Spycatcher (57 page)

Victor's finest achievement for MI5 was securing F.J.'s succession.

F.J. was never a popular figure in Whitehall. He was too much his own man, and too secret even for that bastion of secrecy. Normally the outgoing Director-General has the right to choose his successor, but as F.J. approached retirement in 1972, the Home Office, and especially Philip Allen, decided it was time to exert authority. Allen was convinced that an outsider should be appointed. He had become suspicious of MI5 and feared they had become a dangerous repository of scandal. He knew only sketchy details of the full extent of the traumas of the mole hunts, but he knew about Blunt and Long, and he knew enough to be worried. He was alarmed by what seemed to him to be the cavalier use of immunities, and the undoubtedly poor caliber of MI5 management. He wanted a safe pair of hands at the helm of the organization - someone who could tell him what was going on, someone he could trust.

Simkins finally retired, to my great relief, about a year before F.J.'s scheduled retirement, and was replaced by Michael Hanley. As far as Allen was concerned, Hanley was neither experienced enough nor independent enough to be entrusted with the top job. Allen's preferred candidate was Sir James Waddell, a deputy secretary at the Home Office, who was responsible for Police and Security Affairs, and handled all day-to-day liaison between MI5 and the Home Office. Waddell was a dependable mandarin who had somehow missed out on a permanent secretary's job. Allen, to whom he had given loyal service, wanted to install him as Director-General of the Security Service.

Waddell's prospective appointment was viewed with considerable concern inside MI5. He was a finicky man who insisted on the last dot and comma on intercept warrant applications. He lacked the experience as an intelligence officer to gain the respect of its senior officers. Many of us felt his candidacy was pure Whitehall expediency, which would set the Service back a decade, in the same way that Rennie's appointment as C just a few years before had caused a massive slump in morale in MI6.

Of course, there was another consideration as well. There were many secrets which M15 had kept from their political and Civil Service masters, and the last thing anyone in MI5 wanted at that stage was the explosive story of the mole hunts to receive an airing around Whitehall.

The first I heard of the problem of succession was when F.J. mentioned it in late 1971. He told me he was determined to stop Waddell taking over the Service, and said he had already approached Dick White to ask for assistance. But the situation looked gloomy. A committee of top permanent secretaries chaired by the Cabinet Secretary and attached to the Senior Appointments Selection Committee had already recommended Waddell, and although F.J. had put forward Hanley's name he had received no votes at all. He was too new, too inexperienced, and the mandarins knew too little about him.

"Is there anything you can do with your powerful friend?" asked F.J., referring in his customary manner to Victor.

At the time I used to see Victor informally once a week - sometimes in his room at the Cabinet Office, more often at his home. On my next visit I raised the question of the succession. It had all the right elements to fire Victor's imagination - a heady brew of intrigue and secrecy.

He told me he had already been alerted to the situation by Dick White, who had told him that he supported Hanley for the job. Dick had initially given some thought to supporting Maurice Oldfield for the job. Sir John Rennie, anxious to remove the man who effectively ran MI6, even though he himself was the titular head, had put Oldfield's name forward, but Oldfield had made it plain he preferred to sit it out and wait for another chance as Director C if Rennie retired. (Rennie did retire prematurely after the disclosure that his son had been convicted of a drugs charge, and Oldfield succeeded him.)

"Do the Service want Hanley?" asked Victor. He often used me as a sounding board for Service as opposed to management opinion.

"Certainly," I replied.

"Do you have anything against him?"

I told him the story of the HARRIET affair. Although Victor already knew of my suspicions about penetration, and I had discussed both Hollis and Mitchell with him, the fact that Hanley had once been a suspect was new to him.

I told him I was quite convinced he was in the clear, and so were the Americans. I told him the Service were dead set against Waddell, and that there would undoubtedly be serious trouble if he were appointed.

"We need all the help we can get, Victor!"

"Ted won't like it," he told me, for the moment assuming the GRAVITAS of a senior civil servant. Then he cast the somehow inappropriate mantle aside, and fell into his more natural conspiratorial manner.

"Let's see what we can do," he muttered, and asked me to arrange for him to meet Hanley as soon as possible.

By this time Hanley and I had established a reasonable working relationship. HARRIET was always a block to any warmth, but he dealt with me in a straightforward manner, and I tried to be as much help as I could, guiding him around the previous twenty years of counterintelligence rather like an accomplished chauffeur, pointing out the sights to admire, and the potholes to avoid. I knew he would bridle when I told him of my meeting with F.J. and Victor. There was just a trace of socialism about Hanley, which showed itself in utterances about achieving the job on his merits, not through the old boy network. But in the end ambition was the better master, and he agreed to go with me one evening to Victor's elegant flat in St. James's Place. I had one drink and made a tactical withdrawal to my club to allow them to talk freely. The next day Victor rang me up.

"He's a very good choice," he said "We must meet tonight and make our plans."

That night, over a particularly fine claret, we drew up our campaign. Dick White had obviously failed to impress his choice either on his mandarin colleagues or on Ted Heath. Dick was always diffident when it came to staff matters, and had not been able to summon up the gumption to bang the table. Of course, that was never his style. Undoubtedly his one failure in his career was his inability to make good appointments. Too often he was betrayed by sentiment or orthodoxy. He overpromoted Hollis and Cumming in MI5, and he failed to order the decisive purge necessary in the Philby infected MI6 until much too late. It was the same with Hanley. He knew what was best for the Service, but he seemed unable to grasp the nettle and act.

To be fair, he never enjoyed good relations with Edward Heath. Their styles were so dissimilar. Dick worshipped Harold Macmillan, and the grand old man had a very high regard for his Chief of Intelligence. Similarly, he got on well with Harold Wilson. They shared a suppleness of mind, and Wilson appreciated Dick's reassuring and comforting manner on vexed issues such as Rhodesia. But Heath was a thrusting, hectoring man, quite alien to anything Dick had encountered before, and he found himself increasingly unable to stamp his personality on the Prime Minister.

Victor and I went through all the options, even at one point considering whether we could run Victor himself as an alternative candidate. I knew he had secretly hankered after the job for years, but although his appointment would have been a brilliant and popular one, he knew he was too old, and in any case, the Think Tank was the real challenge for a man of his intellectual horizons.

We discussed casting around for support in the scientific community, and we decided that Victor would approach people like Sir William Cook to gain their support for Hanley. Victor also told me he would contrive a safe meeting with Heath.

"It's no good bringing it up formally at No 10," he told me. "As soon as Robert Armstrong sees it, or hears of it, word will get back to the bloody Permanent Under Secretaries!"

Robert Armstrong, Heath's Principal Private Secretary (today Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service), was a key figure in the power struggle, since no one else had closer or more continuous access to Heath. Any hint of special pleading by Victor would certainly be reported by him to the Permanent Secretaries' Committee. Victor decided that the best plan was to get to Heath in an unguarded moment when Armstrong was not there. The best opportunity was the next Think Tank weekend conference, scheduled for Chequers in a few weeks' time.

"I'll take Ted out for a walk in the garden, where Robert can't hear, and I'll bend his ear."

As it happened, I was beginning to see a good deal of Robert Armstrong myself. I had recently been reviewing the American VENONA, and one unidentified cryptonym in participial had begun to interest me. It appeared in the traffic as "Agent Number 19." Agent 19 was clearly a very important Soviet asset, who passed over details of a succession of significant wartime discussions between Churchill and Roosevelt during the Trident Talks in June 1943.

The Americans had assumed the identity of Agent 19 was Eduard Benes, the former Czechoslovakian President, whose reward for a lifetime's work as a Soviet stooge was to be toppled from power ignominiously in 1948. Benes attended the Trident Talks, and was well known as a conduit of intelligence to the Russians. However, when I looked at the text of the messages themselves, I became distinctly skeptical about this explanation. The conversations Agent 19 was reporting were clearly informal discussions between Churchill and Roosevelt about plans for the Second Front, and in particular naval and shipping dispositions. It struck me as improbable that Benes would have been permitted into these discussions, especially since Czechoslovakia had no ships at all, being a landlocked country.

I began to wonder if Agent 19 were perhaps someone closer to home. The first task was to locate any available British records of the meetings between Roosevelt and Churchill at the Trident Talks to see if I could find a record of the particular meeting referred to by Agent 19 and, if possible, a list of who attended it.

The search for the phantom Trident discussion was quite the most bizarre experience of my career. Victor arranged for me to meet Robert Armstrong. He was keen to help. He was a fast-rising mandarin, already tipped as a future Cabinet Secretary, and since he would need the support of the intelligence community to obtain the job, he was anxious to build up friendly relations. He threw himself boyishly into the task of searching No. 10 Downing Street for any available records. But after several weeks we drew a blank.

Armstrong suggested I call on Lord Ismay, Churchill's former Chief of Staff, and Sir John Colville, his former Private Secretary, but although both men remembered the Trident Talks, they had not been present at these particular discussions. I tried Mary Churchill, but she had no records either. Lastly, Armstrong arranged for me to see Martin Gilbert, Churchill's historian. For each day Churchill was Prime Minister, one of his private secretaries kept a record of his engagements and Gilbert had all the volumes. Perhaps here there would be a record. I gave Gilbert the relevant date, and he searched through the indexed diaries.

"Good God," he said, "the diary for that date is blank!"

The search for Agent 19 had run into the sand, and it remains unsolved to this day.

The row over the succession to F.J. fell at the height of my search for Agent 19, so I suggested to Victor that I, rather than he, sound out Robert Armstrong. It was important to maintain Victor's position of neutrality, but no one could blame me for partisanship in the matter of the succession. On my next visit to No. 10 I made a light reference to the fears inside MI5. He smiled.

"The cards are stacked against you," he said. "I don't think it's worth pushing on this one."

I told him that if the wise men were intent on Waddell, they were making a mistake.

"We aren't being civil servants," I told him, "and Waddell will be out of his depth in the job... he'll play it too much by the rules."

Armstrong betrayed little himself, beyond telling me what I already knew, that the Permanent Secretaries were firmly behind Waddell.

"They just want to reward him, and they can't find him a top job in any of the other ministries!" I said bitterly.

Armstrong laughed.

"Oh no, Peter, we're not that conspiratorial!"

A few weeks later I saw Victor again. He had managed to have his talk with Heath in the sunshine at Chequers, and he told him of the strong resistance inside MI5 to the appointment of an outsider. Heath was sympathetic, but explained that he would have to have a very good reason to reject unanimous Civil Service advice. But eventually Victor managed to persuade him to interview both candidates personally.

It was a major breakthrough. We were all certain that Hanley would impress Heath with the force of his personality, whereas Waddell's diffidence would be sure to tell against him. When Hanley got the news his demeanor changed. He could see events were moving in his direction. Rather pompously he came into my office and told me that he was to see the Prime Minister the following day.

"And I don't need a briefing, thank you very much."

I thought the announcement would come quickly, but the days passed and we heard nothing. Throughout the Whitehall village, antennae were out to catch signs of a result. On every visit I made to the Home Office I checked on the latest state of play. But there was no news, apart from the insistent refrain: "Philip Allen will not have Hanley at any price."

At the weekend my wife and I traveled to Dolgellau in Wales, to buy cows at an auction for the farm we had recently purchased in Cornwall for our retirement. Ever since Hollis' interrogation, and my departure from D3, I had begun planning a return to agriculture, and a less painful future away from the whispering corridors and paper mountains of MI5. Whitehall was the last thing on my mind as the auctioneer rattled on in an impenetrable Welsh dialect. Steers and heifers were slapped in and out of the small crowded ring, their owners croaking and whistling to keep their animals alert.

Suddenly across the loudspeaker I heard a voice.

"Can Mr. Wright from London please come to the office for a telephone call..."

I struggled to make my way through the crowded terrace, past a hundred tightly pressed Welsh farmers each craning for a view of the ring.