Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
In Lagos, Elliott transferred to a Dakota transport plane, and five days later he reached Cairo, after hopscotching across Africa via Kano, Fort Lamy, El Fasher and Khartoum. On reporting to Intelligence Headquarters, Elliott was informed that his first job was to take a lorry-load of confidential files to Jerusalem for safekeeping, before travelling on to Beirut. He would then catch the fabled Taurus Express to Turkey.
The elderly train puffed slowly up the Taurus Mountains and then ambled gently across the Anatolian plateau to Ankara, and on to Istanbul, never exceeding thirty miles an hour and stopping frequently for no discernible reason. The food in the restaurant car was excellent, and Elliott found the journey a ‘delight’, made still more pleasant still by the company of his new secretary, a young Englishwoman named Elizabeth Holberton.
Elliott was rather struck by Miss Holberton. She had spent the early part of the war in the Motorised Transport Corps, driving Jeeps in the desert, before becoming a secretary at General Headquarters (GHQ) in Cairo. She was quick-witted, resourceful, beautiful in a demure sort of way, a devoted Catholic and quite posh. Her father was a former managing director of the Bombay Burmah Trading Company and her mother descended from a long line of Irish judges. They got on famously. When the train ran out of supplies of water, the conductor brought Elizabeth a bottle of Turkish Cointreau in which to brush her teeth. She declared the experience refreshing. Elliott liked that.
Ankara was the diplomatic capital of Turkey, but the major powers kept embassies in Istanbul, on the cusp between Europe and Asia; this was where the serious spying was done. Britain’s ambassador to Turkey was Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen, a diplomat of the old school who spent much of his time on the ambassadorial yacht and was, perhaps inevitably, an Old Etonian friend of Elliott’s father. Hugessen adopted an attitude of ‘pained tolerance’ towards the activities of British intelligence in Turkey. Formally a junior diplomat, Elliott joined a swiftly expanding, multi-layered British intelligence force under the overall command of Lieutenant Colonel Harold Gibson, a veteran MI6 professional of ‘great ability and energy’. ‘Gibbie’ oversaw a vast system of intelligence-gathering and agent-running, extending from Turkey into Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia and Hungary. As the representative of Section V, Elliott’s task was to undermine enemy intelligence operations, principally those of the Abwehr. Gibson gave Elliott a fairly free rein to explore and attack espionage targets in Turkey, and there were plenty to choose from.
Istanbul was ‘one of the great espionage entrepôts of the war’, in the words of MI6’s official historian. The city was just forty miles from Nazi-occupied Bulgaria; it was Germany’s gateway to the Middle East, and an access point for the Allies into occupied Europe. The Turks feared the Germans, distrusted the Soviets, and felt little love for either the British or the Americans. But the authorities were prepared to tolerate espionage by foreign powers, so long as this did not impinge on Turkish sovereignty, and the spies did not get caught. By 1942, some seventeen different intelligence organisations had converged on Istanbul, to mix and mingle, bribe, seduce and betray, and with them came a vast and motley host of agents and double agents, smugglers, blackmailers, arms dealers, drug-runners, refugees, deserters, black-marketeers, pimps, forgers, hookers and spivs. Rumours and secrets, some of them true, whirled around the bars and back alleys. Everyone spied on everyone else; the Turkish secret police, the Emniyet, spied on all. Some Turkish officials were prepared to cooperate on intelligence sharing, if the price was right, but every so often, if the spying became too brazen or insufficiently remunerative, the Emniyet would stage an arrest. The spy battle was intense, and oddly intimate. The head of the Abwehr was on nodding terms with his opposite numbers in MI6 and Soviet intelligence. ‘Everyone was well informed as to the identity of everyone else,’ wrote Elliott. When one or other of the intelligence chiefs entered the ballroom of the Park Hotel, the band would strike up the song ‘Boo, Boo, Baby, I’m a Spy’:
I’m involved in a dangerous game,
Every other day I change my name,
The face is different but the body’s the same,
Boo, boo, baby, I’m a spy!
You have heard of Mata Hari,
We did business cash and carry,
Poppa caught us and we had to marry,
Boo, boo, baby, I’m a spy!
Now, as a lad, I’m not so bad,
In fact, I’m a darn good lover,
But look my sweet, let’s be discreet,
And do this under cover.
I’m so cocky I could swagger,
The things I know would make you stagger,
I’m ten percent cloak and ninety percent dagger,
Boo, boo, baby, I’m a spy!
But the dagger beneath the cloak was razor sharp. Just two months before Elliott’s arrival, a Macedonian student had attempted to assassinate the German ambassador Franz von Papen, but the bomb exploded prematurely, blowing up the assassin and only injuring the German diplomat. Moscow blamed the Gestapo; the Germans blamed the Allies; von Papen suspected the British. The plot was almost certainly the work of the Soviet NKVD. A year earlier, a German suitcase bomb planted in the lobby at the Pera Palace Hotel had killed a member of the British consular staff, and badly injured the vice consul, Chantry Page. Espionage in Istanbul, as the MI6 station chief Harold Gibson observed, was ‘not a kid glove affair’.
Elliott was immediately seduced by Istanbul’s sleazy glamour. He moved into an office in the embassy ‘crammed from top to bottom with intelligence operatives engaged in various aspects of skulduggery’, and a garden surprisingly full of copulating tortoises, and plunged into the espionage fray. On his first evening he was swept up by Major Bernard O’Leary, an enormous multilingual former cavalry officer, ‘extremely erudite, but irredeemably idle’, who was responsible for liaison with Turkish intelligence. O’Leary announced they were going to Taksim’s, the spy centre of Istanbul, a cross between a restaurant, a nightclub, a cabaret and a casino. ‘Its clientele,’ wrote Elliott, ‘combined the representatives – mainly engaged in espionage – of all the Axis and Allied powers.’ Taksim’s was run by a charming White Russian who accepted bribes from everyone, without favouritism, and endeavoured to place rival spies at adjacent tables to facilitate eavesdropping. The waitresses were said to be former Czarist duchesses. Nothing at Taksim’s was quite as it seemed. One night Elliott was admiring the club’s resident belly-dancer, a stunning woman with ‘white-coloured skin and jet black hair’, when she fell off the stage, twisted an ankle and swore loudly in a thick Yorkshire accent: she was from Bradford. When not at Taksim’s, Elliott might be found at Ellie’s Bar, a favourite watering-hole of British military personnel that served ‘a ferocious dry Martini with the kick of a horse’. Ellie was buxom, blonde and thought to be Romanian. She ‘spoke excellent English, and purported to fear and hate the Germans’. In fact, Elliott discovered, she was in German pay, employed by the Abwehr to get British officers as drunk as possible in the hope that they would eventually divulge valuable information.
Elliott set about making friends with the sort of people who would have made his father shudder. In later years, he wrote that ‘the capacity for friendship is a particularly important characteristic’ in an intelligence officer. ‘A large amount of intelligence work in the field is all about the establishment of personal relationships; of gaining other people’s confidence and on some occasions persuading people to do something against their better judgement.’ He befriended the Russian maître d’ at Taksim’s, and the waiters at Ellie’s Bar; he went drinking with a former Czarist guards officer called Roman Sudakov, who was plugged into Russian intelligence and agreed to work for MI6; he got to know the porters at the embassies, the consular officials and the clerks at the telegraph office. He made contacts among the press corps, and Lars the fisherman who plied the Bosphorus and did a little smuggling and information-gathering to supplement the catch. He made a particular point of befriending the conductors on the wagon-lits of the Taurus Express, who were much in demand as couriers for the intelligence organisations, since the railway was the only reliable way of getting from Turkey to the Middle East. The conductors would supply information about who was travelling where, report gossip, smuggle documents and even, for an additional consideration, steal travel papers. They were for sale to the highest bidder, but to none exclusively: ‘One particularly remarkable man at one stage was working for both the Abwehr and the SD [Sicherheitsdienst] (each unknown to the other); for the Italians, and for the Japanese; as well as for the British.’
At the other end of Istanbul society, Elliott mixed with high-ranking officials, military officers, diplomats and religious leaders. The papal legate, Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who would later become Pope John XXIII, proved to be a fund of good intelligence, and a vigorous anti-fascist. Like so many in wartime Istanbul, Roncalli was playing a double game, dining with von Papen and taking his wife’s confession, while using his office to smuggle Jewish refugees out of occupied Europe. A few months after they became friends, Elliott discovered that Roncalli’s assistant, one Monsignor Rici, ‘a most unattractive little man’, was a spy, ‘operating a clandestine wireless set on behalf of the Italian military intelligence’. Elliott tipped off the Turkish secret police and had Rici arrested. When he informed Roncalli, with some embarrassment, that his assistant was likely to be spending a considerable period breaking rocks in an Anatolian penal colony, the future Pope merely shrugged, leaving Elliott with the strong impression that he ‘was not altogether displeased’.
After just a few months in Istanbul, Elliott concluded there were ‘more people involved in various forms of skulduggery per head of population than any other city in the world’. And he had identified a good proportion of them: German intelligence officers, Italian agents, Polish, Czech and Yugoslavian informers, Free French and Jewish Agency spies, and officers of the NKVD and the GRU (Soviet military intelligence). ‘All were kept under close observation by the Turks, who ran their own informers.’
Elliott’s energetic counter-intelligence activities met with approval in London. Sir Stewart Menzies had always had what Philby called a ‘schoolboyish’ attitude to counter-espionage: ‘Bars, beards and blondes.’ Elliott was experiencing plenty of all three, and his stock rose still higher when one of his informants on the Taurus Express handed over a bomb, saying he had been given the device by the Japanese military attaché, Colonel Tateishi, with instructions to detonate it on the line between Aleppo and Tripoli. Elliott gingerly handed the package over to the counter-sabotage section in Istanbul, and paid his informant a large bonus; the informant told Colonel Tateishi the bomb had failed to detonate, and demanded another bonus. Everyone was happy.
Elliott relished his new posting. Even a nasty bout of foot and mouth disease picked up on his travels could not blunt his happiness. And he was falling in love. Elizabeth Holberton was proving to be more than just an excellent secretary. Her Catholicism and his cordial aversion to all religion did nothing to hinder a blossoming relationship. They went everywhere together, and drank quantities of Egyptian Bordeaux, which Elliott declared ‘the worst claret I have ever drunk’. Shy beneath his bonhomie, it took Elliott months to summon up the courage to say what was on his mind. A cocktail made for spies finally did the trick: ‘After three of Ellie’s volcanic Martinis we decided to get married.’ Marriages between officers and their secretaries were something of a tradition in MI6, where secrecy bred a special sort of intimacy. Even C was conducting a long-running affair with his secretary.
Elliott dashed off a letter to Sir Edgar Holberton saying that he planned to marry his daughter and ‘hoping he didn’t mind’. Even if Sir Edgar had minded, it would have made no difference, for Elliott had no intention of waiting for a reply. Roman Sudakov, his best man, threw a stag party for him at the Park Hotel – an event made even more auspicious by the presence at the next table of von Papen, the German ambassador, and his military attaché. After the ceremony on 10 April 1943, performed by Monsignor Roncalli in the papal legate’s private chapel, the newlyweds moved into a flat with a view over the Golden Horn – accompanied by a tiny Russian cook named Yaroslav, who made vodka in the bath and began teaching Elliott to speak Russian.
Philby was delighted by Elliott’s success, his growing reputation and the news of his marriage. Nicholas Elliott was a rising star in the service, and a valued friend, and no one understood the value of friendship better than Kim Philby.
5
Philby’s life in the English suburbs seemed drab in comparison to Elliott’s colourful experiences on the frontline of the espionage battle. St Albans was a long way from Istanbul. In Philby’s opinion, it was too far from anywhere, including London, where the important intelligence decisions were being made, and the most valuable secrets might be found. Early in 1943, Felix Cowgill announced that Section V would be moving to new premises on Ryder Street, in the heart of St James’s. Philby was elated, since the new office would be just ‘two minutes from MI5 and 15 from Broadway’, the MI6 headquarters. He would now be closer to his club, closer to the gossipy parties hosted by Tommy Harris, and closer to his Soviet handlers. Ryder Street was also the ideal vantage point from which to assess, befriend and manipulate an important new force in the wartime intelligence battle.