Too secret too long, p.20
Too Secret Too Long, page 20
In view of what my son and I uncovered by inquiries in Great Rollright in January 1983 what might MI5 have learned in 1950 when Sonia’s trail was still warm? The names of those who were to be given free run of her house, now forgotten by the Greatheads, might have provided leads to Soviet agents, some now known, others still unknown. Surveillance or inquiries in 1947 after the farcical MI5 interview might have led to Fuchs who, on his admission to Hume, did not give the U.S.S.R. details of the triggering mechanism for the H-bomb until the following year. But Sonia was never placed under any kind of surveillance. Nobody in the Great Rollright area can remember any inquiries having been made even after Fuchs had named her as his courier in 1950, and nobody questioned the Laski family about Sonia’s activities at Avenue Cottage, when she was actively servicing Fuchs and, almost certainly, ‘Elli’.[21] Nor, apparently, have any security officials made any inquiries on the checkable admissions made by Sonia and her brother, Juergen, in their memoirs.
It seems inescapable that ever since MI5 learned, in 1947, that Sonia had been a Soviet spy, the security authorities have deliberately avoided any serious investigation of her activities and continue to do so. The Sonia case remains a major MI5 defeat which has been conveniently concealed, yet her activities were crucial to some of the most damaging Soviet espionage ever achieved.
While those MI5 officers involved in investigating Hollis realize that her importance was seriously underestimated and that proof of her relationship with Hollis would clinch the case against him, others, who would then be seen to have been derelict in duty, continue to denigrate her role. One of them tried to assure me that Sonia was no more than a ‘magpie sending back everything she could pick up from relatives and friends, which could not have been important when Russia was an ally’.[22] The same source claimed that ‘Foote knew all about Sonia’, which he clearly did not, and that the ‘Sonia connection had been gone into pretty thoroughly and been found wanting’, which I believe to be the reverse of the truth.
There is, presumably, some mention of Sonia’s activities in the official papers relating to the Fuchs case but the latter were all withheld when Cabinet and departmental papers for the year 1950 came up for release in 1981 under the thirty-year rule. They are to remain withheld for a further twenty years. I have been assured by competent authorities that there is nothing in those papers which could be of assistance to any foreign power and their suppression is to save embarrassment to people who are still alive. Some of these people are Labour politicians but others are civil servants and security officials.
In 1969 Sonia was decorated with a second Order of the Red Banner, the highest order of the Red Army, for her work in Britain.[23] This was the first Soviet admission that she had been a spy, her previous decoration having been kept secret, even inside the Soviet Union. The East German semi-official account The Red Orchestra Against Hitler, gives prominence to the fact that Sonia was among very few to be awarded even one Order of the Red Banner, the others being those who had operated in extreme danger inside Germany during the war and had been executed when caught.[24] To have received two Orders her services must have been outstanding.
The minor spies to whom she has been permitted to give clues in her memoirs could not have been the basis for the additional Order of the Red Banner. She claims that she built up her own network, which included an unnamed R.A.F. officer who had been a welder in civilian life, her brother and her father, who died in London in November 1947. A lifelong political activist, Dr René Kuczynski had contacts with Labour politicians who supplied him with economic information which he passed to Sonia for transmission to Moscow. Such modest material would have been of insufficient value to warrant the posting to Britain of a G.R.U. officer of Sonia’s capabilities and dedication, especially when, on her own statement, she had been promoted to full colonel for services already rendered. Both her father and brother had been successfully supplying information to Moscow before her arrival and had no need of her. Juergen says in his memoirs that he was able to get information out of Britain via Soviet supply ships, and through his friend Anatoli Gromov in the Soviet Embassy he could have used the Soviet diplomatic network rather than overburdening Sonia’s transmitter.
Juergen Kuczynski, who is still alive at the time of writing, has made several visits to Britain since his departure for East Germany. He was in Cambridge during 1968, for instance.[25] There is no evidence that MI5 has ever tried to question him about his own espionage or about the wartime activities of Sonia. Indeed, the four members of the Kuczynski family known to have been active Soviet agents had a charmed life in Britain and, in the circumstances, it is reasonable to wonder why. If the connection between Sonia and Hollis can ever be proved the answer may emerge.
Though ‘Fuchs’ is a burned-out case still living in East Germany, Sonia was not allowed to mention him in her memoirs. Neither was Juergen Kuczynski, but in his more recent Dialog mit meinem Urenkel he revealed that when Fuchs was arrested he moved in a hurry from the American occupation zone of Berlin to the Soviet sector, leaving his wife to follow later. The instruction to move came from Walter Ulbricht, then Moscow’s chief German representative and future East German head of state, who clearly feared that Kuczynski might be arrested as an accessory to Fuchs’s treachery, as he should have been. Kuczynski gives no precise date and the warning may have reached him before Special Branch pounced on Fuchs.[26]
Sonia makes no mention of Hollis either, or of any other MI5 source, but she does admit in her preamble: ‘In the writing of memoirs each author has difficulties: selecting, compromising and telling the truth. That was my way.’ It was also the K.G.B.’s.
In 1977 when her memoirs were published it did not seem likely that there would ever be any publicity about Hollis as the MI5 case against him had been buried so long and his career had been too undistinguished to attract a biographer. Perhaps, in a later edition of her memoirs – she has already made a few additions to the original – she may respond to this book, especially as Hollis is now being mentioned, if only vaguely, in Soviet books on espionage, which are all vetted by the K.G.B. With respect to the details she has been permitted to reveal already, including facts about her days in China, many can be crosschecked with other sources, as I have done wherever possible.
In 1984 Sonia, the super-spy among women, is still alive, aged seventy-six, and has realized her literary ambitions by publishing several successful books, including novels, under the name Ruth Werner. She is held in such high regard in East Germany that she has been awarded the Order of Karl Marx and a television film of her contribution to the march of communism is reported to be in preparation, apparently by the Soviet authorities.
In the late 1970s the current inhabitant of The Firs, Mrs Davenport received a visit from Peter Beurton, Sonia’s son by Len, who was visiting Britain in connection with scientific research. Then in his middle thirties, he recalled how he had been dragged away from Great Rollright, which he loved, ostensibly on a holiday, to discover that he had been deprived of all his toys which had been left behind. ‘I was very bitter about it,’ he said. ‘Oddly enough, I still am.’[27] Later, in April 1983, Sonia’s daughter Nina, by then a grandmother, making Sonia a great-grandmother, also turned up on Mrs Davenport’s doorstep for a nostalgic and emotionally charged visit.[28] Efforts were made for her to be interviewed on my behalf and she agreed to a meeting in London but failed to keep it, presumably after taking advice.
Letters which I have sent to Sonia and to her brother have, so far, elicited no replies though there are indications that they caused considerable concern.
Government concern with the continuing danger from pro-Soviet communists crystallized in the summer of 1950 into specific fear that they intended to paralyse British industry by sabotaging power stations at the height of the Korean War, in which British forces were engaged. At Prime Minister Attlee’s request MI5 undertook an inquiry and Hollis, as Director of Security, was in charge of it. At a meeting of a Cabinet Committee he was required to check on the activities of certain communists among power-station workers and to report on security precautions to prevent sabotage. A Cabinet minute, dated 17 August 1950, records that there was no reason to believe that any organized outbreak of sabotage was imminent. While this report was negative it is confirmation of Hollis’s continuing close involvement with counter-Soviet subversion while serving as Director of Security.[29]
A couple of months later, the Government and MI5 were faced with a Soviet subversion effort on an embarrassingly successful scale – the defection of a leading Harwell nuclear scientist, Dr Bruno Pontecorvo, in mysterious circumstances guaranteed to generate maximum publicity. A specialist in the design and operation of heavy-water reactors, he had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain with his wife and family while ostensibly on holiday in Italy. The subsequent inquiries were to show that security procedures, especially vetting, had failed repeatedly in spite of damning information which was available had it been effectively sought and evaluated.
Pontecorvo was a distinguished Italian physicist who had fled from his homeland to France because he was Jewish and also because he had relatives high in the Italian Communist Party. He was gregarious and likeable, and popular with his colleagues. In Paris he worked with the overtly communist scientist Joliot-Curie. After the fall of France in 1940 Pontecorvo fled further, to the U.S., which gave him and his Swedish wife refuge.
At the beginning of 1943 he joined the British atomic team in Canada, eventually working at Chalk River in Ontario, where there was a large nuclear research project. Canadian officials assumed that he had been cleared for security in Britain, but he was never in Britain until January 1949 when, after being granted British citizenship in the previous year, at the age of thirty-five, he was transferred to Harwell. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had in fact relied on a security clearance which had never taken place.[30]
Following the Fuchs case Pontecorvo was screened six times by the Harwell authorities assisted by MI5. He told friends and relatives that he had come through ‘clean as a whistle’. The Harwell security officer, Henry Arnold, had heard rumours that Pontecorvo and his wife had ‘communist sympathies’ and had tackled him about it. Pontecorvo had simply denied the suggestion and the British authorities had no firm information, though the F.B.I. had secured documentary proof that he and his wife were active communists and intensely anti-American. Pontecorvo had retained his American home while he was working in Canada, hoping to secure post-war employment in the U.S., and the F.B.I., which was suspicious of him, had searched it. They found documents showing the Pontecorvos’ dedication to pro-Soviet communism and sent the material to the British Embassy in Washington for forwarding to MI5. They fell into the hands of Philby, the liaison man in the Embassy, who suppressed them. They were not found until Pontecorvo had defected.[31]
Philby would, undoubtedly, have told his Soviet controller in Washington about the F.B.I.’s information and this may well have led the Soviets to warn Pontecorvo of his predicament, whether he was already in touch with them or not. This would explain why Pontecorvo decided to leave Harwell and get himself out of a position where his communist affiliations were an embarrassment. After being at Harwell only a year, he accepted an academic post at Liverpool University, which meant that he would be severing his connections with secret work.
In July 1950 Harwell granted him leave of absence to take a holiday in Europe, including visiting Swiss scientists on business When he failed to pay the visit or to communicate with Harwell the security authorities began a search for him on 21 September. They discovered that he and his family had flown to Moscow via Stockholm and Helsinki on 2 September.[32] Whether he went for purely ideological reasons or because the K.G.B. was able to apply blackmail pressure has never been established.
Inquiries produced no proof that Pontecorvo had been an active spy during the investigations resulting from Gouzenko’s defection, though there is a possibility that an unidentified agent, code-named ‘Gini’ and known to have been Jewish, may have been Pontecorvo. If he had been recruited by the K.G.B. neither his real name nor his code-name would have emerged from these inquiries because nothing has ever been discovered about the K.G.B. network that Gouzenko claimed existed in Canada.
Later inquiries connected with a damage assessment of Philby’s activities confirmed that following Pontecorvo’s decision to leave Harwell, which cut off his access to secrets, he was induced by the Soviets to defect because they urgently needed his expertise in connection with their drive to produce an H-bomb. He was one of the few scientists with working knowledge of the type of nuclear reactor needed to make an essential component of the H-bomb called lithium deuteride. His contribution, supplementing the details of H-bomb design supplied by Fuchs and other spies, may have accelerated the Soviet Union’s acquisition of thermonuclear weapons by several years. Whether Pontecorvo, who became a Soviet citizen in 1952, was an active spy or not is therefore somewhat academic. Once in the Soviet Union he would have supplied the nuclear weapons scientists with every scrap of information in his possession.
While MI5 was only indirectly concerned with the case of Pontecorvo until his defection, it was another security disaster impinging on Hollis. In 1949, when Pontecorvo became of concern to Britain, Hollis was Director of Security responsible for advising Government departments not only about regulating the selection of those who were to have access to classified information, but on the supervision of those already with access. The case further disrupted Anglo-American relations on the exchange of nuclear secrets for, to quote Hollis’s successor, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, ‘It is a scandal that a man has got through the defences.’[33] That the American authorities considered the case scandalous is clear from the official report on Soviet atomic espionage published in Washington in 1951.
The Potential Value of Oversight
If any effective arrangements for the activities of the secret services to be overseen by an independent body had existed they would surely have been suspended during the war. Nevertheless it would seem to be a worthwhile exercise, in assessing the potential value of oversight, to consider what might have happened regarding the cases of Sonia and Fuchs if it had been in operation.
With hindsight it is clear that the decision to suspend the decipherment of clandestine Soviet radio traffic was extremely damaging to the counter-espionage effort against Soviet agents and their British spies. If oversight had existed the few members of the Y Board who made the decision might have been less precipitate and at least have taken steps to secure the agreement of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, which might not have been forthcoming. The existence of oversight might also have prevented the destruction of those records of the traffic which were made. As the results of Operation Bride quickly showed, that too had been a high-level blunder. Fuchs was caught only because the American records had been preserved.
The knowledge that decisions might be questioned might also have made MI5, and Hollis’s section in particular, more cautious in its various reports which resulted in the repeated clearance of Fuchs for secret atomic research, though that would depend on the degree of access provided to the oversight body.
The point at which oversight could have been highly effective followed the defection of Alexander Foote to Britain and MI5’s ritual visit to Sonia at Great Rollright in 1947. I greatly doubt that whoever was responsible for that appalling performance would have dared to perpetrate such a superficial operation, completely lacking in follow-up, had he known that his action, or lack of it, might be subject to independent inquiry. The perfunctory treatment of Foote’s information about Sonia, like that of Gouzenko’s warning about ‘Elli’, offers an excellent example of the potential of oversight to deter incompetence of such a degree that it might be contrived in the interests of treachery or, had it occurred, to detect it and investigate its causes. While Sonia was tough and determined, she was not necessarily unbreakable and enough evidence could have been adduced from witnesses for her to be held for questioning, which might have led to uncovering ‘Elli’ and other agents whom she now admits to have serviced. Instead, she was allowed to defect in a way which to an oversight body might have seemed contrived.
There can be little doubt that if Attlee and his advisers had had access to the full details of the way Fuchs had been repeatedly cleared of suspicion his attitude to MI5 would have been less forgiving. He would also have been angered by MI5’s treatment of the F.B.I. at a time when the repair of relations was so important, particularly in the nuclear field. In this context it is to be hoped that an oversight body would have close liaison with its American counterpart and, in the knowledge that this was so, the British secret services might be less ready to offend the F.B.I. and C.I.A. than they have been in the past.
Detailed oversight of the Fuchs and Sonia cases might have raised concern about MI5’s competence and even, perhaps, the suspicion that some matters had been so mismanaged that more than inefficiency was involved. As things stand in 1984, managers of the secret services can be assured that, barring a security commission inquiry or a leak to an investigative writer, ‘legends’, fabricated or promoted to cover inefficiency or worse, will survive indefinitely because the papers that might reveal the truth may never be released. A continuing oversight body might also find cause for wonder in the extent to which legends which suited MI5 and MI6 also suited the K.G.B.
chapter nineteen
