Poor Cleve Cram was hauled over the coals. He opposed the approach to Wilson, yet Helms and Angleton insisted he begin sounding out George Wigg, Wilson's security adviser. But Hollis was in no mood for excuses. He had been humiliated in front of the entire intelligence establishment in London and Washington, and Cram was threatened with expulsion if there were any further transgressions. I saw Cram a few days later skulking around the fifth floor of Leconfield House. He looked a little sheepish.
"You nearly got me PNG'd," he said, smiling ruefully. He knew the CIA had been trying it on, and had been caught fair and square. The Gray-Coyne report was a terrible indictment of Hollis' tenure as Director-General of MI5, and he knew it. But the Americans, typically, had handled the affair with all the finesse of a bull in a china shop. The essence of their plan was well-meant - to provide the resources and manpower which MI5 lacked. Of course they had other motives. They wanted MI5 as a supplicant client, rather than as a well-disposed but independent ally.
Improvements did flow from the report. For the first time MI5 management conceded the need to drastically expand D Branch, and the old colonial appendages, like E Branch, withered on the vine. Henceforth D Branch had first call on all resources. It was inevitable that new management would be sought for the revamped D Branch.
Alec MacDonald, a former colonial policeman, was brought in, and Malcolm Cumming, realizing that he would never become Deputy DG, opted for early retirement.
The other important initiative which flowed from the report was the recognition which followed that a mechanism was needed to secure closer cooperation between Western counterintelligence services. GCHQ and NSA had a formal exchange under the terms of the UKUSA agreement. MI6 and the CIA regularly exchanged foreign intelligence assessments via the Joint Intelligence Committee in London and the National Security Council in Washington. But counterintelligence was still basically ad hoc. Angleton and I had often discussed the value of creating a forum for the regular free exchange of counterintelligence. So much counterintelligence, particularly when it flowed from defectors, ranged across national borders, and access to each country's files was essential if the best progress was to be made. But Angleton was an autocratic man; he wanted to use the Gray-Coyne report to force a one-way flow. But finally he became converted to the virtues of a genuinely mutual forum and, at his urging, a conference of senior counterintelligence officers from the USA, Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand was organized to take place roughly every eighteen months. The conferences were called CAZAB, and the first was held in Melbourne, Australia, in November 1967.
The Gray-Coyne report was not the only epitaph to Hollis' career. As he approached retirement, the shape of the FLUENCY conclusions became clear. The Working Party consisted of Terence Lecky and Geoffrey Hinton from MI6 Counterintelligence, as well as Arthur Martin when he was transferred over in mid-1965. The MI5 contingent was Patrick Stewart, Anne Orr-Ewing, and Evelyn McBarnet from D3, with me in the chair. The papers were circulated direct to the Director D, Alec MacDonald, and the head of Counterintelligence, Christopher Phillpotts. We met every Thursday in my office or a fifth-floor conference room at Leconfield House.
The mood was tense to begin with, each member aware of the awesome significance of the task at hand - to review in detail every single allegation which had ever been made about the penetration of British Intelligence. The first decision FLUENCY made was to change the approach to penetration which Arthur and I had adopted in the Mitchell case. In 1963, when we presented the case for penetration to Dick White, we relied heavily on analysis of the oddities and discrepancies in technical and double-agent cases, known in the jargon as "manifestations." FLUENCY decided to dispense with all manifestations. They were felt to be an overlay of specific allegations of penetration which had been made by defectors. These were the primary evidence, and we concentrated solely on them.
The first task was to collate the allegations. This was relatively straightforward, as much of the work had already been done during the Mitchell inquiry, and continued at my instigation as part of D3's overall program of research.
After six months' work we had compiled a large file, which contained the full list of allegations - over two hundred in all, some dating back to World War I. The allegations were then apportioned to various officers around the table. Those that came from Polish sources, like Goleniewski, were given to Terence Lecky. Evelyn McBarnet handled the old MI5 allegations, Patrick Stewart took the Golitsin material, and I looked at Krivitsky, Volkov, and VENONA.
Once the allegations were gathered we set about assessing them. We examined each allegation carefully, and made a decision about its validity - that is to say, whether we believed it to be true. In some cases, for instance, a defector might have said a spy existed in MI5 or MI6, but we were able to satisfy ourselves that they were mistaken. Where we satisfied ourselves that an allegation was true, it was termed, in counterintelligence jargon, "a true bill." Then we checked whether each allegation had ever been attributed to a known spy, such as Philby, Burgess, or Blunt, and if it had, the attribution was reexamined to see if it was still valid in view of any intelligence which might subsequently have come to light.
Assessing allegations depended on the quality of our records, and we faced a major problem with MI6 archives. They were in a mess. Each of the Geographical Divisions and the Counterintelligence Department kept their own records. MI6 were producers of intelligence, not collaters of it, and little thought had been given to an effective system of record-keeping. Indeed, this was a principal reason why so many allegations were simply left unresolved, and one of the by-products of the FLUENCY inquiries was a general recognition of the need to improve the MI6 Registry. In 1967 Arthur finally left Counterintelligence to take over the MI6 Registry, where he made one last major contribution to British Intelligence by totally overhauling the system.
After thorough review, each of the two hundred allegations was placed in one of six categories:
a. the allegation was a true bill, and was definitely attributable to a known spy;
b. the allegation was a true bill, and was almost certainly attributable to a known spy;
c. the allegation was a true bill, but it was not possible to attribute it to a known spy;
d. it was not possible to ascertain whether the allegation was or was not a true bill, because there was insufficient information; e. the allegation was doubted;
f. the allegation was not a true bill, i.e. rubbish.
As Hollis approached retirement, FLUENCY began to uncover an entirely new picture of the history of the penetration of British Intelligence. Many allegations which previously had been attributed to known spies like Philby or Blunt were found on detailed inspection to have been wrongly attributed. Twenty-eight of the two hundred allegations we examined were in the all-important C category - they were true bills, but they pointed to as yet undiscovered spies.
Of those twenty-eight, there were ten really important allegations, all of which related to MI5:
1. Volkov's "Acting Head," dated September 1945; 2. Gouzenko's "Elli," also dated September 1945; 3. Skripkin's betrayal, dated 1946 (information came from Rastvorov in 1954); 4. Goleniewski's "middling grade agent," dating from the mid-1950s; 5. Golitsin's information about the Skripkin investigation, also dated 1946; 6. Golitsin's information about the special safe in KGB headquarters to house material from British Intelligence; 7. Golitsin's information about the index to files in KGB headquarters containing material from British Intelligence; 8. Golitsin's information about the "Technics" Document; 9. Golitsin's information about the special arrangements for protecting the Soviet colony in London; and 10. Golitsin's information about the betrayal of Crabbe's diving mission.