ANOTHER VOICE
Are there still lessons to be learned from the tale of three Harolds?
AUBERON WAUGII
Whenever people start getting excited about the three Harolds who occupy such a large part of the nation's attention Macmillan, Wilson and Harold 'Kim' Phil- by — I find myself haunted by the thought that Hollis went to his grave without ever knowing for certain whether Macmillan, the Prime Minister to whom he had direct personal responsibility for most of his period at the head of MI5, from 1956-1965, was a Soviet agent or whether he was not.
Obviously, no sane person welcomes the suspicion that a much respected English Prime Minister is really a Soviet agent. If that person is head of the security service he must be doubly on his guard, and start counting his fingers and toes as soon as the suspicion surfaces in his mind. Hollis's reasons for feeling uneasy about Macmil- lan had nothing to do with his pre-war visits to Moscow in a fetching white hat, nor even with his behaviour over the forcible repatriation of Cossacks and Catholic Croatians after the war. So far as I know Hollis was not even aware of Mac- millan's behaviour on that occasion — nor were many people until Nikolai Tolstoy pointed it out in his excellent book. In parenthesis, I might say that although I do not have any claim to knowing whether Macmillan was a Soviet agent or not, I am not in the least bit impressed by the Cowgill-Booker arguments in exoneration of him. Nobody has ever suggested that Macmillan was the instigator of that dis- gusting episode — merely that he inter- preted and executed his ambiguous instruc- tions with a zeal which cannot be entirely explained by the healthy ambitions of a junior politician on the make.
No, the slightly ambivalent feelings of the Service towards Harold Macmillan date from a later episode when, on 11 November 1955, as Foreign Secretary, he assured the House of Commons, on the basis of advice he claimed to have received from the security service, that extensive enquiries had cleared his fellow-Harold 'Kim' Philby — from any suspicion of being the Third Man in the Burgess- Maclean affair. What the security service knew perfectly well — and what it was constrained from revealing by its public school code of omerta — was that it had given precisely the opposite advice. However, it was charitable to assume that the cock-up had been organised by the Foreign Office's counter-espionage branch, which has never had the most cordial relations with MI5. Shortly after- wards, the head of MI5 retired and Hollis was appointed — by Eden — on the basis that he was a comparatively sane man who was unlikely to fall for lurid theories about treasonous Foreign Secretaries.
No wonder, then, that having served loyally for seven years under a Prime Minister about whom there were always lingering doubts, he tended to pooh-pooh any suggestions about the next Harold who moved into Downing Street. When the much maligned CIA man, James Angle- ton, ran into Hollis's office in Curzon Street with the hot news that Harold Wilson was another grave security risk, his reaction, in the robust language of these people, was to say, 'Fuck off.'
It was only, I fancy, in Hollis's last days in Curzon Street, and subsequently in his retirement, that Macmillan's behaviour over apparent attempts to incriminate him — Hollis, of all people — as a Soviet agent gave him pause to think again about Macmillan's behaviour in 1955. By then it was too late to have second thoughts about Wilson. I do not think Hollis gave any serious thought to the Wilson allegations between his retirement in 1965 and his death in 1973.
The most significant thing about these Wilson allegations is that we cannot print them in full because they are defamatory, unprovable and therefore libellous. Even so, it seems to me that the press has gone over the top in averring their untruth. The Sunday Times this week described it as `treachery' on the part of the security service to investigate a suspicion that the Prime Minister might be a security risk, and to inform others that these suspicions existed. If one sees the history of our times in party political terms, from the focus of a Labour party commitment, I can under- stand it. If, indeed, the purpose of the operation was to change the Government, rather than secure Wilson's retirement, then I would agree that MI5 was ultra vires. But there is not a shred of evidence to this effect. What on earth is a security service to do which suspects that a Prime Minister may be susceptible to pressure from a hostile power? Tell the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, the Americans, the Opposition, the press? Eventually, they did all these things. Wilson had several interviews with Sir Michael Hanley from August 1975. He resigned in March 1976. The matter was not an issue in the 1979 election. Where is the treachery in this?
It was only when reading the first extract of David Leigh's account in the Observer that I received the impression of reading a Soviet newspaper dedicated to the disin- formation of its poor, oppressed readers. Respect for the libel laws is one thing. Special pleading is quite another. Under the heading `Spycatchers who dabbled in treason' we learn 'the full story about Peter Wright's absurd plot to oust Harold Wilson while PM'. The word 'absurd' appears rather frequently in this narrative: 'another absurd theory — that the Russians were using Kagan to pump Marcia Williams'. Quite apart from one's objections to the word 'pump' here, I wonder what Leigh means. The theory may well have been wrong, but why was it absurd? A KGB agent who visited Kagan's flat at this time was plainly going to be measured for a suit of clothes, he says.
But the most worrying passages in Leigh's apologia come later, when he seems to confuse the allegations (which none of us can spell out) in order to shoot them down. They do not concern a 1947 trip to Moscow by Wilson as Trade Minis- ter, but various subsequent trips, in Opposition, as sales representative of Montagu Myers (not John Meyer), timber merchants. The 'absurd gossip' about Wil- son's sex life did not concern Barbara Castle, nor are the 'innocent facts' he produces the 'only basis for the rumours'. What worries me is that I suspect David Leigh knows all this rather better than I do. What sort of game of silly buggers does he think he is playing?
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