Roger Hollis

Sir Roger Henry Hollis (2 December 1905 – 26 October 1973) was a British intelligence officer who served with MI5 from 1938 to 1965.

From 1924 to the spring of 1926, he attended Worcester College, Oxford, where he read English, but left without completing his degree.

At Oxford he was part of the Hypocrites' Club.

From the spring of 1926 into 1927, he was a clerk for the Standard Chartered Bank in London.

In early 1927, he went to Hong Kong as a freelance journalist, then moved to Shanghai.

From 1 April 1928, he worked for British American Tobacco.

In 1930, he transferred to Beijing.

Pincher claims Hollis was recruited by Richard Sorge in China in the early 1930s to spy for the GRU.

In June 1938, he joined MI5 F Division (Countersubversion).

Many departments of MI5, including F Division, moved from London to Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, during World War II, due to threat of bombing.

Evidence has been advanced to support these assertions by Pincher in his book, Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain, which is devoted to positing that Hollis was "Elli", the highly placed mole within MI5 identified by Igor Gouzenko, and operating as a Soviet agent from the 1940s until retiring from MI5.

In its obituary of Pincher, The Times discredited the journalist's conspiracy theory ("Paranoia Hollisiensis") and specified that Hollis had not been a Soviet spy.

During the 1950s and 1960s, a large number of MI5 operations failed in circumstances that suggested the Soviets had been tipped off.

Although many such failures were subsequently blamed on the actions of such self-confessed or defected agents as Philby, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, a number of failures occurred after all three had lost their access to secret information.

Some in MI5 concluded the Soviets had an agent in a very senior position within the organisation.

Peter Wright, Arthur S. Martin, Jane Sissmore and others became convinced that either Hollis or his deputy, Graham Mitchell, could be the only ones responsible, eventually confiding their suspicions to Dick White, director general of MI6.

White instructed Martin to inform Hollis that Mitchell was a suspect, and Hollis instructed Martin (after due consideration) to keep Mitchell under surveillance.

Author Nigel West implies that this was a deliberate ploy to keep tabs on both Mitchell and Hollis.

Martin eventually became so disgruntled and outspoken about Hollis's attitude toward the investigation that Hollis suspended Martin for a fortnight, and the case was turned over to Wright.

Much of the investigation was centred around interviews with Anthony Blunt at that time, and Wright had amassed a sizable amount of taped evidence from Blunt when Martin returned from suspension.

From 1953 to 1956, Hollis was MI5 Deputy Director General under Dick White, succeeding White in 1956 and remaining in that post until his retirement in 1965.

He was Director General of MI5 from 1956 to 1965.

Some commentators, including the journalist Chapman Pincher and intelligence officer Peter Wright, suggested that Hollis was a Soviet agent.

Soviet Naval Attache Eugene Ivanov was also involved with Keeler at this time, in the early 1960s, and sought to learn the date of American plans to arm nuclear warheads in West Germany, from Profumo through Keeler.

After Kim Philby's flight from Beirut to Moscow in 1963, rumours began to circulate that Hollis had alerted him to his impending arrest.

Hollis was criticised for not alerting John Profumo, the War Secretary in Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's Conservative government, that he might have become entangled with a Soviet spy ring through his friendship with Stephen Ward and his affair with showgirl Christine Keeler, who was introduced by Ward to Profumo.

Profumo had to resign in mid-1963, and the resulting scandal did much to bring the Labour Party to power in the October 1964 General Election.

After 1964, Blunt gradually confessed his double-agent role in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

Eventually the operation wound down.

By then, some time after Hollis had retired, suspicion had shifted from Mitchell to Hollis.

New Director General Martin Furnival Jones refused to sanction an investigation into Hollis.

Mole Hunt (Chapter 3, page 45) noted that the investigative team known as FLUENCY had been disbanded before any conclusions had been reached.

In 1984, investigative journalist Chapman Pincher published Too Secret Too Long, a book which examined the early life of Hollis and his MI5 career drawing upon new sources and upon many interviews with retired intelligence personnel.

In his book The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (2009), the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew rejects this theory.

The government's official position, first stated by Margaret Thatcher, is that there was no evidence that Hollis was a traitor.

Hollis' father, the Right Reverend George Hollis, was Bishop of Taunton.

His mother was a daughter of a Canon of Wells Cathedral.

Hollis was educated at Clifton College, Bristol.

Pincher published a revised edition in 2009.

Pincher also accused Hollis of being a Soviet agent, although separate from the Cambridge Five spy ring.