Each of the Golitsin allegations dates from 1962-63.
The really startling thing about this list was the way it followed a clear chronological pattern from 1942 to 1963. The Golitsin material, although more recent, was not specific enough to point in the direction of any one officer, beyond the fact that it had clearly to be a high-level penetration to account for the allegations. But the first three serials, even though dated, transformed the FLUENCY work, and pointed in Hollis' direction for the first time.
Konstantin Volkov's list was the first serial which we investigated. This was already the subject of intensive D3 inquiries to trace the second of the two Foreign Office spies mentioned in the list. I decided to have the entire document retranslated by Geoffrey Sudbury, the GCHQ officer who ran the VENONA program. Sudbury was a fluent Russian speaker, but most important of all, from the VENONA program he was familiar with the kind of Russian Intelligence Service jargon in use at the time Volkov attempted to defect, whereas the British Embassy official in Turkey who made the original translation was not.
One entry in Volkov's list puzzled me in particular. In the original translation it referred to his knowledge of files and documents concerning very important Soviet agents in important establishments in London. "Judging by their cryptonyms, there are seven such agents, five in British Intelligence and two in the Foreign Office. I know, for instance, that one of these agents is fulfilling the duties of head of a department of British Counterintelligence."
When the case against Philby was first compiled in 1951, MI5 assumed that the last spy referred to by Volkov was Philby, who in 1945 was indeed fulfilling the duties of head of a department of MI6-Counterintelligence, responsible for Soviet counterintelligence. But I knew enough Russian from VENONA myself to see that there were two words in the Russian which did not appear in the original translation - the word OTDEL, which means "section," which was closely followed by the word UPRAVALENIE, meaning "directorate" or "senior division." In any case, there was no irresistible reason why this particular entry by Volkov had to be Philby. There were five spies in British Intelligence in all, and any of those could just as easily have been Philby.
A few days after I gave Sudbury the Volkov list he rang me up excitedly, almost forgetting for a moment to switch over to his scrambler.
"The translation's wrong," he said, "it's all NKVD idiom. The man who wrote it was obviously quite senior. He's written it very carefully, with pride in his professional skill and knowledge. The real translation should read. 'I know, for instance, that one of these agents is fulfilling the duties of head of a section of the British Counterintelligence Directorate.'
"Actually, I rather think this man's position is temporary. He's 'fulfilling the duties,' rather than in the job itself, which suggests to me he's the acting head, or something very like it..."
"I'm sorry," I replied cautiously.
"But don't you see," shrieked Geoffrey through the electronic haze, "the British Counterintelligence Directorate is MI5, it's not MI6!"
The meaning was crystal clear. If Sudbury was right, this was not Philby, and it could not be Blunt either, since he was never acting head of anything. Only one man had been acting head of a section of the British Counterintelligence Directorate in 1944-45. His name was Roger Hollis.
The second allegation was Igor Gouzenko's MI5 spy "Elli," which I had first seen in Anne Last's notebook during the Mitchell investigation. FLUENCY reexamined the case of Elli in great detail. The extraordinary thing about Gouzenko's Elli was the fact that it came in September 1945 in exactly the same period that Volkov made his "Acting Head" allegation, and also on the same date that we made the crucial break into the VENONA traffic.
The essence of Gouzenko's story was simple. He said he knew there was a spy in "five of MI." He had learned this from a friend, Luibimov, who had worked alongside him in the main GRU cipher room in Moscow in 1942. Elli's communications were handled through dead letter boxes, one of which was a crack in a tombstone. There was something Russian about Elli, said Gouzenko, either in his background, or because he had visited Russia, or could speak the language. Elli was an important spy because he could remove from MI5 the files which dealt with Russians in London.
Luibimov showed him parts of the telegrams from the spy, whose code name was Elli. Gouzenko said that when Elli's telegrams came in, there was always a woman present in the cipher room who read the decrypts first and, if necessary, took them straight to Stalin. I invited Ismail Akhmedov, a senior GRU officer who defected to the West at the end of the war, to Britain, and asked him who this woman could be. He said her name was Vera, and she controlled all GRU illegals in the West and worked directly under him, although security procedures were such that she never disclosed the identities of her agents to him. Alexander Foote, who worked for the GRU as an illegal in Switzerland during the war before defecting in the late 1940s, also described Vera (in his book HANDBOOK FOR SPIES) as the woman who was in charge of him when he visited Moscow for training in 1945.
The first problem with Gouzenko's story was that over the years since he had first told it in 1945, he varied the details. "Five of MI" became MI5. The distinction was vital. Theoretically, "five of MI" could be taken as referring to Section V of MI. And, of course, in 1942 Philby was working in Section V of MI6. The other problem with Gouzenko was that by the mid-1960s he was an irretrievable alcoholic. His memory was at best unreliable for events which occurred more than twenty years before. I sent a request to the Canadian RCMP for permission to interview Gouzenko once more, but we were told that Gouzenko had been causing problems for the Canadian authorities through his alcoholism and badgering for money. They feared that further contact with him would exacerbate the problems, and that there was a high risk Gouzenko might seek to publicize the purpose of our interview with him.
I asked the RCMP if they had the original notes of the debriefing of Gouzenko, since they were the best evidence for what precisely he had said about Elli in the first days after defecting. The RCMP officer who had looked after Gouzenko was long since dead and his notes had not been filed but almost certainly destroyed.
The evidence in British Intelligence files only complicated the validity of Gouzenko's story still further. When Gouzenko defected, an MI6 officer, Peter Dwyer, traveled up to Canada from Washington to attend his debriefing. Dwyer sent back daily telegrams to MI6 headquarters in London outlining Gouzenko's information. Dwyer's cables were handled by the head of Soviet Counterintelligence in MI6, Kim Philby. Philby, in the following week, was to have to face the pressing problem of Volkov's almost simultaneous approach to the British in Turkey. By good luck he asked that his opposite number in MI5, Roger Hollis, should go to Canada to see Gouzenko instead of him. Was this coincidence, we wondered, or an arrangement made in the knowledge that Hollis was a fellow spy and could be trusted to muddy the waters in the Gouzenko case? We have it from VENONA, however, that the KGB was unaware of the existence of a GRU spy in MI5 when Hollis traveled to Canada and interviewed Gouzenko. The most specific and important material Gouzenko possessed related to possible spies in the atomic weapons development program, and Hollis' report dwelt on this aspect at length. The spy Elli in "five of MI" was almost a footnote. Hollis judged Gouzenko to be confused about the structure of British Intelligence. Gouzenko was wrong, and the matter was buried. This was a mistaken judgment.