URI GELLER SOLVES HISTORY’S GREATEST MYSTERIES: 7
Was Roger Hollis the “Fifth Man”?
Someone tipped off Kim Philby. As the net closed on Britain’s most dangerous traitor, the KGB sent an agent to Beirut to warn their mole to burrow deep underground. Philby escaped - but how did the KGB know he had been compromised?
Spy catcher Peter Wright claimed Roger Hollis, then head of MI5, was the double agent. But Wright’s stories are seen mostly as moonshine - friends in Smiley’s twilight world tell me the “Spycatcher” debacle was engineered by Mrs Thatcher’s government, to plant false information while appearing to hush it up.
Hollis made an unlikely mole, compared to loudmouth extroverts like Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, or sad bunglers like Anthony Blunt. Hollis was efficient, ruthless and commanded the respect of spies. And he did not lack courage - when he saw the fingers of suspicion pointed at him, he did not bluster but called in a spy catcher of his own, Ronald Symonds, to clear his name.
Photographs of Hollis do not seem to exist. But one event in 1999 has given us a clear picture of Britain’s old-school-tie spies - the unmasking of Melita Norwood. Evidently a secretary can be as valuable a mole as a Director General.
Was “M” a Soviet agent? I doubt it. But Miss Moneypenny…
Was Roger Hollis the “Fifth Man”?
Someone tipped off Kim Philby. As the net closed on Britain’s most dangerous traitor, the KGB sent an agent to Beirut to warn their mole to burrow deep underground. Philby escaped - but how did the KGB know he had been compromised?
Spy catcher Peter Wright claimed Roger Hollis, then head of MI5, was the double agent. But Wright’s stories are seen mostly as moonshine - friends in Smiley’s twilight world tell me the “Spycatcher” debacle was engineered by Mrs Thatcher’s government, to plant false information while appearing to hush it up.
Hollis made an unlikely mole, compared to loudmouth extroverts like Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, or sad bunglers like Anthony Blunt. Hollis was efficient, ruthless and commanded the respect of spies. And he did not lack courage - when he saw the fingers of suspicion pointed at him, he did not bluster but called in a spy catcher of his own, Ronald Symonds, to clear his name.
Photographs of Hollis do not seem to exist. But one event in 1999 has given us a clear picture of Britain’s old-school-tie spies - the unmasking of Melita Norwood. Evidently a secretary can be as valuable a mole as a Director General.
Was “M” a Soviet agent? I doubt it. But Miss Moneypenny…
"I do nothing and then I do something. But it's taken years of investigating idleness in all its forms to be able to achieve this. My discipline is borne out of concerted study of idleness."