Too secret too long, p.44
Too Secret Too Long, page 44
Special Branch did not pass the statement to the Prime Minister but, through the usual channels, it reached MI5 where Hollis prevented its further distribution. Nobody ever questioned Eddowes further until he eventually appeared as a witness before Lord Denning.[30]
On Monday, 27 May, Harold Wilson saw Macmillan to tell him the contents of a letter he had received from Ward and to urge him to take some action on the security issue. The Prime Minister’s office sent a record of the conversation to MI5 as a routine procdure and asked for a re-examination of the security aspects of the case. On 29 May Hollis reported to Macmillan in person and told him about the request to Keeler to secure ‘the date on which certain atomic secrets [my italics] were to be handed to West Germany by the Americans’. This, of course, was not strictly true and if the use of the phrase ‘atomic secrets’ was calculated to induce Macmillan to agree with Hollis that Ivanov’s project was ridiculous because Profumo knew no atomic secrets, then it succeeded. When I discussed the matter with Mr Macmillan at his home at Birch Grove late in 1980 he asked rhetorically, ‘What atomic secrets could Jack Profumo possibly have known?’ As I pointed out then he could well have known the date, which was the only secret mentioned by Ivanov.
By the end of May it was clear to several ministers that Profumo had lied and that the truth would soon emerge. Macmillan asked the Lord Chancellor, Lord Dilhorne, to carry out a personal inquiry, which he began on 30 May. For reasons of conscience, and knowing that he would be interrogated by Dilhorne, Profumo decided to tell the truth, though he realized that his career and reputation would be ruined. On 5 June he resigned, leaving Macmillan to face a hostile debate, which I attended, not only from his Labour opponents but from several prominent Tories.[31] Macmillan’s sorry plight was described by George Wigg: ‘The Prime Minister’s defence contained some amazing admissions…Three separate statements by Miss Keeler that she had been asked by Ward to obtain military information from Profumo had likewise never reached the Prime Minister – an admission that evoked the jibe “Nobody tells me anything!” ’[32]
The Law Officers had a hand in preparing Macmillan’s speech and for the security aspects they depended on a brief supplied by Hollis – a further indication of the power and influence wielded by a Director-General of MI5. It should surprise nobody, therefore, that the speech did its best to excuse Hollis’s behaviour, though he had been heavily responsible for the Prime Minister’s predicament. It gave the impression that there was nothing dangerous in the friendship between Ward and Ivanov, who was just an accredited diplomat. If Macmillan had been properly briefed he would have known that Ivanov was a professional G.R.U. officer. Macmillan assured the House that MI5 did not know of the relationship between Profumo and Keeler until January 1963 but he had only Hollis’s word for that. Other MI5 officers believed that to be untrue but had no opportunity of saying so.
Macmillan said that Keeler had been asked to discover from Profumo ‘certain atomic secrets’, another misleading statement originating from Hollis. He went out of his way to discredit the evidence which Eddowes had submitted to the police. As in the Denning Report, a 1952 directive placing MI5 under the Home Secretary and outlining the Director-General’s duties was exploited during the debate to excuse Hollis’s lack of action.
It was suggested to Lord Denning that Ivanov’s function was primarily to divide the United Kingdom from the United States by undermining American trust in British security. He certainly had some success in that respect for the whole Profumo affair made Britain a laughing stock worldwide, with American cabaret acts making the most of it.
By 13 June Lord Dilhorne had submitted his report to Macmillan who passed it to Denning on 21 June with a request to prepare a report of his own for publication. The Dilhorne report has never been published but Denning made much use of it, as Dilhorne, a close personal friend, made clear to me shortly before he died.[33] I know that Dilhorne believed Hollis to have been grossly at fault for keeping the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary in ignorance for so long but he was opposed to any public criticism of MI5 or its chief.
Like the Government, Denning appears to have accepted Hollis’s statement that once Ivanov had left Britain the Profumo affair ceased to have any further security significance. It is, perhaps, understandable that Denning should have done so because Hollis was the expert to whom he had to defer on matters of professional opinion. In fact, Ivanov’s precipitate flight was further evidence of the seriousness of his intelligence activities. He could not have been prosecuted because he held diplomatic immunity and, so far as is known, had sought information only about American weapons in Germany which was not an offence against the British Official Secrets Act. He could, however, have been held and questioned, and his controllers were clearly anxious to avoid that. For Hollis to suggest that Ivanov’s departure should end MI5’s interest in him or in his contacts transgressed all standard procedure. The normal practice is for inquiries to continue long after proven Soviet Intelligence officers have left the country. When Anthony Blunt confessed, MI5’s interest centred on former Soviet controllers known to have been dead for many years. In Ivanov’s case, as soon as he was out of Britain – and MI5, apparently, had a week’s advanced knowledge that he would be leaving – Hollis made his departure an excuse for taking no further action on the whole affair and forbidding any of his officers from doing so. Those officers were convinced that in accordance with normal Soviet practice some other G.R.U. agent would immediately have taken on Ivanov’s major commitments.
F.B.I. records, which have been made available to American researchers under the Freedom of Information Act, show that during June and July 1963, four months after Ivanov had fled, the security and intelligence authorities of the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force became concerned about possible relationships between Keeler and American sergeants and officers which might have threatened nuclear secrets.[34] One document dated 17 July was headed ‘Christine Keeler – Russia and Great Britain’. Three sergeants from a N.A.T.O. base at Ruislip were flown back to the U.S. for interrogation and a team of investigators visited Britain. As the F.B.I. was also involved it is inconceivable that Hollis was not made aware of this American interest in Ivanov but he seems to have avoided mentioning it to any Government minister or to Denning. It would have undermined his claim that security had ceased to be involved after Ivanov’s departure. Nor can he have warned the F.B.I. of the request to Keeler concerning American nuclear warheads, otherwise U.S. security would have reacted more rapidly.
There are other, less important, aspects of the Denning Report which I know to be fallacious. On 15 March 1963, the Daily Express came out with a front-page report bearing the headline ‘War Minister Shock’ and suggesting that, for personal reasons, Profumo had offered to resign. On the right-hand side of the page was a picture of Christine Keeler headed ‘Vanished Old Bailey Witness’. A representative from the Daily Express, Sir Tom Blackburn, told Denning that the juxtaposition of the two stories was entirely coincidental. That was completely untrue but Denning accepted it. I was privy to the talks preceding the setting up of the page and I know that it was intended to be the first break in the Fleet Street silence about the Profumo-Keeler affair. Sir Tom Blackburn had been selected because he had not been involved in the editorial decision and did not know the truth. This was, perhaps, a small detail but it shows that Denning could be misled.
It was Hollis who decided which of his officers, in addition to himself, should give evidence to Denning. One of them, whom Denning questioned about the surveillance of Ward, was Mitchell, who was under surveillance himself. To quote one of the less senior officers who had been involved in the case, ‘The best informed, most reliable and personally disinterested witnesses were never called.’ This particular officer realizes that he should have volunteered his evidence over Hollis’s head but in those days – and probably even now – such action was unthinkable.
It is clear from the Denning Report that when Hollis was trying to explain his lack of action he made highly effective use of the guidelines which had been laid down by a previous Home Secretary to govern the activities of MI5. These stressed that no inquiries were to be pursued unless those in charge of MI5 were satisfied that an important public issue was at stake and bore directly on the defence of the realm. Can anyone doubt that the Profumo affair fulfilled these criteria? Yet Hollis appears to have convinced Denning that he was right in deciding that it did not.
Regarding the Security Service in general, Denning concluded, ‘I find that they covered the security interest fully throughout and reported to those concerned…They took all reasonable steps to see that, the interests of the country were defended…They kept the Foreign Office fully informed.’ How Denning came to that conclusion would baffle anyone who studied his report, the ancillary evidence and the historic consequences. The overall effect of the Denning Report was to reduce the embarrassment factor in every possible way so that no Establishment figure was to blame. I am not saying that this was Denning’s intention but it was certainly his achievement.
While the Profumo case was at its height I discussed it privately with Lord Beaverbrook who was extremely angry at the way events were moving. Shaking his fist he cried, ‘Why in God’s name should a great political party tear itself to rags and tatters just because a minister’s fucked a woman?’ Had I known then the details of Hollis’s handling of the case I might have been able to answer the question. Through Hollis’s evidence to Lord Denning and his statements to Macmillan and others, another legend, which suited both the K.G.B. and his own interests, has been foisted on historians.
Historians may agree that the mishandling of the Profumo affair and the political capital which the Labour opposition were able to make out of it hastened the retirement of Harold Macmillan and the defeat of the Conservative Party at the general election in the following year. During the premiership of Harold Wilson, who had succeeded to the Labour leadership under the flag of representing its left wing, the Labour Party slid progressively to the left with trade union leaders who had been former communists exerting influence on policy. Labour ministers were permitted to support communist front organizations which had previously been proscribed and in the 1983 election the party’s manifesto included commitments, such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and the elimination of American bases in Britain, which must have had the Kremlin’s total support.
Harold Wilson also introduced severe restrictions on MI5’s capacity to investigate M.P.s and peers who might be involved in treachery or subversion. Any form of surveillance was forbidden without the Prime Minister’s agreement – a situation which still stands.
The ancillary documents of the Denning inquiry, including the testimony of witnesses, are unlikely to be released within fifty years and some may have been destroyed, but further light on the Profumo tragedy may be shed by the official biography of Harold Macmillan, now in preparation but to be withheld from publication during his lifetime.
The Potential Value of Oversight
The Profumo affair is surely an unquestionable example of how effective oversight of major MI5 activities, especially those with high political content, could have prevented the worst consequences. It is unlikely that Hollis would have behaved in the way he did had he known that his activities, or lack of them, could be subject to independent scrutiny. While he was able, effectively, to dispense justice in secret, as was to happen in the cases of Blunt and Long, he was also, through inaction, to cause injustice to Macmillan and his administration. These powers have recently been pruned, following the Long case, but as things stand it would still be possible for a Director-General of MI5 to behave as Hollis behaved over Profumo.
Because of the mystique still surrounding MI5, which itself is a reason for oversight, a clever director-general might still be able to mislead his questioners, especially by over-pleading the needs of operational secrecy. In any oversight arrangements there should be powers to call subordinate officers for questioning.
chapter thirty-five
A Clutch of Curious Incidents
Early in 1963 ‘Fedora’, the fake double agent in New York, reported to the F.B.I. that Soviet Intelligence had managed to plant another valuable source of information inside one of the research establishments of the British Atomic Energy Authority.[1] He knew few details beyond the fact that the agent was ideological, meaning that he was a pro-Soviet communist, and had been inserted within the previous two years. Some MI5 officers were already half-convinced that ‘Fedora’ was a fake defector who might have planted the information for mischievous purposes, but there was such sensitivity about possible spies inside the atomic project following the Nunn May, Fuchs and Pontecorvo cases, that the tip could not be ignored.
The only person who fitted the indications was a 39-year-old Italian scientist called Dr Giuseppe Martelli, who was working for the Euratom organization at the Culham Laboratory in Oxfordshire, a few miles from the Harwell station. He had had no known access to nuclear secrets but inquiries revealed that he had been in contact with Russians believed to be intelligence officers. The police detained him after his arrival back in Britain from a holiday and when his house was searched the police found a set of one-time cipher pads for transmitting messages, along with other suspicious objects.
As Martelli had committed no known offence any prosecution would have to be under a section of the Official Secrets Act which makes it an offence to commit an act which is thought to be preparatory to espionage. The MI5 lawyers were doubtful about the wisdom of pursuing the case and Arthur Martin, in particular, among several MI5 officers, strongly advised against it. Hollis, however, who was supported by the suspect Mitchell, was very keen to press ahead with a prosecution, arguing that a conviction would help to establish the good faith of ‘Fedora’ for the F.B.I., which would improve relations with Hoover. Hollis knew that ‘Fedora’ was supporting Nosenko, in whom he claimed to have faith, in contrast to those of his officers who suspected that Nosenko was also a fake, following the Vassall case. The strengthening of ‘Fedora’s’ credibility as a source would, therefore, help to dispose of the suspicions that there was still a high-level naval spy, which Hollis chose not to believe.
As a result, Martelli was put on trial at the Old Bailey on 2 July 1963. The defence admitted contact with Soviet agents but pleaded that Martelli was being blackmailed by threats to his estranged wife, who had been educated in the Soviet Union and wished to return there with their two children. It also admitted the possession of espionage equipment but pointed out that that was not a crime and that Martelli had no access to secrets. Martelli admitted having met Karpekov, who became the K.G.B. ‘resident’ in London. He told the court that once, when they were about to lunch together at a pub, Karpekov produced a list of ‘all the special cars used by MI5’ so that he could check on the cars parked there. He said that Karpekov had boasted that Soviet Intelligence had ‘very highly placed friends’ in MI5, who, presumably, had provided the list.[2] This information cried out for rigorous examination, especially when taken in conjunction with all the previous evidence for the existence of one or more Soviet agents inside MI5. But I have been told that the claim was not pursued because there was no MI5 department with specific responsibility for doing so and that Hollis had no desire to create one.
On 15 July Martelli was acquitted on all charges, to the public and international humiliation of the police and of MI5, which had urged the prosecution. Whatever Hollis’s motives might have been the result was in the K.G.B.’s favour for, among other debits, it exposed a weakness in British law which the K.G.B. could exploit in future. It must have seemed incredible to the Russians that a foreigner could be caught with the paraphernalia of spying, with admission to having been in contact with K.G.B. agents, and yet pay no penalty when he failed to report his position. The fiasco also exacerbated ill feeling between MI5 and the police, which had been involved in the prosecution on MI5’s advice, and it did not go unnoticed in Washington. The F.B.I. considered that it had given MI5 accurate information and Hollis’s outfit had made a hash of it. The proof in court that the information about Martelli’s Soviet connections was accurate helped to establish the bona fides of ‘Fedora’ who was, in fact, a fake and had been given the information by the K.G.B. Centre for that purpose.
While the Martelli case was in progress ‘Fedora’ was active in another direction in an attempt to exacerbate the security aspects of the Profumo case. After returning to New York from a visit to Moscow he told the F.B.I. that, by chance, he had met the Soviet Naval Attaché, Ivanov, and had had a long conversation with him. He claimed that Ivanov had boasted of having installed a microphone in Christine Keeler’s bedroom and that the G.R.U. had secured valuable intelligence which Christine had, presumably, obtained from the War Minister. Hoover regarded this information as so important that he sent a copy of ‘Fedora’s’ report personally to President Kennedy who declined to send it on to Macmillan, as Hoover had suggested, remarking that the British Prime Minister was in enough trouble already.[3]
When the report eventually reached MI5, officers who had examined Keeler’s bedroom decided that it was ‘unbuggable’ and that the statement was further disinformation from ‘Fedora’, though it was possible that Ivanov had made the claim as a boast.
‘Fedora’ did not stop there. In an effort to persuade the F.B.I. that the K.G.B. had not engineered the Profumo scandal he said that he had discovered that it had been planned by French Intelligence, which made no sense to anybody, though the K.G.B. was keen to worsen relations between Britain and de Gaulle. ‘Fedora’ also claimed that there was a Soviet spy inside the establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire, where nuclear weapons are designed. This turned out to be false but wasted much time and scarce security resources.
