Too Secret Too Long, page 67
His published will showed that he left £40,000 net, a sum considerable enough in 1974 to warrant a newspaper headline ‘Spy Boss Left a Fortune’.[9] His salary had never been high and his pension was not inflation-proof in those days. He had been required to pay alimony to his first wife, who died in 1980.
The Potential Value of Oversight
While Hanley was more robust in his treatment of the Hollis case, the second K7 report remained in limbo, so that the decision by the previous management appeared to be endorsed, so far as most of those who knew of the case were concerned. An oversight body might well have been curious to discover the truth behind the alleged fabrication of Gouzenko’s evidence, which seemed to have been contrived to undermine his credibility. As with so many important leads in the Hollis affair, Gouzenko’s later evidence would seem to have been filed without really serious follow-up and oversight might have produced some firmer action.
Nevertheless, Sir Michael Hanley was to be instrumental in furthering official doubts about Hollis by action so secret that it was confidently believed that nobody outside a very charmed circle would ever hear of it.
chapter fifty-three
An Ultra-Secret Warning
Following the close co-operation between the security services of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, established mainly through the agency of MI5, with Hollis acting as the main adviser, Commonwealth Security Conferences became customary. They tended to be held at the same time as the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conferences and in the same locations, secret matters of mutual security and counter-intelligence being discussed.[1] In addition, at the end of the 1960s, when fears that British and American security and intelligence establishments had been penetrated by Soviet ‘moles’ were at their height, regular conferences of the ‘White Commonwealth’ security and intelligence agencies and those of the United States were initiated.[2] These Limited Conferences, the existence of which was held secret, were much more specialized both as to the subjects under discussion and as to participants. They derived from the U.K.U.S.A. agreement, which involves Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the interchange of information of mutual interest is so intimate that representatives of all the member countries sit in regularly on certain meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee in Whitehall.[3] Delegates to the Limited Conferences had to be high level and their major purpose was the protection of the agencies’ lifeblood – their secret sources. This was to be achieved through stringently restricted access within the agencies to knowledge about sources, by the prevention of penetration of the agencies by spies, and by the rooting out of any who might be already there. Because the information discussed at the Limited Conferences was so extremely sensitive, the record of their deliberations was seen by very few people, other than those present, and any actions within the agencies were introduced in ways which could be made to appear to have arisen for other, more mundane, reasons. An initiative taken by MI5 in the ultra-secrecy of one of these Limited Conferences code-named CAZAB is of the utmost importance to a true understanding of the Hollis case.
Because of the extreme secrecy of these meetings and the reluctance of the participating countries even to admit that they occur, it has not been possible to establish, officially, the date of the conference, but it was held in Britain between 8 and 10 May 1974. Present were the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, his Director of Security and staff, senior members of MI5 headed by the Director-General Sir Michael Hanley, assisted by Peter Wright, the C.I.A.’s Operational Chief of Counter-Intelligence James Angleton, with several of his staff, the F.B.I.’s head of Domestic Intelligence and head of the Russian Desk, the Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization and staff, the R.C.M.P. Commissioner, the head of the R.C.M.P. security service and officers, and the Director-General of the New Zealand Secret Intelligence Service and officers.
As Wright publicly confirmed on British television on 16 July 1984, Hanley gave the delegates an account of the investigations into Hollis, who had died in the previous year, with no definite conclusions as to his innocence or guilt. His purpose in supplying the information, which had been officially withheld from them in the past but which had leaked to some of them unofficially, was to enable all the agencies represented to consider the consequences to themselves if in fact Hollis had been a long-term Soviet agent. It was made clear that they were being given the information because of Hollis’s past associations with their services and his long access to information which they had supplied to MI5 over the years. It would help them to make assessments of any damage he might have done to them through his knowledge of their organizations and of their cases and then to take any remedial action which they might regard as still being worth while.
Both officially and unofficially the information was restricted to those agencies which might have been affected, N.A.T.O. Intelligence and the N.A.T.O. Security Committee were not told because of the risk of a leakage there.[4] Even the Defence Ministry’s Director of Defence Intelligence was kept in ignorance because it was felt that he did not need to know.[5]
It was a bold step by Hanley to issue the warning and it cannot be claimed that it was done at the behest of any MI5 ‘Gestapo’ or ‘Young Turks’, as the more determined members of the Fluency Committee have been called by supporters of Hollis. It was the second K7 report that had convinced Hanley that the case was unproven and no Fluency Committee members had been involved in its preparation.
As the visiting security and intelligence chiefs were given the information on a strictly inter-service need-to-know basis it was understood that it was not to be released to anyone outside without MI5’s permission. The meeting was recorded and minuted, with copies of the minutes being eventually provided to each representative of the countries attending. As with the minutes of all such highly secret meetings they have been very tightly held ever since. Retired Director-Generals like Sir Martin Furnival Jones were not even told that the meeting had taken place. Nevertheless, the existence of this warning in the minutes has been officially confirmed by a representative of one of the participants, the R.C.M.P.
Following the publication of Their Trade is Treachery there were many questions in Canada, both inside and outside Parliament, concerning damage which Hollis might have inflicted on Canadian interests. As a result, the then Solicitor-General, Mr Robert Kaplan, made a statement to the Press on 26 March 1981 declaring that ‘in the mid-1970s’ the R.C.M.P. security service was warned that Sir Roger Hollis may have been a Soviet agent. He said that security officials had ‘governed themselves accordingly’ after receiving the information that Hollis was suspect, meaning, as he explained, that action was taken to counter any possible damage to security.[6]
When questions about this statement were raised in the Canadian Parliament by Allan Lawrence, a previous Solicitor-General, Kaplan declined to give further information beyond saying that the warning had not come directly from the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau.[7] Trudeau later said that there could have been ‘an official briefing’. In fact Kaplan had been given the information from the R.C.M.P.’s minutes of the meeting in London which I have described.
Mr Kaplan has not been prepared to confirm the precise date of the warning. Under the terms of the original arrangement he would have been required to consult MI5 first and, from correspondence I have had with him, I have reason to think that he did so and that permission was refused. It is my information that the current MI5 management and the British Government are annoyed with him for going so far as to admit that the R.C.M.P. was warned ‘in the mid-1970s’.
These events make nonsense of claims that the inquiry into Hollis was merely a routine affair to clear him off a list of suspects and that there was not ‘a shred of evidence against him’. Hanley and the other senior officers who agreed to the issue of the warning must have believed that considerable doubt still existed. I have been assured by several former MI5 and MI6 officers that unless the doubt had been really serious the matter would not have been raised, particularly when such an effort had been made by Hanley’s predecessor to prevent any outsider from hearing about the suspicions. The efforts to repair damage which might have been inflicted by Hollis that were carried out by Canada and, I believe, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, were expensive and time-consuming. These allies would not have been put to such cost and trouble without good cause. A senior R.C.M.P. source has told me that Hollis was ‘so fully indoctrinated into Canadian operations and had such insight into R.C.M.P. counter-espionage and counter-subversion “philosophy” that it would be unrealistic to assume anything other than total compromise of everything during the relevant years’.
Hanley’s approval of the warning also vitiates the argument that he and succeeding Director-Generals of MI5 must have been satisfied with the clearance of Hollis. I have established that in 1976 Hanley was still discussing with colleagues the probability that Hollis might have been a spy. In 1977 MI5 asked the American Intelligence authorities to review their deciphered Bride (Venona) traffic concerning a wartime Soviet agent in London because of the possibility that it might have been Hollis.
What remedial action did MI5 itself take against the damage that Hollis might have inflicted on British interest? I have been told, authoritatively, that it was quickly decided that if Hollis had been a spy from the moment of his arrival in MI5, then the damage would have been so immense and far-reaching that no assessment of it was possible. To quote a prime counter-intelligence expert who is familiar with the case, ‘with almost unlimited access, he could have compromised not only the national security of the United Kingdom but of all Commonwealth nations. He would have known about the operations and products of the U.S. National Security Agency as well as of G.C.H.Q., and could have had major impact on C.I.A. counter-intelligence and on the F.B.I. British collaboration with European security services would also have to be considered in any damage assessment. The effort to remedy any damage would be prohibitive.’[8]
It remains a matter for conjecture whether MI5’s failure to warn the C.I.A. and F.B.I. much earlier than 1974 constituted a breach of the conditions of the Anglo-American interchange of security and intelligence.
The British warning and its consequences for America’s interests remain indelibly imprinted in the mind of at least one senior C.I.A. officer who has been active in prompting the exposure of the Hollis affair.
The Potential Value of Oversight
It is my belief, and that of my professional advisers, that if prime ministers, from Harold Wilson onwards, had known of the issue of this warning they would have been less inclined to accept the internal MI5 view that Hollis had been cleared of suspicion and that the need to investigate evidence of Soviet penetration since the departure of Blunt and Philby had disappeared. Presumably an oversight body would have been aware of the secret meeting and its broad results, and in that case it would be reasonable to assume that prime ministers would not have been kept in ignorance, as they undoubtedly were. As will be seen, this would have spared Mrs Thatcher, in particular, from making a statement which was quickly shown to be inaccurate by the disclosure which followed from the Canadian Solicitor-General.
MI5’s continuing disinclination to carry out a damage assessment on the assumption that Hollis might have been a spy could have called for comment from an oversight body. As occurred with Philby, all too belatedly, it would have shown that too many of Hollis’s cases had collapsed for the suspicions to be abandoned.
chapter fifty-four
A Secret Verdict of ‘Not Out!’
In spite of MI5’s continuing doubts about Hollis and the warning to Allied security organizations, the odds are that the case would have died of inanition but for the action of one man who felt that it should remain under scrutiny in MI5’s own interests. This was Stephen de Mowbray, the MI6 officer who had been on the Fluency Committee and, like most of his colleagues, believed that the mystery of the recurrent penetrations of MI5 by Soviet Intelligence had to be resolved.
De Mowbray, a man of intellectual standing who had been recommended for recruitment to MI6 by his Oxford tutor, Isaiah Berlin, had been resolute in helping to clear out suspected traitors and proven security risks from MI6. After being seconded to MI5 for surveillance duties in connection with the Mitchell case he had served with enthusiasm on the Fluency Committee. All this had made him unpopular with the friends of those suspects who were removed, so he had been posted to Malta. On his return he discovered what had happened – or what had not happened – concerning the Hollis case. He found that he was not alone in suspecting that the case was being shelved for political convenience. John Day, the K7 officer who had interrogated Hollis and had been unimpressed by the results, agreed with him that the decision to close the case should be challenged. Others like Arthur Martin and Peter Wright, the former Fluency Committee officer, then serving as special consultant to the Director-General, were equally in favour of further action, though perhaps less vocal inside the closed circle of security/intelligence colleagues. While Martin could be accused – wrongly in my opinion – of promoting inquiries into the Hollis affair out of revenge on the man who had, effectively, fired him, no such charge could be laid against de Mowbray.
I have been unable to establish whether de Mowbray had learned about the warning concerning Hollis issued to the Allied security agencies early in May 1974, but shortly after that date he presented himself, a spokesman for the group, at the door of Number 10 Downing Street and asked to see the Prime Minister, then Harold Wilson.[1] Normally such chance callers see nobody of importance but de Mowbray is a tall, distinguished-looking figure and, once he had established his credentials, he was shown to the office of the most important civil servant in Whitehall, the Secretary of the Cabinet, Sir John Hunt, now Lord Hunt of Tanworth. De Mowbray alleged that there had been a dangerous cover-up and that Hollis might have introduced other agents because, had he been a spy, he would have been under Soviet pressure to do so. Hunt made further inquiries and found that de Mowbray’s former colleagues had been astonished at the way he had managed to do his daily work while still devoting so much time to the Hollis issue. Then, after a further discussion with de Mowbray and without committing himself to him, Hunt decided that he would recommend an independent inquiry and quickly secured Wilson’s agreement to it. It was either at this meeting with Hunt, when Wilson first heard of the Hollis case, or a little later when discussing his knowledge of it with the Director-General of MI5, Sir Michael Hanley, that Wilson made the remark which his political secretary at the time, Marcia Williams, later Lady Falkender, recalls: ‘Now I’ve heard everything! I’ve just been told that the head of MI5 himself may have been a double agent.’[2]
De Mowbray had expressed his particular concern about the danger of the established practice whereby each retiring Director-General of MI5 and MI6 attempted to appoint his successor by recommending him to the Prime Minister, and often succeeded.[3] Because of the danger that an outgoing Director-General might have been a foreign agent, he believed that the chain should be broken from time to time by the appointment of somebody from outside the organizations. Wilson, who remembered his effort to break the chain after the retirement of Hollis by bringing in the ex-Chief Constable Sir Eric St Johnston, agreed that the proposal merited serious consideration. He had been greatly unimpressed by Hollis’s performance over the Profumo case in keeping his penultimate predecessor, Macmillan, in ignorance of facts which had helped to bring about his downfall.
It is possible that both Hunt and Wilson feared that if they did nothing de Mowbray might, in desperation, seek the aid of newspaper publicity but I have been assured that he would never have done so.
With the requirement to keep the Hollis case as secret as possible the problem was to find an independent group to carry out the new inquiry, for it would have to have access not only to witnesses from the secret services but to the top secret ‘Drat’ files inside MI5. A suitable body seemed to be to hand – the Security Commission, the standing body set up in 1964 for the precise purpose of making independent inquiries into security cases. Headed by a judge, and with members from the Services and Civil Service with knowledge and experience of security matters, it seemed highly suitable, but there was one overriding problem which ruled out its use. Under its constitution the Security Commission could not be put into action without prior consultation with the leader of the opposition and when its deliberations were complete the leader of the opposition had to be briefed about the findings, to some degree. The reigning Establishment in Downing Street had no intention of allowing any other politician or, indeed, anyone outside a tiny circle to know anything about the Hollis affair.
When the setting up of a Security Commission was first mooted by Macmillan following the Vassall Tribunal, it was intended that there should also be a small standing group of Privy Councillors who would be told the Commission’s findings and could reassure Parliament about them when secrecy forbade their publication. This idea was shelved but during the premiership of Edward Heath efforts had been made to establish such a body – a very limited kind of oversight body – to which extremely sensitive issues could be referred, though the Privy Councillors were not to be serving politicians. In the result, to reduce the security risk, the number of Privy Councillors selected for this task was reduced to one – Lord Trend who, as Sir Burke Trend, had been Hunt’s predecessor as Secretary of the Cabinet. Lord Trend, then sixty and Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, was able to afford the time for the inquiry and began work on it in July 1974. Until asked to undertake it he had not been told anything officially about the case though he may have heard something about it on ‘the old boys’ network’.
