PROVEN CONNECTION
W. J. West finds
fresh evidence of Hollis's communist contacts
THE correspondence which appeared in The Spectator recently (see Letters, 30 September and 7 October) as a result of Chapman Pincher's review of my book The Truth About Hollis has provoked investiga- tions that have lead directly to new evi- dence proving a connection in the Sixties between Sir Roger Hollis and the con- troversial journalist and sometime Comin- tern agent Claud Cockburn.
The pro-Hollis faction who view Hollis as a staunch conservative have denied through thick and thin that Hollis knew Cockburn after his university days. It has now been established not only that Hollis kept up his connection with Cockburn but that he was meeting him clandestinely at the height of the Profumo affair. This astonishing fact is given added piquancy by the role Cockburn was playing at the time, that of guest editor of Private Eye. The evidence comes from the assistant editor who worked with Cockburn, Alan Brien. Until Chapman Pincher's re- mark in his Spectator review of 9 Septem- ber that any evidence that could link Hollis with Cockburn in later life would be of vital significance, as established in my book, the connection seemed to be one for a gossip column perhaps, but nothing more. Brien himself was certainly unaware of any greater significance in what he knew, and yet his evidence is now seen to provide a link which transforms suspicion about Hollis into fact.
In the summer of 1963 Richard Ingrams, who had been editing Private Eye for three years without a break, decided to take a holiday. Cockburn seemed an obvious choice for guest editor, and he readily agreed to do an issue focused on the Profumo affair. As they began work on the issue Cockburn remarked to Brien, 'I'm going to reactivate some of my contacts in MI5' and soon arranged a lunch with someone 'high up' in MI5 whom he later referred to by name as Hollis.
The only Hollis that Brien knew of at the time was Christopher Hollis, the MP and writer, but that certainly wasn't the man walking along the street towards them whom Cockburn pointed out as they left Private Eye's offices in Soho. It was in fact Christopher's brother, Sir Roger Hollis, the director general of MI5 himself. Hol- lis's behaviour on seeing that Cockburn was talking to someone he did not know was absolutely correct secret service proce- dure — he cut them both dead and walked past without the slightest sign of recogni- tion. Cockburn set off in hot pursuit. When Cockburn returned from lunch he and Brien sat down to write the leader columns of the controversial issue of Private Eye that appeared on 9 August 1963, drawing extensively on Hollis's indiscretions.
Hollis was deeply involved in the Pro- fumo affair, but what exactly had he told Cockburn, knowing that it would be pub- lished? 'Sensitive' information appears everywhere in the issue, but the most important matter was an answer to the question all were asking then, as they have since, which was how the affair had come about in the first place:
If an answer must be given it is that Special Branch, with its very special mentality, took a terrible stunner against a list of people ranging from Profumo to . . . other people. Of course they are as bold as lions but after the customary telephone calls and confiden- tial chats in the course of which discretion creeps up on valour and gives it a fatal blow to the kidneys, they decided that the way to get at the men they were going for was to go for Dr Stephen Ward.
This operation was complicated by the fact that MI5 was sitting there with its nasty sneer, waiting for the Special Branch to fall flat on its face and then kick it. MI5 had a little list too — but not identical with that of Special Branch.
Cockburn then added his own gloss: We are a democracy, so that we have two departments of political police instead of one, and how they hate each other. This means freedom.
There is indeed an insider's tone here on the question of the feud between MI5 and `the Branch' — not to mention the sugges- tion Cockburn also made, for the first time in print, that Ward had been murdered. Whether all this was information or disin- formation will probably never be known for sure, but that Cockburn saw Hollis is beyond dispute. Further, he must have been in some kind of regular contact with a safe way of getting in touch, as Cockburn could hardly have rung the MI5 main switchboard or gained access to Govern- ment Communications Network.
The significance of this new material is clear. We know that Hollis was called out of retirement in 1969 for interrogation by the joint MI5/MI6 Fluency Committee to establish once and for all whether he was a 'mole' or not. The only question Hollis faltered over was about Cockburn, whom he volunteered that he had known at Oxford. He was asked why, as Cockburn's case officer for many years, he had kept secret this friendship and not marked it on Cockburn's file as he was required to do. Hollis eventually explained that he realised that Cockburn had become very left-wing and he did not want to jeopardise his career prospects. This was accepted as a candid admission. If the committee had known that Hollis had actually been meet- ing Cockburn less than a decade before and exchanging confidential information with him, the entire interrogation would have been revealed as a farce.
The most charitable explanation is that Hollis was sticking to loyalties formed earlier in life, just as the Cambridge spies had done in their generation. And after all, these loyalties had been those of the country itself during much of the second world war when Soviet Russia was allied to Britain in the struggle against Nazi Ger- many. Whatever Hollis's motives, it is certain that he was running with the hare and hunting with the hounds — with the results that are now so well known, from the clearance of Fuchs to the Spycatcher fiasco itself.
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