Roger Hollis - Mole Suspicions

Mole Suspicions

After Kim Philby's flight to Moscow in 1963, rumours began to circulate that Hollis had alerted him to his impending arrest. He was also criticised for not alerting John Profumo, the War Secretary in Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's government, to the fact that he might have become entangled with a Soviet spy ring through his friendship with Stephen Ward, and his affair with Christine Keeler.

During the 1950s and 1960s, a large number of MI5 operations failed in circumstances that suggested the Soviets had been tipped off. Although many such failures were subsequently blamed on the actions of the self-confessed or defected agents Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, a number of failures occurred after all three had lost their access to secret information. Thus, some in MI5 concluded that the Soviets must have an agent in a very senior position within the organisation. Peter Wright, Arthur S. Martin and others became convinced that either Hollis or his deputy, Graham Mitchell, could be the only ones responsible, eventually confiding their suspicions to their former DG, Dick White, by now DG of MI6.

According to Nigel West, White instructed Martin to inform Hollis that Mitchell was a suspect, and Hollis instructed Martin (after due consideration) to keep Mitchell under surveillance. Nigel West implies that this was a deliberate ploy to keep tabs on both Mitchell and Hollis.

Martin eventually became so disgruntled and outspoken about Hollis's attitude toward the investigation (Hollis had, for example, reduced the size of the department and had sent one of Martin's best men on an overseas assignment), that Hollis suspended Martin for a fortnight, and the case was turned over to Peter Wright. Much of the investigation was centred around the interviews with Anthony Blunt at that time, and Peter Wright had amassed a sizable amount of taped evidence from Blunt when Martin returned from suspension. After 1964, Blunt gradually confessed his double-agent role in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

Eventually the PETERS operation wound down. By then, some time after Hollis had retired, suspicion had lifted from Mitchell and focused solely on Hollis. However, the then Director-General, Martin Furnival Jones, refused to sanction an investigation into Hollis.

Under his successor Sir Martin Furnival Jones, the higher management of MI5 expressed indignation and loss of morale about the Hollis affair. Hollis was asked to come in and clear up the allegations. Having been the director, Hollis was aware of the procedures of the interrogation and investigation. He remained calm and composed throughout, denying all allegations. He was a very secretive man and MI5 had very little information about many aspects of his past, particularly his years in China. Later, in the 1970s, the Trend Committee under Lord Trend was entrusted with the matter of investigating Hollis and Soviet penetration of MI5 in general. After a long enquiry, it reported the allegations inconclusive, neither denying nor confirming them.

Martin and Wright and the team were unable to convince anyone else in MI5 or MI6 that they were right about Hollis. Wright retired in January 1976, upon reaching age 60, by his own account (in Spycatcher) enraged at being denied a pension for his 30 years of service, on highly legalistic and technical grounds. He emigrated to Tasmania, Australia, and there wrote an account of his work at MI5. Despite attempts by Margaret Thatcher and her government to suppress the publication and distribution of the book, Spycatcher, it was finally published in 1987, and eventually sold over two million copies around the world.

In the book Wright claimed that Hollis had been a Soviet agent. Amongst the evidence for this claim is the Igor Gouzenko defection. Hollis was sent to Canada to interview Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. Wright wrote that Hollis justified his involvement in the case because it involved a communist defection in a Commonwealth nation, so it came under MI5's jurisdiction, and he (Hollis) was MI5's expert on communist matters. Gouzenko had provided Hollis with clear information about Alan Nunn May's meetings with his handlers; all these meetings were immediately cancelled. Alan Nunn May was a scientist and part of the Soviet spy ring which obtained the secrets of the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb for the United States. 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. In view of this circumstantial evidence, Wright became convinced that Hollis was a traitor. Wright alleges in Spycatcher that Gouzenko, who had worked for the GRU, himself deduced later that his interviewer might have been a Soviet double agent, and was probably afraid that he might recognize him from case photos that Gouzenko might have seen in KGB or GRU files, hence the disguise. Gouzenko also admitted that he, being a lower level clerk, had no access to such files. Peter Wright had given a televised interview during the dispute with Thatcher's government. Following Peter Wright's TV interview in 1984, Arthur Martin wrote a letter to the Times, and it was published July 19, 1984. Martin stated that while Wright exaggerated the certainty with which they regarded Hollis's guilt, Peter Wright was justified in saying that Hollis was the most likely candidate, for the reasons Wright had given.

In her 2001 autobiography, Christine Keeler (Profumo's mistress), alleged, without supporting evidence, that Hollis and Ward were part of a spy ring with Sir Anthony Blunt. Ward committed suicide as the Profumo scandal progressed.

Hollis was also accused by Chapman Pincher (investigative journalist who produced several exposés of failures in British counter-intelligence) of being a Soviet agent, though entirely separate from the famous Cambridge Five spy ring. Pincher claims Hollis was recruited by Richard Sorge in China in the early 1930s to spy for the GRU. Little evidence has been advanced to support these assertions.

A further case for Hollis being a Soviet agent was made in 1989 by W. J. West in The Truth about Hollis. However, the testimony of ex-Soviet KGB agents (Oleg Gordievsky and Yuri Modin) has cast doubt on this, as they deny he was the so-called ‘fifth man’.

The book Treachery by Chapman Pincher is devoted to the case against Hollis as being "Elli", the highly placed mole within MI5 identified by the defector Gouzenko, and thus operating as a Soviet agent from the 1940s until Hollis' retirement from MI5.

In his book, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5, Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew used access to 400,000 MI5 files to compile an official history of the service. He claims he has proved conclusively that Hollis was not a double agent and that Wright was misguided at best. However, this view is again challenged in the revised edition of Chapman Pincher's book Treachery published in the UK in 2011.

In the 2009 ITV programme Inside MI5: The Real Spooks Oleg Gordievsky recounted how he saw the head of the British section of the KGB, expressing surprise at the allegations that he read in a British newspaper about Roger Hollis being a KGB agent saying "Why is it they are speaking about Roger Hollis, such nonsense, can't understand it, it must be some special English trick directed against us" But Chapman Pincher in Treachery states that Hollis was believed to be a GRU agent, the GRU being a different organisation to the KGB.