My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (22 page)

An enquiry of this nature raised delicate problems. It implied an Anglo-American intention to abandon Turkey to its fate as soon as war broke out. However relentless the logic of such military thinking, it would hardly have appealed to the Turks. Indeed, it was believed that, if they had got any inkling that such plans were in existence, the resulting storm would blow away their illusions about the West and force them to come to terms with the Soviet Union. This part of the survey, therefore, had to be carried out with almost crippling discretion. Fortunately, the Turks remained unaware of my activity in this respect. If they had shown interest, it seems doubtful whether they would have believed my only possible line of defence, namely, that I was interested solely in the communications of an Allied army advancing into Georgia.

In any case, I decided that my beginnings should be modest.
After the first summer of reconnaissance, I would be better equipped for a more ambitious programme in 1948. The first hurdle was jumped when Uncle Ned, after a characteristic show of reluctance, gave me permission to visit Erzurum, from which Tefik Bey directed operations of the Security Inspectorate throughout the eastern region. The requirements of the topographical survey dictated travel by road; fortunately, my transport park in Istanbul included a heavy Dodge truck which looked as if it could withstand the shocks of a primitive road-and-track system which was all that existed east of Ankara in those days. After a courtesy farewell call on Uncle Ned in the capital, I struck out due east instead of taking the main road which runs through Kayseri to Sivas. My road took me through Boghaz Köy, thus lending the trip a little cultural uplift. It also enabled me to take a look at the unfrequented country between Yozgat and Sivas.

The notebooks which I filled during those journeys would have made nice material for one of Rose Macaulay’s “Turkey books.” Turkey east of the Euphrates had scarcely moved out of the nineteenth century. The Armenians, it is true, had been obliterated, and many of the Kurds as well. But you could still stand on the foothills of Palandöken and look across Erzurum towards the Camel’s Neck and the Georgian Throat, and almost hear the thunder of Paskevich’s guns forcing the eastern defiles. All that was about to be swept away. The Americans, with their missile-launching pads and U2s, were poised to move in.

My first call in Erzurum was at Tefik Bey’s office. He was a pleasant enough colleague with a more lively interest in his work than either Uncle Ned or Aunt Jane. But our discussions gave me little ground for hope about our prospects of infiltrating agents over the Soviet border into Georgia or Armenia. Like his opposite number in Adrianople, Tefik relied on the occasional tip-and-run agent, the occasional refugee, and professional smugglers. He spoke gloomily of the thoroughness with which the Russians had protected their frontier, of the numerous watch-towers and of the continuous ploughed strip on which illicit frontier-crossers must leave tracks.
His own intelligence maps showed the poverty of his resources. A few Soviet units in the immediate vicinity of the frontier had been identified, most of them tentatively. Penetration in depth had not even been attempted, let alone achieved. The
tabula
was depressingly
rasa
.

The talks with Tefik yielded one strong negative conclusion. To achieve penetration in depth, by which I meant the establishment of resident agents in Erivan, Tiflis,
^*
and the eastern ports of the Black Sea, it was useless to look for agent-material locally. The population on the Turkish side of the border was just too backward to serve our purposes. Besides, Tefik had combed the area for years, and it was silly to think that I could find material of promise where he had failed. We would clearly have to concentrate on, say, Georgian and Armenian emigré communities to find agents of sufficient ability to be trained in our requirements. My first recommendation to headquarters was that our stations in Paris, Beirut, Washington, and other centres where refugees tended to congregate be instructed to institute a search.

Another hint of Tefik’s gave me an idea in a different direction. He spoke of the magnificent views of Erivan to be obtained from the Turkish frontier. It occurred to me that if the armed services in London were so interested in a topographical survey of Turkey, they might also take kindly to a long-range photographic reconnaissance of the Soviet frontier area. Before I left Erzurum, I had begun to rough out a memorandum outlining the general idea of an operation on such lines. I called it Operation Spyglass. There was little doubt in my mind that it would be approved, if only because it would give our technical people a chance of trying out some of their latest equipment in the camera line.

I returned to Istanbul reasonably well content with the results of my trip. Very little had been achieved towards penetrating the Soviet Union, but at least I had some ideas on the subject to keep headquarters quiet for a time. The real gain was Spyglass. I strongly
doubted whether it would contribute much to the benefit of the armed service. But it would give me a cast-iron pretext for a long, hard look at the Turkish frontier region.

The reception of my proposals at headquarters was wholly favourable. I had learnt long before, while working for
The Times
, some of the tricks of dressing implausible thoughts in language that appealed to the more sober elements in the Athenaeum. An emissary was sent from London to Paris to discuss the problem with Jordania, sometime head of the independent Republic of Georgia that came into fleeting existence in the confusion following the great October Revolution. Jordania was the most widely acknowledged leader of the Georgian emigration, and it would have been very difficult for us to recruit Georgian volunteers without his blessing. Our request, of course, put him in a very awkward position. He had claimed so often that his people, with a few minor exceptions like Stalin and Ordzhonikidze, were wholeheartedly anti-Soviet that he could scarcely express doubts on the nature of the welcome they would receive in their native country. It was no business of ours to discourage him, and we gratefully accepted his promise to furnish suitable men. But our emissary obviously had his misgivings. In a telegram which he sent me describing the results of his mission, he dismissed the Elder Statesman succinctly as a “silly old goat.”

We were indeed to have our troubles with Jordania. By now, I had a reasonably clear vision of our future proceedings. We would start with a few tip-and-run raids, lasting a few days or perhaps weeks. Their object would be to explore the possibilities of conspiratorial existence in Georgia. Could safe houses be found? Was it possible to obtain a legal identity by purchase or otherwise? Could reliable courier lines be established? If these preliminary sallies went well, a start could be made with setting up, by gradual stages, a resident network, its shape and style to be dictated by the results of the early reconnaissances. What Jordania had in mind it was not easy to discover. We suspected that he wanted to burden his men from the beginning with bundles of stirring leaflets at which
the Foreign Office might have looked very askance indeed. So it became a sort of Chinese tea party. We had to be polite to Jordania because he was in a position to deny us recruits. On the other hand, without our help he would not get any of his people into Georgia at all. Our emissary soon came to know the London-Paris air schedules by heart, and to confess to a dawning dislike of the very sight of Paris. Thus, with deep mutual suspicion, the venture was launched.

My Spyglass proposals were described as “extraordinarily interesting.” This was very gratifying. It meant that I should spend most of the following summer, when the diplomatic corps came down to Istanbul from Ankara, at the opposite end of Turkey. Sir David Kelly, the Ambassador, now deceased, was a shy man with an acute and sensitive mind.

It also meant that I could ask for almost any amount of equipment with a reasonable assurance of getting it. The main item was, of course, the camera. Having no technical knowledge of photography, I could not specify the make; I simply described what I wanted it to do and left the rest to headquarters. In addition, I put in for two jeeps, lightweight tents, miscellaneous camping equipment, compasses and whatnot. Our technical people, always inclined to think that their ingenuity was insufficiently exploited, went to work with a will, and even sent a lot of stuff which I had not asked for, “to be tried out.” Throughout the winter an imposing number of packing-cases were hacked apart in our store-room. The show-piece was the camera. I had imagined some small and highly sophisticated instrument which might, with luck, be invisible from the Soviet watch-towers at a distance of a hundred yards or so. When I first clapped eyes on it, it looked as big as a tram. My reaction was a quick decision that I was not personally going to hump such a monster over the blazing foothills of Ararat and Aladag. My tough young junior was clearly the very man to come with me and do the heavy work.

Meanwhile, during the winter and spring, I was cast back on the meagre resources of intelligence available in Istanbul itself.
Following standard procedure, I began by sounding members of the resident British community. It was rough going. There are, of course, British residents abroad, businessmen, journalists and so on, who are prepared to stick their necks out. There was a Swinburne and a Wynne. But these are usually the lesser fry and their potentialities are limited. The big men, with their big potentialities, are usually unhelpful. They have too much to lose; they have duties to themselves, to their families; they even have duties to their damned shareholders. They would usually agree to pass on anything that “came their way”—invariably valueless gossip. But patriotism was not enough to induce them to take the risks involved in the systematic search for intelligence; and I could not offer them anything like the inducements they received from, say, the oil companies or civil-engineering firms. My patience would be tried by requests from headquarters for information about Turkish harbours which had actually been built by British concerns.

Our lack of success in Istanbul threw into higher relief the importance of our plans for Georgia. Here at least there was some progress to record. Jordania, rather to my surprise, made good his promise of furnishing men, and I was informed in due course that two recruits were undergoing training in London. My task was to clear matters with the Turks and, after several discussions with Uncle Ned, arrangements were made for the reception of the agents in Istanbul and their onward journey to Erzurum. But on one crucial point Uncle Ned proved immoveable. Tefik Bey would take control of the operation in Erzurum and himself make all arrangements for infiltrating them over the frontier. Uncle Ned insisted that I should not accompany them on the grounds that my own safety might be endangered. As he had given me permission to travel the whole frontier area in connection with Spyglass, the pretext was absurd. His obvious purpose was to get the agents to himself for the last forty-eight hours in pursuance of some scheme of his own. Thus, the luckless Georgians would cross the frontier with one assignment from Jordania, another from ourselves and yet
another from the Turks. Everyone was conspiring to weight the scales heavily against them. I gave way with very bad grace just as I thought that Uncle Ned was getting ready to threaten cancellation of the whole business.

In due course, we foregathered in Erzurum: Tefik Bey, myself and the two Georgians. The latter were alert and intelligent enough, but their backgrounds inspired little confidence. They were both in their twenties and had been born in Paris. They knew Georgia only by hearsay, and shared the myths of other emigrés about conditions in their country. One of them was notably subdued. Tefik Bey explained with maps that he proposed to infiltrate them in the neighbourhood of Pozof, a Turkish village facing the Soviet garrison town of Akhaltsikhe. We discussed the time of crossing with reference to the moon. We examined the arms and equipment with which the Georgians had been furnished in London. I wondered who would first lay hands on the little bags of sovereigns and napoleons—the Russians or the Turks. When I got Tefik alone, I questioned the wisdom of putting them over the frontier directly opposite a garrison town, but he countered with the observation that the terrain in that sector was ideal. Just because it was ideal, I asked, would it not be more heavily patrolled? He shrugged his shoulders. I was in a very weak position to argue as I had no personal knowledge of the frontier in that sector. For all I knew, Tefik might be right. Anyway, it was essential that I should be soon doing everything possible to ensure the success of the operation.

So the two Georgians went off under the escort of a Turkish officer to Ardahan and points north. All I could do was bite my nails in Erzurum. One of Tefik’s men was put to following me at a respectful distance of some fifty yards, so I amused myself by walking briskly about the countryside during the hottest part of the day, watching him take off his hat, then his tie and finally his coat. I happened to be with Tefik when the expected telegram came from Ardahan. The two agents had been put across at such-and-such a time. So many minutes later, there had been a burst of fire, and one
of the men had fallen—the other was last seen striding through a sparse wood away from the Turkish frontier. He was never heard of again.

By contrast, the Spyglass venture was wholly enjoyable. Under the escort of Major Fevzi, one of Tefik’s officers, we started at the extreme eastern end of the line, where the frontiers of the Soviet Union, Turkey and Iran meet, and worked our way gradually westward. Our technique was simple. We pinpointed our position on the map every few miles and swung the camera in a wide arc across Soviet territory. For the first day or two, I was expecting a burst of machine-gun fire at any moment. The Soviet frontier guards might have been excused for mistaking our instrument for a light mortar. As far as Tuzluca we followed the course of the Aras, with its teeming population of marshbirds, with Ararat on our left and Algöz on our right. Then we worked up the valley of the Arpa Cay, past the ancient Armenian capital of Ani, as far as Digor, opposite Leninakan. At this point, I decided that I had already taken too long a busman’s holiday, and that the western half of the frontier should wait until the following year. We drove back to Erzurum with a night-stop at Kars, where Fevzi startled me by suggesting a visit to a brothel.