Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
|
|  Yüklə 0.5 Mb.
|
| Spy, ghosted by Kim Philby in Moscow in 1965, give no clue to his activities during this period, apart from confirming what MI5 already knew, that he had enrolled on a Mandarin course at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He was also somewhat vague about precisely when he took over Houghton, and who had run him earlier, but the precise date had been extracted from the former Royal Navy Master-at-Arms while under interrogation. What was certain was that Molody had not been despatched to London for the sole purpose of running Houghton, because he had been in contact with case officers from the embassy rezidentura since his arrival from Warsaw in October 1952. Thus the KGB had waited a further three years before sending Molody to London, and then there had been a further hiatus of four years until he had taken him in harness. The KGB do not invest in illegal rezidents to have them remain idle, so what had Molody been doing or, more to the point, whom had he been running? Molody and the Cohens were extremely important, high-value assets and the KGB would not have sent them to London unless there was a good reason for doing so. Whereas Molody had adopted the authentic identity of a Canadian, Gordon Lonsdale, and was quite secure in his cover (indeed, MI5 never discovered his true name until after he had been released from prison) the Cohens had a considerable past, and because Morris had served in the US Army his fingerprints were on file with the FBI, who regarded him as a fugitive, wanted for questioning in connection with his involvement in the Rosenberg’s atomic spy-ring. As Dzerzhinsky Square must have known, the freedom of the Cohens, masquerading as the New Zealanders Peter and Helen Kroger in Ruislip, could be ended by a single telephone call to the FBI headquarters in Washington DC. In short, the KGB had taken a risk in sending the Cohens to London, and it rather looked as though Mrs Norwood was part of the reason for that fateful gamble.
It is quite obvious to any intelligence professional that because MI5 pulled Norwood’s security clearance in 1951, that had not ended her usefulness as a spy, a fact supported by the knowledge that she was still in touch with the KGB’s illegal rezident a decade later. On that basis alone, MI5’s assumption of her having been of only marginal interest is absurd. It also follows that if Molody was acting as her controller, there must have been good operational reasons to him to have done so, but when had he first made contact with her? Norwood must have been an important and active spy in 1961, a proposition supported by Mitrokhin who alleged that in 1965 she had begun to cultivate a junior civil servant codenamed HUNT, whom she succeeded in recruiting in 1967, and remained productive, supplying details of defences sales exports, for the next fourteen years. Upon his retirement he was allegedly given £9,000 to help him develop his own business, presumably a method of keeping him in harness with access to useful information in his retirement. Once again, the contradiction in MI5’s evidence is stark. On the one hand there is the inference that she must have been harmless after 1951, whereas it is acknowledged that she had been an active recruiter more than sixteen years later. It is noticeable, and quite an irony, that although HUNT, is alleged to have died, MI5 kept to the Rifkind rules and protected his identity! If it was really true that MI5 had placed Mrs Norwood into its second highest priority, it is bizarre that the case should have been allowed to ‘slip from view’, but there may be another explanation for this extraordinarily unprofessional behaviour. Naturally, as Mrs Norwood was active and undetected for so many years, it is somewhat historical in nature, but it goes to the heart of MI5’s apparent reluctance to collect whatever information I had about KGB officers whom I had met in Moscow who had worked in London, and MI5’s anxiety not to question HOLA. The story dated back to December 1961 when a KGB officer, Anatoli Golitsyn, defected to the CIA in Helsinki and named two members of the KGB rezidentura in London who were, between them, running no less than four important spies, three of whom were supplying information about the Royal Navy. Bearing in mind that MI5 knew that Molody had handled HOLA in 1961, and that she had been active as a recruiter six years later, any mole hunter would have wanted to know what she had been doing during the intervening years, a period when the KGB rezidentura was known to have been operating at peak capacity, and at a time when its principal Line X illegal support officer, Vasili Dozhdalev, had been withdrawn from his embassy post in London. Dozhdalev had arrived from Moscow in 1959, following a brief posting in 1952, and he had been identified in January 1961 as the KGB officer responsible for handling Harry Houghton. After his conviction for selling secrets from the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Research Establishment at Portland, Houghton had identified two of his Soviet contacts in London as Nikolai Korovin, whom MI5 suspected had been the rezident, and Dozhdalev, who was later named by the SIS traitor George Blake as his handler too. The arrest of Blake in April 1961, so soon after the Portland spy-ring had been rolled up, must have been a considerable blow for the KGB, and in such circumstances the Soviets usually advise their networks to go into temporary hibernation, but on this occasion there is ample proof that another member of the rezidentura, Nikolai Karpekov, remained active, and was running another spy in the Admiralty, John Vassall. After his arrest in September 1962, following a tip to the CIA from the SCD’s Yuri Nosenko, Vassall had identified Korovin and then Karpekov as his controllers, and in 1965 a scientist strongly suspected of espionage, Dr Alister Watson, picked out Korovin and Karpekov as his contacts, and then identified Sergei Kondrashev, a KGB officer who, incidentally, had also run George Blake in 1953. Shortly before Houghton had been arrested in January 1961 Korovin had handed responsibility for handling Vassall over to Karpekov, and he had instructed him to cease operating until he was contacted again, which did not happen until he was reactivated just after Christmas 1961. The significance of all this activity within the legal rezidentura is that after the hasty departure of Korovin and Dozhdalev, only Karpekov is known to have been running a spy in London, and he was one of the two KGB officers named by Golitsyn as supervising a total of four agents. Houghton and Vassall subsequently confessed to their espionage and identified their handlers, but who had been the third spy supplying information about the Royal Navy? MI5 had hoped the remaining source had been Dr Alister Watson, a Cambridge-educated scientist based at the Admiralty Research Establishment at Teddington, and known to have been a university contemporary and friend of Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, but hidden deep in MI5’s files were details of another, earlier suspect. Although when challenged by MI5 Watson acknowledged having held clandestine meetings with both Kondrashev and Karpekov, he had always denied having passed either of them classified information and would only admit to having concealed his Communist Party membership to obtain a security clearance. However, before MI5 had confronted Watson there had been another suspect, a senior naval officer who had been seen visiting Karpekov’s home in Holland Park. The very existence of this suspect was a closely guarded secret, even within the Security Service, because he represented even more political embarrassment for MI5, which had already caught and imprisoned three spies in the Admiralty, being Vassall, Houghton, and the latter’s girlfriend, Ethel Gee. Quite apart from the fact that MI5 had thought it likely that there was probably another Soviet source in Portland, maybe run by Houghton, who was never charged because there was insufficient evidence against him, MI5’s Director-General, Sir Roger Hollis, had been reluctant to initiate yet another investigation into the loss of even more naval secrets. The cause of Hollis’s unwillingness to pursue the remaining naval suspect was the prevailing climate at the time, which was particularly hostile to the Security Service. Two tribunals of inquiry had been empanelled to look into the breaches of security already known, and Hollis feared the consequences if another scandal emerged. His reticence is understandable, considering that two journalists had been imprisoned for refusing to reveal their sources over a newspaper article that had linked the Portland spies to Vassall falsely. Although there never had been any such connection, Brendan Mulholland and Reginald Foster, and later the veteran Fleet Street crime correspondent Percy Hoskins, had suggested in print there was much more to the story, hinting that microfilms found by MI5 at the Krogers’ bungalow in Ruislip had contained evidence implicating a further source beyond those known to have been in the Portland spy-ring. When asked by the Radcliffe Tribunal about this supposed link between the two arrests, twenty months apart, Sir Roger Hollis had chosen his words carefully and had denied any such evidence had been found, but he was not questioned about whether MI5 was investigating a further lead. In fact the leader of MI5’s investigation team, Ronald Symonds (a future Deputy Director-General of the Security Service, but no relation to me) strongly believed in the existence of another network based in London. His view was based on two compelling facts. Firstly, Karpekov and Korovin had been together the night the news broke of the arrests of Houghton, Gee, Lonsdale and the Krogers and yet, according to MI5’s technical staff monitoring their dinner table conversation, neither had made any comment, or made any move to rush back to the embassy. They had been completely unconcerned, which was either a manifestation of masterly self-control on the part of the rezident and his deputy, or they were genuinely unconcerned, perhaps safe in the knowledge that their other organisation had gone undetected. Secondly, there was the wireless traffic from Moscow to Lonsdale and to the Krogers, which had been intercepted by GCHQ’s technicians. According to their recordings, the KGB had continued to transmit signals to receivers in London after the arrests of January 1961, which again implied the existence of another apparatus that had worked in parallel to, but in isolation from, the Portland network. Whilst this may be of only historical interest in the 21st Century, the ramifications are immense, for all the evidence points to Mrs Norwood being at the heart of a further, undiscovered spy-ring, just as Symonds had suspected. It may also be only relevant today because the Security Service demonstrably has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid opening this particular Pandora’s Box. My only hesitation in advancing such a conspiracy theory is that some might find it hard to believe that someone such as Sir Stephen Lander, who only joined MI5 in 1975, more than a decade after these events had occurred, could have any interest in concealing the misdeeds of the long-distant past. However, the fact remains that MI5’s behaviour in the Norwood case is very strange, and requires more of an explanation than the lame excuses offered to Tom King’s committee. Among some MI5 retirees it is common knowledge that a senior Royal Navy officer was considered a serious espionage suspect by MI5 at the very time Sir Roger Hollis was denying any discovery made in the Kroger household had led to the identification of John Vassall as a spy the following year. The correct sequence of events was that MI5 had been tipped off to Houghton’s espionage by the CIA which in 1960 had received an anonymous letter from a Polish intelligence officer, Michal Goleniewski, who was preparing the way for his own eventual defection in December of that year. The clue to Vassall’s espionage had come from an entirely different defector, Yuri Nosenko. Those two cases, however, did not account for the four spies mentioned by the third defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, so the search had continued until the officer, whose career had been at sea throughout the war and afterwards until 1959 when he had gone to work for the First Sea Lord, became the focus of a molehunt conducted by Michael McCaul. Much to the dismay of those directly involved, the investigation had been abandoned on instructions from the Director-General who allegedly had insisted that Whitehall and Westminster could not sustain a further spy scandal, and the continued existence of the Security Service might even be at stake. When in 1964 McCaul expressed his disagreement, he was transferred to the United States as MI5’s Security Liaison Officer attached to the British embassy in Washington DC, a useful post for malcontents. It was while McCaul was in America that new evidence materialised which served to incriminate Mrs Norwood. In 1965 the US National Security Agency cryptographers had cracked the VENONA message about the atomic spy codenamed TINA, having worked on it almost twenty years, and this was the clue that MI5 had needed to identify TINA as Mrs Norwood, a dedicated CPGB and CND member, local political activist and subscriber to the Morning Star, whose file showed her to have associated with known spies, such as Percy Glading, as long ago as 1938. The text, dated 16 September 1945, from General Pavel Fitin, head of the NKVD’s foreign intelligence directorate, had been addressed to his London rezident, Boris Krotov, and had been the subject of continuous cryptographic attack. The final version, translated into English, had been circulated to MI5 on 29 January 1965, which had prompted the new investigation that was to be shelved by the end of the year. Exactly why MI5 abandoned this extremely important mole hunt is unclear, but considering that we now know HOLA was active during this period, the decision to abandon it looks utterly negligent. One explanation may have been the wish within the Security Service, then still under the leadership of Sir Roger Hollis, to bury past, awkward cases that might reopen the sensitivities of the debilitating mole hunts which had threatened to paralyze the organisation in 1964. The real, continuing embarrassment for the Security Service was that Mrs Norwood had been granted a security clearance in 1945 which had not been revoked until 1951, despite her connection with a notorious prewar espionage case, and her unconcealed, active CPGB membership. On this basis Mrs Norwood had enjoyed access to classified atomic information for at least four years, until the company for which she worked had completed its only classified contract. That, of course, is not to say, or even to imply, as MI5 attempted to do in its written evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee in 2000, that Mrs Norwood had not engaged in any useful espionage during that period. The real implication was that MI5 had been negligent in not checking on Melita Sirnis in 1938, and had blundered in granting her a clearance in 1945. According to Mitrokhin’s notes, she had been recruited originally in 1937 by Andrew Rothstein, one of the CPGB’s founders and a well-known Soviet agent, and had been handled by a GRU agent codenamed FIR until 1944 when she had been handed over to Nikolai Ostrovsky, and then had been run successively by two Trade Delegation officials, Galina Trusevich and Yevgenni Oleynik, but had been put into cold storage in April 1950 following the arrest of Klaus Fuchs in January. Dr Andrew speculates that FIR may have been the legendary GRU agent Ursula Kuczynski, alias Ruth Werner and codenamed SONYA, who moved to Britain from Geneva in 1943, and in November 1947 had been interviewed at her home in Oxfordshire by MI5 after she had been named by a defector, Allan Foote, as a Soviet spy. Shrewdly SONYA had denied ever having engaged in espionage in Britain, and at that time MI5 had not realised that Fuchs had been a spy, and that Kuczynski had acted as his GRU controller, but two years later she had fled to East Germany as soon as she had heard that Fuchs had been arrested. This entire episode, of course, had also been an embarrassment for MI5 because it was only long after Fuchs had been imprisoned that it was realised that it had allowed Ursula Kuczynski to slip through its fingers two years earlier in 1947. Although powerless to arrest the young mother, MI5 had accepted her denials, and had pursued her no further. In the light of Fuchs's treachery, the lost opportunity had looked rather worse than merely that. Just on the basis of her relationship with SONYA, Mrs Norwood would have been a fascinating subject to interrogate, but there would have been numerous other issues to have raised with her. One curiosity is the fact that the Sirnis home in Lawn Road, Hampstead before the war was next-door to the flat rented by Otto Deutsch, the legendary Soviet illegal who had recruited Kim Philby in 1934. Surely this was no coincidence, but what was her explanation for this? Czech by origin, but travelling on an authentic Austrian passport, Deutsch had been the NKVD’s illegal rezident in London, while ostensibly working at London University researching psychology, assisted by his wife, Josefine who had qualified as a wireless operator, and their child. In October 1937 Deutsch’s three-year alien’s permit had expired, and after what had actually been a routine visit from the police, he had left the country hurriedly, later to perish when a ship he was on was sunk in the Atlantic in November 1942. Many of Deutsch’s secrets, as one of the celebrated ‘great illegals’ died with him, but maybe Melita Norwood could have supplied some of the pieces of the jigsaw that was the career of the magnetic personality responsible for having recruited Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross. How could MI5 have passed up such an opportunity? After the conviction of Fuchs, contact with the spy codenamed HOLA was resumed by the London rezidentura in 1952, and at some point between 1945 and 1952 her codename had been changed. The Soviets routinely had changed the codenames of their agents periodically as a security precaution, and when they learned, probably from Kim Philby and another source in America, that their cipher systems had been compromised, and the British and American codebreakers were working on the cryptographic project later codenamed VENONA, all the current operational codenames were changed again, transforming TINA into HOLA. Mrs Norwood, who would have been unaware of these counter-measures, and probably completely ignorant of her own operational codename, was considered so valuable that in 1958 she had been awarded the coveted Order of the Red Banner, the KGB’s highest award. Mitrokhin also recorded her KGB contacts as Yevgenni Belov, Galina’s husband Georgi Leonidovich, Gennadi Myakinkov, Lev Sherstnev and, of course, the illegal rezident, Konon Molody, codenamed BEN. Such continuing attention shows that HOLA was probably the KGB’s longest-running agent in Britain, and the fact that from 23 December 1958, when they first met, she was run (at considerable risk) by the illegal rezident in Britain reflects her unique status. MI5’s blatant bid to sideline HOLA’s significance as ‘marginal’ is contemptible, especially in view of the decoration she received, which only previously had been awarded to a spy the calibre of John Cairncross, following his decisive contribution to the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk. On the eve of the greatest tank battle in history Cairncross had supplied the original Enigma intercepts from Bletchley Park that had allowed the Red Army to locate the enemy’s airfields and launch a decisive pre-emptive raid on the Luftwaffe, eliminating its ground-attack aircraft from the theatre. Kursk had proved a turning-point in the war, and Cairncross’s medal had been in recognition of his achievement. According to Mitrokhin, what Mrs Norwood had achieved had been on a par with Cairncross, no minor accomplishment. For MI5 to have dropped TINA in 1965 is certainly odd, but may be understandable in terms of the need then perceived to keep VENONA source a secret. To have shelved her file again, when exposed as HOLA in 1992, is quite incomprehensible. Admittedly she was by then quite elderly, but the country and creed to which she had given her first loyalty by then had ceased to exist, and it would not have taken much research to establish that she remained mentally and physically agile, and certainly had much to offer in historical terms, if necessarily not much of actual current operational value. When challenged on this point MI5 claimed lamely that public interest issues had been taken into account, when such matters are entirely beyond their purview. The other area where MI5 is culpable is in the behaviour of Dame Stella, the Director-General who succeeded Sir Patrick Walker in February 1992. There had been three hundred Mitrokhin leads for MI5 to pursue in Britain, yet she had fumbled the two most important ones, and the scale of her misjudgments deserve close scrutiny. The most obvious, of course, is her failure to tell successive Home Secretaries of the JESSANT project, and it is clear that she neglected to properly brief either Kenneth Clarke, or his successor in 1993, Michael Howard. However, according to her own astonishing testimony before the Intelligence and Security Committee, she ‘cannot remember ever being briefed about Mrs Norwood’. The constitutional issue raised here is hard to exaggerate, because if Michael Howard is to be believed, and he says he was never briefed, then Jack Straw was the first Home Secretary to be told about JESSANT, and he was not informed until 10 December 1988. If, on the other hand, Howard is wrong, and in fact he was ‘made aware of the project’ sometime in March 1996, as is claimed by his Permanent Under-Secretary (PUS), Richard Wilson, who has averred that the publication was mentioned in passing during a meeting with Rimington and Lander, then the situation is little altered because ‘the Director-General of the Security Service did not know about Mrs Norwood and Mr Symonds and she was therefore unable to brief the PUS at the Home Office’. The implication of this was, of course, that ‘when Michael Howard was made aware of the publication project, both he and Richard Wilson were unsighted on Mrs Norwood and any potential controversy within the UK material’. This verdict, contained in the Intelligence and Security Committee’s report, underlines the degree of Dame Stella’s appalling negligence in respect of Mrs Norwood, but Jack Straw revealed in a statement to the House of Commons on 13 September 1999, that as far as I was concerned, he had never heard of me until the previous weekend, when The Times published its scoop! We do know that a decision not to interview Mrs Norwood was taken at relatively low level in 1992 for fear of compromising Mitrokhin’s security or ‘the international handling of leads to still active spies’ which, in plain language, amounts to an admission that MI5 did not have the skill or the imagination to visit her without inadvertently tipping her off to the fact that she had been compromised by Mitrokhin. This explanation is obviously flawed, not least because of the widespread publicity given in September 1992 to the defection of Viktor Oshchenko. What better excuse, if one really had to be given, than to exploit the happy coincidence of both defections and give Oshchenko the credit for fingering HOLA? Such tactics are commonplace in the intelligence community, and in the example of Robert Lipka the FBI had publicly thanked Oleg Kalugin for leading them to him, when he had done no such thing, although his denials had been disbelieved. Indeed, the exercise had worked so well that the FBI had even subpoenaed Kalugin to give evidence for the prosecution against George Trofimoff, another of Mitrokhin’s victims. Spies always dread the knock on the door immediately after a defection has occurred, and it would have been unusual if Mrs Norwood had not been mildly apprehensive following the media coverage given to the defections of Oleg Lyalin in 1971, Oleg Gordievsky in 1985 and Viktor Oschchenko in 1992. All were members of the so-called ‘London Club’ of KGB officers who had served in Britain, and might have been in a position to compromise HOLA. In fact, as we know, none of the three were, but Mrs Norwood could not have been entirely confident on that score, although she must have developed nerves of steel since the arrest, prosecution and imprisonment of Konon Molody who probably could have traded his freedom for her arrest at any time during the three years he was incarcerated in Britain. Clearly the mistaken decision to delay confronting Mrs Norwood was taken at a relatively junior level within the Security Service, and the error was to be compounded the following year when the entire file was shelved, apparently without the knowledge of the Director-General, or so she says. Even the reasons behind this blunder were improper, for such matters are the province of the law officers, not mole hunters. If, as MI5 claimed, they had dropped the case on public interest grounds, they were not entitled to do so. When challenged on this point, MI5 later resorted to a blatant lie, claiming that Mrs Norwood’s ‘offences were committed 50 years ago’ when the correct figure was more like thirty. The role of the counter-intelligence officer is to advise on operational issues, and emphatically not to take other issues into account, especially on such a crucial matter. In my case, it is equally incredible that MI5 waited more than seven years, until 9 September 1999, to enquire if I could be prosecuted, when of course it had always known of the terms of my immunity, granted by the DPP, Sir Tony Hetherington, fifteen years earlier in 1984. The purpose of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee is to provide democratic supervision of MI5, SIS and GCHQ, but with a staff of just a clerk and a single researcher it is heavily dependent on what it is told, and in terms of public confidence, it reports not to Parliament, but to the prime minister, who personally appoints all nine members and decides what should be included in its reports. As an effort to instil confidence, the Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, published in June 2000 was, quite simply, a travesty. Of the two Cabinet Intelligence Co-ordinators who were directly involved in running the JESSANT publication project, only John Alpass gave evidence to the committee, but only in writing and not in person, and Sir Gerald Warner, who held the post between 1991 and 1996, was entirely absent from the proceedings, and not even mentioned by name. A career SIS officer who had retired as McColl’s Deputy Chief in 1990, Warner would have been a key witness, yet he was made available for an interview with the BBC programme The Spying Game, but failed to appear before the parliamentary committee. His successor as Co-ordinator, John Alpass, did offer written evidence to the committee, but declined to appear in person and the Committee never recorded that he had been one of Dame Stella’s two Deputy Directors-General until he switched to the Cabinet Office in 1994. Of the three SIS Chiefs who supervised the Mitrokhin project, only Richard Dearlove, who took over SIS in August 1999, just a fortnight before the book was to be published, gave evidence to the Committee. Admittedly Dearlove had been SIS’s Director of Operations since 1994, and Assistant Chief since 1998, had an intimate knowledge of the JESSANT case, almost from the outset, but he was the only SIS officer to appear. Spedding, who died in June 2001, was succumbing to cancer when the Committee was conducting its inquiry, but McColl was in perfect health and never appeared. Among the other distinguished no-shows was the former Cabinet Secretary, now Lord Butler, and the former Chairman of the JIC, Sir Rodric Braithwaite. As for the senior civil servants, none seem to have been disadvantaged by the Committee’s typically measured criticism of the way they so comprehensively misled their ministers. The PUS at the Home Office, Sir Richard Wilson, subsequently became Butler’s successor as Cabinet Secretary; Wilson’s successor at the Home Office, Sir David Omand, was appointed Director of GCHQ and later served as the Cabinet’s Intelligence Co-ordinator; Dame Stella retired to a directorship of Marks & Spencer, and Sir Stephen Lander retired to head the Law Society’s discredited complaints committee. In short, it was more a performance of musical chairs that anyone being penalised or disadvantaged for gross dereliction of duty. So where did this leave the Intelligence and Security Committee? Its Chairman, Tom King MP, received a peerage when he retired from the Commons at the 2001 General Election, and the Committee headed by his replacement, Ann Taylor MP, contained not a single member with any personal experience of intelligence. The first Tom King knew of Mitrokhin’s existence was on the evening of 11 August 1999 when he met Dearlove informally, upon his appointment as Chief, just two weeks before publication of The Mitrokhin Archive. The Committee’s clerk received a single copy of the uncorrected proofs of the book from Dearlove on 3 September 1999, four months after the BBC had been sent a synopsis, and days after American television channels had acquired bound copies of the finished book. In retrospect, nobody emerges from the Mitrokhin affair with much credit. The BBC and The Times competed against each other to see who could renege on their agreements first; MI5 tried every slippery trick to conceal Dame Stella’s stunning incompetence; Alpass tried to protect his former MI5 colleagues and then caved in to pressure brought by SIS on behalf of the BBC; senior civil servants conspired to keep their ministers in the dark and played Robin Cook off against Jack Straw. Michael Howard complained he had never been told of the project, while Straw insisted he ought to have been informed much earlier; Rimington and Lander retired with the grateful thanks of the nation, Warner received a knighthood, while King and Butler joined their Lordships’ House. All of this would be funny if it was not so tragic, and as I read and reread the The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report I was struck by one of the key items contained in the Intelligence and Security Committee’s central questionnaire, which was never answered, It was to be found in point three out of a total of five principal issues to be addressed: ‘Why was Symonds not taken seriously when he offered his services in 1984/5?’ Obviously the Committee was not completely serious when it posed this question, because it never asked me. © Copyright John Alexander Symonds 2010 Page | |