Matters came to a head in 1969 at the annual conference attended by senior MI5 officers at the Sunningdale Civil Service College in Berkshire. A number of officers launched bitter attacks on me, and others involved in D1 (Investigations), as well as on the work we were doing. What had D3 ever achieved? they asked. They talked of the bonds of trust between fellow officers ruptured by the climate of suspicion. Innocent men suffering, they said.
"Which innocent men?" I said. "That's a lie. Who? You name them!"
My hands were tied - I could not talk in specifics or generalities, and was forced to defend myself by stressing that every move we made in relation to a case was endorsed by F.J. personally. But without my explaining to them the long history of the search for penetration, they could not possibly understand.
Afterward I appealed to F.J. to publish a paper on the FLUENCY assessments. I outlined the sort of thing we could circulate to the top seventy officers: a resume of the continuous allegations of penetration since the war, including the attributions to the known spies wherever possible, and indicating the large number of still unexplained allegations. F.J. refused even to consider it.
"If I do this, Peter," he said, "it will break the heart of the Service. We would never recover."
"But these people don't even know Blunt was a spy. How can they possibly sympathize and support our work, if they aren't told something?"
"In my view," he said, "it would be better if no one knew, ever!"
"But how can we go on?" I asked him. "We've got young people coming into the Service every year. They listen to the tapes, they read the office histories, and they learn nothing about this, and it's the most important subject there is. How can you expect them to live a lie? You might as well not have done any of this work, unless you face up to it, and show people we have by explaining to them how it all happened, and say to people, 'Look, there are these gaps, and that's why we've got to carry on.' "
F.J. would have none of it. There were moments, not many it is true, but this was one, when he was immutable.
"What about me?" I asked finally. "How do I go on in the office, facing this level of hostility?"
He suddenly became steely.
''That is a price you have to pay for sitting in judgment on people."
In 1968, following his clearance, Michael Hanley was appointed head of Counterespionage. Ever since the traumatic events of the previous year Hanley and I had barely spoken. He had never said anything, but I could tell he blamed me for the decision to investigate him. When he took over he lost no time in trying to clip my wings. At first it was public slap-downs.
"Oh, Peter," he would say mockingly, "that's just another one of your mad theories."
But then his assault became more serious. He began to remove staff and resources from D3 wherever possible. At first I fought my corner, and went to F.J. to get them reinstated, but after a while I began to wonder whether it was worth the fight. The D3 research task was nearing completion. Only the high-level penetration issue remained unsolved, and that had been shelved for more than three years, with little sign that it would ever be revived. The constant strain of the work was taking its toll on my health. My thoughts turned toward retirement and to my first love - farming.
I decided that at least I should confront Hanley personally before giving up. I went to see him and asked him point-blank why he was trying to drive me out of the Service. He claimed there was no persecution. It was just that D3 had got too big, and there were increasing complaints that some of its less glamorous, but no less important tasks, like security assessments for ministers and the like, were being neglected.
"Well, give me an officer to look after the paperwork, then," I countered.
But Hanley refused.
"I know I'm a poor administrator," I admitted, "but are you sure the real reason for this isn't because you bear a grudge against this type of work?"
Hanley became red-faced. He knew what I was driving at, but denied his own experience was coloring his judgment.
"I suppose you know it was me?" I said. "Have you ever seen the file?"
The ice was broken. I went back to my office and pulled out the file on the HARRIET investigation. I showed Hanley everything - the way the search for the middling-grade agent arose from the FLUENCY report, the shelving of the hunt for the high-level spy, the D3 inquiries, the Watson and Proctor cases, the investigations, the visit to his psychiatrist.
"I never realized," he said, as he studied the files.
"We're the people who were asked to do the dirty work," I told him bitterly," and now when we've done most of the work, they want to brush it under the carpet and forget us, and forget the things we did."
Indoctrination into the burden of terrible secrets which so few have shouldered had a profound effect on Hanley. He realized that he had no experience of any of this, and his only knowledge of D Branch was from his time on the Polish desk in the 1950s. In order to make a success of D Branch he had to have guidance. One day he called me into his office and explained his problem. He was quite straightforward, and I respected him for it. He still wanted to break down D3. Its mammoth task was almost finished, he told me, and in any case, he wanted me to become his personal consultant on the whole reorganization of D Branch which he was planning. I was to have sight of every paper, and access to all cases in the Branch with the brief to guide him with my intimate knowledge of the previous fifteen years. Unlike any other officer, I had never moved from D Branch. As Dick White promised at my interview, I received no promotion, but then I was not forced to play musical chairs, switching from department to department every second year. D Branch had been my life. I knew every case and file. It was a fair offer, and I accepted immediately.
But that still left the problem of penetration.
"Who is going to continue that work? We can't let the thing slip again, otherwise another backlog of unresolved cases will build up," I said.
I had been convinced for more than a year that we needed some formal mechanism for looking at the whole question of internal penetration. The problem of the 1960s was that there was no department in the Service where allegations of penetration could be investigated. Everything was ad hoc. FLUENCY had no formal status, it was just a working party. The work did not sit easily inside D1 (Investigations), because their correct job was to investigate penetrations that occurred outside the Service. It was precisely this lack of a mechanism which contributed to the accusations of "the Gestapo" in the office. We were seen to be people pursuing investigations outside the normal channels, and in an organization as conscious of hierarchy as MI5, that was a considerable problem. With a proper section devoted to the work, the Service would be able to see that the management had given its full backing. It would, in other words, have legitimacy.
There was one other factor in my mind, I knew that if the issue of high-level penetration was ever to be solved, it could be done only by giving fresh minds access to the problem. Over the past ten years the subject had become intimately bound up with personalities - principally mine and Arthur's. We were seen as men with grudges, or as men with obsessions, unable to conceive of any interpretation other than Hollis' being guilty. I lobbied Hanley and F J furiously, trying to persuade them to set up such a section, and staff it with people who had no connection with either Arthur or me, or with the terrible events of the previous ten years.