My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (19 page)

Most of us wanted Arnold-Forster to occupy the chair. Apart from his willpower, his enthusiasm and his clear mind, he had acquired, as Principal Staff Officer to the Chief, a better knowledge than any of us of the organization as a whole. But the Chief, leery of Arnold-Forster’s brains and wishing to keep any proposals for reform within bounds, had kept a bombshell in reserve for us. To our utter astonishment, he announced that our Chairman would be Maurice Jeffes, the Director of Passport Control. As the official responsible for the issue of visas, Jeffes was in frequent contact with
our counter-espionage people; but his general knowledge of the service, of its possibilities and limitations, was nothing to write home about. As for his abilities, I do not suppose that he himself would have claimed to be more than a capable if colourless administrator. But there we were. The Chief had spoken.

In saying that Jeffes was colourless, I must explain that I use the term in a purely metaphorical sense. Some years before the formation of our committee, he had been the victim of a singular accident. A doctor, inoculating him against some disease, had used the wrong serum, with the result that Jeffes’s face had turned a strange purplish blue. The process was apparently irreversible, and Jeffes was stuck with his gun-metal face. During a visit to Washington, the honest fellow had been much incensed when the management of a hotel tried to cancel his booking on the ground that he was coloured. To be quite fair, Jeffes did little to interfere in the course of our debates, and never obtruded his authority as Chairman. It was impossible not to like him, and we soon got used to his spectacular presence at the head of the table.

Much of my time during the following months was taken up by the committee. Our deliberations had now become hopelessly academic, and do not call for detailed notice. But a few comments may perhaps throw light on some of the general problems confronting the organization of intelligence. Our first task was to clear up untidy survivals from the bad old days. During the war, finance and administration had gone separate ways with inadequate coordination. The “G” sections were generally messy, those concerned with Western Europe working for Dansey, the rest directly with the Chief. Looking at it from the other direction, Dansey was nominally Vice-Chief of the service as a whole; but in fact he was interested only in the production of intelligence in Western Europe. It was clear that the structure of the service as a whole stood in need of drastic streamlining.

But before we could deal with this first problem, a matter of fundamental principle had to be decided. Should the primary division of the service be along vertical lines, with regional organizations
responsible for the production, processing, assessment and circulation of information relating to their respective regions? Or should it be along horizontal lines, between the production of information on the one hand, and its processing, assessment and circulation on the other? I confess that I still do not know the right answer to this question. But at that time my own interest was heavily engaged. If the vertical solution were adopted, work against the Soviet Union and Communism generally would be divided regionally. No single person could cover the whole field. I therefore threw my weight behind the horizontal solution, in the hope of keeping, for the time being at any rate, the whole field of anti-Soviet and anti-Communist work under my own direct supervision.

In favour of the case for a horizontal solution, I had a strong ally in David Footman. In fact, it was he, in his dry and incisive way, who made most of the running, with myself in support where necessary. My argument was, briefly, that counter-espionage was one and indivisible. A case in Canada might throw light on another one in Switzerland—as indeed one did shortly thereafter; an agent working in China one year might turn up in Peru the next. It was essential, therefore, to study the subject on a world-wide basis. I also made use of the less valid, though not wholly baseless, point that the production of intelligence should be kept separate from its assessment, on the grounds that production officers naturally tended to regard their geese as swans. There was, of course, much to be said on both sides of the question; but the body of service opinion in favour of the vertical division was weakly represented in committee, and the horizontal solution was finally adopted. I knew at least one colleague who might have turned the tide against us, and I had been at some pains to have him excluded from the committee membership.

Once that question of principle was decided, the rest was fairly simple, if arduous, donkeywork. We recommended the creation of five Directorates of equal status: (1) Finance and Administration; (2) Production; (3) Requirements, so-called because in addition to assessing information and circulating it to government departments,
it passed back to the Directorate of Production the “requirements” of those departments; (4) Training and Development, the latter concerned with the development of technical devices in support of espionage; (5) War Planning. We drew up a system of ranks within the service, with fixed pay-scales and pensions on retirement. We threw on the Directorate of Finance and Administration the responsibility for systematic recruiting in competition with the regular civil service and industry, with particular attention to graduates from the universities. By the time our final bulky report was ready for presentation to the Chief, we felt that we had produced the design of something like a service, with enough serious inducements to tempt able young men to regard it as a career for life.

The Chief did not accept all our recommendations. There was still a certain amount of dead wood which found no place in our plan but which he could not bring himself to cut out. But, by and large, the pattern sketched above was adopted as the basic pattern of the service. For all its faults, it was a formidable improvement on anything that had gone before. As for myself, I had no cause for dissatisfaction. One of the minor decisions of the committee was the abolition of Section V.

VIII. T
HE
V
OLKOV
C
ASE

I now come to the Volkov case, which I propose to describe in some detail, both because of its intrinsic interest and because it nearly put an end to a promising career. The case began in August and ended in September of 1945. It was a memorable summer for me because it yielded me my first sights of Rome, Athens and Istanbul. But my delighted impressions of Istanbul were affected by the frequent reflection that this might be the last memorable summer I was destined to enjoy. For the Volkov business, which was what took me to the Bosphorus, proved to be a very narrow squeak indeed.

I had scarcely settled down to my desk one August morning when I received a summons from the Chief. He pushed across at me a sheaf of papers and asked me to look them through. The top paper was a brief letter to the Foreign Office from Knox Helm, then Minister at the British Embassy in Turkey. It drew attention to the attachments and asked for instructions. The attachments were a number of minutes that had passed between and within the British Embassy and Consulate-General, from which the following story emerged.

A certain Konstantin Volkov, a Vice-Consul attached to the Soviet Consulate-General in Istanbul, had approached a Mr. Page, his opposite number in the British Consulate-General, and asked for asylum in Britain for himself and his wife. He claimed that, although nominally a Vice-Consul, he was in fact an officer of the NKVD. He said that his wife was in a deplorably nervous state, and Page remarked that Volkov himself was less than rock-steady. In support of his request for asylum, Volkov promised to reveal details of the headquarters of the NKVD, in which apparently he had worked for many years. He also offered details of Soviet networks and agents operating abroad.
Inter alia
, he claimed to know the real names of three Soviet agents working in Britain. Two of them were in the Foreign Office; one was head of a counter-espionage organization in London. Having delivered himself of his shopping list, he stipulated with the greatest vehemence that no mention of his approach should be relayed to London by telegram, on the grounds that the Russians had broken a variety of British cyphers. The rest of the papers were of little interest, representing only off-the-cuff comments by various members of the Embassy, some of them quite flippant in tone. What proved to be of some importance later was that the Embassy had respected Volkov’s stipulation about communications, and had sent the papers home, securely but slowly, by bag. Thus it was over a week after Volkov’s approach to Page that the material was examined by anyone competent to assess its importance.

That “anyone” was myself; and the reader will not reproach me with boasting when I claim that I was indeed competent to assess the importance of the material. Two Soviet agents in the Foreign Office, one head of a counter-espionage organization in London! I stared at the papers rather longer than necessary to compose my thoughts. I rejected the idea of suggesting caution in case Volkov’s approach should prove to be a provocation. It would be useless in the short run, and might possibly compromise me at a later date. The only course was to put a bold face on it. I told the Chief that I thought we were on to something of the greatest importance. I
would like a little time to dig into the background and, in the light of any further information on the subject, to make appropriate recommendations for action. The Chief acquiesced, instructing me to report first thing next morning and, in the meanwhile, to keep the papers strictly to myself.

I took the papers back to my office, telling my secretary that I was not to be disturbed, unless the Chief himself called. I very much wanted to be alone. My request for a little time “to dig into the background” had been eyewash. I was pretty certain that we had never heard of Volkov; and he, presumably to enhance his value to us, had framed his shopping list in such vague terms that it offered no leads for immediate investigation. Still, I had much food for thought. From the first, it seemed to me that the time factor was vital. Owing to Volkov’s veto on telegraphic communications, the case had taken ten days to reach me. Personally, I thought that his fears were exaggerated. Our cyphers were based on the one-time pad system, which is supposed to be foolproof, if properly used; and our cypher discipline was strict. Yet, if Volkov so wished, I had no objection to ruling out swift communication.

Another train of thought soon claimed my attention. The case was of such delicacy that the Chief had insisted on my handling it myself. But, once the decisions had been taken in London, all action would devolve on our people in Istanbul. It would be impossible for me, with slow-bag communications, to direct their day-to-day, hour-to-hour actions. The case would escape my control, with unpredictable results. The more I thought, the more convinced I became that I should go to Istanbul myself, to implement the course of action that I was to recommend to the Chief. The action itself required little thought. It involved meeting Volkov, bedding him down with his wife in one of our safe houses in Istanbul, and spiriting him away, with or without the connivance of the Turks, to British-occupied territory in Egypt. By the time I put the papers in my personal safe and left Broadway, I had decided that my main
recommendation to the Chief would be that he should instruct me to go to Istanbul to continue handling the case on the spot. That evening, I worked late. The situation seemed to call for urgent action of an extra-curricular nature.

Next morning, I reported to the Chief that, although we had several Volkovs on file, none of them matched our man in Istanbul. I repeated my view that the case was of great potential importance. Dwelling on the delays involved in communication by bag, I recommended, rather diffidently, that someone fully briefed should be sent out from London to take charge of the case on the spot. “Just what I was thinking myself,” replied the Chief. But having raised my hopes, he promptly dashed them. The previous evening, he said, he had met Brigadier Douglas Roberts in clubland. Roberts was then head of Security Intelligence (Middle East), MI5’s regional organization based in Cairo. He was enjoying the fag-end of a spell of home leave. The Chief had been well impressed by him, and his intention, so he told me, was to ask Sir David Petrie, the head of MI5, to send Roberts straight out to Istanbul to take charge of the Volkov case.

I could find nothing to say against the proposal. Although I had formed no very high opinion of Roberts’s ability, he had all the paper qualifications for the task on hand. He was a senior officer; his Brigadier’s uniform would doubtless impress Volkov. He knew the area and had worked with the Turkish secret services, whose co-operation might prove to be necessary. Above all, he spoke fluent Russian—an unassailably strong point in his favour. In despondent mood, I went through other aspects of the case with the Chief, notably the need for getting Foreign Office approval for our plan of action. As I left, the Chief asked me to be available in the afternoon, since he hoped to see both Petrie and Roberts in the course of the morning.

During the lunch interval, I railed against the wretched luck that had brought the Chief and Roberts together the previous evening. There seemed nothing that I could do. Suspenseful as it would be,
I just had to sit back and let events take their course, hoping that my work the night before would bear fruit before Roberts got his teeth into the case. But I was in for yet another lesson in everyday philosophy. On return to Broadway, I found a summons from the Chief awaiting me. He looked thoroughly disconcerted and plunged immediately into his story; from his first words, I realized that luck, against which I had railed so bitterly, had veered sharply in my favour. Roberts, it appeared, though doubtless as lion-hearted as the next man, had an unconquerable distaste for flying. He had made his arrangements to return by boat from Liverpool early the following week. Nothing that the Chief or Petrie could say would induce him to change his plans. So we were back where we started from that morning.