The other person who was visited (by Arthur Martin) was Jane Sissmore. Jane Sissmore was responsible for bringing Hollis into MI5 before the war. She eventually transferred from MI5 to MI6, married an MI6 officer, and became Jane Archer. She was a formidable, intellectual woman who ran the old MI6 Communist Affairs research section. I often used to see her on D3 inquiries. She was always helpful, and told me the inquiries should have been embarked on years before. One afternoon I broached the subject of Mitchell and Hollis, who had both worked closely with her during the war. Jane was a wily old bird, and knew exactly why I was tapping her.
"Could either be a spy, would you say?" I asked her.
"They were both untrustworthy," she told me, "but if I had to choose the more likely candidate I would pick Roger."
In November 1965 Hollis buzzed down to me and asked me to come up to his office. It was unlike him to be so informal. I had never before visited his office without being summoned by his secretary. He greeted me warmly by the door.
'"Come over and sit down," he said, smiling broadly.
He brushed imaginary dust off the sofa, and sat opposite me in the easy chair. That, too, was odd. Hollis usually sat in a straight-backed chair. Hollis was anxious to put the meeting on an informal footing. He made rather clumsy small talk about his imminent retirement.
"Difficult time," he said, "the pension's not much, and every bit counts..."
"What are your plans?"
"Oh, down to the country I think. I have a little place down there. Get right away from it all. A bit of golf, a few walks... that kind of thing."
He laughed in a gurgling sort of way.
"Funny to think my picture will be up there in a few weeks' time," he said, looking up at the portraits which stared down at him. They were all such different-looking men: Kell's stiff military bearing; Petrie's detached pose; Sillitoe, the hunch-shouldered policeman; and Dick, with his easy charm and soft charisma.
Hollis turned to face me, hunching forward, with his hands on his knees. He was smiling again, like a Cheshire cat.
"Peter, there was just one thing I wanted to ask you before I go. I wanted to know why you think I'm a spy."
I had to think very fast. If I told him a lie and he knew I had, I was out that day. So I told him the truth.
Hollis made it sound so natural. Ever since he and I discussed Tisler nearly ten years before, we had been building for this confrontation. But now that it was out in the open, lying on the table between us like an inanimate object, words seemed so inadequate in the face of all the secretly nursed suspicions which had gone before.
"It's all based on the old allegations, sir," I told him, "and the way things have been going wrong. You know my views on postwar failure. It's just a process of elimination. First it was Mitchell, and now it's you."
"Oh yes - but surely you've been looking at new things...?"
"Yes, the old allegations, sir."
For an hour I went through the Volkov list, the retranslation, Gouzenko's Elli, the Skripkin report.
"Well, Peter," he said, laughing gently, "you have got the manacles on me, haven't you...?"
I began to interrupt. He held his hands face up to quiet me.
"All I can say is that I am not a spy."
"But is there anything definite, sir, anything I can put before the FLUENCY meeting, anything at all...?"
"I can probably dig out the notes of the Gouzenko interrogation..." He sounded unsure. "I don't really recollect Skripkin, to be honest. And Volkov..."
He drummed the edge of his seat with his sharpened pencil, and clicked his teeth.
"I don't think you've got Volkov right. Why should Kim go all the way out to Turkey? He'd check first."
He sighed, as if it was all too long ago.
"It's useful, is it, the FLUENCY thing...?" he asked suddenly.
"I think so, yes, sir. I think it's long overdue."
"Yes, I rather thought you would think that... MacDonald isn't so sure - well, I suppose you know that."
"He receives the reports, sir. I suppose he reads them."
"Oh, yes, I'm sure we all read them," replied Hollis, "They make fascinating reading. All that history. Always good to blow a few cobwebs off the pipes."
He smiled his Cheshire cat smile again.
"Well, thank you for your frankness, Peter," he said, rising from his seat. "I must be getting on. Good to have this chat, though..."
He strode stiffly back to his work. Like two actors we exited to different wings, our roles complete.
I never saw Roger Hollis again. Within a few days the new Director-General, Martin Furnival Jones, was installed in the office. His first decision was to remove the photographs from the wall and place them in his ante-office.
"Don't need an audience for the job," he muttered darkly when I asked why.
F.J. was a man of few words, and he grew into the job. He was a determined man who believed he faced one major problem - the scale of the Soviet assault, in terms of numbers of Russian intelligence officers in London, relative to his own pitiful forces. His tenure as Director-General was marked by his campaign to expand MI5 and reduce Soviet diplomatic personnel. He had some success with the first, and eventually triumphed with the second.
F.J.'s top priority was Russian counterespionage, and once he took over, the whole approach to the problem changed. Whereas before I had to be persistent to get anything approved, with F.J. I could buzz him, go right up to see him, and get a decision there and then. He supported the D3 inquiries unreservedly, and sanctioned all the important interviews without question. He never shrank from making value judgments in cases like Watson and Proctor. If the evidence convinced him, he would act on it. F.J. was a man of few complexities. He was typical English gentleman on the surface, with a streak of toughness a mile wide just underneath. It made him few friends in Whitehall, but it was what the Service needed.
Sadly for me, he appointed Anthony Simkins as his deputy. Simkins was probably the one man in MI5 whom I actively disliked, and the feeling was reciprocated in full measure. I knew I would have trouble as soon as he was appointed. Simkins was a lawyer. He and I had already had a major argument some years before, when he was Director-General of C Branch, where he had had some modest success. I was asked to chair an interdepartmental working party consisting of MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, and GCHQ to review technical security at the British Embassy in Moscow, following a fire in the radio room responsible for intercepting local Russian communications. It was clear from the investigation that not only had the Russians started the fire deliberately, but that they had had access to the radio room for some time. The Russians had been reading the radio receiver settings each night, thus they knew what we were intercepting. The Russians who cleaned the Embassy simply unscrewed the bolts (which were well oiled) on the security door lock and walked straight in.