But what of the five spies in British Intelligence? One was Philby, another was Blunt, and a third Cairncross. Long might theoretically have been a fourth Volkov spy, but he was not in London at this time and he could not possibly be one of the eight VENONA cryptonyms, since he was in Germany in September 1945. That still left one Volkov spy, the "Acting Head," unaccounted for, as well as four VENONA cryptonyms, of which presumably the "Acting Head" was one, and Volkov's second Foreign Office spy another. As for Elli, there was no trace of him anywhere.
The third FLUENCY allegation was the Skripkin case. This was given to us by Yuri Rastvorov, a second secretary at the Russian Embassy in Tokyo, who was in fact a Lieutenant-Colonel in the KGB. British Naval Intelligence made contact with Rastvorov in autumn 1953, and began negotiations for his defection. Rastvorov eventually agreed to come, provided only that he was taken straight to a British colony, such as Australia(!), rather than back to Britain. He said his reluctance to come back to Britain was because he knew that British Intelligence was penetrated, although he did not elaborate further.
The Naval Intelligence Department (NID) arranged to fly the KGB man by RAF Transport Command plane from Tokyo to Singapore, where they intended to hand him over to the joint MI5-MI6 establishment SIFE (Security Intelligence Far East). Rastvorov was not told of these plans, but unfortunately, as the aircraft taxied to the end of the runway, a snowstorm hit Tokyo and the plane was unable to take off. While waiting for the storm to abate, the chatter of the crew revealed to Rastvorov that the plane was going to Singapore rather than Australia. He panicked and fled the aircraft, went immediately to the American Embassy, and defected to them instead.
Sometime later the CIA reported that Rastvorov had given further details of his reasons for believing British Intelligence was penetrated. He said that a friend of his, a Lieutenant Skripkin, had approached the British in the Far East in 1946, and offered to defect. Skripkin made arrangements to return to Moscow, fetch his wife, and then defect on his next visit out of the country. However, back in Moscow, Skripkin was somehow detected by the KGB. He was approached by two KGB officers who pretended to be MI6 officers. He gave himself away, was tried and shot.
When we looked Skripkin up in the Registry we found that he did indeed have a file. It contained copies of two reports from British Naval Intelligence in the Far East dealing with plans for Skripkin's defection, one dated May 1946, and the other July 1946. They had been stapled together and sent from SIFE for MI5's information, arriving in London during the first half of August. The file was dealt with by Roger Hollis, the Assistant Director of F Branch, and a junior officer. Hollis instructed the junior officer to make a file and place it in the Registry, where it lay until Rastvorov told his story in 1954. When the file was retrieved it was automatically attributed to Philby by MI5.
When FLUENCY reexamined the case several new facts came to light. Firstly, when Golitsin defected in 1961, he asked us what we knew about the Skripkin case. He said that he had worked on the case in 1946, when he was a junior officer in the Counterintelligence Branch of the First Chief Directorate. He remembered that the report came to him from London, and definitely not from the Far East, at the end of 1946, when the snow was on the ground in Moscow. Without prompting, Golitsin told the story of how the two KGB men tricked Skripkin by posing as MI6 officers. Golitsin was also asked to describe the two documents he had seen. Golitsin was astonishingly accurate. The first, he said, was an account of Skripkin's sounding out, and an assessment of his worth. The second was a resume of his future plans, including an address in Moscow where he could be contacted. Golitsin also said he was certain the papers had been stapled together at the time the agent had photographed them.
The second new fact FLUENCY had was that Philby, when questioned by Nicholas Elliott in Beirut, was asked if he had betrayed Skripkin. Philby vehemently denied having done so, not having known about the case even when given more details of it. This was most odd, because we assumed it would be in Philby's interest to claim credit for the case. Perhaps Philby was telling the truth on this occasion.
I arranged for a complete search of the entire distribution of both Skripkin reports, to see if it could shed any further light on the case. The results were extremely revealing. The May report went to Naval Intelligence (Hong Kong), SIFE at Singapore, and the Naval Intelligence Department in London. They placed the report in a Naval docket and circulated it within NID, and passed a copy routinely to the Naval Section of R Division at MI6. They, in turn, passed it to Section V, who filed it. Extensive searches in the MI6 records showed that Philby was never on the distribution list.
The July document followed the same distribution trail, except at SIFE in Singapore. It was at this point that they decided to staple together both reports, and send them routinely to MI5, where they arrived on August 8. This was the first occasion MI5 knew anything about the affair, and it was also the only place where both reports were stapled together, a fact which chimed perfectly with Golitsin's recollection. Whoever betrayed Skripkin must have been inside MI5, not MI6. That ruled out Philby, and Blunt had already left MI5 the previous year. Once again the finger pointed toward Roger Hollis, the F Branch Assistant Director who handled the Skripkin file.
Once the shape of the FLUENCY allegations became clear I began the most dangerous task I ever undertook. Without authorization I began to make my own "freelance" inquiries into Hollis' background. I had to be cautious, since I knew that the slightest leak back would inevitably lead to the sack. I traveled down to Oxford, and visited the Bodleian Library. There I discovered in the university records that Hollis, although he went up to Oxford in the 1920s, never took a degree. He left inexplicably after five terms. It seemed an odd thing for so conventional a man to do. I visited Hollis' old college, Worcester, and searched the records there to find out who had lived on the same staircase. In his fourth term Hollis moved to digs in Wellington Square, and I checked through the Oxford Calendars, which list the addresses of every student resident at Oxford, to find those students with whom he shared a house. I even tried the records of the University Golfing Society in the hope that somewhere there would be a clue to the enigma of Hollis' personality.
Working without Hollis' record of service, I was forced to work blind. I knew from talking to Hollis that he had visited China, so I ran a trace through the Passport Office for the dates of his arrivals and departures from Britain. I made discreet inquiries at the Standard Chartered Bank, where Hollis worked before leaving for China, but apart from an old forwarding address at a bank in Peking, they had no records.
I wanted to find some evidence of a secret life, a careless friend, a sign of overt political activity. Every man is defined by his friends, and I began to draw up a picture of those to whom Hollis was close in those vital years in the late 1920s and 1930s. Two men in particular were of interest at Oxford - Claud Cockburn and Maurice Richardson. Both were left-wing: in Cockburn's case, when I ran a check on his file I noticed that Hollis had retained the file throughout the war, and never declared his friendship on the file as the Service customs demand. Did he, I wondered, have a reason to hide his relationship with Cockburn, a man with extensive Comintern contacts?
Out in China there was a similar pattern. China was a hotbed of political activity in the 1930s, and was an active recruiting ground for the Comintern. Hugh Winterborn told me that an old retired colonel he had known in Japan knew Hollis while in China, having shared a flat with him for a year, and he made an appointment for me to visit him. Tony Stables was a brusque, old-fashioned military officer, and he remembered Hollis well. He said he never knew his political opinions, but always assumed they were left-wing because he mixed with people like Agnes Smedley, a left-wing journalist and Comintern talent spotter, as well as another man called Arthur Ewert, whom Stables described as an international socialist.