Hollis 'cover up’ alleged by Labour M.P.s

Press, 28 March 1981, Page 8

Hollis 'cover up’ alleged by Labour M.P.s

NZPA-Reuter London A row is brewing over Mrs Margaret Thatcher’s statement to the House of Commons- yesterday that the former MIS head, Sir Roger Hollis, was not a K.G.B. agent. Labour members, dissatisfied by the Prime Minister's statement and its endorsement from the Labour leader, Michael Foot, are sure to raise the affair in Parliament again.

The issue surfaced at the weekly private meeting of Labour members at Westminster yesterday. Tam Dalyell a former chairman of Labour’s back-bench foreign affairs committee, insisted that the Shadow Cabinet should thoroughly probe the findings of the security review body announced by Mrs Thatcher yesterday. Her statement resulted from allegations this week about leaks in British security by the journalist Chapman Pincher. published in the “Daily Mail,” which is serialising his book. "Their Trade is Treachery.”

Many Labour members were deeply suspicious of Mrs Thatcher's statement and Mr Fool’s whole-hearted approval of it.

Their reservations were summed up by Dennis Canavan. Left-wing member for Stirlingshire West, who was the first member to put down a Commons question asking Mrs Thatcher .to make a statement on the Hollis Affair. He was not called by the Speaker during supplementary questions after Mrs Thatcher had made her statement.

Now he is accusing Mr George Thomas, the Speaker, of being “part of a Parliamentary cover-up.” Mr Canavan said, “It is quite clear from the Speaker’s selection of M.P.s to ask questions that the whole Parliamentary establishment is now involved, on both sides of the House, in this cover-up.” Mrs Thatcher said that an inquiry in 1974 by one of Britain's most senior officials, Lord Trend, had concluded that Sir Roger was not a Soviet agent.

Fincher’s account was wrong, she said.

But she announced'that a special commission would be set up to . review security procedures and practices in Britain. Mrs Thatcher said that after Hollis retired in 1965 from his post as Director-

General of MIS, officials investigated him. This was because of indications “which suggested but did not prove that there had been a Russian intelligence service agent at a relatively senior level in British coun-ter-intelligence in the last years of the war.” Leads in the case could also be taken as pointing to Kim Philby, a senior member of the British secret service who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, or to Anthony Blunt, former keeper of Queen Elizabeth's paintings who confessed that he had worked as a Soviet agent in the British intelligence service.

But Hollis was among those who fitted some of the leads and he was therefore investigated, she said. The inquiry did not conclusively prove his innocence.

“But no evidence was found that incriminated him, and the conclusion. reached at the end of the investigation was that he had not been an agent of the Russian intelligence: service,” Mrs Thatcher said.

This view-was challenged by a very few of those concerned and a new inquiry was opened in. 1974. Lord Trend, who as Sir Burke Trend was Secretary of the British Cabinet for a

decade, was called out of retirement and made a detailed investigation. “He was satisfied that nothing had been covered up,” Mrs Thatcher said. “He agreed that none of the relevant leads identified Sir Roger Hollis as an agent of the Russian intelligence service, and that each of them could be explained by reference to Philby or Blunt.”

Lord Trend had agreed with those who concluded that Hollis had not been an agent of the Russian intelligence service, she said. Sir Harold Wilson, Prime Minister at the time of the inquiry, told Parliament that Lord Trend’s investigation lasted one year and he was satisfied that Hollis had not been a spy. But Chapman Pincher stood by his assertion, and he challenged Mrs Thatcher to identify the errors in his book. “It would not have occurred but for the revelations in my book of which I do not retract a word.” He said her statement was only as good as the Civil Service advice on which it

was based. “The statement contains one glaring discrepancy of which she is not aware.” It was “absolute nonsense” for her to have been told that MIS suspicions about a K.G.B. mole pointed identically to Philby and Blunt as well as Hollis. Blunt left the service in 1945 and Philby in 1951. Thereafter neither of them had access to secrets, Pincher said.