HOLLIS WAS BORN in 1905, the son of a clergyman – as was Blunt. His father later was appointed Anglican bishop of Taunton, while one of his three brothers also became a bishop. Another brother, Christopher, a Catholic convert, became an MP and was an eminent writer and historian as well as a frequent contributor to humorous magazines like Punch. The third brother, Mark, was also in intelligence work, in military field security during the war, and later in Philby’s section of the secret service, as I have described.
Roger, who was a sickly child and suffered from inferiority feelings with respect to his brothers, was educated at Clifton College in Bristol and then entered Worcester College, Oxford, in 1924. At Oxford, he joined a circle dominated by the writer and aesthete Harold Acton. His political activity seemed to be confined to membership of the New Reform Club, but he was on terms of close friendship with Claud Cockburn, a sufficiently dedicated communist to become diplomatic and foreign correspondent for the Daily Worker before and throughout the Second World War.
Cockburn was suspected by MI5 because he published a newsletter containing such accurate intelligence that it looked as though he must have good Soviet sources. When Hollis eventually entered MI5, he never recorded that he had been close to Cockburn, as he should have done, and held Cockburn’s file in his own safe for several years.
Hollis was also a close friend of the late Maurice Richardson, the journalist and writer who for a time joined the Communist Party. Another left-wing influence at Oxford was the extraordinary Tom Driberg, whose espionage career will astonish even his friends when I disclose its details in subsequent chapters.
After only two years at Oxford, Hollis decided to quit and get a job because he felt he was unlikely to do well in the examinations. Originally, he and Maurice Richardson decided to leave together and go to Mexico, but Richardson backed down. Hollis therefore left on his own, determined for some unknown reason to go to China. His parents, angry at his premature departure from Oxford, refused to finance his journey, so he worked for a year in the Standard Bank in London to save enough to pay his passage to China. He seriously underestimated the costs, and by the time he reached Penang, in Malaya, he was down to £10. He succeeded in securing a job there with the British American Tobacco Company (BAT) and was eventually posted to Shanghai where, according to old colleagues who are still alive, he worked in the advertising department.
Hollis’s arrival in China was an expression of the dogged determination that was to characterise him throughout his life. Even his friends agree that he was not particularly talented. The MI5 backtrack revealed that in Shanghai Hollis became friendly with Agnes Smedley, an American left-wing journalist prominent in the English-speaking community there. Miss Smedley, who was officially a correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, was then in her mid-thirties, had spent some time in Moscow and had entered China on a forged American passport. There is no doubt that she was a dedicated agent of the Comintern, promoting world revolution, and was deeply involved with several Soviet spy rings in Shanghai, which, at that time, was a major centre of the Comintern conspiracy.
One of these rings was created and run by Richard Sorge, a German who was a professional spy for the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army, first in China and then, with spectacular success, in Japan. Sorge’s assignment in Shanghai was to set up a spy ring for operations inside China, but he also managed to recruit two of the most important members of his Japanese group there. In his memoirs, written shortly before he was hanged in Tokyo, Sorge recorded how Smedley had helped him by introducing friends, whom he was able to recruit, and allowing him to use her house as a rendezvous. Hollis was in Shanghai when communists were being butchered by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops, and his resentment at this as a young man might have facilitated his recruitment in the Comintern, as it certainly did with others, because Soviet intelligence was making a major effort to exploit the circumstances.
Sorge is also believed to have recruited a young German communist of Slav origin who arrived in Shanghai as the wife of an architect. This woman, who later received intelligence training in Moscow and became a most productive Soviet agent, winning two Orders of the Red Banner, was none other than Ursula Beurton, whose real name was Ruth Kuczynski. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, she was to become a Soviet espionage courier in Britain during the Second World War and moved to Oxford just as Hollis arrived there with his evacuated section of MI5.
Before going to China, Beurton and her German husband had worked for the Red Army in Poland. By 1940, he was imprisoned by the Chinese for espionage activities, and his wife, then well established in Switzerland, decided to divorce him. Her purpose in doing this was to secure British nationality before moving on to Britain. On securing a divorce, she immediately married a British member of her Swiss spy ring and thereby secured the passport that enabled her to enter Britain, which she did with little delay, travelling via neutral Lisbon.
Richard Sorge left Shanghai for Moscow in 1932 before proceeding to Tokyo. It is not known whether Hollis met him, but he may well have done so because the European community in Shanghai was small and close socially. Miss Smedley herself was an active recruiter of Soviet intelligence agents for the Red Army. It is known that the spy ‘Elli’, who may have been Hollis, worked first for Soviet military intelligence (GRU), probably before being taken over by the KGB, which usually acquires control of the most important spies.
According to the CIA investigations into Hollis’s background, there was also a ‘particularly brutal’ Soviet recruiter active in Shanghai at the time, and Hollis knew him. The ‘brutality’ referred to the ruthlessness with which the Russian used bribery, women and blackmail to secure agents. Hollis was certainly susceptible to sexual indulgence and developed a notable reputation as a ladies’ man and a retailer of risqué stories. (It is almost certainly coincidental, however, that in the MI5 booklet Their Trade is Treachery, prepared while Hollis was director general, one of the Six Easy Lessons on How to Become a Spy is ‘Develop a few vices, especially abroad, so that with luck you can be compromised and blackmailed.’)
The investigators found that Hollis had been very hard up in China, where he also eventually worked in Peking, Hangkow and Dairen. The recruitment of a young employee of a tobacco company would seem to make little sense, but, as the history of the Ring of Five so clearly demonstrates, Soviet intelligence believes in backing long shots that it can control and then push into positions of trust.
After about nine years’ service in China, Hollis contracted tuberculosis and was sent by BAT to Switzerland for treatment. On the way, he travelled over the Trans-Siberian railway from Vladivostock and spent a little time in Russia. This could just conceivably account for a statement by Gouzenko, the GRU defector, that there was ‘something Russian in “Ellis”’s background’, though a relationship with the White Russian communities in the Chinese cities where Hollis worked would be a more credible allusion.
It could be coincidence that Hollis and Beurton were in Shanghai and Oxford at the same time; or they might both have been recruited in China and brought together in Oxford in the Soviet interest.
It is perhaps an even stranger coincidence that Hollis and Beurton should also have been contemporaries in Switzerland, while Hollis was there for treatment. Beurton lived in the Montreux area, but I have been unable to discover where Hollis was located. If Beurton recruited Hollis to the Soviet cause, it could have been accomplished in Switzerland, though the Fluency Committee regarded China as more likely.
The Swiss treatment was successful, but BAT regarded Hollis’s health as too delicate for further employment, and he left the company. Though surprisingly athletic, he was to retain the look of someone who had had tuberculous and he became progressively so round-shouldered that he looked almost hunched.
At the beginning of 1936 Hollis was basically a broken man. He had no degree, his health was suspect and his experience in China was not likely to be helpful in securing a post in England. The only work he could find was as a clerk typist. Nevertheless, he was still able to afford to play a lot of golf, at which he was a devastatingly consistent performer, with a single-figure handicap, having secured a half blue at Oxford. He was also a good tennis player.
Through his tennis connections, Hollis met an army major and told him that he was keen to get a job in MI5. This in itself was odd because he had no special qualifications for the work. But, when Soviet intelligence secures a promising recruit, he or she is urged to get a job in MI5, the secret service, Government Communication Headquarters (the radio-interception organisation), The Times, the BBC, the Foreign Office, or the Home Office – in that order of preference. On the major’s recommendation, Hollis was interviewed by an MI5 board, which rejected him but suggested that, with his foreign experience, he should try the secret service.