Spy Runner E-Book

Nicholas Reed

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 244

Beschreibung

Most of us remember the seventh of September 1940 as the day the London docks were bombed and devastated by fire. I remember it as the day I was called up. But the police car that collected me took me to Wormwood Scrubs Prison . . . Major Ronnie Reed never spoke about what he did in the Second World War. He was only 23 when it broke out; an amateur radio enthusiast who was working as a maintenance engineer for the BBC. And yet, despite minimal money and qualifications, he became one of the men behind some of the most remarkable spy stories of all time. Recruited in the dead of night from his Anderson shelter, Ronnie became a case officer for double agents, including Eddie Chapman, known then as Agent Zigzag. The passport photo of The Man Who Never Was, was a photo of Ronnie Reed. For ten years after the Second World War, he headed the anti-Russian department of MI5, dealing with notorious spies such as Philby, Burgess and Maclean. In 1994, shortly before Ronnie's death, he revealed the truth of his remarkable past to his son, Nicholas. In Spy Runner he reveals his father's fascinating story with a collection of recently released reports and photos from The National Archives, and intimate family snaps.

Leseprobe

First published 2020

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Nicholas Reed, 2020

The right of Nicholas Reed to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9454 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Spy Catcher and Spy Runner

1    Ronnie’s Father, Thomas Reed

2    Early Life

3    1938–40: Working for the BBC

4    The First Double Agents

5    Eddie Chapman, Alias Zigzag

6    Chapman’s Second Mission

7    Chapman’s Third Mission

8    Operation Mincemeat

9    Those Who Took Part

10  Sir John Masterman and the Double Cross Committee

11  The Seraph

12  1944: Operation Overlord, Garbo and D-Day

13  Ronnie in France

14  Ronnie in Germany and Austria, Second Half of 1945

15  A Young Married Man, After the War

16  The Men and Women Who Spied for Russia

17  Three Years in New Zealand

18  1960–76: At Home and Work

19  R.V. Jones

20  1976–95: Ronnie in Retirement

22  George Blake and the ‘Ethics’ of Spying

Sources

About the Author

SPY CATCHER AND SPY RUNNER

The ‘Spy Catcher’, Peter Wright, and the ‘Spy Runner’, Ronnie Reed, had much in common. Both men were born in 1916, and died in 1995. This meant that they both retired from MI5 in 1976, at the age of 60. Peter Wright describes in detail his last day in The Office, as it was called, when he retired, and my father, Ronnie Reed, must have had a similar ceremony a few months later. Peter Wright had joined MI5 in 1955. My father, in effect, joined it much earlier, in 1940, at the start of the Blitz. So for his first five years, Ronnie was part of the fight against Hitler. But in 1945 he was invited to stay on, and turned to the fight against the Russians during the Cold War. After five years as a Spy Runner, he then became a Spy Catcher, as Peter Wright was later on.

April 2020 saw the death of Lord Armstrong at the age of 93. In 1986, as Sir Robert Armstrong, he was Cabinet Secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and was the principal witness at the hearing where the Court had to decide whether or not to allow the publication of Spycatcher.

Spycatcher was an account of Peter Wright’s work in MI5 between 1955 and 1976. He wanted permission to publish it in Britain, but as he had retired to Australia, he decided to publish it there first, while fighting a court case to publish it in England. After publication in Australia, it then came out in the USA, Scotland and almost every country in the world. However, in England and Wales, the Law Lords (now replaced by our Supreme Court) said it was all too hush hush for it to be allowed to be published anywhere!

The main court battle was held in Australia, and it was there that Sir Robert Armstrong came out with the remarkable statement that on one occasion he had been ‘economical with the truth’. The trouble with that admission is that, if you have sworn to tell ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’, you obviously should not be ‘economical’ with it!

In 1988 the Law Lords acknowledged that because the book had been published overseas it no longer contained secrets, and as a result allowed it to be sold in Britain.

HOW THIS INTERVIEW WITH RONNIE REED CAME ABOUT

In December 1994, my father Ronnie knew he did not have long left to live. He had inoperable cancer and would probably be dead within months. (In fact, he died on 24 January 1995.) I had given up trying to persuade him to let me interview him about his top-secret work. He refused to discuss it, though he sometimes let slip the odd anecdote. However, I thought a filmed interview with someone who ran double-agents during the war and had been in MI5 from 1940 until his retirement would be interesting, so my father agreed to let me film him talking about innocuous matters.

When the day of filming came, it seems my father had thought hard about it and decided there was nothing wrong in recording what he had done, especially now he would no longer be around to face the consequences of ‘breaking the Official Secrets Act’.

During the recorded interview, he failed to mention his own flight out to Lisbon to see the agent Eddie Chapman. A week later, when he was not well enough for me to record an interview with him, he told me he was kicking himself for having omitted that episode. He then described it in detail to me, and I wrote it straight down afterwards.

Nigel West, the unofficial historian of the Security Services, told me in 2019 that several of Ronnie’s colleagues in The Office were very impressed by my father’s work. Perhaps this account, in Ronnie’s own words, will put his important work in context.

Nicholas ReedCanterbury, 2020

1

RONNIE’S FATHER, THOMAS REED

Our story begins at Kensington parish church in 1883, when Robert John Reed, aged 31, married Sarah Little, aged 26, from St Leonards-on-Sea. Robert’s grand address of 16 Hyde Park Gate is misleading: he was a butler, and so probably lived in. His father George had been a publican; her father James had been a carpenter, but both were already deceased by the time of their children’s marriage. By 1886, perhaps when Robert had a new employer, the couple were living at 43 Hyde Park Gate Stables. They went on to have two sons and two daughters, the second of which was Thomas George Reed (my grandfather), born on 23 August 1889. However, within three years the father and breadwinner, Robert Reed, had died, aged just 39, leaving Sarah Reed a widow with four children under the age of 7. It is good to know that she was able to remarry fairly soon, having found someone who would take on both her and her children. She married James Oliver in December 1894.

We next find Thomas in Sandgate, near Folkestone in Kent. In the census of 1901, aged 12, he was staying at 3 Victoria Terrace, a brick-built weather-boarded terrace house close to the church at Sandgate. He was a boarder there with his elder brother Robert, not with their mother but with another family. His mother, meanwhile, had moved to 3 Martello Terrace, Sandgate. This is about half a mile away, in Castle Road, close to Sandgate Castle.

At the age of 13, Thomas won a prize, which was presented to him at Christmas 1902 at the Sunday school at St Paul’s church. One assumes that Thomas himself chose what book he would like as his prize, and it was the vicar Mr Eustace Bryan who presented it to him. It was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne.

Jules Verne was the world’s first science fiction writer, and he was, of course, French. But at this point, it is worth diverting from our narrative to talk about Britain’s first and most famous science fiction writer: H.G. Wells.

In September 1898 Wells, suffering from a serious kidney complaint, was advised by his doctor to move from Worcester Park to the coast. Wells had already written The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds; both had quickly became popular and well known, so Wells’s arrival in Sandgate must have created a sensation in this little village. He moved into 2 Beach Cottage, facing the beach at Sandgate. The house is visible from Martello Terrace, where Thomas Reed’s mother was living. Six months later, Wells moved round the corner, to Arnold House, 20 Castle Road, immediately opposite the local church school which the young Thomas Reed was attending. Wells was there for two years, and then moved to the grand house he commissioned from the architect Voysey: Wells House, just up the hill from Castle Road. It is still there, now an old people’s home.

So it is probably not just a coincidence that, when Thomas Reed had to choose a book as a prize, he chose a book of science fiction. Was Thomas, as a schoolboy, daring enough to approach the great man on some occasion? Did he perhaps tell him how he enjoyed The Time Machine, much the most famous of Wells’s short stories, and which Thomas is bound to have read? It would be nice to imagine that he did, and that Wells recommended another science fiction writer to him: his great predecessor, Jules Verne. Years later, Thomas’s son Ronnie also took a great interest in HG Wells. We know that Eddie Chapman enjoyed Wells’s books, and it was probably Ronnie who introduced Eddie to them.

Once he had finished school, he went off to London, and within a few years he had become deputy head waiter at the Trocadero. This was one of the most impressive restaurants in London at the time, standing in Shaftesbury Avenue, where the rebuilt Trocadero complex now stands. Opened in 1896, it was the grandest of the various establishments founded by J. Lyons and Co. In 1901, for the funeral of Queen Victoria, army officers all dined at the Troc, as it was known. In 1905 several motor car enthusiasts met at the Trocadero and decided to set up the Automobile Association. Its original objective was not to help motorists who had broken down, but to warn them of speed traps.

At the Troc, Thomas Reed had at least two close friends who were also working there: Auguste Velluet and Gerald Clapham. He kept in touch with them when he became a soldier. And, as we shall see, he sets off to France with ‘Jerry’, which must be Gerald Clapham.

In about 1910, the Reed family must have gathered in the family home in Sandgate, and then went into Folkestone to have their photo taken to commemorate the occasion. They commissioned the top Folkestone photographer, Hawksworth Wheeler, to take it. Wheeler is now best known for his archetypal photo of the soldiers setting off for war down the Slope Road in Folkestone (later called the Road of Remembrance). No doubt Wheeler posed the family in the back garden of his photographic premises in Church Street. And that is where we see them: Robert Reed, Thomas’s elder brother, standing at the back, his mother Sarah in a chair on the left, and young Thomas resting on the arm of the chair beside his mother. Thomas’s two sisters, Edie and Foundy, are seen in smart white dresses. As everyone is very well dressed, one wonders if this was a special occasion. If Edie or Foundy had just got married, we would expect to see their husband in the photo. But it was, for what it’s worth, the year in which Thomas had his twenty-first birthday. In this, the earliest photo we have of Thomas, he does not yet have the neat moustache that he grew soon after.

Two years before this photo – sometime in 1908 – he met Theresa Barrett. When I interviewed her in 1971, she could not remember how they met – possibly at a dance. But they courted for seven years, and finally married at their local parish church, St Pancras, in 1915. A year later, on 8 October 1916, their son, Ronald Thomas Reed, was born.

When war broke out in 1914, Thomas joined his local regiment, the 4th East Kent regiment, known as ‘the Buffs’. His work as a head waiter meant he was the ideal sort of man to be valet to a senior officer, and by 1917 he was orderly or valet to Lt Col. Vaughan-Cowell, of the Berkshire Yeomanry, working in the officers’ mess in Dedham, Essex. So for three years all his military service was back in England, far away from the action in France.

Finally he was sent to France, at his request, and in a picture of him shortly before he set off he has a broad smile. In September 1917 we find he has left his usual barracks, and is on his way south. He sent a letter to his wife from the officers’ mess of The Buffs, at the Musketry Camp at Sandwich. It reads:

My Dearest Terry,

Have got to Sandwich allright. Had to march it, as Jerry and I missed train this morning by five minutes. I’m chiefly writing this to let you know my address. I think the above will find me allright. Shall be here, I think, till Friday.

Have heard heavy gun fire lately. I hope it is only the gun practice from Dover. Excuse scribble as I am writing under difficulties. All my love to you, darlings.

From Your Ever Loving Tommy XXXXXXX

Once enlisted for France, he started to keep a diary, with short entries. The first entry is for 26 September 1917, ‘Left Bourne Park Camp 4.15am. Arrived at Southampton Docks.’ On 27 September, ‘Arrived Harve 7am’. Clearly ‘Harve’ was the English term for Le Havre, as ‘Wipers’ was for Ypres. He spells it correctly in the next entry. He continues, ‘Marched to rest camp. Saw many Yanks. Also saw Fritz as prisoner.’ Fritz was the slang term for Germans.

He stayed in the rest camp for the next three days, when he must have talked to some of the ‘many Yanks’, because inside the diary he has stuck a green US one cent stamp showing George Washington. He carefully dated it 28 September 1917. On 30 September he records, ‘Left Havre 9 pm, in battle train’. The last detailed entry is for 1 October. ‘Passed St Omer and arrived about 10 miles from Ypres. Under canvas at Sandgate Camp.’

Sandgate Camp would have been one of the many such camps in France, given familiar English names. But how nice he was in one named after his native town: perhaps he had some choice in going there. He finishes ‘Self in a barn, lost on Ypres Road.’ No doubt this was to remind him of a more detailed story he could have told on his return. The final entry is for 8 October. Hastily scrawled are the words, ‘Up the line’. And there his diary finishes.

But these were not the last words he wrote. Two days later, he wrote a letter to his wife: the only such detailed letter to survive from his hand. It is of historical interest, both as an account written in the trenches, and as the only detailed example of the writing of the father of Ronnie Reed, so I quote it in full. The single sheet has the printed heading ‘On Active Service With the British Expeditionary Force’.

He starts graphically ‘Up to my eyes in mud,’ with the date underneath: ‘Oct. 10th 1917’.

Terry Darling, I had just extracted myself out of a nice muddy shell hole, when an officer gave me five letters and a Ref [probably a reference to a newspaper called The Referee, which was published up till 1939] from you. I went in knee deep, but I didn’t say a word. I was so pleased with my post.

3 were sent on from Bourne Park and the other 2 from Bedford. One letter contains the Ref as well. I was very glad to hear you are feeling better for the change of air(raids). According to Mrs Velluet’s letter she properly got wind up. But I know dear it must be rotten if one’s nerves cannot stick it.

You might send me an envelope and paper in each letter, dear. That pad was no good – would not stick. A few home made cakes now and again dear would be very nice and a couple of candles, also a Sunday paper. I think the Despach as I have not time to read the Ref article.

Please send me a paper of Oct 10th just to see how things went.

I shall be very pleased with the watch dear. Give Foundy my love and thank her very much. I am still very fit and very fed up with this game. I hope Ron has got his birthday present allright. I was glad to hear his cold was better.

As to food, dear, I shall never look at a biscuit again, but I don’t do so bad. I hope Mrs Collis and all are well, dear. I have not heard any more of Frank yet, but I know he is round this way somewhere. The boys all send kindest regards to you.

Love to all. In haste for Censor. All my love, Tommy.

This was the last letter she received from Thomas, and after three weeks Terry wrote in great anxiety to find news of him. By this time she had moved out from Leigh Street to Bedford. As mentioned in Tom’s letter, this was because she was very distressed by the German air raids over London. She seems to have written two letters enquiring about him. One was to the Officer Commanding the 4th (Reserve) Battalion of the Buffs. He replied on 6 November, writing from Crowborough, that he had no information, but was forwarding her letter to the colonel in charge of Records no 2, at Hounslow. Hounslow replied on 20 November, saying they had heard he had been wounded in action. They then sent their letter to Terry’s old address in Leigh Street, so of course it did not reach her until December! But she had also written to the British Red Cross Society. This was forwarded to the War Office, and their letter of 3 November did reach her in Bedford, telling her he had been wounded.

On 3 November, after nearly three weeks of no news, Lt Col. Vaughan-Cowell wrote from the Berkshire Yeomanry HQ at Dedham, Essex. He was clearly writing in response to a worried letter from Terry, pleading for more news of her wounded husband. He said:

I have just received your letter, and am sorry to say that your information is correct. I heard from one of my officers the other day, saying that your husband was wounded at the same time as Lieut. Mitchell, and I am afraid that both were badly hit. I will get some more information and write tomorrow. I was extremely sorry to lose Reed, but it was his wish that he should go with Clapham and Velluet rather than go to the Reserve Battalion and be drafted out without his friends.

And there is this mention of the two friends with whom Thomas worked at the Trocadero, and whom he wished to join at the front.

This letter does not seem to have reached Theresa Reed until late in November. In fact, she heard of Tom’s death through a relative, rather than through official channels. What she received was a telegram from her elder sister Edie. It was sent on 2 November, and presumably reached Terry within a couple of days. Edie said she had had a ‘Letter from Len telling me the worst had happened and that he had written to you. Try to be brave, dear. Edie.’ So this was Terry’s first news of Thomas: clearly implying not just that he was wounded, but that he was dead.

True to his promise, Col. Cowell wrote again the following day, 4 November:

I know no more distressing job of a commanding officer than that of acquainting people with bad news. I have had a letter from my late adjutant, in which he tells that your husband was very badly hit by a shell and that he was not expected to survive his serious wounds. I now understand that he died in the Field Ambulance on October 13th. It is with the deepest regret that I give you this news. My opinion of him as a soldier and a man was the highest I could hold of anyone. Nothing was too much for him either in my service or in the Officers’ Mess. I have written to the Managing Director of the Trocadero about him and you.

At least those who had worked with Thomas expressed real sympathy. This was shown not just by Col. Cowell, but also in a letter from Lt G.S. Dixon, writing from the 4th Buffs, attached RGLI (Royal Guernsey Light Infantry), BEF (British Expeditionary Force), France. He wrote on 30 October:

It is with very deep regret that I have to inform you that your husband has died of wounds. I received notification from England today in a letter from the Battalion orderly room of the 2/4 Buffs…Your husband went up the line with his company and they were rather heavily shelled. The same shell that wounded your husband killed the company commander (a cutting of whose death I enclose), wounded Lt Mitchell, the officer to whom your husband was servant, wounded your husband in the stomach and also several others. Immediate assistance was rendered and your husband was taken to the advanced dressing station. After that nothing more was heard of him, although we sent round to the casualty clearing stations in the area without result, and the letter I received yesterday was the first news we had of him. As I was adjutant of the late 2/4 Buffs I knew your husband pretty well, and I should like to take this opportunity of informing you what a splendid man and cheerful soldier he was. He was very popular with all the officers and men of the old Battalion, and nobody could speak too highly of him. Both in England and in France he did his duty as a man and has died in the service of his country.

All the officers and men of the 2/4 Buffs who are attached to the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry out here, wish me to offer you their most sincere sympathies in your great loss.

According to my father, Tom had ambitions eventually to retire from London and run a smallholding in the country. Indeed, there is a photo of him taken apparently on just such a smallholding, surrounded by chickens, with a look of enjoyment on his face. It is dated 20 December 1916, and was taken at Kennington. Almost certainly he was on Christmas leave, and he and his wife went back to Sandgate to see his mother. They must have had friends at Kennington, which means this is likely to be the village just north of Ashford in Kent. From the thick black belt visible round his waist, which is presumably his military belt of webbing, one assumes he is in uniform, but has rolled up his sleeves to help in feeding the chickens. So here we see him, holding a can, probably of chickenfeed, and perhaps thinking ahead to doing something similar when the war is over.

This photo depicts him smiling, as does the one published in the paper announcing his death – this was the picture taken after he had just heard that he was going to be sent to France, when he could join his friends from the Trocadero, who were already out there. His friends both survived the war: indeed Auguste Velluet lived to a ripe old age, as his grandson Paul Velluet, now a senior officer of English Heritage, remembers meeting him in the 1960s. But, of course, they did not discuss the First World War: few veterans did in those days.

Back on 10 April 1917, presumably when Thomas was serving in Essex, he sent a couple of dried poppies in an envelope, with two short notes inside. The notes were made from one sheet of ruled exercise book paper – probably the only sort of paper around at the time. The first says:

For my Dearest Terry. With all her Tommy’s fondest Love, hoping to be with you again quite soon. xxxxxxx.

The other is:

For my Dearest Sonnie. With all Dad’s fondest Love, trusting he will be a good boy to Mum till Dad returns. Xxxxxxxxx.

Tommy, as we have seen was not to return. He died almost exactly on the first birthday of his only son, and was buried in Solferino Farm Military Cemetery, Brielen, about 2 miles north-west of Ypres.

But that is not the only place he is recorded. On 11 November 1923, the new war memorial was consecrated at Sandgate. A postcard survives of the occasion, sent by Tom’s mother Sarah to Theresa, her daughter-in-law. The card shows a big crowd gathered around the memorial, the vicar conspicuous in his white robes, and in the foreground, three ladies in cloche hats looking at the camera. On the back of the postcard, Sarah Oliver (Tom’s mother) writes, ‘Do you see my old face?’ Her card starts by asking ‘Is it my fault you don’t write? You was going to let me know about (the) jacket.’ I presume Sarah was asking Terry if she wanted to have Tom’s old jacket, which he must have left at Martello Terrace.

An Order of Service survives with the postcard, and is presumably the one followed in 1923. The first poem read was ‘For the Fallen’, by Lawrence Binyon, which includes the immortal lines ‘Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we shall remember them.’ The second was ‘In Flanders Fields’, by Lt Col. John McCrae, MD. It ends, ‘If ye break faith with us who die, We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.’ And last, the recessional hymn, by Rudyard Kipling, with its chilling refrain, ‘Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet: Lest we forget – Lest we forget!’

We do have several other pieces of memorabilia kept by Terry. The saddest is a wallet in which she kept Tom’s letters to her, and she kept his diary, and her later correspondence, from which I have been quoting. But the wallet must have been returned by the War Office after Tom’s death. When they returned it, it still had his blood splashed on it: a thoughtlessly callous thing to send it back like that. I remember my father speaking quite bitterly about how inappropriate he thought it of them to have sent it to her. They also sent to her the identity tag worn by all serving soldiers, and similarly bloody. My father placed with it in the wallet the identity tag that he was given to wear during his service in the Second World War. Such dog tags were worn by all serving soldiers, to identify the body in case it was difficult to recognise.

Thomas’s death was only finally announced in the Folkestone Herald in February 1918. The announcement said he had ‘died of wounds’, but that was not in the field of battle. My grandmother remembered that in fact, before he had even got to the front line in France, a stray shell came across from the German side and wiped out both Tommy and five of his fellow soldiers. More pointless waste of life. Eventually Terry received the large ornamental certificate recording the nation’s gratitude toward those who had died in the service of their country. There is also a large bronze medallion inscribed with his name.

After the war, Sarah continued to live in Sandgate. On 28 July 1927 she went up to the Guildhall (Photographic) Studio in Guildhall Street, Folkestone, and had two photographs taken, on what was her 70th birthday.

Sarah Oliver was still living at Martello Terrace, Sandgate, in the 1930s. In 1996 I interviewed an elderly resident, Mrs Champion, who remembered her, and three things about her. She always kept her hair neat; she was proud of her jewellery; and she had a small flower garden she looked after carefully. So this was someone remembering details about my great-grand-mother, who had died sixty years earlier! It’s never too late to start asking questions about family history.

Sarah’s widowed daughter-in-law, Theresa, continued to live at 9 Leigh Street, St Pancras, with her small son, Ronnie. And it is he who is really the subject of this book.

2

RONNIE REED, EARLY LIFE

Ronald Thomas Reed was born on 8 October 1916, almost exactly a year before his father was killed in France. Throughout his youth, he and his mother Terry lived in a flat on the top floor of 9 Leigh Street, just off the Euston Road in London. On one occasion Ronnie reminisced how there had been large gardens in the centre of the road, in which the children played. As Euston Road was widened for traffic, these gardens got increasingly smaller, until they were finally replaced by the six or eight carriageways that now carry the thundering traffic.