Roger Hollis

Sir Roger Henry Hollis, KBE, CB (1905 - 1973) was a British journalist and secret-service agent who was Director General of MI5 from 1956 to 1965.

Life

Roger Henry Hollis was born at Wells, Somerset, on 2 December 1905, the third of the four sons of the Revd George Arthur Hollis (1868–1944), vice-principal of Wells Theological College and later bishop-suffragan of Taunton, and his wife, Mary Margaret, the daughter of Charles Marcus Church, canon of Wells, a great-niece of R. W. Church, dean of St Paul's.

Hollis was educated at Leeds grammar school, Clifton College, and Worcester College, Oxford. At school he was a promising scholar who went to Oxford with a classical exhibition. But at Oxford he read English and in the view of his contemporaries seemed to prefer a happy social life to an academic one. In the memoirs of Evelyn Waugh he appears as ‘a good bottle man’ and in Sir Harold Acton's as an agreeable friend. Because of this easy-going approach, and for no more dramatic reason, he went down four terms before he was due to take his finals. ["Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer", by Peter Wright, Toronto 1987, Stoddart Publishers.]

After a pre-war career in Barclays Bank, then as reporter for the "Shanghai Morning Post", and with British American Tobacco in China, where he remained for eight years. Hollis developed tuberculosis and returned to England in 1936 for a brief spell with the Ardath Tobacco Company, an associate of BAT. On 10 July 1937 he married in Wells Cathedral to Evelyn Esmé, daughter of George Champeny Swayne, of Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, solicitor in Glastonbury. Their one child, Adrian Swayne Hollis, became a fellow and tutor in classics at Keble College, Oxford, and a chess player of international reputation.

MI5 Career

He joined MI5 shortly before World War II and became an acknowledged expert on communism within the service, even during World War II and the concentration of resources onto the Nazi enemy. When the war ended and the Cold War began, Hollis was in a fortuitous position to become one of the key individuals in the service. In 1953 he was appointed deputy director-general and replaced Sir Dick White in 1956 as head of MI5.

Hollis held the DG role over the next nine years, during which time a string of high-profile spy cases went through the Old Bailey, including Anthony Wraight, John Vassall, George Blake, Harry Houghton, Ethel Gee, Gordon Lonsdale, and the Krogers (the latter all part of the Portland Spy Ring).

Mole suspicions

After Kim Philby's flight to Moscow in 1963 rumours began to circulate that Hollis had alerted him to his impending arrest. He was also criticised for not alerting John Profumo to the fact that he might have been involved with a Soviet spy ring through his friendship with Stephen Ward, and his affair with Christine Keeler.

During the 1950s and 1960s, a large number of MI5 operations failed in circumstances that suggested the Russians had been pre-warned. Although many such failures were subsequently blamed on the actions of self-confessed agents Burgess, Philby and Blunt, so many occurred after all three had lost their access to secret information that some in MI5 concluded that the Russians must have an agent in a very senior position within the organisation. Peter Wright, Arthur S. Martin and others became convinced that either Hollis or his deputy, Graham Mitchell, could be the only ones responsible, eventually confiding their suspicions to their former DG, Dick White, by now DG of MI6.

According to Nigel West ("Mole Hunt", chapter 2, "Operation PETERS") White instructed Martin to inform Hollis that Mitchell was a suspect and Hollis told Martin (after due consideration) to keep Mitchell under surveillance. Nigel West implies that this was a deliberate ploy to keep tabs on both Mitchell and Hollis.

Martin eventually became so disgruntled and outspoken about Hollis's attitude toward the investigation (Hollis had, for example, reduced the size of the department and had sent one of Martin's best men on an overseas assignment) that Hollis suspended Martin for a fortnight and the case was turned over to Peter Wright. Much of the investigation was centred around the interviews with Anthony Blunt at that time and Peter Wright had amassed a sizable amount of taped evidence from Blunt when Martin returned from suspension.

Eventually the PETERS operation wound down. By then, suspicion had lifted from Mitchell and focused solely on Hollis himself. However, the then Director-General, Martin Furnival Jones refused to sanction an investigation into Hollis. ("Mole Hunt", Chapter 3, page 45, "Operation Fluency") noted that the investigative team known as FLUENCY (chapter 3 of "Mole Hunt") had been disbanded before any conclusions had been reached.

Martin and Wright and the team were unable to convince anyone else in MI5 or MI6 that they were right about Hollis. Wright retired, by his own account (in Spycatcher) enraged at being denied a pension for his 30 years of service, on highly legalistic and technical grounds. He emigrated to Australia, and there wrote an account of his work at MI5. Despite attempts by Margaret Thatcher and her government to suppress the publication and distribution of the book, "Spycatcher", it was finally published in 1987, and eventually sold over two million copies around the world. In the book Wright claimed that Hollis had been a Soviet agent. (Among the evidence for this claim is the Igor Gouzenko defection. Hollis was sent to Canada to interview Gouzenko. Gouzenko had provided Hollis with clear information about Alan Nunn May's meetings with his handlers; all these meetings were immediately cancelled. Gouzenko also noted that the man who met him seemed to be in disguise, not interested in his revelations and discouraged him from further disclosures. In face of this circumstantial evidence, Wright became convinced that Hollis was a traitor. Wright alleges in "Spycatcher" that Gouzenko himself deduced later that his interviewer might have been a Soviet double agent and was probably afraid that he might recognize him from case photos that Gouzenko might have seen in KGB files — the reason for the disguise.) Peter Wright had given a televised interview during the dispute with Thatcher's government. Following Peter Wright's TV interview in 1984, Arthur Martin wrote a letter to the "Times", and it was published July 19, 1984. Martin stated that while Wright exaggerated the certainty with which they regarded Hollis's guilt, Peter Wright was justified in saying that Hollis was the most likely candidate for the reasons Wright had given.

Under his successor Sir Martin Furnival Jones, the higher management of MI5 expressed indignation and loss of morale about the Hollis affair. Hollis was asked to come in and clear up the allegations. Having been the director, Hollis knew all about the procedures of the interrogation and investigation. He remained calm and composed throughout, denying all allegations. He was a very secretive man and MI5 had very little information about his past. Later, in the 1970s, the Trend Committee under Lord Trend was entrusted the matter of investigating Hollis. After a long enquiry it reported the allegations inconclusive, neither denying nor confirming them.

In her 2001 autobiography, Christine Keeler (Profumo's mistress), alleged, without supporting evidence, that Hollis and Ward were part of a spy ring with Sir Anthony Blunt. He has also been accused by Arthur S. Martin (head of MI5's Soviet counter-intelligence section at the time), and Chapman Pincher (investigative journalist who produced several exposés of failures in British counter-intelligence) of being a Soviet agent, though entirely separate from the famous Cambridge Five spy ring. Again, no evidence has been advanced to support these assertions.

A further case for Hollis being a Soviet agent was made in 1989 by W. J. West in "The Truth about Hollis". However, the testimony of ex-Soviet KGB agents (Oleg Gordievsky and Yuri Modin) has cast doubt on this, as they deny he was the so-called ‘fifth man’. The balance of opinion appears to suggest that Sir Roger was indeed innocent of the accusations levelled against him.

Later life

On his retirement Hollis moved first to a house in Wells, which he occupied only until 1967. In 1968 his first marriage was dissolved and he married Edith Valentine Hammond, his former secretary, the daughter of Ernest Gower Hammond, of Stratford upon Avon. They moved to a new home in the Somerset village of Catcott, where Hollis indulged his formidable skills as a golfer and undertook some modest jobs in local government.

His son, Adrian Hollis (born August 2, 1940 in Bristol), is a Grandmaster of correspondence chess, and was British Correspondence Chess Champion in 1966, 1967, and 1971. Philosopher James Martin Hollis (1938-1998) was his nephew. His elder brother, (Maurice) Christopher Hollis (1902–1977), was a one-time Conservative MP for Devizes.

References

External links

* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/13/newsid_2532000/2532583.stm "BBC '1988: Government loses "Spycatcher" battle'"]

Sources

Wright, Peter (1987) "Spycatcher", Viking Penguin Inc. New York and London

West, Nigel (1987) "Mole Hunt", Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, London

[Note: Nigel West is the pen-name of Rupert William Simon Allason ]