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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Over the past fifty years, Nigel West has been involved in almost every espionage-related investigation, breakthrough or revelation that you can think of. His molehunts have led to the unmasking of spies within MI5, MI6 and the CIA and the identification of numerous others – some of whom were crucial to the Allied victory in the Second World War and would have died without any public recognition if not for him. His first encounter with the intelligence community was a lecture given at his school by John le Carré, the guest of a Benedictine monk who had recently retired from MI6. Later, West worked as a researcher for SOE agent Ronnie Seth, who was sentenced to death by the Nazis after being captured during Operation blunderhead, and exposed two of the Cambridge spies recruited by Anthony Blunt. For the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings, West traced the double agent codenamed garbo and brought him to London so he could be decorated at Buckingham Palace. As action-packed as the lives of the spies he has written about, this is the story of the most enthralling and significant post-war intelligence revelations as told by Britain's most authoritative writer on espionage and the secret services.
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iii
Contents
Introduction
By the age of fourteen, in 1965, I had acquired a reasonably comprehensive understanding of the role and structure of the Security Service, MI5, and some knowledge of its sister organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. This was unusual in those days, but there were two reasons for my interest. Firstly, in August 1960, my family had been drawn reluctantly and unexpectedly into what became known subsequently as the Profumo affair. My father, who had sat in the Commons since October 1959, had been appointed John ‘Jack’ Profumo’s parliamentary private secretary (PPS) when Harold Macmillan had promoted him to Secretary of State for War from the post of Minister of State in the Foreign Office. Profumo and his wife Valerie Hobson were among my parents’ closest friends, and they often brought their two boys, Mark Havelock-Allan and his half-brother David Profumo, to stay at our holiday home in Bembridge, on the Isle of Wight. Indeed, on the fateful day in August 1961 when Profumo broke off his short-lived affair with Christine Keeler, he promptly caught a train from Waterloo and joined us on the Isle of Wight. At that time, my parents had no viiiknowledge of the brief relationship, although they had met Keeler, who had accompanied Claus von Bülow to one of their parties.
Thereafter, as rumours of Profumo’s indiscretion circulated in Westminster, my father became increasingly preoccupied by what he regarded as unjustified speculation, even persecution, by Fleet Street, fuelled by the personal animus of a spiteful political opponent, George Wigg MP. A former wartime colonel in the Educational Corps who had represented himself to the Labour Party as a great expert on army matters, Wigg always participated in the army debates, and in 1961, when Iraq threatened to invade Kuwait, Wigg had advised the Labour Party that Britain would be powerless to honour our defence treaty and mount an effective defence of the tiny, oil-rich, pro-British Gulf state. Being in opposition, he was unaware of the detailed contingency plans that had been drawn up at the War Office and knew nothing of the strategy of deterrence that had been adopted by Cabinet. Both infantry and artillery were flown into Kuwait from Bahrain, and a squadron of tanks had been shipped from Aden, bolstered by an airborne brigade sent direct from Britain. These measures proved very effective and achieved the desired result in Baghdad, where they hurriedly decided against an invasion. In his memoirs, Ringside Seat, my father explained Wigg’s hostility towards Profumo:
All continued to go well, but unfortunately two clueless servicemen in a truck ignored signs to keep away from the frontier and drove straight into Iraq, where they were arrested and accused of spying, prompting the inevitable Parliamentary Questions. My task, as Jack’s PPS, was to anticipate the likely supplementary ixquestions that would follow the main question: I expected that the worst would be something like, ‘How well were these men trained?’ In the event the supplementary question asked was, ‘What were their orders?’ and in reply Jack improvised, ‘If they got lost they should return to their units,’ but it took Wigg a full two minutes to see the joke.
The success of the Kuwait operation left George Wigg looking foolish as his predictions had not been realised. On the contrary, the War Office had taken the crisis in its stride, and had deterred aggression with considerable professionalism. Nevertheless, Wigg had demanded a debate, to insist that although the army had reached Kuwait just in time, it would not have been able to mount an effective defence against an Iraqi invasion. This left Jack an opportunity to be conciliatory to Wigg, and he agreed to a debate, but instead the wretched Opposition back-bencher was comprehensively savaged by Jack’s junior minister, James Ramsden.
Wigg’s technique had been to ingratiate himself with ministers by offering them excellent racing tips, and he believed he was very popular, although he was the only person who thought this. Nevertheless, he had received a leaked medical report revealing some dehydration among the troops despatched from England, and he had attempted to use this document to show that the men were unfit for combat. Ramsden contradicted Wigg on every point, making him look like a bad loser, thereby leaving Wigg convinced he had been let down badly by Jack.
Although we had regarded this as one of the occupational hazards of politics, where personalities are bruised in the x rough-and-tumble of Parliamentary debate, Jack and I were unaware that these minor victories had been achieved at a price which would be exacted later.1
When the Secretary of State finally confessed to his wife, over the Whitsun weekend in Venice, he also broke the news to my father, ever his faithful supporter. As it turned out, Profumo had tragically misinterpreted an encounter with the Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook, who had conveyed a request from MI5 for his assistance in entrapping the Soviet assistant naval attaché Eugene Ivanov. Profumo had thought Brook was warning him off Keeler and her companion Stephen Ward, and on the assumption that his love life had come to MI5’s attention, promptly penned a short but unambiguous note to Keeler, which she later sold to the News of the World.
For years thereafter, my father was deeply troubled by what he perceived as MI5’s interference in the political arena but grateful that his friend had never disclosed the full truth to him or sought his advice, which would have placed him in a difficult position. Mistakenly, he remained convinced, as did Profumo, that the Security Service had deployed Brook to deliver a subtle warning, but in August 1961, MI5 was only interested in persuading Ivanov to defect. It was a scheme that miscarried spectacularly.
It would take the unworldly Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, to unravel the intricacies of the Profumo saga, but as I read our well-thumbed copy of his report in the autumn of 1963, I was intrigued to learn that the Security Service had no legal powers, that it operated in the never-never land of the royal prerogative and that Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe’s 1952 directive, which had xiset out the organisation’s responsibilities and duties, had itself remained secret until Denning disclosed its existence.
The second reason for my fascination with intelligence was largely due to a Benedictine monk named Henry Coombe-Tennant, who had recently retired from MI6 and in 1961 had taken holy orders. Known by his monastic name, Dom Joseph, he had held a select group of boys enthralled as he regaled them with his adventures as an evading prisoner of war (PoW). As a Welsh Guards officer, he had been captured at Boulogne in May 1940 and sent to a camp at Warburg, Westphalia but had escaped in August 1942, with thirty other prisoners, by sabotaging the camp’s fence lights and then scaling the wire with ladders built from duckboards. He spent two months walking to the Dutch border where he made contact with the local resistance and the comet line, an escape network in occupied Europe. He was escorted across the Pyrenees to Spain and then was repatriated from Gibraltar.
Decorated with the Military Cross by King George VI, and promoted to the rank of major, Coombe-Tennant had joined Special Operations Executive’s (SOE) planning staff with a very personal understanding of conditions in Nazi-occupied Europe. Soon after D-Day, having volunteered to join Operation jedburgh team andrew, he was parachuted into the Belgian Ardennes in August 1944 and remained behind enemy lines for the next three months, liaising with the local Maquis circuit, codenamed citronelle, and harassing the enemy.
After the war, he returned to his regiment to be posted to Palestine and then joined MI6, which sent him first to The Hague and then to Baghdad in 1959, where he converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1961, he took early retirement from MI6 to be ordained xiias a priest and join the Benedictine order, and he fulfilled part of his vocation by running the school’s shooting club. At that time, it was considered entirely reasonable for the boys who possessed shotguns to bring them to school and take the opportunity to participate in weekly rough shoots on the monastery’s extensive estate during the Michaelmas term.
Coombe-Tennant’s best friend in MI6 had been David Cornwell, now better known as the novelist John le Carré, who would occasionally drop in at the school on Friday afternoons as he drove from his house in Hampstead to his cliff-top home, Tregiffian Cottage, near Land’s End. Cornwell had resigned from MI6 in 1965 following the unexpected success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his cover role at the Hamburg consulate being impossible to sustain after his true identity had been revealed in the Atticus column of the Sunday Times.2 Apparently, his chief, Sir Dick White, had offered him an alternative job but on the condition that he abandon his writing career, which was attracting so much attention. Cornwell opted for an author’s life, and his resignation was accepted.
Cornwell was cordially disliked by most of his MI6 colleagues, and a tempestuous affair in Germany with the wife of an MI5 officer ensured that he had few friends in the Security Service, an organisation which has always prided itself on being very ‘clubbable’. Cornwell’s first experience of espionage had been his recruitment as an agent long before he went to Oxford in 1952. There he had spied on his fellow students at Lincoln College. Six years later, he made the unusual transition from MI5 agent to MI5 officer and then moved to MI6 in 1960. While Cornwell boasted of his brief time in MI6, he hated being reminded of his earlier career in the Security xiiiService. Indeed, when I was commissioned by Faber & Faber in 1992 to assemble an anthology, The Faber Book of Espionage, I asked Cornwell’s permission to reproduce an extract from A Small Town in Germany.3 He insisted on inspecting the biographical entry I had drafted. When he had read it, he telephoned me to ask my source for the assertion that he had worked in MI5’s office in the Exhibition Road under Jack Bingham before he had transferred to MI6. I had also mentioned that his mentor Bingham had been the model for the spymaster in his books, George Smiley, although Smiley demonstrably had not shared ‘Black Jack’s’ reputation as a lothario.
‘Who told you that?’ he demanded.
‘Black Jack,’ I replied.
After a long pause… ‘Well… he shouldn’t have.’
Cornwell conceded he had based Smiley on Bingham but refused me permission to quote from any of his books… ever!
Cornwell’s talks to Coombe-Tennant’s group of boys were held in private but undoubtedly influenced several of the attendees who later chose the clandestine world for their future. One of those was the Islamic scholar Sir Mark Allen who headed the school’s falconry club, while others, such as Arthur Denaro, distinguished themselves in the 22nd Special Air Service regiment.
While still at university, I retained my interest in intelligence literature, limited as it was, and worked part-time as a researcher for two well-established authors, both with considerable experience of covert operations. The first, Donald McCormick, had served in the wartime Naval Intelligence Division before joining the Sunday Times. Over his long career, he wrote more than a dozen non-fiction books on intelligence, including The Israeli Secret Service in 1977 and a biography of Sir Maurice Oldfield in 1985.4 The other was xivthe delightful Ronnie Seth. With only minimal training, Seth had been transferred from the Royal Air Force to a section of SOE that proposed to exploit his pre-war knowledge of Estonia, where he had worked briefly as a university lecturer. In October 1942, Seth, codenamed blunderhead, had parachuted into Silesia, and within forty-eight hours he had been betrayed to the Gestapo.5 Sentenced to death, Seth escaped the gallows and experienced many adventures until he emerged in Paris in August 1944 wearing a Luftwaffe uniform, much to SOE’s embarrassment.
Seth is the author of more than two dozen books on the subject of espionage, and in 1952 he completed his memoirs, A Spy Has No Friends.6 This account, which described a harrowing escape from the gallows, a spell in a German PoW camp and even some service as a Luftwaffe officer in Paris, did not entirely conform with the official view taken upon his repatriation that he was a candidate for a court martial. While Seth protested that he was entitled to his back pay for the two years he endured in enemy hands, the British authorities assessed conflicting reports of a Briton matching Seth’s description who had acted as a ‘stool-pigeon’ (informant) for the Germans in various different PoW camps.
Whatever the relative accuracy of Seth’s recollections, he was a gifted writer who had led an extraordinary life. Characteristically, when the War Office balked at paying him the money he was owed, he lobbied Parliament and won his case. His encounter with SOE had left him with permanent poor health and a robust scepticism of what purported to be Whitehall’s collective wisdom.
When I met Seth, he had been living in Malta for many years, and although he enjoyed the climate, which was essential for his health, he missed many of the facilities in the UK that had enabled xvhim to become one of the most prolific authors of his generation. Based in Mdina, he was surrounded by a loyal group of expatriates, which included some MI5 retirees.
Among them was Joan Miller, who had been recruited to join MI5 by Maxwell Knight, a legendary agent-runner who had been responsible for penetrating the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It had been his key mole, Olga Gray, whom he had cultivated and placed in the British-Soviet Friendship Society, in the hope she would pick up some useful information. In fact, Olga had succeeded better than anyone could have hoped for and had become the confidante of Percy Glading, a senior CPGB activist and the party’s former National Organiser. He was also at the centre of an espionage ring that was stealing secrets from the Royal Arsenal, and it was evidence from Olga, as a surprise prosecution witness identified only as ‘Miss X’, that ensured Glading’s conviction and imprisonment in 1938. The coup proved the efficacy of planting long-term moles into target organisations, and Knight, known as the most mysterious man in MI5, attempted to repeat the exercise with Tom Driberg (later chairman of the Labour Party), whom he placed in the Young Communist League, and Joan Miller, who was dispatched to report on suspected fascist Archibald Ramsay MP and his connections to two shadowy pro-Nazi groups, The Link and the Right Club.
Seth also ran a sideline, selling his patented penis-enlarger by mail order under the name ‘Dr Robert Chartham’. The sales were made through advertisements placed in British soft-porn magazines, and one of my duties as Seth’s researcher was to visit kiosks in Victoria Station and buy the relevant titles, wrap them in plain paper and post them to Malta, where at that time the government xvienforced a strict ban on the importation of such dubious material. Thus, as well as undertaking routine research assignments for Seth, I was obliged to make a fortnightly tour of the top shelves in the station bookstalls so my employer could be sure his expensive advertisements had been published properly.
Thus, a combination of influences from Jack Profumo, Henry Coombe-Tennant, Donald McCormick and Ronnie Seth would act to push my career in one particular direction.
343NOTES
1Ringside Seat by James Allason (London: Timewell Press, 2007)
2The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré (London: Penguin, 1963)
3The Faber Book of Espionage edited by Nigel West (London: Faber & Faber, 1993); A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré (London: Heinemann, 1968)
4The Israeli Secret Service by Richard Deacon (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977); ‘C’: A Biography of Sir Maurice Oldfield by Richard Deacon (London: Macdonald, 1985)
5Operation Blunderhead by David Gordon Kirby (London: The History Press, 2015)
6A Spy Has No Friends by Ronald Seth (London: Andre Deutsch, 1952)
Chapter I
The Venlo Incident
The irresistible combination of Cornwell and Coombe-Tennant triggered a deep-rooted fascination for espionage in me, but the school library had virtually nothing on the subject, apart from one memoir, The Venlo Incident, in which the author, Captain Sigismund Payne Best, described his experience as a British intelligence officer who, accompanied by his colleague Major Richard Stevens, had been abducted from the Dutch side of the frontier with Germany in November 1939.1 He had spent the next five and a half years in concentration camps but had survived the experience.
As was the convention at that time, Best mentioned very few real names and concealed the true identities of his fellow professionals. However, according to Coombe-Tennant, Best’s book was unique because no other wartime MI6 officer had ever written about their experiences. Released in 1950, The Venlo Incident appeared to break all the rules. But what had motivated Best to publish, and how had he got away with breaking one of the great taboos of the era? According to Coombe-Tennant, Best felt that he had been badly treated upon his return to England and had used the threat of publication as leverage against then MI6 chief, Sir Stewart Menzies, 2who had prevented Best’s name appearing on a list of concentration camp victims who were entitled to compensation because of their incarceration by the Nazis. Evidently, Best had published his book but had been bankrupted anyway.
Until the early 1980s, there was a polite convention that books on the subject of espionage never used the real names of intelligence personnel. The tradition dated back to the conviction of Compton Mackenzie at the Old Bailey in 1933, charged under the Official Secrets Act for quoting from supposedly secret documents in his Greek Memories. Thereafter, discretion had prevailed. Virtually the only exception to the rule had been Best, a slightly Wodehousian figure who ran a successful business importing British Humber bicycles and had a penchant for wearing spats and a monocle. He and his MI6 colleague Stevens had been seized while waiting at the Dutch frontier for a Luftwaffe general who was alleged to be plotting against Hitler. In fact, the scheme had been an elaborate operation to entrap Stevens and Best, who spent the next five and a half years in Nazi concentration camps.
Although Best had not gone into much background detail in his book, the abduction of these two officers was to have a profound effect upon the clandestine war. The episode had scarcely been mentioned by the press, but its impact had been immense, for Stevens, the ex-Indian Army officer, had been the MI6 head of station in The Hague, and Best had been the local controller of a separate MI6 organisation known simply as ‘Z’. The main MI6 operation in Europe was based upon MI6 professionals attached to British diplomatic missions in the guise of passport control officers (PCO). While ostensibly the PCO took responsibility for issuing visas and vetting travel documents, the majority of the PCO’s staff was 3engaged on intelligence duties. MI6 regarded the PCOs as a very a convenient cover but there were two intrinsic drawbacks. The Germans had never been fooled by the transparency of the PCOs and because of their dependence upon official accommodation, they were vulnerable in the event of a collapse of diplomatic relations. Such an event would force a withdrawal, thereby effectively neutralising the PCO’s local assets.
MI6 itself had belatedly recognised these two fundamental flaws. Soon after the annexation of Austria, the PCO in Vienna, Captain Thomas Kendrick, had been taken into custody temporarily by the Gestapo in August 1938, and over the two days of his interrogation, his captors had left him in no doubt about their depth of knowledge of his illicit activities. Kendrick had been released, but he had been powerless to assist his contacts, who had been rounded up and imprisoned. Thereafter, MI6 was painfully aware that an individual PCO’s network, which depended upon the PCO to facilitate communications, would collapse the moment the host country was occupied. The second structural flaw was the universal nature of the cover. Wherever one was in the world, one could be certain that the nearest PCO was the local MI6 representative. While in some circumstances this might have been helpful, perhaps for an agent anxious to re-establish contact with the Service, it did make it easier for the enemy to mount counter-intelligence operations. As the Germans had demonstrated in The Hague, continuous surveillance of the PCO, his office and his home would eventually compromise every member of his network.
MI6’s solution was the development of a parallel structure known as Z, which operated independently from the PCO and relied mainly upon commercial or journalistic covers. Its members 4were usually British expatriate businessmen and foreign correspondents who communicated directly to London, thereby insulating themselves from the insecurity of the local PCO. Thus, for MI6 to have lost someone as senior as one of its heads of station in an important European city was a terrible blow; the loss of the local Z representative too was a catastrophe. Enemy documents recovered after the war proved conclusively that the Germans had accumulated a vast amount of knowledge about the structure and personalities of the European Z and PCO networks, and the implication was that the data had come from Stevens and Best. In terms of its capability to sustain a clandestine organisation on the Continent, MI6 found itself severely handicapped when the Nazis overran France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Balkans and Norway. The very few wireless sets that had been distributed quickly fell into enemy hands, and MI6 headquarters at Broadway was left almost completely blind, dependent upon neutral diplomats and reports reaching the remaining PCOs in Geneva, Stockholm, Istanbul, Madrid and Lisbon. The meagre preparations made before the war by MI6 proved totally inadequate to cope with Europe’s new frontiers, and it is arguable that if SOE had not been created to foment resistance, and if Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had not made its decisive and timely cryptographic breakthroughs, MI6 would have been lucky to emerge from the hostilities with any reputation at all.
The disaster at Venlo had occurred partly because of a misconceived directive issued to all MI6 personnel on the outbreak of war. The PCOs and the Z men were instructed to make themselves known to each other, and this meant Best revealing his clandestine role to Stevens – most PCOs only learned of Z’s existence when they 5decoded the fateful signal. The result was to eliminate the secrecy which had isolated each of MI6’s compartmentalised cells from the other. By ordering the two separate organisations to combine, apparently in the interests of avoiding wasteful duplication, MI6 had at a stroke undermined them, and it was this instruction, running contrary to all the rules of basic security and common sense, which Best had taken as the starting point for his autobiography.
From the enemy’s viewpoint, the capture of Stevens alone would have been a marvellous prize. To have caught Best too must have been a source of jubilation, for each enjoyed a comprehensive knowledge of MI6’s activities, not just in the Netherlands but into Germany and even further afield. Traditionally, PCOs avoided conducting risky operations in a host country where relations with the local authorities might be placed in jeopardy. Instead, the PCO concentrated his efforts on neighbouring states, thus allowing him a degree of plausibility if the moment came to deny MI6’s involvement in a particular scheme. This convenient arrangement had meant that anti-Nazi operations were run mainly from Berne, Vienna, Prague and The Hague, the cities on the periphery of the Third Reich but out of the Gestapo’s reach. Naturally, the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service), which had studied MI6’s methodology for years, was fully aware of the disproportionately significant status of the MI6 station in The Hague and had made Stevens a priority target. Not surprisingly therefore, both men were subjected to intensive inquisition over many months as their interrogators sought to extract every item of interest from them.
When Best was eventually released from German captivity in the Italian Tyrol in May 1945, he was surprised to discover that MI6 regarded him as a traitor who had spoken too freely to his Gestapo 6interrogators. Both he and Stevens were blamed for the wealth of information the Germans had accumulated about MI6, and each of the men denounced the other as the Gestapo’s principal source. Among the evidence against them was a document entitled Informationsheft Grossbritannien, a handbook intended for the use of the German invaders.2 One chapter, Der Britische Nachrichtendienst, described in compelling detail the structure and personalities of MI6. What made the text so damning were the references, totalling seventeen, to Best and Stevens as the source for the material. An appendix to the book listed hundreds of people considered of interest to the invaders, among whom were dozens of MI6 officers and agents marked down for arrest. The contents were so accurate that even though it had been produced by the enemy, it was still regarded as highly sensitive even years after the end of the war, and my only opportunity to study it was at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, California. There I was given permission to copy the sections dealing with British intelligence, which enabled me to have the material translated. Based on my analysis of the captured material, there seemed little doubt that both Best and Stevens had been forced to help their interrogators. One passage was of particular interest because it assessed the two prisoners:
Best is of a different opinion to Stevens. Unlike Stevens he is not a professional soldier. But he is superior to him as far as experience in the Intelligence Service is concerned, and as a result his attitude is more penetrating; these qualities he combines with considerable character defects and a complete lack of scruples. He is not a British officer like Stevens. He is a civilian who loves 7to live well and be a successful businessman. He may therefore see things in a clearer light in spite of a pretended lack of significance, or he may say more than Stevens.3
While Stevens accepted his fate and took a post as a NATO interpreter, Best became increasingly bitter, and The Venlo Incident was an unusual, if not unique, example of an MI6 retiree breaking ranks. The story of his clandestine contacts with what purported to be a cell of senior anti-Nazi officers was compelling, as was the tragedy of his abduction and incarceration. Stevens, who had attempted suicide while in prison in Berlin, died in Brighton in 1965, and in the same year, Best was declared bankrupt.
Although generally unrecognised as a book of disclosure, chiefly because of the author’s unsensational style and the deliberate omission of his post-war humiliation, it was a tale that whetted my taste for intrigue, and it clearly demanded further research. Accordingly, as a starting point, I conducted a search of the bankruptcy records of the Chancery Division of the High Court, and my attention was caught by some apparently inconsequential correspondence with a lady in Church Street, Okehampton, Devon, who had been peripherally involved with Best in some unspecified way. When I visited the address, I learned that someone else, who lived at 18 Lickhill Road, Calne, had also expressed an interest in Best. This proved to be a tiny, terraced house, and it was here that I discovered Best on 4 June 1976. I had no expectation of finding him, let alone speaking to him, but when Best recovered from the shock of an uninvited stranger turning up on his doorstep and had replaced his dentures, he explained how MI6 had attempted to exclude him from the compensation paid by the Bonn government to victims of the 8Nazi concentration camps and how he had tried to embarrass his former employers by declaring himself bankrupt. After making a thorough nuisance of himself in Whitehall, he had been awarded the paltry sum of £2,400 in 1968 as his part of the German compensation.
We were then joined by Best’s third wife Bridget, who had returned from shopping. Initially very defensive and protective of her husband, she gradually relaxed when she realised I posed no threat to her husband and acknowledged that she had adopted her maiden name to gain access to his bankruptcy records.
Best vehemently denied ever having collaborated with the Gestapo but admitted that he had fabricated many of the pre-war MI6 agents he had claimed expenses for. With a wry smile, he recalled that his diaries, lodged with the Imperial War Museum and now relied upon by scholars, were really works of fiction, for all the agents to whom he had assigned codenames of household furniture, such as the redoubtable (but expensive) table, chair and lamp, had existed only in his imagination and his cash ledgers. He had submitted dozens of false claims for the expenses incurred by his notional networks to the paymaster at MI6 headquarters, and they had all been paid.
Although he admitted to having been something of a rogue, Best resented the allegations made against him by Stevens and remained convinced that Stevens really had been responsible for the wealth of knowledge accumulated by their interrogators. He recalled that in June 1940, Stevens had slipped a note to Best in which he admitted he had been ‘compelled to tell the truth’. ‘Any other line would have been useless. They already knew too much … I was told that if I did not talk I would soon be made to.’ Indeed, Best was emphatic that 9Stevens had never had to endure the same degree of discomfort during his captivity, and he alleged that Stevens was ‘a crypto-Nazi’. Best claimed that Stevens was supposedly intended to accompany the putative Gauleiter for England, Franz Six, to London after the Nazi invasion and that Stevens would have gone willingly.
In his book, Best described meeting a medical officer at Dachau who gave him news of Stevens, which was obviously intended to damn him:
He said that Stevens himself was quite fit and that the conditions of his life were extremely comfortable; his quarters were roomy, he was allowed unlimited exercise in a garden which he shared with a number of other prisoners … and he was permitted to leave the camp in the company of a guard to play tennis, bathe, and even got to the theatre at Munich.4
Best died two years later, in September 1978, aged ninety-three. It was only much later I learned from Christopher Phillpotts, a very senior MI6 officer, that he had been innocent of the allegations made against him by Stevens. In fact, both men had resisted their interrogators, and neither had been informed that another high-ranking MI6 officer, Colonel C. H. ‘Dick’ Ellis, had confessed in 1966, while being questioned by tenacious interrogator Bill Steedman, to having sold MI6’s secrets to the Germans pre-war. This was the material that the Gestapo had used to confront Stevens and Best in their separate interrogations, skilfully playing one off against the other to verify the data that Ellis had already supplied. Whereas Stevens and Best had endured ignominy during the post-war era, Ellis had returned triumphantly from his post in New 10York, where he had been Sir William Stephenson’s deputy, and had subsequently received senior appointments in Singapore and then London. Upon his retirement, he had returned to Australia where in 1952 he had played a central role in the creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS).
Rather than face a scandal, MI6 had allowed the two elderly men to go to their graves embittered by a terrible sense of injustice. Best was a splendid old rascal who, being of mixed Anglo-Indian background, had also been a victim of racial intolerance. All too often, his contemporaries tried to explain that what they termed his deplorable conduct was a consequence of his mixed-race background and a chippyness about being a figure of some ridicule among the pre-war English expatriate community in The Hague.
While Best was still being vilified, Ellis was allowed to retire from MI6 and to escape prosecution for his crimes. Although he had officially retired in 1953 to take up a post with ASIS, Ellis had returned to London and had been employed at headquarters as a ‘weeder’, reading and discarding redundant files. In 1966, when MI6 was in the throes of a molehunt, various leads suggested that Ellis might have been an Abwehr source, and he was investigated. When confronted by Phillpotts and another officer, Theo ‘Bunny’ Pantcheff, Ellis had given a limited confession in which he had admitted to having passed MI6 material to the Abwehr before the war. Naturally, Phillpotts and Pantcheff had suspected that if Ellis had betrayed MI6 to the Germans, he might have done the same thing for the Soviets after the war. Ellis had denied the charge indignantly, citing his long opposition to the Bolsheviks, but his interrogators were reluctant to accept his assurances. In 1975, Maurice Oldfield, 11chief of MI6, had even made a final attempt to extract an admission from Ellis on his deathbed, but he refused to incriminate himself.
Ellis had displayed no remorse for his pre-war duplicity, and astonishingly, even tried to capitalise on his dismissal from MI6. As well as approaching the CIA for financial support, a plea that was interpreted as an attempt at blackmail, Ellis also reported to Sir William Stephenson that he had been dismissed from MI6 because he had been caught raiding the files on his behalf in 1963 and requested suitable compensation.
Stephenson had been the director of British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York during the war, and Ellis had remained in close touch with the millionaire businessman afterwards. In fact, Stephenson had commissioned Ellis to write his biography, and he had been engaged on this project until December 1960. His effort, The Two Bills: Mission Accomplished, had apparently been rejected by Stephenson, who hired Harford Montgomery Hyde instead.5 Hyde, who had also worked for BSC during the war and was fond of visiting Stephenson at his home in Bermuda, had completed the project with the publication in November 1962 of The Quiet Canadian.6 In 1976, Stephenson had collaborated with another author, William Stevenson, who produced A Man Called Intrepid.7 What made this third book so remarkable was the inclusion of a foreword in the form of a ‘Historical Note’, written by Ellis. Although I did not realise it when I first read Stevenson’s work, almost the entire book was a fabrication, and the material which appeared over Ellis’s name was bogus and certainly never written by him. In fact, almost everything about the book turned out to be fraudulent, including the title. Actually, intrepid had not been Stephenson’s 12impressive codename but was BSC’s official, publicly registered cable address in New York.
When I first met Stephenson in June 1979, he had few reservations about A Man Called Intrepid and had yet to learn that his trusted subordinate, Ellis, had been a traitor. Though not in the best of health, having suffered a stroke, Stephenson received me graciously at his modest bungalow in Paget, Bermuda and insisted that I view a videotape of the TV miniseries based on Stevenson’s book, which starred David Niven and Michael York. I had not seen the film before and was surprised by it and also by Stephenson’s dismissal of its many historical inexactitudes. When I queried an episode in which SOE agent Noor Inayat Khan was portrayed as having transmitted a radio warning from France on the night of the Luftwaffe’s raid on Coventry, Stephenson had brushed aside the obvious chronological discrepancy. Khan had not reached France until June 1943, yet the attack on Coventry had occurred more than two and a half years earlier, in November 1940. This encounter with the man who liked to call himself intrepid persuaded me that there was something very odd about the book. As it turned out, I was not, of course, alone in my disquiet. Hugh Trevor-Roper had denounced it in a review as worthless and Sir John Hunt had been equally scathing, but they had judged the book only on its value as an authentic historical record, while I was more interested in the possibility that this was not so much a case of an inaccurate biography but rather that it was something more akin to a hoax.
Soon after my return to England, I visited the Northamptonshire home of Jean Overton Fuller, an authority on the Abwehr’s penetration of SOE and Khan’s friend and biographer. When I mentioned the extraordinary episode in A Man Called Intrepid, 13Jean revealed the extent of her involvement with the book’s author. From her own knowledge of Khan, she was aware that Khan had never met Stephenson, and when she had read the relevant passages in Stevenson’s book, she had been outraged to discover that a large part of Chapter 27 had been lifted from her own biography Madeleine, which had been released in 1952. She had complained to Stevenson’s British publishers about the duplication, and they had instantly agreed to delete the offending chapter. However, Fuller had not realised that Stevenson had used a different publisher in the US, and that it had been the American edition, complete with all her material, that had been the basis of the series. What particularly aggrieved her was the collapse of the sale of her own film rights to Madeleine, as the story had already appeared in A Man Called Intrepid.8
Fuller’s very serious charge of plagiarism, which she could not pursue in the American courts because she was time-barred by the statute of limitations, was the first proof that there was more to this book than met the eye. More evidence was to follow. One significant item, which I came across accidentally in the Public Record Office at Kew, was a letter confirming the appointment of Ellis as an assistant PCO in Berlin, in October 1923. This was effectively the moment Ellis had joined MI6, yet it contradicted what had purported to be Ellis’s own recollection in the ‘Historical Note’ that he had already been ‘twenty years in the professional secret intelligence service when in 1940’ he had been sent to New York. According to the document at Kew, Ellis had only been in MI6 for seventeen years in 1940, and this seemed a strange mistake for Ellis to have made about his own career. This prompted a closer look at the Historical Note, and another inconsistency immediately struck 14home. Ellis asserted that Hyde’s biography of Stephenson, The Quiet Canadian, had received official approval from MI6, which had been anxious to repair the damage inflicted by Kim Philby’s defection: ‘I can now disclose that the reason for the break in the silence about BSC in 1962 was the escape to the Soviet Union of Kim Philby.’9 But, once again, the chronology was entirely wrong. Philby had defected in January 1963, two months after Hyde’s book had been released. His escape could not have played any part in motivating approval for publication because it simply had not happened yet! This bizarre blunder served to undermine the credibility of the Historical Note, which clearly could not have been written by Ellis, and it drew my attention to the main body of the book. The more I researched A Man Called Intrepid, the more it appeared to be a compilation cobbled together from a dozen or so published books. However, I remained mystified by Stevenson’s continuous references to the secret ‘Station M’ archives where he had allegedly uncovered a veritable gold mine of original documentation… and photographs.
A Man Called Intrepid had become a worldwide bestseller, and part of the book’s undoubted attraction lay in the collection of forty photographs, which the author claimed had been recovered from ‘Station M’. Some had obviously been gleaned from Hyde’s books Cynthia and The Quiet Canadian, and a portrait of Khan had been lifted from Fuller’s Madeleine, but fourteen in particular struck me as suspicious.10 Ostensibly they were snaps taken of BSC agents undergoing training, and they all had the same fuzzy appearance. Was it likely that someone preparing to risk their life in enemy-occupied territory would be willing to have their picture taken? Surely this reckless behaviour amounted to a real threat to security? Working 15on the assumption that they were perhaps photos of something quite different, I had them copied and placed on blank sheets of paper without the captions, which I thought were probably fictitious. I then showed the mounted pictures to a Fleet Street picture editor who studied them and, without knowing what they were, suggested they might be movie stills. Scarcely believing that anyone could misrepresent movie stills as authentic photographs, I asked the Imperial War Museum’s film archive to identify what I convincingly described as the war film from which the fourteen stills had been taken. In a very short time, there was a positive identification. The film was School for Danger, a feature made at Pinewood Studios just after the war. Far from being genuine photos snatched of agents departing on secret missions, they were stills that had been taken without consent.
Accordingly, I arranged for two Sunday Times reporters to view the entire film and have each of the fourteen frames frozen on the screen so a comparison could be made with the book illustrations. So there could be no absolutely no room for doubt, they then spoke to Stevenson at his home in London and asked for an explanation. His response was to threaten legal proceedings if the Sunday Times published a word of criticism. Unimpressed, the paper published an exposé, and even traced the actress who had played the part of a trainee agent, but Stevenson never sued. Instead, he left the country and declined to answer any further questions on the subject.
• • •
I had been prompted to take another look at The Venlo Incident after I had read Richard Deacon’s History of the British Secret Service, 16which had been published in 1969, in the wake of a series of stories in the Sunday Times about Kim Philby, whose own autobiography, My Silent War, had caused such scandal the previous year.11 Philby’s notoriety and the details of his disappearance in Beirut in January 1963 came about as a consequence of another internal MI6 dispute, this time involving a retiree, Leslie Nicholson, who had joined MI6 in 1929. He served in Vienna, Prague and Riga before the war and afterwards was sent to Bucharest. Later, when his wife fell ill, Nicholson pleaded for financial support from his chief, Sir Stewart Menzies, but the request had been denied. Nicholson argued that he had been persuaded to leave his army career by the promise of a pension he would be able to commute, but Menzies was adamant.
Already embittered and an alcoholic stricken with terminal cancer, Nicholson took his revenge when his wife died by adopting the pseudonym John Whitwell to publish his memoirs, British Agent, in the US.12 The Australian-born Sunday Times journalist Phillip Knightley, who did not share his colleagues’ reverence for Whitehall conventions, tracked down the forlorn Nicholson to his chaotic accommodation above a seedy cafe in London’s East End in 1968 and learned about how MI6 had protected Philby since 1951 and had kept silent about his defection to Moscow in January 1963. Philby’s disappearance was all the more embarrassing because in October 1955, the then Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan had been obliged to clear him publicly, in the House of Commons, of the accusation of having been the ‘third man’ in the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. For the past five years, MI6 had discouraged anyone seeking to establish the details of Philby’s mysterious absence from his post in Beirut. Knightley had the scoop that made his reputation, and Nicholson died in obscurity in 171973, consumed by guilt about his indiscretion, which had exposed Philby and prompted the traitor to rush out his own memoirs.
The chain of events that effectively terminated a long period of deference to the British security and intelligence establishment had been triggered, albeit inadvertently, by Nicholson and had led to the exposure of Philby as a long-term Soviet mole who had been able to skilfully manipulate MI6’s instinct to protect him. Naturally, the KGB had sought to exploit the situation and rushed out Philby’s memoirs, My Silent War, which were largely accurate and surprisingly only suffered one minor mishap. A British diplomat, Sir David Kelly, objected to the description of his wife as ‘ugly’ and threatened a libel action, so the offending words were removed from the proofs. Kelly had been the ambassador in Ankara when Philby had been stationed at the consulate in Istanbul, and there had been considerable antipathy between the two men.
Nicholson had also triggered a major KGB operation – although he never knew about it – involving another as yet undetected Soviet spy, James MacGibbon. Strongly suspected by MI5 of having been recruited by the CPGB in 1936, MacGibbon had joined the distinguished journalist Robert Kee in 1948 to start a publishing house, MacGibbon & Kee. Although the readers of My Silent War were warned by such critics as Hugh Trevor-Roper that Philby’s memoirs were somewhat Macchiavelian, few realised the scale of the KGB operation, which inevitably had left MacGibbon at some risk of exposure. MacGibbon only admitted his role as a Soviet spy in February 2000, shortly before he died.
The KGB took elaborate measures to conceal the existence of Philby’s manuscript, but MI6 was passed a copy by Graham Greene, whom Philby had approached to contribute a foreword. Greene, 18who had been handed the document in Paris, then tipped off the MI6 chief Dick White, who had sought advice about how to react from Felix Cowgill, then living in retirement in Wiltshire. Cowgill, whom I visited in March 1982, had been one of Philby’s principal victims, unscrupulously outmanoeuvred and sidelined by his own subordinate, and he was outraged by the scale of Philby’s betrayal. However, realising a ban would prove counterproductive and anxious to protect Greene, White opted for silent inactivity, much to Cowgill’s frustrated fury. Cowgill had pioneered MI6’s wartime cryptographic exploitation department, designated Section V, but had been replaced by Philby who had headed Section V’s Iberian sub-section and had promoted the view that excessive caution in handling the Section’s invaluable decrypts was proving counterproductive. Philby had stirred up discontent among the Section’s ‘customers’, the recipients of Section V’s vital intercepts, and when Cowgill was on a visit overseas to the US he replaced him.
Philby re-emerged in Moscow in December 1967 by giving an interview to Murray Sayle of the Sunday Times in the Minsk Hotel, the purpose of which was to float the idea that plans for My Silent War might be scrapped if two spies convicted in 1961, Morris and Lona Cohen, were released from prison in the UK. The proposal was firmly rejected in London, and the book’s release in New York in April 1968 marked an all-time low point for the British intelligence community. Put simply, there were few wartime intelligence secrets unknown to Philby. However, although he had hinted at Bletchley Park’s success in solving the U-boat cipher system and the control of enemy agents, he had not mentioned some other sensitivities such as the joint MI5–MI6 triplex project, which routinely violated the diplomatic pouches of foreign missions in London 19by distracting the couriers, or the Anglo–American venona programme, which decrypted wartime Soviet intercepts and would continue until 1979.
One of the reactions to the book’s publication was a conscious effort to restore the reputations of MI5 and MI6 by mounting a counter-offensive, and the first opportunity was the Double-Cross System alluded to by Philby. Although somewhat garbled, details of how MI5 had established a secret interrogation centre at Ham Common, known as Camp 020, and had persuaded dozens of captured spies to switch sides and act as double agents to deceive their Abwehr masters had already been disclosed in New York by Nicholson to an American historian, Ladislas Faragó. The antidote, as advocated in Whitehall by Sir John Masterman – chairman of the Twenty Committee, which had run the Double-Cross System – was to publicise an authentic intelligence triumph and thereby push the Philby fiasco off the front pages. Of course, there was considerable resistance to his scheme, which centred on a copy of an official report Masterman had written for MI5 in 1945 documenting the entire project. He lobbied his two former Oxford students, Prime Minister Ted Heath and his Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home, to authorise the declassification and release of the document, a copy of which he had been allowed to retain at the end of the war.
Masterman’s persistence and determination paid off, and in 1972, an edited version of The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939–45 was released in a race to trump Ladislas Faragó’s The Game of the Foxes, which purported to be based on captured Abwehr archives.13 Faragó was disadvantaged by his reliance on Nicholson, whose memory was imperfect, and on a collection of tin boxes at the US National Archives, which contained some files recovered from the 20Abwehr’s stelle (office) in Hamburg. However, Faragó had learned about the cryptographic work against the Enigma cipher machine conducted at Bletchley Park, references to which had been excised from Masterman’s book. In his analysis of the Abwehr’s network of spies in England, Faragó was intrigued by one particular agent who had parachuted into Cambridgeshire in September 1940 and had continued to communicate with his Hamburg controllers until the very last day of hostilities. He was known to the Germans as A-3701 and to his MI5 handlers as tate, and he had lived under his alias ‘Harry Williamson’ throughout the war… and then had remained in England. According to the Munich-based historian Günter Peis, who researched the case for his Mirror of Deception in 1977, tate was still alive.14 There were three good reasons to believe Peis. Firstly, he had very good sources among Abwehr veterans, especially in Hamburg; secondly, the Viennese George Weidenfeld would have taken the greatest care in agreeing to publish Mirror of Deception; and thirdly, Peis’s original German manuscript had been translated by Bill Steedman, an MI6 retiree. Steedman was something of a legend in the counter-intelligence world, having joined MI6 in 1949 and having served in Berne and (twice) in Bonn before retiring in 1969. Put simply, Steedman had effectively endorsed Peis’s claim.
The impact of Nicholson, Philby, Faragó, Peis and Masterman on the public’s understanding of how the secret intelligence war had been fought by the Allies is hard to exaggerate. The enemy’s most sensitive communications, discreetly referred to by Churchill as his ‘most secret sources’, had been compromised with great professionalism. Thousands of cryptanalysts, technicians and linguists had been employed to intercept, read and collate Axis wireless traffic. A smaller group of case officers had successfully ‘turned’ the enemy’s 21spies into double agents who had peddled the components of what came to be known as ‘strategic deception’. Historians scrambled to engage in wholesale revisionism, acknowledging that there had been a massive missing dimension to the established view of how the war had been fought. Those who had been indoctrinated into this secret world, including Churchill and Eisenhower, had been successfully persuaded to exercise discretion on these topics. So, with the new revelations, over a very short period of years in the 1970s, there was a thirst for more disclosures and a demand for researchers to venture into this new field of study.22
NOTES
1The Venlo Incident by Sigismund Payne Best (London: Hutchinson, 1951)
2Invasion 1940 by Walter Schellenberg (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2000)
3 Ibid.
4 Payne Best, p.45
5The Two Bills: Mission Accomplished by Dick Ellis (unpublished manuscript)
6The Quiet Canadian by H. Montgomery Hyde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962)
7A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson (London: Macmillan, 1976)
8Madeleine by Jean Overton Fuller (London: Pan, 1957)
9 Stevenson, p.xix
10Cynthia by H. Montgomery Hyde (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965)
11History of the British Secret Service by Richard Deacon (London: Taplinger, 1969); My Silent War by Kim Philby (London: MacGibbbon & Kee, 1968)
12British Agent by John Whitwell (London: William Kimber, 1966)
13The Double-Cross System of the War of 1939–45 by J. C. Masterman (Yale: Yale University Press, 1972); The Game of the Foxes by Ladislas Faragó (New York: David McKay, 1972)
14Mirror of Deception by Günter Peis (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977)
Chapter II
Spy!
For six years, I enjoyed a cordial relationship with Richard Deacon, the pen name of Donald McCormick, formerly a wartime naval intelligence officer and later the foreign news manager of the Sunday Times. During his lengthy newspaper career, McCormick had worked with Ian Fleming, the legendary Antony Terry and wartime MI6 officer Donald Darling. Undoubtedly, McCormick had some good sources and possessed a nose for some great stories. But he was always very secretive about his network of contacts and was always reluctant to allow me to read the proofs of his books. I also spotted several errors in his title The British Connection, which attributed some information to a single individual, an MI5 officer named as ‘Saunders McCulloch’, whereas I knew Miss Saunders and Miss McCulloch had been two quite distinct women.1 In another chapter, he had referred to the ‘late’ physicist Sir Rudolf Peierls as having been investigated as a Soviet spy suspect, but he was still very much alive. However, years later when Peierls’s very extensive MI5 file was declassified, it showed that McCormick had been right about Peierls having been investigated as a likely Soviet spy.224
In 1978, McCormick was asked by BBC TV’s general features department to advise on a six-part drama-documentary series, Spy!. Due to pressure of work, he turned the offer down but recommended me instead. When I joined the production team at Kensington House, I found that the producer, Frank Cox, had already filmed one segment based on Cynthia, the biography of Elizabeth Pack written by Harford Montgomery Hyde, and another about Richard Sorge, which left a further four to be completed. My suggestions were the Venlo affair; the wartime double agent codenamed tate; the honeytrapped spy John Vassall; and the Soviet assassin Bogdan Stashinsky, who had been deployed against Ukrainian nationalists living in West Germany.
When the filming was underway and we had accumulated a large quantity of research material, I obtained Cox’s permission to suggest we release a book to complement the television series. An interview followed with Victoria Huxley of BBC Publishing, a senior editor who had been thinking along the same lines. Rather than discard our voluminous files, they could form the basis of a hardback release. The BBC owned the full rights to the television series, and to all the research that had been gathered but was keen to commission an author to produce a book which could be released as the series was broadcast. I volunteered to write it, and at a later stage, Richard Deacon was brought in to give the manuscript the professional polish my amateurish efforts needed. In its final form, Spy! was released with both names on the jacket and included much of the new information that had been acquired, though not some of the more controversial things we had uncovered.3 A certain amount of tact was required for this project because an interview with Hyde at his home in Tenterden revealed that his book about 25Pack, published in 1966, had been written during a visit to her chateau in the South of France when he had rekindled a wartime love affair. Although subtitled The Spy Who Changed the Course of the War, the book was largely fiction and, as historian Harry Hinsley has explained, the central story of Pack’s theft of the Italian naval code from naval attaché Admiral Alberto Lais was nothing more than a cover story, invented to protect the cryptographic breakthrough achieved at Bletchley Park.
As part of my research, I had already met Hyde at his home in Kent for lunch in October 1978 because I had been keen to find out from him how much of the material that had appeared in William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid had originated in Hyde’s The Quiet Canadian. A former Unionist MP for Belfast, Hyde explained that Stevenson’s book ‘had taken liberties’ with very large quantities of his own material, but he had decided to do nothing about it because of his continuing friendship with Sir William Stephenson. During the course of our conversation, he mentioned that after the publication of The Quiet Canadian, which had included a chapter about the spy whom he had identified only as ‘Cynthia’, he had been surprised by a letter from her inviting him to make contact. He had responded and had been invited to stay with her and her husband at their picturesque chateau in the Pyrenees in southern France.
Best known as a BSC agent who had used her considerable charms to extract secrets from first the Italian and then the Vichy embassies in Washington DC, Pack had moved to France after the war and in 1946 had married Charles Brousse, the French diplomat against whom she had been deployed so effectively in 1941. Born in Minneapolis in 1910 as Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, she had married a British diplomat, Arthur Pack, in April 1930 and given birth six 26months later. To avoid embarrassment, the child had been dispatched to England to be brought up by foster parents while the Packs had moved on the diplomatic circuit from Washington to Chile, Madrid and then Warsaw. When, in 1940, Arthur had been posted back to Santiago, Elizabeth had stayed with him for only a short time before reverting to her maiden name, Thorpe, and returning to the US, where she had operated for BSC. There was some suggestion that she may have helped MI6 while she and her husband had been in Poland, but Hyde had not elaborated on this part of her career. His main concern had been to relate her adventures with BSC.
