Spycatcher (54 page)

Ellis was a venal, sly man. He sat there, stripped of his rank, white-faced and puffy. But never once did I hear an apology. I could understand how a man might choose the Soviets through ideological conviction. But to sell colleagues out to the Germans for a few pounds in time of war? I told him that had he been caught in 1939-40 he would have been hanged.

Ellis clearly thought the interrogation was over. But it had just begun. We wanted to know about his involvement with the Soviets, we said. For a moment he wavered in front of us, then he fought back.

"Never!" he shouted, "never with the Communists..."

The next day we took him through the odd chain of events - his trip to Australia, and his rapid return to Britain, and the coincidence of Petrov's defection. But he denied everything, even when he was caught out in repeated lying about his actions until he retired. Not even an authorized offer of immunity could make him change his mind. But I have little doubt of Ellis' involvement with the Russians.

Bunny Pancheff and I wrote the case up, and concluded that in our opinion Ellis had certainly committed espionage for the Germans, including during the war, and that we believed him also to have been a long-term agent of the Russian Intelligence Service until his removal from secret access. The report was endorsed without reservation by Christopher Phillpotts, and submitted to Dick White and his deputy, Maurice Oldfield.

Oldfield was a shy and good man, with a wonderful grasp of the principles of counterintelligence. But he was a poor judge of character. At first he doubted the veracity of Ellis' confession, until eventually Bunny Pancheff played the crucial exchanges to him. But even though we had uncovered a traitor of major proportions, I sometimes felt as if it were I who was being blamed. Oldfield despised the climate of fear engendered by Phillpotts' vetting purges, and campaigned hard to change Dick's mind. The fact that Ellis had confessed seemed to weigh hardly at all on his thinking. As far as he was concerned, it was all a long time ago, and best forgotten.

As the climate against investigations turned in the late 1960s, I wanted desperately to have some of the FLUENCY conclusions circulated more widely inside both Services. I felt sure that this was the only way we could restore some general consent for a continuation of the work. At the moment, people knew nothing of the cases, and to them our activities seemed like blind McCarthyism. D3 had become such a massive section, embracing FLUENCY and the D3 researches into the 1930s.

Inevitably, other senior officers resented its priority call on resources and personnel, and since they had no way of judging the importance of the work we were conducting, their resentments grew. I was accused of being suspicious of everybody. F.J. would defend me if the attacks were public. On one occasion he turned around and said to my attacker, "It is Peter's job to be suspicious." Like Angleton, I could sense my enemies multiplying. It was a curious sensation. After years of being the hunter, I suddenly felt myself hunted.

Matters came to a head in 1969 at the annual conference attended by senior MI5 officers at the Sunningdale Civil Service College in Berkshire. A number of officers launched bitter attacks on me, and others involved in D1 (Investigations), as well as on the work we were doing. What had D3 ever achieved? they asked. They talked of the bonds of trust between fellow officers ruptured by the climate of suspicion. Innocent men suffering, they said.

"Which innocent men?" I said. "That's a lie. Who? You name them!"

My hands were tied - I could not talk in specifics or generalities, and was forced to defend myself by stressing that every move we made in relation to a case was endorsed by F.J. personally. But without my explaining to them the long history of the search for penetration, they could not possibly understand.

Afterward I appealed to F.J. to publish a paper on the FLUENCY assessments. I outlined the sort of thing we could circulate to the top seventy officers: a resume of the continuous allegations of penetration since the war, including the attributions to the known spies wherever possible, and indicating the large number of still unexplained allegations. F.J. refused even to consider it.

"If I do this, Peter," he said, "it will break the heart of the Service. We would never recover."

"But these people don't even know Blunt was a spy. How can they possibly sympathize and support our work, if they aren't told something?"

"In my view," he said, "it would be better if no one knew, ever!"

"But how can we go on?" I asked him. "We've got young people coming into the Service every year. They listen to the tapes, they read the office histories, and they learn nothing about this, and it's the most important subject there is. How can you expect them to live a lie? You might as well not have done any of this work, unless you face up to it, and show people we have by explaining to them how it all happened, and say to people, 'Look, there are these gaps, and that's why we've got to carry on.' "

F.J. would have none of it. There were moments, not many it is true, but this was one, when he was immutable.

"What about me?" I asked finally. "How do I go on in the office, facing this level of hostility?"

He suddenly became steely.

''That is a price you have to pay for sitting in judgment on people."

In 1968, following his clearance, Michael Hanley was appointed head of Counterespionage. Ever since the traumatic events of the previous year Hanley and I had barely spoken. He had never said anything, but I could tell he blamed me for the decision to investigate him. When he took over he lost no time in trying to clip my wings. At first it was public slap-downs.

"Oh, Peter," he would say mockingly, "that's just another one of your mad theories."

But then his assault became more serious. He began to remove staff and resources from D3 wherever possible. At first I fought my corner, and went to F.J. to get them reinstated, but after a while I began to wonder whether it was worth the fight. The D3 research task was nearing completion. Only the high-level penetration issue remained unsolved, and that had been shelved for more than three years, with little sign that it would ever be revived. The constant strain of the work was taking its toll on my health. My thoughts turned toward retirement and to my first love - farming.

I decided that at least I should confront Hanley personally before giving up. I went to see him and asked him point-blank why he was trying to drive me out of the Service. He claimed there was no persecution. It was just that D3 had got too big, and there were increasing complaints that some of its less glamorous, but no less important tasks, like security assessments for ministers and the like, were being neglected.

"Well, give me an officer to look after the paperwork, then," I countered.

But Hanley refused.

"I know I'm a poor administrator," I admitted, "but are you sure the real reason for this isn't because you bear a grudge against this type of work?"

Hanley became red-faced. He knew what I was driving at, but denied his own experience was coloring his judgment.

"I suppose you know it was me?" I said. "Have you ever seen the file?"

The ice was broken. I went back to my office and pulled out the file on the HARRIET investigation. I showed Hanley everything - the way the search for the middling-grade agent arose from the FLUENCY report, the shelving of the hunt for the high-level spy, the D3 inquiries, the Watson and Proctor cases, the investigations, the visit to his psychiatrist.

"I never realized," he said, as he studied the files.

"We're the people who were asked to do the dirty work," I told him bitterly," and now when we've done most of the work, they want to brush it under the carpet and forget us, and forget the things we did."

Indoctrination into the burden of terrible secrets which so few have shouldered had a profound effect on Hanley. He realized that he had no experience of any of this, and his only knowledge of D Branch was from his time on the Polish desk in the 1950s. In order to make a success of D Branch he had to have guidance. One day he called me into his office and explained his problem. He was quite straightforward, and I respected him for it. He still wanted to break down D3. Its mammoth task was almost finished, he told me, and in any case, he wanted me to become his personal consultant on the whole reorganization of D Branch which he was planning. I was to have sight of every paper, and access to all cases in the Branch with the brief to guide him with my intimate knowledge of the previous fifteen years. Unlike any other officer, I had never moved from D Branch. As Dick White promised at my interview, I received no promotion, but then I was not forced to play musical chairs, switching from department to department every second year. D Branch had been my life. I knew every case and file. It was a fair offer, and I accepted immediately.

But that still left the problem of penetration.

"Who is going to continue that work? We can't let the thing slip again, otherwise another backlog of unresolved cases will build up," I said.

I had been convinced for more than a year that we needed some formal mechanism for looking at the whole question of internal penetration. The problem of the 1960s was that there was no department in the Service where allegations of penetration could be investigated.

Everything was ad hoc. FLUENCY had no formal status, it was just a working party. The work did not sit easily inside D1 (Investigations), because their correct job was to investigate penetrations that occurred outside the Service. It was precisely this lack of a mechanism which contributed to the accusations of "the Gestapo" in the office. We were seen to be people pursuing investigations outside the normal channels, and in an organization as conscious of hierarchy as MI5, that was a considerable problem. With a proper section devoted to the work, the Service would be able to see that the management had given its full backing. It would, in other words, have legitimacy.

There was one other factor in my mind, I knew that if the issue of high-level penetration was ever to be solved, it could be done only by giving fresh minds access to the problem. Over the past ten years the subject had become intimately bound up with personalities - principally mine and Arthur's. We were seen as men with grudges, or as men with obsessions, unable to conceive of any interpretation other than Hollis' being guilty. I lobbied Hanley and F J furiously, trying to persuade them to set up such a section, and staff it with people who had no connection with either Arthur or me, or with the terrible events of the previous ten years.

Hanley was doubtful, but F.J. seized on the idea immediately, and persuaded Hanley to incorporate it into his plans. By late 1968 the reorganization was complete. D Branch became K Branch, which was split into two separate units KX, which handled all investigative work, and had its own director on the Board, and KY, which was responsible for order of battle and operations, also with its own director. KX incorporated D1 (Investigations) and much of the old D3, and comprised three sections Kl and K2, which were Soviet and satellite investigating sections, K3, which was now a research section cut out of D3, a section servicing the investigation sections, and a new unit, K7, charged with sole responsibility for investigating allegations of penetration of the Intelligence Services. KY comprised K4, order of battle, K5, which was agent running and operations, and K6, which assumed responsibility for all security assessments and compiling the specialist records, ministerial briefings, special indexes, and record collection which previously had been under my control in D3.

Duncum Wagh was the first officer appointed to head K7. He was a good choice - a sensible, levelheaded officer who was always thorough in his reasoning and, once his mind was made up, doubly impressive in justifying his proposed course of action. His career had suffered unduly from his mistake in clearing Houghton after his wife's complaint ten years previously. But solid hard work, some of it on my Moscow Embassy Working Party, had earned him a major chance, and K7 was certainly that. He was supported by a forceful ex-marine officer named John Day. I strongly advised that nobody involved in the penetration issue to date should work in K7.

I had one meeting with Duncum Wagh, and handed over to him everything in my safe which related to FLUENCY - all the records from my own freelance inquiries into Hollis' background, my analyzes of the Lonsdale case, some work on the middling-grade agent It was only when he took them that I realized what a burden those small green combination boxes had been all those years.

"Here," I said, "it's your problem now, thank God!"

I had very little to do with K7 in the early days. Neither Duncum Wagh nor John Day wanted me around, for fear it would prejudice their own freedom of maneuver and credibility, and I understood that. I did introduce John Day to Blunt, and talked again through the whole question of why he had been allowed to leave MI5 by the Russians in 1945. Blunt always thought it was odd.

"I think if they had pressured me, I probably would have stayed on, at least for a bit. I loved the work, and adored Guy Liddell and Dick White, and I expect I could still have pursued my art but they never asked me."

Blunt could shed no light on whether there was already a replacement for him in the office, although he knew that was what concerned us. We showed him the VENONA message with the eight cryptonyms. But they meant nothing to him. The only fragment he had was a lunch he attended with Guy Burgess and Graham Mitchell at the Reform Club. It was clearly another looking-over session, but as to whether Guy had actually made an approach, Blunt claimed he knew nothing. A little later I was told that John Day had interrogated Mitchell at long last, and they were quite satisfied he was in the clear. As I always suspected, it came down to Hollis.

For a long time I heard nothing. Then one day John Day came to see me. He brought with him the first K7 report on high-level penetration. It concluded categorically that Hollis was the best candidate, and recommended his immediate investigation and interrogation.