The Brotherhood (37 page)

It will be noted that in all these cases there is no need for Freemasonry as an institution, or indeed for any other member of the movement to be 'conscious' to KGB's use of Masonry. KGB will simply be riding the 'lift' that Masonry supplies ready installed to enable its members to arrive at higher floors more quickly and with less effort than those, perhaps better qualified, who are hurrying up the stairs. During the 'lift ride', others in the 'lift' may be examined and contacted in a relaxed atmosphere. It is clearly unlikely that once KGB found
...
the masonic 'lift' they would not use it again several times. But once again there is no need for one conscious KGB agent within Masonry to know or even know
of
any other. Unless there is some overriding 'need to know', the KGB will obviously make every effort to prevent this happening.

Through an intermediary, I asked former KGB spy Ilya Grigevich Dzhirkvelov, who defected to the West in 1980, about Freemasonry. The Soviet authorities are well aware of the size and influence of Masonry in the West. Dzhirkvelov was based in Geneva for most of his thirty-year career as a KGB agent, so was not in direct touch with espionage activities in Britain. Switzerland's Grand Lodge 'Alpina' is based at Lausanne. The entire country has only fifty-two Lodges - compared with London's 1,677. There are about 3,450 Swiss Masons. Dzhirkvelov spoke of the 'vast' scale of the KGB's espionage activities in the UK, and said that if Freemasonry was such an important part of the Establishment as I said,
there was no doubt at all that the KGB was exploiting it, even to the extent of instructing its British recruits to become Masons.

Among the currently serving and former officers of both services I met was one much respected officer of MI6, recently retired, who was more cautious. We met next to the fish pond on the first floor of Coutts & Co in the Strand early in 1982. He had agreed to meet me only on the understanding that we did not discuss matters covered by the Official Secrets Act. He was not a Freemason. He said that he had never been aware that Freemasonry could be an advantage in government service, nor felt the need to become a Mason to advance his career. He added, 'But perhaps that is because I have never thought about it.'

He told me that he had never come across a case of the KGB using Freemasonry in England, and added, 'But of course that does not mean it has not happened.' The fact that he had never even considered such an obvious possibility did not surprise me. It seems that nobody prior to Chinaman had. Even Sir George Young, former Vice Chief of MI6, told me that the extent of his knowledge about Freemasonry was that 'the Royal Family are all in it'.

My contact pointed out that Masonry would not be used by a KGB agent as a cover, in the sense that Guy Burgess joined the Anglo-German Fellowship before the war to conceal his Communist sympathies, because by its very nature membership of Freemasonry is not something one can boast about without giving rise to suspicion. He paused and set his mind to work on the problem. At length he sa
id: 'The records of Freemasonry
in Tsarist Russia would have fallen into the hands of the CHEKA, the KGB's predecessor, in 1917. A close study of Freemasonry would certainly have been made by Soviet intelligence officers then.*

'If the KGB had a target in England - somebody they wanted to "turn" or from whom they wanted to obtain information by one of a number of means - and this person was a Freemason, I have no doubt that it would instruct an agent to join the same Lodge. That would be an obvious move. If being a Freemason makes a man more likely to bare his soul to another Freemason than to an outsider [there is ample evidence that this is the case], any intelligence service worth its salt would exploit that.

*
This was the case, as already explained.

Once
again, I have no evidence that this has happened. The fraternity most often exploited of course is the homosexual one - the homintern we used to call it.'

Towards the end of our meeting, my contact said, 'Is there any evidence that any of the known people were Freemasons?'

By 'people' he meant traitors, British subjects who had been recruited by the KGB either before they were in positions where they had access to delicate material, while they were rising in their careers towards such positions, or after they had arrived.

One case particularly bears examination.

Few people in MI5 now doubt that Sir Roger Hollis, director-general of the service in the crucial years 1956-65, was a Russian spy for nearly thirty years. This has been convincingly demonstrated by veteran investigative journalist and espionage expert Chapman Pincher. The government in the person of Margaret Thatcher has denied this, and a number of Hollis's old colleagues have jumped to his defence, but their evidence is weak and contradictory.

I shall not rehearse the case against Hollis here. It is proven beyond reasonable doubt in the revised edition of Pincher's book, which appeared in fuller form after various official attempts to discredit the evidence and arguments contained in the first edition.

As one MI5 officer of long standing confided to me: 'We've known about Hollis for years. Pincher has excellent sources within the service and an excellent brain. He is
so close
to the truth.'

Hollis was not a member of the 'homintern'. The same MI5 source told me baldly, 'Hollis was certainly a Mason.'

Of the many mysteries surrounding Sir Roger Hollis, one of the most baffling is how he was ever accepted into MI5 in the first place. He was quite
the opposite
of what was required. In MI5, as opposed to MI6 which operates abroad, there is a reluctance to accept candidates who have travelled widely out of the UK. In the 1930s when Hollis was recruited this stipulation was more easily met than it is today. For this and other reasons, Hollis was a most unlikely recruit. Doing badly at university, he threw in the towel in 1926 after only two years, worked in a London bank for a while and set off for China. Stranded with only £10 in his pocket in Malaya, he got a job with an international tobacco company in Penang and was later transferred to the company's offices in Shanghai. He moved around China for the next nine years, working at Peking, Hangkow and Dairen. After this, he became tuberculous, and travelled to a Swiss sanatorium by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway from Vladivostok, spending some time in Russia. All this, especially his time in Russia, should have been an insuperable obstacle to any hopes he had of joining MI5.

And so it proved
...
at first. Even after his treatment his health was not strong enough for him to continue working for the tobacco company, so early in 1936 he was back in England. 'Even his friends agree that he was not particularly talented,' wrote Chapman Pincher, who describes him at the time of his return to England as 'basically a broken man': 'Though surprisingly athletic, he was to retain the look of someone who had been tuberculous and became progressively so round-shouldered that he looked almost hunched . . . He had no degree, his health was suspect and his experience in China was not likely to be helpful in securing a post in England. The only work he could find was as a clerk-typist.'

However, through an army major he met, he secured an interview with MI5. He was turned down and told that his experience abroad might be useful to MI6. He applied and was turned down for health reasons by that service.

When he applied to MI5 for the second time later that year nothing had changed . . . except the mind of MI5. This time he was taken on. The director-general of MI5 then was Major General Sir Vernon Kell, who happened to be a Freemason.

With almost everything going against him, Hollis got in. What is even more remarkable was the rate at which he was promoted within the service once he had got in. This astonished his colleagues then, and still cannot be explained by any of the MI5 officers, current and retired, with whom I have had contact either directly or through intermediaries. This is one of the great mysteries of Roger Hollis, even to those who, because they were not involved in particular events and because they liked the man, are not convinced that he was a spy.

Even though it was against the regulations for any officer to be a Freemason - and this, incidentally, must presumably indicate that membership was regarded as a threat to security - several officers were in the Brotherhood. Among them was a man called Potter, who was in charge of the huge MI5 card index, now computerized. Such a man would be good to have as a friend.

But was it Freemasonry that got Hollis against all odds into the service and took him, the unlikeliest of all its officers, to the very top? I believe it was. The likeliest key to the mystery of Hollis is Shanghai and the time he spent there working for the British American Tobacco Company in the 1930s.

The European community in Shanghai was small. The English-speaking community was of course smaller and very tight-knit. Virtually every Englishman arriving in Shanghai gravitated to the Masonic Hall at 1623 Avenue Road. Freemasonry had flourished among the British expatriates here and at the previous Masonic Hall at 30 The Bund, Shanghai, since the mid-1800s. In the twenties and thirties, when Hollis was in Shanghai, the tradition of Freemasonry there was at its zenith. A man who was not a Mason was at a grave disadvantage in achieving whatever social or professional ambitions he had.

Almost everyone I have contacted who knew Hollis, including MI5 officers past and present, has reacted similarly to the suggestion that the former director-general was a member of the Brotherhood - that he was just the kind of man, extremely secretive by nature, with few open friendships and with small prospect of advancement - who would join Masonry in order to exploit its covert advantages. Freemasonry, said the contacts, offered the first explanation to the Hollis mystery, his otherwise inexplicable acceptance and his phenomenal rate of promotion. This would be especially likely, I was told, if Hollis's immediate predecessor as director-general of the Security Service, Sir Dick Goldsmith White, had been a Mason. The one notable voice of dissent was that of Sir Dick White himself, whose own formidable career contains one striking anomaly. White is the only man ever to have been head of both MI5 and MI6. He moved from 5 in 1956 to take over the Secret Service from Sir John 'Sinbad' Sinclair. Despite his impressive record and qualifications, the unprecedented transfer was viewed by many within MI6 as dangerous and as something which, once again breaking all the traditional rules governing the secure operation of the two services, should never have been allowed. It was White who, on his appointment as Secret Service Chief, recommended Hollis as his successor to premier Anthony Eden. When I put it to Sir Dick at his retirement home near Arundel that Hollis's period in Shanghai made it virtually certain that he had been a member of the Brotherhood, he laughed and said, 'Oh dear me, I wouldn't have thought so at all. I can't guarantee it, but it seems to me most unlikely.' When I asked why not, he said exactly the opposite of what others had told me - that Hollis 'really didn't seem the type'. When I asked him if he himself was or ever had been a Freemason, Sir Dick seemed amused, and told me genially that he never had, adding that he hoped
I
'reached the right conclusion' about Hollis.

Hollis's treachery should have come to light in the late 1940s when Sir Percy Sillitoe was director-general of MI5. As A. W. Cockerill, Sillitoe's biographer, points out, 'practically the entire effort of the Service from 1946 on, and until long after Sillitoe's retirement, was directed at identifying and weeding out Communists from positions in which they posed a threat to national security'. Cockerill states that one of Sillitoe's first actions after getting settled into the job as MI5 chief was to carry out a purge, for which he had something of a reputation in his former career in the police.

In the case of MI5, he was primarily interested in the political reliability of his staff, and a number of employees were forced to leave for one reason or another.
..
Beginning with those whose credentials were 'impeccable', he carried out a systematic security check of the entire establishment. This was a programme in which the internal security officers combed through each personal file as though the person concerned was a newcomer; the individual's history was checked and rechecked, membership in clubs, societies and social organizations was investigated anew to ensure that the service itself was 'clean'.

But Sillitoe, without knowing it, was fighting an impossible battle. With the man in charge of all the personal records being a member of the Brotherhood, Sillitoe would never be allowed to learn that Hollis's means of entry to the service had been by way of a masonic Lodge in China and a masonic director-general.

It is an interesting fact that the membership lists of the

Shanghai Lodges between the wars are among the most closely guarded secrets of the United Grand Lodge. Several attempts by concerned members of the Brotherhood to get hold of these files through the ordinary channels have been blocked. It is evident that those lists of names contain something so explosive, so potentially damaging to the Brotherhood, that it will not permit them to be examined even by senior Masons. Whose name is being concealed, if not Hollis's?