During the course of the inquiry I was also able to solve one other riddle from Volkov's list. Volkov claimed that the Russians could read the Foreign Office ciphers in Moscow. Maclean certainly betrayed every code he had access to in the Foreign Office, but Foreign Office records showed that the Moscow Embassy used one-time pads during and just after the war, so Maclean could not have been responsible.
Remembering my work with "the Thing" in 1951, I was sure the Russians had been using a concealed microphone system, and we eventually found two microphones buried in the plaster above the cipher room. During the war, two clerks routinely handled the Embassy onetime pad communications, one reading over the clear text message for the other to encipher. The Russians simply recorded the clear text straight through their microphones. By the very good work of the Building Research Laboratory we were able to establish that the probable date of the concrete embedding of the microphone was about 1942, when the Embassy was in Kuibyshev.
The Working Party Report found an extraordinary and persistent level of appalling security inside the Embassy, and every member of the committee endorsed a highly critical conclusion, which demanded the installation of an MI5 officer to work full-time in the Embassy on security. I circulated the trenchant report to F.J., who was then Deputy Director-General, and asked for his approval before I sent it to the Foreign Office. F.J. suggested I show it to Simkins as a courtesy, since he was Director C, responsible for Protective Security, and technically the Working Party covered his area. I sent Simkins a copy, and was surprised, a few hours later, to receive an angry summons to his office.
"You can't possibly send anything like this to the Foreign Office," he said, is if I were suggesting sending inquisition implements as a gift to the Pope.
"Why ever not?" I asked. "It's about time the bastards received a blasting. The whole place is a shambles!"
'"Well, I'm sorry. It's the Foreign Office. It's a most important department of state, and you simply have no business sending them reports like this. I don't propose to approve it!"
To my amazement, he defaced the report with a blue pencil. I took the report to F.J. and showed him what Simkins had. done. F.J. grunted, and told me to type it up and send it unchanged.
"Bloody Foreign Office," he growled, "I've had the bloody lot of them..."
The report was sent and a young MI5 officer, Tony Motion, was sent out to Moscow, but from then on I knew Simkins was an enemy for life.
Shortly after F.J. took over as Director-General the FLUENCY Working Party submitted its first report to him and to Dick White, as chief of MI6. The report was in two sections. The first half listed each of the twenty-eight allegations which we were sure were true bills and investigatable but which could not be attributed to any known spy. The second half of the report contained the allegations written up as a narrative, starting with Gouzenko's Elli in 1942, and ending with Golitsin's information in 1962, to show the more or less continuous nature of the penetration. This report was submitted to both chiefs. But it was six months before the report was discussed again. Then we were told to resubmit our findings, listing only those allegations which we felt could be investigated, and giving the candidate who, in our judgment, best fitted the allegation.
The FLUENCY Working Party decided that Gouzenko's Elli and Volkov's "Acting Head" should both be investigated, and that because of their closeness in time, they should be considered together. The candidate was typed neatly at the bottom of the page. Stripped of title, stripped of rank, it was just a name: Roger Hollis.
The third allegation we included in our report was Goleniewski's "middling-grade agent," and it was potentially as damaging as the first two pointing toward Hollis. The "middling-grade agent" story began in November 1963. Goleniewski, Sniper as he was previously known, finally agreed to meet MI5 to clarify some of the details of the allegations he had made in anonymous letters from Poland. Previously Goleniewski was unwilling to meet anyone directly from MI5 because of our failure to catch Lambda 1, George Blake. But with Blake in jail, Goleniewski was seen by the head of the Polish section, who was himself half Polish by descent.
By the time MI5 saw Goleniewski, the CIA suspected he was going clinically insane. He began to have delusions that he was descended from the Tsar, but despite that, his recall of intelligence remained remarkably accurate. One morning during the course of his interviews, Goleniewski announced that he had a story to tell which he had never told before. He said that he had not mentioned it before because the British had made such a mess of detecting Blake, but he knew there was a middling-grade agent inside MI5.
Goleniewski said he knew about the middling-grade agent because he, a friend, and his former superior, had a serious discussion in the 1950s about whether to defect to the West. Deciding between Britain and the USA was difficult. All three agreed that Britain was the better place to live because of the large Polish emigre community, but MI6 was obviously impossible to approach because of Lambda 1. Goleniewski suggested to the other two that they try to contact MI5 through the emigre community in London, which he knew was monitored extensively by D Branch. Goleniewski's chief said that this plan was equally dangerous, since he knew the Russians also had a spy inside MI5.
This spy had been recruited by the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB, responsible for the armed services. The Third Chief Directorate had been allowed to keep the agent because he was so important to them, and he was not transferred to the First Chief Directorate, which was the usual practice. The agent had served in the British Army, and held rank as a British officer when he was recruited. Goleniewski thought the recruitment had taken place in Eastern Europe, and named the Russian KGB colonel who had carried it out. The spy had provided the Russians with valuable Polish counterintelligence, probably because he worked in the Polish section of MI5.
There was one other detail. In the mid-1950s the British successfully exfiltrated the Polish premier, Hanke, to the West. This had resulted in an inquiry in Warsaw, which General Serov, then head of the KGB, conducted himself. For some reason the KGB had failed to gain advance warning of the exfiltration, and Goleniewski learned that this was because the middling-grade agent was "on ice," either because he was under suspicion or because he was abroad and out of contact, or simply because his nerve was shaky. The spy was apparently perhaps on ice for two to three years before resuming work in the Polish section in the late 1950s. Later, when Goleniewski was in Moscow in 1959 he asked a friend in the Third Chief Directorate who was responsible for recruiting the agent, and if the operation was still active. His friend expressed surprise that he even knew of the affair, and advised him to remain quiet.
"This is a very dark affair," he said, "and I advise you to forget all about it."
Goleniewski's allegation was extraordinarily detailed, but because of the overload in Counterintelligence from late 1963 onward, and because of the doubts about Goleniewski's credibility, the allegation was not investigated properly until FLUENCY began sitting. We divided the allegation up into its seven separate indicators, and allotted marks to every candidate who fulfilled each of the criteria. Eight people in MI5 partially fitted Goleniewski's middling-grade agent, but one fitted every single part of it exactly. His name was Michael Hanley, the Director of C Branch, and a man strongly tipped to become F.J.'s successor.