My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (8 page)

This is not the place for a discussion of the limitations of SOE, whether imposed from outside or inherent in its own weaknesses. I mention these problems only to illustrate the doubts which beset me as I joined the teaching staff at Beaulieu. They explain why, in spite of the good companions I found at the school, my stay there was almost wholly unsatisfactory. My own shortcomings, and the enforced neglect of my other interests, contributed substantially to the unhappy state of affairs. I escaped to London whenever I could, usually on the pretext of visiting Woburn for talks on technical matters. But it was not enough. No wonder that my mess bill was consistently the highest.

My discontent was in no way due to my colleagues at Beaulieu, in whom I was lucky. Our commandant, John Munn, was a young colonel of the sensible military type, as opposed to the no-nonsense military, the mystical military and the plain-silly military. He neither barked nor advocated Yoga. He held together a shoal of pretty odd fish in a net of personal authority. His treatment of us was adult, and his attitude to his own superiors was loyally critical. His Chief of Staff was an older man who had seen service in the First World War. He was fond of saying that he had security in his bones, and looked as if he had little marrow in them. But he was only occasionally a nuisance and had a pretty talent for the piano.

The Chief Instructor was a colourful character called Bill Brooker, who afterwards made a great success of the subsidiary training school established in Canada. He was the dynamic-salesman type, with an inexhaustible armoury of wisecracks and anecdotes, including a series in brilliant Marseilles argot. As far as I am aware, he had never lived an underground life. But, after a little research, he could talk to trainees as if he had never lived otherwise. He was assisted by a paler imitation of himself, who described himself as a drysalter. Drysalting, I learnt, was one of the more respectable of City occupations.

We had one of the pottery Wedgwoods, pale and wild-eyed, who
would break long silences by unexpected and devastating sallies. There was Trevor-Wilson, who later displayed a gift for captivating both the French and the Chinese, which proved invaluable when he was posted to Hanoi. He used to visit Southampton regularly on private business about which he would smile savourously and say nothing. One day he was refused official transport for the purpose and resolutely walked the whole way, there and back—some fifteen to twenty miles. It was the most determined act of gallantry in my experience. In abrupt contrast to Trevor-Wilson, there was a Buchmanite
^*
who unhappily marked me down for conversion. The end came when he gave me his views on sexual intercourse and I remarked that I felt sorry for his wife. After that, our contacts were limited to table-tennis, which he played with a dexterity suggesting human origin.

The star of our team was Paul Dehn,
^†
who had now fulfilled his early promise as an entertainer. He proved that deep waters do not have to be still. At bottom, he was a serious man with a warm and generous strain of romanticism. On the surface, he bubbled and frothed like a trout stream. His tomfoolery at the piano shortened the long summer evenings, and some of his images are still with me. He claimed to have heard at a Manchester bus stop the following snatch of conversation. First prosperous grocer to second prosperous grocer: “Adabitacunt last night. Aaaah, it was luvly . . . just like a velvet marse-trap.”

The one of us who achieved most public recognition after the war (if we except Paul Dehn) was Hardy Amies, the dress-designer. He was my first and only contact with that profession, and he looked the part in a large and elegant fore-and-aft, green for the
Intelligence Corps. He was not a regular member of our mess, as he was liaison officer between the school and headquarters in Baker Street, one of his main duties being to dig out of headquarters material of potential value to our instructing staff. As our requirements were, at that stage, almost limitless, he could have made for himself a pretty wide field of enquiry. I felt unreasonably resentful of his presence as his job would have suited me better than my own.

The first fact to distinguish me from my colleagues was that I was alone in having had personal experience of life underground. Not one of the others had ever dreamt of lowering his voice when passing a policeman in the street. Yet subsequent experience convinced me that, in the circumstances, the choice of raw instructors was wise. Seasoned secret service officers were in desperately short supply. In practice, they could only have been drawn from SIS. It was clear that if SIS had been approached for suitable instructors, it would have followed time-honoured practice by off-loading duds (if even they could have been spared). It is awesome to think what would have happened to the trainees if they had fallen into the hands of such men. As it was, our staff instructors had more than their fair share of intelligence and imagination; beside them, some of the old hands would have looked imbecile. This view, I think, is borne out by experience. There has been much criticism of SOE; of its planning, its operations, its security. But attacks on its training establishment have been relatively and deservedly few.

The second fact that set me apart from my colleagues was that they were all in uniform. On occasion, Peters and Gubbins had both dropped remarks about the desirability of getting me into the army. As I have already said, I thought that such a step might seriously limit my freedom of movement without offering any countervailing benefit. I found that the best way to maintain my eccentric status was neither to agree or disagree; in face of my apparent total indifference, the subject was quietly forgotten. Long before the end of the war, I came to realize my good fortune. I was never inhibited by dreams of promotion nor by the envy of colleagues, and never had rank pulled on me by senior officers outside my service.

The great difference between Beaulieu and Brickendonbury was that we actually trained people at Beaulieu. We were no longer an overstaffed holding camp, but a real school. There was a group of Norwegians, who were remarkable at fieldcraft. In one night exercise, after only a few weeks of training, the whole group succeeded in reaching a particular upstairs room in a house after penetrating thick woods strewn with alarms and booby-traps, laid by the head gamekeeper at Sandringham,
^*
and crossing an open garden heavily patrolled by members of the instructing staff. I was on patrol myself and could have sworn that no one had got through. There were my old Spanish friends from Brickendonbury, required to do a little work at last. After my first talk with them, they nicknamed me
el comisario politico
. These were presumably the same Spaniards whom my old friend, Peter Kemp,
^†
met on the shores of Loch Morar, near Arisaig. In his instructive book,
No Colours or Crest
, Kemp writes of them: “A villainous crowd of assassins; we made no attempt to mix with them”—a remarkable case of telepathic judgement.
^‡
My own feeling is that after being mucked around for a year or so by the British Government, they would cheerfully have killed anyone in the uniform of a British officer. But they exercised restraint.

It is only with sadness that one can recall the party of Dutchmen who attended our first course. Too many of them, owing to an operational disaster, were soon to be sent to certain death. Herr Giskes,
^§
a former Abwehr officer, has written of the capture in Holland of an SOE wireless operator, who thereafter communicated with England under German control and was responsible for party after party being dropped straight into the arms of waiting Germans. Subsequent enquiry seems to have established that the
captured operator did in fact send the emergency signal telling HQ that he was in German hands, but that somehow his message was wrongly interpreted, or just ignored.

Shortly after the school opened, we were sent a party of anti-Fascist Italians, recruited from among Italian prisoners-of-war in India by Alberto Tarchiani and his friends. They were unfortunate in the choice of the British officer put in charge of them. He spoke perfect Italian, but was of the barking type. I used to wonder, not very sympathetically, when he would get a stiletto in his ribs. There were also two Frenchmen, booked for some special mission which was not divulged to us. One was Right, the other Left; but both had an admirable hatred of Vichy. They turned out to be my star pupils, and within a fortnight they were producing leaflets of a high standard. I mention this because they were almost the only trainees who took the slightest interest in politics or political propaganda. The others were probably better SOE material; brave but pliable, content to do what they were told without worrying about the future shape of Europe.

I was clearly bad SOE material, since worry about the future shape of Europe was my chief preoccupation. The war situation was going from bad to worse. The Greek army, facing the Italians in Albania, had shot its bolt by spring. The Yugoslav revolution of April, for which SOE claimed some credit (our people had been there and
post hoc, propter hoc
), was followed by the prompt invasion of Yugoslavia and occupation of Greece. Worst of all was the loss of Crete, for the defence of which sufficient British resources should have been available. The retention of Suda Bay would have been substantial compensation for the loss of the Balkan mainland. It was difficult to discuss such matters in our mess, where a tendency to the stiff upper lip masked realities. But still greater events were looming.

One fine morning, my batman woke me with a cup of tea and the words: “He’s gone for Russia, sir.” After giving two rather perfunctory lectures on propaganda technique, I joined the other instructors in the mess for drinks before lunch. My colleagues were clearly
plagued by doubt in this perplexing situation. Which way should the stiff upper lip twitch when Satan warred on Lucifer? “Russky’s for the high jump, I’m afraid,” said Munn reflectively, and his words were generally agreed, or rather approved. The spirit of the Finland volunteers was still very much alive. For the moment, the subject was closed by the announcement that Mr. Churchill would address the nation that evening. It was clearly wisest to wait until the Prime Minister had spoken.

As usual, Churchill settled the question. By the time he had finished his speech, the Russians were our allies, my colleagues approved, and the upper lip clicked back into place. The only casualty was the spirit of Finland. But in the next few days, we were increasingly alarmed by the informed estimates that seeped through from London of the Red Army’s capacity to resist the German onslaught. The Russian section of the War Office Intelligence Directorate wavered between three and six weeks for the duration of Hitler’s Russian campaign. SOE and SIS experts said much the same. The most optimistic forecast I heard in those days was attributed to a Brigadier Scaife, then employed, I think, in the Political Warfare Executive. He said that the Russians would hold out “at least three months, possibly much longer.” As Evelyn Waugh once wrote: “. . . he was bang right.”

It was now more than ever necessary for me to get away from the rhododendrons of Beaulieu. I had to find a better hole with all speed. A promising chance soon presented itself. During my occasional visits to London, I had made a point of calling at Tommy Harris’s house in Chesterfield Gardens, where he lived surrounded by his art treasures in an atmosphere of
haute cuisine
and
grand vin
. He maintained that no really good table could be spoiled by wine-stains. I have already explained that Harris had joined MI5 after the break-up of the training-school at Brickendonbury. It must have been sometime in July that he asked me if I would be interested in a job that called for my special knowledge of Franco’s Spain. He explained that it would not be with MI5, but with SIS.

In order to make sense of Harris’s suggestion, it is necessary to
anticipate, very briefly, matters that will be discussed in detail in subsequent chapters. SIS was responsible for all secret intelligence work, both espionage and counter-espionage, on foreign soil. MI5 was responsible for counter-espionage and security in Britain and in all British territory overseas. The counter-espionage section of SIS, known as Section V, and MI5 were in fact two sides of the same medal. The primary function of Section V was to obtain advance information of espionage operations mounted against British territory from foreign soil. It was clear that effective advance warning from Section V would go far to help MI5 in its task of safeguarding British security.

Section V, according to Harris, was not providing adequate service. MI5 had been pressing SIS hard to make the necessary improvements, even to the point of threatening to go into the foreign business itself. Such an extension of MI5’s charter could not have taken place without a government decision, but some officials at least were prepared to take the issue up to the top. SIS, therefore, yielded to the pressure by substantially increasing Section V’s budget to finance additional staff. As a high proportion of German intelligence operations against Britain were mounted from the Iberian Peninsula, the biggest expansion, from two officers to six, was planned for the sub-section dealing with Spain and Portugal. Harris told me that Felix Henry Cowgill, then head of Section V, was looking for someone with a knowledge of Spain to take charge of the expanded sub-section. If I was agreeable, Harris thought that he could put forward my name with good hope of success.

I decided at once to fall in with the suggestion, but I asked Harris for a few days to think it over. There might have been snags; in any case, I must rationalize my decision. Section V was located at St. Albans, not ideal, but immeasurably better than Beaulieu. My new job would require personal contacts with the rest of SIS and with MI5. There was also a suggestion of Foreign Office interest, not to mention the service departments. By accident, I discovered that the archives of SIS were also located at St. Albans, next door to
Section V. When I looked for drawbacks, I could only think that the job was not in all respects the one which I would have chosen, Spain and Portugal now lying far out on the flank of my real interest. But the same applied, a thousandfold, to Beaulieu.