The CIA-MI6 targeting of MI5's leadership in the 1960s: the molehunt as pretext

[Paul Rigby]

The interesting thing here is the scale of the MI6 operation targeting the leadership of MI5 in the early 1960s - it was huge and thus unquestionably institutional in nature. The rewards for MI6? Control of operations in Britain's ex-colonies; the favour of Angleton/CIA; and the re-ignition of the Cold War. And none of this with the support, authorisation or knowledge (initially at least) of three elected governments, one Tory, two Labour. MI6 should be abolished as a matter of urgency.

Stephen de Mowbray, last of the great Cold War molehunters obituary

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/20...rs--obitu/

7 OCTOBER 2016 5:51PM

Stephen de Mowbray, the last of the great "molehunters", who has died aged 91, ran the MI6 side of a spying operation against senior MI5 officers suspected of being Soviet agents at the height of the Cold War.

De Mowbray, who became unfairly known within MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) as its "leading conspiracy theorist", worked with Peter Wright (an expert on bugging who later wrote Spycatcher) and the veteran MI5 officer Arthur Martin in the hunt for a mole at the very top of MI5.

The investigation was prompted by a succession of revelations from Soviet defectors, notably Igor Gouzenko, who defected to Canada in 1945, and Anatoli Golitsyn, a KGB officer who went over to the Americans in 1961, to the effect that there was a Soviet mole in the Security Service, MI5.

The 1950s and early 1960s saw the British establishment rocked by a succession of spy scandals, from the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the naming of Kim Philby as the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge Spy Ring, to the Profumo scandal.

Golitsyn not only revealed that John Vassall, a homosexual Admiralty clerk recruited in a KGB honey-trap, had been giving the Russians top-secret Royal Navy documents, but he also backed up claims by Gouzenko that there was a KGB mole, codenamed ELLI, inside MI5.

Wright and Martin were already obsessed with finding ELLI and had convinced themselves that their investigation was being sabotaged by someone at the top of MI5. Faced with the difficulties of investigating their own bosses, they appealed to MI6 and de Mowbray was assigned to help them.

He was soon convinced by their arguments that the way the search was being frustrated at every turn could only mean that the mole must be either the MI5 deputy director Graham Mitchell or Roger Hollis, head of MI5.

A joint MI5/MI6 committee of counter-intelligence experts, codenamed FLUENCY, reviewed the evidence of high-level hostile penetration and concluded that the case was convincing, but the actual identity of the culprit remained elusive.

"There were extraordinary things going on," de Mowbray told the BBC's Gordon Corera in 2010. "Martin was running people against the Soviets and those operations were going wonky." Wright was installing listening devices in Soviet offices around the world and picking up nothing. De Mowbray was "utterly horrified".

Dick White, the former head of MI5 who was now in charge of MI6, told de Mowbray, Wright and Martin to advise Hollis that they suspected Mitchell, and to request permission to place the deputy director under surveillance in order to rule him out of the investigation.

When Hollis refused to allow them to use "technical means" against Mitchell at his Chobham home, only later to agree to a tap on his office telephone after consultation with White, the molehunters saw it as further evidence that Hollis was involved.

As the investigation descended into paranoia, its operations became increasingly surreal, with British spies trailing their fellow spies around London and the rest of the country.

Since Mitchell knew all the members of MI5's "watcher" service, the decision was taken to employ amateurs, all MI6 volunteers who were unknown to him. A total of 40 MI6 staff, few of them trained in surveillance, were assigned to track Mitchell.

"We followed Mitchell all over the place," de Mowbray recalled. "Down-town when he left from the office, trying to chase him up the steps in Waterloo when he went home."

On one occasion de Mowbray heard that Mitchell, an ardent chess fan, was attending a tournament in Eastbourne in which Russians were taking part. De Mowbray commandeered an MI6 colleague with a fast sports car to whisk him down to the tournament, but without any results.

Another time, de Mowbray was following Mitchell through a rush-hour crowd in London when the MI5 officer stopped, turned and looked straight at him. Mitchell said nothing, but stared into de Mowbray's face for several seconds before turning on his heels and walking away. He knew he was being watched.

In one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of British intelligence, three female employees of MI6 took shifts spying through a peephole drilled through Mitchell's office wall. A secret camera recorded the changes in his body language, his eyes sinking into black hollows as he spiralled into depression as a result of his awareness that he was under suspicion.

Mitchell took early retirement, but even after his departure he was kept under surveillance, although de Mowbray and Wright remained convinced that Hollis was the real Soviet mole.

Fuelling the suspicions over Hollis was the fact that he had spent part of the 1930s in China, as a representative of British American Tobacco, associating with a number of communists, including the Soviet spies Richard Sorge and Agnes Smedley, before heading MI5's anti-Soviet section during a period when the Cambridge Spy Ring were all active.

Eventually the CIA were told that Hollis had been cleared, so de Mowbray appealed first to Sir John Rennie, who took over as chief of MI6 in 1968. When Rennie declined to do anything, de Mowbray tried to speak to the prime minister Harold Wilson.

He did not get to speak to Wilson but had an interview with Sir John Hunt, the Cabinet Secretary, who initially thought he was mad. Hunt contacted Sir Dick White, now retired, and asked him if de Mowbray was "a screwball".

White replied that de Mowbray was "patriotic, hardworking and obsessed". White also refused to rule out that Hollis was the mole. Hunt asked his predecessor, Lord Trend, to carry out an inquiry. Trend spoke to de Mowbray, warning him that he was not going "to tear Whitehall apart about all this".

Trend's findings remain classified but its conclusion was ultimately that there was not enough evidence either to clear or condemn Hollis. De Mowbray eventually resigned, furious that no one seemed prepared to do anything about hostile penetration of MI5.

"I could not reconcile myself to doing nothing," de Mowbray recalled some 30 years later. "I had made so many commitments to myself and to others to pursue the problem to the end that I could not wash my hands and forget about it."

Stephen de Mowbray was born on August 15 1925 at Lymington, where his father, Ralph Marsh de Mowbray, was an eminent surgeon. After Winchester de Mowbray joined the Fleet Air Arm in 1943, training as an observer on a torpedo squadron, but arriving too late to see any action. His service was enlivened, however, by the disinclination of his pilot, Laurence Olivier, to take naval discipline seriously.

Demobbed in 1946, de Mowbray went up to New College, Oxford, where he read PPE and was taught by Isaiah Berlin. For someone who saw himself as a "thinker" rather than a doer, it was an invaluable experience. Berlin was a significant influence on the young de Mowbray's life.

Having decided during the war against following his father into medicine, de Mowbray felt that he could make a career for himself as a diplomat. But Berlin advised against it: "I think you had better be a spy."

De Mowbray joined MI6 in 1950, working initially in the Economic Section run by George Young, one of the Service's towering influences in the early period of the Cold War.

A keen sailor, de Mowbray married Tamsin Giles, daughter of the yacht designer Laurent Giles, and shortly afterwards was posted to the Middle East, serving in Baghdad.

On his return to head office, then in Broadway Buildings near St James's Park Underground station, he worked in the MI6 counter-espionage section R5, where he found himself embroiled in the continuing investigations over Operation Nordpol, the German scheme that had successfully dismantled the Special Operations Executive's wartime networks in Holland.

De Mowbray then moved to the Latin American section, and in November 1957 was posted as head of station in Montevideo, where his work was dominated by hunting down Soviet "illegals", KGB agents operating under cover across Latin America.

His experience in such operations became invaluable when he was recalled to London to help deal with the fallout from Golitsyn's defection, but his determination to prove that Hollis was a spy saw him taken off that case in 1964 and sent to Washington, initially as head of counter-intelligence and then subsequently as head of station.

It was on his return to London that he heard that the CIA had been told there was no case to answer against Hollis and de Mowbray embarked on his unsuccessful attempts to persuade two prime ministers, first Wilson and then James Callaghan, that Hollis was a Soviet mole.

"It was a very difficult situation for years on end," he recalled. "People thought I was either mad or bad because I was trying to do something."

De Mowbray's quiet, forensic approach to counter-intelligence which was widely admired ferreted out a suspected mole inside MI6, Donald Prater, whom he interrogated in New Zealand, extracting an admission of a past adherence to the Communist Party.

De Mowbray retired in 1979, frustrated by official refusal to take the allegations against Hollis seriously, and went back to Washington to help Golitsyn write his memoirs, New Lies for Old, assisted by Arthur Martin, and in 1984 arranged for a friend to publish them. Later on he edited Golitsyn's unpublished memoirs, Checkmate.

He also wrote a history of the Soviet Union, Key Facts in Soviet History (1990), and was ghost-writer for Golitsyn's book The Perestroika Deception (1995), which rejected the 1980s reforms, arguing: "Scratch these new, instant Soviet 'democrats', 'anti-Communists', and 'nationalists' who have sprouted out of nowhere, and underneath will be found secret Party members or KGB agents."

When Professor Christopher Andrew published the authorised history of MI5 in 2009, in which he dismissed de Mowbray as one of a trio, with Martin and Wright, of conspiracy theorists with "paranoid tendencies", de Mowbray felt compelled to speak out, having not breathed a word in public about it for 30 years.

He told Gordon Corera (author of The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6, 2012) that when he left MI6 no one seemed willing to countenance the idea of further Soviet penetration of the top of the Security Service. But he remained convinced that he was right.

"I vowed to myself that I would never let go of this case," he said. "There were suspicions with both of them [Mitchell and Hollis]. There are not suspicions now. But somebody was doing it."

Scholarly, self-effacing, kind and gracious, de Mowbray possessed a steely determination and a fierce commitment to the integrity of his service. In retirement he gardened and even talked about opening a snail farm. He played the piano and the cello well, and was devoted to the novels of Anthony Powell.

His first marriage was dissolved in the early 1970s and he married, secondly, Patricia White, a banker, whose work took them to New York and then Africa before they settled at Lymington. She survives him with three sons and a daughter from his first marriage and a son and a daughter from his second.

Stephen de Mowbray, born August 15 1925, died October 4 2016