Too Secret Too Long, page 7
I have established, with difficulty but beyond question in view of the sources, that Hollis was also responsible for the investigation of Comintern and other pro-Soviet activities in the United Kingdom. Further, with B Division’s counter-espionage activities being concentrated against the Germans and their allies, Hollis’s area of responsibility also included the activities of Soviet spies. This has been confirmed to me by former MI5 officers. When the Radio Security Service intercepted messages which appeared to originate with illegal Soviet agents operating in Britain, they passed them to Hollis.[1] There are also confirmatory statements by Philby and Blunt. In his book, My Silent War, Philby, referring to the time when he was head of Soviet counter-espionage in MI6, states: ‘My opposite number in MI5 was Roger Hollis, the head of its section investigating Soviet and Communist affairs.’ Blunt, in his statement to The Times after his public exposure, said in answer to the question ‘Was MI5 concerned about Soviet activity in Britain?’ that ‘…there was a section technically looking after Soviet activities and the Communist Party…’[2]
To appreciate what was required of Hollis and his section in these capacities it is necessary to examine the true nature and strength of the Soviet and communist threats, which were virtually the same because of the total subservience to Moscow of the British communists and of members of foreign communist parties sheltering in Britain.
In 1938, when Hollis entered MI5, the United Kingdom was the main target of Soviet Intelligence operations in Western Europe and by 1939 there was an effective illegal radio-transmission network operating there.[3] Germany became the main target once the Soviet Union had been attacked, but by then Britain had been infiltrated by many German and Czech communists, some of whom were professional Soviet Intelligence agents who had entered the country as political or Jewish refugees, or both. Among the last, one of the most dangerous and most successful was Dr Juergen Kuczynski, Sonia’s elder brother, some of whose nefarious espionage activities have been admitted in his memoirs and in those of his sister.
Kuczynski, who was born in Germany in 1904, had joined the German Communist Party (K.P.D.) in 1930 and visited the U.S.S.R. in the same year. He was soon recruited to the G.R.U., through friendship with a Soviet G.R.U. officer in Berlin called Bessonov, and in the second half of 1936 he was posted to Britain. His cynical cover was that of being anti-fascist on two counts, being Jewish and a communist, but his purpose, in Moscow’s eyes, was to further the Soviet cause rather than oppose Nazism. He was to do that by feeding back information in the economic field, which was his academic speciality, by assisting other spies and agents in the military and scientific fields, and by organizing communist German exiles so that, after the Nazis had been overthrown, they would return to Germany and help to convert it into a communist satellite of the Soviet Union.[4]
About 50,000 German refugees found asylum in Britain before the Second World War and the great majority consisted of Jews escaping racial persecution. Some 700 were political refugees, and of these about 400 were members of the K.P.D., while about 160 belonged to the German Social Democratic Party, which was also on Hitler’s ‘hit list’.[5] Juergen Kuczynski stood at the summit of the communist group and while functioning in secret as a G.R.U. agent, as did several of his comrades, he was overtly involved in most of the K.P.D’s activities. In London he was among the founders of the Free German League of Culture, a centre for German refugees with the prime purpose of securing new adherents to the pro-Soviet communist cause. Its club house was in Upper Park Road, N.W.3, near the home of Juergen and Sonia’s parents, and Juergen’s wife, Marguerite, also an ardent communist, was the librarian there. Until the fall of France, Kuczynski frequently visited Paris for conspiratorial discussions with Gerhardt Eisler, the notorious agent who had been in Shanghai, and others based there. In August 1939 he was prominent at a conference of Communist Party delegates in London and through organizations like the Left Book Club he fostered relations with the British Communist Party.[6]
Most of the German communists found work in Britain, but Kuczynski, like others among the political leaders, were helped financially by the British Communist Party and by Quaker organizations.[7] This left him free to organize communist groups in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. He was friendly with British communists such as Hollis’s university friend Claud Cockburn who, Kuczynski recalls, ‘knew thousands of diplomatic secrets’. After the German occupation of France had forced the Comintern agents out of Paris, Kuczynski lived in the same small London hotel as Gerhardt Eisler and his wife, better known as Hilda Massing, a Soviet agent in her own right. In recalling these clandestine associations Kuczynski underlines the importance of the ‘rules of conspiracy’. He certainly needed to observe them for, as another Soviet spy posing as a German refugee was later to confess, Kuczynski was regarded as the head of the underground section of the K.P.D. in England.[8]
I stress the activities of Juergen Kuczynski at this point to show that it is extremely unlikely that Hollis, being responsible for overseeing communist and Comintern agents, could have been unaware of them. There is documentary evidence to show that Hollis’s section was aware of the subversive activities of several of Kuczynski’s equally dangerous German comrades, like Hans Kahle, Wilhelm Koenen, Heinz Schmidt, Eva Kolmer and Karl Kreibich, who were working for Moscow against British interests long before the Soviet Union entered the war. Their names are in a ‘List of Foreign Communists Considered Dangerous’ supplied by MI5 to the U.S. Embassy in London in December 1940.[9] Some were interned in the general round-up of aliens, but when they were released little or nothing was done to curb their activities.
The history of internments provides further evidence that Hollis should have been aware of Kuczynski and his anti-British activities. As spies might have been infiltrated among people seeking asylum, the Home Office decided that the credentials of all enemy aliens should be examined with a view to interning those who might be dangerous. With assistance from the records of MI5 and Special Branch, the German-speaking refugees were grouped into three categories. Most, who were non-political and considered friendly to the British cause, were in Category C, while some 7,000 who were believed to be anti-fascist but politically active were in Category B. A hard core of about 600 were graded Category A because they were regarded as security risks dangerous to the state. They included some suspected of being Nazis but also many communists likely to put the interests of the Soviet Union before those of Britain.[10]
Kuczynski was among those listed as dangerous and, after appearing before a tribunal on 20 January 1940, he was interned in a camp in Devon. He must have been regarded as a particular risk because this was well before the mass internment of Germans consequent on the fall of France in May 1940 and the expected invasion of Britain. He would normally have been moved to a safer camp in Canada or Australia, as some of his comrades were, but persistent representations by the pro-communist lawyer D.N. Pritt and other agitators secured his release after three months and he immediately returned to active propaganda and espionage,[11] becoming President of the German-Soviet Friendship Society. Indeed, he records that he was active inside the camp in Devon, recruiting to the communist cause, and delayed his release for an extra three days so that he could hand over his pro-Soviet work to another internee. He was never re-interned, in spite of his constant subversion. If MI5 was consulted concerning his release, the record of its reaction could be informative, especially if its advice derived from Hollis’s section.
After his release Kuczynski was quickly in touch with the Soviet Ambassador. He became friendly with Anatoli Gromov, otherwise known as ‘Henry’, a Soviet Intelligence officer posing as a diplomat in the Soviet Embassy.[12] Gromov, who visited Kuczynski’s home, was actively controlling Maclean, Philby, Burgess and the rest of the Cambridge Ring of spies and should have been under some degree of surveillance by MI5, though there is no evidence that he ever was. Kuczynski was, in fact, an active G.R.U. agent throughout the war yet never seems to have been subject to any interference by MI5 or anybody else once he had been freed from internment.
Dr Anthony Glees, who has examined most, and possibly all, of the MI5 documents concerning wartime German exiles which have so far been made available, has noted that the Kuczynskis, who were probably the most important among the communists, are never mentioned.[13] This omission suggests the possibility of a protective hand inside MI5. The origin of any references to such communists would have been Hollis’s Section F and, probably, Hollis himself.
Kuczynski and the rest of the German communists who were Soviet agents had almost all been recruited into the G.R.U. Simultaneously there was an active K.G.B. network, the best known section of which was the Cambridge Ring. Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt and the rest had all been ostensibly recruited into the Comintern and then been taken over by Soviet Intelligence before Hollis entered MI5 but, as they continued to serve the Soviet interest throughout the war, they clearly fell into his sphere of responsibility. Again, there is no evidence that anything was ever done by Hollis or anyone else in the secret services to interfere with their activities or cause them the slightest concern.
Admittedly, Hollis was no less perceptive than anyone else in the secret services in his failure to suspect or detect the treachery of the Cambridge Ring. So, perhaps, in fairness, it should be asked if the attitude to communists in general, before the Soviet Union was unexpectedly forced into the war in 1941, was such as to make it reasonable that he should have failed to take notice even of the overt activities of people like Kuczynski.
I was myself a student in the 1930s at London University where communist agitators and propagandists were probably more active than at Cambridge, and where pro-communist rallies and demonstrations were everyday events. Later, in Liverpool, I witnessed the communist propaganda on behalf of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and recall the differing accounts of Stalin’s purges and show-trials of his former comrades in the general Press and the pro-Soviet Daily Worker. I find it impossible to believe than a person like Hollis, who had been perceptive enough to make a living as a journalist, could have failed to appreciate that Stalin’s Soviet Union was a dictatorship based on terror and every bit as dangerous to democratic freedom as Hitler’s Germany. Only those totally committed to the patently absurd Stalinist ideology could continue to blind themselves to the truth. It is of course, possible that Hollis was one of these, as was his M15 colleague Blunt, and his counterpart in MI6, Philby. In addition to his background experience of communism in action in China, Hollis had the professional appreciations of the true situation in the Soviet Union fed into MI5 from the Foreign Office, MI6 and elsewhere. So, unless he was completely blinkered by ideological adherence, he must have known the full nature of the Soviet threat to establish communist régimes wherever possible, and he must have appreciated that the communists in Britain, both home-grown and imported, as well as the professional Soviet spies who were, inevitably, active, were working to that end. In Hollis’s case in particular, the excuse of ignorance of the extent and nature of the threat, which he was supposed to counter, cannot be pleaded.
There remains the question of whether, being aware of the threat, he ever had the resources at his command to counter it in any effective way. Hollis’s section was small, as was the whole of MI5 when he joined it, and the manpower under his command when he became head of Section F was nowhere near large enough to deal with the threat adequately. There was a sub-section responsible for running the agents intruded into the Communist Party, and there were field officers like the MI5 agent-runner Maxwell Knight, who were attached to other sections and fed in information from their agents and sub-agents.[14] Hollis also had regular reports from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch which, at that stage and since, did much of the leg-work in maintaining surveillance over subversives and suspects. Like any other section, Hollis’s had access to ancillary departments of MI5, such as the watcher service, which undertakes surveillance, and the technical services, which provide electronic and other forms of non-human surveillance, but as the German threat mounted such access inevitably became more limited. Nevertheless, Hollis’s achievement against the pro-Soviet communist threat was appallingly meagre, even after all allowances are made for his second-priority position. The activities of the pro-Soviet German communist refugees have now been heavily documented in various German bibliographical encyclopaedias and they show that the counter-espionage effort against them was so ineffective as to have been negligible. That the effort against British spies who had been recruited by the Soviet Union was equally negative is beyond question. That stricture will be seen to apply, with even more suspicious force, to Sonia when she became British at a later date.
Is it possible that Hollis and his section were efficient and that some higher authority nullified his efforts through lack of interest or for some other reason? Such an argument applies to Philby’s subordinates in MI6, but Hollis was quickly made acting head of his section and there is no evidence to suggest that anyone at higher level in MI5 was stifling his efforts. They may, of course, have been stifled at the political level, but before the U.S.S.R. was forced into the war in June 1941, Churchill, who was aware of the extent to which the Soviet Union was helping Germany to beat the naval blockade with supplies of oil, grain and other materials, expressed concern at the danger of Soviet subversion in Britain. During Chamberlain’s premiership there was certainly deep suspicion of Soviet motives, even in the normally credulous Foreign Office, as the diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, the chief official there, clearly show.[15] It would be reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the political leaders expected MI5 to make an effective effort against the pro-Soviet threat and that Hollis’s superiors would have been keen to please their political masters.
I cannot believe that before the Nazi-Soviet pact the British Government was turning a blind eye to MI5 evidence about Soviet espionage and subversion simply to avoid offending Stalin in the hope that he might make a non-aggression pact with Britain. Nor can I believe that it did so after the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed in the hope of encouraging Stalin to repudiate it.
Early in September 1939, Cadogan received a secret telegram from Washington which gave the first lead to a Soviet spy who had been operating in Britain for several years and may have provided Hollis with his first experience of an espionage case resulting in a trial.[16] The spy was a Captain John King, a cipher clerk in the Communications Department. He was put under surveillance, arrested, and the following month he was tried in camera because Britain was then at war. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He confessed to having been recruited, while serving in Geneva, by a Dutchman operating as an ‘illegal’ Soviet agent. In his diary, Cadogan reveals that the Foreign Office had been aware of leaks over the past few years but had been unable to trace the culprit. King had been exposed only because a defector from Soviet Intelligence, being interrogated in Washington, had revealed his name. This situation, in which a damaging spy was to be exposed only through chance information provided by a defector or an intercept, was to be repeated again and again throughout Hollis’s twenty-seven years in MI5.
The defector who exposed King and gave leads to other British spies was a Polish Jew who called himself Walter Krivitsky but whose real name was Ghinsburg. He had been recruited to the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army (G.R.U.) in 1924, had been transferred to the K.G.B. in 1934, and had defected in October 1937 believing, correctly, that unless he did so he would be killed in Stalin’s paranoid purge of non-Russians ‘plotting against him’. Though never holding the rank of general, as has been claimed, Krivitsky had been virtually West European Inspector-General for both Soviet espionage agencies and his knowledge was so vast that when he defected in Paris the information he divulged to French security, in return for protection, filled eighty large volumes, which were stored with other documents in a barge on the Seine. The French did not share the information, even with an ally in wartime, and according to French officials the documents were all lost because the bottom of the barge rotted away. It seems more likely, however, in view of the known penetration of the French secret services by Soviet agents, that this was an excuse to cover the deliberate destruction of the records.[17]
In January 1940, after being based in the U.S. and in Canada, Krivitsky was invited by MI5 to visit London under the pseudonym Walter Thomas. In the course of an interrogaion, mainly by Miss Sissmore, spread over three weeks, he revealed that Soviet Intelligence was receiving information from several British sources but claimed that he did not know their names. He described one as a young aristocrat who had been educated at Eton and Oxford, had gone into the Foreign Office in 1936 or 1937 and had then been able to hand over copies of the minutes of the ‘Imperial Council’ to the Soviets. This was identified as the Committee of Imperial Defence. He also mentioned a British journalist who had been sent to Spain to spy for the K.G.B. during the Spanish Civil War, and also to France. He said that a White Russian called von Petrov, who was known to have been working for the British secret service, had really been a Soviet agent of the G.R.U. and had been particularly valuable because he had a wonderful source inside the secret service (MI6) who fed him with information for the Russians.[18]
It is now certain that the journalist was Philby and the secret serviceman spying for von Petrov was Charles Howard Ellis. The identity of the young aristocrat remains in doubt. It almost certainly was not Donald Maclean, though he was already spying then for the Soviet Union in the German section of the Foreign Office. Another defector, the diplomat Alexander Orlov, independently confirmed that complete sets of the minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defence were available to Moscow, but Maclean never saw complete sets.[19] However, Krivitsky may have known about Maclean. According to an American lawyer, a former Ukrainian called Isaac Don Levine who assisted Krivitsky in writing his memoirs, the defector described a young spy in the Foreign Office who had a Scottish name and bohemian habits.[20]
