Sir Roger Hollis: A Mole in MI5?

Charges of Soviet spying

The question was almost unthinkable. Sixteen months ago, as Britain rocked with revelations that Sir Anthony Blunt, the Queen’s own art curator, had been a Soviet agent, Writer Chapman Pincher, dean of Fleet Street’s spy watchers, pondered in the Daily Express: “Was M15 Chief Hollis linked with the KGB?” Nobody pressed for an answer, and no wonder. Sir Roger Hollis had spent nine cold-war years as D.G., or director general of M15, Britain’s counterintelligence service, a civil servant so umbrous that his name was never publicly mentioned. After his retirement in 1965 Hollis led a pastoral life of golf mixed with un-spy-like community service in Somerset, until his death at 67, in 1973.

Last week, however, Pincher put the question again in a series of Daily Mail articles. This time the response was deafening. The Times not only picked up the story but reprinted the Daily Mail series, excerpted from Pincher’s new book, Their Trade Is Treachery. If the accusations were true, said the Times, “it would represent the greatest single triumph of the Soviet secret service.” The worry was not only over the British and American secrets Hollis might have passed on to Moscow but also over what other moles he might have planted inside M15.

The thrust of the tumult, as of the book, was that Hollis, in the twilight of his undercover career, had come under suspicion as the result of accusations against him within M15 that he had been a Soviet agent. In 1970, Hollis withstood 48 hours of unstinting interrogation as a result of these charges in an M15 safe house in London, according to Pincher. But doubts remained. A year after Hollis’ death, Lord Trend, a former Secretary of the Cabinet and a highly respected civil servant, was recalled from retirement to reinvestigate the charges. Lord Trend, Pincher reported, concluded there was a strong prima facie case that M15 had been penetrated and that the director general was the most likely suspect.

Since 1946 there has been a string of British spies: Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo for atomic secrets, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Blunt. All seemed too impeccably Establishment to be spies, and so did Hollis.

The son of an Anglican bishop, Hollis attended Oxford but never earned a degree. Instead, he went to work for the British American Tobacco Company in Shanghai and then joined M15 in 1939. There he steadfastly worked his way up: acting head of Section F, which dealt with Soviet and other Communist operations in Britain and the colonies, then deputy director and, finally, D.G. in 1956. throughout, his loyalty seemed beyond question. “I find the whole idea that he would betray his country just incredible,” said Hollis’ daughter-in-law Margaret. “He was so English. He was a keen cricket watcher and golfer. He always drove British cars, and he had his suits made in London.”

He also, according to speculation, had carried on a long-running affair with his secretary, whom he married in 1968 after his wife of 31 years divorced him. Could that affair have provided a basis for blackmail? That seemed unlikely in Britain’s tolerant Establishment. Burgess, Maclean and Blunt were known to be homosexual; Philby had a reputation as a womanizer.

For all their splashy impact, Pincher’s charges left many Britons unconvinced. Said Labor M.P. Robert Cryer:”I am very suspicious of allegations timed to sell books.” Pincher himself carefully pointed out that “at no time in the book do I say that Hollis was a spy. It is a documentary, adducing all the evidence brought forward by his own colleagues.”

Rising in Parliament at 3:30 p.m., the hallowed half-hour at which British Prime Ministers traditionally make important statements, Margaret Thatcher was more declarative before a hushed house. Hollis was no mole, said she, pointing out that although it was difficult to prove his innocence, government investigations did not confirm his guilt. For safety’s sake and political ease, however, the Prime Minister called for a review of all public service security procedures. She also ordered one other investigation — into the contacts that Pincher had tapped to produce his story in the first place. ∎