Shortly afterward he called me into his office and said that he had discussed the whole matter with Dick White, who agreed that such a committee should be established. Dick prevailed upon Hollis, who finally gave his reluctant agreement. The committee would be formed jointly from D Branch staff of MI5, and the Counterintelligence Division of MI6. It would report to the Director, D Branch, and the head of MI6 Counterintelligence, and I was to be its working chairman. The committee was given a code name: FLUENCY.
Hollis used the row over the Symonds report as the pretext for clipping Arthur's wings. He divided the now burgeoning D1 empire into two sections: D1, to handle order of battle and operations; and a new D1 (Investigations) Section, to handle the investigations side of counterespionage. Arthur was left in charge of the truncated D1, and Ronnie Symonds was promoted alongside him as an assistant director in charge of D1 (Investigations).
It was a cruel blow to Arthur, for whom investigations had been his lifeblood since the late 1940s and into which most of his effort had gone since his return in 1959. He had been upset not to be asked to chair the Fluency Committee, although he understood that this was essentially a D3 research task. But to be supplanted in his own department by Symonds, his former junior, who for a long time had viewed Arthur as his mentor, was a bitter pill to swallow. Arthur felt betrayed by the Symonds report. He could not understand how Symonds could write two reports within such a short space of time which seemed to contradict each other. He believed that MI5 had made a desperate mistake.
Arthur became reckless, as if the self-destructive impulse which always ran deep in him suddenly took over. He was convinced that he was being victimized for his energetic pursuit of penetration. To make matters worse, Hollis specified that although the two sections were to be run independently of each other, Arthur was to have some kind of oversight of both areas, in deference to his vast experience and knowledge. It was an absurd arrangement, and bound to lead to catastrophe. The two men rowed continually. Arthur believed that oversight meant control while Symonds wanted to go his own way. Finally things boiled over when Arthur abruptly ordered Symonds to bring his case officers to a conference, and Symonds refused. Arthur told him he was making it impossible for him to do his coordinating job; Symonds retorted that Arthur was interfering, and placed a written complaint before Cumming. Cumming took the complaint to Hollis and recommended Arthur's immediate dismissal, to which Hollis enthusiastically agreed.
The matter was discussed at the next Directors' meeting. Arthur had no allies there; too many Directors felt threatened by his forceful, sometimes intemperate style. The only friend he had among the Directors, Bill Magan, who staunchly defended Arthur to the end, was conveniently absent when the decision was taken.
I remember Arthur came to my office the day it happened, steely quiet.
"They've sacked me," he said simply. "Roger's given me two days to clear my desk." In fact, he was taken on straightaway by MI6, at Dick White's insistence and over Hollis' protests. But although this transfer saved Arthur's pension, his career was cut off in its prime.
I could scarcely believe it. Here was the finest counterespionage officer in the world, a man at that time with a genuine international reputation for his skill and experience, sacked for the pettiest piece of bureaucratic bickering. This was the man who since 1959 had built D1 from an utterly ineffectual section into a modern, aggressive, and effective counterespionage unit. It was still grossly undermanned, it was true, but that was no fault of Arthur's.
Arthur's great flaw was naivete. He never understood the extent to which he had made enemies over the years. His mistake was to assume that advancement would come commensurately with achievement. He was an ambitious man, as he had every right to be. But his was not the ambition of petty infighting. He wanted to slay the dragons and fight the beasts outside, and could never understand why so few of his superiors supported him in his simple approach. He was temperamental, he was obsessive, and he was often possessed by peculiar ideas, but the failure of MI5 to harness his temperament and exploit his great gifts is one of the lasting indictments of the organization.
"It's a plus as far as I'm concerned," he said the night he was sacked, "to get out of this."
But I knew he did not mean it.
I tried to cheer Arthur up, but he was convinced Hollis had engineered the whole thing to protect himself, and there was little I could do. The stain of dismissal was a bitter price to pay after the achievements of the previous twenty years. He knew that his career had been broken, and that, as in 1951, all he had worked for would be destroyed. I never saw a sadder man than Arthur the night he left the office. He shook my hand, and I thanked him for all he had done for me. He took one look around the office. "Good luck," he said and stepped out for the last time.
By the time Arthur left I was in the midst of a major reconstruction of the D3 Research section. When I took it over it had no clear sense of purpose in the way I wanted it to have. I was convinced that it had a central role to play if MI5 were finally to get to the bottom of the 1930s conspiracy. An intelligence service, particularly a counterespionage service, depends on its memory and its sense of history; without them it is lost. But in 1964 MI5 was quite simply overloaded with the mass of contradictory information flowing in from defectors and confessing spies. Loose ends are in the nature of the profession of intelligence, but we were overwhelmed by the weight of unresolved allegations and unproven suspicions about the 1930s which were lying in the Registry. We needed to go back to the period, and in effect positively vet every single acquaintance of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Long, and Cairncross.
It is difficult today to realize how little was actually known, even as late as 1964, about the milieu in which the spies moved, despite the defections in 1951. The tendency had been to regard the spies as "rotten apples," aberrations, rather than as part of a wider-ranging conspiracy born of the special circumstances of the 1930s. The growing gulf in the office between those who believed the Service was penetrated and those who were sure it was not was echoed by a similar division between those who felt the extent of Soviet penetration in the 1930s had been limited, and those who felt its scope had been very wide indeed, and viewed the eight cryptonyms in VENONA as the best proof of their case. Throughout the late 1950s tension between the two sides grew, as Hollis resisted any attempts by those like Arthur and me to grapple with the problem.
The reasons for the failure to confront the conspiracy adequately are complex. On a simple level, little progress was made with the two best suspects, Philby and Blunt, and this made it difficult to justify deploying an immense investigative effort. There was, too, the fear of the Establishment. By the time the defections occurred, most of those associated with Burgess and Maclean were already significant figures in public life. It is one thing to ask embarrassing questions of a young undergraduate, quite another to do the same to a lengthy list of rising civil servants on the fast track to Permanent Under Secretary chairs.
At heart it was a failure of will. Politicians and successive managements in MI5 were terrified that intensive inquiries might trigger further defections or uncover unsavory Establishment scandal, and that was considered an unacceptable risk during the 1950s. Moreover, in order to conduct a no-holds-barred investigation MI5 inevitably would have to show something of its hand. This ancient dilemma faces all counterespionage services; in order to investigate, you have to risk approaching and interviewing people, and thus the risks of leakage or publicity increase exponentially the more intensive the inquiries you make. This dilemma was particularly acute when facing the problem of investigating Soviet recruitment at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s. Most of those we wanted to interview were still part of a closely knit group of Oxbridge intellectuals, with no necessary allegiance to MI5, or to the continuing secrecy of our operations. News of our activities, it was feared, would spread like wildfire, and faced with that risk, successive managements in MI5 were never willing to grasp the nettle. We opted for secret inquiries, where overt ones would have been far more productive.