When I finished studying the VENONA material in the special secure office where it was stored on the fifth floor, I moved into an office with Evelyn McBarnet, Arthur's research officer, who was already busy on the case. The Mitchell investigation came at an awkward time for D Branch. Hollis had moved Furnival Jones from his post to become head of C Branch, in preparation for his appointment as Deputy Director-General on Mitchell's retirement. F.J.'s replacement was Malcolm Cumming. It was not a popular appointment among the bright young men of D Branch, who were laboring to build on the achievements of the Lonsdale case. Arthur himself had hopes that he might have been offered the job. He certainly deserved it, in terms of achievement, but he had never been popular among the Directors for the stand he took in the early 1950s. He was seen as truculent, temperamental, too unwilling to tolerate fools gladly, which unfortunately was a prerequisite for advancement in the Service. When the Mitchell investigation was sanctioned, Hollis decided not to indoctrinate Cumming, who theoretically was a potential suspect. Oversight of the case was given to F.J., who supervised things from C Branch headquarters in Cork Street.
Evelyn McBarnet was a strange woman, with a large birthmark running down one side of her face. Like a hothouse plant, she lived all her life in the enclosed space of the office, and had no perceptible existence outside.
"Are you a Freemason?" she asked me almost as soon as I joined her in her office.
"No," I replied, "and I don't approve of it."
"I didn't think you looked like one, but you'd better join if you want to be a success in this place," she told me darkly.
Evelyn had always believed there was a penetration of MI5. She had spent years working in counterespionage as a research officer, far longer than Arthur or I. She was a walking compendium of office life and a shrewd, if somewhat morbid, judge of character.
"I always knew there would have to be an investigation," she told me, but she had a disturbing conviction that the course of the investigation was preordained. The worst, she was sure, was yet to come.
"Arthur will never last, if he pushes this issue," she told me, "and neither will you, if you associate yourself with him."
"What on earth do you mean, Evelyn?" I asked, in genuine surprise.
She opened her safe and pulled out a small exercise book with a black cover.
"Read this," she told me.
I opened the book. It was neatly written in a woman's hand. I flicked through the pages quickly. It listed details of cases from the 1940s and 1950s, some of which I knew about vaguely, and others I did not, which the author had collated from the MI5 Registry. Each one contained an explicit allegation about a penetration of MI5 or MI6.
"Whose is this?" I asked, aghast.
"Anne Last's, a friend of mine. She used to work with me," said Evelyn. "She did it after Burgess and Maclean went, then she left to have a family, you know. She married Charles Elwell. Before she left she gave me the book, and told me that I would understand."
"Does Arthur know...?"
"Of course."
"But have you shown it to anyone else?"
"And get chopped too...?"
I carried on reading. Maxwell Knight's name figured frequently in the first few pages. During the war he was convinced there was a spy inside MI5, and had minuted to that effect, although no action was taken. There were literally dozens and dozens of allegations. Many of them were fanciful offhand comments drawn from agent reports; but others were more concrete, like the testimony of Igor Gouzenko, the young Russian cipher clerk who defected to the Canadians in 1945, and whose defection triggered such alarm in the single week of British VENONA KGB traffic. According to Anne Last, Gouzenko claimed in his debriefing that there was a spy code-named Elli inside MI5. He had learned about Elli while serving in Moscow in 1942, from a friend of his, Luibimov, who handled radio messages dealing with Elli. Elli had something Russian in his background, had access to certain files, was serviced using Duboks, or dead letter boxes, and his information was often taken straight to Stalin. Gouzenko's allegation had been filed along with all the rest of his material, but then, inexplicably, left to gather dust.
"People didn't believe him," said Evelyn, "they said he got it wrong. There couldn't be a spy inside MI5..."
On the last page was what appeared to be a kind of "last will and testament." "If MI5 is penetrated," it said, "I think it is most likely to be Roger Hollis or Graham Mitchell."
"How the hell can we investigate these?" I gasped. "We'll have to turn the whole place upside down to do it properly."
"That's what they said in 1951," said Evelyn bitterly.
Anne Last's book was only the first of many secrets Evelyn shared with me over the first weeks we worked together. Gradually she filled in much of the forgotten history of MI5, the kinds of stories you never heard on the A2 tapes: stories of doubts and suspicions, unexplained actions, and curious coincidences. I soon learned that I was by no means the first person to come to suspect the office had been deeply penetrated. The fears were as old as the office furniture.
That evening I joined the commuters thronging down Curzon Street toward Park Lane, my head humming with what I had learned from Evelyn. Here was a consistent unbroken pattern of allegations, each suggesting there was a spy in the office, stretching from 1942 to the present day. For too long they had gone uninvestigated, unchallenged. This time the chase would be long and hard and unrelenting. I paused to look back at Leconfield House.
"This time," I thought, "this time there will be no tip-offs, no defections. This one will not slip away..."
For all my high hopes, the Mitchell investigation was a wretched affair. It began with a row, it ended with a row, and little went right in between. It was clear to me that to stand any chance at all of clinching the case one way or the other before Mitchell retired, we would have to turn on the taps, and use every technical resource at our disposal. Hollis vehemently opposed any request for home telephone taps and the full watching facilities, saying that he was not prepared to indoctrinate any further MI5 officers into the case, and certainly had no intention of approaching the Home Secretary for permission to bug or burgle his own deputy's house.
Arthur reacted badly to the setbacks. His temper by now was on a short fuse, and he erupted at a meeting in Hollis' office when his precise, quiet request for facilities was refused point-blank by the Director-General. Arthur said it was intolerable to be restricted when such a grave issue was at stake, and threatened to approach the Prime Minister himself to alert him to the situation. Hollis always reacted smoothly to any threats, and merely said he noted Arthur's comment, but that his decision stood.
"Under no circumstances will I authorize an extension of this investigation!"