"It's in the files. The Prime Minister would not sanction it."
"Did you actually ask him for permission?"
"Of course I did," replied Hollis testily.
"But he has no recollection of the meeting," countered Day.
"That's absurd! The situation was critical. The Profumo business was at its height. The whole question of the exchange with the Americans had to be considered. Another scandal would have brought the Government down. That's why consultation was vital."
It was all shadow-boxing. Day moved and jabbed, but he could never really land a blow. Somehow he never got close enough to street-fight, to grapple and gouge him, and make him confess. Time had slipped away. It was all old, too old, to ever find the truth.
By the end of the afternoon only the routine questions for the record were left.
"Have you at any stage communicated official information to any unauthorized person?"
"No," replied Hollis firmly.
"Have you ever been approached by anyone clandestinely to pass information?"
"Never."
The chairs scraped as Hollis got up. He said goodbye, and meant it. He traveled back to Somerset, back to his golf, and his cottage. He left the interrogation room as unknown as when he entered - an enigma, an apparently sober man, with a streak of filthy humor. The autocrat with crippling insecurity.
F.J. met us again at the Oxford and Cambridge Club that night. There was an air of resignation around the table. We knew that we had not brought the case home. But equally we felt adamant that there was enough doubt to keep the case alive. F.J. was silent. He felt the interrogation vindicated his faith in Hollis.
"I hope we can move on to other things," he said.
Once again the case was closed. But nothing, and certainly not Hollis' interrogation, could paper over the deep chasm which divided those who believed penetration had occurred, and those, like F.J., who had finally come to doubt it. I could not help remembering all the wasted years, the years when it could have been investigated, the years of neglect and drift, the years when files gathered dust, when reports went unanswered, the years when fear of the unknown prevented us from ever knowing the truth. Only a chance breakthrough, a defector or a cipher break, could help us solve the case now. A desperate sense of failure gripped me - failure and frustration and a desire to get away and forget. Looking back, my retirement began that night as I traveled home on the train to Essex. What came after was mostly going through the motions.
Hollis' interrogation signaled the end of one decade, and ushered in the new. The 1970s were to be the years of reckoning, when the secret armies of the West were finally and painfully exposed to the searing searchlight of publicity. For thirty years West and East had fought a nocturnal battle, hidden and protected by custom and necessity. But within four years the secrets would come pouring out.
Ironically, the 1970s opened well for MI5. We finally got a defector we believed in. His name was Oleg Lyalin. He was recruited by two of the best officers in MI5, a bluff Yorkshireman named Harry Wharton, and a former SIS undercover officer of conspicuous courage, Tony Brookes, who with his wife had operated in France AND survived The operation was managed by the head of KY, a calm, dependable officer by the name of Christopher Herbert. Lyalin was having an affair with a girl, and when Wharton and Brookes made contact with him he said he wanted to defect. They managed to persuade him to stay in place, and for six months he provided MI5 with a detailed run-down of the KGB order of battle in London. He was only a relatively low-level KGB officer connected to the Sabotage Department, but any breach in the KGB's armory is invaluable.
As soon as the Lyalin case began we realized that this was the best possible test as to whether high-level penetration of MI5 still existed. If Lyalin survived we were in the clear. From 1966 until at least 1976 we had no evidence of Russian interference with our operations. We had five spy cases, and the Lyalin case and the expulsion of the 105 Russian diplomats, both of which had been in existence for at least six months. Yet up to the end of 1965, every case for twenty years or more was tainted by Russian "sticky fingers." We should note that Hollis retired at the end of 1965. The secret was known to only ten people, and to no one outside the office apart from Dennis Greenhill, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office. Greenhill was a good friend of MI5, and I enjoyed especially warm relations with him. He too had been to Bishop's Stortford College, along with Dick White and me. I first dealt with him over the French STOCKADE operation, but we began to have much more to do with each other when I took over D3, and routinely provided security briefings for his senior diplomats.
Lyalin soon began to exhibit the strain of leading a double life. Brookes and Wharton arranged safe houses where he could meet his girlfriend for love sessions. The arrangements for these visits were laborious, and each time one or the other had to sit outside the room monitoring events inside for telltale signs of stress or betrayal. Lyalin began to drink too heavily, and when he was posted back to Moscow we decided to bring his ordeal to an end. Lyalin himself was quite game to return to Russia and continue to spy in place, but we had already concluded that he would never survive. Lyalin was attached to the Trade Delegation but had no diplomatic immunity, so we decided that we would simply arrest him as he walked through customs at Heathrow Airport, and force his hand.
Almost immediately our plans fell apart. I was living in London during the week, and one night in February 1970, at 3 A.M., I received a telephone call from the Duty Officer.
"Get in quick," he said, "we need access to your safe."
I dressed and took a taxi to the office, to find Tony Brookes waiting for me.
"We need the antidote kit," he told me. "Lyalin's blown. He was arrested for drunken driving a few hours ago, and he's in the clink at Marlborough Street!"
I unlocked my safe and produced a small roll like a toolkit which Dr Ladell of Porton Down had given me ten years previously toward the end of my time as Scientific Officer. It contained antidotes to all the known poisons used by the KGB. Whenever a defector came out we had the case near him twenty four hours a day, but otherwise it remained in my safe. No one else cared to hold it so close.
I quickly described to Brookes the basic symptoms of nerve gas or toxic poisoning, and told him how to administer the antidote. He rushed off to the prison to guard Lyalin, while I hoisted the deputy head of Special Branch out of bed, and got him to alert Marlborough Street to the identity of the drunk in their basement cell. Meanwhile the MI5 Legal Department applied to the Home Secretary and the Attorney-General for formal immunity for Lyalin from his drunken charge, explaining that there was serious risk of assassination if he was brought before an open court.
The successful defection of Lyalin presented MI5 with a unique opportunity. Ever since F.J. became Director-General he had nursed the dream of decisively changing the balance of forces ranged against him. He knew that the central problem facing MI5 was the massive superiority in the numbers of Soviet intelligence officers in London. Throughout the 1960s he had struggled to get the Treasury to agree to an expansion of MI5's counterespionage capability, but they were always reluctant. He had been able to achieve a certain amount by redirecting resources internally in favor of D Branch, but we were still outnumbered by a factor of more than three to one. With Edward Heath in power, F.J. put the case for a major reduction of intelligence officers to him, citing the order-of-battle figures for intelligence officers. This was before Lyalin came on the scene. Heath's reaction was "throw the lot out," The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) protested, but we were not keen to do this either since we wanted a number here to retaliate with if the Russians were vindictive. However, the whole arrangement was agreed between us and FCO by March 1971. We delayed action until the autumn because Lyalin had come on the scene and we did not want to disturb things until he either defected or had gone home.