HARRY CHAPMAN PINCHER, who died in August 2014 at the age of 100, was one of Britain’s finest post-war journalists, breaking numerous major stories in a long career with the Daily Express, initially as the newspaper’s science and medical correspondent but eventually as its specialist correspondent on security and intelligence matters – the world of espionage.
Chapman Pincher – he never used his first name in his by-line – unashamedly set out to infiltrate the establishment, collecting every disaffected senior civil servant, army officer and politician he could find along the way and using them as sources for a series of embarrassing revelations from the very heart of Britain’s armed forces and intelligence services.
The left-wing historian E. P. Thompson dismissed Pincher somewhat petulantly as ‘a kind of official urinal’ in which ‘high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, nuclear scientists … stand patiently leaking in the public interest’.
Pincher didn’t care where the story came from, only that it was true and that its disclosure was of interest to his newspaper’s readers. He took pride in the fact that his scoops – which began with the post-war news that Britain was building its own atomic bomb and ranged from sex scandals to the truly shocking revelation that MI5 had bugged Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson – rocked governments of both left and right. Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan went so far as to ask officials if there was nothing that could be done ‘to suppress or get rid of Mr Chapman Pincher?’
But in many ways his most damaging revelation was the allegation made in this book that Sir Roger Hollis, a former director general of MI5, was a Soviet agent. It has been repeatedly denied, but the suggestion refuses to go away and, most damagingly of all, was widely believed within the US intelligence community.
Pincher’s scoop came from disaffected MI5 officer Peter Wright, who admitted his own involvement in bugging Wilson, and was backed up by Arthur Martin, who had played a prominent part in the hunt for Soviet agents inside Britain’s intelligence services, including the investigation of Kim Philby – the so-called ‘Third Man’ in the Cambridge spy ring.
There is no doubt that the possibility of Hollis being a long-term Soviet agent was examined, but the evidence against him was deemed to be too ‘insubstantial’ to merit investigation. Nevertheless, the claims made in this book retain a remarkable credibility, largely because Hollis spent the vast majority of the period between 1927 and 1936 in China, where the Soviet military intelligence service (the GRU) was assisting Mao Tse-tung’s revolutionary forces in their attempts to take control.
Hollis travelled out to China as a journalist, ostensibly to cover the communist uprising, and is known to have then associated with long-term Soviet agents like Agnes Smedley and Richard Sorge, so it is not difficult to see why there were suspicions that he must have been involved in the world of espionage in some way. But, given the way he arrived in China and the fact that, for most of the eight years he spent there, he worked for British American Tobacco (a frequent cover for MI6 officers), it is by no means certain that he was working for Moscow.
Michael Smith
Editor of the Dialogue Espionage Classics series
October 2014