed some or all of the Canadian cases that collapsed but surveillance, the tapping of his telephone, the bugging of his house and the installation of a T.V. camera in his office produced no evidence of any treacherous activity. As there were no other major suspects the management would almost certainly have insisted on his being interrogated to round off the inquiry, but a contrived event made this imperative. As what is known in the jargon as a ‘litmus test’, Bennett had been told that the counter-espionage branch was arranging to meet a new Soviet defector in Montreal and had been shown a fake document to that effect. The area where the meeting was supposed to take place was covered by R.C.M.P. watchers on the look-out for any K.G.B. officer who might pass through in the hope of seeing the defector, who did not really exist. In the event, an official from the Soviet Consulate did pass through the area, suggesting that the Russians had been given information which could only have come from Bennett.
