There was little in Mitchell's Record of Service to help us either. Born in 1905, educated at Oxford, he then worked as a journalist and later as a statistician in Conservative Central Office. This did surprise me, as I recalled that when arguing with Mitchell about the Lonsdale case, he had claimed that he could not understand my argument since he was "no statistician." He joined MI5 as a result of contact made through the Tory Party, and worked on the anti-Fascist side during the war, latterly with some involvement, too, in the CPGB. Thereafter his progress was swift, he became head of F Branch (Domestic Subversion) in the late 1940s, and Dick White's first head of Counterespionage in 1953, before Hollis appointed him his deputy in 1956. There were only two really striking things about Mitchell's career. One was the way it was intimately bound up with Hollis.' They had been contemporaries at Oxford, joined MI5 at around the same time, and followed each other up the ladder in complementary positions. The second was the fact that Mitchell seemed to be an underachiever. He was a clever man, picked by Dick White to transform D Branch. He signally failed to do so in the three years he held the job, and indeed, when the decision to close VENONA down was taken into account, it seemed almost as if he had willfully failed.
The intensive surveillance of Mitchell in the office revealed very little. I treated his ink blotter with secret writing material, and every night it was developed, so that we could check on everything he wrote. But there was nothing beyond the papers he worked on normally. The closed circuit television was monitored continuously by the MI6 Watchers. It was an unpleasant task, every morning Mitchell came in and picked his teeth with a toothpick in front of the two-way mirror, and repeated the meticulous process again before lunch, after lunch, and then again before he went home. By the end of the case, I began to feel that the only parts of Mitchell that we knew at all well were the backs of his tonsils.
I arranged to feed him barium meals. I circulated to him the bound volumes of my analysis of clandestine Soviet radio communications, with all their classifications and group count schedules, which I had recently updated for GCHQ. If Mitchell was a spy, it was the sort of priceless intelligence he could not afford to ignore. I watched on the monitor as Mitchell looked at the report in a desultory sort of way.
Later James Robertson, an old adversary of mine who had run Soviet Counterespionage for a period in the 1950s, came into his office, and they began talking about me. Robertson never forgave me for the changes I made in D Branch when he was there. He thought I was a jumped-up newcomer, who should have learned to respect my elders and betters before presuming to offer advice. He and Mitchell discussed my radio analysis. Neither man understood its purpose.
"That bloody man Wright," said Robertson tartly, "he thinks he knows it all. Wants his wings clipped!"
Mitchell nodded sagely, and I could not help smiling at the irony of it all.
But the lighter moments were few and far between in what was a grim vigil, watching and waiting for a man to betray himself on the other side of a mirror. Only once did I think we had him. One Friday afternoon he began drawing on a scrap of paper. He concentrated intensely for perhaps twenty minutes, referring to notes on a piece of paper he took from his wallet, and then suddenly tore the piece of paper up and put it in his waste bin. Every night, since the beginning of the case, Hollis arranged for me to search his office, and Hollis' secretary was instructed to retain his burn bag, containing his classified waste, so that it could be checked as well. That evening I retrieved the scraps of paper from the bin, and reconstructed them. It was a map of Chobham Common, near where Mitchell lived, with dots and arrows going in various directions. In the middle of the map were the letters "RV" and the siting of two cars, one at either end of the path across the common which passed the rendezvous site.
For days Pavilion Road was deserted, as the entire focus of the case shifted to the isolated spot on the common indicated by Mitchell's map. But Mitchell never went close to the spot, nor did anyone else.
When I first began searching Mitchell's office, Hollis was highly nervous.
"There are some highly sensitive documents inside, Peter, and I want your word that they will remain undisclosed."
Hollis was worried in particular about personnel reports, and other embarrassing, rather than secret, papers which have by necessity to pass across the Deputy Director-General's desk. He need not have worried. There was nothing remotely interesting that I saw in Mitchell's office, which only confirmed me in my view that being DDG under a man as autocratic as Hollis must have been one of the very worst jobs in the world.
Every night for some months Hollis and I met after hours. At first he expressed distaste at having to pry into a close colleague's affairs, but I never felt the sentiment was genuine. When I told him about the frequency with which Mitchell picked his teeth on the closed-circuit television, he laughed like a drain.
"Poor bugger should go to a decent dentist," he laughed I, for my part, felt determined, even ruthless. I had waited for years for the chance to grapple with the penetration problem, and I felt few scruples.
It was in those evenings that I first came to know Hollis as a man. Although I had worked for him for close on eight years, we had rarely talked outside the strict confines of official business. We had moments of tension, but by and large our relationship was correct. Only once did we have a major confrontation, when I was in A2 with Hugh Winterborn in the late 1950s. An Argentine delegation came over to negotiate a meat contract with the British Government. Hollis passed down a request from the Board of Trade for any intelligence, and instructed us to arrange for microphone coverage of the Argentines. Winterborn and I were outraged. It was a clear breach of the Findlater-Stewart memorandum, which defined MI5's purposes as strictly those connected with national security. The rest of the A2 staff felt exactly as we did, and Hollis' instruction was refused. For a few hours we all anticipated mass dismissals, but then Hollis withdrew his instruction, and it was never discussed again. The only strike in MI5's history ended in total victory for the strikers.
Occasionally, during the searches of Mitchell's office, Hollis talked about his early years. He told me about his travels in China during the 1930s, where he worked for British American Tobacco.
"Dreadful business out there. Any damn fool could see what the Japanese were doing in Manchuria. It was perfectly obvious we'd lose China if we didn't act," he used to say.
As with many older MI5 officers, the roots of his dislike of the Americans lay prewar. He said the Americans could have helped out in the Far East, but refused to because they were gripped with isolationism. The French in the Far East were, he said, effete, and would rather have seen the whole place go down than help us. That left only the Russians.
"They watched and waited," he told me, "and they got it in the end after the war, when Mao came."
He rarely mentioned his family life, although many people in the office knew he was having a long-standing affair. Just occasionally he talked about his son Adrian, who was a gifted chess player, which evidently was a source of great pride for him. (Adrian used to go to Russia to play chess. )
On one occasion we were talking about the case when I ventured an opinion that, whatever the result, it demonstrated a weakness in our protective security. Hollis became huffy.