The letters of Hollis and Colville

WINSTON CHURCHILL banned an electronics expert from Downing Street after an MI5 warning that Soviet spies might use him to bug the prime ministerial hearing aid.

Churchill, then nearing his eighties, had an elaborate desktop loudspeaker system installed at No 10 during his second premiership in the early 1950s.

Files released at the National Archives in Kew show that Roger Hollis, then deputy director-general of MI5, warned Downing Street about the risk of continuing to employ Alexander Poliakoff, a Russian émigré, to service the unit.

The warning over Poliakoff, whose son Stephen is one of Britain’s best known dramatists with hits such as Shooting the Past, occurred in 1953, the year after the Americans had found a bug in the beak of the eagle in the great seal of the United States at their Moscow embassy. They later found another 40; 14 more were found at the British embassy.

Stephen Poliakoff said he had had “no idea” about his father being barred from Downing Street, adding: “He was a complete Tory believer in the Establishment.”

But Hollis’s note warns Alexander had had contact with the Soviet embassy. Sweeps of the hearing aid had found no bugs, but employing Poliakoff and his father, Joseph, “constitutes a risk”, he said.

John Colville, the prime minister’s private secretary, wrote back to Hollis: “Mr Churchill agrees that in the circumstances Mr Poliakoff must not be allowed here any more.”

The Poliakoffs were Jews who fled Russia after the revolution and ran a small electronics company, Multitone, in Mayfair.

But although the Poliakoffs had fled communism, MI5 was still suspicious of them. Hollis’s letter explains that in the 1920s they had been technical advisers to Arcos, the Russian state trading company in London that had been shown to be a front for espionage. They had also supplied equipment to the Russian trade delegation in London in 1946 and had employed two known communists during the war.

Hollis, who was later suspected of being a Soviet agent, failed to mention that the Poliakoffs and their 700 staff had a distinguished war record. He concluded: “The technical examination which has been made in this case seems to show that Poliakoff has made no improper use of the opportunities he has had in servicing the equipment.”

Alexander Poliakoff died in 1996, aged 85. His firm is now part of the Hong Kong-based Champion Technology.

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