The Defence of the Realm (94 page)

Security Service conspiracy theorists were further encouraged by Golitsyn, whose passionately paranoid tendencies made him an increasing liability to the US and British intelligence communities, which had originally welcomed him with open arms. The Service's leading conspiracy theorist at the time of his defection, Arthur Martin (D1), head since January 1960 of the Soviet counter-espionage section, later acknowledged that it was Golitsyn who had ‘crystallised' his long-standing suspicion that there was a major Soviet mole within the Service. Yet, as Martin also acknowledged, Golitsyn could offer only ‘circumstantial evidence' with ‘no precise information' to back up his theories.
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Ironically, Martin's own career offered
tempting material for the conspiracy theorist. He had originally been recommended to the Security Service in 1946 by Kim Philby, who had met him when he was working for the wartime Radio Security Service.
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Whatever Philby's motives, they cannot have been to advance MI5's interests. Martin was a skilful and persistent counter-espionage investigator who was awarded the CBE in 1963, but he lacked the capacity for balanced judgement and a grasp of the broader context. Director B, John Marriott, had written of him in 1955: ‘In spite of his undeniable critical and analytical gifts and powers of lucid expression on paper, I must confess that I am not convinced that he is not a rather small minded man, and I doubt he will much increase in stature as he grows older.'
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A shrewder judge than Martin noted after questioning Golitsyn in April 1962, four months after his defection to the CIA, that his ‘knowledge ranges over a wide field but nowhere has it any great depth'.
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Even Peter Wright, who transferred to D3 in 1964 and was to succeed Martin as the Service's leading conspiracy theorist, later acknowledged that ‘the vast majority of Golitsyn's material was tantalisingly imprecise. It often appeared true as far as it went, but then faded into ambiguity . . .'
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Golitsyn, however, sought with messianic zeal to try to persuade both the American and British intelligence communities that they were falling victim to a vast KGB deception from which only he could save them. His malign influence on MI5 was increased by his decision in December 1962, after one of his periodic disputes with the CIA, to move to Britain. On the recommendation of Graham Mitchell and a senior SIS officer, Golitsyn and his family were accepted for resettlement and arrangements made to obtain a licence for his revolver and organize quarantine for his Alsatian dog. SLO Washington was one of a number of Service officers who thought Golitsyn overrated, dismissing him as a ‘psychopath believing he is a gift from heaven to the Western World'. Following a leak in Washington and press publicity about his presence in Britain, Golitsyn decided in July 1963 to return to the United States. His months in Britain, however, coincided with Martin's successful pressure for the investigation and surveillance of Mitchell and the beginning of his active collaboration with Peter Wright. Golitsyn remained in contact with Martin and other Security Service officers following his return to the United States, writing to Martin with characteristic immodesty after Kennedy's assassination in November, ‘Both CIA and FBI are doomed without my help.'
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Martin unreasonably regarded Hollis's lack of sympathy for his conspiracy theories of Soviet penetration not merely as ‘complacency towards the threat of Russian espionage' but as further grounds for suspecting him
of involvement in it. His other chief suspect, Mitchell, Martin claimed, ‘had had the reputation of being a Marxist during the war' – an assertion which, he later acknowledged, rested only on (inaccurate) hearsay evidence. Because of his suspicions about both the DG and DDG, Martin – by his own admission – ‘deliberately ignored the proper channels' and took his conspiracy theories to the former DG, Sir Dick White, then Chief of SIS. If Martin's account is to be believed, White's response marks one of the lowest points in his long and distinguished intelligence career. According to Martin, White pronounced as plausible his baseless belief that the KGB had been tipped off about Philby's impending interrogation by a senior source in MI5, and said he would like to reflect on how to proceed. Next day he rang Martin to say he should report his suspicions about Mitchell (though not about Hollis) directly to Hollis.
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The presence in Britain of the KGB defector to the CIA Anatoli Golitsyn attracts unwelcome media attention (cartoon by John Jensen in the
Sunday Telegraph
, 14 July 1963 ). Shortly afterwards, Golitsyn decided to return to the United States.

At 6 p.m. on 7 March 1963 Martin called on Hollis by appointment in his office at Leconfield House. The DG sent his secretary home and spent the next half-hour listening as Martin outlined his conspiracy theories about Soviet penetration of the Service and Mitchell's possible treachery,
but failed to mention his suspicions about Hollis himself. According to Martin:

Throughout the telling the D.G. interrupted hardly at all. He sat hunched up at his desk, his face drained of colour and with a strange half-smile playing on his lips. I had framed my explanation so that it led to the conclusion that Graham Mitchell was, in my mind, the most likely suspect. I had ended by saying that while the suspicion remained unresolved I did not see how I could take responsibility for KAGO's [Golitsyn's] safety in the U.K.

I had expected that my theory would at least be challenged but it received no comment other than that I had been right to voice it and that he would think it over. With that he invited me to have dinner at his club [the Travellers] . . . As we settled down into [his] car I said something like: ‘I must say I admire your phlegm, sir!' This seemed to galvanise him and his response has remained one of my most vivid memories of that evening. It was as though this somewhat lame conversational gambit had caught him out. Metaphorically he squared his shoulders, his withdrawn, pensive expression changed to one of challenge and he said: ‘You must not think I do not take your theory seriously; I take it very seriously indeed.'

It seems much more likely that, since the allegation had been made by the head of the Security Service's Soviet counter-espionage section, Hollis concluded that it would have to be properly investigated but groaned inwardly at the thought of pursuing such an implausible and potentially embarrassing line of inquiry. To Martin's annoyance, Hollis kept well away from the subject during their dinner conversation at the Travellers Club. Though Martin was ‘itching to debate', they were reduced to ‘painful small-talk'.

He clearly wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible and, for my part, I had no wish to prolong the embarrassment. We agreed that neither of us wanted coffee.

Only after we had left the club and were standing in Pall Mall did he mention again the subject of our interview. He said that he would get in touch with me again about the middle of the following week and that, in the meantime, I was to tell no one of our conversation. He got into his car and drove away.
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Five days later Martin was summoned to a meeting at Hollis's home, also attended by Director D, Martin Furnival Jones (FJ). Martin was authorized to begin ‘discreet enquiries' into Mitchell's background, which he was to report only to FJ. At the beginning of May, having obtained evidence of what he claimed was ‘suspicious behaviour' by Mitchell, Martin was given a case officer to work under him.
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FJ was initially persuaded by Martin's evidence. A D Branch officer recalls that he and several colleagues
were told by FJ in the summer of 1963 that Mitchell had been a Soviet agent. When pressed, FJ declined to give details. His authority lent credence to a statement which, the officer recalls, they would not have believed if it had come from anybody else.
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In mid-May 1963 Arthur Martin compared notes for the first time with Peter Wright, then in the Science Directorate, who had wrongly deduced from apparent oddities in a number of counter-espionage cases that there must be a high-level penetration of the Service and that Mitchell was the most likely culprit.
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Coached by Golitsyn, Peter Wright rapidly emerged as the Service's witchfinder general, becoming as great a liability as Golitsyn and an even greater menace than Martin. In his memoirs,
Spycatcher
, Wright, while not abandoning his conspiracy theories, later came close to admitting that he and Golitsyn had been consumed by
folie à deux:
‘In the tense and almost hysterical months of 1963, as the scent of treachery lingered in every corridor, it is easy to see how our fears fed on his theories.'
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From 10 May until 14 June that year a number of searches were made of Mitchell's office and a specially recruited surveillance team
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kept him under observation for part of his journey home each evening.
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Though initially unwilling to seek an HOW on the DDG,
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Hollis changed his mind. After meeting the Home Office PUS, Sir Charles Cunningham, at Cunningham's flat on 5 June, he appears to have obtained an HOW for telechecks on both Mitchell's home and office. Hollis and the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke (who was briefed on 24 June),
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had three meetings with the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan – on 28 June and 19 and 27 July – to discuss the unprecedented investigation of the DDG.
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Macmillan, who already had a low opinion of Hollis, seems understandably to have been appalled.
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The only other minister briefed on the investigation was the Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, on 1 July.
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Until his retirement on 6 September 1963, Mitchell (codenamed PETERS at the suggestion of Golitsyn, whose own codename it had once been)
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was kept under both visual and audio surveillance in his office. A small hole was bored through his office wall to enable him to be continuously observed while at his desk by CCTV.
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Hollis also approved ‘barium meal' operations against him, during which bogus intelligence was fed to him which, had he been a Soviet spy, he might have been expected to pass on to Moscow.
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Mitchell's habit of muttering to himself when he was alone in his office added to the suspicions of Martin and Wright – though his mutterings proved difficult for the transcribers to decipher. On 30 August, for example, when he was fed a ‘barium meal' story of a
projected operation against two GRU officers, the transcriber produced two alternative versions of Mitchell's muttered response:

(i)   Well I must tell ?Yu-Yuri that they are. I am sure – (slight laugh) – he'll laugh if the Russians (??have booked).

(ii)  Well I am most terribly curious if they are. I am sure – (slight laugh) – he'll laugh if the Russians (??have booked).

The transcriber felt unable to guarantee the accuracy of either version, but preferred the first. Some of the case against Mitchell was constructed of even feebler material. For example:

It was noticed that the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk had recently been unlocked. On examination this drawer, like all the others, contained a thick layer of dust, but this one also contained marks as if a small object on legs had been placed in the drawer and subsequently removed. No satisfactory evidence has yet been advanced to explain these marks.
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Peter Wright, inevitably, saw a sinister significance in the marks in the dust. They had, he suspected, been made by a KGB camera given to Mitchell to photograph Security Service documents.
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When the new Director of D Branch, Malcolm Cumming (who had talent-spotted Dick White almost thirty years before), was indoctrinated into the PETERS case on succeeding FJ in June 1963,
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he discovered that Martin had fed him some of the bogus ‘barium meal' intelligence, which he had passed on to Mitchell believing it to be genuine. Martin saw Director D's irritation at this discovery as evidence of a character defect – ‘a bitter pill for a vain man to swallow'. The new Director D's lack of enthusiasm for the Mitchell investigation, though in retrospect a sign of balanced judgement, was proof in Martin's less balanced view that he was simply not up to the job of directing counter-espionage.
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By August, a fourth Security Service officer, Hugh Winterborn (A2), had joined the PETERS investigation. All, according to Martin, had no ‘serious doubts about Mitchell's guilt', but feared that ‘we would not be able to produce evidence sufficient for a prosecution except by successful interrogation.'
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Martin insisted that the interrogation take place before Mitchell's retirement and that both the ‘CIA and FBI should be told at once so that in the weeks of climax we could make our moves in concert with them.' Hollis, however, was ‘not yet convinced either that the case was strong enough to justify interrogation or that it was necessary to inform the Americans at all'. Martin, Wright, Winterborn and a colleague then decided between themselves to force Hollis's hand. At a Saturday-morning meeting at Hollis's
house, each in turn made a personal statement saying that he would resign from the Service unless the Americans were told. Hollis gave no immediate reply, but seems to have decided over the next few days that he had little option but to give in to their demand. At the beginning of the year, less than a week before Philby's defection, he had assured Hoover that there was no evidence Philby had worked as a post-war Soviet agent. Having so recently and so seriously misinformed Britain's main intelligence ally, Hollis probably decided that he could not take the risk of concealing the investigation of Mitchell. After consulting White, he went to see Macmillan who agreed that he should brief the Americans soon after Mitchell's retirement.
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