Chapters (38)
- Cover
- Also by Philip Kerr
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
SIR ROGER HOLLIS was cleared of being a Soviet spy by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a statement to the House of Commons in March 1981. However, Ray Cline, the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence from 1962 to 1966, concluded that there was “a high percentage of probability that MI5 had been penetrated at a high level and that, among the possible candidates to be a Soviet agent in that category, Roger Hollis was the best fit to be matched with all the evidence concerned.” Robert Lamphere of the FBI has also stated: “To me, there now remains little doubt that it was Hollis who provided the earliest information to the KGB that the FBI was reading in their 1944–45 cables. Philby added to this knowledge after his arrival in the US but the prime culprit in this affair was Hollis.” Senator Malcolm Wallop, a long-serving member of the Senate committee in charge of U.S. intelligence, told the British author Chapman Pincher that William Casey, the CIA chief from 1981 to 1987, was convinced that Hollis had been a spy. Victor Popov, Soviet ambassador in London from 1980 to 1986, agreed with this assessment. Pincher states in his exhaustively detailed and very readable book Treachery: The True Story of MI5 (2011): “In summary, if one imagines a magic compass that could be placed over any suspicious set of circumstances affecting MI5’s countermeasures to the Soviet intelligence assault, the needle almost invariably points to the man who served in the agency for twenty-seven years and became its chief. The extraordinary concatenation of dates and circumstances all fit. Hollis’s serial culpability for security disasters, whether due to treachery or to sheer incompetence, can no longer be in doubt. Except when events outside his control took command, almost every recommendation he made and every decision he took benefited Soviet intelligence.” That is also my own opinion.
Bernie Gunther will be back in 2017 with Prussian Blue.
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