The Defence of the Realm (96 page)

During the year following the surprise visit to London by Angleton and Golitsyn, talks in Washington between representatives of MI5, SIS, CIA and FBI, some attended by FJ, agreed on British–American collaboration in an investigation of Soviet disinformation and penetration by a small group of intelligence officers who exchanged highly classified information. Though J. Edgar Hoover rejected formal FBI membership of the group, the head of the Bureau's Communist desk, Bill Sullivan, collaborated with it and attended its first conference in Washington in June 1967. A Security Service review two years later concluded that the collaboration had been kept so secret that the other intelligence allies – ASIO, RCMP and the New Zealand Security Service (NZSS)– were not, ‘as far as is known', aware of its existence. All were, however, involved with the CIA, MI5 and SIS in a larger secret association with a similar agenda, codenamed CAZAB, which held its first meeting in Melbourne in November 1967.
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The meeting agreed to set up a joint counter-intelligence group (in association with the FBI) to seek to identify high-level Soviet penetration in the West, especially of intelligence agencies, and to uncover Soviet disinformation campaigns.
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Angleton brought Golitsyn with him to Melbourne, where, according to Peter Wright, Golitsyn ‘laid special emphasis on Britain, and the many penetrations which, he claimed, were as yet undiscovered, and which only
he could locate. FJ was smiling the smile he reserved for particularly tiresome people.'
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Security Service officers continued to consult Angleton personally about the search for traitors in MI5's own ranks. In February 1968, D1/Inv wrote to the SLO in Washington, updating him on the Mitchell investigation and adding:

I think it would be well worth discussing all this with Jim. This would, first, demonstrate that we are trying to get to grips with the case and bring it to a conclusion. Secondly it would enable you to ask for any help CIA can possibly give us in filling in the strange gap [in Mitchell's career] between 1936 and 1938.
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In September 1968 the second CAZAB meeting, this time in Washington, reviewed general progress in the search for high-level penetration of Western intelligence.
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In the case of the Security Service, since there was in reality no high-level Soviet penetration left to uncover, there was inevitably no significant progress to report. For the conspiracy theorists, however, the difficulty in finding proof of penetration was evidence of how successful it had been.

The witch-hunt within the Security Service, though the details were known to few, made Peter Wright increasingly unpopular. At a conference of senior Security Service officers in 1969 at the Sunningdale Civil Service College, Wright was taken aback by the ‘bitter attacks' on him and some of his colleagues in D1/Inv. ‘How do I go into the office', he asked FJ, ‘facing this level of hostility?' ‘That is a price you have to pay for sitting in judgment on people,' FJ replied.
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The FLUENCY Working Party continued, however, to press the DG to authorize the investigation of Hollis. Though deeply sceptical of the case against his predecessor, FJ finally agreed in the summer of 1969. As the DRAT and PETERS cases proceeded,
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Angleton's advice continued to be sought on both.
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Stella Rimington later concluded that Wright and Angleton ‘fuelled each other's paranoia'.
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Angleton, however, provided very little hard information for the FLUENCY investigations. A Security Service review of CAZAB concluded in 1969: ‘We have not received any intelligence which seems to match the bait produced by Angleton in earlier discussions, when he said that C.I.A. had information relevant to United Kingdom interests which they were unable to pass, in the absence of an indoctrination forum.' The Service considered, however, that there had been a general gain in the closeness of liaison on counter-intelligence among the five intelligence allies:

The . . . CAZAB networks, although having something of a precedent in the VENONA exchanges . . . are probably unique in conception, at least in peacetime.
There is acceptance by the participating organisations of the threat from penetration and from disinformation and the professions of complete frankness appear to be reflected in the actual exchanges of intelligence.

. . . The frank discussions on the threat, the exchanges of ideas on the methods to combat the threat have so far been valuable. Now that the proceedings of the Commonwealth Security Conference tend to be inhibited by the large number of delegates in attendance, it has been useful to include Australia, Canada and New Zealand in this intimate circle. It has resulted in them devoting more resources to work on disinformation and penetration.
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In May 1970 FJ agreed to invite Golitsyn to Britain and give him access to material from Security Service files in order to identify the penetrations which he claimed to be able to uncover.
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The operation was run by an MI5 officer who had met Golitsyn while SLO in Washington. Helped by an assistant, the officer transported documents from Leconfield House for inspection by Golitsyn at a safe house on the south coast. Golitsyn was first booked into a hotel in Bournemouth but walked out, convinced he was being spied on by building workers. He was then put into a rented house near Christchurch where he was looked after by an A4 officer and his wife. His paranoid tendencies made him a nightmare to handle; he insisted on drinking only Perrier water for fear of being poisoned, and would go out only at night. After a while he asked to move into the family home of the former Washington SLO, where his behaviour alarmed both the MI5 officer's daughter and one of their neighbours. The officer found the whole time-consuming operation a complete waste of time.
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From the summer of 1969 to the summer of 1970 the Security Service DRAT and PETERS investigations proceeded in tandem.
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The Mitchell case was finally closed after he was questioned in FJ's office in August 1970.
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No evidence of guilt emerged and the DG told Mitchell he had been cleared.
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John Day (K7), who took part in the questioning, later recalled that afterwards, presumably in a half-hearted attempt to make amends, the DG took Mitchell to lunch at his club. Day, who was also present, remembered the meal as, unsurprisingly, ‘rather a strain'.
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The investigation of Hollis, which eventually involved more than fifty interviews (including two with Hollis himself), also turned up no credible evidence since there was none to find.
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FJ's personal embarrassment over this miserable episode was reflected in his failure to inform either the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister that Hollis was under investigation. By contrast, three ministers had been told about the investigation of Mitchell while it was still in its early stages.
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‘The Case against DRAT' submitted on 18 June 1970, drafted by John Day, who was to lead the interrogation of Hollis early in the following year, unintentionally exposes how threadbare the evidence against Hollis was. It remains a shocking document – a classic example of a paper written to support a conclusion already arrived at which excludes important evidence to the contrary and turns on its head evidence which does not fit the preconceived conclusion. There was no mention of the fact that during the Second World War Hollis had been one of the members of the Service most alert to the threat of Soviet penetration of Whitehall and the armed services, even criticizing the DG, Sir David Petrie, for his lack of attention to the dangers which this posed. Hollis had also been almost the only – perhaps the only – wartime member of the Service suspicious about Blunt. Day, however, turned this evidence on its head as pointing to a KGB plot to divert suspicion from Hollis.
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Nor could the conspiracy theorists credibly explain how a series of highly successful operations against the KGB of which Hollis had knowledge – among them the defection of the Petrovs in 1954 – could have been possible if Hollis had been a Soviet spy.

All three of the supposed leads pointing to Hollis's guilt cited in the ‘Case against DRAT' were later shown, as could reasonably have been inferred at the time, to refer to others. Hollis was alleged to be the most likely candidate for the ‘acting head of a department of British Counter-Espionage (or Counter-Intelligence) Directorate' mentioned by Volkov in September 1945 before his failed attempt to defect. It should have been clear well before 1970 that by far the most likely candidate was Philby, who at the time had recently been acting head of SIS Section V (counterintelligence), whereas Hollis had been the substantive (not acting) head of F Division (counter-subversion) in MI5 for five years. (In addition Philby was known to have been responsible for ensuring the failure of Volkov's attempt to defect.) Hollis was also identified as the most likely candidate for a ‘cadre worker' (serving officer) in MI5 able to bring out files on Russians at will who was mentioned by the Soviet resident in Stockholm to the future defector Petrov in early 1954. It should have been obvious that the prime candidate was not Hollis but Blunt, who had confessed in 1965 that during the war he had taken MI5 files out of headquarters in a suitcase. Hollis was also alleged to be the agent codenamed JOHNSON mentioned in London VENONA decrypts of September 1945. As even Wright later acknowledged, this also was Blunt.
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Despite his own scepticism about the ‘Case against DRAT',
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FJ at last informed Sir Philip Allen, PUS Home Office, and Sir Burke Trend, the cabinet secretary, of the investigation of Hollis. Though pressed by Allen,
the DG remarkably refused to tell either the Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, or the Prime Minister, Edward Heath. Since Hollis had had three meetings with the last Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, to discuss the investigation of Mitchell, it is difficult to see the justification for FJ's refusal to inform Heath. No minister was informed of the investigation of Hollis until Harold Wilson was told in August 1975; he too had not been informed of the suspicions against Hollis during his first administration.
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In keeping with the terms of the CAZAB counterintelligence collaboration, FJ did, however, inform his US allies. During a visit to the DCI, Richard Helms, at CIA headquarters in November 1970:

He said that he did not suspect DRAT of having been a spy. He added, however, that others in the Service did not share his view and that in the near future DRAT would be interviewed. Because he might be thought to be prejudiced, to which he admitted, he did not intend to conduct the interview personally.
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In 1970 the FLUENCY codeword was changed.
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(The new codename remains classified.) FJ finally authorized the interrogation of Hollis by Day and a colleague in K7 in February 1971, but gave Hollis advance notice and refused to seek HOWs for letter and telephone checks.
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As even Wright acknowledged, the interrogation of Hollis effectively brought the case to an end: ‘We knew we had not brought the case home.' At the end of the interrogation, Hollis ‘said goodbye, and meant it. He travelled back to Somerset, back to his golf, and his cottage.' FJ declared that the case was closed and that it was time to move on. Very few within the Service apart from Peter Wright disagreed. Wright, however, had lost most of his influence. He later wrote in his memoirs that, though he did not formally retire until 1976, his retirement really began on the day that Hollis's interrogation ended: ‘What came after was mostly going through the motions.'
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Hollis died in 1973.

While ‘going through the motions', Wright's conspiracy theories continued to grow. He convinced himself ‘that the Ring of Five stood at the centre of a series of other concentric rings, each pledged to silence, each anxious to protect its secrets from outsiders'.
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Stella Rimington and some of her friends in the Security Service called Wright ‘the “KGB illegal”, because, with his appearance and his lisp we could imagine that he was really a KGB officer himself, living under a false identity . . .'.
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After the investigation of Hollis and Mitchell was concluded, about one hundred leads pointing to possible other penetrations – half of them provided by Golitsyn – remained. By 1973 it was generally recognized within D Branch that only five of these leads merited investigation; only one was still thought
worth pursuing three years later. Between 1973 and 1978, however, the leading SIS conspiracy theorist repeatedly complained that the investigations into Soviet penetration had been improperly conducted, on one occasion appealing directly to the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Though he did not succeed in seeing Wilson, he put his case to the cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt. Partly in response to the SIS officer's complaints, the previous cabinet secretary, Lord Trend, was asked to review the investigation, and reported in May 1975 that there was no evidence to show that either Hollis or Mitchell had ever been a Soviet agent.
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Wright, Martin and the SIS officer were unconvinced. Conspiracy theory of the kind contracted by all three is an incurable condition. What J. A. Allen (Director KX) wrote of the SIS officer was equally true of Wright and Martin: ‘Involvement in counter-espionage cases induces in some a form of paranoia which causes them to find only pusillanimity, or worse, in others who see through different eyes.'
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The damage done to the reputation of the Service in the eyes of the four Prime Ministers privy to the charges against Hollis or Mitchell or both – Macmillan, Wilson, Heath and Callaghan – was inevitably substantial. The charges against Hollis in particular became the main theme of Wright's best-selling intelligence memoirs, which succeeded in spreading the author's conspiracy theories around the world.