Peter Wright - Claims About Roger Hollis, The Wilson Plot Et Al

Claims About Roger Hollis, The Wilson Plot Et Al

See also: Harold Wilson conspiracy theories

While in MI5, Wright came to be aware that the USSR's espionage agencies had been infiltrating the UK's government, military and education establishments from the 1930s by using, among other things, close-knit left-wing homosexual circles at Oxbridge, especially the Cambridge Apostles. With like-minded MI5 officers, Wright became alert to the fact that some senior figures in the intelligence services, in politics, and in the trade unions were recruited Soviet agents. After the Soviet spy Kim Philby's defection in 1963 following what Wright refers to as a tip-off by "a fifth man, still inside", he became convinced that the KGB had penetrated the higher reaches of MI5. As claimed in Spycatcher, Wright had come to believe that Roger Hollis was the highest traitor in MI5. Wright went so far as to begin to make, as he himself put it, "his own 'freelance' inquiries into Hollis' background" shortly before the latter's retirement.

According to Wright, his initial, unspecified, suspicion was aroused by his analysis of how a Soviet 'illegal' Lonsdale's arrest in January 1961 was handled by the KGB which appeared to have had advance knowledge thereof; Wright deduced that Lonsdale could have been sacrificed to protect a more important Soviet spy in Britain. Wright's suspicions were further strengthened by Hollis' apparent obstruction of any attempt to investigate information from several defectors that there was a mole in MI5, but he then discovered that Hollis had concealed relationships with a number of suspicious persons, including:

• a longstanding friendship with Claud Cockburn, a communist journalist who was at the time suspected of ties to Soviet intelligence; and,
• an acquaintance with Agnes Smedley whilst Hollis was in Shanghai, at a time when Smedley was in a relationship with Richard Sorge, a proven Soviet spymaster.

Later during his investigations, Wright looked into the debriefings of a Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, and found to his surprise that the revelations of that debriefing were not reported or recorded. After a lengthy check, he discovered that it had been Hollis who was sent to Canada to interview Gouzenko. Gouzenko had provided Hollis with clear information about Alan Nunn May's meetings with his handlers. Gouzenko also noted that the man who met him seemed to be in disguise, not interested in his revelations and discouraged him from further disclosures. Gouzenko had not known about Klaus Fuchs, but he had named a low level suspected GRU agent, Israel Halperin, a mathematician, who was later completely cleared. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police searched Halperin's lodgings, they found Fuchs' name in his address book. Fuchs immediately broke off contact with his handler, Harry Gold, and shortly afterward took a long vacation to Mexico. Wright alleges in Spycatcher that Gouzenko himself deduced later that his interviewer might have been a Soviet double agent and was probably afraid that he might recognise him from case photos that Gouzenko might have seen in KGB or GRU files, which would explain why Hollis was disguised.

According to Wright, the FLUENCY Working Party, an interagency committee set up to examine all the hitherto unsolved allegations about penetration of the UK's security apparatus, unanimously concluded, among other things, that Hollis was the best fit for Gouzenko's "Elli" and Konstantin Volkov's "Acting Head" allegations. The committee chaired by Wright submitted its final findings shortly after Hollis retired in late 1965 as MI5 Director-General, but investigation of Hollis was not sanctioned by his successor Martin Furnival Jones, who nevertheless sanctioned the investigation of his deputy, Michael Hanley. A retired civil servant, Burke Trend, later Lord Trend, was brought in during the early 1970s to review the Hollis case. Trend studied the case for a year, and concluded that the evidence was inconclusive for either convicting or clearing Hollis; this was announced by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in March 1981.

Peter Wright, on the basis of his interviews with Sir Dennis Proctor and his friends, also alleged in his book that Proctor, former Permanent Secretary at the UK Ministry of Power, was at the very least, by Proctor's own account, an unwitting source of secret information to the Soviets via his close friend and Soviet spy Guy Burgess, from whom he had kept no secrets which, in Proctor's opinion, obviated the necessity to recruit him.

Wright's sights were also focused on Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, suspicions about whom were initially triggered amongst the MI5 management shortly after his appointment as prime minister in 1964 by James Jesus Angleton, Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence at the CIA. The investigation into Wilson's background by MI5, however, failed to produce any conclusive evidence. When Wright retired in 1976, Harold Wilson was again prime minister. Dame Stella Rimington, MI5 Director General from 1992 to 1996, who was in MI5 while Peter Wright was still working there, wrote in 2001 that she believed that in a Panorama programme in 1988, Peter Wright had retracted his allegation made in his book about the MI5 group of thirty officers who plotted to overthrow Wilson's government. She also criticised Wright who, according to her, by the time she knew him well was "a man with an obsession, and was regarded by many as quite mad and certainly dangerous"; she alleged that he was a disruptive and lazy officer, who as special advisor to the Director had a habit of taking case files that interested him off other officers, failing to return them to their proper place and failing to write up any interviews he conducted.

The case made by Wright against Roger Hollis was brought up-to-date by Chapman Pincher in his Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain (2009).