Spycatcher (49 page)
The first point in his life which aroused our interest was his decision, in 1945, to enroll for a crash course in the Russian language at the Joint Services Language School at Cambridge, which both our own operations and Golitsin had told us was a recruiting ground for the KGB (but there was not the slightest evidence from our sources that Hanley had been involved with them). The Russian language course was the first time Hanley came into contact with Russians, and from then on his career seemed an uncanny fit for Goleniewski's allegations. After service in Budapest, where he served on the Joint Allied Intelligence Committee with the KGB officer named by Goleniewski as having made the recruitment of the middling-grade agent, Hanley returned to London. He became the War Office liaison officer with the Soviet military attache, and dealt mainly with returnee problems. During this time he began to have dealings with MI5, and when he was demobilized in the late 1940s, he applied for a full-time post, and joined as a research officer on Russian Affairs. His first task was the compilation of the index of agents of the Rote Kapelle which decades later I was to find so invaluable in my D3 work.
Within two years Hanley shifted to the Polish desk (D2) and his career took off. First he went to Hong Kong for two and a half years and then returned to E Branch (Colonial Affairs) before becoming head of D2, and in 1960 a member of the Board as Director C. It was a career with ever-increasing momentum, yet his background presented a possible espionage profile. Here was a man from a troubled childhood, with deep-seated feelings of insecurity, who comes into continuous contact with Russians at a delicate time of his life, when he is beginning for the first time to emerge from his shell. Perhaps, like Blake, he had a chip on his shoulder, and the Russians had played skillfully on his concealed feelings of resentment until they fanned into treachery.
The problem was that neither Patrick nor I believed it, despite the fact that on paper the surface fit with Goleniewski's allegation was so precise. It was the exact reverse of the case with Hollis, where we were both instinctively convinced of the case against him, even though on paper the connections looked far weaker.
As far as Hanley was concerned, too much weighed against the "chip on the shoulder" theory. From the start of his career in MI5, Hanley had been marked out as a flyer. He was valued by both his peers and his superiors, despite his often hectoring manner. He had married into the office, and enjoyed a close and devoted relationship with his wife. And lastly there was the evidence of the psychiatrist.
Espionage is a crime almost devoid of evidence, which is why intuition, for better or worse, always has a large part to play in its successful detection. All a counterespionage officer usually has when he confronts his suspect is a background, a trail, a set of coincidences which are open to a variety of interpretations but which, as Dick White used to say, lead to the epiphany - that moment when all the facts add up to only one conclusion. But with Hanley, the trail led one way, and intuition another. The only possible way to resolve the case was through interrogation, and when we submitted the papers to F.J. he agreed.
Mention interrogations, and most people imagine grueling sessions under blazing lamps: men in shirt-sleeves wearing down a sleep-deprived suspect with aggressive questioning until finally he collapses sobbing on the floor, admitting the truth. The reality is much more prosaic.
MI5 interrogations are orderly affairs, usually conducted between 9:30
A.M. and 5 P. M. with a break for lunch.
So why do so many spies confess? The secret is to achieve superiority over the man sitting across the table. This was the secret of Skardon's success as an interrogator. Although we mocked him years later for his willingness to clear suspects we subsequently learned to have been spies, he was genuinely feared by Blunt and other members of the Ring of Five. But his superiority in the interrogation room was not based on intellect or physique. Mainly, of course, it was the devastating briefs provided for him by Arthur Martin and Evelyn McBarnet which convinced men like Fuchs that Skardon knew them better than they knew themselves. It was not only the briefs that helped Skardon but also the skill of the eavesdroppers. In the Fuchs case, Skardon was convinced that he was innocent until they pointed out where Fuchs had lied. This information enabled Skardon to break him. But Skardon himself played an important role too. He epitomized, in his manner, the world of sensible English middle-class values - tea in the afternoon and lace curtains - so much so that it was impossible for those he interrogated to ever see him as the embodiment of capitalist iniquity, and thus they were thrown off balance from the very start.
But none of this stood a chance against Hanley if he was a spy. He was an insider. He knew all the tricks too well. Like Philby, he would see the punches coming. The only way to proceed with a professional is to put him through an extremely thorough vet. A complete curriculum vitae of the suspect's life and career is drawn up, and he is taken through it in interrogation. If there are any deviations, omissions, or inaccuracies, these are then probed. If the suspect is guilty the pressure can often lead to further inaccuracies, until his secret life begins to unravel.
The MI5 technique is an imperfect system. But like trial by jury, it is the best yet devised. It has the virtue of enabling a man, if he has nothing to hide, and has the resilience to bear the strain, to clear himself. But its disadvantage is that hidden blemishes on an innocent man's record can often come to the surface during intensive investigation and render continued service impossible. It is a little like medieval justice: sometimes innocence can be proved only at the cost of a career.
F.J. elected to conduct Hanley's interrogation himself. He knew it would be a difficult encounter and that in the end Hanley's fate would rest in his own hands, and he felt it unfair to entrust the task to any other officer. But he ensured that Patrick and I monitored the entire interrogation from the Dl operations room in Leconfield House.
Hanley was summoned into F.J.'s office one morning, and informed that an allegation had been made, and that he was required to submit himself immediately for interrogation. The interrogation took place in the Director-General's office, with an overt microphone on the table. It was recorded in the room where Patrick and I were monitoring the interrogation. Throughout the first day F.J. took Hanley through his life. Hanley was scrupulously honest, sometimes painfully so. He ducked no questions, hid no details of his life or his inner feelings. On the second day he was given the details of Goleniewski's allegation. He was not shaken in any way. He agreed that he was a perfect fit, but calmly stated that he was not a spy, had never been, and had never at any stage been approached by a Russian or anyone else, although at least once a week in Budapest he had met the Russian officer who was alleged to have made the approach.
Hanley's interrogation proved that while secret service is a profession of deceit and intrigue, many of its practitioners are men of exceptional character. Here was a proud man, who cherished his achievements, and those that he felt might be his to come. One morning he is invited to undergo a trial by ordeal and is stripped apart, year by year, until his soul is bare. All the while he knows that faceless colleagues have dogged his every step, listening at home, listening at the office, listening now. The strain must have been more than most men could bear. No one listening could doubt for one moment that this was an honest man. Hanley was tough, and he showed the system could work.
He walked through the fire and emerged unscathed.
That night F.J., Patrick Stewart, and I went to my club, the Oxford and Cambridge, to discuss the interrogation. F.J. settled down into a corner with a large Scotch. His eyes were pinched, as they always were when he was stressed.
"Are you satisfied?" he asked dully. "He's in the clear," I agreed.
Patrick nodded silently.
"You'll inform FLUENCY, of course...?" said F. J..
At that moment Hanley himself walked in unexpectedly. He and I shared the same club, and occasionally ran into each other, but I never expected he would come there so soon after his ordeal. We were in a quiet corner, and he walked past without noticing us, dragging his feet slightly, as if in shock. His normally florid face was white as a sheet.
After the HARRIET investigation was closed down, F.J. asked me to visit the CIA and inform them that MI5 considered Hanley cleared of the Goleniewski allegations. It was a job of enormous sensitivity. The CIA were already up in arms over the Mitchell and Hollis cases, and were themselves well aware of Goleniewski's allegations, and the fact that Hanley was a near-perfect fit. It was essential for the preservation of the alliance that they be left in no doubt about the veracity of our conclusion.
F.J. did not get on with Americans particularly well, and preferred to leave dealings to Michael McCaul and me. Partly it was antipathy toward Angleton, and partly it was residual upper-middle-class anti-Americanism. Dick White had something of the same prejudice. Neither was a wealthy man, while Helms and Angleton rarely hid the fact that they were paid handsomely for similar duties.
Both men had reason to distrust the Americans deep down. F.J. never forgave Helms and Angleton for the Gray and Coyne affair, while Dick had clashed repeatedly with the American military hierarchy when he controlled Counterintelligence in Europe at the end of the war, and was never forgiven. In 1953, when Sillitoe retired, the Americans stupidly tried to block his appointment as Director-General.
There was, in the end, a fundamental difference in approach. Both F.J. and Dick saw themselves as servants of the Crown, and their services as part of the orderly, timeless configuration of Whitehall. They were insiders, whereas Helms, Angleton, and Hoover were all outsiders. There was a streak of ruthlessness and lawlessness about the American intelligence community which disturbed many in the senior echelons of British Intelligence. They feared a future calamity, and wanted to keep their distance, so inevitably the weight of liaison often fell on the shoulders of officers like me.
I traveled to Washington in 1968 to brief Angleton on the results of the HARRIET case. We had a businesslike meeting. I outlined the course of the investigation, and told him we were unanimously of the view that Hanley was in the clear. Angleton then took me to see Dick Helms and explained to him what my mission was. Helms said that he did not wish to hear anything more, if I said that Hanley was in the clear, he unconditionally accepted my word. But the clearance of Hanley solved very little.
After we left Helms, Angleton said that he wanted to discuss with me the question of Goleniewski's being a plant. The HARRIET fit was so perfect that it did not need a suspicious man to believe the KGB had deliberately planted the allegation to discredit him. Angleton and Helms already suspected that Goleniewski had fallen back under Russian control shortly before he defected. Repeated analysis of the intelligence he provided showed a distinct change in its character from Polish to Russian matters, as if the Russians were deliberately feeding out barium meals of their own intelligence in order to isolate the leak. This analysis was shared by MI5, and was the main reason why Goleniewski's middling-grade agent story was ignored for such a long time. The clearing of HARRIET raised a major question mark over the validity of the middling-grade agent, and the validity of Goleniewski's information, particularly after he defected. The middling-grade agent story did not appear until November 1963. Goleniewski defected in January 1961. Now for the KGB to concoct the story in the detail they did, they would need access to Hanley's record of service. With his position, the only person who could acquire this would be Roger Hollis.
But if Goleniewski had been turned, or was the unwitting vehicle for disinformation, what were the implications for the other assets MI6 and the CIA held in Poland, which since the war had been the West's most consistently fruitful sphere of Eastern Bloc operations? I did some preliminary work on this subject during the HARRIET investigation. I found, to my horror, that for a long period all agents run by MI6 were met at a flat rented by a secretary in the Warsaw MI6 station. Over ninety meetings had taken place there. I speculated that perhaps the reason why the UB and the KGB apparently failed to detect this astonishing series of meetings was that they were planting false agents on us. MI6 hackles were raised again, as they had been over the Penkovsky affair.
The belief that defectors were being sent to deceive Western counterintelligence during the sudden flood of arrivals in the early 1960s obsessed all of us. Golitsin's central contention was that the KGB had embarked on a systematic disinformation campaign, and that false defectors would be sent to the West to discredit him. Almost immediately Yuri Nossenko arrived on the CIA's doorstep, appearing to deflect many of the leads Golitsin gave about Soviet penetration of American and British Intelligence.
Nossenko threw the CIA into turmoil. He told them he had seen the file belonging to Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President Kennedy. He claimed the KGB had no involvement in the assassination, and had made no contact with Oswald in Russia, despite the fact that he had worked on a Top Secret U2 surveillance base shortly before defecting. To many officers in the CIA, Nossenko's story was too pat, especially when it was found that he had lied about his rank and status in the KGB. But why had he been sent? The CIA set about trying to break Nossenko using methods of imprisonment and physical pressure which would never have been tolerated in MI5. But even by 1967 they were no nearer to solving the riddle.
Suspicions were also growing about the FBI sources Top Hat and Fedora, who were passing information while still in place, but refusing to disclose their provenance. They provided bona fides for Nossenko, as if to assure the Americans that he was genuine, even to the extent of supporting Nossenko's claim to a false rank. But if Top Hat and Fedora were phony, what of the leads they gave to penetrations of British security?