Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  FOREWORD

  1. SUPERMOLE?

  2. THE TRUTH ABOUT PHILBY

  3. THE MITCHELL CASE

  4. A MISTAKE IN A SHOPPING LIST

  5. CHINESE DAYS

  6. ENTRY WITH INTENT?

  7. DIPLOMATIC NON-INCIDENTS

  8. DECADE OF DEFEATS

  9. HOLLIS AND PROFUMO

  10. INTERROGATION EXTRAORDINARY

  11. PROFESSOR OF THE ARTS — OF TREACHERY

  12. AGENT ‘ORANGE’

  13. THE ‘KLATT’ AFFAIR

  14. ‘THE MOST INGENIOUS OF ROUTES’

  15. AN UNLIKELY INFORMER

  16. THE TRUTH ABOUT JOHN CAIRNCROSS

  17. THE REAL FIFTH MAN?

  18. A HAUL OF SUSPECTS

  19. SPIES IN THE SECRET SERVICE

  20. A HOTBED OF COLD FEET

  21. LORD OF THE SPIES

  22. SECURITY AND THE UNIONS

  23. SHOULD THERE BE AN INQUIRY?

  POSTSCRIPT

  INDEX

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  HARRY CHAPMAN PINCHER, who died in August 2014 at the age of 100, was one of Britain’s finest post-war journalists, breaking numerous major stories in a long career with the Daily Express, initially as the newspaper’s science and medical correspondent but eventually as its specialist correspondent on security and intelligence matters – the world of espionage.

  Chapman Pincher – he never used his first name in his by-line – unashamedly set out to infiltrate the establishment, collecting every disaffected senior civil servant, army officer and politician he could find along the way and using them as sources for a series of embarrassing revelations from the very heart of Britain’s armed forces and intelligence services.

  The left-wing historian E. P. Thompson dismissed Pincher somewhat petulantly as ‘a kind of official urinal’ in which ‘high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, nuclear scientists … stand patiently leaking in the public interest’.

  Pincher didn’t care where the story came from, only that it was true and that its disclosure was of interest to his newspaper’s readers. He took pride in the fact that his scoops – which began with the post-war news that Britain was building its own atomic bomb and ranged from sex scandals to the truly shocking revelation that MI5 had bugged Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson – rocked governments of both left and right. Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan went so far as to ask officials if there was nothing that could be done ‘to suppress or get rid of Mr Chapman Pincher?’

  But in many ways his most damaging revelation was the allegation made in this book that Sir Roger Hollis, a former director general of MI5, was a Soviet agent. It has been repeatedly denied, but the suggestion refuses to go away and, most damagingly of all, was widely believed within the US intelligence community.

  Pincher’s scoop came from disaffected MI5 officer Peter Wright, who admitted his own involvement in bugging Wilson, and was backed up by Arthur Martin, who had played a prominent part in the hunt for Soviet agents inside Britain’s intelligence services, including the investigation of Kim Philby – the so-called ‘Third Man’ in the Cambridge spy ring.

  There is no doubt that the possibility of Hollis being a long-term Soviet agent was examined, but the evidence against him was deemed to be too ‘insubstantial’ to merit investigation. Nevertheless, the claims made in this book retain a remarkable credibility, largely because Hollis spent the vast majority of the period between 1927 and 1936 in China, where the Soviet military intelligence service (the GRU) was assisting Mao Tse-tung’s revolutionary forces in their attempts to take control.

  Hollis travelled out to China as a journalist, ostensibly to cover the communist uprising, and is known to have then associated with long-term Soviet agents like Agnes Smedley and Richard Sorge, so it is not difficult to see why there were suspicions that he must have been involved in the world of espionage in some way. But, given the way he arrived in China and the fact that, for most of the eight years he spent there, he worked for British American Tobacco (a frequent cover for MI6 officers), it is by no means certain that he was working for Moscow.

  Michael Smith

  Editor of the Dialogue Espionage Classics series

  October 2014

  FOREWORD

  THEIR TRADE IS TREACHERY was originally the title of a booklet prepared in 1964 by the security service (MI5) for restricted circulation among Whitehall officials with access to secret information. The booklet’s purpose was to describe, by means of genuine case records, the ruthless methods used by the Russians and their allies to trap the unwary into serving as spies and saboteurs.

  Though, after securing a copy, I regarded it as a feeble effort, ludicrously restrained by Foreign Office sensibilities about offending the Kremlin, I believed that it should have a much wider circulation because – as this book will show – the most dangerous spies tend to be recruited long before they secure any official position of trust. Whitehall put so many obstacles in my way, however, culminating in resort to threat of prosecution under the copyright laws, that I was able to do little more than mention the booklet’s existence in the newspaper for which I then worked.

  I decided then that, one day, I would produce my own version of Their Trade is Treachery, giving the general public the fullest possible details of the appalling penetration of Whitehall, including the security and intelligence services, by Soviet spies and saboteurs. Where relevant, I thought I should include details of the penetration of the comparable services of Britain’s allies. Here it is.

  I sincerely hope that the facts that I have checked at every available point and which have been studiously suppressed by authority will alert thinking people to the true extent of the communist conspiracy against them. It is my belief that, through Whitehall’s exaggerated zeal for secrecy, even senior ministers have been kept in ignorance of the extent of the penetration of what is our first line of defence. As the former Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, said in the parliamentary debate on the Anthony Blunt affair, ‘My view is that security is a matter for the nation.’ It is also mine.

  Though much that I shall disclose is bound to generate criticism of the past history of the security and intelligence services, making both look like a mountain of ‘mole hills’, that is not my purpose. They are bastions of the nation’s freedom against an opponent growing more dangerous and more daring day by day; for, in an age of nuclear stalemate, the threat from subversion is probably greater than that from direct attack. Wherever Soviet-style communism has been imposed on a nation, it has been accomplished by very small minorities, a few thousand zealots, backed and often controlled by Soviet professionals, who secretly undermine a few key objectives – the security and intelligence services being top-priority targets.

  If one nation can penetrate the security and intelligence services of another, it can then control them like puppets on a string. During the Second World War, by means of brilliantly contrived deception techniques and double agents, the British were able to do just that to the Germans. Since then, for many years and with equal skill, the Russians have penetrated and exerted control over both MI5 and the secret service to an extent that has been so successfully suppressed that the public is scarcely aware of it. The facts disclosed here will speak for themselves as regards the extent of the cover-up.

 
I have taken professional advice on the security aspects and am completely satisfied that, while many of the events that I reveal may anger those who wished them to remain secret, none can prejudice current or future operations. The security aspects of the various situations are outdated. It is the truth that is new.

  Furthermore, some of the formerly sensitive information originates from American sources – the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) being both intimately concerned – who have been involved in the investigations into the Soviet penetration of the British security services. Such information is not subject to official secrecy restrictions.

  I also risk being accused of censuring dead men who are unable to defend themselves, but it is the facts that do that, not I. All the allegations made against the men that I name arose from their own colleagues, who were witnesses to secret events that infuriated them.

  Researchers looking for source references will find few here, for in the main this book deals with prime source material, collected over the years from people who insisted on remaining anonymous in their lifetime. I am confident that the reader will be able to assess the truth of the statements from the detail with which they are presented. As far as possible, I have avoided drawing on published material, so much of which is inaccurate and tends to be perpetuated from one book to the next, for the security services eschew correcting published errors on the principle of ‘keeping the waters as muddy as possible’.

  There is some confusion in the public mind between the security service (MI5), concerned with counter-espionage, mainly in Britain, and the secret intelligence service (MI6), concerned with intelligence gathering and espionage, mainly abroad. In this book, therefore, I shall generally refer to the security service only by its well-known initials, MI5, and to the secret intelligence service by its simpler and better-known name, the secret service. (There is no direct American counterpart of MI5 because its work is shared by the CIA and the FBI. The CIA also carries out the functions of the secret intelligence service.)

  For similar reasons, I shall refer to the Soviet espionage and security organisation by its well-known name, the KGB, though it has had different names in the past. There are currently other lesser-known arms, like the GRU, the military branch, to which I will refer only when necessary.

  After thirty-five years of investigative journalism, I have seen many intelligence and security officers and senior civil servants go to their graves with secrets that are part of the fabric of history. I do not propose to make that error.

  CHAPTER 1

  SUPERMOLE?

  ON 26 MARCH 1981 Mrs Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, announced that her government was to set up an inquiry into the defences of the security and intelligence departments against penetration by spies. It would be the first independent inquiry into this situation for twenty years, and it would also cover the Foreign Office, Home Office, Defence Ministry, and other departments of state harbouring sensitive information.

  The Prime Minister made this announcement as part of a long statement about the original British edition of this book, which had been published that day, and as a direct consequence of various disclosures it contained. In her statement, the Prime Minister confirmed that Sir Roger Hollis, a long-serving director general of MI5, had been deeply suspected by some of his own colleagues of having been a Russian agent, perhaps for nearly thirty years. The suspicion was so great that Sir Roger had failed to dispel it when called back from retirement in 1970 and fully interrogated. So, in 1974, a further inquiry, to settle the issue if possible, had been set up in great secrecy. A former secretary of the Cabinet, Lord Trend, had been asked to undertake it and had spent a year doing so. Before the publication of this book, the public had known nothing of what has since become known as the Hollis affair or of the Trend inquiry.

  The choice of Lord Trend had not pleased those security and intelligence officers who had been pressing for a further inquiry. Formerly Sir Burke Trend, he was very much a Whitehall establishment figure, having held the Cabinet secretaryship for ten years between 1963 and 1973, the period when the suspicion against Hollis had grown and reached its climax. It was greatly in Whitehall’s interest to have Hollis cleared, and, while not impugning Lord Trend’s integrity, the security officers would have preferred a man who had been less involved and more detached.

  The pile of evidence facing Lord Trend indicated that there had been at least one ‘supermole’ and possibly two with the unrestricted opportunity of burrowing into secrets and undermining the entire counter-espionage organisation.

  All the relevant files recording long investigations by a joint team from MI5 and the secret service, along with tape recordings of the dramatic interrogation of Hollis by men junior to him, were made available to Lord Trend. He questioned witnesses and visited MI5 headquarters, spending many days there reading documents.

  Understandably, Sir John Hunt, the reigning Cabinet secretary, and the few Whitehall chiefs who knew of the inquiry hoped that it would clear both men, Hollis in particular.

  Witnesses who had carried out the original investigation came away convinced that Lord Trend agreed with them that there seemed to be a prima facie case that MI5 had been deeply penetrated over many years by someone who was not Anthony Blunt, the art expert who had been exposed as a spy during his wartime service in MI5. They believed that he also agreed that the circumstantial evidence against Hollis was so weighty as to demand explanation. Hollis had not cleared himself during his interrogation. His answers to searching questions had been unconvincing and his memory had been at fault only when it had suited him. Furthermore, the evidence showed that Hollis had consistently frustrated attempts by loyal MI5 officers to investigate the obvious penetrations of their service. His behaviour during the Blunt investigations had been particularly suspicious, as I shall show.

  The other senior officer who had fallen under suspicion while the apparent KGB penetrations of MI5 were being internally investigated was Mr Graham Mitchell. Until his retirement in 1963, Mitchell had been Hollis’s deputy. So, for several years, both the director general of MI5 and the deputy director general had been under deep suspicion of being Soviet spies – a truly appalling circumstance for any security organisation whatever the eventual outcome. (In her effort to allay public disquiet over these disclosures, Mrs Thatcher tried to suggest that the inquiries into these two men were almost routine when, in fact, they were unprecedented and calamitous in their impact on morale.)

  Lord Trend quickly cleared Mitchell, agreeing with the advice of witnesses that he had virtually cleared himself by his convincing responses when he had been resolutely interrogated in 1967, as I shall describe in Chapter 3. He delayed making a decision on Hollis for almost a year. I shall deal with that decision later because it did not become known to more than a very few people until Mrs Thatcher made her statement to Parliament following publication of this book in March 1981.

  In the meantime, early in 1980, Mrs Thatcher was warned about the politically explosive nature of the Hollis and Mitchell affairs by a Conservative Member of Parliament, Mr Jonathan Aitken, a great-nephew of the late Lord Beaverbrook. He had learned of moves by former members of MI5, the secret service and the American CIA to secure a searching inquiry into the security and intelligence services because of the mass of evidence that both had been penetrated by the Russians to an extent unsuspected by Parliament or the public. In a long letter to the Prime Minister, Aitken outlined some of the most spectacular evidence that had been given to him by MI5 sources and CIA sources who feared that Hollis, who died in 1973, may have recruited Soviet agents who might still be ‘in place’.

  Whether Mrs Thatcher was first informed as a result of this letter or knew beforehand, she soon became fully aware of the situation concerning Hollis and the general penetration of the security services by the KGB. Her predecessor as Prime Minister, James Callaghan, had also taken steps to ensure that the heads of MI5 and the secret servic
e briefed him fully on the matter. Sir Harold Wilson, another former socialist Prime Minister, was given the basic facts but was vague when I questioned him. He said that, while he had been told about the suspicions concerning a former director general of MI5, he had not heard Hollis’s name mentioned in that connection. Immediately prior to Mrs Thatcher’s statement, however, he had been allowed to refresh his memory by consulting Cabinet papers, including the report of the Trend inquiry. He then confirmed that there had been serious leakages from MI5 and that some of them could have originated from Hollis. He also went on record, both in Parliament and outside, as claiming credit for having set up the Trend inquiry!

  Soon after Wilson had resigned as Prime Minister in March 1976, he had made some sensational charges concerning his doubts about the loyalty of MI5, charges that many deplored as unworthy of a former Prime Minister. While these remarks had been conditioned by his belief that members of the organisation had been plotting against him in an attempt to bring about his downfall and undermine the credibility of the Labour government, they were to some extent a cri de coeur by a very tired man, horrified and baffled by what he had learned about the penetration of the security services.

  I had known about the cover-up of the Hollis situation for several years and in 1978 named him as suspect in the paperback edition of my book Inside Story. Since then, I have had confirmed details of most of the evidence against him, together with the sinister events and the strange aspects of Hollis’s behaviour that eventually led to his dramatic interrogation. They point to a situation so menacing to national security that the nation should be made fully aware of it. The view of the loyal MI5 officers who uncovered the evidence is that the Russians penetrated both the security and intelligence services so deeply and for so long that they not only neutralised them but effectively ran them.

  I have established that this is also the view of senior officers of the CIA, who had to be alerted to the facts. The confidentiality between the American and British security and intelligence services is always close, but, when KGB penetrations are involved, it tends to be total because a ‘mole’ in any of them could prejudice them all. Some of the CIA officers, past and present, seem satisfied that the main culprit was Hollis, in which case he may have been the most damaging spy in history, for the director general of MI5 is not only responsible for counter-espionage, counter-sabotage and counter-subversion but for protective security. This last, which is regarded as more important than the catching of spies, is the prevention of espionage by physical security precautions, the investigation of leakages and the weeding out of those who are unreliable. A head of MI5 who happens to be a Soviet agent is also in a crucial position to assist in any attempted communist coup or Russian attack.