My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (10 page)

It is now time to turn to some of the personalities involved, many of whom loom large in my subsequent story. The head of Section V, as I have mentioned, was Felix Cowgill.
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He had come to SIS from the Indian police shortly before the war, and had already
made his mark. His intellectual endowment was slender. As an intelligence officer, he was inhibited by lack of imagination, inattention to detail and sheer ignorance of the world we were fighting in. His most conspicuous positive quality, apart from personal charm of an attractively simple variety, was a fiendish capacity for work. Every evening, he took home bulging briefcases and worked far into the small hours. Friday nights, as a regular habit, he worked right round the clock. Mornings would find him, tired but still driving, presiding over a conference of his sub-section heads and steadily knocking an array of pipes to wreckage on a stone ashtray. He stood by his own staff far beyond the call of loyalty, retaining many long after their idleness or incompetence had been proved. To the outer world, he presented a suspicious and bristling front, ever ready to see attempts to limit his field of action or diminish his authority. By the time I joined Section V, he was already on the worst of terms, not only with MI5, but also with RSS, GC & CS and several other SIS sections as well. Glenalmond, the St. Albans house in which Section V had established its headquarters, already felt like a hedgehog position; Cowgill revelled in his isolation. He was one of those pure souls who denounce all opponents as “politicians.”

Unfortunately, Cowgill was up against a formidable array of brains. Most of our dealings with GC & CS on the subject of German intelligence wireless traffic were with Page and Palmer, both familiar figures in Oxford. RSS presented the even more formidable Oxonian combination of [Hugh] Trevor-Roper, Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire and Charles Stuart. Herbert Hart, another Oxonian, confronted him in MI5, though here Cambridge too got a look in with Victor Rothschild,
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the MI5 anti-sabotage expert. All these men outclassed Cowgill in brainpower, and some of them could match his combativeness. Trevor-Roper, for instance, was never a meek academic; and it was characteristic of Cowgill’s
otherworldliness that he should have once threatened Trevor-Roper with court martial. It is a tribute to Cowgill that he fought this combination for nearly five years without realizing the hopelessness of his struggle. How often would he fling off a furious minute denouncing this or that colleague, and then softly murmur, with a gleam of triumph, “and
now
let’s get on and fight the Germans!”

The main issue on which these personal battles were joined was control of the material derived from the interception of German intelligence-signals traffic. When the question first arose, the Chief of SIS had vested control in the head of Section V. There was plenty to be said for the ruling, and, to the best of my knowledge, it was never seriously challenged. What was challenged was the way in which Cowgill exercised his control. He realized at once that he had been dealt a trump card, and from the beginning he guarded it jealously, even to the point of withholding information that might have been put to effective use. His foes held him guilty of seriously restrictive practices, while he held them at least potentially guilty of disregarding totally the security of the source. After a hassle with Cowgill, Dick White, then Assistant Director of the MI5 Intelligence Division, claimed to have had a nightmare in which the material concerned was on sale at the newsstands.

Cowgill’s relations with the rest of SIS posed problems of a different order. Here he was faced, not with what he regarded as excessive interest in his doings, but with the danger of total neglect. During the war, offensive intelligence absorbed most of the energies of SIS. Counter-espionage, with its emphasis on defence, was reduced to Cinderella status. This was largely due to the influence of Claude Dansey,
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who was then Assistant Chief of the Secret Service, or briefly ACSS. He was an elderly gentleman of austerely limited outlook who regarded counter-espionage as a waste of effort in wartime, and lost no opportunity in saying so. His specialty
was the barbed little minute, which creates a maximum of resentment to no obvious purpose.

The cause of counter-espionage should have been defended, at that high level, by Valentine Vivian,
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whose title was Deputy Chief of the Secret Service, or DCSS. He was a former Indian policeman, and had been head of Section V before the war. But Vivian was long past his best—if, indeed, he had ever had one. He had a reedy figure, carefully dressed crinkles in his hair, and wet eyes. He cringed before Dansey’s little minutes, and shook his head sadly at his defeats, which were frequent. Shortly before I joined Section V, Cowgill had brushed Vivian aside, making little effort to hide his contempt. It was no thanks to Vivian that Cowgill finally won his battle for increased appropriations for Section V, and with Vivian that was to rankle. It may seem that the feelings of so ineffectual a man scarcely require mention in a book of this kind. But, at a later stage, they were to play a critical part in my career.

It was more than a year before I was directly affected by these high-level rivalries. My first duty was to do my job and learn it at the same time. I was given precious little guidance from above, and soon became indebted to my head secretary, an experienced girl who had been in the service before the war and was able, despite chronic ill health, to keep me from the worst pitfalls. The volume of work was monstrous. As a result of staff increases, we were now six in the Iberian sub-section, doing the work which two were supposed to have done before. Small wonder that one of them committed suicide. We were still regularly swamped with incoming mail. Some allowance must be made, of course, for Parkinson’s Law; even so, like many of my colleagues, I could only keep pace with my towering “in-trays” by taking a fat briefcase home in the evenings. Every day brought a few telegrams from Madrid, Tangier or
Lisbon. We received showers of minutes from other sections of SIS and of letters from MI5. Once a week, we received depressingly heavy bags from the Peninsula, where our representatives were still thrashing around in the dark. For every lead that produced results of any kind, a dozen lured us tortuously into dead ends.

A typical muddle confronted me at an early stage. An SIS agent in Madrid stole the diary of a certain Alcazar de Velasco, a particularly nasty Falangist from the Spanish Press Office, who had visited England a month or two previously. The diary stated explicitly that he had recruited a network of agents on behalf of the German Abwehr; names, addresses, and assignments were given in detail. It was not until many weeks’ work had been wasted that we reached what was surely the correct conclusion, namely, that the diary, though undoubtedly the work of Alcazar de Velasco himself, was fraudulent from beginning to end, and had been concocted solely for the purpose of extracting money from the Germans.

Yet the theft was not entirely fruitless. We had long suspected Luis Calvo, a Spanish journalist working in London, of passing to Spain information that might comfort, and possibly aid, the enemy. The fact that his name appeared in the diary as a recruit for the Alcazar de Velasco network suggested a promising means of extracting a confession, spurious though we thought the entry to be. Calvo was accordingly arrested and taken to the “tough” interrogation centre on Ham Common. No physical violence was used to break him down. He was merely stripped naked and propelled into the presence of the camp commandant, a monocled Prussian type called Stephens who punctuated his questions by slapping his riding-boots with a swagger-stick. We had made a correct assessment of Calvo’s nerve. Appalled by his compatriot’s frivolous treachery, and doubtless by the swagger-stick, he said enough about his activity to warrant his captivity for the duration. Another by-product of the famous diary was derived from the fact that it mentioned Brugada, the Spanish Press Attaché in London, in compromising terms. Brugada was the last person to want a scandal, and proved satisfactorily
co-operative when MI5 hinted delicately that the diary might furnish the Foreign Office with a plausible pretext for declaring him
persona non grata
. He did not actually do much serious spying for MI5; but he passed on enough gossip about visiting Spaniards to earn a code-name: Peppermint.

A more spectacular success came our way soon afterwards, although I broke all the rules to achieve it and caused a ghastly mix-up which was only resolved after the war. We received an intercepted telegram showing that the Abwehr was sending two agents to South America on the Spanish SS
Cabo de Hornos
. With a carelessness which was all too frequent in Abwehr communications, their names were given in full. One was a certain Leopold Hirsch, travelling with his wife and mother-in-law, the other Gilinski. Shortly before their embarkation, a second, more mysterious message was received from the German out-station in Bilbao, confirming that Hirsch and his “ORKI companions” were ready to leave. “ORKI” was intriguing. What could it be but an organization of revolutionary international Communists—some splinter group of Trotskyists sponsored by the Germans with a view to confounding our Russian allies? We therefore passed the whole passenger list of the
Cabo de Hornos
through our records, finding at least a dozen whose careers suggested possible links with dissident Communism. Of these, perhaps half looked as if they might well be scoundrelly enough to fall in with Abwehr intrigues.

Accordingly, after consulting Cowgill, I sent a cable to the Defence Security Officer in Trinidad, where the ship was due to call, instructing him to arrest the Hirsch family, Gilinski and a string of others. I had no power whatsoever to order this, or any other arrest. The proper procedure would have been a recommendation from me to MI5; another from MI5 to the Colonial Office; an instruction “subject to local objection” from the Colonial Office to the Governor of Trinidad; and an order from the Governor of the Defence Security Officer. Fortunately, the DSO was an enthusiastic type, and acted on my orders without further question. Still more
fortunately, Hirsch promptly confessed, saying, with almost certain truth, that he had nursed no intention of carrying out his German assignment but had accepted it simply to get out of Europe. In the euphoria created by this “triumph” we tended to overlook the fact that the rest of the detained men could not be induced to admit to anything remotely resembling espionage. But a search of their baggage showed that they were all smuggling in greater or lesser degree, so we had some small technical grounds for holding them, just in case.

The solution of the mystery came about a year later. My subsection officer responsible for handling all intercepted material was struck by a sudden thought. He got on the telephone to Palmer at GC & CS, and asked him to look up the relevant signal from Bilbao. Could “ORKI” possibly have been a mistake for “DREI”? Within a very short time, Palmer was back. Yes, it almost certainly was “DREI”; in fact, he could not understand how the cryptographers could have got ORKI in the first place. So, instead of Hirsch and his ORKI companions, we had Hirsch and his three companions, namely, his wife, his mother-in-law and Gilinski. By the time the British Government came to consider the claims brought by the others for wrongful arrest, I was safely out of the way, trying to penetrate the Soviet Union and the Balkan states from my comfortable base in Istanbul.

Hitherto, I have spoken only of the interception of wireless traffic. But there were several other forms of interception which, though less productive from the counter-espionage point of view, had their uses. There was the postal censorship which threw up one or two cases of interest, but less perhaps than might have been expected. There were also sophisticated techniques of opening foreign diplomatic bags. This method could not be used against the enemy directly, since German and Italian bags did not pass through British territory. But the bags of neutral states and of minor allies, such as the Poles and the Czechs, were fair game. Such operations involved several complex procedures.

First the courier had to be persuaded, by one means or another, to leave his bag in British custody. This was not so difficult as it sounds, owing to the inadequate courier systems employed by many states, and to the indiscipline of the couriers themselves. During the period that Britain was cut off from the continent, all diplomatic bags were carried by air. Delays in the departure of aircraft were an everyday occurrence, and it was always easy to engineer a delay even when flight conditions were favourable. On arrival at the airport, the courier would be confronted with an adverse weather report, or with the discovery of a technical fault in the aircraft, either of which could impose an indefinite wait. Thus he would have the choice of sitting on his bag in the airport lounge or going to the nearest town and enduring the rigours of a provincial hotel bedroom. In such circumstances, it was only courtesy on the part of the airport security officer to offer the perplexed courier the hospitality of his safe. “You can see me lock it up myself, old boy. It will be quite all right till you get back.” A surprising number of couriers fell for this soft sell and went off, without encumbrance, to inspect the local talent—which, of course, the security officer was happy to provide on request.

As soon as the courier was safely out of the way, the security officer would inform the waiting experts and put the bag or bags at their disposal. Each bag and its contents were studied with minute care before they were opened. Every knot and seal was measured, copied and photographed where necessary; chemical examination was also made. Then came the task of untying the knots, breaking seals, extracting and photographing the contents. Finally, the hardest of all, was the job of replacing the contents exactly as found, with infinitesimally accurate reproduction of the original knots and seals. The Russians were exempt from this treatment, partly because their bags were invariably accompanied by two couriers, one of whom was always on duty, partly because of a belief that they contained bombs designed to obliterate the inquisitive. But the diplomatic correspondence of the South American states, of the
Spaniards and Portuguese, of the Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Yugoslavs and many others, was regularly subjected to scrutiny. Despite the extreme care used, accidents sometimes happened. On one occasion, the red seals in a Polish bag turned purple under treatment, and nothing could be done to restore them. The Poles were regretfully informed that the bag in question had been “lost.” This happy ending was possible only because the Poles, following their occasional custom, had entrusted this bag to the British for onward transmission—presumably because its contents were of minor importance. It would have been much more awkward if it had been accompanied by a Polish courier.