Arthur stalked out of the room, obviously fully intending to carry out his threat.
That evening Furnival Jones and I went to my club, the Oxford and Cambridge, to try to find a way of averting catastrophe. Relations had been swiftly deteriorating between Hollis and Arthur ever since Cumming had been appointed to the Directorship of D Branch, and with the Mitchell case poised so perilously, any hint of the turmoil inside the organization would be disastrous.
Furnival Jones was in a dreadful position. He knew as well as I that he would be Hollis' deputy himself within a few months, yet I could tell that he felt Hollis was indeed being obstructive.
"It'll mean the end of the Service, if Arthur does something stupid," said Furnival Jones gloomily into his glass.
I asked him if he could not approach Dick White privately to see if some pressure could be exerted on Hollis to relent. Furnival Jones looked at me almost in anguish. He could see that he was slowly being ground between competing loyalties - to Hollis and to those who were conducting a very difficult and emotionally fraught inquiry. It was close to one in the morning before we came to any firm decision. Furnival Jones promised that he would make an appointment to see Dick White, if I undertook to restrain Arthur from any rash course of action. I telephoned Arthur from my club; it was late, but I knew he would be up, brooding over a Scotch bottle. I said I had to see him that night, and took a taxi around to his flat.
Arthur was in a truculent mood.
"I suppose you've come to tell me you've decided to throw your hand in too!" he said acidly.
For the second time that evening I settled down to a long drinking session, trying to talk Arthur around. He looked desperately strained. He had been seriously overworking since before the Lonsdale case, and was putting on weight drastically. His flesh was gray, and he was losing his youthfulness. He railed against the obstructions that were being put in his way. I could see that the specter of 1951 haunted him, when he had allowed himself to be shunted out to Malaya.
"I should have fought then, but I agreed with them at the time. It seemed best to leave it. But not this time," he said.
In the end he saw the sense of F.J.'s approach. An open breach with Hollis would get us nowhere, and there was at least hope that Dick would talk him around to agreeing to some of our requests for more facilities.
The following day I got a call from F.J. He said he had spoken to Dick, and we were all to assemble at his flat in Queen Anne's Gate on the following Sunday afternoon.
"He wants to see a presentation of the case, then he'll decide what to do."
Dick White's flat backed onto MI6 headquarters in Broadway, and I arrived there promptly at the appointed time. Dick answered the door; he was dressed casually, with an open shirt and cravat. He showed us into his study, an elegant book-lined room, decorated in seventeenth-century style. Paintings from the National Gallery collection lined the walls, and an ornamental mirror stood gleaming above the fireplace.
"Shall we have some tea?" he asked, anxious to break the tension which was apparent on everyone's face.
"Now," he said, looking at Arthur, "I think you had better make your case..."
Arthur explained that I had brought my charts tabulating access to the thirty-eight cases, and suggested that it might be better if, in the first instance, I made the presentation. For a moment there was confusion. The charts were too large to spread on the delicate tea table, but Dick saw the problem.
"No, no," he said, "that's quite all right - spread them on the floor."
Within two minutes we were sprawling across the carpet, and the elegant Sunday-afternoon reserve was lost as we began to go through the litany of fears once more. I explained that I had submitted two previous papers, one on Tisler, the other on Lonsdale, but that these had both been rejected. Dick looked at me sharply, but made no comment.
"The whole point is that we can't look at this problem piecemeal," I told him, "and the basis of these charts is to try to take an overall view, to see if there is any evidence of Russian interference in the cases..."
"Sounds like a bad case of induction to me, but go on," said Dick skeptically.
I went through the cases one by one, and explained how it always came down to the same five names.
"Did you at any stage discuss this with Arthur, before you drew this together?" he asked, looking me squarely in the eye.
"How could I? I was over in the Directorate most of the time."
Dick turned to Arthur.
"You mean to tell me that you both came to this conclusion?"
He obviously found it hard to believe.
Arthur took over and explained the problem with facilities. Dick asked F.J., who so far had remained silent, for his opinion. He paused, and then committed himself irrevocably.
"Roger has refused to extend the investigation. Personally, I think it's a mistake. When you put together the lack of following with the lack of technical aids, there really is little chance of finding an answer to this case."
Dick was impressed with F.J.'s sensible appraisal.
"There are two factors here," he said after thinking for a while. "We have to do this investigation, and we have to be seen to do this investigation, and that's almost just as important."
He told us that some changes would certainly have to be made. He thought the investigation should be coordinated from an unofficial house, rather than a government building, and offered us the use of an MI6 safe house in Pavilion Road, near Sloane Square.
"I'll think overnight about what I am going to say to Roger, and you will hear from him."
The following day F.J. informed us that Hollis had given permission for a team of MI6 Watchers to be used on the case, although they would still not be allowed to trail Mitchell beyond the London railway station, in case their presence was noticed. We were allowed to indoctrinate Winterborn, and were given carte blanche to install a closed circuit television system behind a two-way mirror in Mitchell's office. That afternoon we moved the burgeoning files across London to a tatty unfurnished upstairs flat in a small mews house in Pavilion Road, which for the rest of the case became our headquarters.
In the early stages of the investigation, we made a complete reexamination of the circumstances of Philby's defection It yielded one vital discovery. I asked the CIA to check their computer records of the movement of all known Russian intelligence officers around the world, and we discovered that Yun Modin, a KGB officer we strongly suspected had been Philby's controller during the 1940s, and of having arranged the Burgess/Maclean defections, had visited the Middle East in September 1962, just after Flora Solomon's meeting with Arthur in London. A further check showed Modin made a previous visit in May of the same year, shortly after the three Golitsin serials relating to the Ring of Five arrived at Leconfield House. Finally the CIA established that Modin had made no other trips abroad since the early 1950s. Eleanor Philby, Kim's wife, was interviewed at this time, and told us that Philby had cut short a family holiday in Jordan in September, and from then onward until his disappearance exhibited increasing signs of alcoholism and stress. It was obvious to us that Modin had gone to Beirut to alert Philby to the reopening of his case. Once the KGB knew of Golitsin's departure, it was an obvious precaution, but the odd thing was the fact that Philby seemed apparently unmoved until after Modin's second visit in September, which coincided exactly with the time when the case against him became unassailable.