My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (12 page)

It was at about this time that I nearly got into serious trouble. I have mentioned that Central Registry, housing the SIS archives, was next door to Glenalmond. Bill Woodfield, who was in charge of it, had become quite a friend of mine. I have been told that magenta is the only colour that the rainbow lacks. If so, Bill’s face would be out of place in the rainbow. He had a liking for pink gins, which I shared, and prudish appreciation of dirty stories. We used to foregather often to discuss office politics, of which he had had a long experience. This friendly connection paid off, and I was usually in
a position to get files rather more quickly and easily than many of my colleagues. Bill was seriously understaffed, and the people he had were often ill-trained.

There was a series of files in Registry known as source-books. These held the particulars and records of SIS agents operating abroad. It was natural for me to want information on the agents operating in the Iberian Peninsula, and my perusal of the source-books for Spain and Portugal whetted my appetite for more. I worked steadily through them, thus enlarging my knowledge of SIS activity as a whole. When I came to the source-book for the Soviet Union, I found that it consisted of two volumes. Having worked through them to my satisfaction, I returned them to Registry in the normal way.

About a week later, Bill telephoned to ask me for the second volume of the Russian source-book. After consulting my secretary, I called back to say that, according to our books, it had been returned to Registry on such-and-such a date. After further fruitless search in Registry, Bill contested the accuracy of my records, and urged me to make a further investigation. I turned our office upside-down, with negative results. Bill and I met once or twice in the evening to discuss the mystery over a few pink gins. He told me that the normal procedure on a loss of a source-book was for him to report immediately to the Chief. I managed to stall him for a few days, during which my alarm grew. I doubted whether the Chief would appreciate the excessive zeal which had led me to exhaustive study of source-books, especially as it had apparently resulted in the loss of one dealing with a country far outside the normal scope of my duties.

The lowering sky suddenly cleared. Bill telephoned me to offer a “full personal apology.” It seemed that one of his secretaries handling the source-books, wishing to save shelf space, had amalgamated the two volumes into one. She had then come over queer, and gone home with a severe bout of flu. She had only just got back to the office and, on being tackled by Woodfield, had immediately
remembered what she had done. I accepted the apology gracefully, and suggested meeting again that evening. We did so, and drowned the painful memory in another flood of pink gin. I remember thinking for a brief moment, duly regretted next morning, that magenta was my favourite colour.

IV. B
RITISH AND
A
LLIED
I
NTELLIGENCE
C
OMPLEX

Owing to Cowgill’s liking for a family atmosphere, an almost excessive cosiness marked the life and work of Section V. Officers and secretaries were put on Christian-name terms as soon as they arrived. It felt as if the office might at any moment burst into wholesome round games. While this was embarrassing at times, it had its professional uses. It was never difficult to find out what colleagues were doing; what was known to one would be known to all. It also gave me wide freedom of movement. Cowgill did not mind when or how the work was done, provided it was done—itself no mean requirement considering the volume of paper with which we were flooded. This meant that I could go up to London virtually at will. This was valuable for developing contacts with other SIS sections in Broadway Buildings, with MI5 and with other government departments interested in our work. I made a practice of going once a week, invariably with a bulging briefcase and a long visiting list. I also volunteered for night duty in Broadway, which came round once or twice a month. It was an instructive occupation because, in the course of a single night, telegrams would come in from all
parts of the world, throwing new light on the operations of the service.
^*

Broadway was a dingy building, a warren of wooden partitions and frosted-glass windows. It had eight floors served by an ancient lift. On one of my early visits, I got into the lift with a colleague whom the liftman treated with obtrusive deference. The stranger gave me a swift glance and looked away. He was well-built and well-dressed, but what struck me most was his pallor: pale face, pale eyes, silvery blond hair thinning on top—the whole an impression of pepper-and-salt. When he got out at the fourth floor, I asked the liftman who he was. “Why, sir, that’s the Chief,” he answered in some surprise.

At that stage, I knew precious little of the Chief. His name was Stewart Menzies,
^†
his rank Colonel. His office was on the fourth floor. His stationery was a vivid blue, his ink green. He wrote an execrable hand. Before becoming Chief, he had been head of Section IV, which dealt with Army intelligence. His official symbol was CSS, but in correspondence between Broadway and overseas stations he could be designated by any three successive letters of the alphabet, ABC, XYZ, etc. In government circles outside SIS, he was always known as “C.” The initial was a hangover from the days of Captain Mansfield Cummings, RN,
^‡
the first head of the secret service in its modern form. That was the sum total of my knowledge of the Chief at the time of our first encounter in the lift. As will be seen, I came to know him much better, and I hasten to say that I look back on him with both affection and respect, though not necessarily with respect for those qualities on which he would have prided himself.

Apart from Fenwick, the agreeable but ineffectual oilman who vaguely administered the stations in Madrid, Lisbon, Tangier and
Gibraltar, my earliest contact in Broadway was with one of the Chief’s closest cronies. He was in charge of the distribution of information obtained by rifling diplomatic bags, and of arrangements for its secure treatment by recipients. But he was also credited with being very close to the Chief, and thus having influence on policy. I was prepared to dislike him thoroughly, as I had heard appalling reports of him; his nickname was “Creeping Jesus.” My first impressions tended to confirm the awful reports I had been given. He had most of the qualities I dislike most; it would be no justice to describe him as a selfish and conceited snob. Yet he had a capacity to ingratiate himself with senior members of the Foreign Office which, much to my surprise, I came to admire. Furthermore, I was increasingly drawn to him for his inability to assess the intelligence that passed through his hands. Although he was more than twice my age, he came to rely on my judgement. In my turn, I paid him all the outward signs of respect. Our personal association, despite its inherent absurdity, became quite a happy one. It was also of great value to me because, among the waffle and gossip that fills most diplomatic bags, there is sometimes a pearl of price. He would, of course, never have claimed the prerogative of using green ink; he used purple instead.

Through him, I met the famous Colonel Claude Dansey. Before the war, he had busied himself with building up the so-called “Z” organization, designed to penetrate Germany from bases in Switzerland. The most interesting thing about the “Z” system was that its communications were disastrously affected by the collapse of France. In Switzerland, Dansey had left behind to carry on the work a smooth operator named Van Der Heuvel (pronounced Hoyffl) who was alleged to be a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. He will forgive me if I have misspelt his name, either literally or phonetically, but I can claim to be in good company. When I went one day to dine with him at the Garrick, the porter had difficulty in understanding whom I wanted to see. “Ooooh,” he said at last, “you mean Mr. Vanoovl,” and gave me the appropriate direction.

I have already explained that Dansey had the lowest opinion of
the value of counter-espionage, as well as a reputation for unnecessary combativeness. I was therefore surprised by the courtesy he showed me. It proved always to be so. Dansey was a man who preferred to scatter his venom at long range, by telephone or on paper. The only way to deal with him was to beard him in his office; a personal confrontation lowered the temperature, and made it possible to talk common sense. As soon as I grasped this, I had little difficulty with him, except to keep a straight face when he started to make cracks about Vivian, my boss’s boss. Happily, our paths did not cross often, as he was good enough to strike me off his list of pet bugbears.

I made a point of seeing Vivian as often as possible. He was quite useless for immediate practical purposes, being mortally afraid of Dansey and even of his own subordinate, Cowgill. But he probably had a better mind than either, and was of a reflective temperament which led him to discourse long and widely on SIS history, politics and personalities, and on relations between SIS and MI5. He was a stickler for correct procedure, and his sermons on the subject told me more about the intricacies of government machinery than I could have learnt from the more slap-dash “result-getters,” such as Dansey or Cowgill. I had little idea in the early months of my cultivation of Vivian how much it would assist me in attaining the one position in SIS which I wanted above anything the service could offer. Cowgill was to regret bitterly his premature dismissal of Vivian as a nonentity.

It was a short walk from Broadway Buildings across St. James’s Park to the wartime headquarters of MI5 in St. James’s Street. But the difference in style was considerable. Even the entrance compared favourably with the dingy hall at Broadway, and the first good impression was confirmed upstairs. The offices looked like offices; so far as I know, there were none of the makeshift rabbit hutches that disfigured so much of Broadway. The officers sat at desks uncluttered by dog-eared paper. At most, half-a-dozen neat files, each nicely indexed and cross-indexed, would be awaiting treatment. This had its drawbacks. At Section V, we used to complain of the
inordinate detail which MI5 officers found time to pack into their long letters. Some of it, at least, was unwarranted by the significance of its subject-matter. Nevertheless, MI5 wore an air of professional competence which Broadway never matched. It may have been over-staffed, as Cowgill frequently complained. But the result of such over-staffing was that most of the officers knew what they had to do, and how to do it. The same could not be said of all too many in Broadway.

It had not always been so. After the fall of France, MI5 faced a situation for which it was quite unprepared. The British people fell victim to its own propaganda, particularly in regard to the German Fifth Column. For months after Dunkirk, the police and MI5 were swamped with reports of flashing lights, mysterious strangers, outlandish accents overheard in the pub and so on. The organization almost broke down. I first visited MI5 with Commander Peters in the autumn of 1940, when it was in its temporary quarters at Wormwood Scrubs. It was good to think that MI5 was housed in a prison, but the place was in a horrible mess. Stacks of unread correspondence littered the floors, and officers conceded that not more than a tenth would ever be read, let alone answered. Fortunately, it was all waste paper anyway. The German Fifth Column in Britain never existed.

The task of producing order from chaos was entrusted to a certain Horrocks who was imported (from the City, I believe) especially for that purpose. Inside a year, he could claim to have succeeded. I understand that he had authority over the administration in general, but my particular interest was in the archives. There he did a beautiful job. In a new home in part of Blenheim Palace, M15 Registry was a place of delight after Woodfield’s untidy labyrinth at St. Albans. Information was easily accessible in well-kept files and card-indices, and there were enough filing clerks to ensure that the work was done methodically and at a reasonable pace. I was surprised and envious to find that most of the girls knew the contents of the files for which they were responsible as thoroughly as the officers handling cases in St. James’s Street. When I delicately raised
the question with Woodfield, he replied that he was disgracefully under-staffed and that such attention to detail was unnecessary anyway.

Most of my work with MI5 concerned the so-called B Division of that organization. This was the place where intelligence was received and assessed, and where subsequent action was usually determined. By “action” in this context, I mean action to develop and exploit information received only, not such action as arrest. For, like SIS, MI5 had no executive power. It could not arrest suspects, but only recommend their arrest to the usual authorities. Although this made little difference in practice, since MI5’s recommendations were almost invariably accepted, the formal distinction was firmly maintained in theory.

Here, I think, lies one of the most important reasons for the greater professionalism of MI5 compared with SIS. MI5 operates on British territory, and is therefore sensitive to the law of the land. It can, and often does, press for specific breaches of the law, but each one requires the explicit sanction of the government, usually in the form of a Home Office Warrant. Armed with such warrants, MI5 can arrange, for instance, to tap the telephones of private citizens or of institutions such as foreign embassies and the headquarters of the Communist Party. But it must watch its step. If MI5 makes a mistake, questions are asked in Parliament, the press launches campaigns, and all manner of public consequences ensue, of a kind distasteful to a shy and furtive organization. No such inhibitions hamper the operations of SIS in breach of the laws of foreign countries. The only sufferer is the Foreign Service which has to explain away mistakes to foreign governments, usually by simple denials.

The quality of MI5 in wartime owed much to its temporary recruits. There was a particularly good haul from the universities: Hart, Blunt, Rothschild, Masterman, and others, and the law also made a substantial contribution. Most of these fine brains returned to their normal occupations after the war; as this book is not a history, there is no need to enlarge on their excellences. But at the top
of B Division, there were two professional intelligence officers who contrived throughout the war to retain the respect of their brilliant subordinates. As both have some part to play in my story, they call for a respectful mention.