My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (6 page)

DU was not the ideal starting-point for what I had in mind. I
wanted to find out how it was organized and what it was doing. But Guy, following his own predilections, had turned DU into a sort of ideas factory. He regarded himself as a wheel, throwing off ideas like sparks as it revolved. Where the sparks fell he did not seem to care. He spent a long time in other people’s offices, propounding his ideas. As he warmed to his themes, shouts of raucous laughter would drift down the corridor to my office where I sat thinking or reading the newspapers. After a hard morning’s talking, Guy would return to my office, chortling and dimpling, and suggest going out for a drink.

One day in July, Guy came into my office bringing some papers for a change. They were pages of a memorandum written by himself. Grand had given general approval to its contents, and had asked for further study and elaboration of the subject. For that Guy needed my help. I was excessively pleased. From long experience, I knew that “helping” Guy meant taking all the donkey work off his hands. But as I had done literally nothing for two weeks, I would have been glad of any work. I took the papers and Guy sat down on my table to watch my face for signs of appreciation.

It was a characteristic production: lots of good sense embedded to the point of concealment in florid epigram and shaky quotation. (Guy had quotations to meet almost any emergency, but he never bothered to verify them.) What he proposed was the establishment of a school for training agents in the techniques of underground work. It was an astonishing proposal, not because it was made, but because it had not been made before. No such school existed. Guy argued the case for its necessity, obvious now but new then. He outlined the subjects of a syllabus. At the end, he suggested that such a college should be named the “Guy Fawkes College” to commemorate an unsuccessful conspirator “who had been foiled by the vigilance of the Elizabethan SIS.” It was a neat touch. He could hardly have proposed “Guy Burgess College.”

At last, I had got my teeth into something. I broke the subject up into its component parts: syllabus, selection of trainees, security, accommodation and so on, and produced a memorandum on each.
I have forgotten most of what I wrote and, in view of the huge training establishment that gradually developed, I hope that my first modest paper on the subject no longer exists. Having deposited his shower of sparks into my lap, Guy seemed to lose interest in a fresh riot of ideas. But it was not so. He saw that Grand read my papers, and arranged committees to discuss them. I did not take to committee work then, and have never taken to it since. Every committee has a bugbear. My bugbear on the training committee was a certain Colonel Chidson.
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He had played an astute part in rescuing a lot of industrial diamonds from Hitler in Poland, but to me he was a pain in the neck. He had visions of anarchy stalking Europe, and resisted bitterly the whole idea of letting a lot of thugs loose on the continent. One day, I spotted him coming towards me in Lower Regent Street. A moment later, he saw me and froze in his tracks. In a swift recovery, he turned up his coat collar and dived into a side-street. Our training school had evidently become very necessary.

Guy’s refrain at the time was “the idea must be made to
catch on
”; and somehow it did. In due course, I learnt to my surprise that Brickendonbury Hall, a former school building standing in spacious grounds near Hertford, had been acquired for training purposes.
^†
I was introduced to a Commander Peters, RN, who had been seconded to us to act as commandant of the school. He often took Guy and me to dinner at the Hungaria, to listen to our views on the new project. He had faraway naval eyes and a gentle smile of great charm. Against all the odds, he took a great and immediate fancy to Guy, who ruthlessly swiped the cigarettes off his desk. As will be seen, his connection with us was brief. He was later awarded a posthumous VC for what was probably unnecessarily gallant behaviour in Oran harbour. When I heard of the award, I felt a pang that he should never have known about it. He was the type of
strong sentimentalist who would have wept at such honour. Our trainees came to adore him.

There were other additions to the training staff. There was jolly George Hill
^*
who had written books about his secret exploits in Soviet Russia. He was one of the few living Englishmen who had actually put sand in axle-boxes. Immensely paunchy, he looked rather like Soglow’s king with a bald pate instead of a crown. He was later appointed head of the SOE Mission
^†
in Moscow, where the Russians hailed him with delight. They knew all about him. A very belated security check of his conference room in Moscow revealed a fearsome number of sources of leakage. Then there was an explosives expert named Clark, with a rumbustious sense of humour. Asked to arrange a demonstration for the Czech DMI
^‡
and his staff, he planted booby-traps in a copse through which they had to walk to his training-ground. He had assumed that they would go through the wood in Indian file like ducks. Instead, they walked abreast, and the officers at each end of the line suffered nasty shocks. It was a fluke that no one was hurt.

Then there was a melancholy Czech printer, who was recommended as having run an underground press in Prague. He was pale and podgy; after one look at him, the Commander decided that he must mess with the students. Another sad figure was an Austrian Social-Democrat who called himself Werner. He was being groomed to bear-lead any Austrian trainees we might get. No such recruits ever appeared and, as he spoke only German, I had to spend a lot of time holding his hand. He finally resigned, and was earmarked for other employment. He was killed when a submarine taking him to Egypt was sunk by dive-bombers in the Mediterranean.

Our outstanding personality, however, was undoubtedly Tommy Harris, an art-dealer of great distinction.
^*
He was taken on, at Guy’s suggestion, as a sort of glorified housekeeper, largely because he and his wife were inspired cooks. He was the only one of us who acquired, in those first few weeks, any sort of personal contact with the trainees. The work was altogether unworthy of his untaught but brilliantly intuitive mind. He was soon snapped up by MI5 where he was to conceive and guide one of the most creative intelligence operations of all time. It will be seen that those days at Brickendonbury were days of almost unrelieved gloom, as far as I was concerned. They were illumined only by the beginning of a close and most highly prized friendship with Tommy Harris.

A few trainees were tossed our way: two small groups of Belgians and Norwegians, and a somewhat larger group of Spaniards. In all, there were about twenty-five of them. Perhaps they picked up some useful tips at Brickendonbury, but I doubt it. We had no idea what tasks they were supposed to perform, and neither Guy nor I had any success in digging the necessary information out of London headquarters. Otherwise, we had little to do, except talk to the Commander and help him draft memoranda for headquarters which seldom vouchsafed a reply. One thing only was clear. We had little to teach the Spaniards, most of whom were ex-
dinamiteros
from Asturias. “All instructors are the same,” remarked one—a boy of about eighteen. “They tell you to cut off so much fuse. We double it to be quite safe. That is why we are still alive.”

We might have learnt a useful lesson in security procedure if we had but known it. The truth did not emerge for some years. As we proposed to deal with agents to be sent to enemy territory where they were likely to be captured, it was decided that the identities of officers on the training staff should be protected by aliases. Peters became Thornley, Hill became Dale and so on. Guy, indulging his
schoolboyish sense of fun, persuaded the Commander to impose on me behind my back a name so inappropriate that I refuse to divulge it. The only exception was Tommy Harris who, for reasons which escape me, was allowed to retain his own name. Sometime after the war, Tommy ran into the head of our Belgian group, a nasty man of carefully obtruded aristocratic origin, and repaired to a teashop with him. While reminiscing about Brickendonbury, the Belgian remarked that the trainees had penetrated all our aliases save one. Tommy tested him and found that he did indeed know all our names, and asked him who the exception was. “Actually it was you,” replied the Belgian.

Guy Burgess will soon disappear temporarily from these pages, so I may perhaps be forgiven a story which brings out his love of innocent mischief. Night had just fallen after a fine summer day. The Commander was in bed, nursing a sharp attack of eczema, to hide which he was growing a beard. A visiting instructor, masquerading under the name of Hazlitt, was at his bedside sipping a glass of port. There was a sudden shout from the garden, which was taken up by a babel in five languages. Trainees poured into the house, claiming to have seen one, three, ten, any number of parachutes falling in the vicinity. On hearing the news, the Commander ordered the Belgians to get into uniform and mount a machine-gun in the French windows. It commanded a nice field of fire, right across the school playing grounds. I do not know what would have happened if the enemy had come in by the front door. “If the Germans have invaded,” the Commander told Hazlitt, “I shall get up.”

He then made a disastrous mistake. He instructed Guy to ascertain the exact facts of the case, and telephone the result to the Duty Officer in London. Guy went about the business with wicked conscientiousness. I heard snatches of his subsequent telephone report. “No, I cannot add to what I have said. . . . You wouldn’t want me to falsify evidence, would you? Shall I repeat? . . . Parachutes have been seen dropping in the neighbourhood of Hertford in numbers varying from eighty to none. . . . No, I cannot differentiate between the credibility of the various witnesses. Eighty to none. Have you
got that? I will call you again if necessary. Goodbye.” He went to report in triumph. “I don’t know what I shall do if I do get up,” said the Commander, “but I shall certainly take command.”

An hour or two passed, and nothing more happened. The Belgians sadly took apart their Lewis gun, and we all went to bed. Next morning, Guy spent a lot of time on the telephone, and periodically spread gleeful tidings. The Duty Officer had alerted his Chief, who had communicated with the War Office. Eastern Command had been pulled out of bed, its armour grinding to action stations in the small hours. Guy made several happy guesses at the cost of the operation, upping it by leaps and bounds throughout the day. I should add that the nil estimate given him the night before was my own; the eighty, I should think, came from Guy himself. Both of us were wrong. One parachute had fallen. Attached to a landmine, it had draped itself harmlessly round a tree.

As the summer weeks went by without any clear directives from London, the Commander’s aspect changed for the worse. He became more than usually taciturn and withdrawn. At first, I thought that his eczema was bothering him more than he cared to admit. But then I began to hear from the grapevine things which had never been told us officially. Section D had been detached from SIS and reformed under the aegis of Dr. Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare; Grand had gone, his place taken by Frank Nelson,
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a humourless businessman whose capacity I never had an opportunity to gauge. After a visit to Brickendonbury from Colin Gubbins
^†
and a posse of fresh-faced officers, who barked at each other and at us, the Commander fell into a deep depression. He minded not being told. It was no surprise when he summoned Guy and myself one morning and told us that he had spent the previous evening composing his letter of resignation. He spoke sadly, as if conscious of failure and neglect. Then he cheered up and the charming smile
came back, for the first time in many days. He was clearly happy to be going back to his little ships after his brief baptism of political fire.

The Commander’s resignation was accepted without difficulty. Listlessly, we set about disbanding our establishment. The steps taken to this end are no more than a blur in my memory. We must have stashed the trainees away somewhere for future use, as I heard later that, in addition to Werner, at least two of them were dead. One, a nice Norwegian wireless operator, had been caught by the Germans and shot soon after his return to Norway. The other, the best of the Belgian group, had been flown to a dropping place in Belgium. But his parachute had somehow caught on the under-carriage of the aircraft, and he had been hurtled at mercifully high speed to unconsciousness and death. The Spaniards I was to see again.

Tommy Harris left us in pretty high dudgeon and soon found his true level as a valued officer of MI5. Guy and I reported to the new headquarters of Special Operations at 64 Baker Street which afterwards became famous (or notorious, according to the point of view) as plain “Baker Street.” An awful lot of office furniture was being moved in and around; every time we visited the place, partitions seemed to be going up or coming down. Below us, the staff of Marks & Spencer watched and wondered. There were many new faces confronted with new jobs. Banking, big business and the law had been combed for recruits. There was also a distressing dearth of old colleagues. Nelson’s purge had been thoroughgoing. He had been gleefully assisted by some senior officers on the intelligence side of SIS, notably Claude Dansey and David Boyle, of whom more will be heard. They were determined not only to “get Grand,” but to get all his closest henchmen as well.

The purge was to come yet nearer before it was called off. One evening, Guy dropped in for a drink in an unusually tongue-tied condition. Finally it came out; he had fallen “victim to a bureaucratic intrigue,” by which I understood that he had been sacked. I assumed that my own days, if not hours, were numbered, and Guy obviously looked forward to having me as a companion in distress.
But next month, and the month after that, my pay envelope still contained ten £5 notes. Special Operations, it seemed, had need of me; or perhaps I was too insignificant to merit dismissal. Guy was nothing if not resilient. He soon found a desirable niche in the Ministry of Information, which gave him a wide range of cultivable contacts. He began to refer contemptuously to my continued association with “Slop and Offal.”