Art of Betrayal (37 page)

‘Is de Mowbray a screwball?' the Cabinet Secretary asked.

‘No, he's not mad,' replied White. ‘He's patriotic, hard-working but obsessed.'

‘Was Hollis a spy?' asked Hunt. Hollis had died in 1973.

‘I'd be surprised,' said White. It was a strange form of words and was delivered with little conviction. Hunt was left with the impression that it might be surprising but not impossible for it to be true.

‘But how did we get to this?' asked Hunt. He decided to try and find out.
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A couple of weeks later another message came asking de Mowbray to see former Cabinet Secretary Lord Trend in Oxford. For two hours they talked, first inside, then over lunch out in deckchairs on a perfect summer's afternoon. Trend had been asked to conduct his own investigation into the issue and listened carefully. But at the end as he stepped out of his door on to the cobbled Oxford street, Trend turned
to him ‘Don't expect me to tear Whitehall apart about all this,' he said.

Trend was given an office, a safe and a secretary in MI5 headquarters and spent a year poring over the papers and interviewing those involved. ‘How did it all begin?' he asked Peter Wright. It was a question Wright had often asked himself.
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Trend's final report remains secret. It was used to exonerate Hollis when accusations against him became public, although there are some who doubt that it was as conclusive as it was made out to be. When the investigation was complete, Oldfield summoned de Mowbray to meet with Trend and Hunt in the Cabinet Office. De Mowbray met Oldfield down in the car park of MI6's new headquarters, Century House, and they drove over to Whitehall together. De Mowbray began to talk about Russian deception. Oldfield cut across him and said someone was dealing with these problems. Hunt told de Mowbray that he had to reconcile himself to not getting his old job back in counter-intelligence. De Mowbray tried again to pass a note to the Prime Minister. By now the 1970s were fading and James Callaghan had succeeded Wilson after his surprise resignation from Downing Street. Hunt called de Mowbray back and said that the Prime Minister had spoken to the heads of MI5 and MI6, but it was over. End of story. It certainly was for de Mowbray, who asked for early retirement. He walked out of Century House never to set foot inside again. He went off to the US where he joined up with Golitsyn, now out of favour at the CIA, and began helping the Russian with a book.

The aftershocks of the molehunts and investigations continued to reverberate around the secret and the political worlds. In May 1976, a BBC TV reporter received an unusual summons from Harold Wilson who had stepped down as Prime Minister two months earlier. At his home around the corner from the House of Commons, Wilson opened a window into a world of conspiracy and fear for the journalist and a colleague he had brought along. ‘I am not certain that for the last eight months when I was Prime Minister I knew what was happening, fully, in security,' he told the astonished reporters.
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Over sherry and whisky, he said some people in MI5 were ‘very right wing' and that he could not rule out individuals in MI5 and MI6 being involved in smearing him with talk of a ‘communist cell' in Number 10.
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Wilson said he had
summoned Oldfield to ask about the problem and that Oldfield had confirmed that there was an ‘unreliable' section in his sister service and promised to help deal with it but he had never reported back. Wilson explained that he had even gone so far as to send a friend to Washington to ask a former vice-president to find out what the CIA knew. The then-CIA Director and future President George Bush then visited Wilson in Downing Street to discuss the issue. He was convinced that a series of burglaries at his office and home, and those of his colleagues, was part of a wider conspiracy, possibly involving South African intelligence.

Spy-fever washed over British shores again in 1979. A book by a BBC journalist pointed towards Anthony Blunt as a spy. His secret was out and he was stripped of his knighthood. The Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was forced to make a statement in parliament. In November of that year an adaptation of John le Carré's
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
hit television screens. ‘I've got a story to tell you. It's all about spies. And if it's true, which I think it is, you boys are going to need a whole new organisation,' a character tells George Smiley. Alec Guinness played George Smiley, the spymaster who hunted for a ‘mole' within MI6 and found it to be one of his closest friends. To prepare for his role, Guinness had been introduced to the now retired Maurice Oldfield by le Carré in a restaurant. Oldfield had been a fan of Guinness and rather enjoyed the lunch.
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But, like many other officers, he wanted to warn against accepting the bleak world of Smiley as the truth. ‘We are definitely not as our host here describes us,' he told the actor.
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Guinness hurried to watch Oldfield as he walked away. ‘The quaintly didactic waddle, the clumsy cufflinks, the poorly rolled umbrella were added to Smiley's properties chest from then on,' remarked le Carré.
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Although not the template for the original Smiley, the similarities were there in the glasses, the odd walk and the fascination with medieval history. ‘I still don't recognise myself,' the spy chief wrote to the actor after seeing the programme. Almost everyone else could. Oldfield had risen to the top, but even the foreign secretaries he served detected a loneliness in him. He died a few years later, an unhappy obituary arriving later when his homosexuality was exposed amid questions about whether it had posed a security risk. Oldfield had been a sincere churchman from a humble background in Derbyshire surrounded by the upper crust
and living out a double life. ‘He must have had an awful, awful inner struggle,' a colleague reckons.
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The British public had become obsessed with traitors, fuelled by le Carré's fiction. Traitors provided one explanation for why everything had gone wrong in Britain after the war, why the Empire had disappeared and things were not as they used to be. Where Fleming's Bond provided escape from that reality, Smiley offered an alternative, bleaker and self-flagellating, narrative. Thrillers reflect the anxieties of their age. Early spy fiction at the turn of the century had been designed to warn people of the threats and vulnerabilities to Britain and its Empire sitting astride the world.
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By the time of le Carré, the anxieties were much more about moral decay and what lay within. In London and Washington they disliked his work, especially
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
. Over dinner in Washington, CIA Director John McCone complained to Dick White that the negative portrayal was undermining their work. ‘He hasn't done us any good … He's presenting a service without trust or loyalty, where agents are sacrificed and deceived without compunction.'
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The change in spy fiction – from the gung-ho imperial fiction of the early century to the more interior literature of traitors – mirrored Britain's changing position in the world and its perception of itself. The spies had also begun to look inward as much as outward. In Vienna at the start of the Cold War, the first question defectors from the East would be asked was whether they knew of any sign of impending war. By the latter stages of the conflict, the first question they would be asked was whether they knew of any sign that Western intelligence services had been penetrated. The spy world had become more introverted and more self-referential, inhabiting its own subculture with its own strange customs.

On both sides of the Atlantic, a fire had been lit by Philby's betrayal which was fanned by Golitsyn. It blazed with fierce intensity, nearly consuming both the CIA and MI6 until it burnt itself out. Trust is the glue which holds organisations and people together. In the world of spy versus spy, being too trusting, as MI6 had been in the past, can be destructive, opening the way for treachery. But trusting too little can also corrode an organisation from within, shattering its self-confidence, making it impossible for colleagues to work with each other and to work with partners. A poison entered the system.
The molehunters did not begin from a position of paranoia. Belief that the services could have been penetrated was not simply rational, it was true given what had come before in the form of Philby and Blake and others. Not to have carried out investigations would have been dangerously irresponsible. But the trouble came from the quasi-religious acceptance of a theory which could not be disproved by the facts, a problem that recurs from time to time in intelligence. The problem with being convinced that your enemy is practising deception is that ‘the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'.
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‘Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.' In other words, if you can't find what you are looking for, it just means that your opponent is very good at deceiving you.
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Peter Wright was sidelined. ‘When you join the service each case looks different. When you leave they all seem the same,' he later reflected.
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When he walked out of the old offices in 1976 to a new building, he sensed the ghosts that had still not been laid to rest. ‘Walking the corridors of Leconfield House I could still feel the physical sense of treachery, of pursuit, and the scent of the kill,' he wrote.
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The trauma of the molehunts remained hidden from public view for many years. This did not help. The closet into which skeletons were hurriedly stuffed became increasingly fit to burst. In Britain, there were no American-style Congressional committees to help ease the tension and deflate the pressure. Those who felt their country had been betrayed and their own fears ignored became increasingly agitated. Some began to do something that those in the secret world had not done before. They began to talk, first to a few journalists and writers. Then, emboldened, Peter Wright, angry at having been denied a proper pension, decided to publish his own tell-all in his book
Spycatcher
. Fear traversed Whitehall and the secret world and everything was done to try and stop it, including an absurd court case in Australia which made the Cabinet Secretary and government look foolish. But their efforts were futile and out tumbled all the skeletons and the dirty laundry in one messy pile in front of a rapt British public who had not seen anything like it before. Arthur Martin too broke cover to defend Wright, even though he was less sure about Hollis. ‘If it was not Hollis, who was it?' he asked in a letter to
The Times
, warning that the failure to follow through
on the investigation into this had led to ‘a decade of unease'. ‘It is inconceivable that the security service would have allowed an investigation to lapse if similar evidence of penetration had been discovered in any other department of government,' he wrote, beginning a public exchange with other former officers on the letters page of the newspaper. Despite the best efforts of a few, the door to the secret world could never be quite so firmly shut again. Who are all these strange people? the public began to ask.
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In the late 1980s, Gerry Warner was appointed MI6's director of counter-intelligence and security, the post that had previously been the power base of the molehunters. He found the staff still living a hermetically sealed existence, locked into the position of accumulating files and information as they watched for trouble rather than aggressively targeting the other side. In his new role he should have had access to all the files. As he opened the safe, he found that fifteen of them were on Maurice Oldfield and his personal life. Chris Curwen was then C and had been among the hunters. When Curwen retired three years later, he walked into Warner's office. ‘You better have these,' he said and deposited a further handful of files from his own personal Chief's safe. They were files of counter-intelligence investigations that Warner had never been shown before. Perhaps it was something of an apology. Among the files was one on Warner himself. Everyone who had run the Warsaw station up to a certain date had been investigated by the molehunters based on the Angletonian thesis that anyone who had successfully run agents in the Soviet bloc, like Beneficiary the Polish cipher clerk, must have been working for the other side. The molehunters had been looking for the officer who was being groomed by their Soviet controllers for the top of the service, the new Philby. Warner read on, angry and amazed. His relatively humble background, his early reputation as a troublemaker, his wife's mathematical skills (useful for encrypting perhaps), all pointed in one direction, the file argued. The conclusion, at one point, was that he was the spy. Shergy's role in protecting him in Geneva and at the Fort, and in protecting the core of his own operations, became clearer. There was a note on the file. It asked, despairingly, why when we have all this proof has nothing happened and why does Warner continue to be promoted? Warner leant back in his chair. He did not know whether to laugh or cry.

De Mowbray went into a self-imposed silence for three decades after leaving MI6.
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Hollis and Mitchell were not spies, he came to believe (although a few persist in their belief about Hollis).
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‘There were suspicions with both of them. There are not suspicions now. But somebody was doing it,' he argues. ‘I vowed to myself I would never let go of the case.' It would be hard, although not quite impossible, for the identity of a high-level British traitor to have been kept secret for so long on the Soviet side with all the defectors who had come over, especially in the last three decades. ‘Maybe I was wrong. But I don't think I was,' says de Mowbray. ‘I cannot leave this. Ever.' Anatoly Golitsyn, the man who walked out of the KGB Residency that cold Friday night in Helsinki in 1961, died in the sweltering heat of the American South on 29 December 2008. Not a single obituary marked his passing. It was as if the pain of that chapter was so great that no one wanted to remember.