Too Secret Too Long

...However, Vassall later satisfied his interrogators that he had never seen the most important documents attributed to him by Nosenko, who might have been protecting the top-ranking spy...

...There have been further reviews since his death in 1973...

...In 1964 another KGB officer, Yuri Nosenko, defected to the CIA from Geneva...

...But Philby was already supposed to go to Canada to see Gouzenko...

...Holhs may have been recruited during this period by the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, which also employed Sonia...

...Late in 1940 MI5 moved out of London, away from German bombing, to Blenheim Palace, near Oxford...

...One was Hollis...

...Through the knowledge they collected from Prime and his American counterparts, the Russians were enabled to mislead the West about their progress in missile development...

...In other words, there is a good chance that Hollis was being serviced by his old friend Sonia as he advanced to the top of MI5...

...Was Hollis doing the same...

...Well, as to several members of the group we have been discussing and their confreres, one can add up a price tag...

...That group was then merged with the fabulously successful "Lucy" ring...

...His revelations on the vast extent of Soviet spying in Canada much embarrassed the government of Mackenzie King...

...Many people find secret intelligence matters antipathetic or worse, and many ask how important they are...

...Here are some examples: 1) He (or his department) took Sonia's brother off the list of dangerous Communists to be kept under observation, so he was able to continue his operations...

...Hollis was by now acting head of Section F, which brought him on to an interdepartmental group charged with monitoring British Communists and Soviet espionage...

...Even more extraordinary is the discovery that the head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, the British equivalent of J. Edgar Hoover, may himself have been a Soviet spy for his nine years in that post, plus twenty years or so in previous positions...

...The British government has never admitted his guilt, and indeed it would serve little purpose for it to do so now...

...On the other hand, he got to the top by accident, and dullness would help account for his initial lack of success...

...In this he is supported by much of Fleet Street, journalists being the natural enemies of secrecy...

...Hollis prevented this interrogation...

...6) After it became widely believed that there was a Soviet mole in MI5, some suspicion fell on Hollis's deputy Director-General, Graham Mitchell...

...This permits in camera trials of offenders under the Act, protecting names and methods...

...Hollis did go to Canada to interrogate Gouzenko, who later revealed that when he told Hollis that the GRU had a spy inside MI5 Hollis expressed no interest, and in fact only spoke to him for a few minutes, remaining standing...

...In 1945 Igor Gouzenko, GRU cipher clerk in Ottawa, defected with a collection of well-chosen secret papers...

...4) Similarly, extensive recordings of coded Soviet clandestine radio traffic-i.e., from agents-were given to Hollis, who never requested that the sources be located by mobile radio-direction-finding vans...

...Indeed, we can see right here what happens when oversight committees, with their political interests and extensive staffs, rummage around in sensitive matters: Along with the advantages there are leaks, the drying up of sources, and other problems...

...Some British intelligence professionals reply that extensive Parliamentary oversight would undermine the Official Secrets Act, which is useful...

...This mole, said Gouzenko, was in a position to make MI5 dossiers on Soviet spies available to his controllers...

...His offer went for action to Philby in MI6, who realized that he himself was the counter-intelligence head Volkov meant...

...Her brother, a highly active and effective Soviet agent who recruited atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, was also stationed in England...

...His death, and the resultant loss of his moderating influence, which made possible Labour's later swing to the far left, was dismissed by Hollis...

...All this is the quickest possible summary (with footnotes of my own) of just some parts of the extraordinarily rich information in Too Secret Too Long...

...8) Prime Minister Macmillan held Hollis responsible for failing to pursue information that enabled the Portland naval spy ring to continue its work for years...

...With hindsight, it can be seen how much damage Hollis may have been able to do...

...So Philby arranged for Hollis, and not himself, to travel to Canada...

...In 1940 Sonia moved to London with her children but without her husband...

...Fedora's" information, which went promptly to the White House, supported Nosenko, and thus Hollis, against Golitsin...

...The trail of the second spy eventually led to a senior naval officer, but Hollis refused to let him be interrogated...

...3) In 1947 Alexander Foote, who had been a member of Sonia's ring in Switzerland, defected to the British, and revealed that she was in England...

...Alan Nunn May, an atomic spy, as a Soviet agent, as well as "the assistant of (Secretary of State) Stettinius"-i.e., Alger Hiss...

...Soviet intelligence virtually requires this pilgrimage of any important recruit, to permit indoctrination and assessment...

...At the same time the KGB instructed another, lower-level navy spy, who had been put on ice, to resume his activity at such a high rate as to make his discovery almost inevitable...

...Sonia, meanwhile, had been given advanced radio training on one of her periodic trips to GRU headquarters in Moscow, and received a high Soviet decoration...

...Indirect damage, such as that caused by having Philby lecture senior British government officials on the political and military intentions of the Red Chinese, is impossible to assess...

...An issue of Life based on that book and describing this amazing episode at length, with photographs of some of the key participants, was suppressed in France, and to this day the story is little known there outside official circles...

...He produced little important verifiable information, but claimed to have been in the KGB unit assigned to investigate whether the KGB had been involved with Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin...

...Rejected by MI5 and MI6 after his return to England in 1937, he was in 1938 finally able to enter MI5, where he soon joined Section F, which monitored Soviet activities in the United Kingdom...

...5) The interrogations of Maclean in 1951, Philby in 1963, and Blunt in 1965 were apparently leaked to their subjects, with Hollis among the very few who could have done it...

...With 30 pages of footnotes, it must be the most elaborate study of an espionage case ever published (although I understand it may contain some errors or exaggerations) and one of the most remarkable oa espionage in general...

...Golitsin also revealed the existence of one or more Soviet agents very close to President de Gaulle...

...Rudolf Hamburger, Sonia Beurton, and by other names-probably the greatest woman spy of all time...

...Roger Hollis knew a number of Communists when he was at Oxford in the 1920s...

...Volkov stressed the urgency of his situation...

...Hollis cabled London that he did not believe Gouzenko's report of a mole...

...Another Soviet intelligence officer, Konstantin Volkov, came to the British Consulate in Istanbul at this time and offered to defect, bringing the names and covers of hundreds of Soviet spies abroad...

...Particularly if he is able to collect a few fellow-moles around him, he can tell his Russian masters how much that country knows about what other Soviet spies are doing, and can warn those spies if they fall under suspicion...

...When the existence of a spy is suspected, the mole in the security service may be able to see to it that the case is not followed up...

...The book created a sensation, including a statement about it in Parliament by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher...

...about a billion dollars...

...warned by Burgess of his danger...

...If a defector reveals a major penetration of, let us say, the Air Force, our mole can arrange for the deliberate exposure of a lower-ranking agent within the Air Force to protect the one higher up...

...He added that Oswald was not even under surveillance...

...At the time of his defection Golitsin mentioned that the KGB was contemplating the assassination of a Northern European opposition leader...

...The most remarkable incriminating circumstance surrounding Roger Hollis's career is also perhaps the most extraordinary Soviet spy story since World War II, the Golitsin-Nosenko-Fedora sequence...

...Some others include George Blake, John Cairngross, Michael Bettaney, and perhaps Charles Howard Ellis, who did confess to spying for the Germans...

...This was John Vassall, who had been recruited in Moscow through a standard homosexual blackmail operation...

...MI5 visited her but did not search her house, which would probably have revealed her radio...

...this was later proved false...

...Only two men in MI5 had the facts that made the rumors possible...

...Investigations of sensitive matters can be carried out by Royal Commissions...

...Arthur Ewert, and his wife, both Soviet agents and recruiters...

...Martin's Press/$19.95 John Train One of the most effective places for a Soviet spy to work is near the top of the security service of the country he is operating against...

...A secondary agent blown in such a gambit is called bolvan in KGB lingo...

...In the 1960s there was widespread suspicion of Hollis, and beginning in 1970 he was subjected to formal interrogation...

...TOO SECRET TOO LONG Chapman Pincher/St...

...Philby is now credited with having had a large part in the deaths of up to a thousand trained men in one series of operations alone...

...The total number of high-level Soviet spies exposed within MI5 (the equivalent of our FBI) and MI6 (corresponding to our CIA) is astonishing and frightening...

...The KGB "Department of Wet Affairs," which conducts widespread assassinations and kidnappings, is described in a 1965 Senate report entitled "Murder and Kidnapping as an Instrument of Soviet Policy...

...He dropped out to go to China, where he worked as a journalist and an employee of British American Tobacco...

...He consulted his Russian controller, who instructed him to stay on top of the Volkov problem...

...Thus Philby was able to warn his fellow-spy Maclean, in the Foreign Service, that he had been unmasked and help him escape, and (Sir) Anthony Blunt, who was in both counterespionage and Buckingham Palace, was John Train's most recent book is Famous Financial Fiascos (Clarkson N. Potter/Crown...

...Chapman Pincher, the West's leading investigative journalist on intelligence matters, raised this possibility in his 1981 book, Their Trade is Treachery, which made public many matters previously known only in intelligence circles...

...The only grave in a suitable location with a headstone that offered a hiding-place for papers read: "In loving memory of Emily Browne...

...Finally, if one of the moles in the security service is himself suspected, the others can often protect him, or, if things get really hot, tip him off in time for him to escape...

...However, CIA counterintelli-gence under James Angleton uncovered Soviet research papers describing the artificial production of the same fatal symptoms...

...In this period Sonia had been moved to the immediate vicinity of Blenheim, to Oxford, where her house was near that of Roger Hollis...

...did not intend to use nuclear weapons in Korea, may have permitted the Chinese to intervene, preventing a military victory...

...and "Sonia'-actually Ursula or Ruth Kuczynski, also known as Ruth Werner, Mrs...

...When Prime wanted to resign from GCHQ, his Russian controllers made no objection, suggesting that they had a well-placed replacement there...

...7) The KGB disseminated rumors about a top MI5 official, Michael Hanley...

...He was in Moscow in 1934...

...Within two years he was Section F's Assistant Director, and was launched on his long climb to the top, which, however, he reached only accidentally when MI5's chief moved over to fill a vacancy as the head of MI6...

...Sent to Switzerland, she for a while assumed an important role in the spy ring that included the famous Alexander Foote, author of A Handbook for Spies...

...The real code-name for the operation was "Sapphire...

...Ordered to acquire British nationality by marrying Foote, she divorced her previous husband and obtained Moscow's permission to marry another Englishman, Len Beurton, instead...

...Anatoli Golitsin defected from the KGB in Helsinki...

...Flown to the USA, he produced a torrent of valuable material, including the news that Moscow had two important naval spies in England, one at a particularly high level...

...He had prepared for his flight by memorizing a great deal of secret information...

...The Soviets understandably went to considerable lengths to put this idea forward during that period...

...The British conception is that official secrets belong to the Crown, which as it were lends them to the user...

...Hollis essentially made no use of this information...

...He also exposed Dr...

...She transmitted to Moscow for six to eight years...

...began feeding information to a grateful FBI, who gave him the code-name "Fedora...

...Hollis thereafter gave credit for the Vassall break to Nosenko, rather than Golitsin...

...In Shanghai he moved in a circle which included Agnes Smedley, writer, Comintern agent, and recruiter, and for a time mistress of the great Russian spy Richard Sorge...

...if one did exist, he wasn't in MI5...

...Anyone interested in these matters, whether or not he accepts Pin-cher's thesis, will be fascinated by the book...

...Gouzenko had learned that there was a Soviet mole called "Elli" in British counterintelligence, who was so important that he could never be contacted in person (through treffs), but only through dead drops (duboks), notably an aperture in the headstone over the grave of someone called Brown...

...Maclean, by passing on that the U.S...

...The damage done by Geoffrey Arthur Prime, a Soviet spy permitted by lax security to operate inside GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of our NSA, may according to Pincher have cost the U.S...

...This focused attention on Vassall, who confessed, and was sentenced to eighteen years: bolvan...

...I asked Macmillan, who is 91, about Hollis, and was told that he seemed "too stupid" to have been a Soviet agent...

...Nosenko claimed that the conclusion had been that the KGB had judged Oswald unstable, and not safe to deal with...

...The attempt of some French official influences to stifle their exposure is described in Leon Uris's book, Topaz...

...To make a recurrence of these conditions less likely, Pincher pushes hard for Parliamentary oversight of Britain's intelligence and counterintelligence operations...

...He mentioned that there were seven in top British official roles, including one who was "Head of a Department of British Counter-intelligence...

...In 1962 a KGB officer working in the UN...

...Her children's nanny denounced Sonia and Len to the British Consulate as spies, but the warning was ignored...

...However, after ten years of providing what is today considered disinformation, Fedora returned to the Soviet Union, and the FBI now admits that he was a plant...

...Discovery of that deception, in turn, was a major reason for the Senate's rejection of SALT II...

...2) Klaus Fuchs was improperly cleared, which let him transmit atomic secrets to the Soviets...

...Philby then put off going to Istanbul for over two weeks, by which time Volkov, wrapped up in bandages and on a stretcher, was flown back to Russia and killed...

...He could have cleared himself...

...Shouldn't one just forget the whole subject...

...Just over a mile from each is the only cemetery in that area of Oxford, serving five churches...

...And indeed in 1962 Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour opposition, suddenly died of an exceedingly exotic affliction (systemic lupus erythematosus) after a visit to the Soviet Consulate, where, as he mentioned to his physician before he expired, he had been given coffee and biscuits...

...It was proposed to interrogate him...

...A great deal more on the subject has come out since, in large measure because of that book...

...to deal with it Chapman Pincher has now published a follow-up, Too Secret Too Long, which in over 600 pages examines the evidence in the case of Sir Roger Hollis...

...Nosenko also said that the KGB's big British Navy spy was a homosexual, and that he had provided information at the highest level...