Spycatcher (38 page)

"Kim and I had different outlooks on life," Blunt told me. "He only ever had one ambition in life - to be a spy. I had other things in mine..."

Blunt admired Philby, but there was a part of him that was frightened by his utter conviction, his ruthlessly one-dimensional view of life. Blunt needed love and art and, in the end, the comfort of life in the Establishment. Philby, on the other hand, lived his life from bed to bed; he had an Arabian attitude to women, needing only the thrill of espionage to sustain him. Isaiah Berlin once said to me, "Anthony's trouble is that he wants to hunt with society's hounds and run with the Communist hares!"

"Kim never wavered," he said. "He always remained loyal, right to the end."

By late 1964 I was submerged by the weight of material emanating from the Long, Cairncross, and Blunt confessions, as well as the enormous task of collating and systematically reexamining all the material which had reached MI5 since 1960 from the various defectors. It was at this point that Symonds' second report on the Mitchell case finally reached me.

One morning, about a fortnight before the October 1964 general election, Hollis' secretary handed me a thick file, and told me to report to the DG's office that afternoon to discuss it. There was precious little time to read the report, let alone study it. Symonds had followed Hollis' instructions zealously, and during the eight months it took him to prepare the document, he never discussed its contents with either Arthur or me. But its thrust was clear enough. Symonds reassessed the Mitchell case in the light of the Blunt confession, which, of course, we had not possessed at the time of the first report. According to Symonds, the case against Mitchell was not strong. Symonds was not prepared to rule out the possibility of a more recent penetration, but he felt the likelihood was considerably diminished.

Arthur also received Symonds' report that morning; he knew he was being outflanked, and that the decision to circulate the report at such a late stage was a deliberate device to prevent any counterattack. He told me that he intended at the meeting to take the line that he could not comment until he was given adequate time to study it. For the first part of the meeting he was a silent, smoldering presence at one side of the conference table.

Hollis opened briskly.

"I don't propose to waste too much time," he began. "I have read this paper, which strikes me as most convincing. I would like your views before reaching a decision. As you know, gentlemen, an election is due very soon, and I feel it is much better for the Service if we can resolve this case now, so that I do not have to brief any incoming Prime Minister."

Everyone knew what he meant. He did not want to brief Harold Wilson, the Labor leader, who looked increasingly likely to beat the Tories at the forthcoming contest. Hollis' attitude was quite simple: Blunt, Long, and Cairncross tied up some useful loose ends, the Mitchell case fell, and everything was neatly resolved. He wanted to close the case and minute the file that the question of penetration had been dismissed.

Hollis asked for opinions around the table. There was surprisingly little comment at first. The Mitchell inquiry had been so badly botched on all sides that few of us felt it a strong wicket to defend, particularly since Arthur and I both now had strong suspicions that Hollis was the culprit. I said simply that if Symonds' first report was the case for the prosecution, then this latest was the case for the defense, and that without an interrogation I could not accept a verdict of "not guilty," and wanted my views recorded in the minutes. Hollis made a small note on the pad in front of him, and turned to Cumming.

Cumming delivered a lecture on the lack of discipline exhibited during the Mitchell investigation. It was clear to all of us that the decision to exclude him from the indoctrination had shattered his self-esteem.

F.J. said only that the best that could be said for the Mitchell case was that it was nonproven.

"And you, Arthur...?" asked Hollis. Arthur looked up from the report.

"Well," he said, "there is a third possibility. Someone could be running Mitchell as their stalking horse."

There was silence around the table. He and Hollis stared at each other for a brief moment. Everyone in the room knew exactly what Arthur meant.

"I should like that remark clarified," said Cumming from the other end of the table. Symonds flicked anxiously through his report, as if he were looking to see if somehow Arthur's hypothesis had crept into it undetected.

Hollis merely picked up where he left off, ignoring Arthur's comment as if he had not heard it.

"Well, we have to make a decision," he said, "and therefore I propose to close this case down, and minute the file to that effect..."

His pen paused above the file. Arthur could contain himself no longer

"Intellectually, you simply cannot do this," he burst out in his most precise manner. "You're neglecting virtually all the Golitsin allegations about penetration. There's the question of the leak about the Crabbe operation. There's the Technics Document - we don't even know yet which document Golitsin is referring to. Whatever the status of the Mitchell case, it cannot be right to ignore them."

Hollis tried to deflect the attack, but Arthur pressed forward. He knew Hollis had overreached himself. Symonds admitted he knew too little about the Golitsin material to present an authoritative opinion. F.J. was inclined to agree that further work on Golitsin would be prudent.

Hollis could feel the meeting ebb away from him. He threw down his pen in exasperation and instructed Patrick Stewart to conduct a final review of all Golitsin serials outstanding. In the meantime, he ordered the Mitchell case was closed.

After the meeting I approached F.J. It was intolerable, I said, for the DG to assign a research task to an officer without consulting me, the head of Research, when I was already wrestling with the mass of material pouring in from Blunt, Long, and Cairncross, as well as from defectors in Washington.

"Things are difficult enough as it is," I said, "but if we start splitting the work up, there will be chaos!"

F.J. could see the problem. The system was approaching overload, and he agreed with me that more coordination was needed, not less. I suggested that we try to establish some kind of inter-Service working party to research the entire range of material concerning the penetrations of British Intelligence reaching us from confessions or defectors. F. J. said he would see what he could do.

Shortly afterward he called me into his office and said that he had discussed the whole matter with Dick White, who agreed that such a committee should be established. Dick prevailed upon Hollis, who finally gave his reluctant agreement. The committee would be formed jointly from D Branch staff of MI5, and the Counterintelligence Division of MI6. It would report to the Director, D Branch, and the head of MI6 Counterintelligence, and I was to be its working chairman. The committee was given a code name: FLUENCY.

Hollis used the row over the Symonds report as the pretext for clipping Arthur's wings. He divided the now burgeoning D1 empire into two sections: D1, to handle order of battle and operations; and a new D1 (Investigations) Section, to handle the investigations side of counterespionage. Arthur was left in charge of the truncated D1, and Ronnie Symonds was promoted alongside him as an assistant director in charge of D1 (Investigations).

It was a cruel blow to Arthur, for whom investigations had been his lifeblood since the late 1940s and into which most of his effort had gone since his return in 1959. He had been upset not to be asked to chair the Fluency Committee, although he understood that this was essentially a D3 research task. But to be supplanted in his own department by Symonds, his former junior, who for a long time had viewed Arthur as his mentor, was a bitter pill to swallow. Arthur felt betrayed by the Symonds report. He could not understand how Symonds could write two reports within such a short space of time which seemed to contradict each other. He believed that MI5 had made a desperate mistake.

Arthur became reckless, as if the self-destructive impulse which always ran deep in him suddenly took over. He was convinced that he was being victimized for his energetic pursuit of penetration. To make matters worse, Hollis specified that although the two sections were to be run independently of each other, Arthur was to have some kind of oversight of both areas, in deference to his vast experience and knowledge. It was an absurd arrangement, and bound to lead to catastrophe. The two men rowed continually. Arthur believed that oversight meant control while Symonds wanted to go his own way. Finally things boiled over when Arthur abruptly ordered Symonds to bring his case officers to a conference, and Symonds refused. Arthur told him he was making it impossible for him to do his coordinating job; Symonds retorted that Arthur was interfering, and placed a written complaint before Cumming. Cumming took the complaint to Hollis and recommended Arthur's immediate dismissal, to which Hollis enthusiastically agreed.

The matter was discussed at the next Directors' meeting. Arthur had no allies there; too many Directors felt threatened by his forceful, sometimes intemperate style. The only friend he had among the Directors, Bill Magan, who staunchly defended Arthur to the end, was conveniently absent when the decision was taken.

I remember Arthur came to my office the day it happened, steely quiet.

"They've sacked me," he said simply. "Roger's given me two days to clear my desk." In fact, he was taken on straightaway by MI6, at Dick White's insistence and over Hollis' protests. But although this transfer saved Arthur's pension, his career was cut off in its prime.

I could scarcely believe it. Here was the finest counterespionage officer in the world, a man at that time with a genuine international reputation for his skill and experience, sacked for the pettiest piece of bureaucratic bickering. This was the man who since 1959 had built D1 from an utterly ineffectual section into a modern, aggressive, and effective counterespionage unit. It was still grossly undermanned, it was true, but that was no fault of Arthur's.

Arthur's great flaw was naivete. He never understood the extent to which he had made enemies over the years. His mistake was to assume that advancement would come commensurately with achievement. He was an ambitious man, as he had every right to be. But his was not the ambition of petty infighting. He wanted to slay the dragons and fight the beasts outside, and could never understand why so few of his superiors supported him in his simple approach. He was temperamental, he was obsessive, and he was often possessed by peculiar ideas, but the failure of MI5 to harness his temperament and exploit his great gifts is one of the lasting indictments of the organization.

"It's a plus as far as I'm concerned," he said the night he was sacked, "to get out of this."

But I knew he did not mean it.

I tried to cheer Arthur up, but he was convinced Hollis had engineered the whole thing to protect himself, and there was little I could do.

The stain of dismissal was a bitter price to pay after the achievements of the previous twenty years. He knew that his career had been broken, and that, as in 1951, all he had worked for would be destroyed. I never saw a sadder man than Arthur the night he left the office. He shook my hand, and I thanked him for all he had done for me. He took one look around the office. "Good luck," he said and stepped out for the last time.

- 16 -

By the time Arthur left I was in the midst of a major reconstruction of the D3 Research section. When I took it over it had no clear sense of purpose in the way I wanted it to have. I was convinced that it had a central role to play if MI5 were finally to get to the bottom of the 1930s conspiracy. An intelligence service, particularly a counterespionage service, depends on its memory and its sense of history; without them it is lost. But in 1964 MI5 was quite simply overloaded with the mass of contradictory information flowing in from defectors and confessing spies. Loose ends are in the nature of the profession of intelligence, but we were overwhelmed by the weight of unresolved allegations and unproven suspicions about the 1930s which were lying in the Registry. We needed to go back to the period, and in effect positively vet every single acquaintance of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Long, and Cairncross.

It is difficult today to realize how little was actually known, even as late as 1964, about the milieu in which the spies moved, despite the defections in 1951. The tendency had been to regard the spies as "rotten apples," aberrations, rather than as part of a wider-ranging conspiracy born of the special circumstances of the 1930s. The growing gulf in the office between those who believed the Service was penetrated and those who were sure it was not was echoed by a similar division between those who felt the extent of Soviet penetration in the 1930s had been limited, and those who felt its scope had been very wide indeed, and viewed the eight cryptonyms in VENONA as the best proof of their case. Throughout the late 1950s tension between the two sides grew, as Hollis resisted any attempts by those like Arthur and me to grapple with the problem.

The reasons for the failure to confront the conspiracy adequately are complex. On a simple level, little progress was made with the two best suspects, Philby and Blunt, and this made it difficult to justify deploying an immense investigative effort. There was, too, the fear of the Establishment. By the time the defections occurred, most of those associated with Burgess and Maclean were already significant figures in public life. It is one thing to ask embarrassing questions of a young undergraduate, quite another to do the same to a lengthy list of rising civil servants on the fast track to Permanent Under Secretary chairs.

At heart it was a failure of will. Politicians and successive managements in MI5 were terrified that intensive inquiries might trigger further defections or uncover unsavory Establishment scandal, and that was considered an unacceptable risk during the 1950s.

Moreover, in order to conduct a no-holds-barred investigation MI5 inevitably would have to show something of its hand. This ancient dilemma faces all counterespionage services; in order to investigate, you have to risk approaching and interviewing people, and thus the risks of leakage or publicity increase exponentially the more intensive the inquiries you make. This dilemma was particularly acute when facing the problem of investigating Soviet recruitment at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s. Most of those we wanted to interview were still part of a closely knit group of Oxbridge intellectuals, with no necessary allegiance to MI5, or to the continuing secrecy of our operations. News of our activities, it was feared, would spread like wildfire, and faced with that risk, successive managements in MI5 were never willing to grasp the nettle. We opted for secret inquiries, where overt ones would have been far more productive.