Letters to the Editor

The Case of Roger Hollis

SIR: In his detailed critique of the authorised history of MI5 (compiled by Christopher Andrew and published under the title The Defence of the Realm) Dr Paul Monk (April 2010) drew attention to allegations, in that book, that Peter Wright, the former MI5 officer who retired to Australia, had been suffering from “paranoia”, a delusional abnormality which had induced him to interpret normal events as “conspiracies”. That stigma was extended, in the book, to include all those other officers of MI5 and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) who shared Wright’s suspicions while they were serving on secret official committees set up to investigate the evidence. It also applied to investigative writers, like myself, who have put the evidence on public record and reached similar conclusions. Presumably, it still applies to me because I recorded the evidence in full in my book, Treachery, published as recently as 2009. Now ninety-six, I am prepared to undergo any psychiatric tests which MI5 cares to fund to establish the degree, if any, of my “paranoia”, present or past.

I spent nine long days questioning Wright at his home in Cygnet, Tasmania, in October 1980—only four years after he had left MI5—and am better qualified than Professor Andrew to comment on his mental condition at that time. Both Wright and I had been trained in the scientific discipline and I queried everything he told me. Though Wright had a blood disorder, it was under control and I found his intellect to be razor-sharp and his exceptional memory intact. (In addition to being the defence and scientific reporter for a national newspaper, I was also the medical reporter and had read widely in the psychiatry journals.)

No MI5 officer had ever released such a cascade of revelations before and I knew that they would cause a furore when I published them—as I did in 1981 under the title Their Trade is Treachery. So there was extreme need to ensure that Wright’s statements were accurate. They all proved to be so with one exception which the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was advised to inflate as a hopeful means of belittling the whole book. This related to a previously top-secret document known as the Trend Report.

In 1974, in secrecy, the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, induced Lord Trend, a retired Cabinet Secretary, to re-examine the evidence of Soviet penetration of MI5, with special reference to the Hollis case, which he did, leisurely, calling in witnesses, including Wright. Both Wright and another witness I questioned left Trend believing that he had agreed that there was a prima facie case for suspecting that there had been a spy at high level in MI5 and that the evidence extended from the entry of Hollis in 1938 to his retirement in 1965. That is what Wright told me and that interpretation, which I reported in my book, proved to have been misguided. Though the Trend Report has never been published (an academic who sought its release in 2009 was told that it still remains classified “on grounds of national security”) the authorised history of MI5 revealed that Prime Minister Wilson wrote on his copy of the report, “This is very disturbing stuff, even if concluding in ‘not proven’ verdicts”. A former Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, who read the report in the line of duty, had already confirmed to me that Trend had reported that the suspicions against Hollis could not be proved and, unless and until they could be, he should be given the benefit of the doubt.

Nevertheless, Mrs Thatcher read a prepared statement to Parliament, so worded that it immediately led to the myth that both she and Trend had positively “cleared” Hollis, with MI5 recently re-stating that on its website. The stark fact that everything else which Wright told me and which I published has proved to be true was set aside.

The Peter Wright image has since been bedevilled by that fact that in 1986, when he made many public appearances at and around the Sydney court case about his own book, Spycatcher, his condition had deteriorated so much that, when interviewed or photographed—usually in a big drover’s hat—he seemed a ridiculous figure. Further, to enhance his case, he had begun to manipulate the truth, as was established by an investigation by the UK Metropolitan Police, to which I gave evidence.

During my previous thirty-three years of investigative journalism in Fleet Street I was repeatedly accused of being deluded when stating that certain Labour MPs (including a Minister, John Stonehouse) and some trade union leaders were Soviet agents. The authorised history has now confirmed that I was right and that they were taking Soviet Bloc money. The book, however, omits the case of Tom Driberg, the treacherous former MP and Chairman of the Labour Party who operated in the KGB’s interest (code-named Lepage) but also worked for MI5. Disappointingly, as Dr Monk stressed, the book ignores so many other far more influential Soviet agents who operated and escaped unscathed, through MI5’s incompetence (or worse), that I join him, wholeheartedly, in his demand that Professor Andrew must address these deficiencies in his authorised history (perhaps before it is issued in paperback) before it can serve as a trustworthy record of Soviet espionage.

Chapman Pincher,

Kintbury, Berkshire, UK.

SIR: Like many other veterans and historians, I regret that so many unanswered questions (and distortions both intentional and unintentional) continue to block efforts to write a reliable history of the intelligence and counter-intelligence events of our times. Of course, some of this will inevitably remain until all still-secret files are opened, especially in Moscow. But that won’t be soon, so today’s efforts to bring out what can be known, and keep it in the open, are all the more valuable and laudable. Thus we owe thanks to you at Quadrant for publishing online Paul Monk’s excellent article, which shines light on important and unresolved questions surrounding former MI5 chief Roger Hollis which an “authorized” history had blatantly tried to dismiss out of hand.

I send you my congratulations and regards.

Tennent H. (Pete) Bagley

(former CIA chief of counter-intelligence against the Soviet Bloc and author of Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, 2007)

(via e-mail).

SIR: Paul Monk’s “Christopher Andrew and the Strange Case of Roger Hollis” is a brilliant summation of the serious concerns shared by many historians of intelligence about Andrew’s recently published “authorized history” of MI5.

As a former Time magazine national and foreign correspondent, who has upon occasion tried to teach university students our craft, I am a staunch practitioner of the “old school” of journalism: namely, facts matter. As an intelligence historian and long-time follower of the tumultuous debate over the Hollis allegations, I and many others had great hopes that MI5’s “official historian” could reveal new information from the Security Service’s archives that might shed new light on this contentious case. But, as Monk points out, Andrew deliberately kisses off this important piece of history.

The Hollis debate, coming some fifty years after the events have passed, may seem a trifle esoteric, an exercise best left to us “intel wonks”. But as readers of your journal understand, history does matter—and facts do matter. Unlike several other, less well-informed reviewers, Monk clearly understands this, pointing out that Professor Andrew’s failure to deal with the Hollis case “is, frankly, an insult to serious readers”. I couldn’t agree more.

When Christopher Andrew came to the USA in November to flog his newly published book, he refused requests to meet privately to discuss the Hollis case, saying, “You’ll have to come to Cambridge to talk about it.” When questioned after his public presentation at the Spy Museum in Washington, DC, he again refused to discuss Hollis, answering only with his ad nauseam ad hominem: “Anyone who pursues this case is nothing but a conspiracy theorist.”

It’s obvious that Paul Monk is no conspiracy theorist. Nor is Chapman Pincher, the British intelligence historian whose dogged research and analysis of the case Monk summarises so aptly. Hollis may or may not have been guilty of espionage. But the facts and the circumstantial evidence against him are definitely worth serious debate.

It’s very disappointing—and quite odd—that in all of MI5’s archives there was nothing that its “official historian” could cite in order to add understanding to the Hollis case. My hope is that Monk’s well-informed essay will serve to catalyse a major international discussion of this case, stimulating officials to open their archives and others to contribute what personal knowledge they have of these events. Unless new sources step forward, we may have to wait a millennium or two for the GRU’s files to open before some resolution is found to this persistent mystery.

In the meantime, kudos to the author and to Quadrant for publishing this important essay.

John L. Wilhelm,

Washington, DC, USA.

The Bible’s Place in Our Culture

SIR: Tertiary study has taught me that understanding a culture depends on first-hand engagement with its sources. Whether or not I am then persuaded by the ideas in those sources, I am in a much better position to evaluate them honestly.

Scott Monk’s brief demonstration (April 2010) highlights the influence of the Old and New Testaments’ ideas on Western societies. They have shaped us hugely whether we realise it or not, both in our adoptions of them and in our reactions against them.

Surely we have a responsibility to expose our children to these deeply influential documents, for the sake of cultural self-awareness. We might even call it an exercise in “consciousness-raising”, to borrow one of Richard Dawkins’s favourite terms.

Chris Spark,

Newtown, NSW.

SIR: Thank you for publishing Scott Monk’s perceptive article “Why the National Curriculum Must Include the Bible”. It is ironic that, in an age when “reason” rules, it often seems impossible to have a reasoned discussion about such issues as the place of religion in the public sphere. Monk’s article concurs with my suspicion that as a society we are gnawing at the base from which we have grown. We think we are achieving freedom by removing all knowledge of the Bible and God, when in fact we are causing ourselves unspeakable harm. I believe that understanding where we have come from as a society can only strengthen us to face our future.

Stephen George,

Armidale, NSW.

Preference Voting

SIR: In Quadrant’s March issue Charles Copeman urged the abandonment of preference voting, giving as his reason that it is illogical. I agree, but an even better reason is that it is seriously anti-democratic.

The only reason for using a complicated system like preference voting is to make elections more democratic, but today’s political parties have learnt how to manipulate preference swapping so that although in general the same people get elected they often do so only after having agreed to policies thoroughly rejected by the electorate.

This is how it works. Federally and in all the states we usually find two large parties, Labor and Liberal, more or less evenly supported, plus some quite small parties. The two large parties know that if they can gain the preferences of enough minor parties they will probably win even if the election is close. For their part the minor parties know they are very unlikely ever to get enough votes to win office but they also know they can make a major party adopt some of their policies just to get their preferences. “Above the line voting” simply makes this more certain. So we are electing governments obligated to carry out policies of minor parties that are so unpopular that the great majority of us do not vote for them.

Let me offer three examples from Victoria, where minor party policies determine government actions. Labor easily won the last state election with Greens preferences.

Victoria has a long history of catastrophic bushfires. As a result, over many years, numerous experts and parliamentary committees have regularly recommended extensive fuel reduction of various areas but usually about 400,000 hectares as the best strategy for minimising bushfire damage. Under Labor we have burnt only about a third of the recommended area.

Despite a steady growth in both population and the use of air-conditioners Victoria has not built or even considered building a coal-fired power station since Loy Yang was built in the 1980s. The rest of our power stations are very much older. To deal with the predictable increase in electricity demand we are offered “smart meters” to allow electricity demand to be controlled by price.

Our government refuses to build dams to collect surface water and has even vetoed water authorities from collecting further ground water on “associated environmental grounds” (whatever that means). As a result, much of Victoria has now had severe water restrictions for several years. One Labor Water Minister was fond of saying that “there is no use building dams if it doesn’t rain”, but then offered a subsidy to householders who installed rainwater tanks! (Domestic plastic rainwater tanks cost six times as much as concrete dams per unit of water harvested.) Forced by the recent drought, we are now to get a very much more costly desalination plant.

And all this for nothing. At the last election Labor won fifty-five seats, with thirty of them decided, on my count, by Greens preferences. If the first-past-the-post system had applied, Labor would still have easily been elected to govern, by winning fifty-four seats (again on my count).

So Victoria continues to be exposed to risk to life and property from bushfire, electric power blackouts and severe water shortages with no benefit to anyone except to satisfy the ambitions of a minor party which could not garner more than 10 per cent of the vote.

We should either abandon preference voting in favour of first-past-the-post or find some way to make preference swap deals illegal.

Lindsay Brown,

Grovedale, Vic.

SIR: Charles Copeman is correct in stating that preference voting “is illogical because each voter is compelled to vote for all the candidates contesting the electorate”. However, this is a fault of the instructions given to the elector, not the system. Obviously when only two candidates are left, and the ballot paper has not been used to elect a candidate, there only needs be one candidate of the two remaining given a preference.

It is doubtful that “Voting numbers fell by about 10 per cent in each of the next two federal elections because voters did not like the system” (my emphasis). It is just as likely that voters became dissatisfied with the choices they had, and could not be bothered to vote; if they were faced with a choice of two major party candidates, neither of which they liked, why would they bother to go to the polls?

Mr Copeman’s third point is that, quoting Professor Dummett, “it gives the same weight to some voter’s first choices while never giving any weight at all to some voters’ second or later choices”. Professor Dummett is hardly a suitable choice of advocate, as he supports preferential voting, but in multi-member constituencies. (See the Quota Borda system, which Professor Dummett devised.) In order to give weight to second and third preferences it is necessary for voters to be able to express their preferences—hence “preferential voting”.

It is quite logical “to give low preference candidates a full vote”. The situation is exactly the same as if the voter’s first, or perhaps first and second, candidates had not stood. There is no reason to suppose that if a voter prefers candidates A, B, C and D, but they are eliminated in the count, that he should not use the full value of his vote for candidate E. Such a proposition would be equivalent to stating that votes for candidate E should be considered to be of lower value than a vote for candidate A. As to the proposition that whether A or B is eliminated first could make a difference between candidates C and D as to who goes on to battle E and F, yes, de Borda possibly spent the rest of his life trying to devise a suitable system. But it is probable that every one of the possible systems—which normally require allocating points to candidates based on not only the number of votes received but also their ranking by individual voters—failed because of insuperable objections to each (not the least of which is that they lend themselves to fiddling by parties trying to gain an unfair advantage).

Finally, Mr Copeman does not say what voting system he prefers. One supposes it might be first-past- the-post” (FPP), such as operates in the UK, and in Australia prior to 1918, when preferential voting was adopted for federal elections. One only needs to reflect on the last Australian by-election held under FPP (Swan, WA, October 1918), where the winning candidate had 34.4 per cent of the vote, with two others at 30.4 per cent and 29.6 per cent respectively.

I believe that the worst ever constituency result using the FPP system was in Wales where the winning candidate had approximately 27 per cent of the vote. However, the worst country-wide result was probably the British general election of 2005, where the average number of votes per MP elected was: 26,906 for Labour, 44,373 for Conservative and 96,539 for Liberal Democrats. Conservative support was spread thinly over most of Scotland. They got 15.8 per cent of the vote in Scotland, and only 1.7 per cent of the seats. The Liberal Democrats got 22.6 per cent of the Scottish vote and a similar share of the seats (18.6 per cent) because they had strong support in a few constituencies and minimal support in most of the others. Labour won 35.2 per cent of the total vote cast, but got 55.1 per cent of the seats, giving them power to form a government. Taking into account the low turnout (61 per cent), only one in five of the registered electorate actually voted for the government.

Dudley Horscroft,

Banora Point, NSW.

Installation Art

SIR: I am much obliged to Peter Ryan for his tour of installation art (March 2010). Towards the end of a rather beautiful early autumn day in Hobart, my wife and I visited the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, not with the aim of viewing anything in particular, but simply to see what was on offer.

A video was playing of what seemed to be a CCTV tape of a cleaner at work, or at least that’s what it appeared to our untrained eyes. A gallery worker descended upon us and handed us a leaflet which explained this and the other “exhibits”. It wasn’t a cleaner at all but a work depicting the “currency of climate change and its impact to develop a sustainable art practice”. The artist was “securing his breath in a converted weather balloon as an act of carbon capture”.

Nearby was another video which was a protest at security cameras at Hobart’s parliament building. The artist walked, with video playing, up and down outside the building “on the hour every hour during the course of one night”. Like Peter Ryan, I was pleased to have been given the leaflet, because without it nothing could make any sense.

These artworks, we were informed, “demonstrate an awareness of a new internationalism in contemporary art practice, they create artworks that reference a divergent range of local and global issues including the environment, history, politics, knowledge systems and public spaces”. They also demonstrate that good taxpayer dollars are going west.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was, however, the piece that Peter Ryan had written about. Forcefield, by Julie Gough, was sitting in the middle of the gallery and upon the floor were the pasted pages of Keith Windschuttle’s book. The absurdist nature of the whole experience was then revealed. The patrons filed past and around the exhibit but in the ten minutes or so that we observed, not one foot trod upon one page of the offending manuscript. The audience might have been “invited to walk over the book in order to blacken and erase the text”, but the pages remained pristine and unsullied. It might have been a counter-metaphor or it might have represented the good grounding gallery audiences have had in not touching exhibits, but either way it seemed to cry out to the artist, “You are wasting your time”.

William Briggs,

Kingston Beach, Tas.

Rapture, Rapture!

SIR: In my article about W.S. Gilbert (April 2010) I advised Quadrant readers who want to hear the operas on CD to buy the D’Oyly Carte recordings of the 1940s and 1950s. This advice still stands, except for The Yeomen of the Guard.

There is nothing wrong with the performance except that it omits one of the great songs of the canon, “Rapture, Rapture!” The fact that Gilbert also seems to have cut it sometimes is no excuse; he should not have done. I advise you to buy instead, as I did, the performance where Malcolm Sargent conducts the Pro Arte Orchestra with the Glyndebourne Opera Chorus and Sir Geraint Evans in the role of Jack Point. This is very acceptable. There is also a 1930s recording coupled with Patience from the same period, which comes highly recommended if not very hi-fi.

John Whitworth,

Canterbury, Kent, UK.

Jack the Ripper

SIR: I was most impressed by the insightful contribution of Michael Connor (March 2010) on Charles Cross and the Jack the Ripper murders. I believe that Connor here makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of Ripper studies. Cross may well be the best new named suspect to have emerged in recent years whose name can stand alongside Beadle and Macpherson’s new suspect W.H. Bury. who left the East End shortly after the Kelly murder and then murdered and mutilated his wife in Dundee.

It appears that the Polly Nichols murder has become the “forgotten” murder, hence the significance of Connor’s contribution. The online Jack the Ripper Casebook Forum shows the following number of postings: regarding the Nichols murder 459; regarding Chapman 881; regarding Stride 5258; regarding Eddowes 2131; and regarding Kelly 8124. Mary Jane Kelly has been a source of unending fascination for many largely because she was twenty-five, attractive, in complex relationships with the two Joes (Barnett and Fleming), and strangely gravitated from the West End to the East End several years before the murder.

The two most highly regarded Ripper books, those by Begg and Sugden, as Connor points out, briefly mention Cross’s witness statement, and one of these books mentions the time of his alleged departure from his house. However, neither book unearths Cross’s real name (was the chosen name Cross consistent with religious mania?) and both take his witness statement at face value. Connor’s contribution is insightful and takes study in the field one step further.

Kieran James,

University of Southern Queensland,

Toowoomba, Qld.

SIR: Commendations to Michael Connor for reminding us of Jack the Ripper’s enduring role as a cultural blotter for each age. Historians are in agreement that no new historical evidence is likely to be forthcoming, and the answer must be sought elsewhere. Forensic psychology (ignoring the sensational claims of profiling) can provide assistance.

The Ripper was a marauding killer, rather than a commuter; that is, he was locally-based, rather than an outsider travelling into the area. The reason is that Whitechapel, at the time one of the most densely populated areas on earth, was a maze of alleyways, lanes, tunnels, passages and enclosed paths. It required an insider’s knowledge to make a rapid escape and then, as was likely, to circle back and mingle with onlookers to gain further excitement from admiring his work.

The Ripper had a well defined modus operandi. He would kill late on Friday and Saturday night. His victims, with one exception, were middle-aged shop-worn street prostitutes. He had a try-out, after the first killing refining his technique to slit the throat as soon as possible to avoid further struggle and drain blood, then savagely slash the genital and pelvic areas, followed by the breasts and face, and, when time permitted, evisceration. In doing so he was displaying overkill frenzy with picqueurism, a term for the sadistic inflicting of wounds by multiple stabbing. The victim’s body would be propped up in a lewd position with legs splayed, to indicate the killer’s contempt and to shock onlookers.

The Ripper selected street prostitutes, as opposed to brothel workers, indicating a special hatred for what they did as free agents, rather than being under the control of a pimp. This is characteristic of mission killing, where the killer makes a special group the target for his rage.

The one exception among the victims was Mary Jane Kelly, the Ripper’s last known victim. She was younger (twenty-five), more attractive, had worked in a French brothel and had her own apartment. It was here that she was killed, leaving the Ripper with several hours to work on the body. By the time it was found, it was almost eviscerated, with extensive genital and facial mutilation, the heart was burned in the hearth, nose and ears severed, and fingers with rings removed. This was the apogee of the Ripper’s killing frenzy.

David Canter’s spatial profiling has shown that the locations of serial crimes such as murder or rape can be plotted to show the likely base of the offender. If this is applied to the Ripper murders, two interesting facts emerge. First, the killer’s home base was in Plumbers Row, a Whitehall street with access to all the murder zones. It also showed the killer’s proximity to the local mike, the Jewish ritual bath house.

What does this indicate? The killer was likely to be a Jewish inhabitant of Whitehall, where work in tailoring, butchery or barbering would give him skill with knives. He would have a background of petty crime and violence. The killings started during a crisis. Noting the well-established association of prostitute murder by men infected with syphilis, it is likely that such an episode precipitated the murders.

Historian Charles van Onselen has revealed an important parallel with the killer’s modus operandi. In the Book of Ezekiel, the prostitutes Oholah and Oholibah (representing Judea and Babylon), after engaging in lewd behaviour, were punished according to ancient Jewish ritual. Their breasts were cut off, the genitals mutilated, nose and ears severed, and fingers and jewellery excised. The parallel with the Ripper victims is impossible to ignore, making sense of the association with the ritual baths. In the Ripper’s mind, street prostitutes were associated with pollution, infection and degradation. He had been inculcated from an early age with Jewish mythology and legend, and the savage Mesopotamian mutilation fused in his mind with an irresistible mission to eradicate the carriers of impurity.

Michael Connor has his chosen Ripper; I have mine—it is the psychopath, sex slaver and organised crime figure Joseph Lis, mostly known as Joe Silver, magnificently described in Charles van Onselen’s book The Fox and the Flies.

One thing everyone can sure of: every generation will try to reinterpret the Ripper murders.

Robert M. Kaplan,

Graduate School of Medicine,

University of Wollongong,

Wollongong, NSW.

The Trinity

SIR: Michael Giffin presents a glowing theological endorsement of The Shack in his book review (March 2010). In so doing, Mr Giffin, a priest in the Sydney diocese of the Anglican Church, has misrepresented orthodox Christian doctrine on the Trinity and perhaps takes a thinly disguised swipe at his own diocese. In the same issue of Quadrant, C.A.R. Hills includes the doctrine of the Trinity as one of four “absolutely essential” doctrines. I believe, as would most other Christians, that the doctrine of the Trinity is vital for a proper understanding of the God of Christianity.

Mr Giffin relates how the book “describes the three Persons of the Trinity and how they relate to each other, as loving equals, none higher or lower than the other”. He concludes that “[n]othing in The Shack is contrary to the Athanasian Creed” but that “some denominations, and some dioceses within denominations, teach subordinationism … both relationally and in their nature and being”. Whilst ontological subordination is almost universally rejected, Mr Giffin’s statement trips over a hot and contentious contemporary debate about whether relational subordination is true Christian doctrine. He comes down on the side of it being a heresy.

However, a long line of theologians, both past and present, support relational subordination. Some of his own diocese’s key theologians hold this view, and it is widely taught in the diocese. Far from their position being “heterodox”, a wide and careful reading of Athanasius (early Eastern Church, and not the author of the Athanasian Creed), Augustine (early Western Church), early Reformed creeds and contemporary theologians such as Karl Rahner (Catholic) and Karl Barth (Swiss Reformed) would lead one to the conclusion that relational (but not ontological) subordination is true Trinitarian doctrine.

As Quadrant is not a theological publication, I will not labour its readers with further details. However, the interested reader might like to read an article which explores these theologians’ views on the Trinity and its implications: “Use and Abuse of the Fathers and the Bible in Trinitarian Theology”, by Rev. Dr Robert Doyle, Briefing, April 2004 (www.matthiasmedia.com.au/briefing/longing/5002).

Imanuel Costigan

(via e-mail).

Robert Hughes

SIR: Michael Baume writes (March 2010) that I dismissed Robert Hughes as a Lilliputian Kenneth Clark. It wasn’t quite so de haut en bas: (from memory) “No Ruskin, he is a Lilliputian Kenneth Clark, who is perhaps his unconscious paragon …”

Despite the grating English aristocratic hauteur, Clark was undoubtedly a gifted populariser, the Simon Schama of his day; so also in his agent provocateur (or was it just enfant terrible?) way, it can’t be denied, was Hughes.

The real debatable historical question was, was there anything more substantial and enduring? Was he a great critic? I don’t think the jury’s still out on that one.

G.R. Lansell

(via e-mail).