IN RETIREMENT ON a modest pension, Sir Roger Hollis went to live in a cottage in Catcott in Somerset. There he took part in the village life, becoming a rural district councillor, and is remembered by a near neighbour, Mr F. M. Heywood, as ‘very pleasant, much liked in the village. He was quiet and never said a word about his old job, though we knew what it had been.’

He played more golf, improving his game sufficiently to represent the county. He became captain of the Burnham-Berrow Club and president of the Somerset Golfing Union. None of this would seem to fit the character of a Soviet spy, but neither did Anthony Blunt’s posts as director of the Courtauld Institute and surveyor of the Queen’s pictures.

Hollis retained contact with a few old friends, who remember him with affection, but, while it is customary for former chiefs of the security and intelligence services to meet in London on special social occasions, Sir Roger did not attend them. On one occasion, at a dinner for a retiring senior civil servant, all the former surviving intelligence and security chiefs were invited with one exception. ‘Of course, we didn’t invite Hollis,’ the man who had organised the dinner explained. Nor did Hollis receive any of the appointments offered to men of distinction in their retirement, whereas Arthur Martin, the officer he had fired, was given a retirement post in the infrastructure of Parliament.

At the height of the suspicions against him, in 1966, he was awarded a KBE in the New Year Honours. I am told that those involved in recommending the Queen to give this routine award would not have been informed of the suspicions, and no attempt was made to stop the award. Nor was Anthony Blunt deprived of his knighthood when he confessed to having been a spy. That occurred only after his treachery became public knowledge.

Hollis became national news in February 1968 when he divorced his wife after thirty-one years of marriage. Lady Hollis, who died recently, named ‘the other woman’ as Miss Edith ‘Val’ Hammond, who had been Hollis’s secretary in MI5 for eighteen years. Hollis was extremely secretive by nature, and, if he did indulge in extramural clandestine activities, Miss Hammond knew nothing about them. Popular in the organisation, she was promoted to officer rank after Hollis retired but left soon afterward to marry him in 1968. It seems unlikely that he ever told her that he was under suspicion or had been interrogated. He certainly never mentioned it to close friends whom I have questioned.

In 1970, Hollis was invited to MI5 headquarters in London and officially faced with the allegations about him. He was seen first by his successor, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, who said in a friendly way that the allegations just had to be cleared up. He was then transferred to a ‘safe house’ nearby, which had been ‘taped and miked’ – as he must have guessed – for a full interrogation that lasted two days. His interrogators, led by an ex-marine commando, John Day, were former colleagues, so the atmosphere must have been electric.

Hollis was taken through the whole of his early life and did not hold back on his friendship with communists at Oxford or on his meetings with Agnes Smedley in Shanghai. But he was vague and misleading about his life after he returned to Britain. It was noted, for instance, that he said that he could not remember the address of the first house in which he had lived after his first marriage. Inquiries had shown that a former Oxford University friend, Archie Lyall, who had also been a companion of Burgess, had lived only four doors down. Lyall had worked in the secret service while Hollis was in MI5 in London, and, apart from the likelihood that they met professionally, they had used the same railway station.

Being a huge, shambling man, fat, flamboyant and irrepressibly amiable, Lyall would have been difficult to miss, yet Hollis denied that he ever knew that Lyall had been such a close neighbour. This was interpreted as a device to avoid admitting any connection with his former friend because anyone who had ever been involved with Burgess could be suspect, though, in fact, there was never any suspicion against Lyall.

Hollis could offer no satisfactory answer as to why he had been so doggedly determined to join MI5, agreeing that it was the prime target for any Briton recruited to Soviet intelligence. Weakly, he insisted that he just thought that the work would be interesting.

He claimed that he must just have forgotten to put a note about his friendship with Claud Cockburn in the office files. He denied ever having met Ursula Beurton in China, Switzerland or Oxford. He explained that he had fired Arthur Martin because a ‘Gestapo’, intent on investigating every failure, was forming inside MI5. (This may have been the origin of Sir Harold Wilson’s later phrase about a small group of ‘fascists’ among the officers in MI5.)

As befitted a professional, Hollis remained very composed throughout his interrogation, and, whether guilty or not, was rated a ‘tough subject’.

After an interval, for further inquiries, Hollis was brought back for a half day of interrogation, but he never broke. If guilty, he would have been aware of the strength of his position so long as he kept his nerve and declined to confess. As with Fuchs, Blake, Philby and Blunt, the law was powerless to do anything without a confession, and having been ‘close to the horns’ in those cases, and in others that had not become public, Hollis could feel totally secure both from prosecution and publicity.

The possibility of offering Hollis immunity was never seriously considered because it was realised that he must know that a prosecution would never be brought in any circumstances. Even if further evidence accrued, the government, whatever its complexion, would decide that a trial of a former director general of MI5 would not be ‘in the public interest’. Even if such a trial were held partly in camera its effects on relations with foreign intelligence services, particularly those of the United States, could be disastrous. The FBI and the CIA knew all the secret details of the Hollis case, but Congress and the American public did not. The sense of outrage that a trial would engender in the United States could curtail the continuing interchange between Britain and America of intelligence and defence information.

The Hollis affair might have been left buried within the vaults of MI5, but certain members of that service and of the secret service were so concerned about the Soviet penetrations, which, in their opinion, had never been satisfactorily accounted for, that they agitated privately for an independent inquiry. They also wanted an independent method of electing the new directors general of MI5 and the secret service. In the past, this had been done by the Prime Minister, acting largely on the advice of the retiring chiefs, so that if a director general happened to be a Soviet agent – and Philby could have reached that position – he could recommend a successor of whom the Russians approved.

So, in the early summer of 1974, a spokesman for the Fluency Committee, Stephen de Mowbray, presented himself at No. 10 Downing Street and asked to see the Prime Minister concerning an urgent security issue. He did not see Harold Wilson, who had recently won the general election, but had a long session with the Cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt, now Lord Hunt of Tanworth.

Hunt was already aware of the suspicions about Hollis. A few months before, during the premiership of Edward Heath, there had been discussions about the dangers of penetration of the security services by the KGB and particularly about the possibility that previous traitors, of whom Hollis might have been one, could have insinuated others at lower level, who might now be nearing the top. It had been decided then that some independent body, to which allegations of possible treachery might be referred, was desirable. For security reasons, it was also decided that the members of such a body should be senior privy councillors. When discussing possible names, the security problems seemed so severe that it was eventually decided to have just one privy councillor, an individual of long experience, of unquestionable integrity, who should be non-political. The man eventually selected was Lord Trend, Hunt’s predecessor as Cabinet secretary, and he agreed to be the standing privy councillor to whom allegations concerning treachery in the security services could be referred.

After his session with de Mowbray, who seemed to be convinced that Hollis had been a spy and that there had been a serious cover-up by the security services, Hunt decided that the matter should be referred to Trend. He therefore suggested this to the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who agreed to the proposal in July 1974.

When Trend began his inquiry, he did not think it likely that he could take the matter any further than the internal investigations previously carried out by the Fluency Committee and on which assessments had been made by the chiefs of MI5 and the secret service. While some members of the Fluency Committee were convinced of Hollis’s guilt and the rest took the line that the case was not proven either way, the chiefs had decided to consider Hollis innocent unless and until further evidence arrived to change their minds. This had enabled an embarrassing situation to be shelved – permanently, it had been hoped – and had spared the expenditure of further manpower and money on it.

As I have indicated, the security officers who continued to suspect Hollis, some of them being convinced of his guilt, believe that Lord Trend was impressed by the weight of evidence they had produced. I have been assured – and reassured – that Lord Trend told them so. Furthermore, those to whom I have spoken claim that they were never told anything to the contrary. They were left under the firm impression that the Hollis case was to remain in an unproven condition because no new evidence had become available to settle the issue either way. That was, therefore, my information when I wrote the first edition of this book.

In fact, Trend took almost a whole year before coming to a decision. After interviewing all the members of the Fluency Committee except one who was overseas, he spent two days a week over several months browsing among the relevant archives at MI5 headquarters in Curzon Street. He then consulted security and intelligence chiefs, past and present, including Sir Dick White, the former head of MI5, who had recommended Hollis as his successor there. These men all advocated their past opinion that the evidence was not strong enough definitely to incriminate Hollis, though his innocence could not definitely be proved either. Trend then decided that before writing his report he should come to a judgement that would settle the case one way or the other because there was scant likelihood that any further evidence would ever accrue.

Before Mrs Thatcher made her parliamentary statement about this book, it was impossible to secure any official confirmation that the Trend inquiry had ever taken place, much less obtain any information about its contents. Since then, I have been able to consult several people who have read it. They have all confirmed that no further evidence reached Trend during his year of deliberation. I have checked their information at several crucial points. Gouzenko, for instance, has assured me that no intelligence officer has questioned him about Hollis since 1973.

So far as the facts were concerned Trend was in no better a position than the members of the Fluency Committee had been when they had completed their inquiries by interrogating Hollis.

The case really remained – and still remains – ‘unproven’, but such a verdict, though long established in Scotland, does not exist in English law. Trend therefore took a value judgement and decided that, while he could not be certain that Hollis had not been a spy, he should be given the benefit of the doubt. Unless further evidence arrived, the security departments should assume – which they did with relief – that Hollis had not been an agent of the KGB. Trend, however, was unable to offer any other explanation of the mass of evidence that had been stacked up against Hollis.

In his report to the Prime Minister, Trend also stated that there was no truth in Stephen de Mowbray’s contention that there had been a ‘cover-up’ of the Hollis affair. In the Whitehall mind, a ‘cover-up’ is a situation in which officials withhold embarrassing information from ministers. In the mind of most people, including myself, a ‘cover-up’ is a situation in which both officials and ministers withhold embarrassing information from the public that employs them. In this latter and more general sense, there had been a total cover-up of the Hollis affair and of most of the other security scandals disclosed in this book.

In 1975, Stephen de Mowbray was seen by Sir John Hunt and briefed on Trend’s findings, though he was not shown the report. He declined to accept the findings, arguing that Trend had simply followed the convenient departmental line previously taken by the heads of MI5 and the secret service. The Cabinet secretary assumed that de Mowbray would inform the other members of the Fluency Committee that a verdict of ‘not guilty’ had been entered against Hollis on the departmental books. He appears not to have done so, for, as I have indicated, the other members continued to believe that the Hollis case had been left unproven.

The Trend Report was so secret that very few knew of its existence. Six years later, however, following the publication of this book, it gave Mrs Thatcher the opportunity to give Parliament and the public the impression that Hollis had been ‘cleared’ not only by Trend but previously by his colleagues, though she was at pains to point out that his innocence could not be proved. The Times put the situation more accurately. ‘Mrs Thatcher has now officially revealed that there were serious professional suspicions about Sir Roger Hollis which do not seem to have been dispelled but merely disposed of, as it were, by majority verdict.’

Mrs Thatcher’s statement was based on a brief supplied by the Cabinet Office in conjunction with MI5. There was an essential item in it that made no sense either to the security officers who had given evidence to Trend or to me. She said,

Blunt left MI5 in 1945 and had no further access to secret information. Philby left the secret service in 1951 and had no further access to secret information. Yet readers of this book will appreciate that several of the leads that made the Fluency Committee suspicious of Hollis occurred long after those dates. In fact, it was the singular lack of success in MI5 after 1951 that led to the setting up of the Fluency Committee. For some of the members of that committee, the ‘moment of truth’ regarding Hollis centred on the suspicious circumstances of Philby’s defection in 1963. Hollis’s strange behaviour over Mitchell and Blunt followed in that year and in 1964.

I have been assured by people who must know but are anxious not to be identified that Lord Trend did not limit himself to a consideration of the evidence relating to the war years but studied the whole of it up to and including the interrogation of Hollis in 1970. So either Mrs Thatcher was misinformed in the brief provided for her by officials or the statement prepared for her was selective in its references to the Trend Report to provide a political opportunity for an assertion that all the evidence was almost forty years old.

A letter from Lord Trend to me dated 12 August 1981 makes it clear that he declines to be associated with the suggestion that the leads could each be attributed either to Philby or Blunt.

James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher’s predecessor as Prime Minister, seemed to be more straightforward when, during the parliamentary debate on the Blunt case, he said, ‘Blunt is merely one part of a highly complicated case that the security service has spent many years and many man-hours seeking to unravel to find the truth … I do not think that the matter will ever be cleared up.’

He had read the Trend Report but could not have been entirely satisfied by it.

I am convinced that there is no legal evidence admissible in a British court that could be brought against Hollis, were he still alive. But the mass of circumstantial evidence remains and is not really attributable to Blunt, Philby or anyone else who is known.

In a television interview, Sir Harold Wilson, who had reread the Trend Report a few days beforehand, confirmed that there had been serious leakages from MI5 and that some of them could have originated from Hollis.

The Hollis affair remains of importance and interest to the United States, and for that reason, as well as others, this book was discussed by the US Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Malcolm Wallop, within two days of its publication.

As many American readers will be aware, certain former members of the CIA, and James Angleton in particular, had cause to suspect that the CIA had been penetrated at a relatively high level by a KGB ‘mole’. No such ‘mole’ has ever been identified. So when I learned the full extent of the evidence against Hollis, circumstantial though it might be, I wrote to Angleton suggesting that the mole might never have been in the CIA but in MI5, which had access to much of the American information believed to have been leaked. He declined to comment, but I think the suggestion is worthy of serious analysis, for most of the important leakages seem to have occurred during the time that Hollis was in MI5 and to have ceased after 1965, when he retired. It may also be significant that the leakages from MI5 seem to have ended after that date.

Following the Trend inquiry, improvements in the selection of the directors general and in the recruitment of new members to both MI5 and the secret service have been introduced. A Committee of Five, including the chief of the defence staff, now makes the recommendation to the Prime Minister for the appointment of new directors general. The Prime Minister, particularly so in the case of Mrs Thatcher, is in regular touch with the heads of MI5 and the secret service. The days when a director general could studiously avoid contact with his political masters, as Hollis did, are over. Positive vetting of members of the security services is now more stringent and more regular. Internal checks against foreign penetration have been built into both services.

An effective test of whether high-level penetration of MI5 had ceased with the departure of Hollis was provided in the autumn of 1971 by the defection in London of a KGB officer, Oleg Lyalin. It was following this defection that the government, then headed by Edward Heath, expelled 105 Soviet intelligence agents, who had been posing as diplomats and trade officials, though this number was less than half the total known to be in Britain for subversive purposes.

What has not been known is that Lyalin had been recruited by British intelligence six months prior to his defection, which took place when it did only because he was stupidly involved in a drunken driving incident and was arrested by the police. Lyalin had been due to return to Russia, and the intelligence authorities had hoped that he would continue to supply information there, but, following his drunken behaviour, his expulsion from the KGB was almost certain.

Nevertheless, that the Russians had not learned that Lyalin was spying for Britain was excellent evidence that no high-level Soviet agents existed inside MI5. Sir Martin Furnival Jones had insisted that only about ten people in MI5 who needed to know about Lyalin should be told, and nobody outside, in the civil service, Foreign Office or government, was informed. There is no doubt that the Russians would quickly have withdrawn or liquidated Lyalin had they known of his treachery if only because he knew the names of so many other Soviet agents. Indeed, after his defection, he was regarded as such a likely target for assassination that his trial on the driving charge was quashed, and he underwent plastic surgery to change his appearance.

The success of the massive security and intelligence operation preceding the expulsions provided further evidence that both MI5 and the secret service were ‘clean’, at least in the upper levels. The director general of MI5, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, expected that the Soviet ambassador would demand to know the reasons for at least some of the expulsions, and he had detailed evidence ready against every one of the 105. The Russian ambassador made no such demand, and it was clear that he and the KGB had been taken totally by surprise. It was the view inside MI5 that such a welcome situation would not have been possible a few years earlier.

In 1974, the British security services had a major triumph, which could never have been possible had there been a spy at the top in either of the organisations. They provided the lead resulting in the arrest of Guenter Guillaume, the personal assistant to Willi Brandt, then West German Chancellor. It was proved that he was a Soviet bloc agent and former officer of the East German Army, infiltrated into West Germany in the monstrously deceptive guise, so favoured by the KGB, of a political refugee seeking asylum. Given every opportunity to make a new life, he insinuated himself into Brandt’s entourage with such success that, when the full extent of his treachery was appreciated, a senior British official at NATO military headquarters exclaimed, ‘My God, it’s all gone!’ Given the slightest whiff of suspicion against such a valuable agent, whose detection was eventually to end Brandt’s political career, the Russians would have found some way of withdrawing him.

Not long after his final interrogation, Sir Roger Hollis suffered a stroke but virtually recovered from it. In 1973, however, he had a further stroke that killed him at the age of sixty-seven.

His brief obituary notice in The Times was composed by his old colleague, Sir Dick White, who, in line of duty, had been so deeply involved in the investigations into the Soviet penetration of MI5. However impressive the evidence may seem, the mind of the ordinary citizen boggles at the idea of a chief of the British security service sidling off at intervals to contact some Soviet controller and receive his next instructions. But that is exactly what Blunt and Philby did for many years without detection. And, as the next section will show, there were others in similar positions.