"It's very difficult," I explained, "to be told that the man you've worked with for years, who gave you your job, or whom you gave his job, is a spy. That was what Dick White and F.J. found so difficult to come to terms with... and that's why we adopted code names from the beginning, to depersonalize everything."
"Quite so..." said Trend.
"You do understand that all the FLUENCY decisions were unanimous. This was not just me on my own. There were six of us, and we all thought exactly the same."
"Ah yes," murmured Trend, pausing over an apparently innocuous exchange of documents in the file.
Trend seemed especially interested in the middling-grade agent. He asked me to explain how we had broken the allegation down, and the system we had used to allot marks to each of the thirty-four candidates.
I spent several hours explaining the VENONA. He was fascinated by that infernal incomplete jigsaw which promised so much and revealed so little.
I described how we arrived at our identifications. Stanley, Hicks, and Johnson were almost certainly Philby, Burgess, and Blunt, though there was still room for doubt. Stanley was Philby because of the reference to Mexican affairs being the responsibility of his Department. Hicks was Burgess because in one message Moscow Center instructs Krotov to limit Hicks' reports to hard facts, and omit the theories.
"That's Guy to a tee," I said with a laugh, surprised by the intimacy with which I referred to a man I had met only on paper.
"And Johnson?" asked Trend.
"That is where the doubt is... There is a reference here" - I handed him a sheet of the VENONA with paper message ribbons embossed on it - "and you can see that Johnson is traveling abroad. That tallies with Blunt's movements. He went to Italy at the end of the week this message was received. But it is slightly odd that Krotov appears not to know of Johnson's plans. I asked Blunt about this, and he was positive that he told Krotov about his impending trip at least six weeks before."
"Could it have been anyone else?"
"The only officer who made a sudden trip abroad at the end of this week was Drat... I'm sorry, I mean Hollis, when he went to Canada to see Gouzenko."
"And...?"
"I doubt it," I said quietly, "I somehow doubt it. I think Johnson was Blunt, and he was leading us astray on the six weeks business. Johnson is just too closely tied to Hicks and Stanley to be anyone else but Blunt. Anyway, there are three other cryptonyms still unidentified. Any of those could be Hollis."
I was impressed by Trend. He had a quick mind, and a very thorough one too. There was no skating across points. I came away from our first meeting feeling I had been grilled in a rather quiet, patient way. But what worried me was that he had a civil servant's training, not an intelligence officer's background. Would he be able to make the kinds of judgments required to make sense of a mass of contradictory intelligence material? He had no frame of reference, no way of judging the strength of the case against Hollis as against the strength of the case against other spies, like Philby, or Blunt, or Blake. Only years of experience in the secret world could give a man that kind of intuition.
Trend had a high reputation inside MI5. Most people preferred him to Norman Brooke, the previous Cabinet Secretary, who was renowned for getting bees in his bonnet. Norman Brooke and I shared the same club, and after he retired I occasionally used to talk to him. He was careful never to criticize his successor, but always gave the impression things were being handled much more badly now than in his day. Trend was a far more relaxed figure, and he fought the Treasury doughtily on behalf of the Secret Services throughout the 1960s.
Trend continued to work away in Leconfield House for another year. Occasionally we would meet in the corridor. He never said much, and it was late 1975 before I was called in to see him again. By that time we had finally left Leconfield House and moved to the dismal Gower Street offices.
He wanted to talk about the allegations. He thought they were all very old, when you stripped them down to the bone.
"Of course, but what is impressive is the coincidences of the dates of the allegations. They all come from exactly the same time. It's quite uncanny."
Golitsin, Trend said, did not seem to lead anywhere - "not helpful" was the expression he used. I agreed that for the purposes of the case for high-level penetration Golitsin had given us nothing we could investigate. He was, at best, I conceded, an indicator that penetration had occurred.
Trend also discarded the middling-grade agent story.
"Very difficult case that," he agreed, "impossible not to look at, but I think right to discard today."
"Now Volkov," he began again, after turning to a relevant file and adjusting his spectacles.
Wasn't I being finicky in altering the thrust of the allegation after having the document retranslated? he asked.
"I don't see why," I replied. "There are really only two ways to proceed in cases like these. One way is to make guesses about what an allegation means, and where it leads, and how seriously to take it. The other way is to adopt a scholastic approach, and analyze everything very carefully and precisely and build scientifically on that bedrock."
"And then there's Elli," said Trend. "I see you checked the story with Akhmedov. But you've got no follow-up, have you? There's no Elli in the traffic."
"But I didn't expect that there would be," I replied, "Elli is an illegal, and if that's the case, his communications would be illegal, not through the Embassy. If we found Sonia's traffic I am sure we would find Elli. But we can't."
"And you still think Elli was Hollis?"
"Most certainly."
"And nothing since has caused you to doubt that?"
"No, if anything my conviction has become stronger."
Trend sighed patiently.
"But there's no ideological background..." he began.
"There's China."
"Ah, yes," he murmured, "China..." His voice trailed away.
Trend was professional to the end. I never could detect just what his feelings were. He certainly gave me the impression that he thought the case for penetration was strong, but apart from a fleeting reference to the fact that he doubted we had the right candidate in Hollis, he gave nothing away.
Neither did I ever learn from Hanley what Trend's conclusions were. The subject was never discussed, and I assume that Trend's report was completed after I left the Service in January 1976. It was only in 1981 that Mrs. Thatcher filled in that final gap. Lord Trend, she told the House of Commons, had concluded that Hollis was not an agent of the Russian Intelligence Service. He had faith in a man's innocence, as I had faith in his treachery; as another man might have faith in God, or Mammon. One man's view, as I now realize, is in the end worthless. Only facts will ever clear up the eternal mystery.
As I approached my final months in the office I felt a wave of tiredness. I did not know whether to stay in England and fight, or cut my losses and run. My health was bad, my pension derisory. But I had my memories.
One afternoon toward Christmas I drove up to Cambridge with Victor to his country house for the last time. Conversation was difficult. So much needed to be said. So much was inside me, bottled up and waiting to spill out.