Graham Russell Mitchell

Graham Mitchell
Born	Graham Russell Mitchell (1905-11-04)4 November 1905 Kenilworth, Warwickshire
Died	Sherington, Buckinghamshire
Nationality	British
Other names	Graham Russell Mitchell
Occupation	MI5 Security Service officer and deputy director general
Spouse(s)	Eleonora Patricia Robertson

Graham Russell Mitchell OBE, CB (1905 – 1984), was the deputy director general of MI5, the British Security Service, between 1956 and 1963. In 1963 Roger Hollis, the MI5 director general, authorised the secret investigation of Mitchell following suspicions within the Secret Intelligence Service MI6 that he was a Soviet agent. It is now thought unlikely that he ever was a "mole".

Personal life

Graham Mitchell, the eldest child of Alfred Sherrington Mitchell, a captain in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and Sibyl Gemma Mitchell, née Heathcote, was born on 4 November 1905 in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. He attended Winchester College and Magdalen College, Oxford to read politics, philosophy, and economics. As a child he had poliomyelitis which left him with a pronounced limp but he nevertheless went on to become an accomplished golfer and he sailed for Oxford University. In lawn tennis he was a partner in the men's doubles winning team of the Queen's Club Championships in 1930. He represented Great Britain at correspondence chess and was at one time ranked fifth in the world. In 1934 he married Eleonora Patricia Robertson (1909 – 1993), daughter of James Marshall Robertson, and the couple had two children.

After graduation in 1927 Mitchell was briefly a journalist for the Illustrated London News in 1935 before joining the research department of Conservative Central Office, led by Sir Joseph Ball. The "research department" was actually an intelligence service which had infiltrated Labour Party Headquarters. Unfit for military service because of his polio, he joined the MI5 in November 1939. Nigel West suggests that it was Ball's influence that enabled him to be accepted into that organisation – Ball himself had been in MI5 until 1927 and was later appointed to the highly secret home defence security executive.

He was awarded the OBE in 1951 and Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1957. Long after his early retirement from MI5, Mitchell died on 19 November 1984.

MI5 officer

Mitchell's was a member of F division which was for monitoring subversion and was headed by Roger Hollis. His subsection's role was to maintain surveillance on suspected Nazi sympathisers and right-wing nationalist organisations such as the British Union of Fascists as well as German and Austrian political bodies. Mitchell assisted Francis Aiken-Sneath in investigating Sir Oswald Mosley's activities and organising the case for his wartime detention.

After the war Mitchell became director of F division and in 1952 moved to become head of D division (counter-espionage). In May 1951 the diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had defected to Moscow and Mitchell led the MI5 team investigating what Soviet penetration there might have been in Britain's intelligence services. He had a major role in introducing "positive vetting" for civil servants with access to highly classified information. Mitchell was the principal author of the 1955 white paper concerning the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. This document made no mention of Kim Philby, and led to Harold Macmillan exonerating Philby after he had been named in the House of Commons. Chapman Pincher, the investigative journalist specialising in the intelligence services, wrote of the paper "it was strewn with statements now proven to be false – as they were known to be inside MI5 at the time".

Deputy director general of MI5 and the Fluency investigation

In 1956 Roger Hollis became director general of MI5 and he appointed Mitchell to be his deputy. MI5's performance in counterespionage had been notably unsuccessful in the 1950s – its own investigations had led to only one spy being caught and no Soviet defectors had been recruited – and this was in stark contrast to its highly effective performance during the war. This led to suspicions within the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), SIS, that MI5 had become infiltrated by a Soviet "mole" – suspicion fell on both Hollis and Mitchell although any evidence was highly circumstantial. It seemed highly likely that Kim Philby, in SIS at the time of the Burgess–Maclean defection, had been tipped off that he was about to be confronted with conclusive evidence of his treachery and this led to his decampment from Beirut to Moscow in 1962. A complicating factor was that Sir Dick White had been director general of MI5 between 1953 and 1956 before he became director general of SIS in 1956.

With White's authority, Arthur Martin approached Hollis in early 1963 to get permission to investigate the possible tip-off without naming any suspects. Hollis agreed to this if White also approved. Martin then told White that Mitchell and Hollis himself were the main suspects. White contacted Hollis but only to mention Mitchell as a suspect and the molehunt, codenamed fluency, was officially started.

In September 1963 Mitchell unexpectedly took early retirement but he was later interrogated and seemingly was able to answer the charges successfully. The main suspicion then fell on Hollis and, although the matter has never been completely resolved, Christopher Andrew in his Authorised History of MI5 comes to a firm conclusion that neither were traitors.

Public discussion about investigations into Hollis and Mitchell

In 1975 Lord Burke Trend, the former Cabinet Secretary, was asked by the government to review the internal fluency investigation – his inquiry's report has never been published. Andrew states that Harold Wilson wrote on Trend's review of the Hollis and Mitchell cases "This is very disturbing stuff, even if concluding in 'not proven' verdicts". In 1981 Chapman Pincher claimed in Their Trade is Treachery that the inquiry had cleared Mitchell and had concluded that Hollis was the "likeliest suspect". On the day of publication Margaret Thatcher made a statement in the House of Commons disclaiming Pincher, not mentioning Mitchell, but saying of Hollis that while the investigation "did not conclusively prove his innocence" that "Lord Trend, with whom I have discussed the matter, agreed with those who, although it was impossible to prove the negative, concluded that Sir Roger Hollis had not been an agent of the Russian intelligence service".

Peter Wright, a former senior MI5 officer involved in the internal investigation, published Spycatcher in 1987 in which he repeated the claims against Hollis and gave considerable details about the investigations into both Hollis and Mitchell. Wright's suspicions had originally centred on Mitchell but eventually the evidence against Hollis appeared much stronger.

The 2014 MI5 website addresses the matter specifically stating that the original investigation lasted from 1964 to 1971 but "came to no firm conclusions" and that Trend's report concluded "there was no evidence to show that either Hollis or Mitchell had been Soviet agents". It continues that there was a 1988 internal review which concluded the original case was "so insubstantial that it should not have been pursued".

Even in 2011 Pincher still considered that Hollis was a Soviet agent but that the case against Mitchell was "trivial". However, in his 1987 book Molehunt Nigel West had considered that either Hollis or Mitchell were moles but that Mitchell was the more likely candidate. That opinion has been challenged and, in his brief 2004 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography biography of Mitchell, West does not make such a suggestion against him.

References

Works cited

• (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

Further reading

• https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5-history.html History of MI5 on its own website
• https://www.sis.gov.uk/our-history.html History of SIS on its website
• http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/intelligence-records.htm Guide to intelligence and security services records at the National Archives
  • http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C280 Security Service records at the National Archives
  • http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C143 Secret Intelligence Service records at National Archives
• http://spartacus-educational.com/SSmitchell.htm Graham Mitchell biography at Spartacus Educational