Hanley's interrogation proved that while secret service is a profession of deceit and intrigue, many of its practitioners are men of exceptional character. Here was a proud man, who cherished his achievements, and those that he felt might be his to come. One morning he is invited to undergo a trial by ordeal and is stripped apart, year by year, until his soul is bare. All the while he knows that faceless colleagues have dogged his every step, listening at home, listening at the office, listening now. The strain must have been more than most men could bear. No one listening could doubt for one moment that this was an honest man. Hanley was tough, and he showed the system could work. He walked through the fire and emerged unscathed.
That night F.J., Patrick Stewart, and I went to my club, the Oxford and Cambridge, to discuss the interrogation. F.J. settled down into a corner with a large Scotch. His eyes were pinched, as they always were when he was stressed.
"Are you satisfied?" he asked dully.
"He's in the clear," I agreed.
Patrick nodded silently.
"You'll inform FLUENCY, of course...?" said F. J..
At that moment Hanley himself walked in unexpectedly. He and I shared the same club, and occasionally ran into each other, but I never expected he would come there so soon after his ordeal. We were in a quiet corner, and he walked past without noticing us, dragging his feet slightly, as if in shock. His normally florid face was white as a sheet.
After the HARRIET investigation was closed down, F.J. asked me to visit the CIA and inform them that MI5 considered Hanley cleared of the Goleniewski allegations. It was a job of enormous sensitivity. The CIA were already up in arms over the Mitchell and Hollis cases, and were themselves well aware of Goleniewski's allegations, and the fact that Hanley was a near-perfect fit. It was essential for the preservation of the alliance that they be left in no doubt about the veracity of our conclusion.
F.J. did not get on with Americans particularly well, and preferred to leave dealings to Michael McCaul and me. Partly it was antipathy toward Angleton, and partly it was residual upper-middle-class anti-Americanism. Dick White had something of the same prejudice. Neither was a wealthy man, while Helms and Angleton rarely hid the fact that they were paid handsomely for similar duties.
Both men had reason to distrust the Americans deep down. F.J. never forgave Helms and Angleton for the Gray and Coyne affair, while Dick had clashed repeatedly with the American military hierarchy when he controlled Counterintelligence in Europe at the end of the war, and was never forgiven. In 1953, when Sillitoe retired, the Americans stupidly tried to block his appointment as Director-General.
There was, in the end, a fundamental difference in approach. Both F.J. and Dick saw themselves as servants of the Crown, and their services as part of the orderly, timeless configuration of Whitehall. They were insiders, whereas Helms, Angleton, and Hoover were all outsiders. There was a streak of ruthlessness and lawlessness about the American intelligence community which disturbed many in the senior echelons of British Intelligence. They feared a future calamity, and wanted to keep their distance, so inevitably the weight of liaison often fell on the shoulders of officers like me.
I traveled to Washington in 1968 to brief Angleton on the results of the HARRIET case. We had a businesslike meeting. I outlined the course of the investigation, and told him we were unanimously of the view that Hanley was in the clear. Angleton then took me to see Dick Helms and explained to him what my mission was. Helms said that he did not wish to hear anything more, if I said that Hanley was in the clear, he unconditionally accepted my word. But the clearance of Hanley solved very little.
After we left Helms, Angleton said that he wanted to discuss with me the question of Goleniewski's being a plant. The HARRIET fit was so perfect that it did not need a suspicious man to believe the KGB had deliberately planted the allegation to discredit him. Angleton and Helms already suspected that Goleniewski had fallen back under Russian control shortly before he defected. Repeated analysis of the intelligence he provided showed a distinct change in its character from Polish to Russian matters, as if the Russians were deliberately feeding out barium meals of their own intelligence in order to isolate the leak. This analysis was shared by MI5, and was the main reason why Goleniewski's middling-grade agent story was ignored for such a long time. The clearing of HARRIET raised a major question mark over the validity of the middling-grade agent, and the validity of Goleniewski's information, particularly after he defected. The middling-grade agent story did not appear until November 1963. Goleniewski defected in January 1961. Now for the KGB to concoct the story in the detail they did, they would need access to Hanley's record of service. With his position, the only person who could acquire this would be Roger Hollis.
But if Goleniewski had been turned, or was the unwitting vehicle for disinformation, what were the implications for the other assets MI6 and the CIA held in Poland, which since the war had been the West's most consistently fruitful sphere of Eastern Bloc operations? I did some preliminary work on this subject during the HARRIET investigation. I found, to my horror, that for a long period all agents run by MI6 were met at a flat rented by a secretary in the Warsaw MI6 station. Over ninety meetings had taken place there. I speculated that perhaps the reason why the UB and the KGB apparently failed to detect this astonishing series of meetings was that they were planting false agents on us. MI6 hackles were raised again, as they had been over the Penkovsky affair.
The belief that defectors were being sent to deceive Western counterintelligence during the sudden flood of arrivals in the early 1960s obsessed all of us. Golitsin's central contention was that the KGB had embarked on a systematic disinformation campaign, and that false defectors would be sent to the West to discredit him. Almost immediately Yuri Nossenko arrived on the CIA's doorstep, appearing to deflect many of the leads Golitsin gave about Soviet penetration of American and British Intelligence.
Nossenko threw the CIA into turmoil. He told them he had seen the file belonging to Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President Kennedy. He claimed the KGB had no involvement in the assassination, and had made no contact with Oswald in Russia, despite the fact that he had worked on a Top Secret U2 surveillance base shortly before defecting. To many officers in the CIA, Nossenko's story was too pat, especially when it was found that he had lied about his rank and status in the KGB. But why had he been sent? The CIA set about trying to break Nossenko using methods of imprisonment and physical pressure which would never have been tolerated in MI5. But even by 1967 they were no nearer to solving the riddle.
Suspicions were also growing about the FBI sources Top Hat and Fedora, who were passing information while still in place, but refusing to disclose their provenance. They provided bona fides for Nossenko, as if to assure the Americans that he was genuine, even to the extent of supporting Nossenko's claim to a false rank. But if Top Hat and Fedora were phony, what of the leads they gave to penetrations of British security?
Fedora had given the tip which led to Martelli, albeit that it resulted in the disastrous prosecution and his acquittal. Top Hat passed copies of documents detailing American weapons guidance systems to the Americans which, he claimed, the Soviets were obtaining from a source in Britain. After investigation we were able to catch Frank Bossard, an officer in the Missile Guidance Branch of the Aviation Ministry. He was arrested in 1965, and sent to prison for twenty-one years. If Fedora and Top Hat were plants, then the Russians were prepared to sacrifice huge assets in order to build up their bona fides. It must be taken into account that had it not been for the skill of GCHQ we probably would not have obtained the evidence which proved that Bossard was working for the GRU.