The Defence of the Realm (93 page)

Ward says that at the height of the Cuban missile crisis . . . Ivanov brought another Russian official, (Vitalij) Loginov [chargé d'affaires] to see Ward: ‘We had practically a Cabinet meeting one night. That was the night when Kennedy made his famous speech on the radio [revealing the existence of the Cuban missile bases].' Ward tried to give Source the impression that whatever had been discussed at his flat with the Russians had been passed on to the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Home.

Ivanov, he said, had come to him because he knew that Ward would be able to put information through to the Prime Minister: ‘You should have seen what happened. Eugene rang me up in a very worried state and later brought round this man Loginov. Certain messages they gave me they wanted to go to the Foreign Office. The Prime Minister was informed. It had quite a bearing on what transpired later.'
⁷¹

Though Ward's boasts were characteristically exaggerated, there was a core of truth to them. On 24 October, at one of the tensest moments of the Missile Crisis, Ward passed a message from Ivanov to Caccia at the Foreign Office ‘that the Soviet Government looked to the United Kingdom as their one hope of conciliation'. Caccia forwarded it to the British ambassador in Moscow, who was ‘sceptical about both the information and the initiative'. On the 27th, Ward accompanied Ivanov to the home of a Foreign Office official, the Earl of Arran, in order ‘to get a message to the British government by indirect means asking them to call a Summit conference in London forthwith'. Lord Arran passed on the message to Number Ten as well as to the Foreign Office.
⁷²
Next day, however, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missile bases from Cuba and the crisis was resolved.

The Security Service was less well informed about Profumo than it was about Ward and Ivanov. It did not discover that Profumo had had a liaison with Keeler until 28 January 1963, almost eighteen months after their first meeting round the Cliveden swimming pool. At that point, though rumours
were circulating round Fleet Street and Westminster, there was still some reason to believe that Keeler would not publicize the affair. On 6 February F4 (counter-subversion agent-running) informed the DG that ‘our newspaper source' had reported that ‘The courtesan, Christine Keeler, has told source that she has no intention of putting her name to anything that would embarrass Mr Profumo.'
⁷³
It was not long before she changed her mind.

By the end of March the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, was so alarmed by the wild rumours flying round Westminster that he summoned Hollis to ask him what MI5 was up to:

He said that . . . the latest story to reach him was that, in 1961, MI5 had been so worried that both Profumo and Ivanov were sleeping with Christine Keeler that they had sent anonymous letters to Valerie Hobson [Profumo's wife] with the hope of breaking up Profumo's liaison. The Home Secretary said he felt he ought to know the facts.

Hollis forbore to ask Brooke how he could possibly have supposed there might be any truth to the preposterous rumour that the Service had been sending anonymous letters to a cabinet minister's wife. Instead, he replied that MI5's sole concern had been to ensure that Profumo should be warned that Ivanov was a Soviet intelligence officer out to steal British defence secrets. Hollis handled a very difficult case and an excitable Home Secretary well. The Service stuck to its remit of not investigating political or sexual scandal unless it threatened national security. Despite sometimes hysterical media claims that the Profumo affair posed such a threat, it never did. As Hollis told Henry Brooke on 28 March 1963: ‘Security Service interest in the whole case was limited to Ivanov and his contacts, and it was no part of our business to concern ourselves with what Ward was up to in connection with the girls with which he was associated.' Brooke agreed.
⁷⁴

When Profumo admitted lying to the Commons about his relations with Keeler and announced his resignation from the government on 5 June, the combination of sexual scandal in high places (real and imagined) and wide-ranging conspiracy theory produced an extraordinary media feeding frenzy, which in retrospect seems further evidence for Macaulay's dictum, ‘We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.' The evidence in support of Macaulay's dictum was not diminished by a
Times
leader, personally written by the editor Sir William Haley, pompously pronouncing: ‘It
is
a moral issue.'

On 3 July 1963 Ward was committed for trial on a charge of living off the earnings from prostitution of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies
in 1961–2. Convinced that only nine months before he had played a crucial role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he now claimed that he was being framed by an Establishment plot. Though the claim has been regularly repeated since, it is not supported by any evidence in MI5 files. On 31 July he was found unconscious after taking an overdose. Though Ward was found guilty in his absence, he died before sentence could be passed.

A distressed Macmillan told his diary after Profumo's resignation, ‘I do not remember ever having been under such a sense of personal strain. Even Suez was “clean” – about war and politics. This was all “dirt” . . .' Lord Hailsham, Leader of the House of Lords, told the Young Conservatives in a reference to some of the assorted sexual scandals which the media associated with the affair: ‘I am not the man without a head, the man in the iron mask, the man who goes about clad only in a Masonic apron, or a visitor to unnamed orgies.'
⁷⁵
Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, who conducted an inquiry into the Profumo affair, which became an instant best-seller on its publication in September, later recalled:

I saw Ministers of the Crown, the Security Service, rumour-mongers and prostitutes. They all came in by back doors and along corridors secretly so that the newspapers should not spot them. Some of the evidence I heard [while preparing the Denning Report] was so disgusting – even to my sophisticated mind – that I sent the lady shorthand writers out, and no note of it was taken.
⁷⁶

Denning's Report vindicated the role of the Security Service. His judgment, though challenged by numerous conspiracy theorists, has stood the test of time: ‘This was an unprecedented situation for which the machinery of government did not cater. It was, in the view of the Security Service, not a case of a security risk, but of moral misbehaviour by a Minister. And we have no machinery to deal with it.'

But there was one important and potentially highly controversial intelligence lead on the Profumo case from a Western double agent in Soviet intelligence (whose name remains classified) of which neither Denning nor the Security Service was aware. On 14 June 1963, nine days after Profumo's resignation, the agent reported overhearing a Soviet intelligence officer say that ‘the Russians had in fact received a lot of useful information from Profumo from Christine Keeler, with whom Ivanov had established contact, and in whose apartment Ivanov had even been able to lay on eavesdropping operations at the appropriate times.' Though the double agent did not realize it, the Soviet intelligence officer's boast was based on deeply improbable speculation rather than reliable intelligence. Ivanov was a GRU officer and it is highly unlikely that detailed reports on his operations would
have been sent to the KGB residency where the double agent was stationed. At the time, however, the boast was taken seriously and the agent's report forwarded to the US Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, to pass on to his brother, the President, who was due to meet Macmillan in July.
⁷⁷

The probability is, however, that Robert Kennedy, who sometimes disregarded Hoover's advice, did not tell the President and that therefore Macmillan did not learn of the double agent's claim. Hoover himself did not inform the Security Service for several years, probably because of his belief in 1963, in the wake of the series of spy scandals over the past year, that ‘the British leak like a sieve.' The SLO in Washington, who was told of the double agent's report in 1966, was rightly relieved that it had not been available in London when Denning was conducting his inquiry:

I imagine that if it had reached us [in 1963], it would have been difficult to do other than to accept that it had emanated from a genuine source who had proved reliable in the past, even though our own material gave us no reason to believe that there had been security breaches as a result of Profumo's infatuation with Keeler, and the latter's involvement with Ivanov in 1962.
⁷⁸

If the contents of the double agent's report had been mentioned by Denning in 1963, the conspiracy theorists would have had a field day.

After the sensational spy cases of the early 1960s, culminating in (for Macmillan) the almost unbearable embarrassment of Profumo, the usually well-balanced Prime Minister began to succumb to conspiracy theory. He summoned Dick White, in whom he continued to place far more confidence than he did in Hollis, and asked him if he was being set up by Soviet intelligence.
⁷⁹
White did not believe so, but to set the Prime Minister's mind at rest, on 17 June a joint MI5–SIS working party was instructed ‘to look into the possibility that the Russian Intelligence Service had a hand in staging the Profumo affair in order to discredit Her Majesty's government'. By the time that it reported in the negative, ill health had forced Macmillan to resign.
⁸⁰

As a result of the spy scandals and the Profumo affair, protective security became a convenient political stick with which the Opposition could beat the government. The establishment of the standing Security Commission in January 1964, initially chaired by Mr (later Lord) Justice Winn, with a remit ‘to advise whether any change in security arrangements is desirable', was intended to remove protective security from the arena of party politics. The disadvantage for C Branch was that it sometimes found its own lead role in protective security challenged by what it tended to regard as the well-intentioned, enthusiastic amateurs on the Security Commission.
⁸¹

A year after the Profumo affair, the Conservative government headed by Macmillan's successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home (who had given up his peerage), was threatened by the prospect of another sexual scandal – this time involving the promiscuously bisexual senior Conservative politician Lord Boothby, who had been MP for East Aberdeenshire for over thirty years before being given a life peerage in 1958. On 19 July 1964 the lead story in the
Sunday Mirror
, published under the banner headline ‘THE PICTURE WE DARE NOT PRINT', referred to an incriminating photograph of a prominent politician in the Lords in the company of the leader of London's biggest protection racket, and claimed that Scotland Yard was investigating a homosexual relationship between the two. Three days later, uninhibited by British libel laws, the German magazine
Stern
identified the two men concerned as Lord Boothby and the gay psychopath Ronnie Kray, who, together with his twin brother Reggie, ran north London's leading criminal gang as well as moving in showbusiness and celebrity circles. Even before
Stern
named Boothby and Ronnie Kray, D4 noted that an ‘unpaid source of ours who is a semi-reformed homosexual' had reported stories going round Fleet Street linking Boothby, the gay Labour MP Tom Driberg and the Kray twins. Director D minuted that ‘the content of the report appears to be of no security interest as Lord Boothby and Mr Driberg do not have access to classified information.' A D Branch Fleet Street source, however, reported that the links between Boothby and the Krays ‘might blow up into another minor Profumo affair'.
⁸²
That was also the fear of some members of the Douglas-Home government, though – with an election less than three months away – they feared that the scandal might prove more than minor. On 22 July, the day
Stern
named Boothby and Ronnie Kray, the DG was summoned to see the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, who told him that he and some of his colleagues felt that the scandal might develop along the lines of the Profumo affair. Hollis acknowledged that the Security Service had heard numerous rumours, some of them about Boothby's homosexuality, but added that, since he had no access to official secrets, his private life was no concern of the Service.
⁸³

Boothby publicly denied that he had any close or homosexual relations with Ronnie Kray and issued a writ for libel against the
Mirror
. On 7 August the
Mirror
made a public apology and paid £40,000 damages as well as Boothby's costs. Thereafter the media were scared off pursuing the story. In reality, Boothby's relations with the Krays, who five years later were sentenced to life imprisonment for murder (with minimum terms of thirty years), were much closer than he admitted.
⁸⁴
Had those relations been made public at the time, the resulting scandal would have been even
more deeply embarrassing for Harold Macmillan than the Profumo affair. What Hollis and Brooke almost certainly knew but did not mention, when they met on 22 July, was that the bisexual Boothby was the long-term lover of Lady Dorothy Macmillan.

10

FLUENCY: Paranoid Tendencies

The most traumatic episodes in the Cold War history of the Security Service – the prolonged investigations as suspected Russian agents first of a DDG, Graham Mitchell, then of a DG, Sir Roger Hollis – had their improbable immediate origins in Kim Philby's heavy drinking. After Philby's interrogation, partial confession and defection in January 1963, his third wife Eleanor revealed that he had become very nervous during the previous summer and had begun drinking even more heavily than usual. The obvious explanation for his anxiety was an entirely rational fear that the recent KGB defector to the CIA, Anatoli Golitsyn (codenamed KAGO), might be able to identify him as a Soviet agent.
¹
Conspiracy theory, however, triumphed over common sense in explaining Philby's anxiety. It was perversely claimed that he must have been warned by someone in the Security Service that he was once again under suspicion and likely to be questioned. Plans for Philby's interrogation were known to five members of the Service, of whom only Hollis and Mitchell had long enough service and good enough access to classified information to fit the profile of a long-term penetration agent.
²
The Service's fear of penetration was strengthened by the continuing failure to resolve the case of the Magnificent Five and to identify ELLI, as well as by the discovery in 1961 that the SIS officer George Blake was a Soviet spy.
³