However, Roger Hollis’ actions lay him open to suspicion: he prevented a key interrogation during the investigation into John Vassall; his reports during the Profumo affair were not adequately compiled. In 1964, Anthony Blunt had finally admitted his role in the Philby/Burgess/Maclean spy ring in return for immunity from prosecution, and Wright was convinced there was a Fifth Man who had protected the others. (The Fifth Man’s identity as John Cairncross wasn’t revealed until 1990.) Wright made himself extremely unpopular with his allegations, admitting ‘There was talk of the Gestapo.’
Once he had retired from MI5, Wright wrote his autobiography, Spycatcher, in which he made his allegations about Hollis public. Wright claimed that when Hollis was sent to interrogate Igor Gouzenko in 1945, he had stayed in disguise in case Gouzenko recognized him as a Soviet agent, and Hollis had then tried to persuade Gouzenko not to make further allegations. Based on this shaky evidence, he declared Hollis a traitor.
Now, with access to the KGB records, courtesy of defector Oleg Gordievsky, we know that George Blake was the last key agent that Moscow Centre had within either MI5 or MI6, but at the time what may well have been incompetency was seen as something much worse. The Trend Committee, headed by Lord Trend, investigated Hollis and the Soviet penetration of MI5 in the seventies, and reported that the allegations against Hollis were inconclusive. An internal MI5 report from 1988 noted that the belief in a traitor had persisted for so long because of ‘a lack of intellectual rigour in some of the leading investigators… dishonesty on the part of Wright, who did not scruple to invent evidence where none existed… [and] the baleful influence of Golitsyn who realised in 1963 that he had told all he knew and set about developing his theory of massive and coordinated Soviet deception (‘‘disinformation’’) supported by high-level penetration of all western intelligence and security services.’ Couple that with an overwhelming belief that Moscow Centre was a lot more efficient than it really was, and the stage was set for the witch-hunts. As Allen Dulles wrote in 1963: ‘Soviet intelligence is over-confident, over-complicated, and over-estimated.’
7
POWER CORRUPTS
The 2003 invasion of Iraq wasn’t the first time that the United States has gone to war based on inaccurate information supplied to the administration by the intelligence agencies. Sometimes intelligence agencies will choose not to send the White House information that they know will anger the president. The Gulf of Tonkin incident did not play out in the way in which it was initially presented to President Johnson, upon which he based the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 7 August 1964.
Between 1960 and July 1962, the CIA had tried sending teams of trained South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam; these had been unsuccessful. Thereafter, responsibility for actions against the North Vietnamese was transferred to the Defence Department, which began OPLAN34-63, a series of offensives against the North Vietnamese coastline in autumn 1963, and then refined them as OPLAN34A that December (although it seems no one thought to inform the NSA’s Asian desk of the operation.)
The USS Maddox was equipped for SIGINT work and sent into the Gulf of Tonkin on 28 July 1964, reassured by the commander of the SIGINT group in Taiwan that their ship would be in no danger. However, an OPLAN34A raid which took place on 31 July seriously annoyed the North Vietnamese — and they responded by sending three torpedo boats after the Maddox. The Maddox was warned of the impending engagement by NSA intercepts of North Vietnamese orders; when the boats approached, the US ship fired warning shots before the Vietnamese fired. At the end of combat, one of the torpedo boats had been sunk, and the other two damaged.
President Johnson was briefed on the attack the next day, and decided to keep his cooclass="underline" he ordered the Maddox to resume its mission, albeit guarded by a destroyer, the Turner Joy, and air support. Further OPLAN34A attacks took place the following day, and SIGINT suggested that the North Vietnamese would respond again.
On 4 August, everything seemed to indicate that the Maddox was about to be attacked again. North Vietnamese patrol boats had shadowed them for part of the time, and in the evening, they believed they were being followed by two surface and three air contacts. The Turner Joy and the Maddox opened fire on a radar contact at 9.30 that night, and it seemed as if they engaged in a pitched battle with around six patrol boats.
But while that news electrified Washington, and preparations for airstrikes were made, in the Gulf the captains on the Turner Joy and the Maddox were reviewing the action, and realized that, as Captain Herrick said, ‘Certain that original ambush [on 2 August] was bonafide. Details of action following present a confusing picture.’ In Washington, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that an attack had taken place — based on two NSA intercepts, one stating that a North Vietnamese boat had shot at American aircraft; the other that two planes had been shot down, and two Vietnamese ships had been lost. As the NSA’s own history explained, ‘The reliance on SIGINT even went to the extent of overruling the commander on the scene. It was obvious to the president and his advisers that there really had been an attack — they had the North Vietnamese messages to prove it.’ There was one serious problem though. The messages were timed during the ‘battle’ itself — yet referred to the reaction of the North Vietnamese to its conclusion. It was enough to start the conflict. (With the benefit of hindsight, McNamara accepted that the evidence wasn’t strong enough, and that the attack didn’t happen; based on a number of comments he made, President Johnson had doubts from the start.)
However, much as this may have been a misuse of the spies’ work, it is clear that Johnson’s administration was looking for a trigger to begin the war, and as the NSA themselves pointed out, ‘Had the 4 August incident not occurred, something else would have.’
The latter half of the sixties was, to a large degree, a time when spies engaged in the Cold War got on with their business. There weren’t many events that caused major changes to the way espionage was carried out — to the extent that many histories of the period touch on the Vietnam War, and the continuing hunts within the security services for KGB moles as revealed by Golitsyn, but mention little else.
This is slightly ironic, given that this is the era when spies were at the forefront of popular culture: the James Bond movies, based increasingly loosely on the novels by Ian Fleming, were released virtually annually in the sixties. They gave rise to many imitators, including the Matt Helm film thrillers featuring Dean Martin as the sort of self-promoting agent that no self-respecting agency would want near them (but whose weaknesses they would be more than happy to take advantage of to blackmail him), and the TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which predated glasnost with its partnership of American agent Napoleon Solo (a pre-Hustle Robert Vaughn) and Russian Illya Kuryakin (NCIS’ David McCallum). (The CIA even includes memorabilia from the series in its museum at Langley, Virginia, USA.) The backlash to these over-the-top adventures gave rise to the more realistic novels of John le Carré, such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Adam Hall (the Quiller series). Le Carré had served in the British security services in the post-Second World War period, although he acknowledged that he was one of those whose covers would have been blown by Kim Philby before the defection of Burgess and Maclean removed him from office.