"Absolutely not!" he replied with total conviction.
Neither was there any hint of espionage in Hanley's early life. At Oxford before the war he was the model of the sensible, mildly left-wing student. When war came he stayed at Oxford for a year to get his degree and then joined a searchlight regiment in Home Defense as a subaltern, and remained there until 1945. It was important work, but not remotely adequate for someone of Hanley's considerable intellectual gifts. But everyone who knew him at this time remarked on his nagging sense of inferiority, and the consequent lack of ambition.
The first point in his life which aroused our interest was his decision, in 1945, to enroll for a crash course in the Russian language at the Joint Services Language School at Cambridge, which both our own operations and Golitsin had told us was a recruiting ground for the KGB (but there was not the slightest evidence from our sources that Hanley had been involved with them). The Russian language course was the first time Hanley came into contact with Russians, and from then on his career seemed an uncanny fit for Goleniewski's allegations. After service in Budapest, where he served on the Joint Allied Intelligence Committee with the KGB officer named by Goleniewski as having made the recruitment of the middling-grade agent, Hanley returned to London. He became the War Office liaison officer with the Soviet military attache, and dealt mainly with returnee problems. During this time he began to have dealings with MI5, and when he was demobilized in the late 1940s, he applied for a full-time post, and joined as a research officer on Russian Affairs. His first task was the compilation of the index of agents of the Rote Kapelle which decades later I was to find so invaluable in my D3 work.
Within two years Hanley shifted to the Polish desk (D2) and his career took off. First he went to Hong Kong for two and a half years and then returned to E Branch (Colonial Affairs) before becoming head of D2, and in 1960 a member of the Board as Director C. It was a career with ever-increasing momentum, yet his background presented a possible espionage profile. Here was a man from a troubled childhood, with deep-seated feelings of insecurity, who comes into continuous contact with Russians at a delicate time of his life, when he is beginning for the first time to emerge from his shell. Perhaps, like Blake, he had a chip on his shoulder, and the Russians had played skillfully on his concealed feelings of resentment until they fanned into treachery.
The problem was that neither Patrick nor I believed it, despite the fact that on paper the surface fit with Goleniewski's allegation was so precise. It was the exact reverse of the case with Hollis, where we were both instinctively convinced of the case against him, even though on paper the connections looked far weaker.
As far as Hanley was concerned, too much weighed against the "chip on the shoulder" theory. From the start of his career in MI5, Hanley had been marked out as a flyer. He was valued by both his peers and his superiors, despite his often hectoring manner. He had married into the office, and enjoyed a close and devoted relationship with his wife. And lastly there was the evidence of the psychiatrist.
Espionage is a crime almost devoid of evidence, which is why intuition, for better or worse, always has a large part to play in its successful detection. All a counterespionage officer usually has when he confronts his suspect is a background, a trail, a set of coincidences which are open to a variety of interpretations but which, as Dick White used to say, lead to the epiphany - that moment when all the facts add up to only one conclusion. But with Hanley, the trail led one way, and intuition another. The only possible way to resolve the case was through interrogation, and when we submitted the papers to F.J. he agreed.
Mention interrogations, and most people imagine grueling sessions under blazing lamps: men in shirt-sleeves wearing down a sleep-deprived suspect with aggressive questioning until finally he collapses sobbing on the floor, admitting the truth. The reality is much more prosaic. MI5 interrogations are orderly affairs, usually conducted between 9:30 A.M. and 5 P. M. with a break for lunch.
So why do so many spies confess? The secret is to achieve superiority over the man sitting across the table. This was the secret of Skardon's success as an interrogator. Although we mocked him years later for his willingness to clear suspects we subsequently learned to have been spies, he was genuinely feared by Blunt and other members of the Ring of Five. But his superiority in the interrogation room was not based on intellect or physique. Mainly, of course, it was the devastating briefs provided for him by Arthur Martin and Evelyn McBarnet which convinced men like Fuchs that Skardon knew them better than they knew themselves. It was not only the briefs that helped Skardon but also the skill of the eavesdroppers. In the Fuchs case, Skardon was convinced that he was innocent until they pointed out where Fuchs had lied. This information enabled Skardon to break him. But Skardon himself played an important role too. He epitomized, in his manner, the world of sensible English middle-class values - tea in the afternoon and lace curtains - so much so that it was impossible for those he interrogated to ever see him as the embodiment of capitalist iniquity, and thus they were thrown off balance from the very start.
But none of this stood a chance against Hanley if he was a spy. He was an insider. He knew all the tricks too well. Like Philby, he would see the punches coming. The only way to proceed with a professional is to put him through an extremely thorough vet. A complete curriculum vitae of the suspect's life and career is drawn up, and he is taken through it in interrogation. If there are any deviations, omissions, or inaccuracies, these are then probed. If the suspect is guilty the pressure can often lead to further inaccuracies, until his secret life begins to unravel.
The MI5 technique is an imperfect system. But like trial by jury, it is the best yet devised. It has the virtue of enabling a man, if he has nothing to hide, and has the resilience to bear the strain, to clear himself. But its disadvantage is that hidden blemishes on an innocent man's record can often come to the surface during intensive investigation and render continued service impossible. It is a little like medieval justice: sometimes innocence can be proved only at the cost of a career.
F.J. elected to conduct Hanley's interrogation himself. He knew it would be a difficult encounter and that in the end Hanley's fate would rest in his own hands, and he felt it unfair to entrust the task to any other officer. But he ensured that Patrick and I monitored the entire interrogation from the Dl operations room in Leconfield House.
Hanley was summoned into F.J.'s office one morning, and informed that an allegation had been made, and that he was required to submit himself immediately for interrogation. The interrogation took place in the Director-General's office, with an overt microphone on the table. It was recorded in the room where Patrick and I were monitoring the interrogation. Throughout the first day F.J. took Hanley through his life. Hanley was scrupulously honest, sometimes painfully so. He ducked no questions, hid no details of his life or his inner feelings. On the second day he was given the details of Goleniewski's allegation. He was not shaken in any way. He agreed that he was a perfect fit, but calmly stated that he was not a spy, had never been, and had never at any stage been approached by a Russian or anyone else, although at least once a week in Budapest he had met the Russian officer who was alleged to have made the approach.