Treachery

In Treachery, noted intelligence authority and author Chapman Pincher makes a compelling case that the head of Britain's own counterintelligence and security agency was himself a double agent, acting to undermine and imperil the UK and America. Fortified by a mass of new information, he pulls the mask from the MI5 chief, Sir Roger Hollis, and, as a result, years of traitorous action and inaction on his watch come tumbling down. Pincher reveals Hollis' early years, when he attended Oxford University, which 'educated' many agents, and worked in 1930s' Shanghai, a hotbed of soon-to-be spies and Soviet recruiters.

Also for the first time, he exposes how Hollis entered MI5 where, he was a grey presence who rose in the ranks over 27 years while, as Pincher reveals in startling new detail, he was allowing the most notorious Soviet spies of the century to flourish. Myriad intriguing case histories are portrayed here, including that of Lt. Igor Gouzenko, a Red Army cipher clerk who disclosed, in 1945, that there was a mole in MI5 serving Russian intelligence - an exposure which touched off the Cold War.

With a mass of new evidence, some from Russian sources, Pincher tracks that mole and also provides exciting new perspectives on other infamous operatives of our time, including Kim Philby and Klaus Fuchs. Perhaps most explosively, Pincher posits that long after Hollis stepped down, a cover-up was perpetrated at the highest levels, even involving Margaret Thatcher, to conceal the truth forever - a deception which still continues. Treachery warns us to protect our society and institutions from enemy infiltration in the future.

It is a revelatory work that puts twentieth-century politics and war into stunning new relief.