Art of Betrayal (5 page)

Cavendish had roared around Cairo on his Twin Triumph motorbike, occasionally posing as a German prisoner of war to infiltrate escape routes. Oldfield went on to join MI6 and Cavendish soon followed. There he worked in R5, Philby's old section (‘Call me Kim,' the leading light of the service would say as he popped into the office) and in the department dealing with Austria, Germany and Switzerland – his first assignment was eavesdropping on a Swiss trade delegation in London. Training for new officers was slapdash and had not progressed much from the pre-war days when the new
MI6 officer in Vienna – fresh to the whole game and without any instructions from base – had arrived in town and went to see the man he was succeeding for any tips on how to recruit agents. ‘Could you give me some idea of how to begin?' ‘You'll just have to work it out for yourself,' he was told. ‘I think everyone has his own methods and I can't think of anything I can tell you.'
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Cavendish had his own painful introduction into the costs of Secret Service work just before he arrived in Vienna. As he was driving through the North German countryside looking for an evacuation route in the event of the Red Army rolling west, he picked up two young hitchhikers, a boy and a girl in their late teens or early twenties. They came from a town in East Germany called Prenzlau. The Russians had a military garrison in the town and the service wanted a source there. He bought them dinner at a guesthouse. The girl's name was Frieda, his was Alfred, and they both disliked the Russians. To them Cavendish was ‘Paul'. He persuaded the girl to undertake some rudimentary training for a few days, while Alfred was given some money to enjoy himself. She was taught how to use a wireless set and a one-time pad that allowed messages to be written in code, then they were both sent home. Three weeks later she filed her first report. Simple. But six months on, Cavendish had received a message that he should come to see Frieda. Over dinner, she said she was scared that her boyfriend had informed on her because he suspected an affair with Cavendish. ‘Of course, you'll be safe,' he reassured her. Next time they met, she said she thought she was being watched and wanted to stay in the West. It took a lot of persuasion but she went back. A few weeks later she was caught, put on trial and shot. It was only in his later years that the memory of the young girl would trouble Cavendish as he looked back on his own younger, more ruthless self.
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The life of a junior MI6 officer, like Cavendish, in Vienna, was taken up to a large extent with the routine work of maintaining an infrastructure for espionage – looking for locations for dead-letter drops where documents could be stashed by an agent and then picked up by his British case officer or checking out new safe houses to replace old, blown ones (the demand for such apartments must certainly have kept the Viennese property market buoyant, the spies reckoned). There was also the work of recruiting support agents, the
musicians in the beer cellars, the hotel porters, the taxi-drivers who could be useful in operations or when it came to meeting the agents from the other side who were passing on secrets.

Attempts to recruit agents who could pass on secrets were painfully difficult and reflect the amateurishness of the service of the time. By the lavish baroque abbey in Melk, Cavendish struck up a conversation with a young Russian artillery captain called Grigori on the terrace of a pub on the banks of the Danube, which led to a drinking competition involving a near-lethal mix of two-litre glasses of beer and vodka. Perhaps they could meet again? A fortnight later they were back at the pub chatting about their background and Cavendish wondered if he had found a source in Soviet Military Headquarters. Two weeks on and Grigori failed to show. The landlord was asked to make some discreet inquiries among a group of Russian officers about Captain Grigori by saying he had left something behind on his last visit. He had been sent back to the Soviet Union, he was told. He was not the only Russian officer whom Cavendish befriended who would soon afterwards disappear. A colonel he encountered at the Opera one evening agreed to meet three days later at a local beer cellar. All went well, and another meeting was agreed in a week's time at a restaurant in the inner city. A team watched the restaurant in case an attempt were made to kidnap Cavendish but the Colonel never showed. A phone call by a third party to his office revealed that he too had been suddenly recalled to the Soviet Union. Something was not quite right, Cavendish sensed, maybe a bad apple was in the mix somewhere. Field Security felt the same. One time a truck carrying an agent was stopped at a checkpoint. The agent was in disguise, with another twelve men in uniform. Yet a Red Army officer held a photo up and spotted the agent and beckoned him out.
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At one point, MI6 activities virtually ground to a halt amid fears of Soviet penetration, and a senior officer came out from London. Laxness in Field Security was the problem, it was concluded.
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Along with recruiting and running agents to look for signs of the impending war, Cavendish's other task was to prepare for the war itself by building a so-called stay-behind network. This consisted of recruiting sleeper agents and burying weapons and communications systems which would be activated only in the event of Austria being overrun by the Red Army. The men and munitions would then
provide the core of a resistance network, modelled on those the Special Operations Executive had supported in the Second World War. Setting this up involved acting like pirates on Treasure Island, by finding a quiet spot in the park or the countryside and then counting paces from a tree or other landmark, burying a box three feet deep and then producing a map with instructions on how to retrieve the radio or ammunition. Cavendish purchased a large American Chevrolet car, changed the plates and took it to a garage where a secret compartment was fitted in the boot into which weapons could also be stuffed to get them past Soviet checkpoints as he headed out to Lower Austria. Across Europe and the Middle East, gold ingots were dropped into lakes, guns hidden in caves and radio sets buried as part of these efforts. Some were dug up later. Some were not.

There were other distractions in Vienna, which would get Cavendish into trouble. ‘My social activities at this time were devoted mainly to two of the young women working for the CIA, and I have to admit that coping with both of them at the same time diverted some of the energy that I should have been putting into intelligence,' he recalled. When not wooing the American girls, Cavendish would occasionally engage in his own bit of spying by taking a drive out of Vienna through the Russian zone of Austria to get to the British zone. His destination was a little pub by a river where he could go fishing. The route conveniently took him past the Soviet-controlled airport. At just that moment, his car engine would splutter and he would have to stop, lift up the bonnet and rummage around. While doing so, he would aim a long-range camera at the airfield and snap off as many shots as possible of the Soviet aircraft so that some poor soul in London could count whether there were any more or less than there had been the previous weekend and try to work out what that meant.

Scratch beneath the thin veneer of glamour and much of the routine work of MI6 was a form of glorified train-spotting – with a little plane- and boat-spotting thrown in. This was true from the service's inception in 1909 when its primary task was to gather intelligence on the German naval build-up as it recruited people to stroll around harbours. During the First World War, networks of agents behind enemy lines would watch coaches move down the rail tracks
as they did their knitting. Drop one for a troop car, purl one for something else. Send the resultant pullover back for analysis. In postwar Vienna, the methods of intelligence gathering had changed only a little.

Recruiting agents was proving hard, so the next best thing was a defector coming over. Every defector from the Soviets, however lowly, was asked the same initial question. ‘Did they have any knowledge of an impending attack on the West?' This was because it was the question asked again and again at Whitehall at the weekly meeting of Britain's intelligence chiefs. They demanded the answers from every Secret Service station in the field: ‘are there signs of Russian preparations for war?'
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This was the number-one requirement and the first question dealt with in the weekly summaries of current intelligence. The reason it was asked so often and so urgently at the start of the Cold War is that there was no hard intelligence to summarise. Britain was blind.

When it came to intelligence from inside the USSR, the US and UK both had absolutely nothing. Not one source. Not one agent. The Whitehall mandarins frequently expressed their frustration at the poverty of information as they struggled to understand how far Stalin was willing to push a crisis. A March 1946 Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) analysis recorded that conclusions on Russian intentions were ‘speculative' as ‘we have practically no direct intelligence of a detailed factual or substantial nature, on conditions in the different parts of the Soviet Union, and none at all on the intentions, immediate or ultimate, of the Russian leaders'.
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MI6 had been banned from running agents against an ally during the war and the ban remained in place after the war, much to the frustration of officers who were itching to try.
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The blindness was especially painful because it was in sharp contrast to the all-seeing eye that the service had provided in the Second World War. The reputation of MI6 had been salvaged by the box that the Chief hand-delivered to the Prime Minister. Inside it was intelligence derived from the breaking of the German codes (such as those generated by the Enigma machine) at Bletchley Park. That information allowed Britain to get inside German intentions and operations and turn their agents back against them as part of the famous Double-Cross System. But as the gaze shifted from one enemy
to another, it lost all focus. The Soviet Union was a giant black hole out of which no intelligence was to come for well over a decade until the combination of satellites and the first spies provided an initial glimpse. Without that insight, train-spotting and snapping pictures of airfields was the only fall-back.

The threat of the Red Army steamrollering into Western Europe was ever present in those first years of the Cold War, before nuclear-tipped missiles and mutually assured destruction. Fear and insecurity were heightened by ignorance. Because of the reliance on scraps and morsels, intelligence estimates were way off the mark. In 1947, the Joint Intelligence Committee thought the Soviets had an army of 170 divisions which could reach the Atlantic coast in forty days while also seizing the whole of the Middle East. In reality at least half those divisions existed only on paper.
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But no one knew that. The fear that at any moment the Soviets could invade was visceral and real, and the desire to know about it was urgent. If those divisions were to head west some would come through Austria. MI6 was asked to construct an elaborate tripwire to give as much warning as possible of any sign they might be on the move.

The network of train-spotters had been established after the war by MI6's station chief in Vienna, George Kennedy Young, one of the service's most aggressive operators. A tall, independent-minded Scot with red hair and a sharp intellect, Young had served with intelligence in Italy in the Second World War and after a brief spell in journalism had been recruited by an old friend from St Andrews University. Vienna was to mark the beginning of his rapid rise up the ranks of the Secret Service and nurture a profound hatred for Communism which would later draw him to the political right.

Young had a taste for bravura operations, even if they involved a little risk. ‘Keeping the Russians annoyed is rather an important part of intelligence work,' he later said. ‘We are trying to breed insecurity and uncertainty about their own people.'
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In Vienna, he learnt that the Germans had carried out photographic reconnaissance of the Soviet Union and that the valuable information had been buried in the Soviet zone of Austria right next to a Red Army checkpoint. He organised for a newsagent run by his team to send its delivery van to the checkpoint and drop off a copy of a girlie magazine to the guard at the post. While the guard thumbed through its pages, the former
Luftwaffe officer who had originally buried the photographic plates frantically dug them up and stowed them in a secret compartment in the back of the van before quickly driving off.
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‘The professional skill of espionage', Young later wrote, ‘is the exploitation of human weakness.'
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As head of station, Young's main task was to take a strategic overview. He favoured action to confront Soviet aggression. He would complain that the Foreign Office and politicians were far too cautious when his agents reported that the Soviets were using their proxy secret services to bring Czechoslovakia and Hungary under their heel. ‘We were not prepared to take the minimal risks of exploiting internal weaknesses in the Soviet Bloc by active political warfare,' he later recalled. ‘In autumn of 1947 it was apparent that the next Communist take-over would be in Czechoslovakia, but nothing was done to bolster up the will of those Czechs who might have resisted what was in fact a skilfully conducted bluff.'
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Stalin was reasserting his authority at home and abroad, determined to show that he would not be cowed. Nothing was more dangerous, he thought, than the hint of weakness. Stalin's advantage was a deluge of intelligence about his opponents. This, if it had been adroitly handled, could have allowed him to calibrate even more successfully his mix of pressure and bluff to maximum effect, to know when to push and when to back down. Stalin did not want a war but, as Churchill had said, he wanted the fruits of war, a series of pliant buffer states across Eastern Europe. Crackdowns, purges and coups would deliver Soviet control of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania in the years after the war.