LETTERS Claud and I
Sir: In your issue of 14 October (Proven connection'), I learn that I am the sole witness, so far established, of that missing link, consistently denied by Sir Roger Hollis, between himself as DG of MI5 and Claud Cockburn, Marxist wit and Comin- tern agent, after their days together at Oxford. Reading West's article, and new book The Truth about Hollis, as well as several other books on this exhaustively scrutinised topic, I begin to see how easy it is for almost any one of us whose lives, for various reasons, have been at all intricate or shadowy to be denounced for activities of which our accusers deeply disapprove, on the feeblest evidence, indeed little more than guilt by coincidence.
W. J. West has reproduced what I told him over the shaky and intermittent tele- phone lines across the Berwyn Mountains of North Wales with reasonable accuracy. However, he is not correct in reporting that I said that Cockburn had previously advised me that he would be getting in touch with anyone 'in MI5'. We had agreed that, since our ages were 20 years apart, I should concentrate on my contemporaries, mainly those just making their names or three-quarters of the way up the manage- ment ladder, while he would search out his old chums who were now possibly over the top of their trees, with the leisure of semi-retirement to indulge their mischief and malice. His precise words were: 'I am going to re-activate some of my old con- tacts.' Full stop.
I did not think then, or for some time after, that this might include the security services. I had the feeling, now I can't think why, that his 'high-up' informants were most likely to be in the police.
Claud's editorial system depended on both of us getting in touch with any and everyone we knew, or had once known, who owed us a favour, or might welcome what Claud delicately called a 'quid pro quid' for information unprintable in his or her own publication. He urged that we leave on the hob whatever stories every other paper was bringing to the boil, at least for the moment. Instead, we should establish a consensus from well-placed informers about what was being talked about behind closed doors and cupped hands. He was no snob in his role as tittle-tattle gatherer and just as likely to boast of his leak from the Milk Marketing Board or the Society for Propagating the Gospel to the Jews as from the secret service or the Special Branch.
When we were parting at lunch-time, in the middle of the pavement on Old Comp- ton Street, all I knew was that he was meeting someone 'high up' nearby, an important possible tip-off. The pink-faced, cherubic, dark-suited fellow who surged by, glassy-eyed, remained stuck in my memory only because Claud cursed, even mildly, at not being recognised, then again at having to hurry in pursuit at a pace any swifter than his usual, slightly wavering lope. If West judges that Hollis of MI5 was strictly obeying 'correct secret service proc- edure', then surely Cockburn of the Com- intern, playing the same game, should have behaved in the same way. Instead, he made clear to me that he feared he must not have been recognised, and went so far against the rules as to name his source as `Hollis', a name that meant nothing to me, but would have done to many others within earshot.
West also cites me as proof that Hollis went out of his way to meet Cockburn `clandestinely'. But neither then nor, come to think of it, now, is Soho the place to be clandestine, for those to meet who do not want to be observed meeting. Claud in 1963 was an easily recognisable figure, a regular writer for Punch and Private Eye, author of half a dozen books, often on television where he stood out as Fu Man- chu in Irish tweeds. Would any profession- al, let alone the DG of MI5, select this place and this man to plot subversion?
Alan Brien
Glyn Uchaf, Faerdref, Cynwyd, Corwen, Wales
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