WHEN HOLLIS DULY made his application, the secret service carried out its own inquiries and turned him down, ostensibly on the grounds that his health was not reliable enough for service abroad. Because of this, there must have been a secret service file on Hollis, but this was destroyed at some later stage. It may be that a known major spy, so far completely concealed from the public but whom I shall identify later, was employed on ‘weeding’ files for the secret service – removing documents no longer considered of use – and thus destroyed the record on Hollis.

In spite of these rebuffs, which would have deterred most normal candidates, Hollis persisted in his efforts to join MI5, and eventually, at a tennis party where he may have contrived an entry, he met Jane Sissmore, a woman officer of MI5. This woman, later called Jane Archer, was highly regarded in MI5, especially as an interrogator. On her say-so, therefore, Hollis was taken on the MI5 strength in 1936 with the understanding that he would work as her assistant.

There is no suggestion that Miss Sissmore took Hollis into MI5 for any other reason than that she believed he would be useful there when, with war in the offing, the organisation needed to expand. His meeting with her may have been coincidental, or he may have been directed toward her by someone who knew her position, for in those days MI5 officers kept the nature of their employment secret. The director general at the time of Hollis’s recruitment was the legendary Maj. Gen. Sir Vernon Kell, who had held command, with unchallenged integrity, from the inception of MI5 in 1909. Presumably, he approved of the recruitment, but at that time there was no positive vetting of candidates with a search into background and connections. The fact that Hollis’s father was a bishop would be, in all probability, sufficient evidence of his loyalty.

Having engineered his entry into MI5, Hollis was to remain there for twenty-nine years without a break, almost always at headquarters and without experience as a field agent, though paying many liaison visits abroad. Eventually, more through time serving than outstanding aptitude, he occupied the post of deputy director general for three years and then, for nine years, the top position itself.

As assistant to Jane Sissmore, he was involved with those departments of MI5 responsible for overseeing Soviet and communist operations in the United Kingdom and colonies. This meant that he had daily access to all known information about the activities of Russian espionage, subversion and sabotage agents. He also knew of the MI5 efforts to penetrate the British Communist Party and to monitor the activities of British communists who might be assisting Soviet bloc agents.

The backtrack into the MI5 penetration produced one important item that might have implicated Hollis. For five years, in the late ’30s, British intelligence had been successfully decoding the Russian radio traffic to its Comintern agents in Europe. MI5 had access to the results, which were most useful, but suddenly the radio traffic ceased, the last message being an announcement that other means would have to be used for communication. This disappointing event occurred around 1938, after Hollis had arrived at MI5 but before Blunt joined.

Late in 1940, Hollis experienced one of several strokes of good fortune that were to speed his promotion. Jane Sissmore had a major quarrel with her superiors in which she insulted the deputy director general, Brigadier Harker, and, at her own request, was transferred to the secret service. Hollis automatically succeeded her and then became acting head of Section E. He and his department were soon moved as an evacuation measure to Blenheim Palace at Woodstock, the home of the Duke of Marlborough.

Hollis married in 1937, but, according to close friends, he chose the wrong wife, as they were temperamentally incompatible. He is remembered by a wartime woman colleague as being ‘very good-looking, in spite of his round shoulders, dark, and of medium height’. Others who worked with him say that he was secretively quiet but dry and witty in conversation, with an inexhaustible fund of smutty stories. He was known as a good briefer, concise and clear with his instructions. When he attended meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he usually said very little unless questioned. ‘He never believed in stirring things up: controversy was not for him,’ George Young, a former deputy director of the secret service, recalls.

He did, however, occasionally raise eyebrows in areas outside MI5 concerning his judgement about the dangers of communism. Col. Noel Wild, who had been in charge of deception techniques at SHAEF during the war and was later involved in cover plans in the Defence Ministry, told me of an incident that had worried him. When he and Hollis had been discussing a possible operation against extreme left-wing trade union leaders, Hollis had predicted, ‘There will never be a threat from communism to this country.’

According to Sir Dick White, who eventually wrote Hollis’s obituary notice in The Times, ‘the hotter the climate of national security the cooler he became’. That, no doubt, was an excellent temperament for a director general of MI5, beset, as Hollis was, with an unprecedented succession of security disasters. But, as Philby and Blunt showed, it was also an essential attribute for a spy, invidious though the comparison may sound.

Hollis was still in charge of Section F in 1944 when Philby became his opposite number in the secret service, as I have described. It is certain that Philby was then an active spy for Russia, even, according to himself, an officer of the KGB. He was under continuous KGB control and took no decisions on any important issue without first consulting his Soviet superiors, using the excuse that he needed time for thought in order to effect the necessary meetings. If Hollis was then a penetration agent operating on a similar scale, as those who investigated him believe, he and Philby formed a most dangerous axis.

When Clement Attlee appointed Sir Percy Sillitoe, the former chief constable, director general of MI5 in May 1946, the prime task allotted to him was the investigation and elimination of communist subversion. He instructed Hollis to brief him in writing, but all that Hollis did was to hand him a description of the state of the Communist Party, which he had already compiled. Sillitoe’s biographer, A. W. Cockerill, records that Sir Percy was deeply disappointed because Hollis provided little evidence of communist subversion. Yet, by 1950, Attlee and his Cabinet were convinced from their own resources that British communists were behind a series of crippling strikes and acts of subversion.

Sir Percy Sillitoe’s son, Tony, has told me how the secret service career officers reacted to the appointment of a policeman to direct them with a campaign of noncooperation and personal hostility, which was not unconnected with the fact that most of the senior promotions had been set back several years:

In 1947 Alexander Foote, a Briton who had been a key member of the astonishingly successful Soviet espionage operation in Switzerland called the Lucy Ring, offered his services to the West and was heavily interrogated by MI5. Among many things he revealed were details of the espionage activities of Ursula Beurton. He told them how Beurton, then known to him only as ‘Sonya’, had been detailed to train him in operating ‘music boxes’, as the KGB called radio transmitters. She had tried to convince Foote that she wanted to leave Switzerland because she was so ‘shattered’ by Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Hitler, but her previously total dedication to the communist cause suggested a different reason for the determination of this ‘demurely dressed woman with black hair, good figure and even better legs’ to reach Britain.

Hollis, still the key figure in Soviet counter-espionage, could not ignore Foote’s information had he wanted to and was obliged to take some action against Ursula, who was living near Chipping Norton with her English husband, Len Brewer, a Soviet agent also known as Leon Beurton. What happened suggests that the approach to this woman spy was criminally soft. She was told that MI5 knew that she had been a Soviet agent in her early days but was convinced that she had been totally disillusioned by the unprovoked Soviet attack on Finland in November 1939 – a year before she had arrived in England. This made no sense in view of her known participation in the Lucy Ring in 1940.

Naturally, she agreed with what the MI5 interviewers had been instructed to tell her, assured them that she had never spied in Britain, but refused to cooperate any further. If MI5 had made routine inquiries in the area of George Street in the Summertown district of Oxford where she had lived, they could have found evidence that she regularly used a radio transmitter during the war, putting up an aerial from a neighbour’s chimney for the purpose. They might also have learned of her regular visits to the Banbury area, where she had taken over the atomic secrets supplied by Klaus Fuchs, and of contacts with other agents living in the Oxford area, as Hollis had been during the time that she was active. The MI5 men made no effort to see her again and had little chance to do so, for Ursula and her husband moved to East Germany.

The team that eventually was to investigate Hollis discovered not only that Ursula Beurton had been a long-term professionally trained spy but that it was her brother Jurgen, another German taking refuge in Britain, who had first been approached by Fuchs when the atom scientist decided to betray secret information. Furthermore, her father, Professor Rene Kuczynski, an economist teaching in Oxford, also supplied secret political information that he secured from conversations with Sir Stafford Cripps, then a member of the War Cabinet.

Whatever the purposes of the MI5 visit to Ursula, the only one it served was to warn her that she was under suspicion and should get herself behind the Iron Curtain. The implications of her presence in Oxford, as regards Hollis, were not appreciated fully until 1967.

When the Attlee government decided to ‘purge’ known communists out of sensitive areas of the civil service in 1948 because they could be potential spies, Hollis was in charge of the drive. A few high-level communists were removed from secret work, and the Communist Party made maximum propaganda use of them. But several, who should have been detected in the more stringent screening measures supposed to have been introduced, remained in their trusted positions. A few, who had been transferred to non-secret work, even managed to filter back during the expansion consequent to the rearmament program of the ’50s.

Sir Percy Sillitoe, who had become head of MI5 in 1946, was determined to apply the communist purge to his own organisation but met with considerable internal resistance and scant help from Hollis.

One communist of historic significance, who was taken into top-secret work during the period when Hollis was responsible for overseeing communist activities in Britain, was Dr Klaus Fuchs. His communist past was known soon after he arrived as a German refugee in 1933, but MI5, which investigated him six times between 1941 and 1948, raised only vague objections, even after his name was seen on a captured copy of the Gestapo wanted list. An MI5 analysis in 1946 suggested that Fuchs might be a Soviet agent, but the report from Hollis’s section rated the risk as slight, and he was cleared for work at the new Harwell atomic station.

Fuchs was not exposed as the result of any inquiries by MI5 but by a fluke, of which American cypher experts made brilliant use. Normally, the KGB used the safe one-time pad system for transmitting secret messages in code. In that system, the person sending the message and the one receiving it both have a small, identical pad composed of pages each covered with lines of letters chosen at random. The encoder uses the letters from one page to encipher a message, and the decoder, knowing which page was used, can decipher it. Since each page is different, the code is virtually unbreakable provided that any page is used only once. During the war, however, a Russian cypher section, possibly having run short of one-time pads, or through error, used some pages twice. In a superb and arduous operation codenamed ‘Bride’ (later ‘Vanosa’), led by an American cryptanalyst, Meredith Gardner, many of the wartime Russian messages, including much information about Soviet espionage activities by more than 2,000 agents, were deciphered. Among those decoded in 1949 were messages indicating that Fuchs had been a long-term Soviet spy.

The intercepts first indicated that there had been a major leakage of nuclear bomb secrets from the Los Alamos laboratories involving a scientist there. A later deciphered message revealed that the scientist, whose codename was used in the traffic, had a sister studying at an American university. This made Fuchs the prime suspect.

That kind of evidence is not admissible in a British court, and, in any case, it could not have been used because at that time the American and British security authorities were most anxious to avoid giving any indication that they had broken the Russian codes, ‘Operation Bride’ being under the highest security classification. So, though MI5 was convinced of Fuchs’s guilt, the only way he could be prosecuted was by inducing him to confess.

In that operation, MI5 recorded a major success, partly through the skill and patience of the interrogator, Jim Skardon, but partly for another reason, not before disclosed. After Fuchs had repeatedly declined to confess anything, MI5 was about to abandon the task when a woman, who had listened in to Fuchs’s replies to Skardon’s questions and transcribed them, said that she felt ‘in her bones’ that Fuchs was lying on four specific points and not very convincingly. She urged Skardon to try again and concentrate more forcefully on them. He did so, and Fuchs broke down. So, though Jim Skardon deserves all the credit he has been given, his success owed much to a woman’s intuition.

As FBI records show, the KGB knew that Fuchs was in grave danger because one of the few people fully informed about ‘Operation Bride’ and its findings was Philby, the secret service liaison man with the FBI and the CIA in Washington, whose duty it was to pass the information on to London. Indeed, one of his main functions was to assist in the interpretation of the results of ‘Bride’. No attempt, however, was made to warn Fuchs or to retrieve him by an organised defection.

By that time, Fuchs had ceased to spy for Russia, so the KGB could ‘burn’ him without much sacrifice, especially as his conviction would be guaranteed to do devastating damage to Anglo–American interchange of atomic secrets. However, the main reason for the KGB’s failure to warn Fuchs was probably to preserve Philby’s position, which was of great value to them. The defection of Fuchs would inevitably lead to a major inquiry into the source of the leak that he was under suspicion, and Philby, who was then above suspicion, might himself be endangered. The Russians knew, moreover, that if Fuchs held out and managed to avoid confessing, there was no way that he could be prosecuted.

The KGB also deliberately provides an agency that it has penetrated with occasional success in the hope of averting suspicion against itself. In the Fuchs case, the success would appear to accrue to MI5, where there was a high-level KGB agent in need of protection, but it would also keep the spotlight off Philby in the sister service. All intelligence agencies play this game on occasion, but, while MI5 regarded it rather as deliberately losing a piece in checkers, the KGB played chess – with checkmate the objective.

After Fuchs had been convicted and sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment, he was interrogated in jail by both MI5 and the FBI. Aware that his controller, Ursula Beurton, whose name he knew, was safely in East Germany, he identified her from photographs and gave information against her. It was made to appear that other spies, who were eventually arrested, had been identified by Fuchs. Harry Gold, his courier when he was at the Los Alamos bomb laboratory in New Mexico, was picked out by him but only after being shown a film, when he recognised his walk. An American soldier called David Greenglass and the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg also appeared to have been tracked down by such clever detective work. But the truth is that all had been named repeatedly in the KGB coded traffic, and the secret of its decipherment had to be covered. Had the FBI been able to reveal the extent of this evidence, there would have been less opposition to the execution of the Rosenbergs. The FBI records show that Philby and his Soviet controllers must also have known about the intention to arrest the Rosenbergs, but again elected to avoid warning them.

‘Operation Bride’ also provided irrefutable evidence of the existence of a spy network in Australia based on the Soviet embassy in Canberra and involving civil servants and communist union leaders. MI5 was greatly perturbed because of the decision to build rocket and atom-bomb test ranges in the Australian desert. The Americans told the British that the Australians were to be given no secret information until they set up effective security arrangements.

Sir Percy Sillitoe went out in 1948 to see the Australian Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, and was soon followed by his chief security adviser in the shape of Roger Hollis. After talks with Hollis, Chifley agreed to a proposal by a senior Australian civil servant that a special surveillance and screening operation should be carried out on a big Russian delegation that was due to visit Australia. The operation, which involved scores of watchers and other people, produced no evidence whatever, and it was assumed that there had been a leak to the Russians.

A further public disaster in the atomic field, resulting in damaging publicity for MI5, occurred in October 1950 when another nuclear physicist from the Harwell atomic research station, Dr Bruno Pontecorvo, a Jewish refugee from Italy, suddenly fled to Moscow with his wife and family. It quickly became known that Pontecorvo and his wife had long been dedicated communists and that, while the former had been screened several times – most rigorously after the unmasking of Fuchs – the security authorities had never detected them.

Furthermore, inquiries revealed what seemed to be a dreadful misunderstanding between the Canadian security authorities and MI5. The Canadians believed that Pontecorvo had been cleared by MI5 before he reached Canada as a member of the British team in 1943, but MI5 claimed that he was never in Britain before he joined the Canadian project because, previously, he had been living as a refugee in the United States.

Pontecorvo had retained his house in the United States while he was away working in Canada, and the FBI, being suspicious of him, searched it. They found documentary evidence that both he and his wife were communists and intensely anti-American and sent a warning report to the British embassy. The British liaison man in Washington at the time was Philby, so, once again, luck came to the rescue of those dedicated to the Soviet service. Philby sat on the report, which was found years later in the embassy records. Had it been forwarded to London, as the FBI expected, it is likely that Pontecorvo would have been refused permission to work at Harwell when he came to Britain after the war. Instead, a Canadian security clearance, which had never taken place, was accepted by MI5.

Pontecorvo, who was granted British citizenship in 1948 on the basis that he had lived five years in Canada, defected to Russia with his family in October 1950. It is now certain that the journey and its concealment were organised by the KGB, which had induced Pontecorvo to leave Britain on short notice. His expertise was needed in connection with the crash development of the Soviet H-bomb. He was one of the few scientists in the world with knowledge of the type of nuclear reactor required to make the essential component of the H-bomb called lithium deuteride.

It is not known if Pontecorvo went out of ideological loyalty or the offer of more exciting conditions of work, or was blackmailed. Whatever his motive when he defected, the MI5 department of which Hollis was in charge appeared to have been taken by surprise.

When Cabinet and departmental papers relating to 1940 were released to the Public Record Office on 1 January 1981, under the thirty-year rule, those concerning Fuchs and Pontecorvo were withheld for a further twenty years, until 2001. I have been assured that there is nothing in those papers of genuine security value, in the sense that they would be of any assistance to a foreign power. It would seem, therefore, that the only purpose in extending their suppression is political. The papers might show that the Attlee administration had been warned by MI5, if belatedly, that Fuchs was a slight security risk, and elected to take no action because he had learned so many American nuclear secrets while working in the United States that his services were essential. Until 1948, the Labour government’s decision to make and to stockpile atomic bombs was an official secret. The arrest and trial of Fuchs would inevitably have revealed it – with loud outcries from the Labour left. Furthermore, it would have nullified the strenuous efforts then being made by the government to regain access to American atomic secrets denied under US legislation.