A Spy Among Friends (2 page)

Basil Fisher was Elliott’s first and closest friend. A glamorous figure with an impeccable academic and sporting record, Fisher was captain of the First XI, the chairman of Pop, and son of a bona-fide war hero, Basil senior having been killed by a Turkish sniper at Gaza in 1917. The two friends shared every meal, spent their holidays together, and occasionally slipped into the headmaster’s house, when Claude was at dinner, to play billiards. Photographs from the time show them arm in arm, beaming happily. Perhaps there was a sexual element to their relationship, but probably not. Hitherto, Elliott had loved only his nanny, ‘Ducky Bit’ (her real name is lost to history). He worshipped Basil Fisher.

In the autumn of 1935, the two friends went up to Cambridge. Naturally, Elliott went to Trinity, his father’s old college. On his first day at the university, he visited the writer and history don Robert Gittings, an acquaintance of his father, to ask a question that had been troubling him: ‘How hard should I work, and at what?’ Gittings was a shrewd judge of character. As Elliott remembered: ‘He strongly advised me to use my three years at Cambridge to enjoy myself in the interval before the next war’ – advice which Elliott followed to the letter. He played cricket, punted, drove around Cambridge in a Hillman Minx, and attended and gave some very good parties. He read a lot of spy novels. At weekends he went shooting, or to the races at Newmarket. Throughout the 1930s Cambridge boiled with ideological conflict: Hitler had taken power in 1933; the Spanish Civil War would erupt in the summer of 1936; extreme right and extreme left fought it out in university rooms and on the streets. But the fervid political atmosphere simply passed Elliott by. He was far too busy having fun. He seldom opened a book and emerged after three years with many friends and a third-class degree, a result he considered ‘a triumph over the examiners’.

Nicholas Elliott left Cambridge with every social and educational advantage, and absolutely no idea what he wanted to do. But beneath a complacent and conventional exterior, and the ‘languid, upper-class manner’ lay a more complex personality, an adventurer with a streak of subversion. Claude Elliott’s Victorian rigidity had instilled in his son a deep aversion to rules. ‘I could never be a good soldier because I am insufficiently amenable to discipline,’ he reflected. When told to do something, he tended to ‘obey not the order which he had actually been given by a superior, but rather the order which that superior would have given if he had known what he was talking about’. He was tough – the brutality of Durnford had seen to that – but also sensitive, bruised by a lonely childhood. Like many Englishmen, he concealed his shyness behind a defensive barrage of jokes. Another paternal legacy was the conviction that he was physically unattractive; Claude had once told him he was ‘plug ugly’, and he grew up believing it. Certainly Elliott was not classically handsome, with his gangly frame, thin face and thick-rimmed glasses, but he had poise, a barely concealed air of mischief, and a resolute cheerfulness that women were instantly drawn to. It took him many years to conclude that he ‘was no more or less odd to look at than a reasonable proportion of my fellow creatures’. Alongside a natural conservatism, he had inherited the family propensity for eccentricity. He was no snob. He could strike up a conversation with anyone, from any walk of life. He did not believe in God, or Marx, or capitalism; he had faith in King, country, class and club (White’s Club, in his case, the gentleman’s club in St James’s). But above all, he believed in friendship.

In the summer of 1938, Basil Fisher took a job in the City, while Elliott wondered idly what to do with himself. The Old Boys soon solved that. Elliott was playing in a cricket match at Eton that summer when, during the tea interval, he was approached by Sir Nevile Bland, a senior diplomat and a family friend, who tactfully observed that Elliott’s father was concerned by his son’s ‘inability to get down to a solid job of work’. (Sir Claude preferred to speak to his son through emissaries.) Sir Nevile explained that he had recently been appointed Britain’s Minister at The Hague, in the Netherlands. Would Nicholas like to accompany him as honorary attaché? Elliott said he would like that very much, despite having no idea what an honorary attaché might actually do. ‘There was no serious vetting procedure,’ Elliott later wrote. ‘Nevile simply told the Foreign Office that I was all right because he knew me and had been at Eton with my father.’

Before leaving, Elliott underwent a course in code-training at the Foreign Office. His instructor was one Captain John King, a veteran cipher clerk who was also, as it happened, a Soviet spy. King had been passing Foreign Office telegrams to Moscow since 1934. Elliott’s first tutor in secrecy was a double agent.

Elliott arrived at The Hague, in his Hillman Minx in the middle of November 1938, and reported to the legation. After dinner, Sir Nevile offered him a warning: ‘in the diplomatic service it is a sackable offence to sleep with the wife of a colleague’ – and some advice: ‘I suggest you should do as I do and not light your cigar until you have started your third glass of port.’ Elliott’s duties were hardly onerous: a little light bag-carrying for the minister, some coding and decoding in the wireless room, and attending formal dinners.

Elliott had been in the Netherlands only four months when he got his first taste of clandestine work and an ‘opportunity to see the German war machine at first hand’. One evening, over dinner, he fell into conversation with a young naval officer named Glyn Hearson, the assistant naval attaché at the embassy in Berlin. Commander Hearson confided that he was on a special mission to spy on the port of Hamburg, where the Germans were believed to be developing midget submarines. After a few more glasses, Hearson asked Elliott if he would care to join him. Elliott thought this a splendid idea. Sir Nevile gave his approval.

Two days later, at three in the morning, Elliott and Hearson broke into Hamburg port by climbing over the wall. ‘We discreetly poked our noses all over the place for about an hour,’ taking photographs, before ‘returning to safety and a stiff drink’. Elliott had no diplomatic cover and no training, and Hearson had no authority to recruit him for the mission. Had they been caught, they might have been shot as spies; at the very least, the news that the son of the Eton headmaster had been caught snooping around a German naval dockyard in the middle of the night would have set off a diplomatic firestorm. It was, Elliott happily admitted, ‘a singularly foolhardy exploit’. But it had been most enjoyable, and highly successful. They drove on to Berlin in high spirits.

The twentieth of April 1939 was Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, a national holiday in Nazi Germany, and the occasion for the largest military parade in the history of the Third Reich. Organised by propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, the festivities marked a high point of the Hitler cult, a lavish display of synchronised sycophancy. A torchlight parade and cavalcade of fifty white limousines, led by the Führer, was followed by a fantastic five-hour exhibition of military muscle, involving 50,000 German troops, hundreds of tanks and 162 warplanes. The ambassadors of Britain, France and the United States did not attend, having been withdrawn after Hitler’s march on Czechoslovakia, but some twenty-three other countries sent representatives to wish Hitler a happy birthday. ‘The Führer is feted like no other mortal has ever been,’ gushed Goebbels in his diary.

Elliott watched the celebrations, with a mixture of awe and horror, from a sixth-floor apartment in the Charlottenburger Chaussee belonging to General Nöel Mason-MacFarlane, the British military attaché in Berlin. ‘Mason-Mac’ was a whiskery old warhorse, a decorated veteran of the trenches and Mesopotamia. He could not hide his disgust. From the balcony of the apartment there was a clear view of Hitler on his saluting podium. Under his breath, the general remarked to Elliott that the Führer was well within rifle range: ‘I am tempted to take advantage of this,’ he muttered, adding that he could ‘pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking’. Elliott ‘strongly urged him to take a pot shot’. Mason-MacFarlane thought better of the idea, though he later made a formal request to be allowed to assassinate Hitler from his balcony. Sadly for the world, the offer was turned down.

Elliott returned to The Hague with two new-minted convictions: that Hitler must be stopped at all costs, and that the best way of contributing to that end would be to become a spy. ‘My mind was easily made up.’ A day at Ascot, a glass of fizz with Sir Robert Vansittart and a meeting with an important person in Whitehall did the rest. Elliott returned to The Hague still officially an honorary attaché, but in reality, with Sir Nevile Bland’s blessing, a new recruit to MI6. Outwardly, his diplomatic life continued as before; secretly, he began his novitiate in the strange religion of British intelligence.

Sir Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Office mandarin who smoothed Elliott’s way into MI6, ran what was, in effect, a private intelligence agency, outside the official orbit of government but with close links to both MI6 and MI5, the Security Service. Vansittart was a fierce opponent of appeasement, convinced that Germany would start another war ‘just as soon as it feels strong enough’. His network of spies gathered copious intelligence on Nazi intentions, with which he tried (and failed) to persuade Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of the looming confrontation. One of his earliest and most colourful informants was Jona von Ustinov, a German journalist and fierce secret opponent of Nazism. Ustinov was universally known as ‘Klop’ – Russian slang for bedbug – a nickname that derived from his rotund appearance, of which he was, oddly, intensely proud. Ustinov’s father was a Russian-born army officer; his mother was half-Ethiopian and half-Jewish; his son, born in 1921, was Peter Ustinov, the great comic actor and writer. Klop Ustinov had served in the German army during the First World War, winning an Iron Cross, before taking up a post with the German Press Agency in London. He lost his job in 1935 when the German authorities, suspicious of his exotically mixed heritage, demanded proof of his Aryanism. That same year he was recruited as a British agent, codenamed ‘U35’. Ustinov was fat and monocled, with a deceptively bumbling demeanour. He was ‘the best and most ingenious operator I had the honour to work with’, later declared his case officer, Dick White, who would go on to head both MI5 and MI6.

Elliott’s first job for MI6 was to help Ustinov run one of the most important and least known pre-war spies. Wolfgang Gans Edler zu Putlitz was the press attaché at the German embassy in London, a luxury-loving aristocrat and a flamboyant homosexual. Ustinov recruited Putlitz and began to extract what was described as ‘priceless intelligence, possibly the most important human-source intelligence Britain received in the prewar period’, on German foreign policy and military plans. Putlitz and Ustinov shared Vansittart’s conviction that the policy of appeasement had to be reversed: ‘I was really helping to damage the Nazi cause,’ Putlitz believed. When Putlitz was posted to the German embassy at The Hague in 1938, Klop Ustinov had discreetly followed him, posing as the European correspondent of an Indian newspaper. With Ustinov as go-between, Putlitz continued to supply reams of intelligence, though he was frustrated by Britain’s apparent unwillingness to confront Hitler. ‘The English are hopeless,’ he complained. ‘It is no use trying to help them to withstand the Nazi methods which they so obviously fail to understand.’ He began to feel he was ‘sacrificing himself for no purpose’.

In The Hague, Klop Ustinov and Nicholas Elliott established an instant rapport, and would remain friends for life. ‘Klop was a man of wide talents,’ wrote Elliott, ‘
bon viveur
, wit, raconteur, mimic, linguist – endowed with a vast range of knowledge, both serious and ribald’. Ustinov put Elliott to work, boosting the spirits of the increasingly gloomy and anxious Wolfgang Putlitz.

Putlitz was a ‘complicated man’, Elliott wrote, torn between his patriotism and his moral instincts. ‘His motivation was solely idealistic and he went through acute mental torture at the knowledge that the information he gave away could cost German lives.’ One evening in August, Elliott took Putlitz to dinner at the Royale Hotel. Over dessert, he remarked that he was thinking of taking a holiday in Germany: ‘Is Hitler going to start the war before we get back at the end of the first week of September?’ he asked, half in jest. Putlitz did not smile: ‘On present plans the attack on Poland starts on 26 August but it may be postponed for a week, so if I were you, I’d cancel the trip.’ Elliott swiftly reported this ‘startling statement’ to Klop, who passed it on to London. Elliott called off his holiday. On 1 September, just as Putlitz had predicted, German tanks rolled into Poland from the north, south and west. Two days later, Britain was at war with Germany.

Not long afterwards, the German ambassador to The Hague showed Wolfgang Putlitz a list of German agents in the Netherlands; the list was identical to one which Putlitz had recently handed over to Klop Ustinov and Nicholas Elliott. Clearly, there must be a German spy within the MI6 station, but no one for a moment suspected Folkert van Koutrik, an affable Dutchman working as assistant to the station chief, Major Richard Stevens. Van Koutrik had ‘always displayed perfectly genuine faithfulness’, according to his colleagues. Secretly he was working for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and ‘by the autumn of 1939, the Germans had a pretty clear picture of the whole SIS operation in Holland’. Van Koutrik had obtained the list of German spies Putlitz had passed to MI6, and passed it back to German intelligence.

Putlitz knew ‘it could only be a matter of time before he was discovered and dealt with’. He immediately requested asylum in Britain, but insisted he would not leave without his valet, Willy Schneider, who was also his lover. Putlitz was whisked to London on 15 September, and lodged in a safe house.