Fear of scandal became the most important consideration affecting everyone with responsibility for the turmoil of the 1960s, now that there was a growing certainty that whatever the problem had been, it was at an end. I discussed with Victor whether there were any ways of reopening the case.
"Now is not the time," he would say. "We should bide our time, and I will look for a way of raising the matter with Ted. But not now. We'll just end up jeopardizing Hanley's job. The whole thing is too potent. We must let some time go by."
Fear of scandal reached fever pitch when, in 1975, Blunt was thought to be suffering from cancer, and likely to die. Victor approached me again, and asked me whether I thought it likely that Blunt would leave a last will and testament to be published on his death, blowing the lid off the whole affair. I had often asked Blunt about this, and he had always denied making any preparations, but there was a streak of vindictiveness in him which I never quite trusted.
Victor knew better than any outsider just what damage Blunt could do. Both he and Heath were obsessed with the damage the Profumo scandal had done to the last Conservative Government, and were terrified that Blunt could bring them down in the same way. It was not just the problem of the immunity; there was the horrendous possibility that he might name fellow conspirators, both living and dead, as well as the chance that he might choose to leave a more intimate record of the halcyon days of the 1930s. More than a handful of reputations stood to suffer if their sexual peccadilloes from that time were circulated on Fleet Street, not least the former Prime Minister, Anthony Eden.
Victor eventually pressed me to provide him with a full brief on the damage Blunt could do if he chose to tell all. When I was in D3 I had written a variety of papers for the Home Office on the Ring of Five, but they were mostly unsatisfactory. The MI5 Legal Department insisted on removing names like Proctor and Watson on the grounds that we had no proof.
"That's not the point," I argued. "We should be providing the Home Office with intelligence. That's our job. If we filter out things we believe to be true just because we can't prove them, we're failing in our duty."
Victor agreed with my approach totally, and stressed that my briefing had to be as full as possible. I drew together the full history of the Ring of Five, and painstakingly showed how all the connections were made. Forty names were on the list in all. A few weeks later I saw Robert Armstrong about Agent 19. He thanked me for the document.
"Splendid piece of work," he beamed, "real intelligence. Not like the civil servant drafts we normally get from the Security Service."
Around this time word got back that Arthur and Stephen de Mowbray were themselves lobbying for the case against Hollis to be reopened. Arthur had retired, and Stephen de Mowbray's career was in steep decline. He had made himself deeply unpopular inside MI6 during the late 1960s by his unswerving support for Golitsin and all his theories. His mentor was Christopher Phillpotts, under whom he had served in Washington. Phillpotts brought him back to serve in Counterintelligence, but after Phillpotts retired in 1970, de Mowbray was left exposed. Dick White was determined to get rid of him if at all possible, but Maurice Oldfield suggested that a spell in Malta was the best compromise.
When de Mowbray returned in 1972 to find that the Hollis case was shelved, he began to agitate for action. Both Oldfield and Hanley were terrified in case de Mowbray took it into his head to take his fears about Soviet penetration to an MP. Arthur, too, was developing contacts in Parliament. After retirement he went off to work there as a clerk as a way of making up his pension. There were worries in case he decided to brief one of his newfound friends on the traumas of the past twenty years.
Hollis was not de Mowbray's only concern. He also believed that the whole system for appointing heads of the Secret Services was nepotic and potentially disastrous. He had a point, in that once a spy insinuated himself to the summit of an organization, he was in a perfect position to appoint fellow traitors to follow him.
Oldfield raised the question of de Mowbray at one of our quiet dinners.
"Can't you rein him in?" he asked. He made it clear that Hanley would view it favorably as well. Oldfield, too, had personal reasons for wishing to keep the Hollis affair buried. He had been passed over for the top job in MI6 when Dick White returned but was desperately hoping that he would yet get his chance as C.
I told him that I doubted whether in the end I could have much influence over him or Arthur.
"Yes, but they don't know what you know; they don't know how delicate things are. Any hint of scandal now could deal us all a grievous blow."
Poor Maurice was so transparent, you could read ambition in him like a book. Before the evening was out he began to talk about the future.
"Of course," he said, "if Rennie left, and I got the chance, I wouldn't want to stay long..."
His voice trailed away. I knew he wanted me to pass the message along.
A few weeks later I lunched with Stephen and tried to persuade him that now was not the time to push.
"There are things going on," I said, "I know it looks as if it's stalled. But there are many ways of skinning a cat. We just need to give it time."
He was not convinced. He thought I was in Hanley's pocket, and made no secret of it.
In fact, I was still hopeful that the VENONA search authorized by Hanley might yet yield vital clues to the case. Perhaps some more traffic would be found hidden away in a dusty cupboard which would give us the matches to unlock the missing cryptonyms.
There had recently been a small breakthrough in the existing traffic which had given cause for hope. Geoffrey Sudbury was working on part of the HASP material which had never been broken out. Advanced computer analysis revealed that this particular traffic was not genuine VENONA. It did not appear to have been enciphered using a one time pad, and from the non-random distribution of the groups, Sudbury hazarded a guess that it had been enciphered using some kind of directory.
We began the search in the British Library, and eventually found a book of trade statistics from the 1930s which fitted. Overnight a huge chunk of HASP traffic was broken. The GRU traffic was similar to much that we had already broken. But there was one series of messages which was invaluable. The messages were sent from the GRU resident Simon Kremer to Moscow Center, and described his meetings with the GRU spy runner Sonia, alias Ruth Kuzchinski.
The Sonia connection had been dismissed throughout the 1960s as too tenuous to be relied upon. MI5 tended to believe the story that she came to Britain to escape Nazism and the war, and that she did not become active for Russian Intelligence until Klaus Fuchs volunteered his services in 1944. In particular GCHQ denied vehemently that Sonia could ever have been broadcasting her only radio messages from her home near Oxford during the period between 1941 and 1943
But Kremer's messages utterly destroyed the established beliefs. They showed that Sonia had indeed been sent to the Oxford area by Russian Intelligence, and that during 1941 she was already running a string of agents. The traffic even contained the details of the payments she was making to these agents, as well as the times and durations of her own radio broadcasts. I thought bitterly of the way this new information might have influenced Hollis' interrogation had we had the material in 1969.