Spycatcher (47 page)

Sometime later the CIA reported that Rastvorov had given further details of his reasons for believing British Intelligence was penetrated. He said that a friend of his, a Lieutenant Skripkin, had approached the British in the Far East in 1946, and offered to defect. Skripkin made arrangements to return to Moscow, fetch his wife, and then defect on his next visit out of the country. However, back in Moscow, Skripkin was somehow detected by the KGB. He was approached by two KGB officers who pretended to be MI6 officers. He gave himself away, was tried and shot.

When we looked Skripkin up in the Registry we found that he did indeed have a file. It contained copies of two reports from British Naval Intelligence in the Far East dealing with plans for Skripkin's defection, one dated May 1946, and the other July 1946. They had been stapled together and sent from SIFE for MI5's information, arriving in London during the first half of August. The file was dealt with by Roger Hollis, the Assistant Director of F Branch, and a junior officer. Hollis instructed the junior officer to make a file and place it in the Registry, where it lay until Rastvorov told his story in 1954. When the file was retrieved it was automatically attributed to Philby by MI5.

When FLUENCY reexamined the case several new facts came to light. Firstly, when Golitsin defected in 1961, he asked us what we knew about the Skripkin case. He said that he had worked on the case in 1946, when he was a junior officer in the Counterintelligence Branch of the First Chief Directorate. He remembered that the report came to him from London, and definitely not from the Far East, at the end of 1946, when the snow was on the ground in Moscow. Without prompting, Golitsin told the story of how the two KGB men tricked Skripkin by posing as MI6 officers. Golitsin was also asked to describe the two documents he had seen. Golitsin was astonishingly accurate. The first, he said, was an account of Skripkin's sounding out, and an assessment of his worth. The second was a resume of his future plans, including an address in Moscow where he could be contacted. Golitsin also said he was certain the papers had been stapled together at the time the agent had photographed them.

The second new fact FLUENCY had was that Philby, when questioned by Nicholas Elliott in Beirut, was asked if he had betrayed Skripkin. Philby vehemently denied having done so, not having known about the case even when given more details of it. This was most odd, because we assumed it would be in Philby's interest to claim credit for the case. Perhaps Philby was telling the truth on this occasion.

I arranged for a complete search of the entire distribution of both Skripkin reports, to see if it could shed any further light on the case. The results were extremely revealing. The May report went to Naval Intelligence (Hong Kong), SIFE at Singapore, and the Naval Intelligence Department in London. They placed the report in a Naval docket and circulated it within NID, and passed a copy routinely to the Naval Section of R Division at MI6. They, in turn, passed it to Section V, who filed it. Extensive searches in the MI6 records showed that Philby was never on the distribution list.

The July document followed the same distribution trail, except at SIFE in Singapore. It was at this point that they decided to staple together both reports, and send them routinely to MI5, where they arrived on August 8. This was the first occasion MI5 knew anything about the affair, and it was also the only place where both reports were stapled together, a fact which chimed perfectly with Golitsin's recollection. Whoever betrayed Skripkin must have been inside MI5, not MI6. That ruled out Philby, and Blunt had already left MI5 the previous year.

Once again the finger pointed toward Roger Hollis, the F Branch Assistant Director who handled the Skripkin file.

Once the shape of the FLUENCY allegations became clear I began the most dangerous task I ever undertook. Without authorization I began to make my own "freelance" inquiries into Hollis' background. I had to be cautious, since I knew that the slightest leak back would inevitably lead to the sack. I traveled down to Oxford, and visited the Bodleian Library. There I discovered in the university records that Hollis, although he went up to Oxford in the 1920s, never took a degree. He left inexplicably after five terms. It seemed an odd thing for so conventional a man to do. I visited Hollis' old college, Worcester, and searched the records there to find out who had lived on the same staircase. In his fourth term Hollis moved to digs in Wellington Square, and I checked through the Oxford Calendars, which list the addresses of every student resident at Oxford, to find those students with whom he shared a house. I even tried the records of the University Golfing Society in the hope that somewhere there would be a clue to the enigma of Hollis' personality.

Working without Hollis' record of service, I was forced to work blind. I knew from talking to Hollis that he had visited China, so I ran a trace through the Passport Office for the dates of his arrivals and departures from Britain. I made discreet inquiries at the Standard Chartered Bank, where Hollis worked before leaving for China, but apart from an old forwarding address at a bank in Peking, they had no records.

I wanted to find some evidence of a secret life, a careless friend, a sign of overt political activity. Every man is defined by his friends, and I began to draw up a picture of those to whom Hollis was close in those vital years in the late 1920s and 1930s. Two men in particular were of interest at Oxford - Claud Cockburn and Maurice Richardson.

Both were left-wing: in Cockburn's case, when I ran a check on his file I noticed that Hollis had retained the file throughout the war, and never declared his friendship on the file as the Service customs demand. Did he, I wondered, have a reason to hide his relationship with Cockburn, a man with extensive Comintern contacts?

Out in China there was a similar pattern. China was a hotbed of political activity in the 1930s, and was an active recruiting ground for the Comintern. Hugh Winterborn told me that an old retired colonel he had known in Japan knew Hollis while in China, having shared a flat with him for a year, and he made an appointment for me to visit him.

Tony Stables was a brusque, old-fashioned military officer, and he remembered Hollis well. He said he never knew his political opinions, but always assumed they were left-wing because he mixed with people like Agnes Smedley, a left-wing journalist and Comintern talent spotter, as well as another man called Arthur Ewert, whom Stables described as an international socialist.

The other person who was visited (by Arthur Martin) was Jane Sissmore. Jane Sissmore was responsible for bringing Hollis into MI5 before the war. She eventually transferred from MI5 to MI6, married an MI6 officer, and became Jane Archer. She was a formidable, intellectual woman who ran the old MI6 Communist Affairs research section. I often used to see her on D3 inquiries. She was always helpful, and told me the inquiries should have been embarked on years before. One afternoon I broached the subject of Mitchell and Hollis, who had both worked closely with her during the war. Jane was a wily old bird, and knew exactly why I was tapping her.

"Could either be a spy, would you say?" I asked her.

"They were both untrustworthy," she told me, "but if I had to choose the more likely candidate I would pick Roger."

In November 1965 Hollis buzzed down to me and asked me to come up to his office. It was unlike him to be so informal. I had never before visited his office without being summoned by his secretary. He greeted me warmly by the door.

'"Come over and sit down," he said, smiling broadly.

He brushed imaginary dust off the sofa, and sat opposite me in the easy chair. That, too, was odd. Hollis usually sat in a straight-backed chair. Hollis was anxious to put the meeting on an informal footing. He made rather clumsy small talk about his imminent retirement.

"Difficult time," he said, "the pension's not much, and every bit counts..."

"What are your plans?"

"Oh, down to the country I think. I have a little place down there. Get right away from it all. A bit of golf, a few walks... that kind of thing."

He laughed in a gurgling sort of way.

"Funny to think my picture will be up there in a few weeks' time," he said, looking up at the portraits which stared down at him. They were all such different-looking men: Kell's stiff military bearing; Petrie's detached pose; Sillitoe, the hunch-shouldered policeman; and Dick, with his easy charm and soft charisma.

Hollis turned to face me, hunching forward, with his hands on his knees. He was smiling again, like a Cheshire cat.

"Peter, there was just one thing I wanted to ask you before I go. I wanted to know why you think I'm a spy."

I had to think very fast. If I told him a lie and he knew I had, I was out that day. So I told him the truth.

Hollis made it sound so natural. Ever since he and I discussed Tisler nearly ten years before, we had been building for this confrontation. But now that it was out in the open, lying on the table between us like an inanimate object, words seemed so inadequate in the face of all the secretly nursed suspicions which had gone before.

"It's all based on the old allegations, sir," I told him, "and the way things have been going wrong. You know my views on postwar failure.

It's just a process of elimination. First it was Mitchell, and now it's you."

"Oh yes - but surely you've been looking at new things...?" "Yes, the old allegations, sir."

For an hour I went through the Volkov list, the retranslation, Gouzenko's Elli, the Skripkin report.

"Well, Peter," he said, laughing gently, "you have got the manacles on me, haven't you...?"

I began to interrupt. He held his hands face up to quiet me. "All I can say is that I am not a spy."

"But is there anything definite, sir, anything I can put before the FLUENCY meeting, anything at all...?"

"I can probably dig out the notes of the Gouzenko interrogation..." He sounded unsure. "I don't really recollect Skripkin, to be honest. And Volkov..."

He drummed the edge of his seat with his sharpened pencil, and clicked his teeth.

"I don't think you've got Volkov right. Why should Kim go all the way out to Turkey? He'd check first."

He sighed, as if it was all too long ago.

"It's useful, is it, the FLUENCY thing...?" he asked suddenly. "I think so, yes, sir. I think it's long overdue."

"Yes, I rather thought you would think that... MacDonald isn't so sure

- well, I suppose you know that."

"He receives the reports, sir. I suppose he reads them."

"Oh, yes, I'm sure we all read them," replied Hollis, "They make fascinating reading. All that history. Always good to blow a few cobwebs off the pipes."

He smiled his Cheshire cat smile again.

"Well, thank you for your frankness, Peter," he said, rising from his seat. "I must be getting on. Good to have this chat, though..."

He strode stiffly back to his work. Like two actors we exited to different wings, our roles complete.

I never saw Roger Hollis again. Within a few days the new Director-General, Martin Furnival Jones, was installed in the office. His first decision was to remove the photographs from the wall and place them in his ante-office.

"Don't need an audience for the job," he muttered darkly when I asked why.

F.J. was a man of few words, and he grew into the job. He was a determined man who believed he faced one major problem - the scale of the Soviet assault, in terms of numbers of Russian intelligence officers in London, relative to his own pitiful forces. His tenure as Director-General was marked by his campaign to expand MI5 and reduce Soviet diplomatic personnel. He had some success with the first, and eventually triumphed with the second.

F.J.'s top priority was Russian counterespionage, and once he took over, the whole approach to the problem changed. Whereas before I had to be persistent to get anything approved, with F.J. I could buzz him, go right up to see him, and get a decision there and then. He supported the D3 inquiries unreservedly, and sanctioned all the important interviews without question. He never shrank from making value judgments in cases like Watson and Proctor. If the evidence convinced him, he would act on it. F.J. was a man of few complexities. He was typical English gentleman on the surface, with a streak of toughness a mile wide just underneath. It made him few friends in Whitehall, but it was what the Service needed.

Sadly for me, he appointed Anthony Simkins as his deputy. Simkins was probably the one man in MI5 whom I actively disliked, and the feeling was reciprocated in full measure. I knew I would have trouble as soon as he was appointed. Simkins was a lawyer. He and I had already had a major argument some years before, when he was Director-General of C Branch, where he had had some modest success. I was asked to chair an interdepartmental working party consisting of MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, and GCHQ to review technical security at the British Embassy in Moscow, following a fire in the radio room responsible for intercepting local Russian communications. It was clear from the investigation that not only had the Russians started the fire deliberately, but that they had had access to the radio room for some time. The Russians had been reading the radio receiver settings each night, thus they knew what we were intercepting. The Russians who cleaned the Embassy simply unscrewed the bolts (which were well oiled) on the security door lock and walked straight in.

During the course of the inquiry I was also able to solve one other riddle from Volkov's list. Volkov claimed that the Russians could read the Foreign Office ciphers in Moscow. Maclean certainly betrayed every code he had access to in the Foreign Office, but Foreign Office records showed that the Moscow Embassy used onetime pads during and just after the war, so Maclean could not have been responsible.

Remembering my work with "the Thing" in 1951, I was sure the Russians had been using a concealed microphone system, and we eventually found two microphones buried in the plaster above the cipher room. During the war, two clerks routinely handled the Embassy onetime pad communications, one reading over the clear text message for the other to encipher. The Russians simply recorded the clear text straight through their microphones. By the very good work of the Building Research Laboratory we were able to establish that the probable date of the concrete embedding of the microphone was about 1942, when the Embassy was in Kuibyshev.