Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
The loss of such a valuable agent was bad enough, but worse was to follow.
On 9 November, the head of station, Major Stevens, Elliott’s new boss, set off for Venlo, a town on the Dutch border with Germany, in the expectation that he would shortly bring the war to a speedy and glorious conclusion. He was accompanied by a colleague, Sigismund Payne Best, a veteran military intelligence officer. Elliott liked Stevens, considering him a ‘brilliant linguist and excellent raconteur’. Best, on the other hand, he regarded as ‘an ostentatious ass, blown up with self-importance’.
Some months earlier, Stevens and Best had secretly made contact with a group of disaffected German officers plotting to oust Hitler in a military coup. At a meeting arranged by Dr Franz Fischer, a German political refugee, the leader of the group, one Hauptmann Schämmel, explained that elements within the German High Command, appalled by the losses suffered during the invasion of Poland, intended to ‘overthrow the present regime and establish a military dictatorship’. The Prime Minister was informed of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, and Stevens was encouraged to pursue negotiations with the coup plotters. ‘I have a hunch that the war will be over by the spring,’ wrote Chamberlain. Stevens and Best, accompanied by a Dutch intelligence officer, headed to Venlo in high spirits convinced they were about to link up with ‘the big man himself’, the German general who would lead the coup. In fact, ‘Schämmel’ was Walter Schellenberg of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party intelligence agency, an intelligent and ruthless master spy who would eventually take over German intelligence, and Dr Fischer was in Gestapo pay. The meeting was a trap, personally ordered by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
Shortly before 11 a.m., they arrived at the rendezvous point, Café Backus, on the Dutch side of the frontier, a few yards from the border post. ‘No one was in sight except a German customs officer,’ wrote Stevens, ‘and a little girl who was playing ball with a big dog in the middle of the road.’ Schellenberg, standing on the café veranda, beckoned them over by waving his hat. That was the signal. As they climbed out of their car, the British officers were immediately surrounded by SS commandos in plain clothes, firing machine guns in the air. The Dutch officer drew his revolver and was shot down.
‘The next moment,’ recalled Best, ‘there were two fellows in front of each of us, one holding a pistol to our heads and the other putting handcuffs on. Then the Germans shouted at us “March!”, and prodding us in the back with their pistols and calling “Hup! Hup! Hup!”, they rushed us along toward the German frontier.’ The commandos bundled the captives into waiting cars, dragging the dying Dutch officer with them.
‘At one stroke,’ wrote Elliott, ‘all British intelligence operations in Holland were compromised.’ Worse still, Stevens had been carrying in his pocket, idiotically, a list of intelligence sources in Western Europe. MI6 scrambled to extract its network of agents before the Germans pounced.
The Venlo incident was an unmitigated catastrophe. Since the Dutch were clearly involved, and had lost an officer, Hitler could claim that Holland had violated its own neutrality, providing an excuse for the invasion of Holland that would follow just a few months later. The episode left the British with an ingrained suspicion of German army officers claiming to be anti-Nazi, even when, in the final stages of the war, such approaches were genuine. Stevens and Best were imprisoned for the rest of the war. By December, through information derived from the British captives and the double agent van Koutrik, the Germans were ‘able to construct detailed and largely accurate charts of [MI6’s] agent networks’, as well as the structure of MI6 itself. It was the first and most successful German Double Cross operation of the war. Oddly, it was also one of the last.
Looking back on the Venlo incident, Elliott blamed the ‘intense ambition’ of Stevens, who had scented the ‘possibility of winning the war off his own bat, and this completely clouded his operational judgment’. Instead of maintaining the fiction of a resistance cell inside German High Command, Schellenberg sent a crowing message: ‘In the long run conversations with conceited and stupid people become boring. We are cutting off communications. Your friends the German opposition send you hearty greetings.’ It was signed ‘The German Secret Police’.
In his first six months as a spy, Elliott had learned a salutary lesson in the forgery and fraud that is the currency of espionage. His boss was now in a German prison, having fallen for an elaborate deception; a valuable spy had fled to London, betrayed by a double agent; the entire intelligence network in Holland had been fatally compromised. Even the innocuous Captain John King, the cipher clerk who had taught Elliott coding, was now in prison, serving a ten-year sentence for spying, after a Soviet defector revealed that he had been ‘selling everything to Moscow’ for cash.
So far from being repelled by the duplicity around him, Elliott felt ever more drawn to the game of skulduggery and double cross. The Venlo debacle had been ‘as disastrous as it was shameful’, Elliott concluded, but he also found it fascinating, an object lesson in how highly intelligent people could be duped if persuaded to believe what they most wanted to believe. He was learning quickly. He even made up a ditty in celebration:
Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive.
But when you’ve practised quite a bit
You really get quite good at it.
At three on the morning of 9 May 1940, Elliott was awoken by the arrival of an emergency telegram from London. He extracted the code books from the ambassador’s safe, sat down at the embassy dining table, and began to decode the message: ‘Information has been received that the Germans intend to attack along the entire Western Front . . .’ The next day, Germany invaded France and Holland. ‘It soon became apparent,’ wrote Elliott, ‘that the Dutch, bravely though they fought, would not last out for long.’
The British prepared to flee. Elliott and his MI6 colleagues made a swift bonfire of compromising files in the embassy courtyard. Another officer seized most of Amsterdam’s industrial diamond stocks and smuggled them to Britain. The Dutch Queen sailed to safety on a Royal Navy destroyer, along with her Cabinet, her secret service, and her gold. Elliott’s principal task, he found, was to evacuate the terrified dancers of the Vic-Wells touring ballet company, which he did by loading them onto a dredger commandeered at Ijmuiden. On 13 May, a British destroyer, HMS
Mohawk
, anchored off the Hook of Holland, waiting to carry the last British stragglers to safety. As he raced in a convoy towards the coast, Elliott watched as flames from burning Rotterdam lit up the horizon. He was one of the last to climb aboard. The following day, the Dutch surrendered. As the young MI6 officer alighted in Britain, he was greeted by the words: ‘We’re in the final now.’
*
Elliott had expected to find a nation in crisis but he was struck by the ‘normality and calmness’ of London. From that moment, he wrote, it ‘never occurred to me for one moment that we might lose the war’. Within days he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, and then, to his astonishment, he found himself behind bars.
Wormwood Scrubs, the Victorian prison in West London, had been adopted as the wartime headquarters of the security service, MI5, and was now expanding rapidly to cope with the threat of German espionage. The fall of France and the Netherlands was attributed, in part, to Nazi fifth columnists, enemy spies working from within to aid the German advance. The threat of a German invasion set off an intense hunt for spies in Britain, and MI5 was swamped by reports of suspicious activity. ‘England was gripped by spy fever,’ wrote Elliott, who was seconded to MI5 to ‘give evidence of what I had seen at first hand of Fifth Column activity in Holland’. The fifth column threat never materialised, for the simple reason that it did not exist – Hitler had not intended to go to war with Britain, and little effort had been made to prepare the ground for a German invasion.
The Abwehr soon set about making up the deficit. Over the next few months, so-called ‘invasion spies’ poured into Britain, by boat, parachute, and submarine; ill-trained and underequipped, they were swiftly duly rounded up. Some were imprisoned, and a handful executed, but a number were recruited as double agents, to feed false information back to their German handlers. This was the embryo of the great Double Cross system, the network of double agents whose importance would steadily expand as the war progressed. Under interrogation, many of these spies provided information of vital interest to the Secret Intelligence Service. Elliott was appointed liaison officer between the sister services, and based in Wormwood Scrubs. It was a bizarre place to work: malodorous and dingy. Most of the inmates had been evacuated but a handful remained, including an Old Etonian contemporary of Elliott’s, Victor Hervey, the future 6th Marquess of Bristol, a notorious playboy who had been jailed in 1939 for robbing a Mayfair jeweller’s. Elliott worked from a soundproofed jail cell, with no handle on the inside; if his last visitor of the day accidentally turned the outside handle on leaving, he was locked in until morning.
Elliott loved his new life, in prison by day and at liberty at night, in a city under siege and threatened with invasion. He moved into a flat in Cambridge Square, Bayswater, belonging to the grandmother of another friend from Eton, Richard Brooman-White, who was also in MI6. Basil Fisher was now a fighter pilot with 111 Squadron, flying Hurricanes out of Croydon. Whenever Fisher was on leave, the three friends would gather, usually at White’s. The Blitz hammered down, and Elliott was elated by the ‘feeling of camaraderie’ as he sat with his friends in the smoky, mahogany-panelled luxury of London’s oldest and most exclusive gentleman’s club. ‘My only moment of real danger was when drinking a pink gin in the bar of the club. A bomb fell on the building next door, upsetting my gin and knocking me flat. I got another pink gin with the compliments of the barman.’ Elliott was enjoying his war. Then, three months after returning to London, he discovered what war is about.
On 15 August, 111 Hurricane Squadron was scrambled to intercept a formation of Luftwaffe Messerschmitts that had crossed the Channel at Dungeness. In the ferocious, sky-sprawling dogfight that followed, one of the fiercest engagements in the Battle of Britain, seven of the German fighter-bombers were shot down. Basil Fisher’s plane was seen peeling away with smoke and flames streaming from the fuselage. He managed to bail out over the village of Sidlesham in West Sussex, with his parachute on fire. The cables burned through, and Elliott’s friend tumbled to earth. The pilotless Hurricane crashed into a barn. The body of Flying Officer Basil Fisher was found in Sidlesham pond. He was buried in the churchyard of the Berkshire village where he had been born.
Elliott was quietly but utterly distraught. Like many upper-class Englishmen, he seldom spoke about his feelings, but in its taut, agonised understatement, his private epitaph for Basil Fisher said more than any number of emotive words. The mask of flippancy slipped. ‘Basil Fisher was killed in action. I felt this very deeply. He had been virtually a brother to me. This was the first time I had been hit by tragedy.’
Elliott was still dazed by grief when, just a few weeks later, he met another new recruit to the secret world, a product of Westminster School, a fellow graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a man who would define the rest of his life: Harold Adrian Russell Philby, better known as Kim.
2
The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was ‘charm’, that intoxicating, beguiling, and occasionally lethal English quality. Philby could inspire and convey affection with such ease that few ever noticed they were being charmed. Male and female, old and young, rich and poor, Kim enveloped them all. He looked out at the world with alert, gentle blue eyes from under an unruly forelock. His manners were exceptional: he was always the first to offer you a drink, to ask after your sick mother, and remember your children’s names. He loved to laugh, and he loved to drink, and to listen, with deep sincerity and rapt curiosity. ‘He was the sort of man who won worshippers,’ said one contemporary. ‘You didn’t just like him, admire him, agree with him; you worshipped him.’ A stutter, which came and went, added to his appeal, betraying an attractive glimmer of fragility. People waited on his words, for what his friend, the novelist Graham Greene, called his ‘halting stammered witticisms’.
Kim Philby cut a dashing figure in wartime London. As
The Times
correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, reporting from the rebel Nationalist side, he had narrowly cheated death in late 1937 when a Republican shell landed near the car he was sitting in eating chocolates and drinking brandy, killing all the other three fellow war correspondents. Philby escaped with a minor head wound and a reputation for ‘great pluck’. General Franco himself had pinned a medal, the Red Cross of Military Merit, on the young war reporter.
Philby had been one of only fifteen newspaper correspondents selected to join the British Expeditionary Force sent to France on the outbreak of the Second World War. From the continent, he wrote wry, distinctive despatches for
The Times
as he waited with the troops for the fighting to start: ‘Many express disappointment at the slow tempo of the overture to Armageddon. They expected danger, and they have found damp,’ he wrote. Philby continued reporting as the Germans advanced, and quit Amiens with the Panzers already rumbling into the city. He took a ship for England with such haste that he was forced to leave behind his luggage. His expenses claim for lost items became a Fleet Street legend: ‘Camel-hair overcoat (two years’ wear), fifteen guineas; Dunhill pipe (two years old, and all the better for it), one pound ten shillings.’ It is a measure of his reputation that
The Times
compensated its star correspondent for the loss of an old pipe. Philby was a fine journalist, but his ambitions lay elsewhere. He wanted to join MI6, but like every would-be spy he faced a conundrum: how do you join an organisation to which you cannot apply, because it does not formally exist?