Britain was losing the war at the timer, MI5 was a shambles but nothing mattered so much as the dignity of its then Director General. Jane Archer had denounced the then acting Director General of MI5, Brigadier Oswald ‘Jasper’ Harker as being ‘incompetent’. She was right and Harker was soon replaced but by then — notwithstanding that she was MI5’s premier Russian expert — she had been permanently lost to the service and her deputy; Roger Hollis had automatically stepped into her shoes. MI5 spent the rest of Hitler’s War fighting the intelligence organs of the German state, gaining immense experience and learning everything there was to know about that enemy, while Hollis and his small Russian Section, under-resourced and very nearly forgotten quietly went about their business. At the end of the war, the old German ‘hands’ were redundant whereas Roger Hollis was not so much MI5’s leading ‘expert’ on the Soviet Union; as the United Kingdom’s only real expert on its one remaining enemy. The rest was history, by 1953 he had been promoted to Deputy Director General. His subsequent elevation to the top chair was axiomatic when Dick White left to take over as Head of the Secret Intelligence Service in 1956.
In the way of these things it was not actually until Hollis reached the crowning pinnacle of his career in MI5, that people began to look back at his apparently brilliant, meteoric ascent and started asking themselves what precisely had been so stellar about his inexorable two-decade rise?
Although he had been knighted in 1960, Sir Roger Hollis had been the subject of a whispering campaign long before the October War. All the way back to his China days he had had an uncanny knack of collecting left-wing friends, and the very fact that he had become MI5’s ‘Soviet expert’ during and after the 1945 war dogged his steps and drip fed the rumour mill. It did not help that over the years he had developed a reputation for dourness and had become progressively less tolerant and forgiving of fools; of whom there were many in MI5 in the late forties and throughout the 1950s. Worst of all, he had always been in the long shadow of Sir Richard Goldsmith ‘Dick’ White, MI5’s wartime poster boy and the first man to be appointed Director General of both MI5, and then MI6. Moreover, while Dick White’s charm and ‘legend’ seduced the majority of his establishment peers, Hollis had singularly failed to develop the network of friends and allies in Government and the Civil Service that any self-respecting senior mandarin must if he is to do his job properly. Inevitably, once Dick White had moved on Hollis’s detractors quickly pointed out that a pygmy was now walking in the footsteps of a giant.
Sir Roger Hollis had been living with the whispering campaign and the lies people were telling about him for several years. He did not like it very much but it was not his job to be liked. What was intolerable was to be called to account by the jumped up little pipsqueak that bloody Thatcher woman had appointed Home Secretary!
Especially a little pipsqueak whose file he had read with immense interest shortly after his appointment in January. Politicians were quite happy to bandy about the less than salacious or judicious University connections of members of the security community; they were not so keen to have their own ‘student peccadilloes’ and ‘attachments’ exposed to public scrutiny!
Roy Jenkins viewed the MI5 man over the rims of his glasses. Before the war he had not been without his vices; he freely admitted as much to friends. He had had affairs but he had tried to be discreet. Likewise, he had a fondness for fine red wine, a thing curtailed, like his affairs by the October War. In his younger days one particular male friendship had gone beyond honest good fellowship at Balliol but that ‘involvement’ had not drawn untoward attention at the time — it had been during the war, anyway — and he could rely on the confidence of the other party. All in all he did not think that there was anything skeletal in his cupboard that the Director General of MI5 was likely to wave in his face. The trouble with people like Hollis was one simply could not afford to underestimate them.
He had only met Sir Roger Hollis two or three times since assuming his current post. The man had been pleasant enough, a little haughty and politely dismissive, clearly not wanting to trouble him with ‘technical’ security matters. Roy Jenkins had not paid great attention, or lent particular credence to any of the malicious rumours flying around the Security Service in the wake of the pre-war Philby scandal. He was a politician; he was used to constant back stabbing by people one had a right to regard as friends. MI5 had assured him that in the matter of the ‘Cambridge Spies’ appropriate inquiries had been made and all the bad eggs had been ‘purged’. MI5 housekeeping was a thing best left to the professionals, and besides, he had been confronted with bigger, more pressing issues in the last three months than the idle gossip of mischievous and disgruntled former intelligence officers.
The problem was that after his ‘little chat’ with the Foreign Secretary earlier that afternoon the ground had shifted under his feet and he had determined to radically amend his personal rules of engagement with MI5 and its uncommunicative Director General.
‘You’ll gather from my Who’s Who entry in the last edition published before the October War,’ Tom Harding-Grayson had prefaced. He had done practically all the talking during their little chat. ‘Between 1939 and 1946 I was posted to the War Office. That’s the cover all nomenclature for anybody who was engaged in intelligence work. In my case, it conceals my assignment to the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park. I was in it from the start. Well, actually from before the war because as soon as we realised the war was coming we started recruiting. We started by recruiting four men. My people called them The Wicked Uncles; two of them were certifiable geniuses, and the other two were not far behind.’
‘Bill Welchman and Alan Turing are two of the names in the GCHQ letter?’
‘They’d be the certifiable geniuses; the other wicked uncles were Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry.’
‘Who exactly were your people, Tom?’ The Home Secretary had asked, thinking it a perspicacious question until Tom Harding-Grayson had smiled a particularly impish smile.
‘Now that really would be a state secret, old man.’
Because he was a pragmatic soul at heart the Home Secretary had abandoned that blind alley and inquired: ‘What can you tell me about The Wicked Uncles?’
Tom Harding-Grayson had smiled again but this time he had ruefully shaken his head. The Home Secretary had mistakenly interpreted this as a bad sign and therefore had been immensely relieved when the older man had shrugged, and rhetorically mused aloud ‘where to begin?’
He had begun ‘at the beginning’.
Roy Jenkins eyes must have been the size of dish plates by the time he finished his ten minute explanation of how it was that The Wicked Uncles had, quite literally, shortened the Second World War by years and not to put too fine a point on it, ensured that they were conversing in English not German that evening.