Sir Roger Henry Hollis KBE CB (2 December 1905 – 26 October 1973) was a British intelligence officer who served with MI5 from 1938 to 1965.

Some commentators, including the journalist Chapman Pincher and intelligence officer Peter Wright, suggested that Hollis was a Soviet agent.

Many departments of MI5, including F Division, moved from London to Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, during World War II, due to threat of bombing.

[8] After Kim Philby's flight from Beirut to Moscow in 1963, rumours began to circulate that Hollis had alerted him to his impending arrest.

Peter Wright, Arthur S. Martin, Jane Sissmore and others became convinced that either Hollis or his deputy, Graham Mitchell, could be the only ones responsible, eventually confiding their suspicions to Dick White, director general of MI6.

[10] In 1984, investigative journalist Chapman Pincher published Too Secret Too Long, a book which examined the early life of Hollis and his MI5 career drawing upon new sources and upon many interviews with retired intelligence personnel.

Evidence has been advanced to support these assertions by Pincher in his book, Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain, which is devoted to positing that Hollis was "Elli", the highly placed mole within MI5 identified by Igor Gouzenko, and operating as a Soviet agent from the 1940s until retiring from MI5.

[12] In its obituary of Pincher, The Times discredited the journalist's conspiracy theory ("Paranoia Hollisiensis") and specified that Hollis had not been a Soviet spy.

Wright retired in January 1976, upon reaching age 60 and, by his own account, was enraged at being denied a pension for his 30 years of service, on highly legalistic and technical grounds.

Despite attempts by Margaret Thatcher's government to suppress the publication and distribution of Spycatcher, it was finally published in 1987 and eventually sold over two million copies around the world.

[15] The accuracy of various allegations made in the book by Wright was questioned in a review of Spycatcher published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, an in-house think tank for the CIA.

While admitting (on page 42) that the book included "factual data", the document stated that it was also "filled with [unspecified] errors, exaggerations, bogus ideas, and self-inflation".

The review added (on page 45) that "Gen. Oleg Kalugin, former Chief of Counterintelligence" had confirmed to the author that Hollis had not worked for the KGB.

In her 2001 autobiography, Christine Keeler (John Profumo's mistress), alleged, without supporting evidence, that Hollis and Stephen Ward were part of a spy ring with Sir Anthony Blunt.

[20] He believes Andrew dismisses Wright's claims almost ad hominem but fails to address the specific points made by Pincher in his final (2009) book on the subject.

This is supposedly disproved by KGB archives – Long is thought to be RALPH – and solely supported by the later questioned testimony of Gordievsky.

"[21] In the 2009 ITV programme, Inside MI5: The Real Spooks, Oleg Gordievsky recounted how he saw the head of the British section of the KGB expressing surprise at the allegations that he read in a British newspaper about Hollis being a KGB agent, saying "Why is it they are speaking about Roger Hollis, such nonsense, can't understand it, it must be some special English trick directed against us.

"[25] Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB head of station in London who defected to Britain in 1985, had said that Hollis was innocent and said of Wright's book, "there was a lot of fantasy in it and malicious speculation".