5

THE WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

Anatoly Golitsyn broke into a cold sweat when a colleague announced that all the staff inside the KGB Residency in Helsinki would have to be searched.1 It was Friday night in the Finnish capital and everyone wanted to get home. But a secret telegram had gone missing. Golitsyn did not have the telegram but he did have a dozen other secret documents surreptitiously stashed in his inside pocket. The missing telegram was found. Golitsyn, a short, heavyset man with black hair and an intense look, walked calmly out into the dark and cold of a Helsinki evening with snow deep on the ground. It was the middle of December 1961.

He had arranged to meet his wife and daughter in a park. When his taxi pulled up, they were nowhere to be seen. Had she changed her mind? Three months earlier he had begun the planning for this day and he had asked Svetlana if she would join him. She was taken aback and uncertain. But she had agreed to follow him with their daughter Tanya. Golitsyn went back to his apartment and found his wife and daughter waiting there, perhaps unwilling to believe what they were about to do.

The KGB officer called a local number. A man answered and Golitsyn hung up without saying a word. He now knew that the American was at home. Golitsyn had previously met Frank Friberg at a diplomatic reception and decided he must be CIA. Finland was on the Soviet frontier and was a key northern staging ground for spies from both sides. Golitsyn took a few photos, grabbed Tanya’s favourite doll and, telling his daughter they were going to a party, led his family out of the door.

The fifteen-minute taxi ride to the well-heeled suburb of Westland seemed the longest of the KGB officer’s life. He, his wife and his daughter were silent, lost in their own thoughts about those left behind. If Friberg had gone out since answering the phone then Golitsyn knew he would have to try again over the weekend, the risks growing with every moment that passed. When he rang Friberg’s bell, there was an agonising wait followed by relief when the door swung open.

Frank Friberg had just been having a shave and getting ready to leave for a cocktail party when his doorbell rang. There was no recognition, only surprise as he stared at the man on his doorstep.2

‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Golitsyn, who was wrapped in a thick overcoat and a fur hat.

‘No,’ replied Friberg.

‘I am Soviet Vice-Consul Anatoly Klimov,’ Golitsyn said, giving the cover name he used in Finland.

The penny dropped for the American. ‘We know you’re KGB,’ Friberg said.

The Russian spoke little English and his accent was heavy. Golitsyn kept repeating a word which sounded to Friberg like ‘asool’. It was only when the family came in and Golitsyn wrote it down that he realised the word was asylum.

Frank Friberg’s hope for a peaceful evening had been shattered and on that evening in Helsinki a fast-burning fuse had been lit beneath the British and American intelligence communities. The stocky Russian was like one of Penkovsky’s satchel atomic bombs – compact and primed to explode in the enemy capital. The radioactive fall-out still tumbles to the ground today. He had a story to tell that would hint at dark conspiracies behind the deaths of political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, a story which would cascade through the corridors of MI6 and the CIA, nearly bringing both to their knees.

Back in Vienna in the early 1950s, Golitsyn had been singled out by the defector Pyotr Deriabin as a possible target for the CIA because he appeared out of sorts among fellow officers. In Golitsyn’s own account, the disaffection was political and came in 1956 when Stalin’s crimes were exposed by his successor Khrushchev. He believed it was too little, too late and meaningless, and felt strongly that the Party, not Stalin alone, was responsible for what had happened. The strategy he says he had decided upon to maximise his eventual usefulness to the West was clever but also proved hazardous. He would collect as many tidbits of intelligence as he could until he was ready to make his move and then use them to enhance his value to the West. In the late 1950s he attended a training academy and took a risk in selecting as his thesis topic: ‘The Prevention of Betrayals and Defections by Members of Official Organizations, Visiting Delegations and Tourist Groups Abroad’. It allowed him to learn how people got caught when they were doing exactly what he hoped to do. He also spent time working on the NATO desk of the KGB watching and listening. He understood that defectors were coldly evaluated so he mentally filed away every piece of gossip, every file he read, every rumour he heard, knowing that each would buy him a little more importance in the West.

In Friberg’s house, Golitsyn was intensely nervous, fearful of discovery. He told the CIA man he wanted to be out of the country that night. There was an 8.15 p.m. flight to Stockholm and he demanded to be on it. Friberg called up one of his officers who quickly came to collect passports and organise visas and flights to New York. As they left the house, Golitsyn went to Friberg’s driveway and pulled out a package of a dozen documents that he had buried in the snow just before ringing the bell.3

They made it to the airport less than half an hour before the plane was due to take off. ‘We’ve made it. Now we’re safe!’ Golitsyn said to Svetlana. He had spoken too soon. If ever there was a journey to put fear into the heart of an already edgy defector this was it. When he arrived in Stockholm, Golitsyn said he did not want to catch the next flight out because it had originated in Helsinki and he feared being pursued. Friberg secured seats on a US air force plane but it was unpressurised and Tanya began to suffer. Next they went to Frankfurt for a flight via London. As they arrived in London, there was a bomb alert. Golitsyn says he had asked for all the baggage of passengers who had joined the flight in London to be searched in case the KGB had been following him.⁴ By the time the plane departed from London, fog had enveloped New York and the plane was diverted to Bermuda. From there, Golitsyn eventually made his way to the United States. In all, it had taken four days to get to Washington. During their long and difficult journey, Friberg had found Golitsyn nervous and occasionally prone to recalling the wrong name or place. In contrast to Golitsyn’s claim that his defection was ideological in nature and had been nurtured for five years, Friberg later said he thought it had been in the works for only a year or so.5 The CIA man said he believed it was due to a falling out with the KGB Resident in Helsinki, Golitsyn saying his defection served him right after they had clashed and after he had received a negative evaluation that might lead to demotion. But en route Golitsyn had also begun to offer up just some of the secrets he had been hoarding away. A senior Finn was a KGB agent of influence, he explained, giving away the first of his nuggets. The details he provided in those first few days would easily be enough to prove that he was a real defector and no plant. And he also provided the first elements of his biggest bombshell. He explained one of the reasons he was so nervous was that the KGB had penetrated Friberg’s own organisation, the CIA. In Germany, they had an agent codenamed ‘Sasha’.

In Washington the hunt would begin for a traitor. The existence of one could explain Popov and Penkovsky being caught and all the other recent disasters. It was known there had been high-level penetrations in Britain and Germany. Why not America? Golitsyn’s information was tantalising but vague. The mole was someone with a Slavic background who had been in Germany. His codename was ‘Sasha’ and his real name began with a ‘K’ was all he could say.

It was clear that Golitsyn would be hard to handle. He demanded a meeting with the President or the FBI Director (eventually he met Attorney General Robert Kennedy). Penkovsky’s and Popov’s former handler, George Kisevalter, who was originally assigned to deal with Golitsyn, found him exhausting and their relationship soon broke down. Golitsyn had accumulated hundreds and hundreds of fragments of intelligence, some based on files, others on conversations. Sometimes they overlapped and referred to the same person, sometimes they were frustratingly vague. Sorting through it, when so much was at stake, produced chaos.

Golitsyn’s relationship with his first set of CIA handlers had fractured by late 1962, but his ideas would eventually find refuge in the welcoming arms and fertile mind of James Jesus Angleton. Since his friend Kim Philby had left Washington, Angleton had grown in power within the CIA, becoming head of counter-intelligence in 1954. Counter-intelligence is a specialised discipline which aims to understand and work against an opponent’s intelligence service. Part of it is classic spy-catching or counter-espionage, looking for the Blakes and Philbys who are betraying from within. But there is more to it than that. Spy versus spy, it is the world of double and triple agents and requires a peculiar mind to understand the dizzying complexities of the tricks and games a wily foe may be playing against you, spotting the false agents they may be planting carrying misleading information. This means checking out the agents that others on your side are recruiting and making sure they are legitimate, sometimes to the annoyance of their handlers who may have invested heavily in them. And it involves attacking your opponent in a careful chess game, understanding his intentions and getting inside his operations and subverting them from within and deceiving him. British intelligence had succeeded in this during the Second World War with its Double-Cross System in which German spies landing in Britain were turned to provide false information back to their masters. Philby did something similar, though on a smaller scale, as a penetration agent when it came to Anglo-American operations in Albania, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. By getting inside your opponent’s service, you know what he knows, at a stroke destroying the value of all the secret information he has collected and allowing you to mislead him. This was Angleton’s world.

For its practitioners, counter-intelligence was a complex, intricate art which involved navigating supple confusions and ambiguities, reconstructing events from tiny fragments like an historian of the dark ages. Perhaps then it was no coincidence that medieval history was the pastime of the drily sceptical Maurice Oldfield who would become MI6’s counter-intelligence chief. When he was in Washington, the CIA had thought the portly, taciturn Oldfield, with his large glasses, had been invented precisely to deflate the caricature of British secret agents being like James Bond. Oldfield disliked the aggressive special operations crowd because of their impact on his carefully hatched plans to collect intelligence.6 He was not, as some thought, the model for John le Carré’s fictional, and scholarly, counter-intelligence chief George Smiley, but there were similarities (medieval history was also the passion of the Oxford academic who was the real inspiration for Smiley).⁷ In the subtle world of counter-intelligence, like medieval history, the truth was often inaccessible and so arguments, occasionally vicious, would rage over what each fragment meant since entire interpretations would be built upon those tiny shards. Counter-intelligence required a suspicious mind and you could always trump your colleagues by showing that you were intellectually capable of suspecting something even more devious than they could manage. You should not work in counter-intelligence for too long, a few noted. It did something to your brain. You would see shadows everywhere.

Kim Philby’s ghost haunted the corridors of the CIA and MI6. Angleton had been indelibly scarred by the experience of having a man he trusted so completely betray him. ‘I think that it had a devastating effect on Angleton,’ argues one former CIA colleague, ‘that just drove him over the edge.’8 Years later Angleton would always maintain that he, the man who saw everything, had suspected Philby. But this was a lie to cover the fact that the man who was supposed to watch for KGB penetration had been suckered by the greatest KGB penetration of all. If he could be fooled, then the KGB had to be really clever and devious, he concluded.

Word of an important new defector had quickly reached London. The Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was briefed about Golitsyn at Chequers on 18 April 1962 by the Cabinet Secretary ahead of a meeting with the Americans. ‘His revulsion against the Communist regime in the Soviet Union appears to be genuine and deeply felt,’ the briefing note read. ‘His desire to use his knowledge to help Western countermeasures shows every sign of being sincere and unemotional. His interrogators rate him as a reliable and an accurate reporter.’ But the note remarked of his knowledge: ‘nowhere has it any great depth’. Golitsyn had warned that the Foreign Office, Admiralty and ‘British intelligence’ were all penetrated and that five unnamed MPs accepted tasks from the Russians. ‘Enquiries are being made by the Security Service in collaboration with the departments concerned,’ the Prime Minister was told.⁹

Two British officers were sent out to talk to Golitsyn in March and September of 1962. One was Arthur Martin, the dogged MI5 investigator and Philby’s pursuer-in-chief, whose unassuming face masked a quiet ferocity. Since Golitsyn seemed to have information about penetrations in Britain and his relationship with his original case officers was breaking down, he agreed to relocate with his wife and daughter to work with British intelligence, sailing over on the Queen Elizabeth.10 His nerves were never far from the surface. On the boat he thought someone was looking for him. On arrival he was taken to a safe house but as he stepped out of the door he was convinced he was being followed. He could not settle easily anywhere. The next stop was Stratford-upon-Avon, where again he became convinced he had been spotted, and he sent his family back to America. His fear was not irrational – he was indeed high up the KGB target list for execution.¹¹ He tried remote Truro in Cornwall, where Arthur Martin would visit on a Sunday.

Those who worked with him talk of ‘vintage Golitsyn’ – the information he passed in the first few months which was accurate and contributed to the arrest of spies in Britain, France, Norway, Canada and NATO. But as the debriefings continued even some of his onetime supporters acknowledge he was mishandled.¹² ‘Defectors are like grapes – the first pressings are the best,’ Oldfield would say.¹³ That first pressing produced information before a defector began to feel the pressure of what others wanted to hear and before the worries that he had nothing left to give preyed on his mind

Golitsyn received so much attention partly because sources such as himself were so rare at the time. This also meant there was little scope for cross-referencing his information. In London, there were more insecurities for Golitsyn to work on than there were in Washington. Spy mania was gripping the country courtesy of a cast including George Blake, and the intelligence services were fearful of what else might be placed on public display.

One of Golitsyn’s British leads centred on a naval attaché which guided MI5 to John Vassall (see Chapter 6). But the information which really captivated Martin was the talk Golitsyn had heard in Moscow of a ‘ring of five’ British spies who had all become acquainted at university and who had all been providing valuable intelligence.¹⁴ The reference to a ‘ring’ indicated that they all knew each other. Burgess and Maclean were long gone. Philby had long been suspected. But who else made up the five?

Soon after Philby was exposed in 1963, Arthur Martin arrived at the Courtauld Institute to interrogate Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Blunt had been a young Cambridge don in the 1930s and a close friend of Guy Burgess. Burgess had helped recruit the tall, languid academic to the Communist cause, which he had faithfully served as a wartime MI5 officer providing reams of purloined documents to his controllers. Martin was now armed with the testimony of an American student the former Cambridge don had tried to recruit. ‘I saw Mr Straight the other day and he told me about his relations with you and the Russians.’ Blunt’s hangdog face gave nothing away.15 Martin offered immunity in return for a confession. Blunt walked to the grand window, looked out, poured a drink and said, ‘It is true.’ So began eight years of interviews for Blunt, which he dealt with through copious amounts of booze. Martin and others came to him again and again, trawling through every friendship and meeting from Cambridge and after, looking for anything that could point to more spies.

Where Philby decided to run, Blunt stayed, taking the offer of immunity. Although he had passed vast quantities of crucial information, Blunt was never a hardened, dedicated spy like Philby nor truly ever dedicated to the idea of Communism. ‘I realised that I would take any risk in this country, rather than go to Russia,’ he wrote later.¹⁶ As a fellow academic said of him, Blunt liked to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, to be part of the establishment and attack it. When his treachery was finally exposed publicly in 1979, he would choose to defend himself in literary style by citing E. M. Forster’s dictum: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ By confessing, he had betrayed both. But the establishment thought at the time that at least it had managed to sweep this case under the carpet without a public fuss. The same year as Blunt confessed, John Cairncross, another immensely clever intelligence officer and civil servant, was identified as a Soviet spy. But it was only much, much later and after much anguish that MI5 would conclude that Blunt and Cairncross completed the ring of five. Because they had not been recruited at Cambridge at the same time as Philby, there had been a belief that the remaining members were still at large.¹⁷ There were indeed more spies than the Cambridge Five operating during the Second World War and after. Their KGB controller just after the war boasted that the KGB had a total of thirty agents in 1944, providing so much information that it had to prioritise by picking the best five to work with. Much of the intelligence produced by the rest was simply left to pile up untranslated (what would those who provided the intelligence have made of their work being ignored if they had known?).18 Martin and other molehunters were now determined to find every one of the traitors that had operated then and their successors.

Golitsyn’s initial debriefings by Arthur Martin provided a haul of over 150 leads relating to Britain and the Commonwealth. A few of these required the involvement of MI6 because of overseas connections. The MI6 counter-intelligence branch was tiny, effectively just one officer, so another, named Stephen de Mowbray, was called in to work on the Golitsyn leads. De Mowbray divided his colleagues into two camps – ‘thinkers’ and ‘doers’ – and he was the former. After serving in the Fleet Air Arm in the Second World War, he had made his way to New College, Oxford.¹⁹ There he had been taught by one of the century’s great thinkers, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The young Berlin had witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia before coming to England. During the war, he was one of those dons brought into government service and, rather curiously, his irascible friend Guy Burgess had tried to get Berlin posted first to Washington and then to Moscow.²⁰ After the war he returned to Oxford and one day found de Mowbray visiting his study. The student had set his heart on the life of an academic but before his final exams decided he might not make it. ‘I think you’d better be a spy,’ the laconic Berlin told him. Another tutor, a former SOE man, passed on his details and, at a house on Kensington High Street, George Kennedy Young swiftly took de Mowbray through the formalities of an interview, most of their conversation revolving around a shared interest in classical music.

Fresh from a posting to South America, de Mowbray was assigned to support MI5’s investigations into two Britons whom Golitsyn said had been targeted by the KGB in Vienna for their homosexuality. After a few months, his boss came into his office and told him he had something ‘special’ for him to work on with two MI5 officers. He was told to head over to a safe house the following day. There he was met by the two central figures of the spy-hunt. Alongside Arthur Martin was Peter Wright. The latter was the Security Service’s master technician and authority on bugging. The Security Service operated outside the law during this period. It was overseen, but only in the loosest sense, by politicians and civil servants but was not governed by any statute. ‘We bugged and burgled our way across London at the state’s behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way,’ Wright said with relish of his work.21 But some of Wright’s beloved bugging operations had mysteriously come to nothing, he explained to de Mowbray. He and Arthur Martin had independently come to the same conclusion: ‘We believe MI5 is penetrated.’

Sometimes when two people come together, the sum is greater than the parts. With Martin and Wright, their individual beliefs in a conspiracy were confirmed and compounded over long evenings spent in the pub agonising over the problem. They alone, they thought, could see the darkness at the heart of British intelligence and they would have to struggle to shine a light on it. But there was something more to their bitter struggle, a sub-text that neither man might have openly acknowledged but which lurked behind so much of British life. It was class.

Wright and Martin were not cut from the same cloth as their prey. They were not ‘officer class’. Wright’s father had been a radio engineer but had lost his job in the Great Depression. It had plunged Wright senior into alcoholism and forced him to take young Peter out of private school since he could not afford to educate both his sons. The trauma left Peter with a chronic stammer, just like Philby. Arthur Martin too was no public-school boy and had a chip on his shoulder about it. As the two men began to investigate the lives of the gilded elite who had walked through the manicured courts of Trinity Cambridge, they burned with resentment of those who had been given everything and yet had still betrayed their country. As they visited country piles in Britain and farmhouses in France bought with family money, they struggled to grasp what had driven these people to betray. ‘They had enjoyed to the full the privileged background and education denied to me, while my family had suffered at the capricious hand of capitalism,’ Wright said later. ‘I experienced at first hand the effects of slump and depression, yet it was they who turned to espionage. I became the hunter, and they the hunted.’²² The two men rooted through the dirty laundry of the British establishment, and how the establishment despised them for it. ‘I had seen into the secret heart of the present Establishment at a time when they had been young and careless. I knew their scandals and their intrigues. I knew too much, and they knew it.’23 At one meeting, Anthony Blunt lectured Wright on the atmosphere of the thirties. ‘Unless you lived through it, Peter, you can’t understand.’ Wright lost his temper. ‘Oh I lived through it, Anthony. I know more about the thirties probably than you will ever know. I remember my father driving himself mad with drink, because he couldn’t get a job. I remember losing my education, my world, everything. I know all about the thirties.²⁴ As they investigated an Oxford ring of spies, one MP whom they confronted killed himself. Even Graham Greene was called in for questioning about his former boss. He knew more than he was letting on, it was thought, but was cleared of any involvement.²⁵ But it was the thought of a traitor within their own ranks that really drove the two men.

Martin had already gone to C, Dick White, with his concerns. White, a former head of MI5, had high regard for Martin from their time working together. Like Angleton, he had been involved in the Double-Cross System in the Second World War and so was fascinated by the possibilities of deception, and for a while bought into the idea of a high-level penetration. White had also always had a fixation with Philby. It was Martin’s theory that his old foe had been tipped off that most intrigued the MI6 chief. There was one piece of evidence which was puzzled over endlessly. When he had been invited to see Peter Lunn in Beirut and found his old friend Nicholas Elliott waiting, what had Philby meant when he said, ‘I rather thought it would be you’?²⁶ This remark sent shivers down the spine of Martin and White. Had Philby been tipped off that he was blown and known that someone was coming out for him? There were other explanations for Philby’s curious phrase, but Martin was convinced it signposted a tip-off, and White agreed. If true, it would suggest a mole at the highest levels. Only five men in MI5 had known of the plan to tackle Philby in Beirut. Only two of them had been around long enough to fit the profile of a long-term penetration agent. The problem was that the two men were the head of MI5, Roger Hollis, and his deputy, Graham Mitchell.

The certainty of Wright and Martin grew out of a number of events which they felt brooked no other explanation. Both had seen their operations go awry. Wright had been planting bugs in buildings due to be occupied by the KGB who then suddenly appeared to change their plans and move elsewhere. Wright also said there had been a rise in radio transmissions when a Soviet spy, Gordon Lonsdale, had been arrested, suggesting that a warning was being passed back to Moscow. The fact that Lonsdale had not been warned himself was a sign that he must have been sacrificed for an even more important spy. When Soviets were not caught it meant there was a spy; when they were found, it also meant there was a spy but he was being protected. This logic was hard to disprove. A Soviet defector at the start of the Cold War in Canada had talked of two agents called Elli. One had been identified, but who was the second?

And now there was Golitsyn. ‘In the tense and almost hysterical months of 1963, as the scent of treachery lingered in every corridor, it is easy to see how our fears fed on his theories,’ recalled Wright. Golitsyn’s talk of penetrations and the fact that he appeared to have seen recent material from the Security Service, including one of Wright’s technical papers, reinforced the growing convictions of Martin and Wright. Golitsyn had nothing on Hollis or Mitchell specifically. ‘The vast majority of Golitsyn’s material was tantalizingly imprecise,’ Wright wrote in retrospect. ‘It often appeared true as far as it went, but then faded into ambiguity, and part of the problem was Golitsyn’s clear propensity for feeding his information out in dribs and drabs. He saw it as his livelihood.’27

Dick White had told Martin to go and see Hollis and explain his doubts about Mitchell, but not about the MI5 chief himself. Martin spent half an hour explaining his theory. Hollis, the son of a bishop and a dour and dry man, had listened quietly, barely saying a word. Martin described how ‘his face drained of colour and with a strange half-smile playing on his lips’.²⁸ Hollis did not demur but said he would think it over. He knew he had little choice but to countenance an investigation. His former boss Dick White, the senior figure in British intelligence, had already called him.²⁹ Why did the two chiefs go along with it? For White and Hollis, the fear of penetration was real but so was the fear of missing it and, even more important, of being accused of having missed it deliberately. A few days later Martin had been summoned to see Hollis again and told to begin. Soon afterwards he had met Wright and they began to compare notes.

Who watches the watchers? How could MI5 investigate its own top men? It could not, since Graham Mitchell had oversight over all operations. So Wright and Martin explained to de Mowbray that it had been agreed with Dick White that MI6 would instead undertake the surveillance and that he was to be in charge. Thus began one of the stranger episodes in the history of British intelligence which occasionally edged into farce. In all, forty members of MI6 staff were engaged in spying on the number two of their sister organisation. These were not trained ‘watchers’ of the type MI5 employed to carry out surveillance on the streets of Britain. These were officers, technicians and mainly secretaries who had either not been tutored in the arts of surveillance at all or had only the most rudimentary education. They were run out of an MI6 safe house near Sloane Square. Time was short since Mitchell was due to retire in six months. He would be tracked from MI5 headquarters to Waterloo station, where two women would follow him on to his train. One summer’s evening the women followed him in the hope that he was leaving something incriminating in a dead drop. There was nothing. De Mowbray frequently did the tailing himself as the two men had never met. One evening, de Mowbray was remaining close behind for fear of losing his man in the rush-hour mêlée. Mitchell suddenly stopped, turned and faced de Mowbray. He stared directly at him. Seconds ticked by. Then he turned again and walked off. He knew what was going on. Mitchell was old-school establishment, Winchester and Oxford, and his hobbies included yachting and chess. On one occasion, de Mowbray raced down to the south coast in a fast car driven by an MI6 colleague to where Mitchell was taking part in a chess tournament also attended by some Russians. All of the surveillance drew a blank. A hole was drilled in Mitchell’s office wall to allow a small camera to capture him at work. Three women from MI6 took it in turns to watch him. It was a surreal experience, as Mitchell often sat in front of the camera picking his teeth. The strain of knowing that he was under suspicion began to take its toll on him. He would mumble in a way which made it hard to make out his words.30 The women watched as his eyes became dark and sunken. When people were in the room he carried on as usual, but when he was alone a tortured look came over his face. His phone was tapped and de Mowbray would listen in to the calls of senior MI5 officers and despair of what he saw as the poor quality of those leading the organisation. ‘Are we on the right man?’ the team wondered.

There was an awkward problem for those who believed that British intelligence had been penetrated at the highest level. Its name was Oleg Penkovsky. Mitchell and Hollis were among the few to have known about Penkovsky’s betrayal. If either was a Soviet plant, then surely they would have told their masters and Penkovsky would never have been able to spy for so long and hand over so much material. There was only one way around this conundrum for the molehunters. Penkovsky himself must have been a plant by the Soviets. Some reasoned he was planted from the beginning. Others believed that he had genuinely betrayed his country before being turned as a double agent towards the end after being betrayed by the British mole. Wright began to bury himself in the files; forwards and backwards he went, poring over the fragments of this and every other case, convinced there was a dark secret.

Golitsyn first heard of the Penkovsky case in early 1963 when an MI6 officer in Washington said the service had just lost a valuable agent in Moscow.31 He was in England when the show-trial in Moscow took place. How could Penkovsky be genuine? Golitsyn wondered. He told Martin he wanted to see Dick White. At the meeting, Golitsyn asked to see the Penkovsky file. A few weeks later he was taken to the MI6 annexe office at Carlton Gardens and ushered into a grand chandeliered room. Two precious volumes were laid before him. For days he devoured them, taking notes watched by an MI6 officer and a security guard. Golitsyn then asked to take the files out. The request was granted. By his own account, he would sit in London’s public parks and squares reading one of the most sensitive files held by British intelligence until they were handed back at the end of the afternoon. Golitsyn became convinced that Penkovsky was a plant sent as part of a ‘master plot’. Among the reasons was that Penkovsky had proposed a particular woman as a courier. Golitsyn said that he knew her as the wife of a colleague and that he had been told she was involved in a KGB operation by General Oleg Gribanov, the chief of the Second Directorate. Golitsyn told Peter Wright what he had found. Wright at first strongly disagreed (although he later changed his mind) and told him there were people in MI6 who had made their careers on Penkovsky. He mentioned Harry Shergold and warned that he would be furious.

In the summer of 1963, the presence of a Soviet defector, wrongly named as Dolitsyn, found its way into the British press. Golitsyn believed the story came from the Russians but many others thought that it was Angleton determined to get his man back on his side of the Atlantic. By the time Golitsyn returned to Washington, he had been bled dry of his original intelligence, but he had come up with a new way of making himself useful. He said that if he was allowed to study the actual in-house intelligence files, it would trigger associations in his mind and allow him to recollect and piece together new leads based on the fragments in his memory. Angleton and others were convinced of the possibilities of what Golitsyn grandly described as his ‘methodology’. Angleton had backed Penkovsky’s bona fides but, fascinated by Golitsyn, he agreed for select aspects of the case to be shared, though never the whole file – the Americans were not as trusting as the British. Golitsyn still found aspects of Penkovsky’s career and his access to secrets that he considered suspicious. Penkovsky’s offer to blow up buildings in Moscow, Golitsyn thought, was simply to gauge whether there was any interest in the West in such schemes and then control any resulting plans. Golitsyn surmised that the Cuban crisis had been ‘deliberately provoked by the Soviets to get the deal they wanted’ and they had used Penkovsky to pass accurate information to the Americans to ensure that a bargain could be done. The theory may have been aided by the Soviet Ambassador to the UN who, probably hoping to minimise the embarrassment of the betrayal, told a Western diplomat that Penkovsky ‘is very much alive and was a double agent against the Americans’.32 The officers who handled Penkovsky were furious with the aspersions cast on someone they saw as a good man who had paid the ultimate price. Joe Bulik was called into Angleton’s office to have the theory presented to him that not just Penkovsky but all his other agents from 1960 were plants. ‘I was so angry I just turned and left and we never spoke again,’ he recalled later.³³

When Peter Wright in London produced a paper claiming that Penkovsky was a plant, he showed it to Maurice Oldfield. ‘You’ve got a long row to hoe with this one, Peter, there’s a lot of K’s and Gongs riding high on the back of Penkovsky,’ referring to the knighthoods and honours the celebrated operation had produced. Shergy was, as predicted, furious. ‘Harry Shergold … practically went for me at a meeting in MI6 one day,’ Wright wrote. ‘What the hell do you know about running agents?’ he snarled. ‘You come in here and insult a brave man’s memory and expect us to believe this?’34 The fury was so intense that it stuck in the mind of one conspiratorially minded molehunter. Surely Shergy couldn’t be bad as well? But Shergy understood what was taking place and was playing his own game.

After Golitsyn had returned to Washington, he began to pursue the idea that the Soviet Union was undertaking a ‘master plan’ of ‘strategic deception’ to fool the West and its intelligence agencies. Just before he left Moscow, Golitsyn said he had heard talk of a massive deception and disinformation campaign. He says another officer told him of plans to finish with the United States once and for all.³⁵ The plot included fooling the West that there was greater disunity in the East than was really the case. For instance, Golitsyn maintained that the split between the Soviet Union and China was in fact a charade, as was that between the Soviets and Tito’s Yugoslavia.³⁶ The master plan would be perpetuated by the agents placed everywhere in Western governments and especially their intelligence services whose careers and whose judgements would be bolstered by defectors. The whole operation was being controlled by an inner core of the KGB. The rest of the KGB knew nothing about it and everything they did could be compromised as part of the plot. Anything that fitted this theory was true, anything that did not support it had been planted as part of the master plot and therefore provided proof of its existence. This was a worldview which, once accepted, was internally coherent and explained everything. It was a faith and one that Angleton placed his trust in.

Western intelligence was, Angleton said, trapped in a ‘wilderness of mirrors’ designed like a fairground trick to bend and shape the truth so that the observer would become disoriented and lose any sense of proportion. Angleton had borrowed the phrase from a friend of his, the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot, whose words, like an intelligence puzzle, required deciphering by the knowledgeable and were open to many interpretations. Only a truly sharp counter-intelligence mind could see the truth of the KGB’s intentions, Angle-ton thought, and Dick White agreed. In their eyes the KGB was all-powerful, ever cunning and infallible, the stuff of nightmares. It had fooled MI6 in the 1920s with its fake émigré group, the Trust, and in the late 1940s in Albania. There were no coincidences, no room for missteps from the other side.

As with buses, the CIA found that having waited ages for a defector, two came at once. Yuri Nosenko would pay a heavy price for arriving just after Anatoly Golitsyn. In early summer 1962, he approached an American delegate at an arms-control meeting in Geneva. He shook hands and checked that no one else was in earshot. ‘I would like you to help me with contact with CIA people. You see I have some problems. It’s a private matter.’37 At an apartment the well-built man in his mid-thirties with a slight hunch asked for a scotch and then told the first officer he met, Pete Bagley, that he was a KGB officer who had got into money problems. Bagley spoke little Russian and Nosenko little English, but the KGB man explained that he had no desire to defect since he still had family in the Soviet Union (his father was at one point minister for shipbuilding). But he needed 250 dollars in Swiss francs, a pathetically small sum, and would be willing to meet CIA officers on later trips anywhere but Moscow. The truth, which Nosenko did not reveal at the time, was that he had been over-excited by his first taste of freedom outside the USSR and had taken a prostitute back to his hotel room. He had woken up the next morning to find his wallet missing. Inside were his 250 dollars’ worth of KGB expenses which he needed to account for.³⁸

Kisevalter came out and joined Bagley for a second meeting at which Nosenko, having had one drink before and another during the meeting, explained how Kisevalter’s former agent Pyotr Popov, first recruited in Vienna, had been caught. It had not been through a traitor as some suspected but through surveillance of an American Embassy official in Moscow posting a letter. He also said he knew a little about a spy in the British Naval Attaché’s office in Moscow who had been blackmailed over his sexuality (another reference to John Vassall).³⁹ Nosenko had worked on targeting American officials, journalists and tourists in Moscow and said he also knew about the first CIA man in Moscow in the 1950s who had been targeted over his affair with a KGB maid. Bagley kept asking for more, Nosenko remembered, hungry for every scrap of intelligence. He said he also knew that the KGB had recruited an American officer in Germany–codenamed ‘Sasha’.⁴⁰ They agreed that if he made it out again he would send a telegram to a US address signed ‘George’. Two days after sending it, he would meet his contact in front of the first cinema listed in the local phone book in the city from which the telegram was sent.41 The two CIA officers returned on separate planes, one carrying the tapes, the other their notes. Just in case.⁴²

When Bagley got back to Washington, he talked to Angleton about Nosenko. The counter-intelligence chief then inducted him into the secret of Golitsyn’s defection six months earlier. Two defectors one after another was a little odd. What was interesting was the overlap between the two, for instance on the spy in the British Naval Attaché’s office. They also both talked of a senior KGB officer coming to the US on an unexplained visit. Nosenko’s account seemed to explain it away as the targeting of a low-level official, while Golitsyn believed it might have been linked to the mole within the CIA. Golitsyn also differed in other areas, for instance over how Popov was caught. Golitsyn thought there was a high-ranking spy in the CIA, Nosenko thought Sasha was just an army captain. Angleton and Bagley agreed there was something suspicious going on. Golitsyn himself had warned that the KGB would send others after him to try and muddy the waters. Could this be what was happening? Was Nosenko part of the KGB’s grand deception strategy unfolding and an attempt to protect its mole within the agency itself? ‘Nosenko will mutilate the Golitsyn leads,’ Angleton told Bagley, as if talking about a weed corrupting the purity of one of the orchids that he bred in his spare time.⁴³ Anyone who followed Golitsyn and who did not back his case would be seen by Angleton as a false defector sent to confuse. That was the case with Nosenko, it was decided.

Nosenko resurfaced in Geneva in January 1964. It was a cold night and the first cinema in the phone book was closed. Bagley, in disguise, brushed past the Russian who was waiting outside and handed a note with the location for their meeting.⁴⁴ ‘Yuri has a bit of a surprise for us,’ Kisevalter told Bagley when he arrived. In a strangely emotionless and mechanical voice, Nosenko declared he was now ready to defect.⁴⁵ ‘I don’t want to go back,’ he said.⁴⁶ Bagley and Kisevalter were not keen on the idea. Nosenko said the KGB was on to him, although it seemed strange that he had been let out of the country if it was. At a second meeting, he claimed to have received a telegram recalling him home. ‘I just defected now; this day, this hour, this minute, I just defected,’ he told them.⁴⁷ He provided details of microphones hidden in the US Embassy in Moscow and also dropped a sensational bombshell. He said that in his job working on Americans in Moscow he had personally been responsible for the file on Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who had assassinated President John F. Kennedy just two months earlier. Oswald was a former marine and radar operator who had tried to defect in the USSR before returning to the US and who had more recently been in touch with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. When he was named as the assassin, Nosenko explained, the Soviet leadership demanded all files relating to him to be flown to Moscow immediately by military plane.48 The KGB had thought Oswald a nuisance – he had even tried to slash his wrists to get attention – and so it had decided he was mentally unstable and not even worth debriefing. The KGB had had nothing to do with the assassination, Nosenko now explained.⁴⁹ This revelation meant that debriefing Nosenko was vital. The timing was remarkable. And suspicious, some thought. Was it really plausible that the KGB had not been interested in Oswald? Had Nosenko now been sent by the KGB to divert attention from the truth that it had assassinated an American president?

Nosenko was brought to the US by the CIA in February 1964 and taken to the attic of a house in the suburbs of Washington DC. Word went out that he must be broken. He was grilled by CIA officers after being denied sleep for up to forty-eight hours. ‘At times the interrogation descended into a shouting match,’ recalled Bagley.⁵⁰ One tape recording is said by a former CIA officer to include Nosenko mumbling ‘From my soul, I beg you to believe me’ and a voice screaming ‘That’s bullshit’ again and again.⁵¹ The hope was to secure a confession that he was a plant and then send him back to the Soviet Union. Nosenko said he believes he was administered drugs, possibly LSD, an indication that Sidney Gottlieb’s methods might have been in play. Others have disputed the idea that drugs were used. His treatment foreshadowed the way in which the CIA treated suspects of a different time after 11 September 2011. He never had access to a lawyer or any legal process. He was shackled and blindfolded and taken on a plane. He thought he was being sent back to Moscow but was in fact taken to a specially built facility at the Farm, the CIA’s training establishment in rural Virginia. He was kept in a concrete cell watched by a camera, with no pillows, blankets, air conditioning or heating. ‘To say it was a nightmare is not enough. It was a hell,’ he would later recall.52 To occupy his mind, he would fantasise that he was a submariner or a pilot or a fireman carrying out heroic deeds. At night he would talk in his sleep in character, confusing the guards.⁵³ In his interrogation and polygraph, Nosenko was not helped by the fact that he was a drinker and that he had lied about his rank and exaggerated his importance. Among his falsehoods was the claim that a telegram had forced him to defect. None of this helped his case within the CIA.⁵⁴ His knowledge was patchy in some areas where it should have been stronger. He had come from a very privileged background but had consistently under-achieved, flunking various exams, and had tried to hide this from the CIA.⁵⁵ Was he a loser or a cunning double agent? Some officers invested their career in arguing that Nosenko was a plant and that there was a high-level penetration. Golitsyn was also allowed to review Nosenko’s file and, perhaps unsurprisingly, concluded that his rival was indeed a plant. The head of the CIA was originally convinced that Nonsenko was a plant, but by 1966 doubts were beginning to creep in and further reviews were ordered.⁵⁶

There was a growing and disturbing suspicion in some parts of the CIA that Nosenko might be innocent. There were also concerns over the legality of his detention.⁵⁷ Some of his guards even found his treatment troubling, telling Kisevalter of their concerns when he went down to the camp to work as an instructor.⁵⁸ But what should be done? The way he had been treated could cause a scandal. Pete Bagley wrote some notes which included the options of ‘liquidating the man’ or ‘render[ing] him incapable of giving a coherent story’. He always maintained that these were his private scribbling, in which he was venting his frustration and that there was never any serious intent to kill Nosenko.⁵⁹ Eventually, Nosenko would be released and rehabilitated. In all he had been held for a total of 1,277 days. Years later he called up Angleton on the phone. ‘I have nothing more to say to you,’ Angleton said. ‘And Mr Angleton, I have nothing further to say to you,’ Nosenko replied.⁶⁰

The molehunts on either side of the Atlantic moved largely in parallel, but their paths sometimes crossed. The British molehunters understood they had allies in the CIA and would occasionally use this as a bargaining chip. On one occasion, they issued an ultimatum to Hollis saying they would resign unless he told the Americans about the investigation into Mitchell. Hollis performed the drearily familiar ritual of flying over to Washington to tell the Americans that there might be yet another leak, this time no less than his number two. The President was informed.61 The CIA was getting worried about the British. Teams were sent over – sometimes with the knowledge of British intelligence but sometimes without – to look into their cousins and see how bad things were. One report in 1965 said MI5 was suffering from poor organisation and leadership.

Arthur Martin began to drink heavily and put on weight under the strain of his hunt for the spy. His hair turned grey and anger flared. Even his friends acknowledged that he lacked tact, but he became increasingly reckless, even self-destructive, in his single-minded pursuit. As promotion passed him by, a sense of victimhood increased. At meetings, the tension between Martin and Hollis crackled like electricity in the air. Hollis decided that enough was enough. He confronted Martin and in late 1964 suspended him. But this was not the end for Martin. His old mentor Dick White immediately took him on at MI6. White’s MI6 was becoming almost a safe haven from which the hunters could operate against his old service.

There could be only one reason why Hollis had been so reluctant to brief the Americans and to sign off on more intrusive investigative techniques, the hunters decided. And so they trained their guns on him. The MI5 chief was by most accounts a mediocrity with many unable to see how he had risen to the top. He was codenamed ‘Drat’. There were a few mysteries to his past and Peter Wright travelled to Oxford to go through university records. Why had he dropped out of university in the 1930s before finishing his degree? Why was he shy about admitting to friendships with a few Communists at the time? And was it entirely clear what he had been doing in China before the war? Even Hollis’s friend Anthony Courtney, the naval commander of the Baltic operation, had been startled when Hollis visited him in Germany and said, ‘My experience is that every man, without exception, has his price – but mine is a very high one.’⁶² Nothing was conclusive. But it was suggestive to those of a certain bent of mind. The Americans were told of the new investigation, and Angleton plotted to have Hollis removed.⁶³ CIA Director Richard Helms was briefed on ‘what could have been a scandal far outstripping even the Philby disaster’.64 But while the Americans were briefed, the British Prime Minister was not informed at the time. As his stint as head of MI5 drew to a close, Hollis confronted Wright at headquarters. ‘There is just one thing I wanted to ask you before I go,’ Hollis said. ‘I wanted to know why you think I’m a spy.’ Wright went through his reasoning. ‘All I can say is that I’m not a spy,’ Hollis said and exited, he thought, stage left.⁶⁵

The hunt was not over. De Mowbray was sent to the US as the counter-intelligence officer under Christopher Philpotts, a high-flyer who believed he was heading for the top and who had bought into the idea of penetration. De Mowbray’s brief was to stay close to Angleton, whom he found fascinating. All the molehunters would visit Angleton’s curtain-shrouded, dimly lit office to hear from the master. Files would be scattered on the desk and the cigarette smoke generated a haze which was enhanced by his furtive pronouncements.

A few months into his tour, de Mowbray went up to New York with Arthur Martin to meet Golitsyn in person for the first time. It was the beginning of a long and complicated friendship. He found Golitsyn strong willed. ‘He is a very fierce man. At times I used to have hell from him,’ de Mowbray recalls. The molehunt looked to have run out of steam, but then in 1968 a new chief of MI6 arrived. Sir John Rennie was an outsider, a Foreign Office man. As such he was distrusted and disliked by most of the service. Among the only people who liked him were the molehunters. Rennie went over to Washington soon after starting and met Golitsyn. He then had dinner with Philpotts, who like others was frustrated that MI5’s leadership had failed to pursue the penetration theory. Philpotts explained his concerns to Rennie. ‘Let’s do something,’ the new Chief said to him. Philpotts returned to London as head of counter-intelligence and began an aggressive investigation, which included scrutiny of the service itself.

There were many Communists, some former and some current, littered around the establishment, including MI6. The molehunt led by Philpotts in the late 1960s never found another Philby in the service. But ten officers, some very senior, were forced to retire early because of ‘irregularities’ in their past, often relating to Communism. None was proved to have been a traitor. The purge had been restrained by the ever cautious and calculating Oldfield, but once he moved post it drove forward. Andrew King, the Pekingese-owning former station chief in Vienna, was among those to fall foul of it. As well as engaging in what were seen as ‘unnatural vices’, King had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s (he had noted at the time that giving 20 per cent of his income to the party seemed a ‘jolly high’ proportion). He said he had declared this at the time and also when he had first been interrogated soon after the war. After that interrogation, he told the molehunters his then boss had asked the Chief whether more security checks were required. ‘C says that since spies are only people of foreign origin, don’t bother.’66 This was the type of culture the hunters believed had allowed the service to rot from within. Most damning of all, even though there was no evidence he was a traitor, King admitted he had always known that Philby and Burgess had been Communists.⁶⁷ Another senior MI6 officer, Donald Prater, was summoned back from Stockholm and dismissed in 1968 for pre-war Communism in Oxford.⁶⁸ Another officer left because he had been a schoolfriend of Philby and had been recommended for the service by him. Nicholas Elliott was also interviewed – his friendship with Philby inevitably bringing him under suspicion. This was a bitter and miserable period. One of the ten who resigned quit simply because he did not like what was being done to his colleagues. A chilled delirium overcame the service. It was a McCarthyite witchhunt, a few whispered privately to each other. Antipathy against the molehunters spread, but few dared speak openly for fear of the consequences. At MI5, younger officers avoided Peter Wright in the canteen, whispering of the Gestapo and referring to him as the ‘KGB illegal’. Within the claustrophobic confines of MI5 and MI6 headquarters, an atmosphere of mistrust developed. In the highly compartmentalised world of British intelligence, new recruits were never informed of what was happening or about the suspicions, but they could sense that something bad was afoot.

Shergy was worried. The core of professionalism he had built up in Sov Bloc operations was under threat from the hunt. Success was the key to winning the argument, but he also knew that he had to tread carefully. Just after he returned from Warsaw, Gerry Warner was asked by Shergy to speak at the Fort, the service’s training establishment. What would you like to speak on? Shergy asked. How about the desirability of officers working on Eastern Europe in London visiting the region so they could understand the conditions better? ‘You can’t have that,’ Shergy told him. ‘But it is terribly important,’ protested Warner. ‘If you insist on this, I’ll have to send you back to London straight away.’ Shergy understood that the molehunters believed that anyone who spent time behind the Iron Curtain would be subverted and if they discovered he had allowed such a talk to be given, it would not just be Warner who would pay the price.

Out in the field, officers learnt to fear the dread hand of suspicion reaching out to them. Following Poland, Gerry Warner was based in Geneva. His wife was a mathematician who had worked on a doctorate during their time in Warsaw and had to go back to defend it. The week before she went, one of the molehunters came out to see the station chief who was frequently heading down to a neighbouring European capital to carry out surveillance on the MI6 head of station, whom Philpotts suspected. Warner and the visiting officer had dinner one night out on the shores of the lake and Warner mentioned that his wife was going to Warsaw. After dinner was over, the officer raced to see the station chief to tell him. A few months later, Shergy appeared in Geneva. ‘You won’t be pleased to see me when I tell you that you have to leave Geneva in a fortnight,’ he told Warner. They went for a walk out on the streets, unwilling to talk openly in the office. ‘You’ve got to know too many Russians.’ But that was the job, Warner protested. Shergy explained that the real problem had begun months earlier when the hunters had learnt that Warner’s wife was planning to visit Warsaw. Since then they had been trying to have him removed, and Shergy had held them off by saying he would have to see Warner in person and had only been able to do that now. Warner was given a few extra months’ leeway, but moved out of Sov Bloc work. The sudden shift had damaged his personal life though not his career. He was moved off into the Far East controllerate where he began to rise.

De Mowbray returned to London just after Philpotts to work with him and join the Fluency Committee, the joint MI5–MI6 team set up to review the issue of penetration. Its 1967 report concluded there were twenty-eight anomalies that could not be attributed to any spy who had yet been identified.69 Golitsyn returned to Britain, again fearing that the KGB was on his tail as he headed for the south coast. He visited four times, on each occasion for a month. De Mowbray was one of those assigned to look after him. Golitsyn was now given the freedom to range over the MI5 files on individuals. Whatever he asked for he received so long as it predated his defection. He was paid £10,000 a month for his work (having asked for more).

Even de Mowbray’s former tutor came into the sights. Golitsyn thought Isaiah Berlin’s familial links to Russia were suspicious and constituted a vulnerability. This was too much for de Mowbray who argued it out with Golitsyn. Hollis was brought back from retirement for interrogation (he had found a strange refuge by occasionally sitting in John le Carré’s house).70 He admitted nothing and there was no hard evidence, just belief. ‘Dear old Roger; to do this successfully would have required intelligence and skill of a very high order,’ one colleague later said of the idea that Hollis could have been a spy.⁷¹ Rumours swirled through the secret world and began to filter out. The investigations provided plenty of ammunition for reputations to be smeared (and not always deliberately – in one case Judith Hart, a Labour minister, was deemed a security risk because MI5 had muddled her up with Edith Tudor-Hart who had recruited Philby).⁷²

Golitsyn said that a KGB chief of operations in Northern Europe had talked of killing an opposition leader in the West. The leader of the Labour Party Hugh Gaitskell had died in January 1963. Was he the victim of an assassination plot designed by the KGB to get ‘their man’ into Downing Street? Arthur Martin spoke to Gaitskell’s doctor, who said it was mysterious how the Labour leader could have contracted the unusual disease which killed him. Harold Wilson had taken over as leader. Perhaps he was a KGB man? they speculated. After all, he had conducted some business dealings in the Soviet Union and had some friends with suspicious connections. From 1964 when Wilson won the general election, some in Washington, and even a few in London, believed that the Prime Minister worked for the KGB. Golitsyn never said he was definitely a spy but trusted that the bits and pieces he had seen ‘fitted’ with Wilson. Angleton once even flew over to London saying he had new information to back up the claim but could not pass on the details.⁷³ In fact, the KGB had once opened a file on Wilson in order to target him but had never had any success. For Wright and one or two others, a sense had grown up that they were the ultimate guardians of the sanctity of the state against some terrible plot which everyone else was blind to. The idea that the spies were manning the ‘last watchtower’ while the citizens slept blissfully unaware of the dangers is a notion that occasionally arises within secret services, particularly when there is a deep-seated belief in subversion from within, and it could occasionally edge into something dangerous and itself subversive.74 Wright dwelt on the idea of plotting to remove the government. He would later admit that almost no one else within the secret world was ready to follow him in that direction, although there were some of its former members who were also thinking along the same lines, not least George Kennedy Young, the former MI6 deputy chief who created an ‘action’ committee called Unison dedicated to the ‘security of the realm’, which, he claimed, even had police chief constables on its books. These murmurings (including one discussion in the late 1960s in which Lord Mountbatten was invited and declined to take part in a prospective coup) never really came close to actually toppling the government but they helped heighten an increasingly febrile atmosphere.⁷⁵

The American molehunt had been nearly as savage as the British. Officers whose name began with a K had their careers wrecked. Then it spread wider as Golitsyn scoured the personnel files. In all, around fifty officers came under suspicion at one time or another, a dozen and a half investigated heavily. After he retired Richard Helms had a conversation with the editor of the Washington Post. ‘Do you know what I worried about most as Director of CIA?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘The CIA is the only intelligence service in the Western world that has never been penetrated by the KGB.’⁷⁶ The pursuit paralysed operations against the Soviet Union. It was simply too dangerous to recruit anyone in case they were either betrayed or had been planted as part of the master plot. Perhaps the only thing worse than having a mole is the fear of having a mole. The CIA was left emasculated, governed by a fear that the enemy was inside its walls, watching its every move and pulling the strings behind its every move. ‘Angleton devastated us,’ explained one official from the Soviet division. ‘He took us out of the Soviet business.’⁷⁷ One defector was sent back to the Soviet Union on the basis that he was a plant. He was almost certainly not and was most likely killed.

By the 1970s the CIA had entered into a dark place. When one CIA officer was posted to Paris as station chief, Angleton actually warned the French that his colleague might be a Soviet agent.78 Angleton became an insomniac. When Peter Wright visited he would stay up drinking and comparing notes with the MI5 officer until 4 a.m. At one point, he turned to Wright and said, ‘This is Kim’s work.’⁷⁹ Perhaps he meant that Philby was behind the plots. He was certainly behind Angleton’s fear. It was Angleton who was to become lost in his wilderness of mirrors, watching Philby’s disjointed reflection darting around his own angular self.

Eventually, and with a grim inevitability, the revolution began to devour its children. Someone asked who had damaged CIA activity most. That old friend of Philby, James Jesus Angleton. One officer said there was an 80 to 85 per cent chance that Angleton was himself the spy, the attachment of a percentage to such an issue, a sign of the absurdity to which it had all descended.⁸⁰ Or perhaps Golitsyn, not Nosenko, was the plant, sent by a cunning KGB to manipulate the growing paranoia of Philby’s old friend and lead him down the garden path? (He was not, as was evidenced by the KGB’s reaction to his defection and its plans to assassinate him.)⁸¹ Angleton was not a spy, but his time had passed. A new CIA director began to break up the sprawling Angleton empire, removing his power of veto over operations. One officer was tasked with investigating his work. He went down to Angleton’s private vault at the end of his office. Past a combination-locked door was a private library of files, inaccessible to the rest of the CIA. In all there were 40,000 files on individuals in ten racks eight feet high, kept in brown envelopes.⁸² There were forty-nine volumes on Kim Philby alone. One safe had the Hollis and Mitchell files, as well as those on Harold Wilson, Henry Kissinger and other top Western officials. Inside this vast storehouse was another smaller vault beyond push-button locks where even more secret material was housed. It took the officer six years to complete his study, which ran to 4,000 pages.⁸³ The sum was far less than the parts, a collection of leads which went down winding paths but never quite reached a destination. Sasha was eventually agreed to be not a CIA officer but a head agent in Germany called Orlov.

In 1975 Angleton was finally forced out on the pretext of his involvement in domestic surveillance in which he had been opening American citizens’ mail. At the same time, the Watergate scandal had damaged the CIA, as had the exposure before Congress of the role of Larry Devlin and other officers in proposed assassinations abroad. In the tussle between believers and critics of deception and molehunts, the pendulum swung the other way. The revulsion against Angleton was so strong that counter-intelligence became a dirty word, the last division any aspiring young officer would want to serve in. The memories of the hunt were so piercing that for years no one wanted to revisit its dark hallway.84 The CIA began aggressively to recruit agents in the Soviet bloc. These efforts would later be met with catastrophe because, after Angleton had left, the KGB really did manage to get inside the castle walls just when everyone had stopped looking.

The struggle within MI6 ebbed and flowed. The rising star of the service was Maurice Oldfield. He played a complex, ambiguous role in the molehunt. When he was the liaison in Washington before Philpotts, he had been close to Angleton and, as an instinctively cautious, counter-intelligence expert, had at least in part backed the theories. When Oldfield came back to London as head of counter-intelligence just before Philpotts took the job, he walked a more ambivalent line, ever mindful of the politics. He voiced the need for care and for a more passive stance rather than for an aggressive recruitment of Soviets. Another scandal had to be avoided. When Rennie was appointed chief, Oldfield was angry about being passed over for an outsider. He became number two, controlling as much as he could and repositioning himself as the voice of reason against the molehunters. Philpotts, once a contender for the throne, was outmanoeuvred and gave up the fight in 1970, a stellar career lost in the contrived corridors of suspicion. Oldfield then had de Mowbray moved away from the molehunting team. Against his protests de Mowbray was sent to work on the Southern Mediterranean. De Mowbray was indignant about his treatment but made sure he kept in touch with his fellow believers in MI5. Their numbers began to dwindle, but de Mowbray had decided he would not give up. ‘I could not reconcile myself to doing nothing: I had made so many commitments to myself and to others to pursue the problem to the end that I could not wash my hands and forget about it.’

In the early 1970s, de Mowbray heard from his friends at MI5 that the CIA Director had been over to London and had been told that the case against Hollis had been closed. De Mowbray went to complain to Rennie. ‘You know if I were to do something and make a fuss, one or other of us [meaning himself or the head of MI5] would have to go,’ Rennie said. De Mowbray realised he would no longer get any support from within MI6. He used the connection of having gone to New College, Oxford, to approach a former private secretary to the Prime Minister now working in the City. He asked him whether he would have accepted a closed envelope to pass directly to the Prime Minister. The ex-official said he would have done. A few days later, in June 1974, de Mowbray approached a serving official at 10 Downing Street where Harold Wilson had just returned as prime minister. He was taken to one of the grand upstairs rooms, but he was told that no private message could be passed to the Prime Minister without an official reading it first. A day later, he received a message summoning him to see the Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt. De Mowbray took Hunt through the investigation and said he believed that MI5 was incapable and unwilling to investigate itself. He thought Hunt had listened intently. But Hunt told a colleague, ‘As de Mowbray’s eyes glazed over, I had the feeling of a dangerous obsession.’85 Hunt told the Prime Minister who then said to his secretary and confidante, ‘Now I’ve heard everything. I’ve just been told that the head of MI5 itself may have been a double agent!’⁸⁶ Hunt also called Sir Dick White in from retirement.

‘Is de Mowbray a screwball?’ the Cabinet Secretary asked.

‘No, he’s not mad,’ replied White. ‘He’s patriotic, hard-working but obsessed.’

‘Was Hollis a spy?’ asked Hunt. Hollis had died in 1973.

‘I’d be surprised,’ said White. It was a strange form of words and was delivered with little conviction. Hunt was left with the impression that it might be surprising but not impossible for it to be true.

‘But how did we get to this?’ asked Hunt. He decided to try and find out.⁸⁷

A couple of weeks later another message came asking de Mowbray to see former Cabinet Secretary Lord Trend in Oxford. For two hours they talked, first inside, then over lunch out in deckchairs on a perfect summer’s afternoon. Trend had been asked to conduct his own investigation into the issue and listened carefully. But at the end as he stepped out of his door on to the cobbled Oxford street, Trend turned to him ‘Don’t expect me to tear Whitehall apart about all this,’ he said.

Trend was given an office, a safe and a secretary in MI5 headquarters and spent a year poring over the papers and interviewing those involved. ‘How did it all begin?’ he asked Peter Wright. It was a question Wright had often asked himself.88 Trend’s final report remains secret. It was used to exonerate Hollis when accusations against him became public, although there are some who doubt that it was as conclusive as it was made out to be. When the investigation was complete, Oldfield summoned de Mowbray to meet with Trend and Hunt in the Cabinet Office. De Mowbray met Oldfield down in the car park of MI6’s new headquarters, Century House, and they drove over to Whitehall together. De Mowbray began to talk about Russian deception. Oldfield cut across him and said someone was dealing with these problems. Hunt told de Mowbray that he had to reconcile himself to not getting his old job back in counter-intelligence. De Mowbray tried again to pass a note to the Prime Minister. By now the 1970s were fading and James Callaghan had succeeded Wilson after his surprise resignation from Downing Street. Hunt called de Mowbray back and said that the Prime Minister had spoken to the heads of MI5 and MI6, but it was over. End of story. It certainly was for de Mowbray, who asked for early retirement. He walked out of Century House never to set foot inside again. He went off to the US where he joined up with Golitsyn, now out of favour at the CIA, and began helping the Russian with a book.

The aftershocks of the molehunts and investigations continued to reverberate around the secret and the political worlds. In May 1976, a BBC TV reporter received an unusual summons from Harold Wilson who had stepped down as Prime Minister two months earlier. At his home around the corner from the House of Commons, Wilson opened a window into a world of conspiracy and fear for the journalist and a colleague he had brought along. ‘I am not certain that for the last eight months when I was Prime Minister I knew what was happening, fully, in security,’ he told the astonished reporters.⁸⁹ Over sherry and whisky, he said some people in MI5 were ‘very right wing’ and that he could not rule out individuals in MI5 and MI6 being involved in smearing him with talk of a ‘communist cell’ in Number 10.⁹⁰ Wilson said he had summoned Oldfield to ask about the problem and that Oldfield had confirmed that there was an ‘unreliable’ section in his sister service and promised to help deal with it but he had never reported back. Wilson explained that he had even gone so far as to send a friend to Washington to ask a former vice-president to find out what the CIA knew. The then-CIA Director and future President George Bush then visited Wilson in Downing Street to discuss the issue. He was convinced that a series of burglaries at his office and home, and those of his colleagues, was part of a wider conspiracy, possibly involving South African intelligence.

Spy-fever washed over British shores again in 1979. A book by a BBC journalist pointed towards Anthony Blunt as a spy. His secret was out and he was stripped of his knighthood. The Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was forced to make a statement in parliament. In November of that year an adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy hit television screens. ‘I’ve got a story to tell you. It’s all about spies. And if it’s true, which I think it is, you boys are going to need a whole new organisation,’ a character tells George Smiley. Alec Guinness played George Smiley, the spymaster who hunted for a ‘mole’ within MI6 and found it to be one of his closest friends. To prepare for his role, Guinness had been introduced to the now retired Maurice Oldfield by le Carré in a restaurant. Oldfield had been a fan of Guinness and rather enjoyed the lunch.91 But, like many other officers, he wanted to warn against accepting the bleak world of Smiley as the truth. ‘We are definitely not as our host here describes us,’ he told the actor.⁹² Guinness hurried to watch Oldfield as he walked away. ‘The quaintly didactic waddle, the clumsy cufflinks, the poorly rolled umbrella were added to Smiley’s properties chest from then on,’ remarked le Carré.⁹³ Although not the template for the original Smiley, the similarities were there in the glasses, the odd walk and the fascination with medieval history. ‘I still don’t recognise myself,’ the spy chief wrote to the actor after seeing the programme. Almost everyone else could. Oldfield had risen to the top, but even the foreign secretaries he served detected a loneliness in him. He died a few years later, an unhappy obituary arriving later when his homosexuality was exposed amid questions about whether it had posed a security risk. Oldfield had been a sincere churchman from a humble background in Derbyshire surrounded by the upper crust and living out a double life. ‘He must have had an awful, awful inner struggle,’ a colleague reckons.94

The British public had become obsessed with traitors, fuelled by le Carré’s fiction. Traitors provided one explanation for why everything had gone wrong in Britain after the war, why the Empire had disappeared and things were not as they used to be. Where Fleming’s Bond provided escape from that reality, Smiley offered an alternative, bleaker and self-flagellating, narrative. Thrillers reflect the anxieties of their age. Early spy fiction at the turn of the century had been designed to warn people of the threats and vulnerabilities to Britain and its Empire sitting astride the world.⁹⁵ By the time of le Carré, the anxieties were much more about moral decay and what lay within. In London and Washington they disliked his work, especially The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Over dinner in Washington, CIA Director John McCone complained to Dick White that the negative portrayal was undermining their work. ‘He hasn’t done us any good … He’s presenting a service without trust or loyalty, where agents are sacrificed and deceived without compunction.’⁹⁶

The change in spy fiction – from the gung-ho imperial fiction of the early century to the more interior literature of traitors – mirrored Britain’s changing position in the world and its perception of itself. The spies had also begun to look inward as much as outward. In Vienna at the start of the Cold War, the first question defectors from the East would be asked was whether they knew of any sign of impending war. By the latter stages of the conflict, the first question they would be asked was whether they knew of any sign that Western intelligence services had been penetrated. The spy world had become more introverted and more self-referential, inhabiting its own subculture with its own strange customs.

On both sides of the Atlantic, a fire had been lit by Philby’s betrayal which was fanned by Golitsyn. It blazed with fierce intensity, nearly consuming both the CIA and MI6 until it burnt itself out. Trust is the glue which holds organisations and people together. In the world of spy versus spy, being too trusting, as MI6 had been in the past, can be destructive, opening the way for treachery. But trusting too little can also corrode an organisation from within, shattering its self-confidence, making it impossible for colleagues to work with each other and to work with partners. A poison entered the system. The molehunters did not begin from a position of paranoia. Belief that the services could have been penetrated was not simply rational, it was true given what had come before in the form of Philby and Blake and others. Not to have carried out investigations would have been dangerously irresponsible. But the trouble came from the quasi-religious acceptance of a theory which could not be disproved by the facts, a problem that recurs from time to time in intelligence. The problem with being convinced that your enemy is practising deception is that ‘the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’.97 ‘Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist.’ In other words, if you can’t find what you are looking for, it just means that your opponent is very good at deceiving you.⁹⁸

Peter Wright was sidelined. ‘When you join the service each case looks different. When you leave they all seem the same,’ he later reflected.⁹⁹ When he walked out of the old offices in 1976 to a new building, he sensed the ghosts that had still not been laid to rest. ‘Walking the corridors of Leconfield House I could still feel the physical sense of treachery, of pursuit, and the scent of the kill,’ he wrote.¹⁰⁰ The trauma of the molehunts remained hidden from public view for many years. This did not help. The closet into which skeletons were hurriedly stuffed became increasingly fit to burst. In Britain, there were no American-style Congressional committees to help ease the tension and deflate the pressure. Those who felt their country had been betrayed and their own fears ignored became increasingly agitated. Some began to do something that those in the secret world had not done before. They began to talk, first to a few journalists and writers. Then, emboldened, Peter Wright, angry at having been denied a proper pension, decided to publish his own tell-all in his book Spycatcher. Fear traversed Whitehall and the secret world and everything was done to try and stop it, including an absurd court case in Australia which made the Cabinet Secretary and government look foolish. But their efforts were futile and out tumbled all the skeletons and the dirty laundry in one messy pile in front of a rapt British public who had not seen anything like it before. Arthur Martin too broke cover to defend Wright, even though he was less sure about Hollis. ‘If it was not Hollis, who was it?’ he asked in a letter to The Times, warning that the failure to follow through on the investigation into this had led to ‘a decade of unease’. ‘It is inconceivable that the security service would have allowed an investigation to lapse if similar evidence of penetration had been discovered in any other department of government,’ he wrote, beginning a public exchange with other former officers on the letters page of the newspaper. Despite the best efforts of a few, the door to the secret world could never be quite so firmly shut again. Who are all these strange people? the public began to ask.101

In the late 1980s, Gerry Warner was appointed MI6’s director of counter-intelligence and security, the post that had previously been the power base of the molehunters. He found the staff still living a hermetically sealed existence, locked into the position of accumulating files and information as they watched for trouble rather than aggressively targeting the other side. In his new role he should have had access to all the files. As he opened the safe, he found that fifteen of them were on Maurice Oldfield and his personal life. Chris Curwen was then C and had been among the hunters. When Curwen retired three years later, he walked into Warner’s office. ‘You better have these,’ he said and deposited a further handful of files from his own personal Chief’s safe. They were files of counter-intelligence investigations that Warner had never been shown before. Perhaps it was something of an apology. Among the files was one on Warner himself. Everyone who had run the Warsaw station up to a certain date had been investigated by the molehunters based on the Angletonian thesis that anyone who had successfully run agents in the Soviet bloc, like Beneficiary the Polish cipher clerk, must have been working for the other side. The molehunters had been looking for the officer who was being groomed by their Soviet controllers for the top of the service, the new Philby. Warner read on, angry and amazed. His relatively humble background, his early reputation as a troublemaker, his wife’s mathematical skills (useful for encrypting perhaps), all pointed in one direction, the file argued. The conclusion, at one point, was that he was the spy. Shergy’s role in protecting him in Geneva and at the Fort, and in protecting the core of his own operations, became clearer. There was a note on the file. It asked, despairingly, why when we have all this proof has nothing happened and why does Warner continue to be promoted? Warner leant back in his chair. He did not know whether to laugh or cry.

De Mowbray went into a self-imposed silence for three decades after leaving MI6.102 Hollis and Mitchell were not spies, he came to believe (although a few persist in their belief about Hollis).¹⁰³ ‘There were suspicions with both of them. There are not suspicions now. But somebody was doing it,’ he argues. ‘I vowed to myself I would never let go of the case.’ It would be hard, although not quite impossible, for the identity of a high-level British traitor to have been kept secret for so long on the Soviet side with all the defectors who had come over, especially in the last three decades. ‘Maybe I was wrong. But I don’t think I was,’ says de Mowbray. ‘I cannot leave this. Ever.’ Anatoly Golitsyn, the man who walked out of the KGB Residency that cold Friday night in Helsinki in 1961, died in the sweltering heat of the American South on 29 December 2008. Not a single obituary marked his passing. It was as if the pain of that chapter was so great that no one wanted to remember.