Anthony Glees: The Secrets of the Service. A Story of Soviet Subversion of Western Intelligence. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1987. 447 pp. Ill.
In the early chapters of Secrets of the Service, Anthony Glees writes like a fussy professor delivering a lecture to elementary level students. Pedantically laying out his evidence step by step, he is so determined to be even-handed that the results can be maddening. Every claim that Soviet subversion did real damage seems to be followed by “Yet on the other hand…” The pace is rather plodding.
As the book progresses, though, he proves to be less even-handed than at first sight. Glees sketches out opposing points of view regarding responsibility for intelligence failures, but is hardly agnostic on the matter – he lays the blame squarely with the British intel community, in part because they were simply blind, in part because they willfully avoided their gaze, and in part because they were subverted.
In pinning responsibility on them, Glees exculpates Churchill and Eden, saying they underestimated Stalin because of poor intelligence as to his real intentions whereas he was perfectly knowledgeable about theirs. British intel misled the political elite by giving them an incomplete or overly rosy a view of the Soviet dictator. This was because they lacked information about real conditions – they simply had too few agents on the ground who could provide it.
“British policy was, therefore, not based on the cynical appeasement of the Soviet Union, but on the honest, though ignorant, attempt to work together with it.” (pg. 58) And after all, what could Churchill have done differently, even if he had been better informed? Not much, according to Glees.
The further one reads, the clearer it becomes that the author’s purpose is less to defend Whitehall’s honor than to refute the charge, advanced by Peter Wright and especially Chapman Pincher, that there must have been a high-placed mole in MI6 working for the Soviets even after the defection of Maclean and Burgess. Glees’s ultimate goal is to defend the head of MI6, who he believes has unjustly come under suspicion: “So what can be concluded about the unfortunate Roger Hollis? I believe that, at the end of the day, the hard truth is that during the war the moles were indeed undetectable; there was no way in which a man like Hollis could have even begun to unravel the evidence of Communist subversion in the high offices of the British State. … Hollis must have shaken his head in disbelief as ever more evidence came to light showing that the penetration achieved by the secret Communists had been far deeper and far heavier than anyone had imagined.” (pg. 395)
Glees suggests that Chapman Pincher’s circumstantial but highly detailed case against Hollis has been bolstered by Soviet disinformation. He implies that Philby, who had defected in 1963 and was then still working in Moscow, may have been the ultimate source, as part of a KGB effort to sow distrust.
A good indication that Hollis makes an unlikely mole comes late in the book and, strangely enough, is mentioned only in passing. One of his friends, speaking under the cover of anonymity, offers this exculpatory testimony: “Roger never mentioned any foreign girls. He had a strong view that English things were best. His worst fault was that he could be lavatorial after a drink. And he was a very poor drinker; he did not have a good head.” (pg. 376) If alcohol had such an effect on him, it seems highly unlikely he could successfully withhold gnawing secrets about himself for decades. Maclean certainly couldn’t manage to do so, but it was his good fortune that no one took his drunken confessions about being a Soviet spy seriously. Philby could hold his tongue, but he was a practiced drinker, free of any inner urge to confess, and was by nature far more ruthless. Given that Hollis was, like Maclean, the sort who lowered his guard when he drank, the fact that he never confessed indicates strongly he had nothing to confess.
Speaking of Maclean, perhaps the book’s most glaring drawback is its tendency to downplay the significance of the information he betrayed. Indeed, Glees goes so far as to quote Lord Sherfield to the effect that the damage done by Maclean has been seriously exaggerated. (pg. 354f) This exculpatory line seems untenable in light of information that has come to light since publication of this book in 1987. As Verne Newton has shown (Cambridge Spies, 1991), Maclean passed on secrets that enabled the North Koreans to launch their attack without fear of unleashing a US nuclear response. Glees does not downplay this – he simply ignores it, or is wholly unaware of it. The Korean War rates barely a mention in this book.
Returning to the main point, while ultimate proof is probably unattainable in such matters, it has to be said that Glees’s defense of Hollis seems persuasive. What’s more, his case is bolstered by the access he had to private family letters, from which he quotes liberally. As he sums up: “Hollis, like his colleague Dick White, stood for a certain sort of security service, one which tried to keep people away from situations where damage might be done, one which was passive and reactive, rather than invasive and interventionist. It would be a great tragedy if the secrets of the service, its failures and its shortcomings, were ever to cause this to change. For a passive security service is a far better safeguard of the democratic liberties of a State than an active one.” (pg. 398) Not a message likely to find many adherents in these post-9/11 times, but nonetheless one that should be listened to and taken seriously.
© Hamilton Beck
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