The second attempt in Portsmouth ended in disaster. Crabbe was overweight and overage. He disappeared, although a headless body which was later washed up was tentatively identified as his. John Henry, MI6 London Station's Technical Officer, had informed me that MI6 were planning the Crabbe operation, and I told Cumming. He was doubtful about it from the start. It was a typical piece of MI6 adventurism, ill-conceived and badly executed. But we all kept our fingers crossed. Two days later a panic-stricken John Henry arrived in Cumming's office telling us that Crabbe had disappeared.
"I told Nicholas not to use Buster; he was heading for a heart attack as it was," he kept saying.
We were highly skeptical of the heart attack theory, but there was no time for speculation. The secret MI6 parlor game was at risk of becoming embarrassingly public. Crabbe and his MI6 accomplice had signed into a local hotel under their own names.
"There'll be a fearful row if this comes out," snapped Cumming. "We'll all be for the pavilion!"
Cumming buzzed through to Dick White's office and asked to see him immediately. We all trooped upstairs, Dick was sitting at his desk. There was no hint of a welcoming smile. His charm had all but deserted him, and the years of schoolmaster training came to the fore.
"The Russians have just asked the Admiralty about the frogman, and they've had to deny any knowledge. I'm afraid it looks to me rather as if the lid will come off before too long," he said tersely.
"John, how on earth did you get yourself into this mess?" he asked with sudden exasperation.
Henry was chastened, but explained that the Navy had been pressing them for months for details of the ORDZHONIKIDZE'S propeller.
"You know what Eden is like," he said bitterly, "one minute he says you can do something, the next minute not. We thought it was an acceptable risk to take."
White looked unconvinced. He smoothed his temples. He shuffled his papers. The clock ticked gently in the corner. Telltale signs of panic oozed from every side of the room.
"We must do everything we can to help you, of course," he said, finally breaking the painful silence. "I will go and see the PM this evening, and see if I can head the thing off. In the meantime, Malcolm will put A2 at your disposal."
A thankful John Henry retreated from the room. Cumming telephoned the CID in Portsmouth and arranged for the hotel register to be sanitized. Winterborn and Henry rushed down to Portsmouth to clear up any loose ends. But it was not enough to avert a scandal. That night Khrushchev made a public complaint about the frogman, and a humiliated Eden was forced to make a statement in the House of Commons.
The intelligence community in London is like a small village in the Home Counties. Most people in the senior echelons know each other at least well enough to drink with in their clubs. For some weeks after the Crabbe affair, the village hummed in anticipation at the inevitable reckoning which everyone knew to be coming. As one of the few people inside MI5 who knew about the Crabbe affair before it began, I kept my head down on John Henry's advice.
"There's blood all over the floor,'' he confided to me shortly afterward. "We've got Edward Bridges in here tearing the place apart."
Shortly after this, Cumming strode into my office one morning looking genuinely upset.
"Dick's leaving," he muttered. "They want him to take over MI6."
The decision to appoint Dick White as Chief of MI6 was, I believe, one of the most important mistakes made in postwar British Intelligence history. There were few signs of it in the mid-1950s, but MI5, under his control, was taking the first faltering steps along the path of modernization. He knew the necessity for change, and yet had the reverence for tradition which would have enabled him to accomplish his objectives without disruption. He was, above all, a counterintelligence officer, almost certainly the greatest of the twentieth century, perfectly trained for the Director-General's chair. He knew the people, he knew the problems, and he had a vision of the sort of effective counterespionage organization he wanted to create. Instead, just as his work was beginning, he was moved on a politician's whim to an organization he knew little about, and which was profoundly hostile to his arrival. He was never to be as successful there as he had been in MI5.
But the loss was not just MI5's. The principal problem in postwar British Intelligence was the lack of clear thinking about the relative role of the various Intelligence Services. In the post-imperial era Britain required, above all, an efficient domestic Intelligence organization. MI6, particularly after the emergence of GCHQ, was quite simply of less importance. But moving Dick White to MI6 bolstered its position, stunted the emergence of a rationalized Intelligence community, and condemned the Service he left to ten years of neglect. Had he stayed, MI5 would have emerged from the traumas of the 1960s and 1970s far better equipped to tackle the challenges of the 1980s.
The departure was conducted with indecent haste. A collection was swiftly arranged. The takings were enormous, and he was presented with an Old English Silver set at a party held in the MI5 canteen. It was an emotional occasion. Those who knew Dick well, and at that time I was not among them, claimed that he agonized over whether to move across to MI6, perhaps realizing that he was leaving his life's work undone. Dick was nearly crying when he made his speech. He talked of the prewar days, and the bonds of friendship which he had formed then. He thanked Cumming for encouraging him to join the Office, and he talked with pride of the triumphs of the war years. He wished us well and made his final bequest.
"I saw the Prime Minister this afternoon, and he assured me that he had the well-being of our Service very much at heart. I am pleased to announce that he has appointed my Deputy, Roger Hollis, as my successor as proof of his faith in this organization. I am sure that you will agree with me that the Service could not be in safer hands."
The tall, slightly stooping figure in the pinstripe suit came forward to shake Dick White's hand. The era of elegance and modernization had ended.
Roger Hollis was never a popular figure in the office. He was a dour, uninspiring man with an off-putting authoritarian manner. I must confess I never liked him. But even those who were well disposed doubted his suitability for the top job. Hollis, like Cumming, had forged a close friendship with Dick White in the prewar days. For all his brilliance, Dick always had a tendency to surround himself with less able men. I often felt it was latent insecurity, perhaps wanting the contrast to throw his talents into sharper relief. But while Hollis was brighter by a good margin than Cumming, particularly in the bureaucratic arts, I doubt whether even Dick saw him as a man of vision and intellect.
Hollis believed that MI5 should remain a small security support organization, collecting files, maintaining efficient vetting and protective security, without straying too far into areas like counterespionage, where active measures needed to be taken to get results, and where choices had to be confronted and mistakes could be made. I never heard Hollis express views on the broad policies he wanted MI5 to pursue, or ever consider adapting MI5 to meet the increasing tempo of the intelligence war. He was not a man to think in that kind of way. He had just one simple aim, which he doggedly pursued throughout his career. He wanted to ingratiate the Service, and himself, with Whitehall. And that meant ensuring there were no mistakes, even at the cost of having no successes.