Armstrong betrayed little himself, beyond telling me what I already knew, that the Permanent Secretaries were firmly behind Waddell.
"They just want to reward him, and they can't find him a top job in any of the other ministries!" I said bitterly.
Armstrong laughed.
"Oh no, Peter, we're not that conspiratorial!"
A few weeks later I saw Victor again. He had managed to have his talk with Heath in the sunshine at Chequers, and he told him of the strong resistance inside MI5 to the appointment of an outsider. Heath was sympathetic, but explained that he would have to have a very good reason to reject unanimous Civil Service advice. But eventually Victor managed to persuade him to interview both candidates personally.
It was a major breakthrough. We were all certain that Hanley would impress Heath with the force of his personality, whereas Waddell's diffidence would be sure to tell against him. When Hanley got the news his demeanor changed. He could see events were moving in his direction. Rather pompously he came into my office and told me that he was to see the Prime Minister the following day.
"And I don't need a briefing, thank you very much."
I thought the announcement would come quickly, but the days passed and we heard nothing. Throughout the Whitehall village, antennae were out to catch signs of a result. On every visit I made to the Home Office I checked on the latest state of play. But there was no news, apart from the insistent refrain: "Philip Allen will not have Hanley at any price."
At the weekend my wife and I traveled to Dolgellau in Wales, to buy cows at an auction for the farm we had recently purchased in Cornwall for our retirement. Ever since Hollis' interrogation, and my departure from D3, I had begun planning a return to agriculture, and a less painful future away from the whispering corridors and paper mountains of MI5. Whitehall was the last thing on my mind as the auctioneer rattled on in an impenetrable Welsh dialect. Steers and heifers were slapped in and out of the small crowded ring, their owners croaking and whistling to keep their animals alert.
Suddenly across the loudspeaker I heard a voice.
"Can Mr. Wright from London please come to the office for a telephone call..."
I struggled to make my way through the crowded terrace, past a hundred tightly pressed Welsh farmers each craning for a view of the ring. Eventually I reached the tiny office and picked up the telephone. It was Victor.
"Do you know what the buggers have done now?" he roared.
"What are you talking about, Victor?"
"They've switched horses. They want to appoint some chap called Graham Harrison. Does the name mean anything to you?"
"They will never accept him," I yelled back. "The man was a friend of Burgess and Maclean."
I suddenly remembered where I was. But I had no need to worry. The auctioneer's clerk continued to work on his figures, oblivious to my conversation. I told Victor I would call on him as soon as I got back to London.
Francis Graham Harrison was also a deputy secretary at the Home Office. Although there was no suggestion that he was a spy, he was a close friend of Guy Burgess, and had moved in the Oxford set which included Jennifer Hart and Arthur Wynn. To appoint a man with those connections would have been, to borrow F.J.'s phrase, grotesque, and I told Victor that the Service would never wear it.
Early the following week Victor rang again.
"An announcement will be made tomorrow," he said. "I think you will be pleased..."
"How did you swing it?"
"I took Dick by the ear and took him in to see Ted. We both told him there would be a mutiny unless he appointed Hanley. He soon got the point!"
The next day F.J. summoned in a couple of the senior officers to tell us that Hanley had finally been appointed.
"It's been a difficult campaign," he told me gravely, "but I have finally won through."
"I am very pleased to hear that, sir," I replied with a straight face.
Shortly before F.J. retired he and I had a short meeting to discuss the looming situation in Northern Ireland. It was clearly going to be the major problem facing his successor. He feared that it would threaten all that he had done since 1965 to build up MI5's counterespionage capability. He had lobbied the Treasury to provide more resources, but they had refused. They wanted F.J. to shift resources away from counter-espionage and into counterterrorism. As far as they were concerned, the expulsion of the 105 diplomats had eradicated the KGB threat for a generation. But F.J. believed that complacency was precisely the way to fritter away the advantage he had achieved.
F.J. looked tired, as if he longed to put the burdens aside. He was a man of few words but I could tell he wanted to talk. He was glad to be going, he said. The pleasure of the work had all but disappeared. He was worried, too, about money. Although he cultivated the air of a gentleman, he was not a wealthy man. He had an attractive house in Hampstead, but he had a young daughter still to educate, and he talked bitterly of having to sell himself in the marketplace as a security consultant, when he should be retiring to his beloved bird-watching. (In fact, he became a consultant to Imperial Chemical Industries [ICI]. )
"Well, how do you think I've done?" he asked me as he cleaned his pipe, sucking and scraping at it almost nervously.
"What, you want to know, honestly?" I asked.
He nodded.
"You got on top of the Russian problem, but I don't think you ever made contact with the ordinary officer."
He looked surprisingly wounded. "You should have told me," he said.
"I'm sorry. I didn't feel it was my place."
I always liked F.J., and I think most of the senior officers did too. He was never a wag, but he saw the absurdity of life and his profession. I will always treasure traveling to Australia with him for the first CAZAB conference in 1967. As we approached the passport barrier a party of ASIO officials was waiting to meet us on the other side. F.J. handed in his passport.
"What's this?" drawled the passport officer, pointing to the entry in F.J.'s passport under "Occupation."
F.J. had entered "Gentleman."
"That is my occupation," uttered F.J. in his most patrician manner, "I have no other. I am a gentleman. Don't you have them here?"
The Australian drew himself up to his full height, but luckily I had managed to attract the attention of the ASIO party, who hurriedly explained the situation and whisked us both through to the other side. F.J. beamed for the rest of the day, as if he had won a great team match single-handed.
F.J. ran the office as a democracy of the elect. If you were a trusted senior officer, his door was always open, his manner always familiar. But he remained a remote figure to the younger generation of officers, and he was consequently blind to many of the resentments which were building up below.
Few in Whitehall mourned his passing. At the height of the row over his succession, he offered to stay on another year to give Hanley extra time to play himself in as deputy. But the Home Office would have none of it. He told the truth and politicians and civil servants hated him for it. He also kept the secrets, and that made him an object of fear and suspicion.