My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (18 page)

Although Hollis had achieved little in respect to Soviet activity, he had been successful in obtaining an intimate picture of the British Communist Party by the simple expedient of having microphones installed in its King Street headquarters. The result was a delicious paradox. The evidence of the microphones showed consistently that the Party was throwing its full weight behind the war effort, so that even Herbert Morrison, who was thirsting for Communist blood, could find no legal means of suppressing it.

At the beginning of 1945, when the section was adequately staffed and housed, the time came for me to visit some of our field stations. My object was partly to repair the damage done by Steptoe, partly to discuss with our station commanders ways and means of getting the information required by Section IX. The first part of my mission was easily achieved, simply by telling all concerned
that my first action in taking over the section had been to get Steptoe sacked—a news item that won universal approval. But the second part was much more difficult. Our real target was invisible and inaudible; as far as we were concerned, the Soviet intelligence services might never have existed. The upshot of our discussions could be little more than a general resolution to keep casting flies over Soviet and East European diplomatic personnel and over members of the local Communist parties. During my period of service, there was no single case of consciously conceived operations against Soviet intelligence bearing fruit. We progressed only by means of windfalls that literally threw the stuff into our laps. With one or two exceptions, to be noted later, these windfalls took the form of defectors from the Soviet service. They were the ones who “chose freedom,” like Kravchenko who, following Krivitsky’s example, ended up a disillusioned suicide. But was it freedom they sought, or the flesh-pots? It is remarkable that not one of them volunteered to stay in position, and risk his neck for “freedom.” One and all, they cut and ran for safety.

These trips, which covered France, Germany, Italy, and Greece, were to some extent educative, since they gave me insight into various types of SIS organizations in the field. But after each journey, I concluded, without emotion, that it would take years to lay an effective basis for work against the Soviet Union. As a result, it is the trivial incident, rather than any real achievement, that remains brightest in my memories of that summer. There was the wineglass of chilled Flit which I drained in Berlin; my host had proffered it in the belief that it was Niersteiner. My visit to Rome was marred by an interminable office wrangle over the Passport Control Officer’s transport. Was he entitled to an official car or was he not? In Bari, I was instrumental in getting a pet bugbear chosen for air-drop into Yugoslavia; but instead of breaking his neck, he covered himself with glory. In Larissa, I watched one of the atmospheric marvels with which Greece is so generous: two separate and distinct thunderstorms, one over Ossa, the other over Olympus, while around us the plain of Thessaly rippled quietly under the clearest of blue
skies. Meanwhile, back in grimy Broadway, events were in train that were to claim a great deal of my attention.

The accumulating shocks of war had swept away the amateurish service of previous years, although some of its survivals were a long time dying. With victory in Europe, the large wartime service contracted rapidly, and what was left of it had to be reshaped. As the head of a section, I was now regarded as an officer of some seniority—especially as my section was clearly going to be larger, by a long chalk, than any other. The penalty was that I was drawn increasingly into administration and policy-making. Doubtless there are expeditious means of administering organizations and framing policies; but we had not yet found them. I spent a frightening number of mornings and afternoons busily doodling in committee, with only one ear on the proceedings.

As this book is primarily a record of my own experiences, I have so far mentioned the higher levels of the service only occasionally, when their sometimes unaccountable interventions affected my work. Before going on to describe the reorganization of SIS which took place after the war, it is necessary to take a closer look at my elders and betters, beginning with the Chief, now Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies.

I think that I have already made it clear that I look back on the Chief with enduring affection. He was not, in any sense of the words, a great intelligence officer. His intellectual equipment was unimpressive, and his knowledge of the world, and views about it, were just what one would expect from a fairly cloistered son of the upper levels of the British Establishment. In my own field, counter-espionage, his attitudes were schoolboyish—bars, beards and blondes. But it was this persistent boyish streak shining through the horrible responsibilities that world war placed on his shoulders, and through the ever-present threat of a summons from Churchill in one of his whimsical midnight moods, that was his charm. His real strength lay in a sensitive perception of the currents of Whitehall politics, in an ability to feel his way through the mazy corridors of power. Capable officers who knew him much better than myself
spoke of his almost feminine intuition—by which I do not mean that he was anything but a whole man.

The Chief’s skill in this respect first became common knowledge in SIS when he repelled a determined assault launched by the three service Directors of Intelligence, his colleagues on the Joint Intelligence Committee. The burden of their complaint was that secret intelligence obtained from SIS was inadequate and something would have to be done about it. There was surely some substance in their allegations; there never was an intelligence service that could not have done with improvement. But the Chief knew that it would be useless to contest the accusations against him point by point. His basic weakness was that he had to look over his shoulder so often. Not a few senior officers were after his job; one of these was said to be Admiral Godfrey,
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sometime Director of Naval Intelligence.

The Chief had no intention whatever of turning his office upside down to please the services. But he was astute enough to know that real danger lurked somewhere along the corridors. Characteristically, rather than meet it head on, he resorted to suppleness and manoeuvre. Conceding much of his colleagues’ criticisms, he invited each of the service Intelligence Directors to send to his staff a senior officer. These officers would be given the rank of Deputy Directors. They would be given full access to all aspects of work of SIS bearing on their particular provinces. They would be free to make any sort of recommendations they liked, and their recommendations would be given the most sympathetic consideration. The Chief, or so he said, had no doubt that, with specialist senior officers of the Military, Naval and Air Intelligence Directorates at his elbow, the requirements of the services would soon be fully covered.

It was a handsome offer, which the services could hardly have refused. It was also a shrewd one. The Chief knew well that no service Intelligence Director in his right mind would part with a
senior officer of value to himself—certainly not in conditions of total war. It could be expected with the utmost confidence that the officers seconded to SIS would be expendables, if not outright duds. Once they were bedded down in Broadway Buildings, they could be shunted out of harm’s way. I do not suppose that the Chief for a moment doubted that he could achieve a happy ending; and the event proved him wholly right.

So we got our three service commissars, as they were promptly dubbed. Deputy Director/Army was a certain Brigadier Beddington. Within a few weeks, he was engrossed in the problem of checking the ranks of Army officers on the strength of SIS. As a civilian, I had no official contact with him, so I cannot say what lay behind his fleshy face. But I had one small brush with him that suggested that I was lucky to be out of his reach. In those days of clothes rationing, I tried to save the elbows of my two or three civilian suits by wearing in the office the tunic of my war correspondent’s uniform. Thus attired, I once entered the office lift with Beddington. We were not on speaking terms—he was that kind of a man—but I noticed a pair of widening eyes wander up my tunic and come to rest on my virgin shoulder-straps. Within half an hour, I received a visit from one of Beddington’s underlings, who asked me for details of my military service. I explained how I had come by my tunic and why I was quite entitled to wear it without badges of rank.

The representative of the Air Ministry, Air Commodore Payne,
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was more difficult. Payne went to the United States, where his assignment, satisfactorily prolonged, took him as far west as California—Hollywood, according to some.

Deputy Director/Navy, Colonel Cordeaux, was a Marine officer, and the best of the three commissars. He was a footballer of parts, having played in goal for Grimsby Town. With the Chief’s encouragement, he soon settled down to conscientious, if some-what stodgy, direction of SIS operations in and around Scandinavia. It was nice to see at least one of the commissars taking an
interest in the work of our service to the extent of actually doing a little himself. From the Chief’s point of view, it was satisfactory that Cordeaux, confined to his tight little corner of Northern Europe, was ill-placed to promote revolutions within SIS.

Not long after the Deputy Directors had settled down in their respective spheres of harmless obscurity, there were further changes at the top. I have already shown that Vivian’s star was waning rapidly. It became absurd that he should continue under the style of Deputy Chief. He was therefore kicked downwards and sideways into a sinecure created for him, as Adviser on Security Policy. He clung on for years regardless of pride, writing long minutes which nobody read, hoping against vain hope to retire with a K. His place was taken by Dansey. But, to assuage Vivian’s feelings, which were very easily hurt, Dansey became, not Deputy Chief, but Vice-Chief. Dansey’s former position, that of Assistant-Chief, was now filled by a new and unaccountable intrusion from outside the service in the diminutive shape of General Marshal-Cornwall. At the time of his induction into the service, he was the senior General in the British Army. If he does not figure more prominently in this narrative, it is because his influence was ineffectual where it was not unfortunate. It was he who, through some inexplicable quirk, sustained the long and vicious vendetta against the Passport Control Officer in Rome on account of his wretched car.

Peace soon brought new faces. Marshal-Cornwall left unregretted, almost unremarked. Dansey retired with a knighthood, to experience in quick succession the states of marriage and death. It came to me, when I heard that he was dead, that I had really rather liked him. Nefarious as his influence on the service was, it gave me a pang to think that that crusty old spirit was still for ever. Dansey’s place as Vice-Chief was filled from outside by the appointment of General Sinclair,
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formerly Director of Military Intelligence. The
Chief, on hearing criticism of the appointment, characteristically remarked: “Why, I have stifled War Office criticism for five years.” The vacancy caused by Marshal-Cornwall’s departure was filled by another outsider, Air Commodore Easton.

For both these newcomers I soon felt a respect which I had been unable to extend to their predecessors. Sinclair, though not overloaded with mental gifts (he never claimed them) was humane, energetic and so obviously upright that it was impossible to withhold admiration. Easton was a very different proposition. On first acquaintance, he gave the impression of burbling and bumbling, but it was dangerously deceptive. His strength was a brain of conspicuous clarity, yet capable of deeply subtle twists. Regarding them from time to time in the light of antagonists, I could not help applying to Sinclair and Easton the obvious metaphor of bludgeon and rapier. I was not afraid of the bludgeon; it could be dodged with ease. But the occasional glimpse of Easton’s rapier made my stomach flop over. I was fated to have a great deal to do with him.

Before these last appointments were made, a serious attempt had been launched to put the whole organization on a sound footing. I have indicated that the pre-war service had been a haphazard and dangerously amateur affair. There was no regular system of recruitment, of training, of promotion or of security at the end of a career. The Chief took whom he could when and where he could, and all contracts of service were subject to termination at any time. In such conditions, it was impossible to attract a regular flow of recruits of the requisite standard. No wonder that the personnel of the service was of uneven quality, ranging from good through indifferent to downright bad. The war had been a rude awakening. The service had to be vastly increased in numbers, and many able people passed through its ranks, dropping ideas as they went. But the strength of the service had been achieved by a succession of improvisations under the day-to-day stress of war. Almost everything that was done could have been done better if there had been time for reflection. Now the time was ripe. The end of the war in Europe had relieved the pressure for immediate results, yet the
government was still alive to the value of intelligence. It was essential to use the remaining months of 1945 to hammer out a new structure for the service before the government sank back into post-war lethargy. The Chief himself had doubtless been thinking along these lines. When it was presented to him that there was considerable support for the idea in the service, he appointed a committee to advise him on the subject. The so-called Committee of SIS Reorganization began its meetings in September 1945.

The ringleaders of the movement had been Arnold-Forster and Captain Hastings, RN, a senior and influential officer of the Government Code & Cypher School. Although not a member of SIS, Hastings had a legitimate interest in its activity, in view of wartime lessons on the need for close liaison between the cryptographers and SIS. His appointment also had the advantage of bringing a fresh mind to the debates in committee. David Footman
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was brought in to look after the political needs of the service, while Colonel Cordeaux represented the “G” sections. I was also invited to serve, not because of any aptitude for committee work (which I detested), but because, Vivian excepted, I was the senior counter-espionage officer in the service. Our secretary was Alurid Denne, a careful, not to say punctilious, officer who could be relied on for complete impartiality because he had a comfortable niche awaiting him in the Shell Oil Company.