William J. West
Berkeley Books, USA, 1990
From the UK reviews:
‘Unassailably accurate … beautifully written … the definitive book on the Hollis story’ – The Times
‘Lively, well-written a completely engrossing book. West has unearthed completely new material’ – Financial Times
‘West is a thorough and meticulous researcher. His book is one of the most interesting to appear for many years’ – The Observer
Many of the early chapters, most of pages 55 – 154, are totally irrelevant and hardly mention Hollis at all. In these chapters, most of West’s so-called evidence is of the form, ‘Hollis must have known this or that’, and leads to his unproven conclusions that Hollis did or did not do something else.
‘Hollis must have been better placed than almost anyone else..’ (p. 112)
‘He would have been the obvious choice removing communists from MI5 (p. 124)
‘There is another pointer to Hollis’s collusion with the Communist Party’ (p. 124)
‘Hollis also took the view, it seems‘ (p. 125)
‘Hollis would have known that there was already a file on Burgess…’ (p. 129)
‘Must have been clear to Hollis’ (p. 140)
‘Hollis would clearly have agreed (p. 144)
The next chapter, ‘The Great Mole Hunt – From Burgess and Maclean to Spycatcher‘, turgidly regurgitates what has been written by other people about this area, and introduces nothing new of any substance. After 172 pages of non-starters we meet the chapter ‘The Director General of MI5 – Spyrnaster or Spy?’. This does not really address nor answer the question, but partially covers the Chapman Pincher Hollis-was-guilty and the Anthony Glees Hollis-was-innocent axis, without reaching any conclusion.
In the following chapter he quotes from Spycatcher:
‘Dreadful business out there [China in the 1930s]. Any damn fool could see what the Japanese were doing in Manchuria. It was perfectly obvious we’d lose China if we didn’t act, he [Hollis] used to say.’
From this West draws this astonishing conclusion:
‘His view that the arrival of Mao was the equivalent of Russia’s winning China chimed exactly with Burgess’s line, that Mao was the leader of a Russian-style Communism on a strict Leninist analysis, only carrying it one stage further.’ (p. 214)
In the section on the Profumo Affair, West states:
‘[Stephen] Ward was being used by MI5 but, more importantly, the fact that he was introduced to Ivanov in the way that he was establishes that if Hollis arranged it then he did not tell his junior officers in MI5.’ (p. 222) (emphasis added)
‘If Hollis was keeping his junior officers in the dark…’ (p. 222) (emphasis added)
‘Hollis had set up the entire operation, without the knowledge of his staff’ (p. 255)
A one-man Hollis operation? Hollis the Superman? The mind boggles. According to West,
‘The only conclusion possible from all of this is that Hollis was personally responsible for the Profumo debacle from start to finish. If Hollis was acting as a GRU agent, he couldn’t have acted with greater effectiveness.’ (p. 226)
The facts are somewhat different. As early as mid-1961 Ward was being run by the Security Service officer, Keith Wagstaffe, then working for D1 (a), Operations, Counter-intelligence. The Service decided to try and ‘honeytrap’ Ivanov, for which Ward was most willing and eager to provide a suitable female – Christine Keeler. After things started to become politically ‘hot’ over the Ward-Ivanov-Profurno axis, Hollis issued explicit instructions on 1 February 1963 that the Security Service should not be further involved:
‘Until further notice no approach should be made to anyone in the Ward galère, or to any other outside contacts in respect of it. If we are approached, we listen only.’
Elsewhere, without offering any evidence, West claims that the brilliant WWII black propaganda expert, Sefton Delmer, was a Soviet agent. In the mid-1950s Delmer was expelled from Egypt for being an SIS agent. President Abdel-Nasser, who played footsie with both the Americans and the Soviets, would have hardly have booted out a Soviet agent and risked jeopardizing Egyptian-Soviet relations.
He also asserts that ‘the espionage reporters of all the great papers all now work hand in glove with the Security Service’.(p. 155) Names please, Mr West?
As to West’s contention that Hollis was a traitor, and the publisher’s blurb that Hollis ‘for nine years was a communist spy’, there is only one conclusion: not proven.
Morris Riley