One of the pleasures of running coldspur is the fact that so many interesting people stumble across it, and contact me. Apart from the dozens of professional and amateur enthusiasts of intelligence and espionage matters, a number of individuals with intriguing backgrounds have written to me: for example, a retired counter-intelligence officer overseas; a man who lodged with Agent SONIA in Great Rollright as a boy; a grand-daughter of the MI5 officer Michael Serpell; the son of the FBI’s representative in London during the Fuchs events; a son of the Communist spy Dave Springhall, who only recently learned who his father was; and, recently, the grandson of a soldier who guarded interned spies at a Home Office internment camp in World War 2.
It is the last whose story I want to highlight in this month’s feature. I believe that Pete Mackean owns a startling set of photographs from Camp 020 in its four incarnations, at Latchmere House, Huntercombe Park, Diest and Bad Nenndorf, some of them showing notable figures involved in the administration of the camps that have not been published before. They deserve a wider audience. When Pete shared them with me, I immediately suggested that coldspur might be a good place to showcase them, and he graciously agreed to let me use them.
Lieutenant Mackean of the Staffordshire Regiment
Yet I wanted to place them in a solid context. I was familiar with Latchmere House at Ham in Surrey, partly because I had played golf in the grounds next to it. I had also encountered the history of Camp 020 (as it became to be called) from the work issued in 2000 by the Public Record Office (as it then was), Camp 020: The Official History of MI5’s Wartime Interrogation Centre, compiled from the accounts of Lieutenant-Colonel R. W. G. Stephens and his assistants Lieutenant-Colonel G. Sampson and Major R. Short, and edited with an introduction by Oliver Hoare. Camp 020, otherwise known as Latchmere House, is a well-known landmark in counter-espionage literature. During World War II, it was used as a detention and interrogation centre for suspected German spies (most of whom, incidentally, were not German citizens), as well as, for a short time, a place to intern obvious domestic subversives, such as Oswald Mosley. It was led by the celebrated Lieutenant-Colonel R. W. G. Stephens, known as ‘Tin-Eye’ because of his monocle.
But Huntercombe, the alternative and back-up partner to Camp 020, which was dubbed Camp 020R, was much of a mystery to me, and I wanted to research its provenance and development in more detail. It was intended by Stephens and MI5 that there should not be any sharp distinctions made between the Camp 020 and Camp 020R. Yet a study of the files at the National Archives (specifically, KV 4/102 & /103) reveals that Huntercombe took on an identity and life of its own, and was not just an extension, or potential replacement, for Camp 020. (The ‘R’ stood for ‘Reserve’.) Its story has been largely overlooked.
Huntercombe merits only one paragraph (and a very occasional reference) in Stephens’s history: Christopher Andrew ignores it completely in his authorised history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, while John Curry briefly records, in his official history of MI5, that Camp 020 and 020R were in fact a ‘joint establishment’. Hinsley and Simkins, in Volume 4 of British Intelligence in the Second World War, merely cite, in an Appendix, when it was opened, as a reserve camp, in January 1943. In MI5, Nigel West suggests that ‘a long-term detention centre was hastily sited at a quiet spot on Lord Nuffield’s estate, Huntercombe Place, Nettlebed, near Henley’, an assessment that turns out to be incorrect on several counts. Guy Liddell, in his Diaries, makes one or two references to Huntercombe specifically, but his generic mentions of ‘Camp 020’ could be intended to designate either of the two.
As background reading, I heartily recommend A. W. Brian Simpson’s In The Highest Degree Odious (1992), a magisterial account of the slide into aggressive detention policy in the first years of the war. (Its major defect for me was an abundance of Footnotes, a tide that became highly distracting. Most of them should have been packaged as Endnotes. I also believe that Simpson is a little harsh on MI5, since his criticisms of it cover exactly the time that it was essentially leaderless, under Lord Swinton’s Security Executive, from May 1940 to March 1941.) Hinsley and Simkins give an overall solid account of the legislative muddles that accompanied the establishment of Camp 020, although they cover very superficially the implications of the Treachery Act. Helen Fry’s London Cage (2017) is a very useful guide to the string of prisons and detention centres where German prisoners-of-war were interrogated.
As a final observation on the slimness of official accounts, I have found no single place where all the Camps referred to in the literature (001- Dartmoor, 011- Bridgend, 020 – Ham, 020R – Huntercombe, 186 – Colchester, L – Isle of Man, WX – Stafford Prison, and then the Isle of Man, X – Canada, Z – Aldershot) are listed and described. A sentence on the Kew website runs as follows: “Those classified in Category A were interned in camps being set up across the UK, the largest settlement of which were on the Isle of Man though others were set up in and around Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Bury, Huyton, Sutton Coldfield, London, Kempton Park, Lingfield, Seaton and Paignton. Other documents indicate that there was not a direct correspondence between identified camps and named prisons: for example, Camp001 was the isolated hospital wing at Dartmoor.
The Background – Dealing with Hostile Elements:
Great Britain, primarily represented by the Home Office, struggled with the challenge of controlling and defanging undesirable elements in the first year of the war. The problem was multi-dimensional. In one category were British citizens who held unreliable opinions – the Fascist sympathisers, such as Oswald Mosley’s British Union, and The Link; communists driven into a hostile position by the demands of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, who might undermine the war effort; pacifists who, out of different convictions, might spread similar disaffection. In the second category were aliens, including German (and other) citizens who had fled from Nazi-controlled territories before the war, refugees escaping from territories that had succumbed to Nazi invasions in the first half of 1940, as well as unfortunate Germans and Austrians who had settled unobtrusively in the country during the last decade or two. The Home Office had no confident means of distinguishing between those fiercely opposed to Hitlerism, those who may have been infiltrated as spies or subversives, and those essentially apolitical beings who had switched their national loyalties. (This problem became more absurd when Italy entered the war in June 1940.) In the third category were true spies, who entered the country illegally or clandestinely (or, later in the war, were picked up on territories abroad), were not protected by any military uniform, and presented a unique challenge since no appropriate laws had been set up for their treatment, and, because of MI5’s peculiar interest in them, presented some problems for any open prosecutorial process.
The problem of handling subversive citizens had been addressed by some clumsy amendments to general Defence Regulations, most notoriously Amendment 39A, and a new paragraph 1a to 18B, which was introduced in May 1940. This allowed detention of any persons who were found to be furthering the objectives of the enemy, and resulted in many prominent citizens (such as Oswald Mosley) being detained in prison. As Simpson wrote, anyone to whom the Home Secretary took exception could be locked up for an indefinite period. Yet the policy took on a sharper focus in the summer of 1940. Mass internment of persons of German origin began after the Fifth Column scare of early June, 1940, and special camps, such as on the Isle of Man, were set up to hold such groups. Since the centuries-old Treason Act required special rules of evidence and procedure (and foreign spies, unlike those who has sought asylum, could hardly be accused of treasonable behaviour against a country to which they owned no allegiance), a Treachery Bill was quickly formulated, and passed on May 23. It likewise demanded the death penalty, but it could be commuted.
The outcome of this combination of respect for legal procedure, and somewhat panic-driven haste, was that a mixture of irritating but probably harmless ruffians, possible traitors sympathetic to Germany, suspicious but maybe innocent foreigners, and certifiably dangerous spies and saboteurs sometimes found internment in the same location. Ascot Racecourse was one internment camp, as were the Oratory Schools: Wandsworth and Holloway jails were also used. In January 1941, the Royal Victoria Patriotic Schools building in Wandsworth was set up as a general reception function (the London Reception Centre) for all manner of aliens, under the responsibility of the Home Office, but with MI5 conducting the interrogations, and the Army providing the guards and sentries. In mid-July, 1940, Latchmere House opened, and as Professor Hinsley wrote, ‘accepted its first batch of enemy aliens, British fascists, and suspects arriving from Dunkirk’. Yet the awareness of habeas corpus, and the inability of the government to hold suspects for more than twenty-eight days, led to vociferous complaints by the British citizenry among this group, declaring their entitlement to a fair trial, meant that a change of policy occurred. The crux of the matter was that internees could be interrogated, but those prosecuted could not.
As Hinsley went on to write (Volume 4, p 70): “Latchmere House had been opened as an interrogation centre for suspect Fifth Columnists in July, but in October MI5 decided that it should be used only for more serious cases among aliens, for example where espionage was suspected, and that British subjects should be taken there only in very exceptional circumstances. And from early in November the place was entirely reserved for captured agents, including some of the double-cross agents, arrangements being made by which MI5 reported to the Home Office every month the names of those detained, the reason for their detention, and the length of time they had been there.” Early the following year, as the double-cross operation gained momentum, the danger of leakage about the whole process impelled the authorities to decide that Latchmere House could not be used as a holding-place for short-term interrogation. It gained the nomenclature of ‘Camp 020’ in December 1941, and was by then assigned to the permanent detention of captured agents and dubious refugees, even though many were sent on to other secure areas, such as Dartmoor Prison (Camp 001), or Camp WX on the Isle of Man.
Since one of the primary functions of Camp 020 was to weed out dedicated Nazi agents, with the possibility of ‘turning’ suitable candidates to work for the British, it took on a highly secret nature, since, if an agent was detained, and then found not be suitable for turning, or betrayed that trust, MI5 could not risk any inkling of that attempt to leak out to the enemy. The initial policy for Camp 020 was to hold detainees incommunicado: that was one of the key differences between internment and imprisonment. (In September 1941, a potential disaster was averted after the failed double-agent JEFF had been sent to Camp WX, next to Camp L, on the Isle of Man, where Nazi German internees were held.) Moreover, complications were caused by the fact that, if any such victim were sent to trial, officers at Latchmere House would be called upon to give evidence. Proceedings and interrogations were documented in secrecy: if a formal statement were required, officers would have to send the subject to one of the prisons. Permanent detention was thus preferred to open prosecution. Permanent detainees could be housed in conventional prisons, but run-of-the-mill offenders could not be detained indefinitely in Camp 020.
The Regimental Sergeant-Major with Stephens and Sampson
Rumours about the prolonged interrogation and detention in 1943 would cause questions in high places to be posed about whether MI5 was under proper ministerial control. Indeed, up till then, Camp 020 had been running in an extra-legal fashion, much to the embarrassment of the Home Secretary, John Anderson. Nigel West points out that it was omitted from the list of camps submitted to the Red Cross, and thus was protected from inspection. MI5 survived that investigation, and several probable spies – though many who had been captured overseas could not be convicted of offenses against Great Britain, and had to wait until the end of the war to be repatriated – remained in detention for years. As Hinsley wrote: “Once a man’s case was completed, if he was not executed, released as innocent, or released to B1A to act as a double-agent. life in Camp 020 was far from intolerable.” (Hinsley overlooks the fact that some prisoners were despatched to other camps.) And that was the fate of the overwhelming majority of those sent to Camp 020.
From various comments in his Diaries, Guy Liddell betrays some of the tensions experienced in trying to keep the lid on the activities at Camp 020, away from the prying eyes of diplomats and bureaucrats. The main objective seemed to be to ensure that no whisper of information about the Double Cross initiatives – especially of those who had been initially considered, and exposed to the scheme, but then turned out to be unreliable – must be allowed to travel outside. Hence the emphasis on keeping prisoners incommunicado, and not releasing them for trial. Liddell makes references to more candidates who were offered the chance, but then failed the test. They had to be locked away. Moreover, MI5 took big risks with Agent ZIGZAG, Edward (Eddie) Chapman, who was brought back to Camp 020 for interrogations after undertaking missions abroad.
The Idea Behind Camp 020R:
The sense of awkwardness about Camp 020R may have been due to the fact that it had become an expensive white elephant. It was originally conceived as a back-up in the event that Latchmere House were bombed. A minor aeronautical raid in January 1941 had exposed the establishment, as if the Germans knew what was going on there. Stephens wrote as follows: “In consequence the Commandant was instructed to plan a duplicate camp at Nuffield. Thus Huntercombe, or Camp 020R, came into being. Primarily it was intended as a reserve camp. It was large enough to absorb Ham in time of crisis and to provide for the future commitments of a long-term war. It included a hostel at Wallingford where some 80 female staff could be accommodated. The decision was wise, but the cost, about £250,000, was high, and it is for consideration whether M.I.5. should not have a permanent lien on the place. In the event, Huntercombe was never put to full use as the Germans were good enough to leave Ham alone. The camp, however, did become the oubliette *; the place where enemy spies, no longer of interest, were allowed to vegetate until the end of the war.”
[* Oubliette: ‘a dungeon with no opening except in the roof’ (Chambers Dictionary, from the French ‘oublier’, to forget. Obviously a very un-English form of punishment)]
A study of KV 4/102 & 4/103 at the National Archives tells a rather more complicated story. Brigadier Harker had been discussing with Lord Swinton, the Chief of the Security Executive, as early as December 1940, the acquisition of ‘another complete establishment in the country’, concurrently with plans to construct new cells near the existing Latchmere House building. Early in 1941, waves of fresh German spies were expected. Army GHQ was concerned about the location and exposure of Ham, and the War Office began pressing Lord Swinton for an ‘alternative Latchmere’ in February. Swinton concurred: Latchmere had almost been hit again that month.
Thus negotiations began. The Home office and the Ministry of Works had to be involved. A March 10 memorandum to R. S. Wells at the Home office by D. Abbot states: “So far as the area of search [for premises] is concerned we must be guided by Home Forces. For our part we would like to be somewhere well outside London, and if possible in the general direction of Oxford. Or perhaps more broadly speaking within a sector bounded by lines drawn due West and N.N. West from London.” The search began. The Ministry of Works recommended a site, The Springs, North Stoke, in Oxfordshire, but it was deemed unsuitable.
The Selection of a Site:
By May 1, however, a more attractive site (for what was then called ‘Latchmere R’) had been found, and the Post Office was asked to be involved, as it would need setting up the same listening equipment that existed at Camp 020. Here we also find a mention of a ‘Home for Incurables’, suggesting that some diehard prisoners might be accommodated on the new premises, and require special handling in a facility some 200 or 300 yards from the main building. The site is not yet identified, but a report says that ‘the present owner, who is anxious to get rid of the place, has offered it for sale for £25,000, but the Ministry of Works . . . would requisition it under their present powers probably at a rental of £200 or £300 per annum.’
The site is soon identified as Huntercombe Place, owned by Sir Francis Maclean. Maclean had been a WWI air ace, and was now Sheriff of Oxfordshire. He was famous for an aviation feat on August 10, 1912, when he flew his biplane through Tower Bridge, and under several other bridges on the Thames (see https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/10-august-1912/ ) Sir Francis wanted to stay in the Mansion House until the end of the year, but he was told that the outbuildings would need to be possessed immediately.
Initial Sketch for Camp 020R
Stephens visited the site in the middle of June, and was impressed with the location, the seclusion it offered, and the general amenities. But he was not so happy with the emerging plans for replicating Latchmere House, and the amount of personnel it would take to guard the place properly. On June 23, he wrote to Richard Butler (of the MI5 Secretariat) that his plans would turn out to be cheaper than those of the Ministry of Works: his suggestion can be seen alongside that of the Ministry. Lord Swinton chipped in at the end of the month, indicating that the back-up site was more urgent than the ‘Home for Incurables’, and stressing the need for speed.
Yet, despite all the apparent urgency, obstacles started to appear for what was now being called ‘Nuffield Camp’. The War Office was under the impression that the shadow camp would be occupied only if Ham were evacuated, and therefore no new guard personnel would be required. Stephens had to somehow finesse the problem that the separate oubliettes required by MI5 and SIS would come into operation immediately, while the shadow Prison block for Latchmere House would come into operation when Latchmere House was irretrievably ‘blown’, which went very much against Lord Swinton’s view of things. Moreover, the Ministry of Works was dragging its feet, and the optimum building season was, by July, passing by.
Stephens had a clash with the ‘pessimist’ Russell, of the Ministry of Works, who was slow visiting the site. They disagreed about the availability of labour, and Stephens was impelled to write a letter to Butler, complaining about the delays, saying that ‘the completion of Latchmere “R” ten months hence [i.e. May 1942] will be of little use to the Security Services’, when Swinton had hoped for completion by October 1941. Stephens was still referring to the need for the ‘reserve’ camp in terms of Latchmere House’s staff and prisoners moving ‘in the event of an invasion, or if it should again suffer from enemy action’. Yet he must have known by then, what with Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June, that both threats were drastically reduced.
Lord Swinton Intervenes:
And then a further blow occurred. There had obviously been rumblings about who should pay for the construction, and it was agreed in mid-September that it had to be out of MI5’s budget, on the secret vote, and not appear as a War Office expenditure. In that way, as a memorandum in November 1941, stated, ‘no inquisitive persons or committees will be able to investigate it’. Yet, as early as September 1941, a Ministry of Works letter to Abbot drew attention to the fact that the Prime Minister had asked the Production Executive to perform a drastic curtailment of any marginal projects. The official (a Mr. E. Batch) went on: “It is felt here . . . that it is doubtful whether we should proceed with Huntercombe Place”.
Relaxing at Huntercombe Place
Lord Swinton was able to intervene, however, and the work that had started in late September continued. Batch was summarily taken care of. Construction, and especially the electrical installations, required sentries to guard the property: Latchmere overall was taking on a new existence, and on December 1, David Petrie, the Director-General of MI5, had to rule that the establishment would be separated from B.1.E. on the grounds of its discrete characteristics of Policy, Intelligence, Administration and Army Administration. Furthermore, he declared that “in the interests of Security it is desired that in future Latchmere House, and the Country establishment at Nuffield, shall be referred to in all connections as Camp 020 and Camp 020, R. respectively.’
The Nuffield reference is a fascinating one, in its own right. Nigel West’s suggestion of a larger Nuffield estate, of which Huntercombe Place was a portion, cannot be true. Lord Nuffield (who as William Morris, founded Morris Motors) moved into his house, which was formerly known as Merrow Mount, only in 1933, when he renamed it. One map in the archive shows ‘Merrow Mount’ as a mansion on the right of the entrance road to Huntercombe Place and its much more expansive property. Furthermore, the name of ‘Nuffield’, apart from giving away the location of the new camp, was possibly of some embarrassment, for Lord Nuffield had been a prominent member of the pro-German society, The Link (and is actually listed as such on page 167 of West’s book).
Plan showing Merron Court (Lord Nuffield’s Residence)
The bills started coming in. An expenditure of £26,500 was marked for the period up to the end of February 1942. The archive is strangely silent for the summer of 1942, but, in August, Lt.-Col Stephens started raising new security concerns, primarily because of the proliferation and extension of USA air-bases in the area. He specifically wanted Huntercombe (and Latchmere) to be declared a ‘Prohibited Area’, where any aliens would be excluded, writing in stark tones: “The fact is that Camp 020 and the reserve establishment 020R are not only contre-espionage [sic] centres, but also prisons where spies who richly deserve the death penalty under the Treachery Act are kept alive for active Intelligence purposes.”
At this point, Stephens made a more exacting demand, suggesting that the camps be handed over to the War Office for administration: “ . . . to discard the appellation ‘Internment Camp’ in each case, and to invite the War Office, from an Army point of view, to administer Camp 020 and 020R definitely as War Office units rather than the responsibility of London District and South Midland Area, by which uninformed and uneven treatment is not unnaturally at times received. Precedents exist in support of this proposal. The first is ‘Camp Z’, which was kept off official lists altogether, and the second is the series of M.I. 19 Intelligence Camps Nos. 10, 20 and 30, which are not only kept off official lists, but are administered by the War Office direct rather than the Military Districts in which they are situated.” This language is rather puzzling – and provocative – as it seems to draw attention to the fact that the legality of Stephens’s establishments may have been questionable.
The irony was that even the MI5 Regional Control Officer, Major M. Ryde, did not know what was going on, and rumours were starting to fly around about the new ‘P.O.W. camp’. The police had taken an interest, but had been refused entry. Even though the place had been requisitioned from the Sheriff of Oxfordshire, the Chief Constable did not know why his officers had been refused admittance. In addition, Stephens had to write about the ‘vast extension’ of the aerodrome at Benson, three miles north, and the erection of a camp for 4,000 US servicemen at Nettlebed, one and a half miles south, which, he believed, would ‘render Intelligence work by special apparatus quite impossible’. Yet he still used the threat of further air bombardment at Ham, and the threat of invasion, as arguments for protecting the ‘reserve’ site.
In the short term, Stephens managed to win this particular battle, it seems, and was able to turn to the problem of staffing. In this he was beset by the problem of whether Camp 020R was going to be complementary to Camp 020, or whether it would still have to absorb all the latter in an emergency. He produced a paper that stressed how important it was to remove the more dangerous ‘old lags’ from Latchmere to Huntercombe. Camp 020 was operationally full in September 1942. Stephens looked forward to Camp 020R opening ‘in the near future’: “I would move there the old lags, split disturbing elements between 020 and 020R, and possibly accommodate some XX prisoners under better conditions.” Who these reformed ‘XX prisoners’ were is rather mysterious, as it hints at several previously unknown spies who could neither be executed nor turned, and Stephens’s desire to house them in better conditions shows a rapid shift in humanitarian impulses from the commandant. In any case, in October, Stephens prepared for the influx. He arranged for Butler to appeal to the War Office that Huntercombe Farm, planned as a domicile for American troops, should be assigned to the Camp ‘for additional accommodation’. Brigadier Harker added his weight to the case in December. New maps of the protected territory were drawn. Another year had passed.
Diagram of Camp 020R (September 1942)
A Change of Mood:
While demands on rural space did not go away, Stephens’ tone continued to change. He softened his objections to low-flying aircraft from R.A.F. Benson. On January 26, 1943, he noted that ‘the threat of a comic Nazi invasion recedes’. Yet now a new bureaucratic challenge emerged – the Home Office, who may have been prodded into action by Stephen’s outburst from August. When MI5 started planning for the transfer of prisoners to Camp 020R in February 1943, it discovered that it had neglected to inform Sir Alexander Maxwell, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, even of the idea of the camp. Since Maxwell was very concerned about issues of welfare and fair treatment, Stephens had to prepare a grovelling report, submitted under Petrie’s signature, that stressed how superior the conditions were to those at Latchmere.
Stephens’ words ran as follows: “The conditions at Camp 020 R are more advantageous to the prisoners than at Camp 020 itself. More space is available out of doors, constant association is possible when desirable, while wireless, papers, games, cigarettes and other privileges are provided free of charge. Rations are somewhat better than received elsewhere as we are able to supplement the prescribed scale by produce form the ground.” This was far from the notions of ‘oubliettes’ and ‘prisoners being kept alive’: a concern now focussed on prisoners’ welfare. It sounded as if the ‘country establishment at Nuffield’ was taking on the characteristics of a country club, or health farm.
Moreover, the emphasis is no longer on ‘reserve’, even though the two camps are to be considered as one entity. Stephens told Maxwell that the camp was to be used ‘primarily as a place to which we can send prisoners whose intelligence investigations have been completed at Camp 020 and who, because of the espionage nature of their case, cannot, for security reasons, be transferred to any ordinary internment camp, or other place of detention.’ He was no doubt thinking of agents who had not been successfully turned, and thus knew too much about the Double-Cross System, such as SUMMER. Yet SUMMER had had to be re-confined well before Camp 020R was ready to accept prisoners.
The Home Office Wakes Up:
Standing orders were issued for the reception of internees on November 10, 1942, and prisoners started arriving in January 1943, it seems. (On the other hand, documents in KV 4/103, such as those referring to unauthorised lending of library-books between prisoners [!], indicate that detainees were already being held there.) Soon some ‘incident’ must have occurred, probably of maltreatment, since Harker had to intervene, but possibly an attempt at suicide by one of the detainees. The full documents have been removed, but the Register holds a memorandum from the Deputy Director-General, who had to seek a meeting with Maxwell to ‘explain what had happened’. “I further made it quite clear to Sir Alexander Maxwell that Mr. Milmo was in no way responsible for what had occurred, and I feel sure that his position will not be imperilled in any way by reason of any premature action”. But what had ‘Buster’ Milmo done? Liddell went on to write that Maxwell confirmed Milmo’s view that ‘the persons transferred to 020(R) are illegally detained’. A flurry of activity resulted in a report for Maxwell’s benefit.
The legal basis for the camps thus had to be investigated, and was eventually determined. In an instrument dated March 20, 1943, Camp 020 was ‘formally authorised as a place of detention for persons held under Articles 5A and 12(5A) of the Aliens’ Order’, and the Home Secretary then signed an equivalent order for Camp 020R (thus, incidentally, undermining the argument that the two camps should be seen as one unit.) But the Home Office also found a loophole: there was no formal authorisation for those detained under D.R.18B and 18BA, namely arrested spies, and the Home Secretary had to sign an order with retroactive effect, to cover this situation. Sampson informs us that Home Secretary John Anderson had given Swinton a ‘verbal’ [he should have written ‘oral’] approval during a telephone call in 1940, but had clearly not discussed the matter with his civil servants.
At Huntercombe Place
[Lt.-Col. Sampson second from left. Is that a senior RAF officer in the centre, maybe visiting from R.A.F. Benson? Looks a bit like the future Marshal of the R.A.F. Arthur Tedder, but then perhaps all Air-Marshals looked like Tedder.]
Apparently the transferred prisoners were not happy with their lot, as they started sending in petitions to the Home Secretary in the summer of 1943. Whether the more comfortable conditions at Camp 020, and the availability of books, had contributed to their sense of entitlement, or whether they had been put up to it by some champion for them, is not clear, and the record is sparse. But in August 1943, Milmo (B1B) had to respond to a complaint from the Home Office, which was obviously perturbed by the volume of petitions coming to it. “As has been pointed out”, he wrote, “the amenities at Camp 020R leave nothing to be desired, and are of an exceptionally high standard, being more reminiscent of a modern hotel than an internment camp.” He went on to explain the comforts, freedom of movement and association, no forced work, gardening optional, free tobacco, etc. etc. , and concluded: “We are quite satisfied that these manifestoes are the result of something in the nature of a conspiracy, and this is borne out by the fact that there were no signs of unrest or disturbance of any kind at the camp.”
When Maxwell held a meeting, on July 29, to discuss the administration of Camp 020R, Petrie himself attended, confirmed the fact that both Dr. Dearden and a local practitioner were available for medical attention. (Here also is the first indication that Camp 020R had its own commandant, a Major Gibbs.) The last item informs us that ‘such matters as attempts at, or actual, suicide would be so reported’, thus confirming the ‘incident’. Petrie followed up, somewhat sluggishly, on November 29, by inviting Maxwell to visit Camp 020R, so that he might investigate working conditions for himself. He reminded Maxwell that a ‘considerable number’ of ‘detainees’ had been transferred to Camp 020R, and that he expected several more in the coming months. Some jocularity was now called for: “I think you will also be interested in the ‘amenities’ which are provided at Stephens’ ‘country’ residence!”.
Petrie had visited the camp just before he sent this letter, and a memorandum from Butler to Stephens, dated December 1, reminds the latter that he and Petrie were both keen that ‘more books and games’ should be made available for the prisoners, and that money was on hand to address this need. The ensuing flurry of memoranda shows the earnestness with which this project was pursued, and also informs us that ’well over 100’ internees were now present there, of which half knew little English. Maxwell, meanwhile, was highly occupied, and replied on December 16 that he would not be able to accept the invitation until January.
So yet another year passed. Maxwell visited Camp 020R on January 5, and wrote promptly to Petrie the next day. In a somewhat starchy and headmasterly way, he requests Petrie to make sure that the Home Office receives a copy of any report made after a prisoner complaint. He is evidently concerned that he is ultimately responsible for the treatment of the prisoners, but has not been kept properly informed. Stephens’ instructions to Butler, a few days later, indicate that Milmo has been following the book over such cases, and the problem was probably due to civil servants in the Home Office suspecting that facts were being withheld. Stephens takes the time to remind Butler that Maxwell was otherwise very impressed.
The final note in the first file on Camp 020R shows that Maxwell has bought into the idea that Camp 020R was ’not an ordinary internment camp’. In a memorandum to Petrie, Butler reports on a meeting he had with Maxwell, where the latter ‘entirely agreed that it was extremely important that as few people as possible should know the details of the cases at Camp 020 and Camp 020R, or indeed of their existence. In the preparations for D-Day it was essential that no leakage of information about the so-called ‘double agents’ should occur.
Stephens’ assessment of Camp 020R was somewhat mournful: “There the prisoners learnt much about the British Constitution; they whiled away their time by writing petitions to the King, to the Home Secretrary and to the Judges. Sometimes they gave good advice to Mr Churchill and Mr Anthony Eden. Occasionally they tried to escape. In the end it became a soulless camp, and much sympathy is due to the officers and men who carried out their dreary task so conscientiously and well for so long a time.” Peter Mackean has pointed out to me how these obligations endured for several years after the war.
Camp 020R in Operation:
The second file, KV 4/103, covers Camp 020R after it opened for business at the beginning of 1943. It is not very revealing. It is replete with standing orders, such as the posting of sentries, fire precautions and orders, inspections, and instructions for distributing newspapers and cigarettes, bathing protocols, cell cleanliness, exercise, and the procedures for escorts and vehicle searches. The Home Office is clearly very interested in the welfare of the internees, who are now granted rights that one might deem over-indulgent for such a group of desperadoes. “Complaints, couched in respectful language, will be in writing and will be handed by prisoners to the Orderly Officer of the day at breakfast rounds only”, runs one edict.
Group Guard Portrait: Mackean at back left
By early 1944, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, Sir Alexander Maxwell, has visited the camp, and is overall satisfied, but he is concerned about extra medical supplies, and wants the chief prison Medical Officer, Dr. Methven, and Sir John Moylan (who appears to be responsible for handling petitions) to visit the camp at Huntercombe. Stephens is concerned about security and disruption. Maxwell seeks extra milk for prisoners having medical problems, a concern that Stephens has to address himself, and informs Milmo back in Head Office. Petrie is involved in the question of extra nourishment that ‘may be required for medical grounds’. One wonders: did these gentlemen not know that there was a war on?
Despite all this attention to their wellbeing, prisoners still planned escapes from their Colditz-in- the-Cotswolds, as a letter of February 21, 1944 confirms. The detainees involved were Stephens, K. C. Hansen, Pelletier, Hans Hansen, Oien, Olsen, Robr, Ronning, Steiner [sic], and Lecube – not all of whom, somewhat mysteriously, appear in the list maintained, and later distributed, by the camp authorities. But Stephens was on top of it, and wrote to Richard Butler on February 23: “I am not in the least troubled by the situation at Camp 020R. the men involved are determined to escape and the authorities concerned are equally determined that they will not succeed.”
Another year passed, apparently peacefully, and at the end of May 1945, Stephens planned to liquidate both Camp 020 and Camp 020R at once. He was alert to the constitutional challenges, and firmly believed that, no matter how ill-prepared their native countries might be, the prisoners should be repatriated at once. He wants some detainees at 020R to be sent to Camp 020, and sets a target of June 15 for Camp 020R to be closed. All prisoners were in fact moved to Ham by July 3, and the property was handed over to the Ministry of Works later that month, and its closure formally declared on September 5. Those German prisoners captured towards the end of the war who had been brought initially to Ham (such as Karl Heinz Kraemer, who played a very significant role in Stockholm) were transferred to Diest in Belgium, and then Bad Nenndorf, camps which were managed by the Ministry of War, not MI5. Camp 020 was disbanded in December, although Petrie did report to Maxwell that ‘a small residue’ of detainees were still in Beltane Schools [sic: a school originally for German Kindertransport children, in Wimbledon], awaiting repatriation.
Diest PrisonMackean at Bad Nenndorf
After the war, Camp 020R became a Borstal prison. In 1983, it became a cellular prison for young juveniles. It has since (according to Wikipedia) taken a role for holding foreign national offenders awaiting deportation – an echo of its wartime role. Huntercombe Hall, which was used for administration, and as a recreational and residential facility, is now Huntercombe Hall Care Home, owned by Oxfordshire County Council, which offers ‘residential, nursing, and dementia care for up to 42 elderly residents’.
Thus the installation has come full circle, and acts as a stark reminder of the legal and constitutional challenges facing a security service and police force that today have to protect the democracy from hostile elements planning mayhem, but who may have not committed any act that can confidently be prosecuted.
The Prisoners:
Stephens’s commentary in his history, and a Kew file (KV 2/2593), combine to give us a good description of those who were moved to Camp 020R. I list them here, with a brief thumbnail sketch of those for whom information exists.
Stoerd Pons Only member of his LENA spy squad to escape execution
Gosta Caroli SUMMER: reneged, tried to escape by overpowering his guard
Kurt Goose Double-agent who tried to smuggle message to German Embassy
Albert Jaeger
Otto Joost LENA spy who was spared
Gunnar Evardsen LENA spy who was spared
Cornelius Evertsen Dutch captain who tried to land agents in Fishguard
Arie Van Dam Member of Belgian sea-mission in London; denounced
Theophil Jezequel Cuban from Spain recruited by Abwehr; brought in by Evertsen
Juan Martinez ditto
Silvio Robles ditto
Pedro Hechevarria ditto
Kurt Hansen
Gerard Libot
Wilhelm Heinrich
Hugo Jonasson Swedish skipper recruited by Abwehr in Brest
Francis de Lee
Jan de Jonge Dutchman arrested in Gibraltar making inquiries about convoys
Jose del Campo Cuban arrested in British port, confessed
Karl Hansson
Johan Strandmoen Norwegian arrested in Wick on ‘fishing’ expedition
Bjarne Hansen ditto
Hans Hansen ditto
Henry Torgesen ditto
Edward Ejsymont Pole form Gdansk who made misleading statements
Helmik Knudsen
Edward Balsam Polish Jew who shadowed Ejsymont; made false claims?
Abraham Sukiennik ditto
Eigil Robr Norwegian traitor spirited into UK by military attaché in Stockholm
Leopold Hirsch Crook who tried to bribe Germans captured in Trinidad
Oscar Gilinsky ditto
Gustav Ronning
Martin Olsen
Thorleif Solem Norwegian in pay of Germans arrested in Shetland Islands
Sigurd Alsaeth ditto
Cornelius Van der Woude
Florent Steiner Belgian seaman denounced by Verlinden
Piet Schipper Dutch seaman engaged by Abwehr
Jean Pelletier
Gottfried Koch
Erich Blau
Hans Sorensen
Carl Meewe
Hilaire Westerlinck Belgian doctor denounced by Verlinden
Tadeus Szumlicz Polish refugee recruited by Germans in Paris
Jens Palsson
Leon Jude Belgian airline pilot recruited by Germans
Robert Petin Frenchman in air force who retracted his confession
Alfred Lagall
Jose Manso Barras
Sandor Mocsan Hungarian employed by German in Brazil: radio interception
Janos Salomon ditto
Sobhy Hanna Egyptian groomed by Abwehr, arrested in Dar-es-Salaam
Pieter Grootveld
Pierre Morel Demobilised French pilot, employed by Germans: evasive story
Serrano Morales
Juan Lecube Mulish Spaniard, arrested in Trinidad: radio interception
Jose Moreno-Ruiz
Vincente Fernandez-Pasos
Gabriel Pry Belgian mathematician: offered services to Abwehr, arrested in Lisbon
Ernesto Simoes Portuguese spy in UK who contacted Germans by secret ink
Dos Santos Mesquita Portuguese journalist captured in Lourenço Marques
De Ferraz Freitas Portuguese radio operator on fishing-fleet: radio interception
Garcia Serrallach Petty Argentinian crook captured in Trinidad
Andres Blay Pigrau ditto
Homer Serafimides Greek seaman, swindler: handed over to British in Durban
Torre de la Castro
Frank Stainer Belgian crook Abwehr planned to infiltrate, captured in Lisbon
This is a mixed bag of scoundrels. Clearly some of them deserved the death penalty, but MI5 was reluctant to invoke the Treachery Act, as it would mean public trials, and secrets coming out that the service would prefer remain hidden, followed by an obligatory death sentence if the accused had been found guilty. There might be further information to be gained by interrogation, and, if too long a time passed, questions would be asked why there had been a delay. A few were failed ‘double-agents’ who knew too much. Some of the accused had been denounced, and motives might have been suspect; the identity of others had been gained by interception of Abwehr radio signals (ISOS), and clearly had to be kept quiet. Lastly, many of those detected had been arrested on foreign soil. The jurisdiction that the UK security service had over such probable criminals was uncertain, and many such persons had therefore to be detained until the end of the war, when they were repatriated to their home countries so that they could receive native justice. At least one (Stainer) was executed under such circumstances.
* * * * * * * * *
Now that the Presidential election is over and decided (pending last-minute judicial challenges), we have to look forward to the period of transition. We thus need to build a word-ladder from TRUMP to BIDEN.
A word-ladder is a set of words that incorporates a change of one letter at a time to transform the subject word into the object word, where no proper names are used. Thus MOAT can become HILL by a sequence such as MOAT-MOOT-HOOT-HOLT-HILT-HILL.
I have discovered a ladder of 14 steps to take TRUMP to BIDEN (i.e. thirteen intermediate ‘rungs’). And I have created another 14-step ladder to transform TRUMP to PENCE, as the Republican chief in waiting. However, if we want to project the transition to my favourite for the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, Nikki Haley, I have plotted another 14-step campaign for TRUMP-HALEY. On the other hand, sketching the 2024 handover from BIDEN to HALEY is a 6-step breeze. I am offering an extended free tour of my library to anyone who can offer a combined array shorter than these, a 48-step total. And I can promise that my library is far more interesting than the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library ever will be, as the latter will probably contain just bound volumes of Playboy, and signed copies of The Art of the Deal. Please send your answers to antonypercy@aol.com. (Travel and accommodation arrangements are the responsibility of the winners.)
“These got a further boost when, just after midnight on 9 June, CATO [the German codename for GARBO] spent two full hours on the air sending a long and detailed report to his spymaster, Kühlenthal. The risk of capture was enormous when an agent transmitted that long, for it gave the direction-finding vans plenty of time to locate him. But this very fact impressed the Germans with the importance of his signal.” (Hitler’s Spies, by David Kahn, p 515)
“If the receivers of this vast screed had paused to reflect, they might have registered how unlikely it was that a wireless would have been able to operate for more than two hours without detection. But they did not.” (Double Cross, by Ben Macintyre, p 324)
“Garbo still ranked high in the esteem of his controller, but if Kühlenthal had thought coolly and carefully enough, there was one aspect of that day’s exchange of signals that might have made him suspicious. Garbo had been on the air so long that he had given the British radiogoniometrical stations ample time on three occasions to obtain a fix on his position and arrest him. Why was he able to stay on the air so long? Did he have a charmed life? Or was he being allowed to transmit by the British for the purpose of deception? These were questions that Kühlenthal might well have asked himself. But instead of being suspicious, he sent a message to Berlin. In it he recommended Garbo for the Iron Cross.” (Anthony Cave-Brown, Bodyguard of Lies, pp 676-677)
“The Abwehr remained remarkably naïve in thinking that in a densely populated and spy-conscious country like England an agent would be able to set up a transmitter and antenna without attracting attention. Moreover, it seems not to have smelled a rat from the fact that some agents, notably GARBO, were able to remain on the air for very long periods without being disturbed. It did have the good sense to furnish agents sent to Britain with only low-power sets that would cause minimal interference to neighbors’ receivers and would be more difficult for the British to monitor – though they also afforded less reliable communication. Once again, GARBO was an exception. Telling the Germans that he had recruited a radio operator with a powerful transmitter, he sent his messages at 100 watts from a high-grade set. Even this did not raise the Abwehr’s suspicions.” (Thaddeus Holt, The Deceivers, pp 142-143)
“And so, with Eisenhower’s authorization, Pujol transmitted, in the words of Harris, ‘the most important report of his career’. Beginning just after midnight, the message took two hours and two minutes to transmit. This was a dangerously long time for any agent to remain on air.” (Operation Fortitude, by Joshua Levine, p 283)
“GARBO’s second transmission lasted a record 122 minutes, and hammered home his belief that the events of the past forty-eight hours represented a diversionary feint, citing his mistress ‘Dorothy Thompson’, an unconscious source in the Cabinet Office, who had mentioned a figure of seventy-five divisions in England.” (Nigel West, Codeword OVERLORD, p 274)
“The length of this message should have aroused suspicion in itself. How on earth a real secret agent could stay on the air transmitting for so long in wartime conditions was unbelievable. British SOE agents operating in Europe were told to keep transmissions to less than five minutes in order not to be detected. However, this was not questioned.” (Terry Crowdy, Deceiving Hitler, p 270)
“We are sure that we deceived the Germans and turned their weapon against themselves; can we be quite sure that they were not equally successful in turning our weapon against is? Now our double-cross agents were the straight agents of the Germans – their whole espionage system in the U.K. What did the Germans gain from this system? The answer cannot be doubtful. They gained no good from their agents, and they did take from them a very great deal of harm. It would be agreeable to be able to accept the simple explanation, to sit back in the armchair of complacency, to say that we were very clever and the Germans very stupid, and that consequently we gained both on the swings and the roundabouts as well. But that argument just won’t hold water at all.” (The Double-Cross System, by John Masterman, p 263)
“Masterman credited only his own ideas, fresh-minted like gold sovereigns entirely from his experiences on the XX Committee. The wonder of it is, with the exception of the sporadic pooh-poohing from the likes of maverick Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor and veteran counter-intelligence officer David Mure, The Double-Cross System came to be swallowed whole. Farago’s book was essentially forgotten; Masterman’s became celebrated.” (Fighting to Lose, by John Bryden, p 314)
“Yet, when all is said, one is left with a sense of astonishment that men in such responsible positions as were those who controlled the destinies of Germany during the late war, could have been so fatally misled on such slender evidence. One can only suppose that strategic deception derives its capacity for giving life to this fairy-tale world from the circumstance that it operates in a field into which the enemy can seldom effectively penetrate and where the opposing forces never meet in battle. Dangers which lurk in this terra incognita thus tend to be magnified, and such information as is gleaned to be accepted too readily at its face value. Fear of the unknown is at all times apt to breed strange fancies. Thus it is that strategic deception finds its opportunity of changing the fortunes of war.” (Fortitude, by Roger Hesketh, p 361)
“Abwehr officials, enjoying life in the oases of Lisbon, Madrid, Stockholm or Istanbul, fiddling their expenses and running currency rackets on the side, felt that they were earning their keep so long as they provided some kind of information. This explains why for example Garbo was able to get away with his early fantasies, and Tricycle could run such outrageous risks.” (Michael Howard, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 5, p 49)
“However, the claim that the Double Cross spies were ‘believed’ in ‘Berlin’ needs some amplification. Even if the information was swallowed by the Abwehr, that is not to say that it was believed at OKW or that it influenced overall German policy. Part of the problem is that the Abwehr was not a very efficient organisation. Nor was it involved in significant analysis of its intelligence product: on the contrary, the Ast and outstations tended to pounce on any snippet of potentially useful information and, rather than evaluate its intelligence value, pass it on to Berlin as evidence of their ‘busyness’ and as justification for their salaries and expense accounts.” (David Kenyon, Bletchley Park and D-Day, p 163)
“We have succeeded in sustaining them so well that we are receiving even at this stage . . . an average of thirty to forty reports each day from inside England, many of them radioed directly on the clandestine wireless sets we have operational in defiance of the most intricate and elaborate electronic countermeasures.” (Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, in February 1944, from Ladislas Farago’s Game of the Foxes, p 705)
“A fundamental assumption they [the Germans] made was logically simple: if they were reading parts or all of different British codes at different times, and no mention of any signal was ever found that referred to any material transmitted by the Germans in an Enigma-encoded message, then the system had to be secure.” (Christian Jennings, The Third Reich is Listening, p 261)
By 1943, the Radio Security Service, adopted by SIS (MI6) in the summer of 1941, has evolved into an efficient mechanism for intercepting enemy, namely German, wireless signals from continental Europe, and passing them on to Bletchley Park for cryptanalysis. Given the absence of any transmissions indicating the presence of German spies using wireless telegraphy on British soil, the Service allows its domestic detection and location-finding capabilities to be relaxed somewhat, with the result that it operates rather sluggishly in tracking down radio usage appearing to be generated from locations in the UK, whether they are truly illicit, or simply misguided. RSS would later overstate the capabilities of its mobile location-finding units, in a fashion similar to that in which the German police units exaggerated the power and automation of its own interception and detection devices and procedures. RSS also has responsibilities for providing SIS agents, as well as the sabotage department SOE (Special Operations Executive), with equipment and communications instructions, for their excursions into mainland Europe. SOE has had a very patchy record in wireless security, but RSS’s less than prompt response to its needs provokes SOE, abetted by its collaborators, members of various governments in exile, to attempt to bypass RSS’s very protocol-oriented support. RSS has also not performed a stellar job in recommending and enforcing solid Signals Security procedures in British military units. Guy Liddell, suspicious of RSS’s effectiveness, knows that he needs wireless expertise in MI5, and is eager to replace the ambitious and manipulative Malcom Frost, who is eased out at the end of 1943. It thus takes Liddell’s initiative, working closely with the maverick RSS officer, Sclater, to draw the attention of the Wireless Board to the security oversights. Towards the end of 1943, the plans for OVERLORD, the project to ‘invade’ France on the way to ensuring Germany’s defeat, start to take shape, and policies for ensuring the secrecy of the operation’s details will affect all communications leaving the United Kingdom.
Contents:
NEPTUNE, OVERLORD, BODYGUARD & FORTITUDE
Determining Censorship Policy
The Dilemma of Wireless
Findlater Stewart, the Home Defence Security Executive, and the War Cabinet
Problems with the Poles
Guy Liddell and the RSS
‘Double’ or ‘Special’ Agents?
Special Agents at Work
The Aftermath
NEPTUNE, OVERLORD, BODYGUARD & FORTITUDE
Operation Bodyguard
My objective in this piece is to explore and analyse policy concerning wireless transmissions emanating from the British Isles during the build-up to the Normandy landings of June 1944. This aspect of the war had two sides: the initiation of signals to aid the deception campaign, and the protection of the deception campaign itself by prohibiting possibly dangerous disclosures to the enemy that would undermine the deceits of the first. It is thus beyond my scope to re-present the strategies of the campaign, and the organisations behind them, except as a general refreshment of the reader, in order to provide a solid framework, and to highlight dimensions that have been overlooked in the histories.
OVERLORD was originally the codeword given to the assault on Normandy, but in September 1943 it was repurposed and broadened to apply to the operation of the ‘primary United States British ground and air effort against the Axis in Europe’. (Note that, on Eisenhower’s urging, it was not considered an ‘invasion’, a term which would have suggested incursions into authentic enemy territory.) NEPTUNE was the codeword used to describe the Normandy operation. BODYGUARD was the overall cover plan to deceive the enemy about the details of OVERLORD. BODYGUARD itself was broken down into FORTITUDE North and FORTITUDE South, the latter conceived as the project to suggest that the main assault would occur in the Pas de Calais as opposed to Normandy, and thus disguise NEPTUNE.
I refer the reader to six important books for greater detail on the BODYGUARD deception plan. Bodyguard of Lies, by Anthony Cave Brown (1975) is a massive, compendious volume, containing many relevant as well as irrelevant details, not all of them reliable, and the author can be annoyingly vague in his chronology. Sir Michael Howard’s British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 5 (1990), part of the authorized history, contains a precise and urbane account of the deception campaign, although it is rather light on technical matters. Roger Hesketh, who was the main architect of FORTITUDE, wrote his account of the project, between 1945 and 1948, but it was not published until 2000, many years after his death in 1987, as Fortitude: The D-Day Deception Campaign. (In his Preface to the text, Hesketh indicates that he was given permission to publish in 1976, but it did not happen.) Hesketh’s work must be regarded as the most authoritative of the books, and it includes a large number of invaluable, charts, documents and maps, but it reflects some of the secrecy provisions of its time. Joshua Levine’s Operation Fortitude (2001) is an excellent summary of the operation, lively and accurate, and contains a highly useful appendix on Acknowledgements and Sources. Nigel West delivered Codeword Overlord (2019), which sets out to cover the role and achievements of Axis espionage in preparing for the D-Day landings. Like many of West’s recent works, it is uneven, and embeds a large amount of source material in the text. Oddly, West, who provided an Introduction to Hesketh’s book, does not even mention it in his Bibliography. Finally, Thaddeus Holt’s Deceivers (2007) is perhaps the most comprehensive account of Allied military deception, an essential item in the library, very well written, and containing many facts and profiles not available elsewhere. It weighs in at a hefty 1000+ pages, but the details he provides, unlike Cave Brown’s, are all relevant.
Yet none of these volumes refers to the critical role of the Home Security Defence Executive (HSDE), chaired by Sir Findlater Stewart, in the security preparations. (Findlater Stewart receives one or two minor mentions in two of the Indexes, but on matters unrelated to the tasks of early 1944.) The HSDE was charged, however, with implementing a critical part of the censorship policy regarding BODYGUARD. The HSDE was just one of many intersecting and occasionally overlapping committees performing the planning. At the highest level, the Ops (B) section, concerned with deception under COSSAC (Chief of Staff to Supreme Allied Commander), was absorbed into SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) in January 1944, when General Eisenhower took over command, expanded, and split into two. Colonel Noel Wild headed Ops (B), with Jervis Read responsible for physical deception, while Roger Hesketh took on Special Means, whose role was to implement parts of the deception plan through controlled leakage.
In turn, Hesketh’s group itself was guided by the London Controlling Section (LCS), which was responsible for deciding the overall strategy of how misinformation should be conveyed to the enemy, and tracking its success. At this time LCS was led by Colonel John Bevan, who faced an extraordinary task of coordinating the activities of a large number of independent bodies, from GC&CS’s collection of ULTRA material to SOE’s sabotage of telephone networks in France, as well as the activities of the ‘double-agents’ within MI5. Thus at least three more bodies were involved: the W Board, which discussed high-level policy matters for the double-cross system under General Davidson, the Director of Military Intelligence; the XX Committee, chaired by John Masterman, which implemented the cover-stories and activities of both real and notional agents, and created the messages that were fed to the Abwehr; and MI5’s B1A under ‘Tar’ Robertson, the group that actually managed the activities and transmissions of the agents. Lastly, the War Cabinet set up a special group, the OVERLORD Security Sub-Committee, to inspect the detailed ramifications of ensuring no unauthorised information about the landings escaped the British Isles, and this military-focussed body enjoyed a somewhat tentative liaison with the civilian-oriented HDSE through the energies of Sir Findlater Stewart.
When Bevan joined the W Board on September 23, 1943, the LCS formally took over the responsibility for general control of all deception, leaving the W Board to maintain supervision of the double-agents’ work solely. Also on the W Board was Findlater Stewart, acting generally on behalf of the Ministries, who had been invited in early 1941, and who directly represented his boss, Sir John Anderson, and the Prime Minister. The Board had met regularly for almost three years, but by September 1943, highly confident that it controlled all the German agents on UK soil, and with Bevan on board, held only one more meeting before the end of the war – on January 21, 1944. It then decided, in a general stocktaking before OVERLORD, that the XX Committee could smoothly continue to run things, but that American representation on the Committee was desirable. As for Findlater Stewart, he still had a lot of work to do.
Determining Censorship Policy
The move to tighten up security in advance of NEPTUNE took longer than might have seemed appropriate. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed on the approximate timing and location of the operation, but it needed the consent of Stalin at the Teheran Conference at the end of November, and the Soviet dictator’s commitment to mount a large scale Soviet offensive in May 1944 to divert German forces, for the details to be solidified. Thus Bevan’s preliminary thoughts on the deception plan for OVERLORD, sketched out in July, had to be continually revised. A draft version, named JAEL, was circulated, and approved, on October 23, but, after Teheran, Bevan had to work feverishly to prepare the initial version of the BODYGUARD plan which replaced JAEL, completing it on December 18. This received feedback from the Chiefs of Staff, and from Eisenhower, newly appointed Commander-in-Chief, and was presented to SHAEF in early January, and approved on January 19. Yet no sooner was this important step reached than Bevan, alongside his U.S. counterpart Bauer, was ordered to leave for Moscow to explain the plan, and convince the Soviets of its merits. Such was the suspicion of Soviet military and intelligence officers, and such was their inability to make any decision unless Stalin willed it, that approval did not arrive until March 5, when the delegates returned to London.
Yet Guy Liddell’s Diaries indicate that there had already been intense discussion about OVERLORD Security, the records of which do not seem to have made it into the HDSE files. Certainly, MI5 had been debating it back in December 1943, and Liddell refers to a Security Executive meeting held on January 26. At this stage, Findlater Stewart was trying to settle what travel bans should be put in place, and as early as February 8 Liddell was discussing with his officers Grogan and (Anthony) Blunt the implications of staggering diplomatic cables before OVERLORD. The next day, he met with Maxwell at the Home Office to discuss the prevention of the return of allied nationals to the country (because of the vetting for spies that would be required).
More surprisingly, on February 11, when reporting that the Chiefs of the General Staff had become involved, and had made representations to Churchill, Liddell refers to the formation of an OVERLORD Security Committee, and comments drily: “The committee is to consist of the Minister of Production, Minister of Aircraft Production, Home Secretary and Duncan Sandys, none of whom of course know anything about security.” This committee was in fact an offshoot of the War Cabinet, which had established a Committee on OVERLORD Preparations on February 9, part of the charter of which was ‘the detection of secret enemy wireless apparatus, and increased exertions against espionage’, perhaps suggesting that not all its members were completely au fait with the historical activities of RSS and the W Board. It quickly determined that it needed a further level of granularity to address these complex security matters. Thus the Sub-committee on OVERLORD Security was established, chaired by the Minister of Production, Oliver Lyttleton, and held its first meeting on February 18, when Liddell represented MI5. Oddly, no representative from MI6 attended. Liddell continues by describing the committee’s charter as considering: 1) the possibility of withdrawing diplomatic communications privileges; 2) the prevention of export of newspapers; 3) more strengthened surveillance of ships and aircraft; 4) the detection of secret enemy wireless apparatus and increased precautions against espionage. Findlater Stewart is charged with collecting relevant material. In what seems to be an overload of committees, therefore, the HDSE and the War Cabinet carry on parallel discussions, with Findlater Stewart a key figure in both assemblies.
The primary outcome of this period is the resistance by the Foreign Office to any sort of ban, or even forced delay, in diplomatic cable traffic, which they believed would have harmful reciprocal consequences abroad, and hinder MI6’s ability to gather intelligence (especially from Sweden). This controversy rattled on for months [see below], with the Cabinet emerging as an ineffective mechanism for resolving the dilemma. Liddell believed that, if the Foreign Office and the Home Office (concerned about invasion of citizens’ rights) had not been so stubborn and prissy about the whole thing, the Security Executive could have resolved the issues quickly.
Thus the impression that Findlater Stewart had to wait for Bevan’s return for seeking guidance before chairing his committee to implement the appropriate security provisions is erroneous. Contrary to what the record indicates, the critical meeting on March 29 was not the first that the HDSE Committee held. Yet, when Bevan did return, he might have been surprised by the lack of progress. He quickly learned, on March 10, that the Cabinet had decided not to withdraw facilities for uncensored communications by diplomats, as it would set an uncomfortable precedent. That was at least a decision – but the wrong one. Bevan had a large amount of work to do shake people up: to make sure that the rules were articulated, that the Americans were in line, and that all agencies and organizations involved understood their roles. “Only under Bevan’s severe and cautious direction could they perform their parts in FORTITUDE with the necessary harmony”, wrote Cave Brown. Bevan clearly put some urgency into the proceedings: the pronouncements of LCS were passed on to Findlater Stewart shortly afterwards.
The history of LCS shows that security precautions were divided into eight categories, of which two, the censorship of civilian and service letters and telegrams, and the ban on privileged diplomatic mail and cipher telegrams, were those that concentrated on possible unauthorised disclosure of secrets by means other than direct personal travel. The historical account by LCS (at CAB 154/101, p 238) explains how the ban on cable traffic was imposed, but says nothing about wireless: “The eighth category, the ban on diplomatic mail and cipher telegrams was an unprecedented and extraordinary measure. As General EISENHOWER says, even the most friendly diplomats might unintentionally disclose vital information which would ultimately come to the ears of the enemy.”
What is significant is that there is no further mention of wireless traffic in the HDSE meetings. Whether this omission was due to sheer oversight, or was simply too awkward a topic to be described openly, or was simply passed on to the War Cabinet meetings, one can only surmise. When the next critical HDSE meeting took place on April 15, headlined as ‘Withdrawal of Diplomatic Privileges’, it echoed the LCS verbiage, but also, incidentally, highlighted the fact that Findlater Stewart saw that the main threat to security came from the embassies and legations of foreign governments, whether allies or not. Well educated by the W Board meeting, he did not envisage any exposure from unknown German agents working clandestinely from British soil.
The Dilemma of Wireless
It is worthwhile stepping back at this juncture to examine the dilemma that the British intelligence authorities faced. Since the primary security concern was that no confidential information about the details of the actual assault, or suggestions that the notional attack was based on the strength and movement of illusionary forces, should be allowed to leave the country, a very tight approach to personnel movement, such as a ban on leave, and on the holidays of foreign diplomats, was required, and easily implemented. Letters and cables had to be very closely censored. But what do to about the use of wireless? Officially, outside military and approved civil use (railway administration, police) the only licit radio transmissions were being made by Allied governments, namely the Americans and the Soviets, and by select governments-in-exile, the French, the Poles and the Czechs (with the latter two having their own sophisticated installations rather than just apparatus within an embassy). It was quite possible that other countries had introduced transmission equipment, although RSS would have denied that its use would have remained undetected.
Certainly all diplomatic transmissions would have been encyphered, but the extent to which the German interception authorities (primarily OKW Chi) would have been able to decrypt such messages was unknown. And, even if the loyalty and judgment of these missions could be relied upon, and the unbreakability of their cyphers trusted, there was no way of guaranteeing that a careless reference would not escape, and that a disloyal employee at the other end of the line might get his or her hands on an indiscreet message. (Eisenhower had to demote and send home one of his officers who spoke carelessly.) Thus total radio silence must have been given at least brief consideration. It was certainly enforced just before D-Day, but that concerned military silence, not a diplomatic shutdown.
Yet the whole FORTITUDE deception plan depended on wireless. The more ambitious aspect focused on the creation of dummy military signals to suggest a vast army (the notional FUSAG) being imported into Britain and moved steadily across the country to assemble in the eastern portion, indicating a northern assault on mainland Europe. Such wireless messages would have appeared as genuine to the Germans – if they had had the resources and skills to intercept and analyse them all. Thus the pretence had to be meticulously maintained right up until D-Day itself. In August 1943, the Inter-Services Security Board (ISSB) had recommended that United Kingdom communications with the outside world should be cut off completely, and Bevan had had to resist such pressure. As Howard points out, most involved in the discussion did not know about the Double-Cross System.
As it turned out, both German aerial reconnaissance and interception of dummy signals were so weak that the Allies relied more and more on the second leg of their wireless strategy – the transmissions of its special agents. Thus it would have been self-defeating for the War Cabinet to prohibit non-military traffic entirely, since the appearance of isolated, illicit signals in the ether, originating from British soil, and remaining undetected and unprosecuted, would have caused the Nazi receivers to smell an enormous rat. (One might add that it strains credibility in any case to think that the Abwehr never stopped to consider how ineffectual Britain’s radio interception service must be, compared with Germany’s own mechanisms, if it failed completely ever to interdict any of its own agents in such a relatively small and densely populated territory. And note Admiral Canaris’s comments above.) Of course, the RSS might have wanted to promote the notion that its interception and location-finding techniques were third-rate, just for that purpose. One might even surmise that Sonia’s transmissions were allowed to continue as a ruse to convince the Germans of the RSS’s frailties, in the belief that they might be picking up her messages as well as those of their own agents, and thus forming useful judgments about the deficiencies of British location-finding.
We should also recall that the adoption of wireless communications by the special agents was pursued much more aggressively by the XX Committee and B1A than it was by the Abwehr, who seemed quite content to have messages concealed in invisible ink on letters spirited out of England by convenient couriers, such as ‘friendly’ BOAC crewmen. Thus TREASURE, GARBO and BRUTUS all had to be found more powerful wireless apparatus, whether mysteriously acquired in London, from American sources, or whether smuggled in from Lisbon. The XX Committee must have anticipated the time when censorship rules would have tightened up on the use of the mails for personal correspondence, even to neutral countries in Europe, and thus make wireless connectivity a necessity.
In conclusion, therefore, no restrictions on diplomatic wireless communication could allow prohibition completely, as that would leave the special agents dangerously exposed. And that policy led to some messy compromises.
Findlater Stewart, the Home Defence Security Executive, and the War Cabinet
Sir Findlater Stewart
It appears that the War Cabinet fairly quickly accepted Findlater Stewart’s assurances about the efficacy of RSS. A minute from February 28 runs: “We have considered the possibility that illicit wireless stations might be worked in this country. The combined evidence of the Radio Security Service secret intelligence sources and the police leads to the firm conclusion that there is no illicit wireless station operating regularly in the British Isles at present. The danger remains that transmitting apparatus may be being held in readiness for the critical period immediately before the date of OVERLORD – or may be brought into the country by enemy agents. We cannot suggest any further measures to reduce this risk and reliance must therefore be placed on the ability of the Radio Security Service to detect the operation of illicit transmitters and of the Security Service to track down agents.” Thus the debate moved on to the control of licit wireless transmissions, where the HDSE and the War Cabinet had to overcome objections from the Foreign Office.
The critical meeting on ‘OVERLORD Security’ – ‘Withdrawal of Diplomatic Privileges’ was held on the morning of April 15, under Findlater Stewart’s chairmanship. This was in fact the continuation of a meeting held on March 29, which had left several items of business unfinished. That meeting, which was also led by Findlater Stewart, and attended by only a small and unauthoritative group (Herbert and Locke from Censorship, Crowe from the Foreign Office, and Liddell, Butler and Young from MI5) had considered diplomatic communications generally, and resolved to request delays in the transmission of diplomatic telegrams. After the Cabinet decision not to interfere with diplomatic cable traffic, Petrie of MI5 had written to Findlater Stewart to suggest that delays be built in to the process. A strangely worded minute (one can hardly call it a ‘resolution’) ran as follows: “THE MEETING . . . invited Mr. Crowe to take up the suggestion that diplomatic telegrams should be so delayed as to allow time for the Government Code and Cypher School to make arrangements with Postal and Telegraph Censorship for particularly dangerous telegrams to be delayed or lost; and to arrange for the Foreign Office, if they agreed, to instruct the School to work out the necessary scheme with Postal and Telegraph Censorship.”
It would be difficult to draft a less gutsy and urgent decision than this. ‘Invited’, ‘suggestion’, ‘to make arrangements’, ‘if they agreed’, ‘to instruct’, and finally, ‘particularly dangerous telegrams’! Would ‘moderately dangerous telegrams’ have been allowed through? And did GC&CS have command of all the cyphers used by foreign diplomacies? Evidently not, as the following discussion shows. It is quite extraordinary that such a wishy-washy decision should have been allowed in the minutes. One can only assume that this was some sort of gesture, and that Findlater Stewart was working behind the scenes. In any case, as the record from the LCS history concerning Eisenhower, which I reproduced above, shows, the cypher problem for cable traffic was resolved.
When the forum regathered on April 15, it contained a much expanded list of attendees. Apart from the familiar group of second-tier delegates from key ministries, with the War Office and the Ministry of Information now complementing Censorship, the Home Office, and the Foreign Office, Vivian represented MI6, while MI5 was honoured with the presence of no less than seven officers, namely Messrs. Butler, Robertson, Sporborg, Robb, Young, Barry – and Anthony Blunt, who no doubt made careful mental notes to pass on to his ideological masters. [According to Guy Liddell, from his ‘Diaries’, Sporborg worked for SOE, not MI5.] But no Petrie, Menzies, Liddell, White, Masterman, or Bevan. And the band of second-tier officers from MI5 sat opposite a group of men from the ministries who knew nothing of Ultra or the Double-Cross System: a very large onus lay on the shoulders of Findlater Stewart.
The meeting had first to debate the recent Cabinet decision to prohibit the receipt of uncensored communications by Diplomatic Missions, while not preventing the arrival of incoming travellers. Thus a quick motion was agreed, over the objections of the Foreign Office, that ‘the free movement of foreign diplomatic representatives to this country was inconsistent with the Cabinet decision to prohibit the receipt of uncensored communications by Foreign Missions in this country’. After a brief discussion on the movement of French and other military personnel, the Committee moved to Item IX on the agenda: ‘Use of Wireless Transmitters by Poles, Czechs and the French,’ the item that LCS had, either cannily or carelessly, omitted from its list.
Sporborg of MI5/SOE stated that, “as regards the Poles and the Czechs, it has been decided after discussion with the Foreign Office –
that for operational reasons the transmitters operated by the Czechs and the Poles could not be closed down:
that shortage of operators with suitable qualifications precluded the operation of those sets by us;
that accordingly the Poles should be pressed to deposit their cyphers with us and to give us copies of plain language texts of all messages before transmission. The Czechs had already given us their cyphers, and like the Poles would be asked to provide plain language copies of their messages.”
Sporborg also noted that both forces would be asked not to use their transmitters for diplomatic business. Colonel Vivian added that “apart from the French Deuxième Bureau traffic which was sent by M.I.6, all French diplomatic and other civil communications were transmitted by cable. There were left only the French Service transmitters and in discussion it was suggested that the I.S.S.B. might be asked to investigate the question of controlling these.”
Again, it is difficult to make sense of this exchange. What ‘operational reasons’ (as opposed to political ones) could preclude the closing down of Czech and Polish circuits? It would surely just entail an announcement to targeted receivers, and then turning the apparatus off. And, since the alternative appeared to be having the transmitters operated by the British – entrusted with knowledge of cypher techniques, presumably – a distinct possibility of ‘closing down’ the sets must have been considered. As for Vivian’s opaque statement, the Deuxième Bureau was officially dissolved in 1940. (Yet it appears in many documents, such as Liddell’s Diaries, after that time.) It is not clear what he meant by ‘French Service transmitters’. If these were owned by the RF Section of SOE, there must surely have been an exposure, and another wishy-washy suggestion was allowed to supply the official record.
The historical account by LCS says nothing about wireless. And the authorized history does not perform justice to the serious implications of these meetings. All that Michael Howard writes about this event (while providing a very stirring account of the deception campaign itself) is the following: “ . . . and the following month not only was all travel to and from the United Kingdom banned, but the mail of all diplomatic missions was declared subject to censorship and the use of cyphers forbidden”, (p 124, using the CAB 154/101 source given above); and “All [the imaginary double agents] notionally conveyed their information to GARBO in invisible ink, to be transmitted direct to the Abwehr over his clandestine radio – the only channel open after security restrictions on outgoing mail had been imposed.” (p 121) The irony is that Howard draws attention to the inconvenience that the withdrawal of mail privileges caused LCS and B1A, but does not inspect the implications of trying to suppress potentially dangerous wireless traffic, and how they might have affected the deception project’s success.
Problems with the Poles
The Polish Government-in-Exile
Immediately after the critical April 15 meeting, the War Office began to toughen up, as the file KV 4/74 shows. The policy matter of the curtailment of diplomatic privileges was at last resolved. Findlater Stewart gave a deadline to the Cabinet on April 16, and it resolved to stop all diplomatic cables, couriers and bags, for all foreign governments except the Americans and the Russians. The ban started almost immediately, and was extended until June 20, even though the Foreign Office continued to fight it. Yet it required some delicate explaining to the second-tier allies. Moreover, the Foreign Office continued to resist it, or at least, abbreviate it. They even wanted to restore privileges on D-Day itself: as Liddell pointed out, that would have been stupid, as it would immediately have informed the enemy that the Normandy assault was the sole one, and not a feint before a more northerly attack at the Pas de Calais.
Brigadier Allen, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, who had been charged with following up with the ISSB on whether the British were controlling French service traffic to North Africa, drew the attention of the ISSB’s secretary to the importance of the proposed ban. The record is sketchy, but it appears the Chiefs of Staff met on April 19, at which a realisation that control over all diplomatic and military channels needed to be intensified. The Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee was instructed to ensure that this happened, and a meeting was quickly arranged between representatives of the ISSB, MI6, SOE, the Cypher Policy Board and the Inter-Service W/T Security Committee, a much more expert and muscular group than had attended Findlater Stewart’s conference.
While the exposure by French traffic was quickly dismissed, Sir Charles Portal and Sir Andrew Cunningham, the RAF and Royal Navy chiefs, urged central control by the Service Departments rather than having it divided between SHAEF and Allied Forces Headquarters, and invited the JISC committee “to frame regulations designed to prevent Allied Governments evading the restrictions imposed by the War Cabinet on diplomatic communications, by the use of service or S.O.E. ‘underground’ W/T channels for the passage of uncensored diplomatic or service messages.” This was significant for several reasons: it recognized that foreign governments might attempt to evade the restrictions, probably by trying to use service signals for diplomatic traffic; it recommended new legislation to give the prohibitions greater force; and it brought into the picture the notion of various ‘underground’ (not perhaps the best metaphor for wireless traffic), and thus semi-clandestine communications, the essence of which was barely known. This minute appeared also to reflect the input of Sir Alan Brooke, the Army Chief, but his name does not appear on the document – probably because the record shows that he was advocating for the shared SHAEF/AFHQ responsibility, and thus disagreed with his peers.
The outcome was that a letter had to be drafted for the Czechoslovak, Norwegian and Polish Commanders-in-Chief, the Belgian and Netherlands Ministers of Defence, and General Koenig, the Commander of the French Forces in the United Kingdom, outlining the new restrictions on ‘communications by diplomatic bag and cipher telegrams’ (implicitly cable and wireless). It declared that ‘you will issue instructions that no communication by wireless is to be carried out with wireless stations overseas except under the following conditions’, going on to list that cyphers would have to be deposited with the War Office, plain language copies of all telegrams to be submitted for approval first, with the possibility that some messages would be encyphered and transmitted through British signal channels. A further amendment included a ban on incoming messages, as well.
Were these ‘regulations’, or simply earnest requests? The constitutional issue was not clear, but the fact that the restrictions would be of short duration probably pushed them into the latter category. In any case, as a memorandum of April 28 makes clear, Findlater Stewart formally handed over responsibility for the control of wireless communications to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), reserving for himself the handling of ‘mail and telegrams’ (he meant ‘mail and cables’, of course). By then, the letter had been distributed, on April 19, with some special annexes for the different audiences, but the main text was essentially as the draft had been originally worded.
The Poles were the quickest to grumble, and Stanisław Mikołajczyc, the Prime Minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile, wrote a long response on April 23, describing the decision as ‘a dangerous legal and political precedent’, making a special case out of Poland’s predicament, and its underground fight against the Germans. He promised to obey the rules over all, but pleaded that the Poles be allowed to maintain the secrecy of their cyphers in order to preserve the safety and security of Polish soldiers and civilians on Polish soil fighting the German. “The fact that Polish-Soviet relations remain for the time being unsatisfactory still further complicates the situation,” he added.
It is easy to have an enormous amount of sympathy for the Poles, but at the same time point out that their aspirations at this time for taking their country back were very unrealistic. After all, Great Britain had declared war on Germany because of the invasion of Poland, and the Poles had contributed significantly in the Battle of Britain and the Italian campaign, especially. The discovery by the Germans, in April 1943, of the graves of victims of the Katyn massacre had constituted a ghastly indication that the Soviets had been responsible. Yet Stalin denied responsibility, and broke off relations with the London Poles when they persisted in calling for an independent Red Cross examination. Moreover, Churchill had ignored the facts, and weaselly tried to placate both Stalin and the Poles by asking Mikołajczyc to hold his tongue. In late January, Churchill had chidden the Poles for being ‘foolish’ in magnifying the importance of the crime when the British needed Stalin’s complete cooperation to conclude the war successfully.
Yet the Poles still harboured dreams that they would be able to take back their country before the Russians got there – or even regain it with the support of the Russians, aspirations that were in April 1944 utterly unrealistic. The file at HW 34/8 contains a long series of 1942-1943 exchanges between Colonel Cepa, the Chief Signals Officer of the Polish General Staff, and RSS officers, such as Maltby and Till, over unrealistic and unauthorized demands for equipment and frequencies so that the Polish government might communicate with all its clandestine stations in Poland, and its multiple (and questionable) contacts around the world. Their tentacles spread widely, as if they were an established government: on December 9, 1943, Joe Robertson told Guy Liddell that ‘Polish W/T transmitters are as plentiful as tabby cats in the Middle East and are causing great anxiety’. They maintained underground forces in France, which required wireless contact: this was an item of great concern to Liddell. Thus the Poles ended up largely trying to bypass RSS and working behind the scenes with SOE to help attain their goals. The two groups clearly irritated each other severely: the Poles thinking RSS too protocol-oriented and unresponsive to their needs, RSS considering the Poles selfish and too ambitious, with no respect for the correct procedures in a time of many competing demands.
The outcome was that Churchill had a meeting with Mikołajczyc on April 23, and tried to heal some wounds. The memorandum of the meeting was initialled by Churchill himself, and the critical passage runs as follows: “Mr. Churchill told Mr. Mikołajczyc that he was ready to waive the demand that the Polish ciphers used for communication with the Underground Movement should be deposited with us on condition first, that the number of messages sent in these ciphers was kept down to an absolute minimum; secondly, that the en clair text of each message sent in these ciphers should be communicated to us; thirdly, that Mr. Mikołajczyc gave Mr. Churchill his personal word of honour that no messages were sent in the secret ciphers except those of which the actual text had been deposited with us, and fourthly, that the existence of this understanding between Mr. Mikołajczyc and Mr. Churchill should be kept absolutely confidential; otherwise H.M.G would be exposed to representations and reproaches from other foreign Governments in a less favourable position.”
Thus it would appear that the other governments acceded, that the Poles won an important concession, but that the British were able to censor the texts of all transmissions that emanated from British soil during the D-Day campaign. And Churchill was very concerned about the news of the Poles’ preferential treatment getting out. Yet the JIC (under its very astute Chairman, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck) thought otherwise – that the news was bound to leak out, and, citing the support of Liddell, Menzies, Cadogan at the Foreign Office and Newsam at the Home Office, it requested, on May 1, that the Prime Minister ‘should consider the withdrawal’ of his concession, and that, if impracticable, he should at least clarify to Mikołajczyc that it ‘related to messages sent to the underground movement in Poland and not to communications with other occupied or neutral countries’.
Moreover, problems were in fact nor restricted to the Poles. De Gaulle, quite predictably, made a fuss, and ‘threatened’ as late as May 29 not to leave Algiers to return to the UK unless he was allowed to use his own cyphers. The Chiefs of Staff were left to handle this possible non-problem. Churchill, equally predictably, interfered unnecessarily, and even promised both Roosevelt and de Gaulle (as Liddell recorded on May 24) that communications would open up immediately after D-Day. Churchill had already, very naively, agreed to Eisenhower’s desire to disclose the target and date of NEPTUNE to France’s General Koenig. The Prime Minister could be very inspiring and insightful, but also very infuriating, as people like Attlee and Brooke observed.
And there it stood. Britain controlled the process of wireless communication (apart from the Soviet and US Embassies) entirely during the course of the D-Day landings, with a minor exposure in Polish messages to its colleagues in Poland. The restrictions were lifted on June 20. And B1A’s special agents continued to chatter throughout this period.
Guy Liddell and the RSS
Guy Liddell
Guy Liddell, deputy director-general of MI5, had been energized by his relationship with Sclater of the RSS, and, with Malcolm Frost’s departure from MI5 in December 1943, he looked forward to an easier path in helping to clean up Barnet, the headquarters of the Radio Security Service. In the months before D-Day, Liddell was focused on two major issues concerning RSS: 1) The effectiveness of the unit’s support for MI5’s project to extend the Double-Cross System to include ‘stay-behind’ agents in France after the Normandy landings succeeded; and 2) his confidence in the ability of RSS to locate any German spies with transmitters who might have pervaded the systems designed to intercept them at the nation’s borders, and who would thus be working outside the XX System.
Overall, the first matter does not concern me here, although part of Liddell’s mission, working alongside ‘Tar’ Robertson, was to discover how RSS control of equipment, and its primary allegiance to MI6, might interfere with MI5’s management of the XX program overseas. Liddell had to deal with Richard Gambier-Parry’s technical ignorance and general disdain for MI5, on the one hand, and Felix Cowgill’s territoriality on the other (since a Double-Cross system on foreign soil would technically have fallen under MI6), but the challenges would have to have been faced after D-Day, and are thus beyond my scope of reference. In any case, the concern turned out to be a non-problem. The second matter, however, was very serious, and Liddell’s Diaries from early 1944 are bestrewn with alarming anecdotes about the frailties of RSS’s detection systems. The problems ranged from the ineffectiveness of Elms’s mobile units to the accuracy of RSS’s broader location-finding techniques.
I shall illustrate Liddell’s findings by a generous sample of extracts from his Diaries, as I do not believe they have appeared in print before. Thus, from January 26:
Sclater gave an account of the work by the vans on an American station which had been d.f.d by R.S.S. The station was at first thought to be a British military or Air Force one as it was apparently using their procedure. The vans went out to the Horsham area where they got a very strong signal which did not operate the needle. Another bearing caused them to put the Bristol van out, which luckily found its target pretty quickly. The point of this story is that it is almost impossible to say more than that a wireless transmitter is in the north or south of England. Unless you can get into the ground-wave your vans don’t operate. To get into the ground-wave you may need to be very close to their target. There is still no inter-com between the vans and they cannot operate for more than 8 hours without having to drive several hundred miles in order to recharge their batteries. Not a very good show. Sclater is going to find out who is responsible for American Army signal security.
While this may not have been a perennial problem for units that were repeatedly broadcasting from one place, it clearly would have posed a serious exposure with a highly mobile transmitting agent. Moreover, at a meeting on February 17, MI6/SIS (in the person of Valentine Vivian, it appears) had, according to Liddell, admitted some of its deficiencies, stating, in a response to a question as to how its General Search capability worked: “S.I.S. did not think that an illicit station was operating in this country but it was pointed out that their observation was subject to certain restrictions. They were looking for Abwehr procedure, whereas an agent might use British official procedure, which would be a matter for detection by Army Signals, who were ill-equipped to meet the task.” Did Vivian not know what he was talking about, or was this true? Could an agent using ‘British official procedure’ truly evade the RSS detectors, while the Army would not bother to investigate? I recall that Sonia herself was instructed to use such techniques, and such a disclosure has alarming implications.
The minutes of the War Cabinet Sub-committee on February 17 confirm, however, that what Vivian reported was accepted, as an accompanying report by Findlater Stewart displays how the vision for wireless interception embraced by Colonel Simpson in 1939 had been allowed to dissolve. (In fact, as Liddell’s Diaries show, a small working-party had met on the morning of the inaugural meeting to prepare for the discussion.) In a report attached to the minutes, Stewart wrote the following (which I believe is worth citing in full):
“As a result of their experience extending over some four years the Radio Security Service are of opinion there is no illicit wireless station being worked in this country at present. Nevertheless it must be borne in mind that by itself the watch kept by the Radio Security Service is subject to some limitations. For example, the general search is mainly directed to German Secret Service communications and if an agent were to use official British signal procedures (there has already been some attempt at this), it is not likely to be picked up by the Service, and no guarantee that such stations would be detected should be given unless the whole volume of British wireless traffic, including the immense amount of service signal traffic, were monitored. This ‘general search’, however, is not the only safeguard. The danger to security arises from the newly arrived German Agent (on the assumption that there are no free agents at present operating here), but the art of tracking aircraft has been brought to such a point that the Security Service feel that in conjunction with the watch kept by the Radio Security Service even a determined effort by the enemy to introduce agents could not succeed for more than a few days. Admittedly if the agent were lucky enough to be dropped in the right area and obtain his information almost at once serious leakage could occur. But there is no remedy for this.”
I find this very shocking. While the RSS was justifiably confident that no unidentified spies were operating as its interceptors were monitoring Abwehr communications closely, it had abandoned the mission of populating the homeland with enough detective personnel to cover all possible groundwaves. Apparently, the sense of helplessness expressed in Stewart’s final sentence triggered no dismay from those who read it, but I believe this negligence heralded the start of an alarming trend. And the substance of the message must have confirmed Liddell’s worst fears.
Liddell and Sclater intensified their attention to RSS’s activities. Sclater also referred, later in February, to the fact that RSS had picked up Polish military signals in Scotland, but the Poles had not been very helpful, the signals were very corrupt, as picked up, and it was not even certain ‘that the messages were being sent from Gt. Britain’. Liddell also discovered that RSS had been picking up messages relating to Soviet espionage in Sweden, and blew a fuse over the fact that the facts about the whole exercise had been withheld from MI5 and the Radio Security Intelligence Committee, which Dick White of MI5 chaired. Thus, when he returned from two weeks’ leave at the end of March, his chagrin was fortunately abated slightly, as the entry for April 16 records:
During my absence there have been various wireless tests. GARBO, on instructions from the Germans, has been communicating in British Army procedure. He was picked up after a certain time and after a hint had been given to Radio Security Service. He was, however, also picked up in Gibraltar, who notified the RSS about certain peculiarities in the signals. This is on the whole fairly satisfactory. TREASURE is going to start communicating blind and we shall see whether they are equally successful in her case. Tests have also been taking place to see whether spies can move freely within the fifteen-mile belt. One has been caught, but another, whose documents were by no means good, has succeeded in getting through seven or eight controls and has so far not been spotted.
This was not super-efficient, however: ‘hints’, and ‘after a certain time’. At least the British Army procedure was recognised by the RSS. (Herbert Hart later told Liddell that ‘notional’ spies dressed in American military uniforms were the only ones not to get caught.) But the feeling of calm did not last long. Two weeks later, on April 29, Liddell recorded:
The Radio Security Service has carried out an extensive test to discover the GARBO transmitter. The report on this exercise is very distressing. The GARBO camouflage plan commenced on 13 March but the Mobile Units were not told to commence their investigations till 14 April. From 13 March to 14 April GARBO’s transmitter was on the air (and the operator was listening) for a total of twenty-nine hours, and average of one hour a day. On 14 April the Mobile Units were brought into action and they reported that the GARBO transmitter operated for four hours between 14 and 19 April inclusive. In fact, it operated for over six and a half hours, and it would seem that the second frequency of the transmitter was not recorded at all. On 15 April, GARBO transmitted for two whole hours. This incident shakes my confidence completely in the power of RSS of detecting illicit wireless either in this country or anywhere else. It is disturbing since the impression was given to Findlater Stewart’s Committee and subsequently to the Cabinet that no illicit transmissions were likely to be undetected for long. Clearly, this is not the case.
The irony is, of course, that, if the Abwehr had learned about RSS’s woes, they might have understood how their agents were able to transmit undetected. Yet this was a problem MI5 had to fix, and the reputation of the XX System, and of the claim that MI5 had complete control of all possible German agents in the country, was at stake. Liddell followed up with another entry, on May 6:
I had a long talk with Sclater about the RSS exercise. Apparently the first report of Garbo’s transmitter came from Gib. This was subsequently integrated with a V.I. report. The R.S.S. fixed stations in N. Ireland and the north of Scotland took a bearing which was well wide of the mark, and although the original report came in on March 13th it was not until April 14th that sufficiently accurate bearings were obtained to warrant putting into action of the M.U.s. They were started off on an entirely inaccurate location of the target somewhere in the Guildford area. Other bearings led to greater confusion. Had it not been for the fact that the groundwave of the transmitter was then ranged with the Barnet station it is doubtful whether the transmitter would ever have been located. The final round-up was not done according to the book, i.e. by the 3 M.U.s taking bearings and gradually closing in. One M.U. got a particularly strong signal and followed it home.
By now, however, Liddell probably felt a little more confident that homeland security was tight enough. No problematic messages had been picked up by interception, and thus there were probably no clandestine agents at large, a conclusion that was reinforced by the fact that the ULTRA sources (i.e. picking up Abwehr communications about agents in the United Kingdom) still betrayed no unknown operators. Nevertheless, Liddell still harboured, as late as May 12, strong reservations about the efficacy of RSS’s operations overseas, which he shared with the philosopher Gilbert Ryle at his club. At this time, MI5 was concerned about a source named JOSEFINE, sending messages that reached the Abwehr via Stockholm. (JOSEFINE turned out to be the Swedish naval attaché in London, and his associates or successors.) But then, Liddell expressed further deep concerns, on May 27, i.e. a mere ten days before D-Day:
I had a long discussion with TAR and Victor [Rothschild] about RSS. It seemed to me that the position was eminently unsatisfactory. I could see that the picking up of an agent here was a difficult matter. If he were transmitting on ordinary H.F. at fairly frequent intervals to a fixed station on the continent in Abwehr procedure we should probably get his signals. If he were transmitting in our military procedure it was problematic whether we should get his signals. If he were transmitting in VHF it was almost certain that we should not get him. I entirely accept this as being the position but my complaint is that the problem of detecting illicit wireless from this country has never been submitted to a real body of experts, and that possibly had it been given careful study by such a body at least the present dangers might have been to some extent mitigated. Victor agreed that it might be possible to work on some automatic ether scanner which would increase the chances of picking up an agent. There might also be other possibilities, if the ground were thoroughly explored. So much for picking up the call. The next stage is to D.F. the position of the illicit transmitter. Recent experiments had shown both in the case of GARBO and in the case of an imaginery [sic] agent who was located at Whaddon, that the bearings from the fixed stations were 50-60 miles out. This being so, the margin for error on the continent would be considerably increased. We have always been given to understand that fixed stations could give a fairly accurate bearing. The effect is that unless your vans get into the ground-wave they stand very little chance of picking up the agent. The D.G. is rather anxious to take this matter up; both TAR and I are opposed to any such course. I pointed out to the D.G. that the Radio Security Committee consisted of a Chairman who knew nothing about wireless, and that he and I had no knowledge of the subject, and therefore we would all be at the mercy of Gambier-Parry who could cover us all with megacycles. The discussion would get us no where and only create bad blood. He seemed to think however that we ought to get some statement of the position particularly since I pointed out to him that if an agent were dropped we should probably pick him up in a reasonable time. The fact is that unless the aircraft tracks pin-pointed him and the police and the Home Guard did their job, we should be extremely unlikely to get our man. Technical means would give us little if any assistance. By the time a man had been located the harm would have been done.”
Some of this plaint was misguided (VHF would not have been an effective communication wavelength for a remote spy), but it shows that, despite all the self-satisfied histories that were written afterwards, RSS was in something of a shambles. Fortunately there were no ‘men’ to be got: the Abwehr had been incorporated into the SS in the spring of 1944. Canaris was dismissed, and no further wireless agents were infiltrated on to the British mainland. Liddell was probably confident, despite RSS’s complacent approach, that no unknown wireless agents were at large because intercepted ISOS messages gave no indication of such. He made one more relevant entry before D-Day, on June 3:
TAR tells me that since 12 May RSS have been picking up the signals of an agent communicating in Group 2 cypher. They have at last succeeded in getting a bearing which places the agents somewhere in Ayrshire. The vans are moving up to the Newcastle area. Two hours later, TAR told me that further bearing indicated that the agent was in Austria. So much for RSS’s powers of D.F.ing. My mind goes back to a meeting held 18 months ago when G.P. [Gambier-Parry] had the effrontery that he could D.F. a set in France down to an area of 5 sq. miles.
Did someone mishear a Scottish voice saying ‘Ayrshire’, interpreting it as ‘Austria’? We shall never know. In any case, if Liddell ever stopped to think “If we go to the utmost to ensure there are no clandestine agents reporting on the real state of things here, wouldn’t German Intelligence imagine we were doing just that?”, he never recorded such a gut-wrenching question in his Diaries.
‘Double’ or ‘Special’ Agents?
Before Bevan left London for Moscow, he attended – alongside Findlater Stewart – that last meeting of the W Board before D-Day. They heard a presentation by ‘Tar’ Robertson, who described the status of all the double agents, confirmed that he was confident that ‘the Germans believed in TRICYCE and GARBO, especially, and probably in the others’. Robertson added that ‘the agents were ready to take their part in OVERLORD’, and offered a confidence factor of 98% that the Germans trusted the majority of agents. The concluding minute of the meeting was a recommendation by Bevan that the term ‘double agents’ be avoided in any documentation, and that they be referred to as ‘special agents’, the term that appears in the title of the KV 4/70 file. A week later, Bevan was on his way to Moscow.
The reason that Bevan wanted them described as ‘special agents’ was presumably the fact that, if the term ‘double agent’ ever escaped, the nature of the double-cross deception would be immediately obvious. Yet ‘special agents’ was not going to become a durable term: all agents are special in some way, and the phrase did not accurately describe how they differed. Liddell continued to refer to ‘DAs’ in his Diaries, John Masterman promulgated the term ‘double agents’ in his influential Double Cross System (1972), and Michael Howard entrenched it in his authorised history of British Intelligence in the Second World War – Volume 5 (1990).
Shortly after Masterman’s book came out, Miles Copland, an ex-CIA officer, wrote The Real Spy World, a pragmatic guide to the world of espionage and counter-espionage. He debunked the notion of ‘double agents’, stating: “But even before the end of World War II the term ‘double agent’ was discontinued in favor of ‘controlled enemy agent’ in speaking of an agent who was entirely under our own control, capable of reporting to his original masters only as we allowed, so that he was entirely ‘single’ in his performance, and by no means ‘double’.” The point is a valid one: if an agent is described as a ‘double’, he or she could presumably be trying to work for both sides at once, even perhaps evolving into the status of a ‘triple agent’ (like ZIGZAG), which applies enormous psychological pressure on the subject, who will certainly lose any affiliation to either party, and end up simply trying to survive.
Yet ‘controlled enemy agent’ is, to me, also unsatisfactory. It implies that the agent’s primary allegiance is to the enemy, but that he or she has been ‘turned’ in some way. That might be descriptive of some SOE agents, who were captured, and tortured into handing over their cyphers and maybe forced to transmit under the surveillance of the Gestapo, but who never lost their commitment to the Allied cause (and may have eventually been shot, anyway). Nearly all the agents used in the Double Cross System had applied to the Abwehr under false pretences. They (e.g. BRUTUS, TREASURE, GARBO, TRICYCLE) intended to betray the Germans, and work for the Allied cause immediately they were installed. Of those who survived as recruits of B1A, only TATE had arrived as a dedicated Nazi. He was threatened (but not tortured) into coming to the conclusion that his survival relied on his operating under British control, and he soon, after living in the UK for a while, understood that the democratic cause was superior to the Nazi creed. SUMMER, on the other hand, to whom the same techniques were applied, refused to co-operate, and had to be incarcerated for the duration of the war.
Thus the closest analogy to the strategy of the special agents is what Kim Philby set out to do: infiltrate an ideological foe under subterfuge. But the analogy must not be pushed too far. Philby volunteered to work for an intelligence service of his democratic native country, with the goal of facilitating the attempts of a hostile, totalitarian system to overthrow the whole structure. The special agents were trying to subvert a different totalitarian organisation that had invaded their country (or constituted a threat, in the case of GARBO) in order that liberal democracy should prevail. There is a functional equivalence, but not a moral one, between the two examples. Philby was a spy and a traitor: he was definitely not a ‘double agent’, even though he has frequently been called that.
I leave the definitional matter unresolved for now. It will take a more authoritative writer to tidy up the debate. I note that the highly regarded Thaddeus Holt considers the debate ‘pedantic’, and he decided to fall back upon ‘double agent’ in his book, despite its misleading connotations.
Special Agents at Work
The events that led up to the controversial two-hour message transmitted by GARBO on June 9, highlighted in the several quotations that I presented at the beginning of this script, have been well described in several books, so I simply summarise here the aspects concerning wireless usage. For those readers who want to learn the details, Appendix XIII of Roger Hesketh’s Fortitude lists most of the contributions of British ‘controlled agents’ on the Fortitude South Order of Battle, and how they were reflected in German Intelligence Reports. Ben Macintyre’s Double Cross gives a lively account of the activities of the agents who communicated via wireless – via their B1A operators, in the main.
TATE (Wulf Schmidt) was the longest-serving of the special agents, but the requirement to develop a convincing ‘legend’ about him, in order to explain to the Abwehr how he had managed to survive for so long on alien territory, took him out of the mainstream. In October 1943, Robertson had expressed doubts as to how seriously the Germans were taking TATE, as they had sent him only fourteen messages over the past six months, and in December, the XX Committee even considered the possibility that he had been blown. Their ability to verify how TATE’s reports were being handled arose mainly because communications were passed to Berlin from Hamburg by a secure land-line, not by wireless (and thus not subject to RSS/GC&CS interception.) Indeed, Berlin believed that the whole ‘Lena Six’ (from the 1940-41 parachutist project, and whose activity as spies was planned to last only a few weeks before the impending German invasion!) were under control of the British, but the Abwehr, in a continuing pattern, were reluctant to give up on one of their own. The post-war interrogation of Major Boeckel, who trained the LENA agents in Hamburg, available at KV 2/1333, indicates that Berlin had doubts about TATE’s reliability, but that Boeckel ‘maintained contact despite warnings’. TATE provided one or two vital tidbits (such as Eisenhower’s arrival in January 1944), and by April, the XX Committee judged him safe again. In May, he was nominally ‘moved’ to Kent, ostensibly to help his employer’s farming friend, and messages were directed there from London, in case of precise location-finding. But TATE’s information about FUSAG ‘operations’ did not appear to have received much attention: TATE’s contribution would pick up again after D-Day.
The career of TREASURE (Lily Sergeyev, or Sergueiev) was more problematical. In September 1943 she had had to remind her handler, Kliemann, that she was trained in radio operation, and that she needed to advance from writing letters in secret ink. Kliemann then improbably ordered her to acquire an American-made Halicrafter apparatus in London, and then promised to supply her one passed to her. He let her down when she visited Madrid in November, so the XX Committee had to start applying pressure. They engineered a March 1944 visit by TREASURE to Lisbon, where she was provided with a wireless apparatus, and instructed on when and how to transmit, with an emphasis that the messages should be as short as possible. She returned to the UK; her transmitter was set up in Hampstead, and her first message sent on April 13. There was a burst of useful, activity for about a month or so, but, by May 17, a decision was made that TREASURE had to be dropped. She confessed to concealing from her B1A controllers the security check in her transmissions that she could have used to alert the Germans to the fact that she was operating under control: she was in a fit of pique over the death of her dog. Robertson fired her just after D-Day.
TRICYCLE (Dusko Popov) had formulated a role that allowed him to travel easily to Lisbon, but the Committee concluded that he need to communicate by wireless as well. Popov had engineered the escape to London of a fellow Yugoslav, the Marquis de Bona, in December 1943, who would become his authorized wireless operator, and Popov himself brought back to the UK the apparatus that de Bona (given the cryptonym FREAK) started using successfully in February. Useful information on dummy FUSAG movements was passed on for a while, but a cloud hung over the whole operation, as the XX Committee feared, quite justifiably, that TRICYCLE might have been blown because Popov’s contact within the Abwehr, Johnny Jebsen (ARTIST) knew enough about the project to betray the whole deception game. When Jebsen was arrested at the end of April, TRICYCLE and his network were closed down, with FREAK’s last transmission going out on May 16. TRICYCLE explained the termination in a letter written in secret ink on May 20, ascribing it to suspicions that had arisen over FREAK’s loyalties. Astonishingly, FREAK sent a final message by wireless on June 30, and the Germans’ petulant response indicated that they still trusted TRICYCLE. After the war, MI5 learned that Jebsen had been drugged and transported to Berlin, tortured and then killed, but said nothing.
The career of BRUTUS (Roman Czerniawski) was also dogged by controversy, as he had brought trouble on himself with the Polish government-in-exile, and the Poles had access to his cyphers. Again, fevered debate over his trustworthiness, and deliberation over what the Germans (and Russians) knew about him continued throughout 1943. His wireless traffic (which had been interrupted) restarted on August 25, but his handler in Paris, Colonel Reile, suspected that he might have been ‘turned’. Indeed, his transmitter was operated by a notional friend called CHOPIN, working from Richmond. By December 1943, confidence in the security of BRUTUS, and his acceptance by the Abwehr, had been restored: the Germans even succeeded in delivering him a new wireless set. Thereafter, BRUTUS grew to become the second most valuable member of the team of special agents. A regular stream of messages was sent, beginning in from February 1, culminating in an intense flow between June 5 and June 7, providing (primarily) important disinformation about troop movements in East Anglia.
Lastly, the performance of GARBO was the most significant – and the most controversial. According to Guy Liddell, GARBO had made his first contact with the Abwehr in Madrid in March 1943. GARBO had also claimed to have found a ‘friend’ who would operate the wireless for him. The Abwehr was so pleased that it immediately sent him new cyphers (invaluable to GC&CS), and, a month later, advised him how to simulate British Army callsigns, so as to avoid detection. A domestic crisis then occurred, which caused Harmer in MI5 to recommend BRUTUS as a more reliable vehicle than GARBO, but it passed, and, by the beginning of 1944 GARBO was using his transmitter to send more urgent – as well as more copious – messages. GARBO benefitted from a large network of fictional agents who supplied him with news from around the country, and his role in FORTITUDE culminated in the epic message of June 9 with which I introduced this piece.
The Aftermath
BODYGUARD was successful. The German High Command viewed the Normandy landings as a feint to distract attention from the major assault they saw coming in the Pas de Calais. They relied almost exclusively on the reports coming in from the special agents. They did not have the infrastructure, the attention span, or the expertise to interpret the deluge of phony signals that were generated as part of FORTITUDE NORTH, and they could not undertake proper reconnaissance flights across the English Channel to inspect any preparations for the assault that they knew was coming. Interrogations of German officers after the war confirmed that the ‘intelligence’ transmitted by the five agents listed above was passed on and accepted at the very highest levels. This phenomenon has to be analysed in two dimensions: the political and the technical.
The fact that the Abwehr (and its successor, the SS) were hoodwinked so easily by the substance of the messages was not perhaps surprising. To begin with, the Abwehr was a notoriously anti-Nazi organisation, and the role of its leader, Admiral Canaris, was highly ambiguous in his encouraging doubts about the loyalty of his agents to be squashed. He told his officer Jebsen (ARTIST) that ‘he didn’t care if every German agent in Britain was under control, so long as he could tell German High Command that he had agents in Britain reporting regularly.’ Every intelligence officer has an inclination to trust his recruits: if he tells his superiors that they are unreliable, he is effectively casting maledictions on his own abilities. Those who spoke up about their doubts, and pursued them, were moved out to the Russian front. The Double Cross System was addressing a serious need.
When the ineffectiveness and unreliability of the Abwehr itself was called into question, and the organisation was subsumed into the SS, the special agents came under the control of disciplinarians and military officers who did not really understand intelligence, were under enormous pressures, and thus had neither the time nor the expertise to attempt to assess properly the information that was being passed to them. They had experienced no personal involvement with the agents supposedly infiltrated into Britain. What intelligence they received sounded plausible, and appeared to form a pattern, so it was accepted and passed on.
Yet the technical aspects are more problematic. Given what the German agencies (the Sipo, Gestapo, and Abwehr) had invested in static and mobile radio-detection and location finding techniques (even though they overstated their capabilities), they should surely have asked themselves whether Great Britain would not have explored and refined similar technology. And they should have asked themselves why the British would not have exercised such capabilities to the utmost in order to conceal the order of battle, and assault plans, for the inevitable ‘invasion’ of continental Europe. Moreover, Britain was a densely populated island, homogeneous and certainly almost completely opposed to the Nazi regime, and infiltrated foreign agents must have had to experience a far more hostile and obstructive environment than, say, SOE agents of French nationality who were parachuted into a homeland that contained a large infrastructure of Allied sympathisers. Traces of such a debate in German intelligence are difficult to find. Canaris defended his network of Vertrauensmänner, and referred to ‘most intricate and elaborate electronic countermeasures’ in February 1944, but his motivations were suspect, and he was ousted immediately afterwards. Why was GARBO (especially) not picked up? How indeed could anyone transmit for so long, when such practices went against all good policies of clandestine wireless usage?
Even more astonishing is the apparent lack of recognition of the problem from the voluminous British archives. Admittedly, the challenge may have been of such magnitude that it was never actually mentioned, but one might expect at some stage the question to be raised: “How can we optimise wireless transmission practices so that it would be reasonable to assume that RSS would not be able to pick them up?” That would normally require making the messages as brief as possible, switching wavelengths, and changing locations – all in order to elude the resolute mobile location-finding units. That was clearly a concern in the early days of the war, with agent SNOW, when B1A even asked SNOW to inquire of his handler, Dr. Rantzau (Ritter) whether it was safe for SNOW always to transmit from the same place. Rantzau replied in the affirmative, reflecting the state-of-the-art in 1940. But progress had been made by the Germans, especially in light of the arrival of SOE wireless agents, and the XX Committee must have known this.
Yet, four years later, all that the XX Committee and B1a appeared to do was allow GARBO to emulate British military traffic. And they showed a completely cavalier attitude to the problem of time on the air by allowing GARBO to compose his ridiculously windy messages. After all, if they were sharp enough to ensure that signals emanated from a location roughly where the agent was supposed to be, in case German direction-finders were on the prowl, why would they not imagine that the Germans were contemplating the reciprocal function of RSS? It was even more comprehensively dumb than the Abwehr’s credulous distancing from the problem.
Did MI5 try to communicate to the Abwehr the notion that RSS was useless? Guy Liddell confided his doubts about the apparently feeble tracking of GARBO only to his diary, so, unless the Abwehr had a spy in the bowels of RSS, and a method of getting information back to Germany, that would have been an impossible task. Perhaps some messages from the special agents indicating that they were close to being hunted down, but always managed to escape, would have given a measure of verisimilitude, indicating the existence of a force, but a very ineffective one. The behaviour of B1A, however, in reusing transmission sites, while paying lip-service to the location-finding capabilities of the foe, but allowing absurdly long transmissions to take place, simply denies belief. The utterly unnecessary but studied non-observance of basic protocols was highly unprofessional, and should have caused the whole scaffolding of deceit to collapse. It is extraordinary that so many historians and analysts have hinted at this debacle, but never analyzed it in detail.
In conclusion, the mystery of the Undetected Radios was not a puzzle of how they remained undetected, but of why both the Abwehr and MI5 both considered it reasonable that they could flourish unnoticed for so long, and behave so irresponsibly. Findlater Stewart’s 1946 history of RSS – which helped set the agenda for the unit during the Cold War – proves that he did not really understand the technology or the issues. What all this implies for the Communist agent Sonia’s transmissions (around which this whole investigation started) will be addressed in a final report that will constitute the concluding chapter of Sonia’s Radio and The Mystery of the Undetected Radios.
[This report lays out the detailed arguments behind the recent article in the ‘Mail on Sunday’ that featured research by Professor Glees and me. We claimed that MI6 had engaged upon a reckless exercise to try to manipulate Sonia as some kind of ‘double-agent’, but had been fooled completely by Sonia’s working as a courier for the atom-spy Klaus Fuchs. This piece reproduces and recapitulates some of my earlier research on Sonia, but also presents some new analysis.]
Sonia’s Home in Switzerland
Background and Sources
The
story starts – probably – in the summer of 1939. One has to qualify many of the
Switzerland-based events in this saga with ‘probably’ because so much of the
evidence is provided by Ursula and Len Beurton themselves, who, in their
testimonies to British immigration officials, told so many lies that it is
difficult to trust anything they said. Moreover, Ursula (agent SONIA) then
compounded the mendaciousness in her GRU-controlled memoir, Sonjas Rapport.
We can recognise the first set of untruths because the statements are often self-contradictory,
and easily refuted through an examination of the archival record. Many of
Sonia’s claims in her book have been shown to be false by simple inspection of
time and space, or by other records that have come to light that show persons
she talks about were simply not where she said they were at the time, or by
knowledge of the modus operandi of her employer, the GRU. Yet Sonia’s
account has been cited by numerous historians as if it were a reliable version
of what happened.
The
primary source for assembling the story is a rich set of files at the UK
National Archives – not just on Sonia, but on her family, the Kuczynskis, and
her husband Len Beurton, on the senior International Brigader she recruited for
her team in Switzerland, Alexander Foote, and on other Communist agents such as
Oliver Green, whose exploits reflect usefully on the policies and practices of
MI5. The files on the primary spy for whom Sonia acted as courier, Klaus Fuchs,
are also very relevant, as are, to a lesser extent, the Diaries of Guy Liddell,
the head of counter-espionage at MI5 at this time. (I have taken one hundred
pages of notes from the on-line Diaries, without recording a single reference
to Ursula, Kuczynski, Hamburger, or Beurton. The absence of nocturnal canine
latration, whether because of redaction or by Liddell’s choice, is highly
significant.) MI6 files are regrettably not available, but correspondence
between, and memoranda to and from, officers of the Security Service and the
Secret Intelligence Service are scattered among the files, as are occasional
items from the Home Office and the Foreign Office. These records are
complemented by a variegated set of files concerning the Radio Security Service
(RSS), which was responsible for wireless interception in WWII.
More
recently, some analysts have been promoting the value of files held in Russian
archives, although nearly all of these derive from KGB (State Security) records
rather than those of the GRU (Military Intelligence), for whom the Beurtons
worked. William Tyrer and Svetlana Chervonnaya (see www.documentstalk.com ),
have cited items of relevance, yet the existence of actual documents is hard to
verify. What Chervonnaya shows are primarily American, not Soviet documents,
and her focus is on American history. Moreover, her website appears to have
fallen into disuse in recent times. The Vassiliev Papers, again focussing on
KGB matters, are a highly reliable source, and show some important facts about
Sonia, at a time when the KGB was exerting more control over the GRU. They also reveal some interesting information
about Sonia and her brother after they escaped to East Germany.
Solid literature on Sonia is sparse. Alexander Foote’s memoir, Handbook for Spies, brings some psychologically convincing insights into his time with Sonia in Switzerland, as well as plausible observations on Sonia’s marriage to Len, but we have to recall that the book was ghost-written by MI5’s Courtenay Young. John Green’s 2017 study of the Kuczynski clan, A Political Family, is a useful compendium in some ways, drawing much from Kuczynski family memoirs and interviews, and helping with a few facts, but it contains many errors, and is too adulatory of the family’s ‘fight against capitalism’, thereby side-stepping any awkward anomalies in the records. (For example, he writes of the family’s ‘overall achievements and its contribution to our humanistic legacy’, a statement straight out of the Felix Dzerzhinsky playbook.) I have started to inspect one or two books in Russian: Vladimir Lota’s book on the GRU (cited in last month’s coldspurpost) provides convincing proof of the communications of the Rote Drei in Switzerland (although nothing of Sonia’s), and presents photographs of decrypted GRU telegrams. I ordered V.V. Beshanov’s book on Sonia, Superfrau iz GRU on May 3 of this year, but it has not yet arrived: I hope to be able to report on it in a later bulletin.
What
is certain is that Sonia was stranded in Switzerland in the summer of 1939. She
had moved from Poland, where her daughter Janina, by her lover in China, Johannes
Patra, had been born in 1936, but the affair had damaged her marriage to Rudolf
(Rolf) Hamburger. Sonia’s visa was due to expire at the end of September: she
and Rolf had acquired Honduran passports, but they were of dubious stature. If
Sonia were to be extradited to her German homeland, she would almost certainly
face death as a Jew and Communist. She had recruited the International
Brigaders Alexander Foote and Len Beurton as wireless operators, but they were
working as spies in Germany during the summer, and were not withdrawn until
just before war broke out.
Exactly what happened in those months is difficult to determine. Sonia’s account is illogical and inconsistent, and John Green skirts around that period, as if he didn’t trust her version of events, but also didn’t want to draw attention to the deceits. I gave an account in Sonia’s Radio: Part 2, but it is worth delving a little more deeply now, as the subterfuges hint strongly at strings working behind the scenes. The anomalies point strongly to the first plottings by the MI6 representative in Switzerland, Victor Farrell. What is certain is that Claude Dansey, the head of the shadow Z Organisation within MI6, and the deputy to the new Director-General, Stewart Menzies, had established its base in Geneva at the beginning of the war, and that Dansey himself was around to watch as these intrigues progressed, including Sonia’s divorce from Rolf Hamburger. Dansey did not return to Britain until November 1939.
In Handbook for Spies, Alexander Foote indicates that at this time Sonia’s husband, Rolf (identified as ‘Schultz’) was ‘incarcerated in a Chinese jail for Communist activities’. In Foote’s version of the story, therefore, Rolf never appears in Switzerland, and Foote records his visit to Sonia’s chalet, where she lived singly with her two children and the nurse. Foote then collapses the whole story of Sonia’s divorce and marriage as follows: “Sonia was increasingly dissatisfied with the life and work and wished to return [sic: she had never stayed there for long] to England. The main obstacle, apart from Moscow’s views, was of course her German passport. Therefore, in order to get British nationality, she managed to persuade Bill [Len Beurton] to agree to marry her if she could get a divorce from Schultz. She managed to obtain a divorce in the Swiss courts early in 1940, and straight away married Bill and was thus entitled to a British passport.” He adds that, throughout this whole exercise, ‘she had no intention of being unfaithful to Schultz’, but the charade of a mariage de convenance fell apart when she and Len fell in love. This is all nonsense, of course, because of her affair with Patra, and Foote’s suggestion that Sonia was feeling useless and ‘homesick’, with Moscow resisting her plans to withdraw from espionage. Sonia would have done what she was told.
Ursula Beurton (Sonia)
In Sonya’s Report, the author imaginatively
has both her husband and her lover in Switzerland at the same time that summer,
but the chronology is gloriously vague. “In the early summer of 1939, as the
danger of war increased daily, an expired German passport was useless to an
emigrant. My Honduras passport did not give me real security either. Centre
asked what possibilities there might be of obtaining another passport for me.
We proposed that, before Rolf left Europe, we should start divorce proceedings
and I would enter into a pro-forma marriage with an Englishman.” Apart from the
somewhat premature series of activities described, Jim [Foote] won the lottery,
since his age was closer to Sonia’s: Rolf came to see Sonia for the last time.
“When his return to China had been approved, Centre enquired whether he would
be prepared to work under Ernst [Patra]. Generous and principled as he was,
Rolf had a high opinion of Ernst and agreed.” The display of lofty unselfishness
is comical: the notion that Soviet agents would have the freedom to accept or
decline Centre’s instructions is absurd.
Sonia then compounds the unlikelihood of this
domestic drama by having Ernst visit Switzerland, to see his daughter for the
first and only time, and she then (apparently in about July 1939) sees off her
husband and her lover from the train station in Caux. (Green informs us that
Sonia and Patra did not see each other between 1935 and 1955.) Helpfully, Rolf,
before he left, had written a letter to facilitate the divorce proceedings,
which Sonia ‘ever since the spring’ had been trying to finalise. (So much for
Sonia’s suggestion to ‘start divorce proceedings’ in early summer.) Why Rolf
could not have more actively contributed by playing his part while in
Switzerland is not explained. But then Foote tries to back out of the arranged
marriage, claiming some difficulties with a girl in Spain, and a possible
breach of promise. Why he had not thought of that earlier is likewise not explained,
but Foote then recommends Len to take his place, and Len gallantly accepts the
assignment, with Sonia saying that she will divorce him as soon as required. By
February 1940, Sonia had collected all the documents she needed in order to
marry.
When Foote was interrogated by MI5 and MI6
officers in late 1947, however, a different story emerged. In a report
distributed by Percy Sillitoe (from KV 2/1613-1, pp 23-28), Foote’s first
testimony claimed that Sonia’s divorce had been put through without Hamburger’s
knowledge, ‘Foote providing the principal false evidence of Hamburger’s
misconduct in London’. Later, however, Foote was shown information at Broadway
(MI6’s head office) suggesting that Hamburger had been in Switzerland in 1939,
indicating that the Security Intelligence Service was already keeping close
tabs on the extended members of the Kuczynski clan. Foote was shown a
photograph of Hamburger but was apparently ‘quite unable to identify it’.
When challenged later, Foote revealed even more
to the MI5 officers Hemblys-Scales and Serpell, the latter writing the report:
“Foote replied blandly that he had been the sole witness in the case. It was on
his false testimony that Sonia obtained her divorce from Rudolf Hamburger and
Foote made no bones at all about the perjury he had committed in the Swiss
courts. When I asked him what was the false evidence he had produced, he said
that it had been a story of Rudolf Hamburger’s adultery with one of Sonia’s
sisters in a London hotel. I asked which sister was selected for this episode
and Foote replied, Mrs. Lewis. After these revelations, I can no longer feel
surprised at the anxiety shown by the Beurtons over the Hamburger divorce
during their conversations with Mr. Skardon and myself at Great Rollright.” And,
if Foote’s testimony were truthful, he would obviously have had to tell the
Geneva court that he knew what Hamburger looked like. In fact, he had committed
obvious perjury, as he now confessed.
Lastly,
we have the records from Moscow acquired by William Tyrer, although his story
contains its own contradictions. In a personal communication to me, he claimed
that Sonia and her husband lived with Honduran documents after she and Rolf
went to the Honduran consulate in Geneva, some time in mid-1939. Tyrer then,
somewhat implausibly, suggests that, with her Swiss mission completed, she set
her sights on going to Great Britain, where she would be more useful, and
moreover closer to her family – but that this desire awoke only after August
1940! He then cites a reliable-sounding but undated document (Tsa
MO RF, Op. 23397, delo 1, l. 33-37: The Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense
of RF, op. 23397, file 1, pp. 33-37) that purports to record a wireless
message from Sonia to Moscow Centre in late August 1939. It is remarkable in
many dimensions, not least because it suggests that the thought of divorce has
only just occurred to her, directly contradicting what she wrote in her memoir,
and because it also asserts that Rolf is already working in China, a fact of
which Moscow Centre would clearly have been aware, if it were true, and about
which it would thus not have to be informed.
The text of
the message (the name of the translator is not given, but it could be
Chervonnaya, since the English is choppy) runs as follows: “In case of war, I
will be sent to Honduras, where I won’t be able to work on your assignments. In
this connection, I have the following suggestion. The idea is, that I divorce
officially with Rolf and marry “Jim” or “John”. The marriage would be
fictitious, but it would help me to obtain a permanent British passport, with
which I’d be able to travel around the European countries without any obstacles
and would be able to go to Britain at any time.
… At present, I am still on a firm footing
in Switzerland – my husband works as an architect in China, myself with two
kids, I am unable to travel to join him, because China is in war. Waiting for
my husband’s arrival, I am taking a rest with the kids at a mountain resort.
With the help of my father, I am maintaining ties with some officials of the
League of Nations, which also helps to improve my credibility.”
Fortunately
for Sonia, Moscow Centre went along with her plan. For some reason, they did not
point out to Sonia that, in the event of war, she would not be able to gad
around Europe purely on the basis of a British passport. But why, if she was
proposing to divorce Rolf, would she lament that she was unable to join him in
China? (Note that Sonia here, in September 1939, first recommends the idea of
divorce, while claiming in her memoir that Rolf had left the previous month,
having already agreed to it. That the divorce was ‘unofficial’ beforehand is
evident.) And how would she know, having just seen Rolf off at the
train-station in Caux, that he was already working there as an architect? Even
more incredibly, why would she be waiting for her husband’s arrival in late
August 1939, if they had agreed to split? And, if Moscow had just approved
Rolf’s return to China, why would he be on his way back again?
The
conclusion must be that this document is a clumsy fake, inserted into the
archive at some unspecified time, and forgotten when the GRU helped Sonia write
her memoir. It is much more likely that Moscow approved the divorce plans much
earlier, ordered Rolf to return to China so that he was out of the way and thus
could not mess up the legal process, and then engaged in orchestrating Sonia’s
new British citizenship and infiltration into the United Kingdom as a courier.
And it is at this stage that MI6 starts to consider the possibilities of using
the opportunity to manipulate Sonia.
Step One: Facilitating Sonia’s divorce and re-marriage
The marriage certificate of Len and Ursula Beurton
There is no doubt that Alexander Foote had been recruited by MI6. The file KV 2/1613-1 specifically records how in 1947, after his desertion and return to Britain, MI5 warned Foote not to talk about his intelligence experiences, using the claim that he had been a deserter from the R.A.F. as a threat hanging over him. One does not have to buy in to the argument that he was eventually used as a medium for passing on packaged ULTRA secrets to the Soviets (as I do) to conclude that he had been infiltrated into the Swiss network in order to gain insights into its wireless techniques. Indeed, one might assume that he started passing on the practices described in Handbook for Spies to his controllers in Berne as early as 1940, when he became the leading operator for the Rote Drei.
Thus,
when faced with the prospect that Sonia intended to marry Foote when she had
gained her divorce, MI6 would have been appalled at the plan. It would not have
helped them to have Foote repatriated to the United Kingdom as soon as he had
become effective. Yet the notion of potentially manipulating Sonia was
attractive: Len Beurton would be proposed as the replacement candidate to marry
Sonia. Foote would then come up with a bogus explanation as to why he could not
go through with the marriage, and would instead provide false evidence against
Rolf Hamburger, since the Swiss courts were apparently rather sticky when it
came to granting divorces against absent spouses. Whether Rolf actually
provided the letter that was supposed to grease the wheels is dubious:
apparently it was not enough to convince the authorities.
So
how did MI6 hope to use Sonia at this stage of the war? Of course, the Soviet
Union’s pact with Nazi Germany was in effect: in principle, she might have been
able to inform them of strategic intelligence. Yet her utility in Britain would
have been very constrained. Any activity on UK soil – including contacts with
as yet undiscovered sources – would transfer to MI5’s area of responsibility,
and the Security Service would therefore have to be party to the plot, and take
over the supervision and surveillance of Sonia. Perhaps they thought that she
would lead them to other GRU agents in Europe, and would repay her new masters
for their kindness in saving her from persecution in Germany. I suspect,
however, that the real agenda was to use her as some kind of ‘double agent’ *,
perhaps to feed her disinformation that she would be bound to transmit to
Moscow Centre, and thereby gain further insights into her encipherment
techniques. When her messages were intercepted (so went the plan), the fact
that she had been passed texts that she would encode would provide an excellent
crib for assisting in decryption – a technique that mirrored what RSS and
GC&CS were performing with transmissions performed by the Abwehr.
(*
‘Double-agent’ is not really the appropriate term, as it suggests a
continuing dual role. ‘Controlled enemy agent’ is the preferred description. I
shall explore this phenomenon further in the coming final chapter of ‘The
Mystery of the Undetected Radios’.)
According
to her marriage certificate, Sonia received her divorce on December 29, 1939 (not
in October, as she for some reason told UK immigration officers later), and was
married to Len Beurton on February 23, 1940. Yet one further action hints at
the connivance of MI6.
The
anecdote appears in both Foote’s and Sonia’s narratives, although the details
and motivations differ slightly, and it involves Olga Muth, Sonia’s nanny. Muth
had been hired shortly after Nina’s birth in April 1936, and accompanied Sonia
to London, back to Poland, and then to Switzerland. Sonia presents Olga as
becoming distraught over the prospect of being separated from Nina, Sonia’s
daughter, and, in the knowledge that Sonia had a wireless transmitter, goes to
the British consulate in Montreux to denounce her as a spy. Foote states that
Olga was distressed by Sonia’s disloyalty to Rolf in not just marrying Len, but
subsequently falling in love with him.
In
Foote’s account, Olga rings up the Consulate to denounce Sonia and Len as Soviet
spies, telling them where the transmitter was hidden. In both versions, her
broken English was incomprehensible, and she was thus ignored. During his
interrogation in London, Foote additionally claimed (KV 2/1611-1) ‘that Ursula and Beurton were considered by
Moscow to have been compromised by the action of Olga Muth, and it was the
basis of their return to England.’ This is quite absurd: if they had been
rumbled in Switzerland by the British, they would hardly have been allowed to
settle in Britain. MI5’s Serpell sagely made a note, questioning why Sonia and
Len would have been denounced to the British authorities rather than the
Swiss? One might thus ask: Had the whole business been a ruse concocted
to suggest distancing of the Beurtons from MI6 in Switzerland?
Step Two: Providing Sonia with a Passport
Milicent Bagot
On March 11, 1940, Sonia visited the British Consulate in Geneva to apply for a British passport, based on her marriage to Beurton (who was known as ‘Fenton’ in the MI5 files). She records that the reaction of the Consul was ‘distinctly cool’, Victor Farrell no doubt affecting a lack of enthusiasm for the whole venture. Mr. Livingston passed her application on to the Passport Office in London, adding the annotation that the purpose of her marriage was probably to confer British nationality on her, and then he rather provocatively appended the strange observation: ‘Husband is understood to be under medical treatment, and intends to return to Switzerland after escorting the applicant to England.’ Why Beurton, if he had recovered enough to make the arduous journey across Europe to Britain in war-time, would jeopardise his health, and then want to repeat the ordeal by returning to Switzerland for medical treatment instead of seeking it in the UK, is not evident.
I have described the events that took place next in Sonia’s Radio: Chapter 2, and Chapter 8, but it is worth summarizing them here. The application was processed quickly, before Milicent Bagot, who was very familiar with the Kuczynski family, could advise against it. Sonia’s brother Jürgen had actually been interned as a dangerous communist, collaborating with another noted incendiary, Hans Kahle, in organizing espionage, but was conveniently released at about the same time that Sonia’s passport application was approved, in May. Len Beurton was on the C.S.W. (Central Security War) Black List, and thus not a person whose re-entry was to be encouraged. Cazalet in MI5 too late pointed out the anomalies, but stated that Sonia’s passport should be issued for limited duration, and should not be used for travel.
One
bizarre item in the KV 6/41 file shows that Sonia, perhaps concerned that the
application was not moving fast enough, actually sent a letter to her father
(addressed mystifyingly as ‘Renée’: his forenames were Robert René) requesting
local pressure on the Passport Office. In this missive, she curiously refers to
herself in the third person (‘Maria’), and informs her family that ‘Maria’s
husband’ (aka ‘Georgie’) has just written to the Office to advance his claim.
As it happened, the passport had been approved the day before: it is not clear
how Len’s personal approach would have helped his suit, unless he perhaps
thought that making an overt breach from his chequered past would somehow make
the Passport office look on his submission with more favour. Len’s letter has
not survived, but it was not necessary.
Thus
it is apparent that MI6 was able to bulldoze through the application, even
though Sonia was known to be one of a dangerous Communist family, with
lower-level officers in MI5 speaking strongly against the award, at a time when
the Soviet Union was supporting Nazi Germany in the war effort against Great
Britain. It is quite extraordinary that, during a period when any German
refugees were looked at with great suspicion, and as rumours of a dangerous
‘Fifth Column’ of hostile aliens were gathering momentum, MI6 would go to
strenuous efforts to facilitate the entry into the United Kingdom of a known
German-born revolutionary. Laconically, Sonia reported in her memoir: “In the
late autumn of 1940, Centre suggested that Len and I move to England”, as if
the thought had just occurred to them. (This is presumably the sentiment that
Tyrer echoes in his notes.)
Step Three: Exploiting Len’s Extended Presence in Switzerland
Len Beurton
Len’s status in 1940 is a little perplexing. We know from the infamous ‘Geneva Letter’ (see The Letter from Geneva) that Farrell must have engaged him for some intelligence-gathering purposes, with the Falkenberg connection providing a vital insight into how prominent German minds against Hitler might be thinking. Yet it surely cannot have been MI6’s intention to prevent his leaving with Sonia, as it would draw undue attention to her situation, and would make her passage more hazardous. Was the statement about his returning to Switzerland a blind, when they knew that he would struggle to gain a transit visa, and might be even less welcome in the UK than Sonia was?
Sonia
wrote that ‘as a former member of the International Brigade, Len could not
travel through Spain and had to stay in Geneva until we [Moscow? The British
Consulate?] could find a different route for him.’ Yet she presents this
observation very late in the cycle, after she and Len had received instructions
from Moscow towards the end of 1940. It is difficult to imagine that they could
have been so uninformed at this stage. She confirmed the fact when she was
interviewed by customs officials in Liverpool on February 4, 1941, saying
(after lying about how long she had been in Switzerland) that her husband had
been unable to leave Switzerland as he could not obtain a Spanish visa.
The
untruths about Len’s poor health (and other matters) start here. There are two
interrogation reports on Sonia on file: one dated February 8, from Security and
Immigration, and the other February 15, from the Home Office. In the former
report, she is quoted as saying that Len had been in Switzerland for about two years
‘for health reasons’. She cannot give a date for when she first met him, but claims
she went to Switzerland for the last time ‘just before the outbreak of war’,
and that Len had paid visits to Germany during the previous nine months in an
attempt to secure money owed her. She married Beurton in February 1940, ‘having
secured a divorce from her former husband’. Fortunately, Len had now recovered
from his tuberculosis, but had not been able to acquire a Spanish visa
necessary for reaching Portugal, because of his membership of the International
Brigades. Yet, despite Len’s ‘recovery’, she still cites his ill-health as an counter
to the Spanish government’s obduracy, suggesting that his inability to fight
should remove their concern.
The
Home Office Report gives a slightly different story. Now Sonia claims that she
had been in Switzerland since February 1940, thus eliding the circumstances by
which she had been able to acquire her divorce papers. She was presumably not
questioned as to where she had been prior to her arrival. She again says that
Len had gone to Switzerland for health reasons, but now embroiders the reason
why she had to leave Switzerland without him – that she was, as she coyly
admitted, ‘afraid to stay any longer owing to her connection with a well-known
anti-Nazi family’. That family was of course the Kuczynskis, to which she was
rather tightly bound, not simply ‘connected’. She does not indicate here that
Len has recovered, and thus leaves the argument that he was unfit to be a
fighting man in place.
The
report goes on to say that the Spanish visa ‘has been refused by the Spanish
authorities as he is still of military age and when it was pointed out to them
that he was medically unfit they said that the grounds for refusal were that he
was an engineer and therefore as valuable as a fighting man.’ It is not clear
whether the officials derived this information from Sonia herself, or another
source, but it does confirm that Len’s invalidity has already been raised as a
reason for letting him depart. Sonia rather ingenuously concluded her statement
by indicating that ‘Mr. Beurton would attempt to leave France by a cargo boat
from Marseilles’. A simple cross-check between different statements to customs
officials and Livingston’s passport application would have turned up an
enormous contradiction about the supposed frailty of Len’s health and his
desire to join his wife in England as soon as possible, as well as a cavalcade
of lies about their movements in Europe. MI5 and MI6 were simply not interested
In
any case, Len surely did face a challenge in trying to pass through France and
Spain because of his history as an International Brigader, and this fact would
consume some more of MI6’s devious energies later. Meanwhile, he made himself
useful. In Handbook for Spies, Foote stated that Len gradually
extricated himself from the Soviet organisation, and that contact ceased after
March 1941 (when Sonia was safely ensconced in Oxfordshire). This was the
period when Farrell presumably nurtured him, believing him also to be an ally,
and indebted to the British authorities, and used him for
intelligence-gathering purposes. Some time after his return to the United
Kingdom, Len apparently tried to revive his career with MI6. In the Alexander Foote
archive, in KV 2/1612-2, can be found a statement that Beurton ‘gave information about his work with KWEI,
Z.156 [presumably von Falkenberg] and Rolf SUESS which was of little
value, and he tried to obtain employment with British intelligence. This offer
was refused, and in July 1943 he asked for help in joining the R.A.F. on the
strength of “having rendered valuable assistance in Switzerland”’.
The exact sequence and timing of events is uncertain, but K 6/41 tends to undermine the ‘intelligence’ application in favour of the ‘R. A. F’ story. There, Colonel Vivian of MI6 confirms the approach, informing Shillito on August 17, 1943 that Beurton presented himself at the War Office with an introductory letter, asking for an interview with (name redacted). (But why else would Vivian have been involved?) Yet Beurton waited a long time to make this approach, as if he was not certain whether he was working for the GRU, or MI6, or both. He must have been getting rather desperate. Shillito had picked up the case again, and was busy asking questions at this time. Perhaps the combination of Farrell’s reminder in March, the imminent birth of his and Sonia’s baby, and his failure to find employment were making Len a bit desperate. MI6 in London were obviously quite aware of his services to the Swiss station, but had no wish to recruit him. If they were interested in taking him on, they would surely have acted soon after his arrival.
Step Four: Arranging the passage of Sonia and her children to Lisbon
The Grande Hotel, Estoril
Refugee literature informs us how arduous was the trek across France and Spain to the relative safety of Portugal. For a lone woman travelling with a nine-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter, it must have been especially difficult. Yet Sonia’s children (Maik and Janina) almost did not make it. The original passport application had specified that Sonia wanted her children added to the passport, but it seems that this inclusion did not guarantee their ability to travel, presumably since they had been born as German citizens, and had not been naturalized. This discovery occurred very late in the day. Sonia did not notice the dilemma until shortly before she left, apparently, or may have assumed that their status as appendages to her passport gave them right of entry. Else she may have considered that perhaps the original plan was for her to travel alone, leaving the children in Len’s (or somebody else’s) care. Sonia ignores the whole issue of her children’s approval process, merely stating that she planned to leave at the end of December.
Yet
KV 6/41 shows that an urgent plaintext telegram was sent from Geneva to London
on November 21, 1940, reflecting the recognition that the children might be
turned away on attempting to land. (The question of whether they would have got
past the Embassy in Lisbon is not raised.) Extraordinarily, the cable states,
even at this late stage, that the children would be accompanied by their
parents [sic, plural], and throws in the name of Sonia’s father,
(“Doctor Kuczynski of London University’), as if that impressive academic touch
would seal the deal. Mystifyingly still, Cazalet’s response of December 10 misses
the point entirely, stating that MI5 (to whom the request was addressed) ‘have
no objection to the names of Mrs. Ursula BEURTON’s children being added to her
passport and the children accompanying their mother to this country’. His memo
to Stafford of the Passport and Permit Office, dated December 4, clearly
indicates that the problem was due to the fact that they were ‘German born
children’.
Once
she and her children arrived in Lisbon, Sonia faced multiple challenges in
planning her transit. This section of her memoir is probably one of the more
reliable parts, in the bare outline of their movements. She wrote a letter to
her parents in which she described the horrendous journey, the unheated bus
through France, the icy cold in which they stood waiting at customs houses,
alleviated by a more comfortable train ride from Barcelona to Madrid, and then
a more stressful passage to Lisbon, where they arrived on December 24, 1940, with
all three of them ill. The British consulate explained that Sonia was ‘about
the most insignificant person on the long list’, so she moved, somewhat
incongruously, to a comfortable hotel up the coast in Estoril (the ‘Grande’,
“once the setting for the European aristocracy to spend its summers”), using
monies from Moscow Centre’s account. “After about three weeks, the consulate
informed me that we would be taken to England by ship”, she wrote. Yet the
letter she wrote to her family on January 4 indicates that she already knew
then that the waiting-time would be ‘about three weeks’ – not a bad prospect
for someone so lowly on the pecking-order. She had been granted a Category ‘C’
endorsement (no internment required) on January 10. It appeared that MI6 had
primed the consulate: Sonia gave the game away again.
Moscow
also helped with the expenses involved in transporting Sonia and her family
across Europe. While funding was tight in Switzerland, and caused special
stresses, Foote informed his interrogators that ‘Albert’ (Radó) managed to send
$3,500 to her in Portugal. This was obviously essential for Sonia’s living
expenses while staying at the Grande Hotel. Sonia admitted this contribution in
her memoir. Yet she was clearly indebted to MI6 for working behind the scenes
to advance her priority up the queue of desperate refugees waiting to gain a
spot on one of the ships bound for Liverpool. No questions were apparently
asked about her source of funds or her lavish accommodation.
Step Five: Helping Sonia Settle in Britain
‘The Wake Arms’ in Epping
In two respects, MI6 helped Sonia with her accommodation and trysting arrangements in England. In one extraordinary item of testimony, Foote told his interrogators (KV 6/43-243A) that, before Sonia left Switzerland, she asked Foote to send a message to Moscow giving the address in Essex where her GRU contact was to meet. Foote’s notebook revealed that Sonia was to ‘meet with the Russians on 1st & 15th of every month at 3pm GMT at Wake Arms in Epping’. This location has an especial interest, since some of the items of correspondence intercepted at the Summertown address in September and October 1942 came from Epping. It would nevertheless not have been an easy place to travel to and from for a mother with two young children resident in Oxford. Yet Epping had its enduring attractions. In 1944, Sonia consequently decided to send Nina, aged seven, to a ‘boarding school in beautiful rural surroundings near Epping Forest’, Micha having already won a scholarship to a boarding school in Eastbourne, Sussex. Nannies and boarding-schools: those are the emblems of the truly dedicated Communist with important work to do.
What
is astonishing about this item is how Sonia must have gained the intelligence. Unless
the claim was a gross invention by Foote (which seems unlikely, given its
detail, and the context), we have to consider the alternatives for the source
of a message that was to be sent to Moscow. It therefore could not have
originated from Moscow, but we also have to consider why Moscow would need this
information. Did Sonia believe that Moscow would have to pass it on to her GRU
contact in London, so that she and her handler could meet successfully? Surely
not: Moscow was in constant touch with London. Or was she simply confirming
what her GRU contact had told her already? Yet, even if she had been able to
contact the GRU in London, by wireless, or possibly by coded letter to her
sister or father, there would have been no need for her to inform Moscow, as
her relatives must have derived the data from the local GRU residency.
Thus
we have to assume that the address was given to her by Farrell in MI6. The
implication that MI6 was in communication with GRU officers in London about the
plan to bring Sonia to Britain, and aiding the process of setting up her treffs,
is too scandalous and impossible to consider. I suggest one tentative
interpretation. What probably happened is that Sonia had been able to inform
Moscow that MI6 was going to recommend a suitable meeting-place (presumably
with the objective of surveilling it closely), and, at the last minute before
she left, it gave her the times and location for Epping. Her message thus
constituted a warning to her bosses that this place was not to be used.
There is no other evidence that she travelled regularly to Epping, which would
have been an arduous journey from Oxford, although much easier from Hampstead,
if that is where MI6 believed she would probably take up residence.
The
fact that Foote had to inform Moscow of the arrangement must mean that the GRU
was aware that Sonia was negotiating with MI6. That was in principle also a
dangerous path, as such collaboration was severely frowned upon. In late 1943,
Radó received a royal carpeting when he suggested to Moscow that he and Foote
seek shelter in the British consulate in Geneva when the Gestapo started
applying pressure to the Swiss, and mopped up the Rote Drei network.
Sonia must have wisely told Moscow everything, and gained their approval for going
along with MI6’s game, as it represented the best chance of gaining the
foothold in Britain that they all desired.
The other instance where MI6 helped her was in her attempt to learn where her destination in England would be. I laid out in Sonia’s Radio: Chapter 8 how she sent a desperate letter from Lisbon to her father’s address in London, which was redirected to the address in Oxford that she would later give, as her destination, to the immigration officer in Liverpool. Whether Oxford was chosen as part of a deep strategy by the GRU, as a sensible idea by MI6, or out of a firm preference from the Kucyznski family is unclear. It may well have been the latter, as Jürgen Kuczynski had expressed dismay that Sonia was coming to Britain, where she might draw undue attention by MI5 and Special Branch to his own subversive activities on behalf of the Party. The anguish in her letter shows that Sonia must have known already that she was not welcome in London, and would be directed elsewhere. Yet Sonia did learn what this address was before she arrived in Liverpool. Some emissary from MI6 must have provided this information care of the Consul in Lisbon: there is no other reasonable explanation. In Chapter 8 I put forward one speculative notion.
The
voyage to Liverpool took three weeks: the Avoceta arrived on February 4.
After the interrogation(s) (in which she was now able to provide a destination
address), Sonia managed to find a hotel to stay in, and after an air-raid
interrupted night, the next morning travelled smoothly by train to Oxford.
Thereafter, her account does not ring true. She claimed that her parents were
staying with friends at the Oxford address (78 Woodstock Road, as the MI5 files
tell us: they followed her there), but that they had to return to London
‘because their room was needed by their friends’ relatives’. Implausibly, Sonia
states that, because house-hunting in Oxford was ‘hopeless’, she tried to find
something in the bombed cities, but that was impossible too. (Did she travel to
Portsmouth? Coventry? Liverpool? She does not say.) ‘At last’ she found a furnished room, but had
to send the children away, as the landlady insisted on only one renter. So she
found a room at the vicarage in Glympton, near Woodstock, settled down, and
started her fortnightly visits to London.
If
one were not aware of her brother’s objections, one night ask why on earth she
didn’t move to the bosom of her family in London, so she would have
grandparents to look after her children, and be able to carry on her trysts so
much more easily? Apparently ‘moving in with them was out of the question’, as
her parents were staying with friends in an overcrowded house’. In April 1941,
she conveniently found the furnished bungalow in Kidlington, with no landlady,
and the ability to keep her children with her. What she also omitted to mention,
however, was that, during these hectic weeks, she was actually residing with
her sister, Barbara, Mrs Taylor, at 97 Kingston Road, Oxford, as the
constabulary report of February 24 informs us. Barbara’s husband, Duncan
Burnett Macrae Taylor, was a trainee wireless operator in the R. A. F., and
thus may well have been the officer Sonia claimed to have developed as an
informer (‘James’) when she boasted of her ‘network’ in her memoir. Moreover,
the report says that her parents are still living at 78 Woodstock Road. It is
no wonder that Sonia fails to describe this part of her life in Oxford in any
detail.
Step Six: Allowing Sonia to Carry On Unsurveilled
Kidlington Airport
What is clear from the archives is that a minimal surveillance of Sonia was undertaken, but it was of the generic kind of instructing the local constabulary ‘to keep an eye on her’, as if they might surprise her in the act of planting a bomb somewhere. It extended to intercepting her mail, but specifically did not track her movements. The problem is that much of the initiative came from younger officers, like Hugh Shillito, who were trying to do their job, but had clearly not been filled in on the bigger picture. Shillito (B.10.e) wrote to Major Ryde in Reading (the Special Branch representative) on February 7, suggesting that Sonia might want to ‘be kept under observation’. Yet he gives no indication that she is a communist, and related to subversives who have been interned. He merely states that she ‘clearly comes from an entirely different social stratum, and it appears that the marriage was one of convenience’. He says that Len’s ‘present whereabouts are unknown’. It is obvious that he has not been briefed properly, has not spoken to Milicent Bagot, has not read the immigration reports, and is completely unaware of the Communist group that Sonia was part of. He ends his request with the statement: ‘I shall be very interested to hear the result of any enquiries you may make’, but one could hardly expect Major Ryde to jump into action on the basis of this weak letter.
Shillito
in fact copied his letter to the Oxford Constabulary, and Ryde did send it on
to the Oxford City Police. Acting Detective-Sergeant Jevons did make enquiries,
and discovered the facts about the Taylors, and also that Sonia’s father held ‘strong
Communist views’, facts that he reported to Shillito on February 24. The very
next day, Hyde sent a letter to Shillito, enclosing a copy of the Beurtons’
marriage certificate. This is shocking and absurd: Why did these dedicated
civil servants have to educate an MI5 officer about the details of the case? I
have noticed that MI5 officers often seemed remarkably ignorant of the marital
status of Len and Sonia: when Sonia’s application for a passport came through
in March 1940, Cazalet had even indicated that they thought Len was in Germany,
in February 1940, which would have been a ridiculous supposition if he had
married Sonia the previous month.
Thus
Shillito appears to have been kept in the dark, deliberately. His response to
Ryde of March 1 suggests that the marriage is all news to him. In any case, at
that point Shillito effectively signs off, deeming no further action required,
and again expresses the perennial hope that ‘an eye can be kept’ on Sonia. The
file is passed to B4, as it appears to be a Communist Party matter. Thereafter,
Sonia and Shillito disappear from the archival radar, the case not taking on
new life until her husband’s repatriation in July 1942, by which time Shillito
has been heavily involved with the business of Oliver Green, a member of the
Communist Party of Great Britain, and a spy who had been convicted and
imprisoned, not for espionage, but for forging petrol coupons. In the
reorganization of July 1941, after Petrie’s arrival, Shillito had been moved
into the new F Division, tracking CP members, and was given a new assignment.
According
to Sonia’s account, the hounds (if that is how these tentative inquisitors must
be characterized) must have been called off at about the time she first met
with her controller in London, in May, after several abortive attempts. She
travelled up to London every couple of weeks, to speak to her father, and
colleagues like Hans Kahle. She stayed with her parents, or one of her sisters,
presumably leaving her children behind. She never explains how they were taken
care of. It was in 1941, of course, that Peter Wright claimed that she
maintained ‘a nest of spies’, something that surely should have gained the
attention of any agency chartered with ‘keeping an eye on her’. As readers of
these bulletins will know by now, I largely discount Wright’s allegations,
although it is possible that Sonia developed contacts in important scientific
research organisations in Oxford. And
yet, throughout the rest of 1941, no one apparently noticed any of her journeys
and absences, or pondered how a mother was able to leave her kids behind so
regularly.
The
political environment changed in 1941, of course. The Battle of Britain was over;
the threat of invasion receded; the search for parachuted German agents waned;
Hitler turned his attention eastwards and invaded the Soviet Union on June 22.
With Churchill’s immediate message of support to Stalin, and signals from the Y
Board and the Foreign Office that counter-intelligence operations against the
Soviet Union should be wound down, Sonia would have been seen in a different
light. What possible harm could a lone and disconnected housewife perform to
the cause of the war?
MI6’s
need for insights into Soviet decryption techniques, however, did not go away,
and GCHQ never completely abandoned its plans for attacking Soviet traffic. It
was in the summer of 1941 that Sonia, having assembled her wireless transmitter
at Glympton, began transmitting regularly to Moscow, and the only surviving
message concerning her wireless activity (not from her directly, but from the
Soviet Embassy) dates from July of this year. As I have outlined, her attempts
to contact her bosses at that time were made from Kidlington, and were
(apparently) never picked up. Thus it would appear that MI6 fell into a fallow
period with Sonia, not certain what to do with her, and perhaps frustrated in noticing
that, having installed herself as a competent wireless operator in Oxfordshire,
she stubbornly refused to co-operate by sending any messages that could be
intercepted.
The
circumstances surrounding Sonia’s broadcasts in 1941, and the apparent failure
of RSS to pick them up, are still perplexing. Since her messages needed to
reach Moscow, she would have had to use a higher band-width (probably over 1000
kcs) than would have been used by postulated Nazi agents trying to reach
Hamburg, or enemy wireless operators working on the Continent. Such signals
should have immediately drawn attention, but they would have been harder to
pick up at that wavelength, and it is probable that the Voluntary Interceptors (VIs)
had not been instructed to perform General Searches in this range. We can only
speculate as to how well MI6 understood the technicalities of waveband
selection for the cuckoo they had transplanted into their nest, or how
reluctant they would have been to divulge too much about her presence to RSS
officers who were supposed to detect her.
We do know that, by early 1942, a VI picked up such a signal from the Soviet Embassy, but location-finding techniques still had great difficulty in tracking it down. It may be that, not until MI6 took over the fixed direction-finding stations from the Post Office in late 1941, and built new ones, and connected them all, was the RSS able to include in its ambit a greater range of frequencies, and pass some of them to the VIs. One RSS officer, Bob King, assured me that the complete spectrum of wavelengths was monitored, and, moreover, that Sonia’s transmissions were picked up, and instructions received to ignore them, but the dating of such events suggests they were post-war. I shall pick up this fascinating aspect of the story in the conclusion to my series The Mystery of the Undetected Radios.
The
final anomalous oversight of this period was Sonia’s momentous meetings with
Klaus Fuchs. Yet those encounters properly belong to the time after Beurton’s
arrival back in the United Kingdom, which was an important scheme by MI6 in its
own right. It would be Len’s controversial arrangements for rejoining his wife
that would gain Hugh Shillito’s attention again.
Step 7: Orchestrating Len’s Repatriation
Eleanor Rathbone
One extraordinary aspect of the whole project concerning Len’s repatriation is the extreme lengths that MI6 went to. When far more-deserving candidates, such as escaped prisoners-of-war, were struggling to gain passage back to England, Beurton, a known communist, agent in a Swiss spy network, and member of an official Black List, benefitted from the provision of false papers, and the advantage of an aircraft return to Poole, Dorset instead of the dangerous and slow sea journey that most refugees had to endure. (The busy MI9 route out of Gibraltar also used aircraft.) It is difficult to imagine that MI6 would go to such extreme lengths purely because of the pressure applied by leftist friends of the Kuczynskis, and for the office of the Foreign Secretary to become involved only draws attention to the anomaly.
Readers
will recall that, when Sonia arrived in Liverpool in early February 1941, one
of the accounts that she gave of Len’s absence was that he had gone two years
ago to Switzerland for treatment for tuberculosis, that he had recovered and
was thus fit to travel, but that the failure of the Spanish to grant him a
transit visa had prevented his accompanying her. (And that this intelligence
was in contradiction of what the passport application from Geneva had indicated.)
Unsurprisingly, the testimonies now differ. Sonia reported that Radó had
applied pressure on Len, saying that his work in Switzerland was more
important, and Len had been influenced by him. But when he asked Moscow what he
should do, they told him to ‘do as Sonya says’ – an extremely unlikely
interchange.
Foote
described it differently: “Bill
[Len] then pulled out of the organisation, and though he remained in
Switzerland until 1942 he had no more official contact with us after March
1941. Moscow allowed him to try to make arrangements to leave at the end of
1941 and even assisted him in obtaining a British passport by getting a leading
British politician to intervene on his behalf. The politician concerned acted,
I am sure, quite innocently in this as worked through a number of cut-outs, and
the person in question would probably have been horrified at the thought of
assisting a Russian spy.” Probably a more accurate account, and a useful
commentary by the MI5 ghost-writer, to be sure. Radó echoed Foote’s account in Codename Dora,
indicating that ‘John’ [Len] stayed on to provide training (‘at Central’s
request’) but then observed that Len was able to leave the country by the
spring of 1941. Even if Radó
was mistaken over the date of Len’s derparture, it strongly suggests that Len
was not occupied with the Rote Drei any longer.
Sonia made much of Len’s struggles to gain any
priority with the consulate in the queue of escapees trying to reach Britain,
and she said she then contacted Hans Kahle, who, in turn invoked the support of
Eleanor Rathbone, the left wing MP, who pleaded on the basis of Len’s eagerness
to join the British Army. It might have suited MI6 to keep Len in place for a
while, since he was providing useful information on anti-Nazi thinking from his
association with General von Falkenhausen, but someone obviously concluded that
he would be of more use back in Britain. Events then took some extraordinary
turns, involving some barefaced lies that apparently did not concern the
authorities, who were, after all, responsible for some of them.
For example, Sonia wrote that Rathbone must
have asked a question in Parliament, along the lines of : “Why is a British
citizen and anti-fascist with military experience in the Spanish Civil War, who
is abroad and wants to volunteer for the British Army, not being given the
support of His Majesty’s Government in order to return to his home country?”
She overlooked the obvious paradox that, in order to gain a transit visa
necessary for repatriation and then enlisting, Beurton had to be declared unfit
for military service in Geneva. A veritable Catch22. [I cannot find, in the
1942 Hansard records, this question from the MP for the Combined Universities,
but Miss Rathbone was a vigorous and regular critic of government policy.]
When Rathbone wrote to Alexander Cadogan, the
Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, on February 18, 1942, she
explained that Beurton had gone to Switzerland before the war for health
reasons, and then underwent a serious ski-ing accident that prevented him from
leaving. For good measure, the International Brigade Association secretary, Mr
Jack Brent, threw in (orally) that Beurton probably had tuberculosis as well,
and would therefore be unfit for military service, thus undermining Rathbone’s
appeal. This submission conveniently reinforced the ‘legend’ that Sonia had
built up about Len’s affliction, yet rather over-egged the pudding with the
details of Len’s misfortunes while ski-ing. Of course, the myth that Len was
unfit for military service was necessary in an effort to convince the Vichy
French and Spanish authorities that Len could not contribute to the war effort,
but it rather undermined the urgency of the reasons why the British authorities
would be eager to repatriate a tubercular, crippled Communist subversive. Did
they perhaps not recall that Klaus Fuchs’s brother Gerhard had arrived by
aeroplane in the UK from Switzerland in July 1939, but had been denied entry,
and had been forced to return, because he had tuberculosis?
In
any case, the Foreign Office wisely pointed out that Beurton would probably
need to be pronounced unfit by an impartial medical board in order to gain
transit visas from the French and Spanish authorities. On June 3, Livingston,
of the Geneva consulate, informed Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, that
Beurton had been trying to leave for two years (some slight exaggeration), but he
was able to supply the good news that, in April, the doctor attached to the
French consulate had declared him unfit for military service. Thereafter, they
had applied for French and Spanish visas. The Spaniards, not smelling a rat (or
possibly receiving some form of encouragement), had granted the visa, but the
French were still delaying things. Yet what Livingston did not state at this
juncture was that Beurton had already, on March 9, been issued with a false
passport in the name of John William Miller. This fellow must have been a
really important asset.
The
final visa was issued on July 8, Beurton left Geneva on July 13, and Livingston
reported his departure on July 20. There is no record of his journey on file,
but Beurton apparently was given VIP treatment, not taking the regular MI9
route for escaped POWs and agents from occupied Europe via Madrid to Gibraltar,
but enjoying instead the diplomatic route, and the comfort of a quick plane
from Lisbon. He arrived at Poole Airport on July 29, hale, but a little peeved
that the he had to undergo an interrogation, as he felt that the authorities in
Lisbon should have warned immigration about his arrival. He confidently declared
that his passport was a forgery, denied that he had gone to Switzerland for
health reasons, indicated that he had gone to Germany in January 1939 to
retrieve property owned by Rudolf Kuczynski, and intimated that he had an
affair with the latter’s daughter, Ursula. He boasted that he had survived on a
$20,000 legacy that he had been carrying round in cash. Furthermore he stated
that he and Ursula were married in May 1940, and that they did not leave
Switzerland at the beginning of the war as they were waiting for his wife’s
divorce papers to come through. He was, however, quick to mention his contact
from the League of Nations, L. T. Wang.
A
more incriminating farrago of lies would have been difficult to concoct. On
August 5, Vesey (B4A) wrote to MI6 expressing surprise that the Passport
Control Officer would have issued a false British passport to man whose history
must have been known. MI6 replied to Vesey that he had been given a faked
passport as he had been refused a transit visa in his own name, adding that the
PCO in Geneva was ‘of course’ not aware of the ‘individual circular’ concerning
Beurton, who had in the meantime approached the ‘Passport Control’ (i.e. MI6
itself) to join the Armed Forces. MI6 was meanwhile very interested in Wang and
Kwei. Vesey and a representative from MI6 would interrogate Beurton in October
about the questionable legacy and his actions with Sonia’s friend Marie
Guinzberg at the UN in gaining a Bolivian passport. Yet interest in all these
suspicious activities was buried.
Step 8: Suppressing Leads on Sonia’s and Len’s Activities
Klaus Fuchs
I have written at length on the apparent confusion surrounding MI5’s surveillance of the Kidlington and Summertown addresses, and the Beurtons’ telephone and mail (see https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-response-to-denis-lenihan/, of March 19, 2020). Sonia claimed that she and Len had to move out of the Kidlington house very soon after Len’s arrival, but was fortunate in finding accommodation in the annex to the house owned by Neville Laski and his wife. Sonia was careful in picking landlords of impeccable standing: Laski was a notable jurist, and may have acted as a solicitor for MI5 at some stage. When the Beurtons moved to The Firs at Great Rollright after the war, they rented from Sir Arthur Salter, the Member of Parliament for Oxford University from 1937 to 1950.
My
main conclusion was that Hugh Shillito, having been emboldened by a successful
investigation of Oliver Green’s espionage activities, shifted his attention
back to the Beurtons soon after Len’s arrival in July 1942, but was firmly
discouraged by senior MI5 officers from pursuing the leads too energetically. For
example, the apparent failure to follow up on the provocative batch of letters
listed on file is perplexing. Just after the time (November 1942) when he had
gained the enthusiastic support of Director-General Petrie, and his immediate
supervisor Roger Hollis, for his prosecution of the Green case, Shillito made
the outlandish suggestion that Sonia and Len were probably Soviet spies. Yet
this was information that some senior officers did not want to hear.
It
would be quite plausible that Liddell and White had been drawn into the plot by
MI6 at this stage, but that Petrie and Hollis (who had replaced his former
boss, John Curry, as head of F Division in November 1941), had not. F2 was
responsible for ‘Communism and Left-wing Movements’, but Sonia and Len were not
associated with the Party, or visibly part of any ‘movement’, so they, along
with many other free-flowing communists (such as Jürgen Kuczynski and Fritz
Kahle) were allowed to behave unhindered. Perhaps a case was made on those
lines that the Beurtons should be ignored. As late as July 1943, however, when
the very disgruntled but severely anti-communist Curry had been transferred to
MI6, Shillito was still grumbling to his former director that he thought the
Beurtons were Soviet agents.
Yet
it is the Fuchs business that dominates this period. Sonia had been introduced
to Fuchs through her brother, Jürgen. From Sonia’s account, one would get the
impression that she cycled out to the Banbury area a dozen times or more,
sometimes meeting Fuchs in person, sometimes leaving a message in a shared
‘letterbox’ to arrange a subsequent meeting. When Fuchs passed her a
hundred-page book of blueprints, she had to travel to London to inform her
handler (by a secret chalk sign) that they would meet outside Oxford, and she
then had to pedal out to the junction of the A34 and the A40 to hand over the
formulae and drawings. Frank Close echoes the account of these idyllic trysts,
even quoting what Sonia later told the local Oxford newspapers: “During the
final months of 1942, and throughout 1943, Fuchs and Sonya met at regular
intervals near Banbury, always at weekends. She would come from Oxford by train
in the morning, Fuchs arriving from Birmingham in the afternoon. One meeting
was in Overthorpe Park, two miles east of Banbury, and within easy reach by
bicycle or on foot.”
One can already see the contradictions. Did Sonia bike the whole thirty miles to Banbury, or did she take her bicycle to the train station, and then ride out to Overthorpe Park? Remember, most of these adventures would have occurred in the windy and rainy English winter of 1942-1943: moreover the Beurtons’ son, Peter, was born in September 1943, which would have hindered Sonia’s cycling excursions in the latter part of this period. Fuchs would not have been able to make regular forays to duboks in North Oxfordshire just to inform Sonia when the next meeting should be. Sonia promoted the notion that they walked around arm-in-arm, as if they were lovers, to throw off any suspicions. Yet most of this must be fantasy.
Sonia
probably met Fuchs for the first time in a café near Birmingham railway
station, in late summer 1942, and on that occasion they probably only checked
each other out. The Vassiliev Papers record that she had reported that Fuchs
had already passed papers to her by October 22 (and they also inform us that
Fuchs’s previous handler, Kremer, had returned to the Soviet Union in August
1942). MI5 later claimed that such meetings occurred only every two or three
months (echoing what Fuchs told them in his confession), and lasted only a few
minutes, which would appear to make more sense, with Fuchs needing to be
careful about absenting himself from Birmingham. If Sonia had indeed been
taking her bike to Oxford station at regular intervals, surely ‘keeping an eye
on her’ would have quickly led to her being stopped, and interrogated about her
business? And what happened if her bicycle had broken down and she had secret
plans in her basket?
Sonia’s handling of Fuchs lasted only one year. They had their infamous ‘Quebec Agreement’ meeting in mid-August 1943, and a final tryst in November. So, even allowing for MI5’s possible distortions to cover their ineptitude, she and Fuchs probably met only about three or four times before, which, logistically, makes much more sense. More poignantly, this period happened to coincide almost exactly with Len’s presence, and idleness, before being enlisted in the R. A. F. on November 18, 1943, as a trainee wireless operator. Len had expressed to Vesey, in October 1942, his annoyance at being turned down by the Air Force, whom he was keen to join, for health reasons. But his ill health was a myth. Had MI6 been working behind the scenes to disrupt his application? And what about the support of Rathbone, Cadogan and Eden for getting this man into the fight against the Nazis? Did Rathbone conveniently forget about the vociferous appeal she had made on behalf of the valiant British fighting-man?
That
there might be significance behind the apparent coincidence of Fuchs’s
productivity and Len’s wireless activity is too horrendous to consider, but
Beurton had surely taken over the operation of the radio in Kidlington from
Sonia. Was that what MI6 conceived as his role? Unless they were interested
purely in improved marital relations for Sonia and Len, MI6 must have had plans
for him. Yet he could not be used for intelligence purposes in the UK, and he
could possibly be a danger if used in the Armed Forces, as his later problems
in being accepted reveal. Farrell’s letter of March 1943 remains puzzling, but
could have been a coded reminder that Len needed to re-commit to the cause of British
Intelligence, and advice from his new-found ‘friend’ would be timely.
Whether
Sonia actually used her apparatus to transmit from the new address in Summertown
is mainly speculation. The discovery of her set in January 1943 has been
analysed studiously. Certainly she claimed that she transmitted regularly, and that
her children confirmed her nocturnal activities, but the evidence is sparse.
GCHQ, on behalf of RSS, claimed very unscientifically to Peter Wright that she
could not have transmitted undetected, but of course her messages might have
been intercepted, and decisions made to leave Sonia untouched and uninterrupted.
Wright himself wrote vaguely of Sonia’s lost messages, and scoured the globe
for them. William Tyrer’s dossier contains a number of unverifiable, mostly
undated, messages from Moscow to Sonia, but they are largely very
unbusinesslike and novelettish, and mostly predate the Fuchs era or are placed
after the war. If she did transmit anything from the Summertown address, it
would have been relatively harmless material, and used as a distraction to draw
attention away from Kidlington.
With
her knowledge and experience from direction-finding in Poland, however, it
would have been career suicide for her to transmit repeatedly from a single
address in densely populated England, and expect not to be detected. Thus one
must assume that either a) if she had been a genuine, freely-operating spy, she
would not have used her apparatus (maybe surprised that the authorities did not
investigate her equipment), but would have taken advantage instead of Len and
the Soviet Embassy to ensure that her secrets reached Moscow; or b) if she had
been aware of MI6’s attempts to control her, she would have transmitted only
her variant of ‘chicken-feed’, which would be enough to keep her watchers busy,
but would never reveal any information that might cast doubt on her ‘new’
loyalties, even if GC&CS were able to decipher her messages. In any case,
MI6 were stuck with the cuckoo in their nest, and, at the peak of Great
Britain-Soviet Union ‘co-operation’ in 1942-43, had to sit back and let things
take their course. Even though the extent of Sonia’s espionage may have been
overstated, she certainly duped British Intelligence in her coup with Fuchs.
Step 9: Keeping the Lid On, 1944-1946
‘The Firs’ at Great Rollright
After Fuchs’s departure for the USA in December 1943, and Len’s enlistment in the R. A. F., Sonia’s espionage activities waned. She claimed that she maintained her contacts, and continued to use her wireless, even stating that she sent her son, Micha, and daughter, Nina, to boarding-schools in Eastbourne and Epping respectively so that they would not notice her nocturnal transmissions. How the financially strained Beurtons found the money to pay for private education is never explained, although MI6 has been known to help out in this manner for well-deserving cases. Certainly Sonia helped Erich Henschke and other anti-fascists in the OSS project to drop agents into Germany, in late 1944, but since her brother Jürgen was actually engaged by the American OSS at the time, her actions would not have been regarded as suspicious.
She
also had some contact with Melita Norwood (TINA) who was probably of even more
use to the Soviets than was Fuchs, but this lasted only for a short time in
1945. Melita’s mother was on friendly terms with Sonia’s mother, and Sonia and
Melita had met shortly after Sonia’s arrival in 1941. It would not have been
efficient for Sonia, based in Oxfordshire, to have couriered for Norwood, who
was, after all, a KGB agent. The Vassiliev Papers (Yellow Notebook No. 1: File
82702) tell us that, even though Norwood had been recruited by the OGPU as far
back as 1935, the receipt of papers from her in June 1945 was only the second
batch she handed over. Moreover, she had left her job at the British
Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association in 1943 to bear her child, and was out
of action for over a year. Thus the claim that David Burke makes in The Spy
Who Came In From the Co-Op (p 14), that Sonia ‘was Melita Norwood’s
controller between 1941 and 1944’ should be quickly dismissed.
MI5,
in the person of Shillito, continued to dig around, noticing the anomalies in
Beurton’s sickness record. Shillito also
noted that Sonia’s first husband Rudolf had been arrested as a spy in Persia,
which resuscitated his suspicions about Sonia. Sargant of O.D.3a had to respond
to Air Ministry questions about Len’s dubious story concerning money and
health. It was apparent that the Service was now having a difficult time
keeping up consistent appearances of the plot to which it had colluded, and
struggled to explain why Beurton had been given a fake passport. The rumours
even reached the US Embassy, who in August 1944 were anxious to track down
Rudolf Hamburger’s wife and family. Roger Hollis himself was called upon to
respond to an inquiry from M. J. Lynch. In a letter dated August 10, 1944,
Hollis made the best fist he could, admitting that the Beurtons had ‘communist
sympathies’, and had probably been funded by the Soviets, adding, however, that
MI5’s enquiries had come to nothing, and that neither Mr or Mrs Beurton had
been noticed performing anything nefarious. He clearly hoped the problem would
go away.
In
any case, Moscow Centre at this time decided to loosen its ties with Sonia,
although it articulated this message via the Embassy, which had become a much
safer way of exchanging vital information by this time. One of the more
convincing messages cited in William Tyrer’s dossier, dated January 15, 1945,
and sent to Sklyarov in London, runs as follows:
“For
your personal information. In the mountain country [Switzerland]
Sonia was in contact with Albert [Rado] and his wife. The
counterintelligence in your country knows about Albert’s activities in the
mountain country and his work for us. There are grounds to suppose that to some
degree the counterintelligence may learn about Sonia’s work during her stay in
Albert’s country.
In this connection:
1. Any personal contact with Sonia should
be ceased and not to be resumed without our authorization.
2. To forbid Sonia to be engaged in our
work. She should lead the life of a model mother, wife and housekeeper. Report
on the execution. Direktor.”
Moscow was apparently alarmed by the break-up of
the Swiss Ring, and the fact that Alexander Foote and Radó might have betrayed
information about Sonia’s past activity. Yet there is a trace of
disingenuousness here: how could they have imagined that British
counter-intelligence was ignorant of Sonia’s career? Nevertheless, the pressure
increased, with Gouzenko’s defection in Canada in September 1945 causing panic,
and the closing down of multiple agents. The Vassiliev Notebooks (Yellow
Notebook, No, 1, p 86) confirm that Moscow cut off all contact with Sonia in
January 1946. When Fuchs returned to the UK in 1946, he had to seek out a new go-between.
Thereafter, while Sonia was said to communicate occasionally (the language is
ambiguous and puzzling), her sister Renate was used as an intermediary to get
funds to her. Sonia claimed that she still used her wireless set at this time,
having moved to The
Firs in Great Rollright, and Bob King of the
Discrimination Section of RSS reported to me that he was certain that her
messages were picked up by the RSS interceptors, but buried by senior officers.
Before the dramatic defection in July 1947 of
Alexander Foote, back to the British, and his subsequent interrogation by MI5,
one last twist in the story occurred, revealing the awkwardnesses of MI5
officers having to explain the situation. In April 1946, the FBI, still trying
to establish the whereabouts of Rudolf Hamburger, through J. Cimperman, contacted
MI5 to determine whether they might approach Ursula Beurton. This time, it fell
upon John Marriott (him of the XX Committee, now F2C), and he shared the
remarkable information that a letter from the FBI of July 13, 1945 had referred
to an address in Geneva (129 Rue de Lausanne), reportedly the address through
which Hamburger could be contacted, which was the same address where Mrs.
Beurton had last stayed in in Switzerland. Furthermore, she had indicated in
1941, when he arrived, that she thought her husband was still resident there.
One might imagine that an astute officer would either have concealed this information from the Americans, or, alternatively, shown great enthusiasm in following up this extraordinary coincidence. Marriott used it, however, to suggest to Cimperman that the relationships between the two men and Mrs. Beurton made it ‘undesirable’ to approach the lady. Yet he did promise to make further enquiries. The wretched Hamburger meanwhile had been taken back to Moscow from Persia, cruelly interrogated on the suspicion of being a spy, and sentenced to a long stay in a labour-camp. Peter Wright claims in Spycatcher that Hamburger had been an MI6 spy, although John Green comments that this story has never been corroborated.
Maybe foolishly (why would he think that Hamburger
still had a link with Geneva?), Marriott agreed to follow up, and turned to the
MI6 office responsible – Kim Philby. The same day, he wrote to Philby,
explaining the situation, and asking him to make enquiries about the address,
and provide, if possible, information on the whereabouts of Hamburger. Marriott
revealed his discomfort about Cimperman’s approach directly to Philby, stating:
“For a variety of reasons I do not feel
able to comply with this request,. . .”, hinting at a
tacit, awkward understanding between the two. Two weeks later, Philby, having initiated the appropriate search,
responded with a very enigmatic explanation, also confirming that his contact
was trying to establish whether Beurton was still living at that address. Continuing
to play his role of the simpleton, he added that ‘we have no knowledge of the
present whereabouts of HAMBURGER’. Marriott was soon able to enlighten Philby
that Beurton was now a Guardsman with the 1st Battalion of the
Coldstream Guards in the B.A.O.R. He then sent a very useless and bland letter
to Cimperman, which did nothing to shed light on the mystery of the shared
address. Apparently nobody followed up with Len or Sonia to learn more about
what may have been a Soviet safe-house. Philby clearly wanted to bury the
story.
Step 10: Foote and Fuchs: Allowing Sonia and Len to Escape
Alexander Foote
Two challenges remained for the Beurtons – the defection of Alexander Foote, and the arrest of Klaus Fuchs.
The
GRU had always harboured its suspicions about Foote’s loyalties, because of his
relationship with the British consulate in Geneva, and especially when he
encouraged Radó to take cover with him there in November 1943. After Foote was
released from prison in November 1944, he made his way to Paris, where he made
the extraordinarily bold decision to travel to Moscow to face the music,
arriving in mid-January 1945. During the next couple of years, MI5 and MI6
communicated desultorily on Foote’s fate. Foote, meanwhile, was undergoing
intense interrogation, and his brazenness in afforming his loyalty must have
impressed the Soviets. He was sent to spy school, and on March 7, 1947, left
Moscow for Berlin, with a new identity, and a mission to operate as a Soviet
agent in South America. On July 2, he defected to the British authorities in
Berlin. Claude Dansey did not see his hero return: he had died, discarded,
disliked and dejected, on June 11.
Foote
was initially interrogated by MI6, and quickly revealed, as is evident from the
first Interrogation Report of July 14, that he had worked alongside ‘Sonia’ in
the Rote Drei, and that ‘Sonia’ was the alias given to her by the
Russian Secret Service, her real name being Ursula KUTSCINSKI’ [sic]. MI5’s
Serpell (who had replaced an exasperated Shillito by then) was sent out to
interrogate Foote, who immediately voiced his concerns about Sonia’s probable
espionage in Britain. Foote was brought
back to the UK, under an assumed name, and arrived at Northolt on August 7. All
this must have been a little embarrassing for MI6, who know saw matters
spiralling out of control, with officers who had not been ‘indoctrinated’ in
the case, including the new Director-General, spreading the news around. Percy
Sillitoe contacted the Canadians about the Gouzenko connection; Serpell
excitedly got in touch with the American Embassy. Foote, meanwhile, had a
crisis of conscience: Sonia had, after all, been his collaborator and tutor,
and he sent her a furtive message via Fred Ullmann, another International
Brigader who had originally helped recruit him, that she and Len should be on
their guard.
This
news re-awakened MI5, with the familiar Marriott (now B1b) seeking information
on the Beurtons’ whereabouts, since they had lost track of Len since his
discharge in August 1945. He immediately
requested a Home Office Warrant check put on the Beurton’s correspondence, as
it had apparently just come to his notice that they had both been Soviet spies
in Switzerland during the early part of the war. Further revelations from the
interrogation of Foote came to light: “Foote suggested that another symptom of
SONIA’s continued link with MOSCOW after she reached England was contained in a
message he had from Moscow in 1941 about the efforts to get BEURTON back to the
U.K. The message said that ELEANOR RATHBONE and others were helping.”
Marriott
treated the deluge of Foote’s divulgements as if they were all news to him, and
wrote, apparently without irony: “It is not clear why Ursula Beurton left
Switzerland as she did at the end of 1940 to proceed to this country, but on
the evidence of Foote she did so with at least Russian concurrence and the
possibility therefore cannot be excluded that she came here with a mission.” (Indeed. Had he not read the files
in the Registry?) On August 18, he disingenuously tried to finesse the issue by
noting that ‘the circumstances of the issue of this latter passport are known
to me, and are not relevant to my inquiries.’ The outcome was that Serpell, accompanied
by William Skardon, went to The Firs on September 13, to interrogate
Sonia and Len.
This
extraordinary encounter has been thoroughly reported on, by such as Chapman
Pincher and John Green. It seemed the intention of Serpell and Skardon was to put
Sonia at her ease, by assuring her that they knew that she had not engaged in
any espionage activity in Britain, but instead indicating that they wanted to
learn more about what had happened in Switzerland. Yet Sonia had been prepared
for the visit by Foote. While Serpell’s continued references to her marriage
unnerved Sonia, she realised that if she stuck to her guns, and remained
silent, no ill could come out of the exercise. After all, British Intelligence
had as much to lose from the truth coming out as she did.
While
the focus of the questions seemed to be on events in Switzerland (and
Marriott’s notes had indicated that questions concerning Len Beurton’s passport
were uppermost in his mind), Serpell and Skardon seemed singularly uninterested
in Len, who joined the gathering later, and even indicated that he thought that
he was on their side (which, of course, he had been, for a while). The behaviour
of the officers in this encounter bewildered Sonia: it was as if MI5 had been
trying to catch her out, but they performed with total clumsiness. Serpell and
Skardon revealed events in Switzerland that could only have been communicated
by Foote. Certainly, the visit confirmed that any espionage activity by her and
Len would have to cease at that stage, but Moscow had already decreed that
outcome. Or was it a subtle indication that MI5 knew all about her, and that
she and Len should make their escape while the going was good? That is an
interpretation that John Green hypothesizes. Remarkably, the Home Office
Warrant letter checks on not only Sonia, but on other members of her family,
were withdrawn immediately after this encounter. So life carried on smoothly
for a couple of years.
The arrest of Fuchs, on February 3, 1950, was more alarming. Sonia feared that he would reveal everything under interrogation, and, indeed, as early as February 20, J. D. Robertson (B2A) remarked that Sonia might be induced to talk because of the announcement of his arrest, although it is not clear what prompted him to make that connection. Fuchs had indeed spoken of a female contact he had had encounters with in Banbury, which should have set some MI5 pulses beating faster. Sonia herself wrote that ‘when the press mentioned that Klaus had been meeting a foreign woman with black hair in Banbury I expected my arrest any day’. Frank Close, in his biography of Fuchs, Trinity, reports that ‘the files record enigmatically that she was “touch not”’, but indicates that a pencilled annotation explained that this should be “tough nut”. Quite so: I have not been able to verify this, but the message is clear.
In
any case, Sonia jumped the gun, and escaped with her two youngest children to
East Germany on February 27, while Fuchs’s trial was under way. The
extraordinary gaffe in this exercise was that no effort at preventing her
departure was made, despite the obvious recognition that MI5 had shown (such as
in Robertson’s note) that she might have been connected to the case. It was
obviously easier to have her out of the way. She was untouchable. As Sonia herself wrote: “Either it was
complete stupidity on the part of MI5 never to have connected me with Klaus, or
they may have let me go with it, since every further discovery would have
increased their disgrace.”
Sonia’s
departure must have been recorded, yet many MI5 officers remained in the dark.
They even expressed the desire for bringing her and Len in for questioning.
Fuchs continued to reveal more. On June 16, Robertson reported that Jürgen
Kuczynski was the person who had originally put Fuchs in touch with the
Russians. On June 22, a letter was sent
to the GPO, requesting a Home Office Warrant for Sonia, as ‘we have recently received information which indicates that Ursula
Beurton has not relinquished her connection with Soviet espionage since her
arrival in the U.K.in 1941’. Even Director-General Sillitoe was on the act,
asking Rutherford on July 25 about the whereabouts of Sonia and her husband. On
June 27, Len Beurton, who had been recovering from a broken leg sustained in a motorcycle
accident, was also allowed to leave the country untouched. On August 22,
Robertson at last learned that Sonia had flown the coop. Not until November did
Fuchs, obviously having been informed that Sonia and Len had safely left the
country, admit that Sonia was his contact, and on December 18 he recognized her
in a photograph. All through 1950, Liddell made no comment in his diaries about
the Kuczynski link – or, if he did, the passages have been redacted. When Sonia
was at last identified, his chagrin, and that of all senior officers in MI5 and
MI6, must have been immense.
Conclusions
Claude Dansey
What started out as an imaginative opportunity for MI6 turned into a nightmare. It enabled the entry into Britain of a spy dedicated to the communist cause, one who helped her masters acquire secrets that would have been used to destroy the pluralist democracy. No doubt encouraged by the fruitful achievements of the emerging MI5 operation of developing double-agents (at that time, SNOW), Claude Dansey, the deputy to Stewart Menzies, alighted upon the availability of Ursula Hamburger to implement a similar project for Soviet spies. He was in Switzerland from September to November 1939, as Sonia’s divorce proceedings culminated. His man, van den Heuvel, and Farrell, the Passport Control Officer who was van den Heuvel’s deputy, became the instruments to make the plan a reality. In believing that they were saving Sonia’s life by abetting her escape, MI6 succumbed to the illusion that she and Len would be permanently beholden to them.
Yet
managing so-called ‘double-agents’ is a hazardous business. It requires both
very tight operational security, restricting knowledge of the project to as few
persons as possible, and maintaining exclusive control over the agents’
movements and communications. The handling agency can never be sure that the
person assumed to having been turned has made an ideological about-face, and
switched his or her loyalties. Thus, unless a very tight rein is held over the
agents’ behaviour, there is always the risk that, in their communications, they
will betray the fact that they are being manipulated, or even arrange
unsurveilled meetings where they will be able to describe what is going on. That
is why they are properly called ‘controlled enemy agents’. MI5 knew this; the
Abwehr knew this; the CIA, in its enthusiasm for transplanting the Double-Cross
techniques to their own theatre of operations after the war, were slow to
recognize the truth. For some reason MI6 did not think through the implications
of bringing Sonia and Len into their fold.
The
brunt of the burden fell upon MI5, who were responsible for domestic security
against subversion and espionage. And the archive shows clearly how the service
was divided over how to handle Len and Sonia once they arrived in Britain. The
senior officers (Liddell and White, but not the Director-General) were surely
complicit with MI6 in the scheme. Junior officers and recruits (such as
Shillito, Cazalet, Reed, Vesey, J. D. Robertson, Bagot, Serpell) were kept in
the dark, and left to stumble around, pursuing leads, until they became too
energized in their suspicions, recommended some kind of interrogation or
prosecution, and had to be gently talked out of it. (At a high-level meeting on
January 25, 1950 between Lord Portal, Roger Makins, Liddell and White at the
Ministry of Supply, this uncomfortable truth was even admitted.) The middle
ranks (such as Marriott, Hollis, and Curry) were no doubt brought, at least
partially, into the subterfuge, and were delegated the unpleasant tasks of
dealing with other organisations, such as the Foreign Office, MI6 and the FBI. As
can be seen, primarily in Marriott’s anguished correspondence, they struggled
dismally with explaining away the inexplicable. The complexities of the project
and its intelligence ramifications were clearly too deep to be entrusted to the
Directors-General, one a soldier (Petrie) and the other a policeman (Sillitoe),
although Petrie’s anti-communist vigour would mean that he probably had to have
things explained to him after the Green case.
Above
all, the exercise shows how improbable the theory must be that Roger Hollis
single-handedly, as a Soviet mole, managed to protect Sonia (and Len) from the
attention and prosecution that they obviously deserved. This theory has taken
root so deeply that new historical works and biographies regularly appear that
take it for granted that the assertions of Chapman Pincher and Peter Wright
should be accepted unquestionably. Hollis’s guilt is affirmed purely on the
basis that he must have protected Sonia (Len is rarely mentioned). The mass of
detail that shows how Sonia and Len were nurtured, supported, assisted,
recruited, even lied for – and then deliberately ignored, and allowed to escape
– proves that it could not have been because of Hollis’s skills in throwing a
blanket of ignorance around the couple with the outcome that they were thus
able to remain unmolested. Even if Hollis had possessed the power and authority
to insist that they were harmless, the widespread knowledge about their
background, the illicit marriage, the recruitment of Len by MI6, the phony
stories about ex-husbands, tuberculosis, and ski-ing injuries, about forged
passports, dubious medical certificates, and unlikely inheritances would have
made his protestations a laughing-stock.
In
the English edition of her memoir, Sonia wrote: “I know no Fifth Man, and I
must also spoil the speculation or, as some writers state, ‘the fact’ that I
ever had anything to do with the one-time director of MI5, Roger Hollis”. That
may be one of the few true statements she made in her book. Later in life,
however, she wryly admitted that she mused over the possibility that someone in
MI5 was protecting her. Indeed, madam.
As
for the GRU, Sonia’s penetration of British atomic research was a coup,
although perhaps not as astounding as the mythology has made it. Fuchs was her
source for only a year, and modern assessments indicate that, as far as the
United Kingdom was concerned, Engelbert Broda and Melita Norwood were probably
far more valuable contributors to the Soviet’s purloining of weapons secrets.
Sonia’s connection with Norwood has often been overplayed. Yet Sonia’s
achievements were a significant blow to the prestige of British Intelligence, which
had held a worldwide reputation now revealed to be unmerited. In the first
couple of decades after the war, the Soviet Union and East Germany openly
denied the activities of their spies, wanting to impress their citizens that
their scientific achievements were attributable to Communist ingenuity.
Only
when the spy scandals were rolled out in the United States and Great Britain
did the mood change to one of pride in how their intelligence services had
outfoxed the West’s. Then they lauded openly the achievements of their ‘atomic
spies’, promoting memoirs like Sonia’s. President Putin, relying on his
public’s fragile connection with history, after a brief fling promoting Soviet
spy exploits (see the case of Svetlana Lokhova and The Spy Who Changed
History, at https://coldspur.com/four-books-on-espionage/
) seems now to want to return to the Cold War status quo ante,
reinforcing the idea that the Soviet Union’s success with nuclear weaponry owed
more to Russian skills than it did to underhand espionage and the theft of the
discoveries of former allies.
One
has to assume that the GRU in Moscow knew exactly what was going on at the
time, and took a back seat while MI6 floundered. Immediately Sonia or Len was
first approached by MI6 with any sort of feeler, each would have reported it to
Moscow. Thus all further moves would have been passed on as well. Anthony Blunt
was keeping his bosses informed, and relayed to them the lukewarm attention
that Hugh Shillito paid to CP and GRU spies. The GRU must have wondered exactly
what MI6 was up to, if it believed the opposition’s service could manipulate Soviet
agents with such naivety. Indeed, around this time, the GRU’s sister service,
the NKGB (as the NKVD-KGB was known at that time), was so dumbfounded by the fact
that British Intelligence could allow the Cambridge Ring to flourish that it
issued an internal report suggesting that the whole exercise was one of
disinformation. Referring to the Double-Cross (XX) Committee as one of the
vital institutions involved, Elena Modrzchinskaya, the head of the Third
Department of the NKGB’s First Directorate, published the report in November
1942: it took almost two years for the suspicions to be disproved, and
credibility in the sources re-established.
Yet,
if MI6 and MI5 showed an alarming amateurishness about the whole process, the
GRU’s agents likewise put on a dismal display of tradecraft. Before placing
‘illegals’ in the western democracies, the GRU and OGPU/NKVD invested an
enormous amount of time in creating solid ‘legends’ for their agents, where,
supported by false passports, individuals of indeterminate central and eastern
European origin were allowed to establish convincing identities and occupations
in the cities from which they operated. The GRU could not have exerted any
influence on the stories that Sonia and Len concocted before embarking on their
journeys to Britain, yet they – especially Sonia – should have been well
indoctrinated into the necessity of maintaining a coherent narrative about
their previous travel, objectives, sources of funds, business activities, and
disabilities.
Sonia and Len behaved, however, completely amateurishly. Their accounts to the immigration authorities were absurd. It was as if they did not even discuss what their separate stories should be if they were interrogated, and how these rigmaroles would mesh together. The resulting narrative was so ridiculous that it should immediately have been discredited, and the suspects hauled in. We now know, of course, why that did not happen. Perhaps the Soviets, and Len and Sonia in particular, were so sure of MI6’s game-plan that they felt that they did not need to bother. But that assumption would have been based on granting the fragmented and pluralistic British intelligence services a discipline and unity that may have existed in the Soviet Union, but simply was unrealistic in a democratic society.
What it boils down to is that the truth is indeed stranger than anything that the ex-MI6 officer John le Carré, master of espionage fiction, could have dreamed up. If he ever devised a plot whereby the service that recruited him had embarked on such a flimsy and outrageous project, and tried to cover it up in the ham-fisted way that the real archive shows, while all the time believing that the opposition did not know what was going on, his publisher would have sent him back to the drawing-board.
This month’s Commonplace entries can be found here.
I
was intending to publish this month the final chapter in the series The
Mystery of the Undetected Radios, but was inhibited from doing so by the
closure of the National Archives at Kew. I had performed 90% of the research,
but needed to inspect one critical file to complete my story. Since my doughty
researcher, Dr. Kevin Jones, will not be able to photograph it until we get the
‘All Clear’, the story will have to remain on hold. Instead, I use this month’s
bulletin to sum up progress on a number of other projects.
Contents:
Sonia and Len Beurton
Ben Macintyre
Prodding Comrade Stalin
The
National Archives and Freedom of Information
Professor Frank Close at the
Bodleian
The BBC and Professor
Andrew
Nigel West’s new publications,
and a look at ELLI
The Survival of Gösta Caroli
Dave Springhall and the GRU
‘Superspy Daughter in Holiday-camp
Tycoon Romance Drama!’ (exclusive)
China and the Rhineland Moment
Sonia
and Len Beurton
I published the recent bulletin, The Letter from Geneva, because I believed it was important to get this story out before Ben MacIntyre’s book on Sonia appears. The fact that Len Beurton, Sonia’s bigamous husband, had acted as an agent-cum-informant for SIS in Switzerland seemed to me to be of immense importance for Sonia’s story, and the way that she was treated in the United Kingdom. Sonia herself wrote in her memoir that, when Skardon and Serpell came to interview her in 1947, they treated Len as if he were opposed to communism, rather than being an agent for it, abetting his wife as a recognized but possibly reformed spy or courier for Moscow, and the contents of the letter helped to explain why.
I
wanted to have my conclusions published in a respectable medium, so as to have
a more serious stake placed in the ground. I could not afford to wait for the
more obscure journals on intelligence matters (and then perhaps get a
rejection), and instead considered that the London Review of Books might
be suitable. The editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, could conceivably have a personal
interest in the story (she is an Eitingon, and has written about her grandfather’s
cousin Leon, who managed the project to kill Trotsky). The LRB
frequently runs long articles on off-beat subjects (in fact, it runs so many earnest
leftish political pieces that one sometimes forgets what its mission is
supposed to be), and it could presumably turn round my piece quickly. I thus
sent my bulletin, as an exclusive, to Ms. Wilmers, with a covering letter
explaining the appeal it could have to her readers, the opportunity for a
scoop, and describing how I would re-work my article to make it a suitable
contribution for her periodical.
After
a week, I had heard nothing – not even an acknowledgment. (Coldspur 0 : The
Establishment 1) So I made a similar approach to the Times Literary
Supplement, with obviously different wording in the cover letter. The
Editor, Stig Abell (who had, after all, commissioned a review of Misdefending
the Realm a couple of years ago), responded very promptly, and informed me
he was passing my piece to a sub-editor to review. A couple of days later, I
received a very polite and appreciative email from the sub-editor, who offered
me his regrets that he did not think it was suitable for the periodical. That
was it. I thus decided to self-publish, on coldspur. (Coldspur 1 : The
Establishment 1)
I have since been in contact with a few experts on this aspect of Sonia’s and Len’s case, and have discussed the puzzling circumstances of the letter, why Farrell chose that method of communication, and how he must have expected its passage to be intercepted. Why did he choose private mail instead of the diplomatic bag? Would the diplomatic bag have taken the same route as airmail, and would the German have opened that, too? Why did he not send an encrypted message over cable (although the consulate had probably run out of one-time pads by then), or wireless to SIS in London? Presumably because he did not want Head Office to see it: yet this method was just as risky. And what kind of relationship did he possibly think he could nurture with Len in those circumstances? No convincing explanation has yet appeared.
Ben
Macintyre
Meanwhile,
what about Ben Macintyre’s forthcoming book on Sonia, Agent Sonya,
subtitled variously as Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, or as Lover,
Mother, Soldier, Spy? The publisher indicates that it is ‘expected on
September 15, 2020’, yet Mr. Macintyre himself seems to be lagging a bit. His
US website (to which I was directed at http://benmacintyre.com/US/
) shouts at us in the following terms: ‘The Spy and the Traitor Arriving
September 2018’, but even his UK website needs some refreshment, as it informs
us that the paperback edition of his book on Gordievsky will be published on
May 30, 2019 (http://benmacintyre.com/about-the-author/
), and lists events in 2019 where the author will be signing copies of the same
book. Wake up, Benny boy! This is 2020.
So,
back to the publisher of Agent Sonya, where we can find information at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612487/agent-sonya-by-ben-macintyre/
. The promotional material includes the following passage: “In 1942, in a quiet village in the
leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with
her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula
Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign
accent.” This is all rather disturbing, however. Sonia’s husband, Len, returned
from Switzerland only in July 1942, and they lived in Kidlington for a short
time before moving to Summertown, in Oxford. Her third child, Peter, was not
born until 1943. Len did not work as a machinist at that time, since he was unemployed
until called up by the R.A.F. in November 1943. And their name was not ‘Burton’
but ‘Beurton’. Still, ‘thin’ and ‘elegant’ might, with a little imagination, conceivably
be accurate, and she surely spoke English with a foreign accent. Not a
promising start, however.
So what is ailing our intrepid journalist? I
hope things improve from here onwards. I shall place my advance order, and
await the book’s arrival, as expectantly as the publisher itself. In fact, I
heard from my sources earlier this month that Macintyre has started ‘tweeting’
about his new book. Meanwhile, I believe I have taken the necessary initiative
by posting my analysis first. (Coldspur 2 : The Establishment 1)
Prodding Comrade Stalin
Neo-Keynesian Stalin?
It continues to dismay me how Stalin’s pernicious influence casts a depressing and inaccurate shadow over the history of the twentieth century. We can now read how President Putin attempts to resuscitate the days of the Great Patriotic War, emphasising Stalin’s role as a leader, and minimising events such as the Nazi-Soviet pact or the massacres of the Katyn Forest. At the end of last month, the New York Times carried a story that described how the Russian authorities have tried to discredit an amateur historian who discovered mass graves of Stalin’s victims in Sandarmokh in Karelia, near the White Sea. The State Military society is arguing that ‘thousands of people buried at Sandarmokh are not all Stalin’s victims but also include Soviet soldiers executed by the Finnish Army during World War II’, which is palpable nonsense.
Thus my disgust was intense when I read an
article by one Lionel Barber in the Spectator of April 4. It included
the following passage:
“Covid-19 is indeed the Great Leveller.
Conventional wisdoms have been shattered. But crises offer opportunities. Wise
heads should be planning ahead. FDR, Churchill, and, yes, Stalin lifted their
sights in 1942-43 as the war against Nazi Germany began to turn. Prodded by
gifted public servants like Keynes and others, these leaders thought about the
future of Europe, the balance of power and the institutions of the post-war
world.”
The idea that Stalin could have been ‘prodded’
by ‘gifted public servants’ is a topic to which perhaps only Michael Wharton (Peter
Simple of the Daily Telegraph) could have done justice. I can alternatively
imagine a canvas by Repin, perhaps, where the wise Stalin strokes his chin as
he listens to a deputation from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, as if saying:
‘You make a strong point there, Alexey Dimitrovich. Maybe world revolution is
no longer necessary. I shall change my plans immediately.’ I was propelled into
sending a letter to the Editor of the magazine, which ran (in part) as follows:
“I wonder whether the Stalin Mr. Barber refers
to is the same Joseph Stalin who incarcerated and killed millions of his own
people, and then, after the war, enslaved eastern Europe, killing many of its
democratic leaders and thousands of those who defied him, as he prepared for
the inevitable collision with the ‘capitalist’ west? I doubt whether the despot
Stalin was ‘prodded’ by anyone, except possibly by a distorted reading of Marx
and Lenin, and certainly not by ‘gifted public servants’, whether they were
Keynesian or not. The ‘future of Europe’, especially that of Poland, was a
topic that, after Yalta, caused a sharp rift between the Allies, and led to the
Cold War. Where did Mr. Barber learn his history?”
The Editor did not see fit to publish my
letter. I do not know what is the saddest episode of this exercise: 1) The fact
that Lionel Barber, who was Editor of the FinancialTimes from
2005 until January of this year, and is thus presumably an educated person,
could be so desperately wrong about the character and objectives of Stalin; 2)
The fact that the Editor of the Spectator was not stopped in his tracks
when he read this passage, and did not require Mr. Barber to modify it; 3) The
fact that no other Spectator reader apparently noticed the distortion,
or bothered to write to the Editor about it; or 4) The fact that the Editor,
having read my letter, determined that the solecism was so trivial that no
attention needed to be drawn to it. (Coldspur 2 : The Establishment 2)
To remind myself of the piercing insights of
Michael Wharton, I turned to my treasured copy of The Stretchford
Chronicles: 25 Years of Peter Simple, and quickly alighted on the following
text, from 1968:
Poor
old has-beens
“The Soviet Government,” said a Times leader
writer the other day, “has become hopelessly outdated and out of touch with
contemporary movements at home and abroad.”
So the Soviet Government is hopelessly
outdated, is it? It has just imposed its will on the Czechs and Slovaks by
force. And this is supposed to be hopelessly outdated in an age which, thanks
to perverted science (a highly contemporary movement if there ever was one),
has seen and will see force repeatedly and successfully applied on a scale
undreamed of by the conquerors of the past.
So force is outdated. Treachery is outdated.
War is outdated. Pain is out dated. Death is outdated. Evil itself is not only
outdated but out of touch with contemporary movements at home and abroad.
That a writer, presumably intelligent,
certainly literate and possibly able to influence the opinions of others, can
believe these things is positively terrifying. If the Russian Communist
leaders, as we are told day in day out, are now cowering in the Kremlin in a
state of extreme terror here is some little comfort for them.
When Soviet tanks are on the Channel Coast, shall
we still be telling ourselves that the Soviet Government is outdated and out of
touch? As we are herded into camps for political re-education or worse, shall
we still go on saying to each other, with a superior smile: ‘This is really too
ridiculously outdated for words. I mean, it’s quite pathetically out of touch
with contemporary movements at home and abroad.’?”
There was as much chance of Brezhnev and his
cronies paying heed to ‘contemporary movements at home and abroad’ in 1968 as
there was of Stalin being prodded ‘by gifted public servants’ in 1946. Pfui!
As a final commentary on this calamity, a few weeks ago I read Norman Naimark’s Stalin and the Fate of Europe, published last year, which explained how duplicitous Stalin was in his dealings with western political entities, and how he restrained European communist parties until the Soviet Union successfully tested the bomb in August 1949. One of the books cited by Naimark was Grigory Tokaev’s Stalin Means War, published in 1951. I acquired a copy, and read how, in 1947, Colonel Tokaev had been commissioned by Stalin to acquire German aeronautical secrets, by any means necessary, including the kidnapping of scientists, to enable the Soviet Union to construct planes that could swiftly carry atomic bombs to New York. Thus would Stalin’s plans for world revolution be enforced.
‘Stalin Means War’
I do not think this book is a hoax. Tokaev
managed to escape, with his wife and young daughter, to the United Kingdom at
the end of 1947, where he had a distinguished academic career, and managed to
avoid Moscow’s assassins. He died in 2003, in Cheam, in leafy Surrey, just a
few miles from where I was born and grew up. I wish I had had the honour of
shaking his hand. His book provides undeniable evidence that Stalin was not
listening to gifted civil servants, and musing about the peaceful organisation
of the world’s institutions. He wanted war.
The National Archives and Freedom of
Information
In my recent piece on Rudolf Peierls (The Mysterious Affair . . . Part 2) I drew attention to the increasing trend for archival material that had previously been released to be withdrawn and ‘retained’. Further inspection, prompted by a deeper search by Dr. Kevin Jones, reveals that an enormous amount of material is no longer available, especially in the ‘AB’ (records of the Atomic Energy Authority) category. I have counted 43 files alone in AB 1, 2, 3, & 4, mainly on Rudolf Peierls, including his correspondence, as well as multiple reports on Pontecorvo, and including Fuchs’s interview by Perrin. For instance, if you look up AB 1/572, you will find a tantalising introduction to the papers of Professor Peierls, described as ‘Correspondence with Akers, Arms, Blackman [Honor?], Blok, Bosanquet [Reginald?], Brown . . .’, from the period 1940-1947: yet the rubric informs us that ‘This record is closed while access is under review’.
I suspect some of these files may never have
been made available, but it is hard to tell unless one has been keeping a very
close watch on things. For example, the file on Perrin’s interviews with Fuchs (AB
1/695) has been well mined by other researchers, and the fact that the
statement ‘Opening Date: 16 July 2001’ appears below the standard message would
suggest that this file has indeed been withdrawn after a period of
availability. But does the lack of any such date indicate that the file was
never released, or is the absence merely the inconsistent application of
policy? Several months ago, I referred to another provocative file, HO 532/3
(‘Espionage activities by individuals: Klaus Fuchs and Rudolf Peierls’),which
has a different status of ‘Closed or Retained Document: Open Description’,
where the rubric reads ‘This record is retained by a government department’,
and has never been sent to the National Archives. It puzzles me somewhat as to
why the Home Office would even acknowledge the existence of such a
controversial file, as an open description without delivery just encourages
speculation, but I suppose that is how bureaucracy works, sometimes.
Dr. Jones (who has made it his speciality to
find his way among prominent archives) offered me his personal interpretation,
which may be very useful for other researchers. He wrote to me as follows:
“Where a file is stated to be ‘closed while access is under review’, but has ‘Open Document’ in the ‘Closure status’ field (e.g. AB 1/572), then the file has always been available, until its ‘disappearance’.
Similarly, as with AB 1/695, if there is a specific ‘Record opening date’ the previously retained file was made available from that date, again until its ‘disappearance’.
With the likes of HO 532/3, where it is stated ‘Retained by Department under Section 3.’”, the file has indeed never been available.
Many of these ‘Retained’ files do reveal the file’s title (the ‘Open Description’) to tantalise the researcher, but many such files are listed in the catalogue with no title/description.
Where a specific government department is named in a retained file entry (e.g. FO, MOD, etc.), it is obliged to process a FoI request, though don’t expect a quick response, especially if they are composing various forms of waffle to justify not releasing the file! When the ‘government department’ is not named (as with HO 532/3), there is good chance it is retained by MI5/MI6, both of which are exempt from the FoI Act (well, certainly the latter, which also holds the retained SOE files; not 100% sure about MI5). In any instance, click the ‘Contact Us’ button and the TNA’s FoI team will inform you of the good/bad news.”
Occasionally, therefore, the researcher is
invited to submit an FoI (Freedom of Information) request, as an attempt to
challenge the status of the censored file. I performed this over the above
Espionage file, on the grounds that no conceivable reason could be justified
for withholding it now that the subjects (and their offspring) are all dead,
but received just an acknowledgment. My colleague Denis Lenihan had approached
GCHQ concerning the HASP file (referred to by Nigel West and Peter Wright), which
was claimed to contain transcripts of Soviet wireless messages intercepted in
Sweden during WW II. Denis requested its release, as no conceivable aspect of
British security could be damaged through its publication, but his request was
rejected by the GCHQ Press Office (as if it were simply a matter of PR).
Denis then brought my attention to another
statutory body whither appeals could be sent – the Investigatory Powers
Tribunal. I had just read an article in the Historical Journal of March
2014, by Christopher J. Murphy and Daniel W. B. Lomas (‘Return to Neverland?
Freedom of Information and the History of British Intelligence’), which very
quickly explained that ‘the intelligence and security services fall outside its
provisions, in marked contrast to the comparable legislation in the United
States . . .’ I thus wondered why we
bothered, and under what circumstances any of the security services (MI5, SIS,
GCHQ) would feel they should have to even consider such requests. But, after
all, Kew does advertise the facility: is it an exercise in futility?
Denis wrote to me as follows: “While they’re right about the FOI legislation, the security
agencies react in odd but sometimes helpful ways. I remember Pincher saying
somewhere that the Romer Report (re the Houghton/Molody/Kroger case) was
obtained from MI5 by someone who applied under FOI. I once sought a document
from MI5 and got the classic Sir Humphrey response: ‘while MI5 is not subject
to the FOI Act, it has been decided to treat your application under that Act.
It has been unsuccessful’.” That was rich – so generous! Then Denis went on to
say that the authors of the article appeared not to be aware of the
Investigatory Powers Tribunal, to which he had turned with the HASP material.
(On his recommendation, I made a companion request, referring to the fact that
a reference to HASP was evident on some of the RSS records, and that it was
thus in the public interest to make the material available. I have since
conducted some deep research into the HASP phenomenon: I shall report in full
in next month’s coldspur.)
I followed up Denis’s valuable lead to Chapman Pincher’s Dangerous
to Know. Pincher’s account of the application, and its rejection, can be
seen in the chapter ‘The Elli Riddle’, on pages 318 and 319. An official of the
Intelligence and Security Committee suggested that Pincher complain to the
Tribunal about MI5’s lack of action on a ‘missing’ report on Gouzenko made by
Roger Hollis. The Tribunal had been set up in 2000, under the Human Rights Act,
to consider complaints about the public authorities, but Pincher had,
surprisingly, never heard of it. It took notice of Pincher’s request (would it
have paid heed to submissions by those of lesser standing, without a platform
in the media?), and required MI5 to respond on the status of the Hollis report.
MI5 sent two items of correspondence to Pincher, stating that ‘despite an extensive search of the Service’s archives ‘it had to conclude that no record of the important interview was ever made’. And that appeared to be the end of the affair – until William Tyrer, through an astonishing display of terrier-like determination, managed to extract a copy from MI5, having first discovered a reference to a vital telegram in the Cleveland Cram archive. Tyrer wrote up his conclusions in 2016, in an article in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence (see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2016.1177404), and Denis Lenihan has analysed Tyrer’s findings in Roger Redux: Why the Roger Hollis Case Won’t Go Away.
As the Tribunal’s website (https://www.ipt-uk.com/ ) explains, the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 did strengthen
provisions for the public to make appeals, but it is not clear to me that the
withholding of files really fits into what the IPT declares its mission, namely
‘a right of redress for anyone who believes they have been a victim of unlawful
action by a public authority using covert investigative techniques’. That
sounds more like heavy-handed surveillance techniques, or officers and agents
masquerading as person they were not in order to infiltrate possibly dissident groups.
And the organisation has a very bureaucratic and legalistic methodology, as the
recent decision on an MI5 case shows (see: https://www.ipt-uk.com/judgments.asp, and note that the Tribunal cannot spell ‘Between’). It is
difficult to see how the body could sensibly process a slew of failed FoI
requests. And what about the Home Office, retaining aged documents? That
doesn’t come under the grouping of security services.
Yet all of this fails to grapple with the main question: why has
the Government suddenly become so defensive and concerned about records dealing
with matters of atomic power and energy, most of them over seventy years old,
and many of which have already been dissected in serious books? In the articles
to which I provided links beforehand, Michael Holzman and Robert Booth say it
all. The lack of a proper explanation is astounding, and the blunderbuss
approach just draws even more attention to the fact that the civil service is
out of control. Did Peierls’s letters to Blok and others betray some secrets
that would be dangerous for the country’s foes to get hold of? I cannot imagine
it. Maybe all will be revealed soon, but the furtive and uncommunicative way in
which these files are being withheld just induces more distrust of the
authorities, and their condescending attitude to the public. (Coldspur 2 : The
Establishment 3)
Professor Frank Close at the Bodleian
Professor Frank Close
My status as Friend of the Bodleian entitles me to attend events staged by that institution, and a couple of months ago I received the following invitation: “Our first video by Professor Frank Close, available exclusively to the Friends, can be viewed here. In this talk, ‘Trinity: Klaus Fuchs and the Bodleian Library’, Professor Close uses the Bodleian’s collections to describe an extraordinary tale of Communist spies and atomic bombs.” I viewed the presentation on YouTube, but I don’t believe that it is available solely through subscription, as the above link appears to function properly.
It does not appear that Klaus Fuchs
ever visited the Bodleian Library, but Professor Close uses Bodleian resources,
such as the correspondence of Rudolf Peierls, and the photographic collection
of Tony Skyrme, another Trinity College, Cambridge man, and contributor to the
Manhattan Project (see https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/3424 ) to weave a fascinating story about Fuchs. Skyrme
accompanied Fuchs and the Peierls family on a ski-ing holiday in Switzerland in
1947, and produced a riveting set of photographs of that adventure, some of
which Close reproduces in Trinity, his biography of Fuchs. Close also
makes some fascinating linkages between the dates that Fuchs claimed vacation
days from his work at Birmingham, and the timings of wireless messages to
Moscow reporting on the communication of his latest secrets. He does, however,
avoid any possible hint of controversy over Peierls’s career, ignoring what I
have written about him, even though his final message was a very pertinent one
about the relationship between Fuchs and those who ‘adopted’ him, and how he
eventually betrayed them.
Since I have read Close’s book, and
am familiar with the overall story, the pace of his presentation was a little
slow for me. Yet I could see that Close is a very gifted lecturer, and must
have truly energized his students when he was a working physics don. I
accordingly sent an email congratulating him on his performance, at the same
time asking a question about the source of some of his data. I never received a
reply. Apparently I have fallen out of favour with the learned professor, who
was so eager to communicate with me a few years ago. (Coldspur 2: The
Establishment 4)
The BBC and Professor Andrew
Readers may recall my last
Round-up, in November 2019, where I left with the optimistic projection that,
having been able to speak to Mr Brennan’s Personal Assistant, and hearing from
her that she would commit to follow up on my letter, I might be able to make
some progress on my complaint about Professor Andrew’s high-handed, even
contemptuous, behaviour towards the listeners to the ‘Today’ show. (This
concerns a letter written by Eric Roberts to a friend which Andrew categorized
as ‘the most extraordinary intelligence document’ that he had ever seen, but of
which he later claimed to have no memory.)
Well, I heard nothing. So, early in
January, I tried to call the lady at Broadcasting House. (I had to explain who
I was to get past the switchboard.) And there was no reply. I thus tried asking
the switchboard operator if he could give me her email address, telling him,
quite truthfully, that I was following up a previous conversation with her.
And, believe it or not, in what was probably a gross breach of institutional
policy, he gave it to me. I was thus able to write to her, as follows:
Dear Xxxxxxxx,
You may recall that we spoke several weeks ago about my
correspondence with the BBC, specifically with Bob Shennan. You were familiar
with my letter, and told me that it had been passed to Audience Services. You
also said that you would personally ensure that I received follow-up.
Well, I have heard nothing since, and felt it was time to
make contact again. Could you please explain to me what is happening, and why I
have not yet received a reply to my letters?
Thank you.
Sincerely, Tony Percy.
Six days later, I received the following reply:
Good evening Mr Percy,
I am very sorry I have just
picked up this email, which was sitting in my Junk inbox. I will
again try and find out where your original correspondence is and why it hasn’t
been responded to, I know you offered to resend me a copy, may I please take
you up on this.
Apologies again for the non
response and I will come back to you as soon as I can.
Regards,
Xxxxxxxx
EA to Group Managing Director.
‘Be patient now . . .’
I thus responded:
Thanks for your reply, Xxxxxxxx.
The reason I was not
able to send you the letters beforehand was that I never received any email
from you giving me your address! Only when the kind switchboard operator
offered it to me when I called last week (explaining that I had spoken to you
before: otherwise he probably would not have handed it out), was I able to
contact you.
Anyway, here are the two
letters we discussed. I would really appreciate your tracking down whoever is
tasked with giving me a response. You will notice that it is now over three
months since my original letter . . .
Best wishes, Tony.
I didn’t hear from Xxxxxxx
again, but on January 21st, I received the following message:
Dear Antony Percy,
Reference CAS-5759257-M8M4X9
Thank you for your letters and we apologise for the time it has taken to
respond.
I have discussed your request with Sanchia Berg whose report you refer to on
the Today Programme. While we appreciate your frustration, the decision whether
or not to release the document rests with the family and not with the BBC.
Sanchia has confirmed that this was a private family document which Eric
Roberts’ family shared with her and later with Rob Hutton. The family did not
want to publish it in full but agreed to certain extracts being made public. It
was only with their consent that she shared it with Christopher Andrew. I
understand Sanchia did suggest that you look at Rob Hutton’s book, as he’d
published more of the letter than Sanchia had made available in her reports.
Nor is it the case that Sanchia was being evasive. Rather she was respecting
the family’s wishes.
I am afraid too that we can’t really comment on what Christopher Andrew has
said. He obviously views an awful lot of documents, so it’s not that surprising
he cannot remember in detail a long document he read four years ago. He is not
the only historian the BBC talks to about MI5 – but he is their official
historian, so it’s logical that we should go to him fairly frequently.
I have asked Sanchia to contact the family on your behalf and will let you know
if she is successful. However, we would make it clear there is no guarantee
they will be back in touch. I am sorry I am not able to give you any further
help and once again I apologise for the time it has taken to respond to your
concerns.
Thank you for
your reply. It was worth waiting for.
I appreciate
your asking Sanchia to approach the family on my behalf. Since the family
approved her showing the document to Christopher Andrew and Rob Hutton, I
assume that they were comfortable with greater publicity. (Rob Hutton did not
reply to my inquiry.) I await the outcome with great interest.
But I must
admit that I do not find your distancing the BBC from Andrew acceptable. After
all, it is on the BBC website that his comments still appear (see https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33414358). Do you not accept some responsibility for this highly provocative
opinion, and do you not agree that it would be appropriate for the BBC to
contact him, remind him of what he said, point out the information on the
website, and request a clarification from him, instead of members of the public
(like me) having to chase around for months trying to gain an explanation from
the corporation? Why does Andrew’s role as MI5’s ‘official historian’ allow him
to use the BBC to promote himself and to provoke public interest, but then to
evade his professional responsibilities by concealing facts concerning MI5?
Sincerely,
Tony Percy.
But that was
it. I heard no more. The BBC is in such
disarray, and the ‘Today’ editors have now moved on. I am not going to gain
anything else. For a moment, I thought I might score a goal, but I suppose it
is a draw of some sorts. (Coldspur 2 – The Establishment 4)
Nigel West’s
New Publications
As I was
flicking through one of the book catalogues that I receive through the mail, I
noticed two startling entries, one advertising a new edition of Nigel West’s
MI5 (originally published in 1981), the other his MI6 (1983),
published by Frontline. Now this was exciting news, as I needed to learn what
the “Experts’ Expert” (Observer, 1989) was now writing about the two
intelligence services after an interval of over thirty years. I was half-minded
to order them immediately at the discounted prices of $37.95 and $26.95, but
thought I should check them out on-line first. Thus Casemate Publishers can be
seen to promote the books, at https://www.casematepublishers.com/mi5-british-security-service-operations-1909-1945.html#.XrLLhSN_OUk , and the overview for MI5 includes the following: “In this new and revised edition, Nigel West
details the organizational charts which show the structure of the wartime
security apparatus, in what is regarded as the most accurate and informative
account ever written of MI5 before and during the Second World War.”
This was encouraging, and I thought I might get
a glimpse of the new Contents by gaining a Google Snippet view, before
committing myself. Yet the text, as displayed by that feature, indicated that
the Contents of the book had not changed, and the number of pages had not
increased. Was that perhaps merely a procedural mistake, where Google had not
replaced the former text? I decide that the only way to find out was to ask the
author himself. Now, I have not been in touch with Nigel for a few years. I
have since tweaked his nose a bit on coldspur, especially over his
superficial yet contradictory treatment of Guy Liddell, and I wondered whether
he would reply. Maybe he had not seen what I had written, but, if he had, he
might not want to communicate with me.
Anyway, I sent a very polite message to him, in
which I explained how excited I was at the prospect of reading his new
versions, and the very next morning he replied very warmly, and included the
following revelation: “The four wartime titles
recently republished (MI5; MI6; The Secret War: The Story of SOE and The
Secret Wireless War: GCHQ 1900 -1986) are simply corrected new editions of
the four books previously published.”
Is this not shocking, even a gross misrepresentation of goods
sold? Apart from the fact that, if I were a historian with a chance to revise
an earlier book in these circumstances, I would take the opportunity to refresh
it with all the research uncovered in the meantime, such as a host of files
from the National Archives, and Christopher Andrew’s authorised history, I
would be very careful in arranging how the book was presented to the public.
But not just one! Four titles? I think this is highly irregular, and I hereby
warn anyone who was thinking of acquiring any of these four volumes that the
information they get will be very outdated, and that I doubt that all the
multiple errors in them have all been addressed. (Coldspur 3 : The
Establishment 4)
Meanwhile, I have been scouring other Nigel West books. His
latest, Churchill’s Spy Files: MI5’s Top Secret Wartime Reports (2018),
exploits the KV 4/83 file at Kew (although the reader is pushed to find the
source, since it does not appear until a footnote to the very last sentence of
the book). Beginning in April 1943, Director-General Petrie of MI5 sent a
regular summary report, delivered to Churchill and for his eyes only (the copy
was taken by the emissary), outlining the activities and achievements of MI5.
It seems that West produces the reports in full, although I cannot yet verify
that, as the files have not been digitized, and he adds some very useful (as
well as some very dense and impenetrable) commentary gained from study of the relevant
MI5 files at Kew, such as on the Double-Cross System, and on MI5’s major
success against Soviet espionage in World War 2, the successful prosecution of
Dave Springhall.
Yet it is another weird West concoction, akin to his recent book on Liddell (see https://coldspur.com/guy-liddell-a-re-assessment/ ), on which my colleague Denis Lenihan has recently posted an invigorating article (see https://www.academia.edu/43150722/Another_Look_At_Nigel_West_s_Cold_War_Spymaster_The_Legacy_of_Guy_Liddell_Deputy_Director_of_MI5 ). The author’s sense of chronology is wayward, he copies out sheaves of material from the archives, the relevance of which is not always clear, and he overwhelms the reader with a host of names and schemes that lack any proper exegesis. Moreover, the Index is cluttered, and highly inaccurate. I saw my friend General von Falkenhausen with a single entry, but then discovered that he ranges over several pages. Indeed, West describes, through rather fragmentarily, the SIS scheme to invoke Falkenhausen in 1942-43, which is very relevant to my discoveries about Len Beurton. I immediately downloaded from Kew the relevant files on the very provocative HAMLET, taking advantage of the current free offer. I shall return to comment on this volume when I have completed my reading of it.
West does highlight the role of Anthony Blunt in editing the
reports for Churchill, which brings me back, inevitably I suppose, to ELLI, the
spy within MI5 (or SIS) called out by the defector Gouzenko in 1945. I have
studiously avoided making any statement on ELLI in my reports so far, but Denis
Lenihan has been writing some provocative pieces, and I must catch up with him
eventually. I had happened to notice, in Chapman Pincher’s Treachery
(2012 edition, p 78), that the author quoted the file KV 3/417 as confirming
that ELLI was a spy working for the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) in
London in 1940. He gave the source as the GRU defector, Ismail Akhmedov, whose
work In and Out of Stalin’s GRU, I had quoted in Misdefending the
Realm. So I went back to that file, resident on my PC, and found the
reference, in paragraph 104. The writer indeed states that Akhmedov was indeed
the source, but that the defector claimed that ELLI was a woman! Why did
Pincher not include that in his account – was that not rather dumb? And how
come nobody else has referred to this anomaly? Professor Glees has pointed out
to me that no male given a cryptonym by Soviet Intelligence ever received a
female name. Apart from Roessler (LUCY, after Lucerne, which is a special case)
and DORA (an anagram of Alexander RADÓ), I think he is overall correct,
although I have to add the somewhat ambiguous IRIS, who was Leo Aptekar, a
‘chauffeur’, Sonia’s handler at the Soviet Embassy.
I have thus started a fresh project on digging out the various sources on ELLI. First of all, I re-read Molehunt, Nigel West’s account of the hunt for Soviet spies in MI5. This is a very confusing world, what with Pincher staking his reputation and career on Hollis’s culpability, based on what Peter Wright told him, John Costello pointing the finger at Guy Liddell (before succumbing to a mysterious and untimely death himself), Nigel West, using the substance of Arthur Martin’s convictions behind the scenes, making the case that Graham Mitchell was the offender, and Christopher Andrew pooh-poohing the lot of them as a crew of conspiracy theorists while allowing himself to be swayed by Gordievsky’s assertion that ELLI was, improbably, Leo Long. West’s book is very appealingly written, but his approach to chronology is utterly haphazard, he is very arch in concealing his whole involvement in the process, and he makes so many unverifiable assertions that one has to be very careful not to be caught up in the sweep of his narrative. For instance, he identifies the failure of British double-agent manoeuvres with Soviet spies as a major item of evidence for stating that MI5 had been infiltrated. But he never explores this, or explains what these projects were. Apart from the attempt to manipulate Sonia (and Len) I know of no documented case of such activity, and, as I have repeatedly written, such projects are doomed to fail as, in order to be successful, they rely both on discipline by a very small and secure team as well as exclusive control of the double agent’s communications.
Ismail Akhmedov
I also went back to Akhmedov, to re-acquaint myself with how he
described his lengthy interviews with Philby in Ankara in 1948. His conclusion
was that, even though a stenographer was present, and he suspected the
safe-house had been bugged, Philby reported only a small amount of the material
that he passed on, which certainly included a description of the GRU’s set-up
in London. (He does not mention ELLI here.) But he also wrote that he knew this
because of his contacts with American intelligence afterwards. “Many years later I learned that Philby had
submitted only a small part of the reams of material obtained from me to the
British and American intelligence services”. That indicated to me that a fuller record
exists somewhere, and that Akhmedov was shown Philby’s report. Akhmedov also said
that, a year later (in 1949) he was thoroughly debriefed by the FBI, CIA and
Pentagon officials in Istanbul. So I assumed that CIA records
were a good place to look.
And, indeed, the CIA archives display quite a lot of information
that Akhmedov supplied them about GRU techniques and organisation, but in
secondary reports. (I have not yet found transcripts of the original
interviews.) Moreover, literature produced more recently points to a critical
role that Akhmedov played in unmasking Philby. One account (Tales from
Langley by Peter Kross) even states that Akhmedov informed the CIA in 1949
that Philby was a Soviet spy (how Akhmedov discovered that is not clear, since
he obviously did not know that for a fact in 1948, although he claimed he partly
saw through Philby’s charade at the time), and that Philby was presented with
Akhmedov’s testimony when he was recalled from Washington immediately after the
Burgess-Maclean escapade. Unfortunately, Kross provides no reference for this
assertion, but Akhmedov’s informing the CIA at that stage would be an
astonishing revelation: it would put Philby’s presence in Washington under a
harsh new light, frame White’s ‘devilish plot’ in a dramatic new context, and
even explain why Eric Roberts was faced with an astonishing new reality when he
spoke to Liddell in 1949. Is that what Andrew was hinting at? I am going to
claim an early goal, before VAR gets in. (Coldspur 4 : The Establishment 4)
Another anomaly I have noticed is the famed reference to ELLI
(actually ‘ELLY’) in the Vassiliev papers. (These were transcripts of files created
by Alexander Vassiliev from the KGB archives, containing information on the GRU
as well, and available on the Internet at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/86/vassiliev-notebooks .) Chapman Pincher presented the assertion that Gouzenko had
betrayed the existence of ELLI in British intelligence as appearing in a report
from Merkulov to Stalin in November 1945, and William Tyrer has echoed
Pincher’s claim in his article about ELLI.
Yet the published archive states no such thing. The comment that “Gouzenko
reported on the GRU source in British intel. ‘ELLY’” is not in the selected
highlights of Merkulov’s report, but appears as an introduction in a separate
pair of parentheses, looking as if it had been added by Vassiliev as editorial commentary,
after the statement that informs us that what follows is a summarization
of what Philby has given them. If it is intended to also reflect the
information received from ‘S’ [STANLEY = Philby] that immediately precedes it,
it is worth noting that Philby’s report likewise includes nothing about ELLI.
Pincher
cites the comment as coming from Merkulov’s report, but uses the on-line
version as his source. He is wrong. Tyrer reproduces the whole introduction in
his article, but removes the parentheses. He is careless. Of course, it is very
possible that Merkulov did write to Stalin about Gouzenko and ELLI, and
that needs to be verified. Merkulov was, however, in the NKVD/KGB, not the GRU,
and it seems implausible that he would want to lay any bad news concerning the
GRU on Stalin’s plate. I cannot quickly see any other reference to the GRU in
Merkulov’s communications, and Allen Weinstein and Vassiliev himself, in The
Haunted Wood, suggest (note, p 105) that any reference to the GRU by
Merkulov was an attempt to pass off some of the responsibility for Elizabeth
Bentley’s defection to the GRU, who recruited her originally in 1936, and for
whom she worked until 1938, when she was transferred to the NKVD.
Thus
one might ask: if Vassiliev thought that the reference to ELLI was important
enough to be highlighted, why did he not publish the original text that
contained it? (I have checked the original Russian manuscript on the Wilson
Center website: the texts are the same. Yet some pages are missing in all
versions: original scan of manuscript, Russian transcription, and English
translation). We should recall, also, that Vassiliev was not transcribing the
texts surreptitiously: he had been given permission from the Association of
Retired Intelligence Officers (KGB alumni) to inspect them, was well-briefed in
western intelligence interests, and under no pressure. So I decided to try to
ask him what the import of his commentary was. I know he is hiding somewhere in
England (maybe holed up with Oleg Gordievsky in an especially leafy part of foliate
Surrey), so on May 18 I sent a message to his publisher to inquire whether they
could pass on a question to him. I was brushed off with a message saying I
should look on Vassiliev’s social media, or write a letter to the publisher. I
doubt whether Vassiliev is seeking any attention, or wanting to give clues to
his whereabouts, so I shall take the latter course.
There is no doubt ELLI existed. But ELLI was almost certainly a
woman, and the information on her is so sparse that she was probably a minor
player, and was not an informant for long. Thus the quest for identifying ELLI
has to be separated from the generic search for traitors within MI5. If there
was evidence of leakage on certain projects, MI5 should have investigated it,
traced it back to those officers who were privy to the information, and then
tried to discern how they might have passed it to a member of Soviet
intelligence. Instead, they listened to the emotional appeals of Angleton and
Golitsyn, and started examining (and sometime interrogating) Mitchell, Hollis,
Liddell, Hanley, even White.
In Spycatcher, Peter Wright tried to list the strongest
reasons for suspecting a major source of treachery within MI5, narrowing his
search for ELLI to Hollis and Mitchell.
I noticed that, after the Gouzenko revelations broke out, he even
consulted Akhmedov to discuss the arrival of ‘ELLI’s telegrams’ [sic] in
Moscow. But the two of them apparently did not discuss ELLI’s gender! It is all
very mystifying. And if there was an endemic failure to protect against
communist subversion (as L’Affaire Sonia shows), it makes even less
sense to pretend that the rather dim Roger Hollis had the power and influence
to stop all his smarter colleagues from performing their jobs properly. Every
time I go back to Pincher, I am stunned by the ham-handed way he overstates his
case against Hollis. Any decent defence-lawyer would submerge his case within
minutes. Nevertheless, I am not yet ready to claim the winning goal.
The Survival of Gösta Caroli
Gosta Caroli
When I wrote about Jan Willem ter Braak, the German agent who apparently escaped undetected for several months in Cambridge in the winter of 1940-1941 (see https://coldspur.com/the-mystery-of-the-undetected-radios-part-3/ and https://coldspur.com/two-cambridge-spies-dutch-connections-2/ ), I referred to the claim that Nicholas Mosley had made about another agent parachuted in, Gösta Caroli, in his book The Druid. Mosley reported that Caroli had in fact been hanged in Birmingham prison, contrary to Nigel West’s reports that he had been repatriated to Sweden after the war.
Now, if that were true, it would have been an alarming course of
events, with the Security Service arranging an extra-judicial killing, given
that there was no account of a trial, even in camera, to be found. The
biography of Caroli’s colleague Wolf Schmidt (TATE) was written by two Swedes, and
mentioned Caroli, but it apparently gave no details about his incarceration and
subsequent return to Sweden. So I left the issue hanging.
Now I can report that the intrepid Giselle Jakobs (the
grand-daughter of Josef Jakobs, who was indeed executed as a spy) has tracked
down the biography of Caroli, written by the same two authors, in Swedish,
which they self-published in 2015. She has arranged for enough portions of it
translated to prove that Caroli, while his health had been damaged by the fall
on his landing in England, did recuperate enough to live for thirty more years.
It includes a photograph of Caroli after his marriage. Giselle’s extraordinary
account of his life, and of her admirable efforts to present the information
for posterity, can be found at https://www.josefjakobs.info/2020/04/the-apres-espionage-career-of-gosta.html and at http://www.josefjakobs.info/.
While this is good news, removing one black mark against the
occasionally dubious application of the law by the British authorities when
under stress in 1940 and 1941, it does not materially change anything of my
suggestion that the death of ter Braak was not a suicide. I expect this matter
to be resuscitated before long. My on-line colleague Jan-Willem van den Braak
(actually no relation, as Ter Braak’s real name was Fukken) has written a
biography of Ter Braak, in Dutch. It is now being translated into English for
publication next year, and Mr. van den Braak has invited me to offer an Afterword
to present my research and theories.
Dave Springhall and the GRU
In April last year, I was investigating hints provided by Andrew
Boyle about the possible recruitment of Kim Philby by the Communist Douglas
(‘Dave’) Springhall, and wrote as follows:
“Springhall is
problematical. On my desktop computer, I have twenty-seven bulky PDFs from his
files at the National Archives, which I have not yet inspected properly. They
provide a fairly exhaustive account of his movements, but Special Branch did
not appear to track him having a meeting with members of the Soviet Embassy in
1933. (Springhall did make a request to visit Cambridge in March of that year,
however.) I suppose it is possible that Liddell had an interview with the
communist activist at the time of his conviction in 1943, but it is improbable
that a record of such a conversation has lain undiscovered. Somewhere in that
archive (according to Springhall’s Wikipedia entry) is a suggestion that
Springhall was working for the GRU from 1932 onwards, but locating that record
is a task that will have to wait – unless any alert reader is already familiar
with the whole of KV 2/2063-2065 & KV 2/1594-1598 . . .”
Douglas (‘Dave’) Springhall
Well, I have at last had enough time on my hands to go through the whole of that archive, and take notes. The evidence of a strong connection between ‘Springy’ (the comrades referred to each other thus, with Len Beurton responding to his MI5 interviewers about ‘Footie’ – Alexander Foote – as if they were members of the England cricket team) and Soviet military intelligence is thin. It derives from an SIS report concerning a translation of a Russian request for information on Indian Army capabilities from the Intelligence Directorate of the Staff R.K.K.A. to the Military Attaché in Berlin, in which Springhall’s name is brought up (KV 2/1594-2, p 40, August 20, 1931).
Yet
Springhall was very much a naval/military figure. Even though he missed the
Invergordon Mutiny (he was occupied in Moscow at the time), he was a regular
commentator on military affairs. He was head of anti-military propaganda in
England, he gave eulogistic descriptions of life in the Red Army, and busied
himself with secret work at Woolwich Arsenal. And his eventual arrest, in 1943,
for extracting secrets on radar defensive measures (WINDOW) from Olive Sheehan,
was obviously for trying to transfer facts to Soviet military experts. MI5
never determined, however, who his courier was, despite the close watch that
was kept on him. I noticed in his MI5 that Nigel West suggested that
Gorsky of the KGB was his contact at the Soviet Embassy, but in the same
author’s recent Churchill’s Spy Files, he indicates that it was a GRU
officer, and that the courier was someone called Peppin. (Somewhere in the
Springhall archive, I got the impression that the courier might have been
Andrew Rothstein.) So I wrote to West about it, and he confirmed that it must
have been a GRU contact, but he could no more about the courier.
This
is a vast archive: I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is writing a book about Springhall
at the moment. West’s book provides a good introduction, but there is so much
more to be explored, and I shall certainly return to the archive when I come to
write about Slater and Wintringham. I shall thus say little more here, but
merely make a few important observations on three aspects: 1) The role of
Anthony Blunt (as introduced above); 2) The immensity of the surveillance of
Springhall; and 3) Springhall’s trial.
One
of the remarkable features of the monthly reports to Churchill on MI5’s
activities, starting in March 1943, was that Guy Liddell, to whom the task was
delegated by Petrie, in turn brought in Anthony Blunt to perform much of the
editorial work. Thus here was additional proof that most of the service’s
‘secrets’ were being passed on to Moscow before you could say ‘Andrew
Rothstein’. Thus one has to interpret the prosecution and sentencing of
Springhall (conducted in camera) in a completely new light. The CPGB (the head
office of which, in King Street, had been bugged comprehensively by Special
Branch) was shocked and disgusted at the fact that Comrade Springhall had been
involved in espionage, and thus was guilty of bringing the Communist Party into
disrepute. Moscow was, of course ‘appalled’, and denied anything untoward had
taken place.
Yet,
if Moscow had known what was going on throughout the Springhall investigation
because of Blunt, they would not have been surprised at the outcome. They would
have to make the necessary melodramatic denials, but were perhaps not
completely unhappy that all the attention was being paid on an expendable,
somewhat irresponsible, open member of the Communist Party, while their
unmasked agents were gathering information on the atomic bomb. In that way, MI5
would continue to imagine that the Party was the major source for subversive
activity (with Ray Milne in MI6, and Desmond Uren in SOE being minor casualties
dragged in by Springhall), and their moles in the intelligence services would
be able to carry on unhindered. ‘Springy’ was not sprung.
The
second noteworthy aspect is the sheer volume of material that was collected
about Springhall, hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes on his career in the
Navy, his visits to the Soviet Union, his published articles in the Daily
Worker, his girl-friends, his associates and friends, his meetings at
Communist Party headquarters, his speeches exhorting revolution at rallies –
and of course on his espionage, his arrest, his trial, his sentencing, his time
in prison, and his release before dying in Moscow of cancer in 1953. MI5 and
Special Branch must have an expended an enormous amount of time trailing and
surveilling him, yet the service was mostly powerless in doing anything at all – until Springhall so
clumsily tried to extract the secrets from the communist flatmate of a loyal
citizen, Norah Bond, who shared what she overheard with her RAF boyfriend,
Wing-Commander Norman Blackie.
In a way, I suppose,
Springhall’s being caught red-handed justified all the effort, and it enabled
MI5 to move the traitor Ray Milne quietly out of SIS, and Raymond Uren out of
SOE. Yet so much other surveillance was going on that one has to conclude that
it was all rather wasted energy. ‘Keeping an eye’ on suspicious characters
became a literal watchword, in the vain hope that such an activity would lead
to larger networks of subversive ne’er-do-wells. But what next? So long as the
Communist Party was a licit institution, its members could make calls for
revolution, even during wartime, without any fear of prosecution, and the Home
Office seemed far too timid as to how the factories might be adversely affected
if too energetic moves were made against the comrades of our gallant ally, the
Russians. Meanwhile, most government institutions were infected with Communist
moles, agents of influence, and fellow-travellers who separated themselves from
links with the Communist Party itself.
Lastly, the Trial
itself. Files KV 2/1598-2 & -3 from Kew contain a full record of ‘Rex v
Douglas Frank Springhall, at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, 20th
July Sessions, 1943’, before Mr Justice Oliver. It represents a transcript of
the shorthand notes of George Walpole & Co. (Shorthand Writers to the
Court). The Solicitor-General, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, K.C. and Mr L. A. Byrne
appeared on behalf of the Prosecution, with Mr J. F. F. Platts-Mills appearing
on behalf of the Defence. I think it is an extraordinary document.
From the first lines of
the transcript, where the portentous Justice Oliver rather patronisingly puts
the Rumpolean Maxwell-Fyfe in his place, and the Solicitor-General
deferentially responds ‘If your Lordship pleases’, we can see a classical
court-room drama take place. Oliver then treats Platts-Mills in the same
peremptory manner, and, when the prosecuting council start their questioning of
Olive Sheehan (who had passed on to Springhall secrets about ‘WINDOW’), Oliver interrupts
them freely, as I am sure he was entitled to. He rebukes Platts-Mills, rather
pettily, for referring to the Air Ministry as Sheehan’s ‘employers’: “Now, Mr
Platts-Mills, this court has not become a theatre of politics.” Platts-Mills has to adapt to his Lordship’s pleasure.
I shall comment no more
now than to remark how different this court was from those administered by
Roland Freisler or Andrey Vyshinsky. Yes, it was in camera, but this was
not a show-trial where the defendants knew they were already guilty and were
facing inevitable execution. Britain was at war, and had caught a spy declaring
allegiance to a foreign power, stealing secrets that could have seriously
harmed the war effort if they had passed into the wrong hands, and calling for
revolution, but Springhall received a fair trial. It concludes with Springhall
making a rather eloquent but disingenuous speech about wanting ‘to arouse the
country behind the government headed by Mr Winston Churchill’. The jury took fifteen
minutes to consider the evidence before returning a verdict of ‘Guilty’ on
almost all counts, and Springhall was sentenced to seven years’ penal
servitude. A very British trial.
‘Superspy Daughter in Holiday-camp Tycoon Romance Drama!’
(“I wanted to marry him”, confesses distraught schoolgirl)
‘I am the Daughter’
A while back, I acquired a slim volume titled ‘Die Tochter bin ich’ (‘I am the Daughter’), by one Janina Blankenfeld. It was published in Berlin in 1985, and is a brief memoir by a schoolteacher who was the daughter of someone who will be familiar to all readers of this website – Ursula née Kuczynski, aka SONIA. Janina was actually Sonia’s daughter by her lover, Johannes Patra (cryptonym ERNST), conceived in China, born in Warsaw in 1936, and spending much of her childhood years in Switzerland and England. Janina did not learn who her real father was until 1955, when Sonia’s first husband, Rolf, returned to Berlin, and Sonia felt she ought to break the news to her. I bought the book because I thought it might shed some light on Sonia’s movements in the UK, and even explain how Janina was able to attend an expensive boarding-school in Epping.
Unfortunately, it gives little away, sheltering under her mother’s
memoir, published a few years beforehand. Janina gives the impression that
money was very tight, and she says nothing about the private school. For a
while, the idea of a holiday was impossible, but Janina wrote that, six months
after her grandmother’s death (which occurred in June 1947), Sonia found an
inexpensive room on the Welsh coast, in Criccieth, which was a revelation for
Janina, as she enjoyed the coastline and the ruined castles. (Criccieth is a
bit too close to the University of Aberystwyth, to my liking.) But “Das schönste Erlebnis für mich war unser
Bummel durch Butlins Holiday Camp.” (‘The best
experience for me was our stroll through Butlin’s Holiday Camp’.) She revelled
in the string of bungalows, and the loudspeakers playing all day, and the
dances and merry-go-rounds in the evenings. “Der Glanzpunkt war die Wahl der schönsten
Urlauberin. Schöne Beine and ein hübsches Gesicht – mehr war nicht
gefragt.“ (“The climax
was the election of the most beautiful holidaymaker. Fine legs and a pretty
face – nothing more was asked for.”)
I am not sure what the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation leaders
would have thought of all this frivolity, with no time spent on propaganda
lessons and correct ideological thinking, and far too much attention paid to
superficial bourgeois pastimes like beauty contests, but Janina’s memoir
managed to get through the censors. And it all made a strong impression on the
twelve-year-old girl. “Seit
diesem Besuch hatte ich neue Träume – ich wollte so gern Herrn Butlin heiraten,
ganz reich sein and jedes Jahr meinen Urlaub in solch einem Feriencamp
verbringen. ” (Ever since this visit I had fresh dreams
– I wanted to marry Mr Butlin so much, to become quite rich, and to spend my
holiday every year in such a Holiday Camp.”) Instead, eighteen months later,
she had to leave for good her idyllic life in the Cotswolds and Wales,
exchanging it for Walter Ulbricht’s holiday-camp of East Germany.
China and the Rhineland Moment
I have been thinking recently of China’s gradual expansion, and reactions to threats to its growing power (e.g. concerning Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Uighurs, industrial espionage, Hong Kong), and reminded myself that, if the first response to a bully is to refrain from challenging him, and biffing him on the nose, he will continue in the knowledge that his adversaries are really too cowardly, afraid of ‘provoking’ him more, and that he can thus continue unimpeded with his aggressive moves. I thought of the piece I wrote on Appeasement a few months ago, and how I judged that Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1936 was the incident marking the opportunity for the dictator to have been stopped.
Then, on May 30, Bret Stevens wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New
York Times titled ‘China and the Rhineland Moment’ (at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/opinion/china-hong-kong.html, inside the paywall). His piece started off as follows: “Great struggles between great powers tend to
have a tipping point. It’s the moment when the irreconcilability of differences
becomes obvious to nearly everyone. In 1911 Germany sparked an international crisis
when it sent a gunboat into the Moroccan port of Agadir and, as Winston
Churchill wrote in his history of the First World War, ‘all the alarm bells
throughout Europe began immediately to quiver.’ In 1936 Germany provoked
another crisis when it marched troops into the Rhineland, in flagrant breach of
its treaty obligations. In 1946, the Soviet Union made it obvious it had no
intention of honoring democratic principles in Central Europe, and Churchill
was left to warn that ‘an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’.” After making some recommendations as to what
the USA and Great Britain should do, Stevens concluded: “If all this and more
were announced now, it might persuade Beijing to pull back from the brink. In
the meantime, think of this as our Rhineland moment with China — and remember
what happened the last time the free world looked aggression in the eye, and
blinked.”
This month’s Commonplace entries can be seen here.
I interrupt this bulletin to note the deaths of two significant persons related to the world of intelligence that have been recorded in NYT obituaries in the past ten days, reminders of the feverish days of World War II.
On
April 2, Walentyna Janta-Polczynska died in Queens, New York. She was appointed
personal secretary to General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the prime minister of the
Polish government-in-exile, in 1939. She translated and prepared reports by Jan
Karski, who brought the first eyewitness accounts of atrocities against the
Jews in Warsaw. In 1943 she assisted in Sikorski’s funeral arrangements after
his plane crashed after takeoff from Gibraltar. She was born in Lemberg (Lvov,
now Lviv): her father ‘hailed from an English family that had initiated oil
exploration in eastern Poland’. Ms. Janta-Polcynska was 107.
On
April 7, Henry Graff, historian, died in Greenwich, Connecticut, aged 98. In
November 1943 [date probably wrong], he translated part of a message
sent by Hiroshi Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin who had regular
discussions with Hitler, and passed on encrypted summaries of what he learned.
In this case, Oshima described German plans for countering the expected D-Day
invasion. Nine months later [sic], shortly after Hiroshima, Graff
translated a message from Japan to the Soviet Union, for some reason directed
at Bern in Switzerland, asking for help extricating Japan from the war. [I
informed the ‘New York Times’ of these anomalies, but have not received a
reply, and, as yet, the publisher has not issued a Correction.].
Wilmington, NC and the Beautiful Blue Danube . . . I mean the Cape Fear River
Next, four anecdotes . . .
Soon after we retired to Southport, North Carolina, at the beginning of August 2001, I made a trip into Wilmington, a town about thirty-five miles away, a port city on the Cape Fear River. I wanted to explore it, to familiarize myself with its layout, find out where the libraries and bookshops were, and, while I was about it, to get a haircut. I found a barber’s shop in a quiet street, went in, and sat down, waiting for my turn. I was then horrified when I heard the man I believed to be the owner, snipping away at a customer’s hair, say: “Of course the blacks were much happier when they were slaves.”
I
had come across some casual racism in my time in the United States, mainly in
the South, but not exclusively there, and had even experienced some ‘ethnic’
hatred directed at me, but I had never heard such a blatant example of stupid,
ugly, patronizing, disgusting, ignorant speech before. How dare this redneck
put himself in the minds of his fellow citizens, and make a facile conclusion
about them and their ancestors of almost two centuries ago? I would not call it
‘prejudice’, because this insect had clearly thought about the matter before
coming up with his well-exercised opinion. And the fact that he was ready to
speak up openly about it, in the presence of a stranger, made the expression of
his opinion even more frightful and alarming than it would otherwise have
been. Was this a common feeling among
‘white’ Wilmingtonians?
I
felt like standing up and biffing the perpetrator on the nose, but thought that
causing an affray so soon after my arrival in South-Eastern North Carolina
might not be a good idea. The barber might claim that I had misheard him, after
all, or that it was a joke taken out of context. But I knew it was not. I
simply stood up and walked out of his establishment, and found a proper
hairdresser in the centre of town. Maybe that was a shabby exit, not
confronting evil when it pushes its voice into your face, but it was all a bit
overwhelming at the time.
I have since discovered that sentiments like the barber’s are not that uncommon, and that even though Wilmington has overall become more civilized by the arrival of Yankees and others in its population, and joining its media outlets, etc. (much of it resented by some locals, I should add), a combination of resentment that the Civil War was lost, and regret over the decline of ‘white’ supremacy, can still be found in many pockets of New Hanover County and its surrounding rural areas.
2. Early in 2000, about eighteen months before we left Connecticut for good (we have not been back in almost twenty years), I read in the New York Times about a photographic exhibition being held at a small gallery in New York City. It concerned records of lynchings that has been carried out in the United States in the twentieth century, with some of the photographs taken after I was born (in 1946). These had apparently not been shown before. I had reason to make a business trip to New York – about an hour away by train – so I decided to make time to visit this gallery. I am not somebody who chases down the grisly out of some perverse pleasure, but I believed that this might be a once-only opportunity to become educated about a horrific aspect of American history about which I had only vague understandings.
It
was an experience both moving and horrifying. I had read about the British
soldiers who discovered Belsen, and were so shocked by what they found that it
made them physically sick. I had a similar reaction – not quite so physical,
but creating that roiling in the stomach. To see a ‘black’ man strung up on a
tree, and ‘white’ families celebrating as if it were a public holiday (which is
how they probably treated it), was nauseating. What made it even worse – although this is a specious argument – was
that it had taken place in my lifetime. One thinks of ‘medieval’ practices, but
all this happened frequently in the first part of the twentieth century, in a
country that made all manner of claims about human liberty, and ‘making the
world safe for democracy’.
‘Kolyma Stories’ by Varlam Shalamov
(no photograph of Kolyma does justice to the horrors)
After all, this was not Stalin’s Gulag, where in fact the horrors were far worse in number. I have just read Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories, covering a largely contemporaneous period (1937-51) when Shalamov spent most of his incarceration working as a slave in or around the notorious goldmines of Kolyma. The death rate there was truly monstrous, and dwarfed the assaults on humanity represented by the lynchings. Yet the photographic record of Kolyma is scanty: the world knows little about the broken bodies, the mutilations and executions. Shalamov’s vignettes provoke similar feelings of disgust, but the Gulag reflected a different kind of cruelty – the abomination of State-run terror run amok. Prisoners were sentenced to ten years in Kolyma for being members of the Esperanto Society, for expressing a hope for the return of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for praising the exiled poet Ivan Bunin, for complaining about the length of the queue for soap, or on the false denunciation of a neighbour, and few would survive. The lynchings were private vigilante operations, and took place in a supposedly democratic society run by the rule of law. How can one compare them? A few hundred lynchings in twentieth-century America, six million dead in the Holocaust, over a million in Kolyma alone? Every brutal death was an individual calamity.
Notes taken after seeing the ‘Witness’ Exhibition
(Amazingly, I was able to dig out, on the afternoon after I wrote the above two paragraphs, my clippings file on the exhibition, and related topics. I had forgotten that I had composed a brief memorandum immediately afterwards, which I present here, in its unimproved form. As is evident, one or two of the references are incomplete, but I believe it sums up well my immediate disgust. I recall now that the main reference I left unfinished was the final passage of Emanuel Litvinoff’s searing Faces of Terror trilogy, where Peter Pyatkov is taken down to the cellars of the Lubianka:
‘Cold metal against the nape of his
neck. His moment.
“Who am – ? . . .’
I
also reproduce in this page some clippings from The New York Times of
that time. A warning: they are discomforting to look at.)
It was at that time that I understood there was something much darker and more pervasive going on. I had rather naively imagined that the absurd colour barriers and divisiveness had broken down in the ‘Great Society’ of the 1960s. I knew that it had been illegal in North Carolina, up until 1965, for a marriage between a ‘white ‘ person and a ‘black’ one to take place (which would have meant that Sylvia and I could not have wed), but thought that these absurd racial categories were gradually being eroded. Other political trends, however, were in fact re-emphasising this false science.
3. A few years after we moved down her, Sylvia, Julia and I made a visit to the Orton Plantation. This was one of the few private estates that are open to visitors in this neck of the woods – or even across the whole of the country. It is attached to the Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson Historic Site, half-way between Southport and Wilmington, on the west side of the Cape Fear River. Brunswick Town was a port that was destroyed by the British in 1776, but never rebuilt, while Fort Anderson was constructed on the ruins, as a fort in the Civil War. There is not much to see there, especially for those familiar with the variety of castles that can be inspected in Great Britain, but it is of great historic interest, and a compulsory target for any tourist or resident of the area.
The Orton Plantation
Near
the historical site lies the Orton Planation, of which the jewel is the
antebellum country house, considered to be one of the best of its kind. It has
apparently been used in many movies and TV shows (none of which I profess to
have seen: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood somehow escaped my
attention), as the following link explains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orton_Plantation)
. We were able to walk around the park, and survey what had been the rice
plantations, worked by hundreds of slaves, that led down to the Cape Fear
River. We were reminded of how many of England’s fine country houses were
constructed with the wealth derived from the exploitation of slaves, only in
their case not in their back yard, but mostly thousands of miles overseas, such
as in St. Vincent, where Sylvia was born.
The house itself was not open to the public, but as we walked near it, an elderly gentleman saw us, and approached us, and, perhaps after learning where we were from, invited us to take a look round. I don’t recall much of the details (there was a billiard-table in good condition), but it was charming house, and we considered ourselves very fortunate. The gentleman gave his name as ‘Sprunt’: I worked out later that he was probably Kenneth Murchison Sprunt, whose name appears in the Wikipedia entry. In 2010, the Sprunts sold the whole property to Louis Moore Bacon, a hedge fund manager, and descendant of the house’s original owner and builder, Roger Moore. The grounds have not yet been re-opened.
4. Earlier this month, Sylvia and I filled out the US 2020 Census forms, on-line this time. It was quite a simple operation: we were asked for birthdate information for the three of us, and whether we rented or owned the house, and whether we had any mortgage. What business was it of theirs, we asked ourselves? And then we came to the bulk of the form, which was about ‘ethnicity’. The first part required us to state whether we were ‘Hispanic’ or not – and did not allow this binary question to be ignored! At the same time, it reminded us that ‘Hispanics’ or ‘Latinos’ could be of any race.
How in heaven’s name were they going to use this information? Deciding what federal aid should be given to each State, I suppose, but how could they verify whether anybody really understood the question, or could even be relied upon to tell the truth on the form? And how would such information affect the government’s decisions? I thought of a root of my maternal-grandfather’s family, the Robinis, who were Huguenots escaping via Guernsey, and suddenly felt a surge of Italianate fervour. And then there was my unexplained partiality to Neapolitan ice-cream and pizza margherita. Were such features part of my ‘identity’? H’mm. But there was no way out. We decided to say ‘No’, and move on.
The last section concerned ‘race’, and in this area the Census Bureau believed they were on firmer ground. The first option was ‘White’, but if you rejected that, it offered a whole host of exotic categories to choose from, including ‘Pacific Islander’ (about which I have written before here). Why it believed that, in 2020, American citizens would universally want to define themselves in such terms is absolutely beyond me, but it keeps many Census Bureau people in employment, and helps to foment those minor distinctions that can breed resentment, and feelings of entitlement, and which accompany the notions of ‘identity’ which the sociological professors get so excited about. Fortunately, the very last option was to tick off ‘Other’, and Sylvia and I happily entered ‘Human’ in the box, and were gratified that our submission was not rejected. But should we expect a visit from the Census Police, to verify that we are indeed so?
* * * * * * * * * *
I
shall get round to ‘Wilmington’s Lie’ soon, but I need to digress over some
science, and some definitions. As readers may have noticed, in this text I have
used ‘black’ and ‘white’ in quotation marks. Since all reputable scientists
have concluded that ‘race’ is a sociological construct, and that the genetic
differences between human beings of different pigmentation are smaller than
those found within any one particular ‘ethnic group’, I struggle with what
language to use in this discussion. American institutions have for a long time
advised us that anyone born with a drop of ‘black’ blood should be defined as
‘black’, which is obviously nonsense. Yet using some term is inescapable in
this discussion. Selecting the term ‘Negro’ is disdained these days; ‘colo(u)red’
is a ridiculous hangover from South African categorisations, although it
endures in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People;
‘African-American’ is simply inaccurate (what about Egyptians?), and some
famous Americans, such as Colin Powell, have objected to it (his parents came
from Jamaica), since they do not regard themselves as having ‘roots’ in the
African continent.
To
remind readers of the stubbornness of some sectors of government and the academic
world to recognize the facts about race, I present the following paragraphs. I
picked them out of a book review from the Listener of 13 November, 1935.
For some reason, I had acquired a few years ago a bound copy of the issues of
that magazine from September to December 1935: they present a fascinating
perspective of the world seen from a variety of educated viewpoints as the
totalitarian states of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia started to exert an eerie
hold over the democracies’ attentions. The review is titled Racial Problems
in Europe, and it comprises a critique of We Europeans, by Julian
Huxley, A. C. Haddon, and A. M. Carr-Saunders, written by A. S. Russell.
“‘In
a scientific age’, say the authors, ‘prejudice and passions seek to clothe
themselves in a garb of scientific respectability; and when they cannot find
support from true science, they invent a pseudo-science to justify themselves’.
There is today a pseudo-science of ‘racial biology’ which has been erected to
justify political ambitions, economic ends, social grudges, and class
prejudices. ‘Race’ and ‘racialism’ are regarded by the authors as almost
blasphemous terms, and it is against the fallacies associated with these vague
and mischievous ideas that the principal part of the book is directed.
People
who talk about pure races nowadays do not know what they are talking of. You
cannot judge a man’s race accurately from externals. You can be certain of a
man’s racial purity only when you know his ‘genetical constitution’. The
discovery of the gene, thousands of which go to the physical make-up of an
individual, has revealed how immensely more complex inheritance in the physical
sense is than was thought of in old days, when the characteristics of a child
were considered to be a mere blending of those of the parents. It was convenient at one time to make a rough
classification of Europeans into the Nordic, the Alpine and the Mediterranean
‘races’; the first exemplified in the tall, ‘long-headed’, fair-haired Swede;
the second in the ‘round-headed’ Russian peasant of medium height; the third in
the dark, ‘long-headed’, small inhabitant of southern Italy. Actually these
types, like every other in Europe, are just different mixtures; they aren’t in
any sense pure races. Everybody in Europe is of mixed race as evidenced by his
or her ‘genetical constitution’. And the reason for this is plain. For tens of thousands of years man has been
on the move in every part of the world inter-breeding and inter-breeding. There
might have been pure races at one time; sections of mankind might have got
isolated geographically from the rest for thousands and thousands of years and
evolved so as to become adapted to their climactic environment; but those days
are long past and it is in the highest degree unlikely they will ever recur.”
One might observe that even Wallace didn’t quite get it, what with his references to ‘racial purity’ and ‘inter-breeding’. Yet the challenge to the monstrous racial theories of Hitler is clear. Nevertheless, in what could be considered a provocative commentary on Hitler’s dogma, later in the review, Wallace questions the authors’ application of their research into the identity of the Jews (“ . . . the authors assert the Jews are of mixed origin and no more different from the mass of Europeans than ourselves or the Germans” – a judgment that would anticipate what Schlomo Sand wrote recently in his engrossing and controversial Invention of the Jewish People). Wallace concludes by accepting that nations of ‘inter-marriage’ are based purely on sentiment and tradition. I could point to dozens of articles that I have read over the years that would reinforce the assertions of Huxley and co. They got it right eight-five years ago, but too many people still resist those notions. For example, I marvel at the unscientific way that certain liberal arts critics misrepresent how genetics works. My latest offering: “Whether they have been hard-wired into a Jewish genetic make-up after centuries of the singular Jewish experience it’s impossible to prove, but Lebrecht’s passion is persuasive”, from Mark Glanville’s review of Norman Lebrecht’s Genius and Anxiety, in the TLS of February 28.
And now to Wilmington’s
Lie. I had been vaguely aware of the murky secret that the city of
Wilmington had tried to hide. I have another clipping, from the New York
Times of December 19, 2005, showing a report by John DeSantis headed ‘North
Carolina City Confronts Its Past in Report on White Vigilantes’. His second
paragraph sums up the event very succinctly: “Only scant mention is made,
however, of the bloody rioting more than a century ago during which black
residents were killed and survivors banished by white supremacists, who seized
control of the city government in what historians say is the only successful
overthrow of a local government in United States history.”
What prompted the attention
then to the happenings of November 10, 1898 was the release of a draft of a
500-page report ordered by the state legislature. In what may come as a
surprise to many European readers, after the Civil War, the government of
Wilmington, which had been ruled by the Democratic Party, was replaced by a coalition
that was dominated by Republicans, and contained many ‘blacks’. (It was the
Republican Abraham Lincoln who had resisted the Southern States’ rights to
continue slavery, and the switch of party allegiances around civil rights and
white supremacism would come much later.) The growing power and influence of
those persons whom reactionary Democrats considered as inferior to them, and
responsible for diminishing their prosperity, caused a mass of resentment that
broke out murderously before Election Day of November 9, 1898. A mob of white
vigilantes invaded ‘black’ businesses, most notably the printing-press of The
Daily Record, and shot ‘black’ men in the streets of Wilmington. The report
estimated that up to a hundred ‘black’ deaths were recorded, and hundreds fled
from the city.
The Wilmington 1898 Memorial
I regret not getting hold of the full report, which, according to de Santis, was to be delivered the following year. There was some controversy over its release, as many felt that the ‘mistakes’ of over a hundred years ago should be buried. In 2008, however, a Memorial Park was opened in Wilmington, although the City still seems very ambivalent about promoting and describing it. A link on the City’s webpage, indicating the website of the memorial, leads to a Facebook Page: a full description can be seen at https://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/monument/842/. I have visited the memorial, and was moved by it, but was sorry it had been placed somewhat off the beaten track, and found the symbology puzzling. The monument itself consists of six 16-feet tall paddles, which, according to a plaque nearby, refer to the role of water in ‘the spiritual belief system of people from the African continent’. Why the memorialists would want to generalise all the religions of the African continent in that stereotypical way, especially when almost universally those who suffered at the time of the events (and those who come to honour them today) were and are devout Christians is one of those weird dimensions of ‘identity’ and ‘heritage’ that dominate discussions of such topics today.
And then, earlier this
year, David Zucchino’s account of the incidents, Wilmington’s Lie: The
Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, was published.
Zucchino gained his Pulitzer Prize for feature-writing in The Philadelphia
Inquirer in 1989: he has also published Thunder Run and The Myth
of the Welfare Queen. His book provides a very thorough history of the
events that led up to what he characterises as the 1898 ‘coup’: the action was,
however, not so much the directing ousting of a governing body as the
terroristic oppression of those citizens who would democratically elect that
group, but the result was the same. Zucchino uses the official report
(available at https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/p249901coll22/id/5842, released on May 31, 2006,
which I have not read), as well as an account by LeRae Umfleet, the principal
researcher on the project, A Day of Blood, which I have also not looked
at. So I regret I cannot compare Zucchino’s account with Umfleet’s. Zucchino
has also trawled through an impressive list of books, unpublished memoirs and
diaries, articles, theses, dissertations, and government publications and
documents.
The Wilmington Coup, 1898
Zucchino takes his readers painstakingly through the background that led to the vigilantism of 1898. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Wilmington became the largest city in North Carolina, and freed slaves flocked to it for the opportunities in trade and exports that it provided. In the author’s words, ‘it was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, policemen and magistrates.’ The Ku Klux Klan had made an attempt to roll back Reconstruction in 1868, but had been driven out of town. Abraham Galloway (of ‘mixed race’) had been the vigorous senator who had encouraged the locals to defend their right, and when he died in 1870, the cause was taken up by Alexander Manly, the publisher of the Daily Record. “Manly”, Zucchino writes, “could easily have passed as white, the preferred option of so many so-called mulattoes.” Manly spoke up for Negro rights, and pointed out the hypocrisy that occurred when ‘white’ supremacists spoke up for the virtue of their women intermingling with ‘black’ males, while they themselves had affairs with ‘black’ women. He thus became the prime target of the frustrated Democrats.
In 1897, several
lynchings occurred in Georgia. ‘White’ leaders could not imagine that a sexual
act between a ‘white’ woman and a ’black’ man could be consensual, and
vigilante justice was frequently the outcome. After a Mrs. Felton defended the
practice of lynching, Manly wrote an editorial that pointed out the hypocrisy,
and ridiculed the insecurity and self-delusion that lay at the heart of the
hatred of Southern ‘white’ men. Thus the office of the Daily Record
became the prime target of the rebels. Two days after voting took place for the
state legislature on November 8, 1898, over two thousand Red Shirts (as they
were called), heavily armed, piled into Wilmington looking for victims.
Buildings were burned, and at least sixty ‘black’ men were killed in the
streets.
Zucchino reports how
the Wilmington Messenger published the lyrics to ‘Rise Ye Sons of
Carolina’ on November 8, 1898.
“Proud Caucasians one
and all . . .
Hear your wives and
daughters call . . .
Rise, defend their
spotless virtue
With your strong and
manly arms . . .
Rise and drive this
Black despoiler from your state.”
It is a message that
anticipates Hitler. A shocking and nauseating refrain, blatantly ignoring the
fact that the forbears of these ‘black despoilers’ had been brought to those
shores against their will, in utterly cruel conditions, when, if they had
survived, they were forced into slavery. What demagogues, preachers or teachers
had embedded this sort of thinking? How could anyone today not denounce such
ugliness?
I shall not relay all
the details of the coup. Readers can pick up the book. Zucchino has performed
an absolutely vital task of chronicling the details of this ghastly event, one
that remained buried for so long. Yet Wilmington’s Lie is not very easy
reading: not because of the grisly subject-matter, but because the author lacks
a good narrative sweep, and moves around without a clear chronology. Events
outside Wilmington are sketched very thinly, so we do not gain a good
understanding of, for example, why federal or state officials were so reluctant
to intervene. He leaves the meatier issues for the Epilogue, almost as an
afterthought, such as the way that Wilmington became an example for ‘white’
supremacists in other states to pick up on voter suppression, and vicious
attacks on ‘blacks’. He has nothing to say about the culture and political
battles that encouraged such cruelty, or how the fundamentalist Josiah Nott,
who had Gobineau’s dangerous writings on the Aryan race translated, exerted such
a swift and penetrative effect on the Southern states and the rise of the Ku
Klux Klan. Where did they learn about ‘Caucasians’? This, for me, was an
extraordinary omission.
The Dawes Severalty Act
Moreover, Zucchino makes no references to the expulsion of indigenous Americans of a couple of generations before, which these horrors echoed, or even the infamous Dawes Act of 1887, which applied different racial principles to the treatment of indigenous American tribes. The author makes a link between the events of 1898 and current attempts to implement voter ID laws: such initiatives may or may not be stirred by similar impulses, but Zucchino does not examine the case. He skims over in one paragraph the bouleversement in Party allegiances (when minority rights became a Democratic plank of policy) that was caused by the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, noting that in 1972 North Carolina elected its first Republican US senator for seventy-four years – the notorious Jesse Helms. And lastly, he appears to be a prisoner of his own cultural milieu – talking about ‘white blood’ and ‘black blood’ as if they were realities, and never analysing seriously the pseudo-science behind these notions. (As I was completing this piece, I encountered the following quotation from the NYT obituary of Abigail Thernstrom, a stolid opponent of affirmative action, a woman who had grown up in a communist household: “Race is the American dilemma. It is race that, you know, keeps this country in agony. It is our most serious domestic problem. And therefore, we want to think specially hard about anything that involves sorting people out on the basis of one drop of blood of this or that.”)
I noticed one poignant
aspect. The captain general of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina in 1868 was a
Colonel Moore, who led the attempt to terrorize ‘blacks’ in April 1868, was
then repulsed, and was left licking his wounds inside Thalian Hall. Thirty
years later, no longer Klan leader, he was still active in Wilmington, and had
been elected to the County Board of Commissioners in the corrupt elections of
1898. Yet he was outsmarted by another political rival, Colonel Alfred Waddell,
who led the attack on Manly’s newspaper offices. After the killings of November
10, one of the businessmen who tried to persuade Waddell to allow the ‘blacks’
who had been chased out of town, since he needed them for loading the seven
steamships backed up at the port, was a James Sprunt. Sprunt ‘told a reporter
he was confident that the city’s blacks would be reassured by Mayor Waddell’s
public declarations of equal treatment for both races’. He had been born in
Glasgow, was British vice-consul, and later became renowned for his
philanthropic work in Wilmington, and his dedication to local history.
Colonel Roger Moore
was a descendant of Roger Moore, a brother of Maurice. Maurice Moore sold the
Orton Planation to Roger when the latter moved into the area from South
Carolina, in 1725, and together they founded Brunswick Town. Roger Moore had to
deal with unfriendly native Americans, who destroyed his first house, but then
set up the rice plantation with slave labour. The gentleman whom we met at the
Orton Plantation, Murchison Sprunt, was a grandson of James Laurence Sprunt,
who, with his wife, Luola, purchased the property in 1904, on the death of his
father-in-law, Colonel Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison, a Confederate military
officer. In May 2010, as I described earlier, the Sprunt family sold the
Plantation to Louis Moore Bacon, who informs us that he is a direct descendant
of the first Roger Moore. (How he might be related to the notorious Klansman
Roger Moore, I do not know.)
Thus are the fortunes
and careers of North Carolinians – like those of everyone, I suppose –intertwined.
Allowing for about ten generations since 1725, Louis Moore Bacon could also
claim that he was the direct descendant of about one thousand other people. Yet,
like many others, he favours a single lineage with a name that endured, and a
known family history. Likewise, there are probably thousands of other persons
who could claim ‘direct descendancy’ from Roger Moore, but who did not have the
money, the genealogical insights, or the personal interest, to want to bid for
the Orton Plantation, and invest in it. That is the way the world works.
Back to today’s
Wilmington. It is easy for someone like me to sit back, and proclaim that all
these racial categories are absurd, when such loftiness in fact could show an
insensitivity to the realities of the stories of humiliation passed down, and
the daily insults that continue. Whenever I walk around in Wilmington, I am
especially careful, say, to open the door for any ‘black’ person coming into
the Post Office, and offer them a friendly ‘Take your time, sir!’, or ‘Have a
good day, madam!’, perhaps to balance the affronts or rudenesses they may have
encountered from persons who share my skin pigmentation, and I deliver such politesses
a little more enthusiastically than I might do to anyone else. Maybe it is
condescending behaviour, but I trust it helps. Because I can hope for the day
when these categories will be meaningless (and I think of our beautiful Anglo-Irish-Italian-French-German-West
Indian-Vietnamese grand-daughters – ignoring, for now, the Persky branch from
Minsk), but have to accept that reality is different. So long as census-takers, white supremacists, affirmative
action lawyers, ethnic studies professors, fundamentalist preachers, racial
activists, identity politicians, Dixie whistlers, sociologists, psephologists,
pseudo-historians, eugenicist neo-confederates, Marxist academics, cultural
appropriation specialists, self-appointed ‘community’ spokespersons, and general
grudge-grinding journalists have a job to hold on to, the distinctions will
continue. And, after all, if the New York Times says that a ‘Latinx’
community exists, it must be so, right?
My gestures are a kind of reparation,
I suppose. And thereby lies one final dilemma, as the irrepressible and
overexposed Ta-Nehisi Coates has promoted, urging that ‘blacks’ should receive
money for the injustices performed against them (or their forebears). Yet not
all those who would have to pay are guilty, nor are all those who would be
remunerated necessarily victims. None of us automatically inherits the sins or
the virtues of our forebears, and each us should be free to reject the
indoctrination of parents, school or religious institution.
I made light of this at my seventieth birthday party a few years ago, attended by a few dozen of my closest friends, at which I made a speech (see Taking the Cake). At one point, I took out a piece of paper from my jacket pocket, and told the assembled diners that it was a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice. I proceeded to read it: “Dear Mr. Percy . . . blah, blah, blah, . . . We have to inform you that, according to recent legislation, you, as a descendant of colonialist oppressors, are hereby ordered to make the following reparations payments to victims of such injustices. (Pause.) Mr. Tiger Woods: $5,000. Mrs. Sylvia Percy: $10,000. And to Mr. Douglas Hamilton (not his real name, but a prosperous ‘black’ friend of mine sitting at Table 4): $50,000!”
Yet so long as that barber, and
persons like him, are around, it is no laughing matter.
(Recent Commonplace entries can be found here. This month’s collection includes a special not-to-be-missed feature on Gavin Ewart and light verse.)
This
segment really belongs as an appendix to ‘Sonia’s Radio’, but I deemed it to be
of such startling importance that I decided to devote a Special Bulletin to it.
It concerns a letter sent from Geneva to Len Beurton, the husband of Ursula,
agent Sonia, in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, in March 1943, one that provokes an
entire re-evaluation of the Beurtons’ relationship with the authorities. The
letter was intercepted by the U.K. censorship before being mailed to the
address to which Beurton had moved in August 1942, to be reunited with his
wife, and it appears in one of the Kuczynski files at the National Archives, KV
6/41.
KV
6/41 must be one of the richest and most provocative files at Kew. Its activity
record shows that it was a very frequently inspected folder during the 1980s and
early 1990s. A book could be written on it alone, as it offers tantalising
glimpses of other worlds, other discussions, other communications, and other
meetings, the proceedings or records of which have been withheld or destroyed.
Thus this analysis is highly exploratory, and reflects more my thinking as it has
evolved rather than a tidy and complete item of research. I do not have clear
answers to many of the riddles it offers, and am seeking help from my readers.
A
recap may be useful for the occasional coldspur reader. Len Beurton was
a veteran of the International Brigades in Spain, and had been recruited by his
friend Alexander Foote to join the Soviet espionage team in Switzerland in early
1939, and train as a wireless operator under Ursula Hamburger (as she then was),
née Kuczynski. With her Swiss visa soon to expire, Sonia was ordered, early in
1940, to travel to the UK, but needed a British spouse in order to gain a UK
passport. Foote initially responded to the call, but then evaded it, on the
grounds that he had a pregnant girl-friend in Spain, and recommended Beurton
instead, who accepted the role with enthusiasm. Foote then provided perjurious
evidence of Sonia’s husband’s infidelity in order for the pair to be married.
Thereafter, SIS in Switzerland helped to arrange Sonia’s passage, via France,
Spain, and Portugal, to England, where she installed herself and two children
in Oxford at the end of January 1941. Len had not been able to join her at
first, since his enlistment in Spain disqualified him from being given a visa
to pass through France, Spain, and Portugal. After pleas from Sonia to the MP Eleanor
Rathbone, and with the intervention of the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, SIS’s
representatives in Geneva supported the project to bring him home. They
provided him with a false identity, and Len was eventually able to leave the
country, arriving back in the UK in late July 1942. Almost immediately, he and
Sonia moved from their rented bungalow in Kidlington to a cottage attached to
the house of Neville and Cissie Laski, in Summertown, Oxford, where Sonia
rather flamboyantly installed her wireless set. Len, meanwhile, was thought to
be spending time at the old address, and MI5’s F Division requested that mail
sent to Len (but not Sonia) at Kidlington be intercepted. This letter is one of
only two addressed to Beurton on file.
The
Geneva Letter
An image of the document appears here:
The Letter from Geneva
[Do
not be concerned about the readability of the document. I present it here to
show that it exists, and to reveal one or two important aspects of it.]
First
of all, the text:
“My
dear Burton,
I have heard nothing from you since your
arrival in the United Kingdom. I hope this only means that you are absorbed in
work which so interests you that you have little time for private
correspondence. Communication with U.K. has steadily deteriorated since your
departure and I have no doubt that the day is not far off when only the air
will be available!
W. is as friendly and inscrutable as
ever. Recently he became the proud father of a second daughter whom we expect
to meet next week. He asks frequently of you and wonders where you have gone to
earth.
The general aspect of life here has
changed very little since you left except that prices have steadily risen to
ruinous heights.
[ ‘paragraph missing’ * ]
Let us hear from you some time,
Your sincerely, V. C.
Farrell”
* British Postal Censorship
“The British Examiner is not
responsible for the mutilation of this letter.”
An
inspection of the envelope indicates that the latter passed through German
territory: several stamps with the swastika appear on the left side, with the
slogan ‘Geöffnet’ [opened] between them. (The challenges of delivering airmail
from Switzerland when the country was surrounded by Axis forces had not
occurred to me. I found a link to the potentially very useful following article:
“Zeigler, Robert (2008): “The Impact of
World War II on Airmail Routes from Switzerland to Foreign Countries,
1939-1945” in the
National Postal Museum at the Smithsonian, but the item has disappeared.) What
is not clear is whether the letter was automatically forwarded to Summertown
(if instructions for forwarding mail were still extant and valid), or whether
it was simply delivered to the address at Kidlington, under the assumption that
Len Beurton still lived there. An earlier item on file (at 47B) offers a list
of intercepted mail from September 19 to October 10, 1942, including an item
redirected from Kidlington, sent from Epping, in Essex, but there is no other
record of interception details.
The story of the interception requests is a
puzzle in its own right. The record is predictably incomplete, but the first
request, for all correspondence sent to Avenue Cottage, Summertown, is made by
JHM of F2A on September 15, for a period of two weeks. [This ‘JHM’ is probably
the renowned punctilious solicitor, J. H. Marriott. Marriott was reportedly
working in B1A as Secretary of the XX Committee by this time, but he was
probably performing double-duty. His name appears in the Beurton file after the
war, when he returned to F Division for a while.] F2A was responsible for ‘Policy activities of
C.P.G.B. in UK’, under John Curry’s ‘Communism and Left-Wing Movements’
Division. D. I. Vesey (B4A), working for ‘Suspected Cases of Espionage in UK’,
under Major Whyte in Dick White’s ‘Espionage’ B Division, had referred to
Beurton’s residence in Kidlington up until September 9, at which time he was
seeking an interview with Beurton, which occurred on September 18. (His belated
report was not submitted until October 20: the delay seems unnatural and
indolent.) JHM’s analysis of the mail received from September 19 until October
10 is on file. It is a fascinating document, but there is no indication that
any of the correspondents were followed up.
One entry, concerning the letter from Epping,
Essex, introduced above, has been redirected from 134 Oxford Road, Kidlington,
strongly indicating that the Beurtons had cleared out and informed the Post
Office of their move. Another, astonishingly, is from Alexander Cadogan, the
Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, a very important figure in the
war, accustomed to accompanying Eden and Churchill around the globe, addressed
to ‘L. C. Beurton, Esq.’. Cadogan had also been instrumental in authorizing
Beurton’s liberation from Switzerland. Was he perhaps asking whether his
protégé had settled in satisfactorily? It seems very provocative for Cadogan to
be writing, in his own hand, but JHM’s entry incontrovertibly records ‘envelope
signed – A. CADOGAN’. A few letters are described as having been sent from
Kidlington, but only one is identified – Dr. Duncan, at Exeter House. Is that a
clue? It would have been highly negligent for these correspondents not to be
followed up. The lead from Epping might have been very fruitful: Alexander
Foote was later to tell his interrogators in MI5 that Sonia visited her contact
in Epping once a month.
And then, on November 30, Hugh Shillito, F2B/C,
‘Comintern Activities General and Communist Refugees’ & ‘Russian
Intelligence’, inquires of the G.P.O whether there is a telephone at 145 Oxford
Road, stating that Beurton has ‘gone to live there’, as if Beurton had left the
new family nook in Summertown to return to the premises north of Oxford. The
following day, Shillito makes a request to Colonel Allan of the G.P.O. for a
Home Office Warrant to check all of Len Beurton’s mail (but not his wife’s).
Nothing had been submitted by December 19 (‘unremunerative’, in Shillito’s
words), and the first item is the Geneva letter. But Shillito presumably sat
next to JHM, and exchanged ideas and insights with him and with Vesey. How
could Shillito have possibly been mistaken in thinking that Len was spending
time at the address in Kidlington?
The
Sender of the Letter
Who
was the sender of this remarkable letter? The signature is somewhat inscrutable,
but a helpful note visible at the side states: ‘V. C. Farrell. P.C.O., Geneva’,
an annotation that was surely made much later. And there lies the real drama of
the correspondence. For ‘P.C.O’ stands for ‘Passport Control Officer’, and that
role was adopted by SIS as the (supposedly) undercover job title for SIS
representatives in consulates and embassies abroad. Yet Victor Farrell was more
than that. While his name does not appear in Keith Jeffery’s authorised history
of SIS, Jeffery merely stating that ‘in September 1939, SIS had a station in
Geneva, headed by a Passport Control Officer, with an assistant and a wireless
operator’, Nigel West, in MI6, describes him in the following terms:
“One
important figure already in Geneva at this time [June 1940] was Victor Farrell,
an experienced SIS officer who had previously served in Budapest and had then
replaced Kenneth Benton in Vienna in 1938. Farrell had been appointed to head
the Geneva Station in place of Pearson, and had succeed in recruiting an
extremely valuable local source of German intelligence. Farrell’s agent was
Rachel Dübendorfer, a middle-aged Polish Jewess who was then working in the
League of Nations’ International Labour Office as a secretary and translator.”
(p 202). West also writes (p 152) that Menzies had appointed Farrell as PCO in
Geneva in February 1940.
In
Colonel Z, their biography of Claude Dansey, the head of the shadow Z
network within SIS, (which work needs to be considered somewhat circumspectly),
Anthony Read and David Fisher supply the information that Farrell had been
Professor of English at the St Cyr military academy in France, and inform us
that Farrell had been promoted to consul at the beginning of 1941, taking over
from Frederick Vanden Heuvel. The authors also describe how the officers in
Switzerland felt marooned from the outside world:
“The only way out for
couriers, escapers or anyone else was the hazardous land route through southern
France to Spain, using all the cloak-and-dagger paraphernalia of disguises,
false names and forged papers. Radio sets were still in short supply, and in any
case the Swiss, ever fearful for their precious neutrality, did not welcome the
transmission of secret information which might be intercepted by the Germans
and used as an excuse for invasion. The SIS therefore had only one available
radio transmitter, located in Victor Farrell’s office in Geneva. This was used
for urgent communications; anything less vital was sent as telegrams through
the Swiss Post Office over the normal telegraph lines, enciphered by the
one-time pad method . . .” (p 239)
“Sissy [Dübendorfer] was
a communist, and merged her network with Radó’s, and her communications were
channelled through Allan [Alexander] Foote. Yet all the time, she was being
paid by Victor Farrell.” (p 247) [This refers to the famous communist Rote
Drei network in Switzerland. Alexander Radó was its leader, Alexander Foote
its main wireless operator. The network was also called the Lucy Ring,
after its reputed main informant, Rudolf Rössler, who was based in Lucerne.]
“All that was required
of her [Sissy Dübendorfer] was that she should send the material given her by
Farrell to Rössler via Schneider for evaluation, and then pass Rössler’s
reports to Radó. But in order to maintain the camouflage, Dansey also used the
various other routes to Rössler and Radó: Sedlacek, Foote, Pünter, and the
official Swiss and British intelligence organizations all played their parts in
his master plan.” (p 253)
In their companion book,
Operation Lucy, Read and Fisher further describe Farrell’s valuable
role: “He dealt with escaping prisoners, organising routes through southern
France and across the Pyrenees into Spain, then Portugal and so to Britain,
besides liaising with the French and with other agents working in the ILO and
similar institutions in Geneva, on behalf of the SIS. He also looked after the
smuggling of arms and strategic materials such as industrial diamonds. Farrell
had his own radio transmitter/receiver, through which he could contact both
Berne and London.” (p 111) M. R. D. Foote’s and J. M. Langley’s book titled MI9:
Escape and Evasion 1939-1945 confirms that ‘Victor’ was the (unimaginative)
cryptonym of the contact officer in Geneva for escaping prisoners-of-war and
SOE agents.
SIS in Switzerland
It is very difficult
trying to establish a clear chronology of the movements of the SIS officers in
Switzerland during World War II. The chief was apparently Frederick Vanden
Heuvel, who, according to West, was flown out to Berne by Menzies (or Dansey) at
the beginning of 1940 to become the case officer of the valuable informant
Madame Symanska. Yet, continues West, Vanden Heuvel had to decamp to Geneva in
June 1940 in the face of a possible German invasion (p 202), before returning
to Berne a month or two later. Jeffery, on the other hand, writes (p 507): “For
most of the Second World War the main representative in Switzerland was
Frederick ‘Fanny’ Vanden Heuvel, based in Geneva”. On page 381, Jeffery refers
to some twenty-five reports that were sent from Geneva between August 1940 and
December 1942, channeled through Symanska, with commentary apparently supplied
by Vanden Heuvel. (How these reports were sent is not indicated, but the
implication is by cable or by courier. If anything was sent by wireless, it
would have had to go via Geneva, but that did not mean that Vanden Heuvel
worked there.)
Yet Read and Fisher have
Vanden Heuvel sent out by Claude Dansey to Zürich (i.e. not Berne) in February
1940, working out of offices at 16 Bahnhofstrasse, and being appointed
vice-consul in March 1940, and then consul on May 31 (p 231 & p 238). Soon
afterwards, he moved his base to French-speaking Geneva, leaving Eric Grant
Cable in charge, and became Consul in Geneva until the beginning of 1941. At
that time he passed on the title to Farrell, and moved, nominally to take on
the ‘unlikely role of assistant press attaché in Berne’, but actually to deal
with Symanska in that city. That makes more sense, in view of the absence of
Farrell’s name in the correspondence concerning Sonia’s passport application in
early 1940. In November 1940, when negotiations were undertaken over adding
Sonia’s children to her passport, a single unencrypted cable from Geneva
(‘PRODROME’) can be found in the archive, but no official’s name appears on it.
In the Kuczynski archive at Kew, Len Beurton attests to Farrell’s being the
consular officer (‘Geneva Consulate-general’) who helped him acquire a passport
under a false name in early 1942. Beurton claimed that ‘after becoming friendly
with a member of the British Passport Office in Geneva, to whom he claims he
gave useful information’, he was given a passport under a false name. (Document
47A in KV 6/41 confirms that Farrell, as PCO in Geneva, enabled Beurton to get
his passport.)
A
clue to the ‘useful information’ that Beurton had provided to Farrell appears
in another (anonymous) document on file, which reports that, when in
Switzerland, Beurton had been in touch with a Chinese journalist accredited to
the League of Nations, one L. T. Wang. A contact with a mysterious General Kwei
is posited, but the contact appears to have more relevant implications. For
Sonia herself, in Sonya’s Report, describes Wang in exactly the same
terms, but adds the following: “He was married to a Dutch woman. General von
Falkenhausen, a former military adviser of Chiang Kai-Shek who became High
Commander in Belgium during the Nazi occupation, often stayed in Switzerland
and was well acquainted with Wang and his wife. Through Wang, Len occasionally
learnt something of the General’s opinions and comments.”
This
is highly significant, for von Falkenhausen was later known to be a fierce
critic of Hitler, and was lucky to escape execution after the failed
assassination attempt of 1944. Allen Dulles was sent to Switzerland in November
1942 precisely to assess the level of opposition to Hitler, and Stalin would
remain highly suspicious of any peace initiatives between the western Allies
and the Nazis that took place behind his back. The fact that Beurton had
first-hand information about a potential anti-Hitler movement (which, of
course, he continued vigorously to pass on to Moscow) would mean that he had
been an extremely valuable asset for SIS, who would have wanted to keep him in
place. The fact that von Falkenhausen was known to be a realistic anti-Hitler
conspirator at this time has been revealed by Dennis Wheatley, who, in his
memoir of his work at the London Controlling Section (The Deception Planners)
recalls how the Political Warfare Executive in April 1943 floated an idea for propaganda
centred on an anti-Hitler figure for whom von Falkenhausen would be a prominent
supporter.
The claim that Vanden
Heuvel, and then Farrell, acted as consuls in Geneva, does raise some
questions, however. What is certain is that the official working on behalf of His
Majesty’s Consul at the time of Sonia’s passport application, in March 1940,
was one H. B. Livingston. His stamped name, with ‘SGD’ [‘signed’] appearing
next to it, appears above the rubric ‘His Majesty’s Consul’. If, as the authors
mentioned above claim, Vanden Heuvel and Farrell occupied that office,
Livingston must have been a junior member of staff, and the narratives would
suggest that both Vanden Heuvel and Farrell distanced themselves from the details
of the process. Thus it is impossible to confirm confidently either Read’s and
Fisher’s claim of Farrell’s appointment in early 1941 or West’s assertion that
Farrell was the immediate successor to the disgraced Pearson in February 1940. A
synthesis of the various accounts would suggest that Farrell was an assistant
to Vanden Heuvel, maybe with vice-consular status, in Geneva in 1940, before
being promoted in early 1941. (This fact has significance when assessing
Farrell’s exposure to Sonia’s various arrangements.)
Moreover, Livingston was
a permanent fixture. On June 3, 1942, after the intervention of Sir Alexander
Cadogan, he submitted a memorandum to Sir Anthony Eden, Foreign Office
Minister, explaining his failure in being unable to help Mr Beurton. Yet, on
July 20, Livingston is able to inform Sir Anthony that Beurton left Geneva on
July 11, rather surprisingly informing his boss only now that Beurton had been
issued a new passport under the name of John William Miller on March 9. It doesn’t
sound like a civil servant completely in charge of the case: the message lacks
authority, and his tone is very subservient. (What is extraordinary is the fact
that Livingston sent the message as a package, enclosing Beurton’s old
passport, and it was received at the Foreign Office as early as August 5. ‘John
Miller’, moreover, was a cryptonym used by the circle of Alexander Foote
(‘Jim’) to refer to Beurton.)
The Implications of the Letter
Len Beurton
In
any case, the event of the letter is pretty remarkable. A high-up in the Secret
Intelligence Service is sending a plaintext letter to a recognised communist
who has married a wireless operator known to be a Soviet agent, in the
knowledge that the letter will be opened and inspected by a) the Swiss
authorities, b) the German censors, c) British Censorship, and d) (probably)
MI5, before the recipient reads it. For some reason, the writer gets his
addressee’s name wrong, calling him ‘Charles Burton’ on the envelope, when his
name is really ‘Leonard Charles Beurton’. But the introduction is ‘My dear
Burton’, an astonishingly intimate parlance for an exchange between a consul
and a lowly peon. One would expect ‘Dear Mr Burton’ in a formal letter, and
‘Dear Charles’ if the two were close friends, even ‘Dear Burton’, if they had
been at school together, but not bosom buddies *. ‘My dear Burton’ suggests a
close colleagueship in the same organisation, or a professional acquaintance of
some duration. (One can track the degrees of acquaintance and intimacy between
British civil servants through their correspondence, ranging from, for example,
‘Dear Vivian’, through ‘My dear Vivian’, and ‘Dear Valentine’, to ‘My Dear
Valentine’, in the case of the SIS officer Valentine Vivian.) But the two were
not social equals, by any stretch. Readers will recall that Beurton stated that
he had become ‘on friendly terms’ with the consular official, but what is going
on here?
[*
Back in the nineteen-fifties, my father recited to me a jingle from his
schooldays:
“He
had no proper sense of shame.
He
told his friends his Christian name.”
This
tradition at independent schools certainly endured into the 1960s.]
Moreover,
the text surely has some coded messages. “I have no doubt that the day is not
far off when only the air will be available!” certainly does not look forward
to the time when airline passenger service will be restored between the two
countries: it must refer to the use of wireless. “Recently he became the proud
father of a second daughter . . .” is probably not referring to a real birth,
but is some kind of pre-arranged text to indicate that something has happened, perhaps
the recruitment of a new sub-agent. (Rössler had been recruited in November
1942.) Such a formulation was a common practice for coded messages in WWII. The
statement that Farrell expects to meet W’s new daughter is very revealing,
however, since it suggests that Farrell has taken over Beurton’s role in
associating with Wang and his links to Falkenhausen.
The
second part of the sentence might otherwise have indicated that ‘W’ could be
Foote, but, now that L. T. Wang has been identified, and Beurton’s friendship
with him revealed, the Chinse journalist must be the prime suspect. The
statement that ‘communication has deteriorated since you left’ could refer to
the fact that the German entry into Vichy France in November 1942 had made the
escape/route (by which couriers could carry messages to London) even more
perilous and unreliable. Yet ‘W’ is a very odd way of identifying a common
acquaintance in a personal letter, and the usage draws attention to the
secrecy. Why would Farrell not use the person’s real name, unless it was a
foreigner with dubious connections? Moreover, Farrell signs off by requesting
Beurton to ‘let us know’, not ‘let me know’, thus suggesting his membership of
a larger organisation.
But,
again, why was Farrell communicating by letter with Beurton rather than going
through Head Office? Farrell expresses disappointment that he has not heard from
Beurton, and regrets that Beurton has no time for ‘private correspondence’. Yet
it is a strange set of circumstances where a consular official and a communist
agent would try to establish a ‘private’ exchange of letters. And the implicit
references to do not suggest that these are purely personal matters.
At
face value, the letter makes an appeal to Beurton to contact the Geneva station
by wireless. Now, although Jeffery’s History of SIS does not mention Farrell by
name, it does reveal some useful facts about wireless communication at that
location: “There was a SIS
wireless set at Geneva, but it could be used only for receiving messages as the
Swiss authorities did not permit foreign missions in the country to send
enciphered messages except through the Post Office” [apparently describing
the situation in 1940], adding that “These communication difficulties meant
that only messages of the highest importance could be sent by cable, and that
much intelligence collected in Switzerland reached London only after a
considerable delay. Because of the lack of continuous secure communications,
moreover, London was unable to send out any signals intelligence material,
which was another handicap for the Swiss station [undated, but implicitly
suggesting the period after Vichy had been closed off in November 1942].”
(p 380)
Analysis
In this context, we have to take some logical
steps about the context of Farrell’s letter:
First
of all, irrespective of the text enclosed, it would on the surface have
been extraordinarily foolish for a senior diplomatic officer, having acted as a
presumably objective arbiter in a repatriation case, to enter communication
with the subject in any form. Yet Farrell not only bypassed the official
channels: he wrote privately, from an undisclosed address, to a distorted and
hence not immediately familiar name, using an unnaturally intimate form of
address, and concluding with a near-undecipherable signature. He was
indisputably trying to contact Beurton about business they had discussed, but
in his effort made a clumsy attempt to conceal the fact.
Second,
Farrell must have known that his letter would be intercepted by both Swiss and
British – and even Nazi – censors, and
that the message would reach the eyes of MI5, SIS and other government
organisations. Yet he did not expect the Swiss censor to be able to identify
him or Beurton, or the British censor to recognize his name. Beurton was known
as ‘John Miller’ to the Swiss authorities. (Beurton appeared as ‘Fenton’, the
name of his adoptive parents, in MI5 files, but his identity was known to MI5
before he arrived in Britain.) The fact that German intelligence could have
discovered messages that pointed to Switzerland’s possibly weakening neutrality
by allowing British wireless communications could have had a very serious consequence.
Yet Farrell, an experienced SIS officer, was apparently not concerned about
this exposure.
Third,
given what is known about Farrell’s close involvement with, and recruitment and
maintenance of, Sissy Dübendorfer, and her association with the ‘Lucy’ Ring,
and his presence as Passport Control Officer in Geneva at the time Sonia
departed for the UK (and probably when her marriage and passport application
took place), one’s first instinct is to assume that he was familiar with the
SIS exercise of enabling Sonia’s marriage, and her passage to the United
Kingdom. He most certainly knew about the shenanigans involved in giving
Len a false identity, and oversaw the whole project. Yet he might not have
known about the details of the arrangement of Sonia’s affairs, if they were
arranged before he was installed in Geneva, or were handled by other officers.
(Sonia describes the passport officer as being somewhat remote, as if he were
unfamiliar with her recent marriage, but, again, he may have been acting so.)
Fourth,
the message indicates that Farrell had received information from a third party
that Beurton had arrived safely in England, and rejoined Sonia, but had clearly
not been given his Summertown address. In that case, however, unless he was
confident that Beurton was living alone at Kidlington, a highly unlikely
supposition, he must have realised that Sonia could have picked up the letter,
and opened it, or that Len would have to explain to her what the letter was
about. Thus he must have believed that referring elliptically to wireless
transmission was not a statement that incurred undue risk in the management of
Sonia.
Fifth,
if one accepts that Farrell was an experienced and respected member of Dansey’s
Z organisation, and that he performed his job of consul/PCO professionally, and
one finds the superficial meaning of the text absurd, one can only assume that he
had an ulterior motive beyond that outlined in the letter, and was consciously
drawing Len out into the open. Alternatively, because he believed the
import of his message was concealed, he did not believe that anyone not part of
the conspiracy would be able to detect what was going on. He surely must have
gained approval from Vanden Heuvel for what he was doing.
Sixth, if receiving messages on his apparatus
in Geneva was not a problem (although without confirmation of receipt, or an
ability to discuss them, their value would have been diminished), trying to
acquire another sender in the United Kingdom would appear to be pointless. Thus
Farrell’s request only makes sense if it implies a tacit agreement that
Beurton’s wireless would communicate not with the Geneva station, but with a
wireless apparatus outside the consulate – presumably Alexander Foote’s,
and that, in addition, Beurton would have useful information to impart. He
would have been of no value as a freelancer. Thus a clandestine but official link,
not so easily detectable by the Swiss authorities, but monitorable by Dansey (presumably)
at one end, and Farrell at the other, would allow a two-way exchange to take
place. His invitation is undeniable: the content of any such exchange deriving
from it still enigmatic.
Seventh,
Farrell must have considered Beurton a loyal servant to the cause, committed to
helping SIS, and he must also have imagined that Beurton’s International
Brigade past had been some kind of cover, or that he had changed his views, or
that his Communist past was irrelevant for the current project. This was an
understandable attitude to take after June 1941, but would not have been when
Sonia left Geneva at the end of 1940, when the Nazi-Soviet pact was still in
effect. He and Beurton shared the desire to acquire information about
opposition to the Nazis: they were both interested in helping escaped POWs get
to Lisbon. Farrell has apparently taken over Beurton’s role as intermediary
with Wang. Thus all evidence seems to suggest that Farrell trusted Beurton.
(When Skardon and Serpell questioned Beurton in the infamous 1947 encounter at
‘The Firs’, they assumed Beurton was anti-communist, according to Sonia.)
Eighth,
Beurton could thus, with the Soviet Union and Great Britain as allies, presumably
feel at ease with working for SIS, expressing enthusiasm for his role in
returning to the UK, and managed to convince Farrell and his team that he could
put his wireless operations skills to good use in a shared cause. Beurton
claimed, after his return, that he had been able to help Farrell on some matters
of intelligence (surely the Wang-von Falkenhausen business), something that may
have facilitated the granting of his false identity. As a quid pro quo
for gaining Farrell’s help on his passport, he probably made some sort of
agreement with Farrell for trying to communicate with Farrell (or the
surrogate) by wireless when he reached the UK – perhaps on the status of Soviet
POWs – but probably did not plan to take
it seriously. Farrell’s hint that he knows what Beurton is focused on (‘you are
absorbed in work that so interests you’) indicates that Beurton might have
confided in him some aspect of his plans with Sonia. Yet why, if Farrell had
taken over Beurton’s role as intermediary to Wang, he would be expecting useful
information from Beurton at a personal level now that Beurton was in England,
is very puzzling.
Thus
the primary enigma over Farrell’s approach stands out: was it authorised, unauthorised,
or clandestine? If it was authorised, it would seem unnecessarily hazardous, as
Beurton could much more easily have been contacted and influenced from London.
If it was unauthorised, it would seem pointless, as Beurton would have nothing
of value to offer to Farrell in Geneva, or any associate wireless operator in
Switzerland, and raises all manner of questions of responsibility and secrecy. The
third option is that it was clandestine, and that Farrell was also a Soviet
agent or, at least, a sympathiser. Yet the foolishness of exposing his
relationship with Beurton to Swiss, German and British intelligence is simply
beyond belief, and Farrell’s stature as a senior SIS officer – even with what we
know about Kim Philby – almost certainly would seem to exclude him from that
category. Thus a more plausible conclusion is that the communication was ‘semi-authorised’:
Farrell had received tacit approval for an exercise that would be denied on
high if the details ever surfaced.
In
this scenario, therefore, Farrell would have been treating Beurton as a
potentially valuable communicant, with wireless skills, who would be able to
facilitate secret, less obvious, exchange of information with Dansey in London
and the Swiss outpost through its extended network, namely Foote. There was
risk involved, but he must have considered that Sonia would not be perturbed by
disclosure of the agreement. What information, and from what source, Beurton
would have provided his contact in Switzerland is not clear. It may be
coincidental that ‘Lucy’ (Rudolf Rössler) was recruited by the Swiss network in
November 1942, shortly after Beurton’s arrival in Britain. Yet the case for Beurton’s
being the conduit for Ultra-derived messages would appear to be weakened by the
following:
Foote had been transmitting such
intelligence messages before Len’s arrival in the UK;
Beurton, unlike Foote, would have
explained to Moscow (via Sonia) the source of his intelligence, but Moscow
continuously pressed for more information about ‘Lucy’;
Even if he did not see the Ultra-based messages
himself, Farrell would presumably have been aware of Beurton’s role, and thus
would not have had to remind him of his obligations;
If SIS had nurtured Beurton as an official
messenger for such traffic, and trusted him, it would surely have kept him out
of national service, so that he could continue his role;
Foote would not have complained so much, after
his return to the UK in 1947, about Sonia’s receiving warnings by an officer
within MI5 about Fuchs’s imminent arrest.
Farrell’s
Intentions: A Closer Study
If
a more detailed look is taken at Farrell’s situation, enhanced by the
(admittedly unreliable) memoirs of Foote and Sonia herself, one might conclude
that Farrell was indeed acting in a semi-official capacity, probably with
Vanden Heuvel’s knowledge, but without any formal approval from SIS in London.
Consider the following reasoning:
Because of the multi-month
delay since Beurton’s arrival in the UK, Farrell’s letter of March 1943 must
have been prompted by some event. The likeliest candidates must be i) Beurton’s
failure to do something, or ii) an unexpected happening with the Soviet network
in Switzerland. Yet it is difficult to see how any of the events concerning the
Rote Kapelle after July 1942 (such as Rössler’s recruitment) could have
prompted the approach. The cryptic references to ‘W’, and W’s new child, would
not appear to have anything to do with wireless communications. On the other
hand, the progress of hostilities might have provided a stimulus: the
Wehrmacht’s first major defeat of the war at Stalingrad, in February 1943,
could conceivably have re-energised interest in the anti-Hitler movement.
Farrell might have then tried to resuscitate a contact.
What was Farrell’s
probable relationship with Beurton? His familiar mode of address shows that he
had grown to know him well in the time between Sonia’s leaving (December 1940)
and Beurton’s departure (July 1942). Beurton confirmed that he had provided
Farrell with information and that the two had become friendly, but Sonia’s own
account suggests that it was only very late in the cycle, after Cadogan’s
involvement in February 1942. In Sonya’s Report, the author describes
how Len’s applications to the British Consulate were brushed off since they had
more urgent cases to deal with. Only after Cadogan’s letter (written February
29) did Farrell ask Beurton to come and see him, and then ‘smoothed the way for
his journey’.
What was Beurton’s
status? To SIS, it would probably have been safer, and more productive, for
Beurton to remain in Switzerland, where he was effectively neutralized, but
could provide useful information via his Chinese acquaintance, Wang. It is significant that SIS apparently made no
move to accelerate his reunion with his wife. After all, they (in London) did
not really know whether he was an unideological agent (like Foote), or a
committed communist (like Sonia). If he was an unreconstituted International
Brigader, and had enthusiastically married Sonia, SIS would conclude that he
was certainly the latter. But he shared SIS’s anti-fascist mission. Moreover, Sonia
relates how Len and ‘Jim’ (Foote) grew apart in 1940, as Foote became more
egoistic and pleasure-loving. She notes that Foote did not become a communist
until he returned from Spain. Foote writes, in Handbook for Spies,
that Beurton had no further contact with the group after March 1941. He also
told MI5, in 1947, that Beurton had been very critical of Radó, whom Beurton
‘hated’, and that Moscow had asked Foote to get Beurton to stop sending
embarrassing telegrams to Sonia that were unencrypted.
Did the request from the
UK to do whatever it could to gain Beurton’s egress come as an unpleasant
surprise, or simply a bureaucratic chore? Cadogan and Eden, after pressure from
Sonia and Eleanor Rathbone, had become involved. There is no evidence of SIS
applying pressure, and a note from SIS to Vesey on file reinforces the fact
that the PCO in Geneva knew nothing of Beurton’s shady past beforehand. (It
would say that, of course. It would not have been wise for SIS to admit to Cadogan
and Eden that they had been employing known Communists for clandestine work.)
So why would such high-ups agree to support the case of one single dubious citizen?
It seems an inordinate amount of effort to gain the repatriation (and airplane
flight home from Lisbon) of a highly dubious and subversive character, who was,
moreover, on the C. S. W. (‘Central Security War’) Black List, and thus
considered officially an undesirable. Sonia had also been placed on that list
before her arrival.
One suggestion, put to
me by Professor Glees, is that Beurton may have been recruited as an SIS agent before
his marriage to Sonia, in a fashion similar to the method Foote indeed had been
(according to my theory), and was instructed to marry her to facilitate her
passage to the UK. In this role, his task would have been to keep an eye on
Sonia, and he thus would have been sent to the UK to fulfil this mission, but
reporting to Farrell via personal letter, and then wireless, rather than to
London. This is a very dramatic hypothesis that must not be excluded, but it
does raise questions about Beurton’s true commitment, and whether he never
really switched allegiances, but acted along with SIS as far as he could. While
Alexander Foote was an adventurer, of pliable political convictions, Beurton
had been a dedicated communist for years, having joined the CP in Spain, and
openly transferred to the CPGB on his return. Moreover, we have to face the
fact that Beurton showed intense loyalty to Sonia, and followed her to East
Germany in 1950, soon after she and their three children escaped, where they
apparently lived happily together. According to Sonia, Beurton worked in a
dedicated fashion for the German Democratic Republic for twenty years.
However, after Len’s departure, Farrell (and Heuvel, presumably) did nothing for eight months. If they had divulged anything confidential to Beurton, they must have known that, as soon as Beurton arrived in Oxford, he would tell Sonia about the set-up in Geneva, and what discussions he had had with Farrell. Did Farrell let Beurton know about the infiltration of the Rote Kapelle network (by Foote and Dübendorfer)? Surely not, otherwise Foote would have been blown. (Although Radó knew that Foote had friends in the British Embassy.) Foote underwent strenuous interrogation in Moscow after the war, and was absolved. Sonia admits she did not mistrust Foote in 1940, even when the breach with Beurton occurred. Again, that may have been an insertion required by the GRU, but the latter allowed Sonia to describe Foote’s innate humanity in warning her to leave the country well before Fuchs’s arrest.
Ursula Beurton (Sonia)
What did Sonia do in the
weeks/months following Beurton’s return? The most significant is being set up,
with Moscow’s approval, to meet Fuchs (although some accounts suggest she met
him earlier). Did she get the all-clear because Beurton returned from
Geneva? Thus Moscow could not have been alarmed by anything Beurton reported. Maybe
she received the go-ahead on the basis that her husband was in place to
transmit her messages. Meanwhile, Dansey and Menzies must have breathed a sigh
of relief that nothing outwardly changed after Beurton’s arrival. There were no
alterations in behaviour, and Sonia clearly believed she could transmit
undisturbed.
Farrell’s informal
approach to Beurton therefore only makes sense if either a) Farrell had not been
personally involved with Dansey in the scheme to manipulate Sonia, and had been
delegated with merely formal tasks to facilitate her passage only, or b)
Beurton was now a recognized SIS agent, and Farrell was his controller. Sonia
presents the request for a passport as a surprise to the British Consul in
Geneva, as if he had no knowledge of the marriage itself. (“His response was
distinctly cool.”) Farrell’s primary focus was on escape lines – as was that of
Beurton, who was tasked by Moscow with trying to get escaped Soviet
prisoners-of-war out of Switzerland. Farrell knew Beurton and Foote were (or
had been) friends. Farrell must have had broad sympathies with anti-fascist
activities, and believed Sonia’s story that she had abandoned any Soviet espionage
because of her disgust with the Nazi-Soviet pact (a claim Sonia makes in her
book, and one that is conveniently echoed in Foote’s Handbook for Spies,
where it suited MI5 to indicate that Sonia’s disillusionment meant that she had
given up spying).
A plausible explanation
is that Beurton thus made some deal with Farrell concerning liaison with his (former)
friend Foote, but did not take it seriously, as he considered he had duped Farrell,
and thus did nothing about it on his return to the UK. If he had been recruited
to keep a watch on Sonia, he would surely have passed on some worthless details
to keep his legend alive, rather than do nothing at all. Beurton turned out to
be a highly mendacious character, inventing all manner of stories to mislead
the authorities about his travels, and his source of funds, but suddenly
expressed a sense of entitlement when SIS aided his return to the United
Kingdom
The conclusion must be
that Farrell made an unofficial approach to Beurton, reckless in its poorly veiled
language, but that all the authorities astonishingly failed to note its import,
with the result that no strategies were derailed. Yet the existence of the
Geneva letter shows a degree of connivance with the Beurton/Sonia axis that has
been ignored by those who claim that SIS had no part in masterminding Sonia’s
escape.
Conclusions
Farrell:
On the most probable assumption that Farrell was acting without overt higher
authority, the implication of his action is that a high degree of naivety must
be ascribed to him and Vanden Heuvel, because, irrespective of their degree of
trust in Beurton, and his exact mission, they must have realised that Beurton
would immediately inform Sonia of what was happening. I am of the opinion that
Sonia probably guessed in 1940 that SIS was trying to manipulate her, because
of the chain of events that led to her arrival as a free Englishwoman in war-struck
Britain in January 1941, but Len’s arrival eighteen months later, if he
divulged any secret agreement with Farrell, would have immediately confirmed
that everything they did was presumably under surveillance. And that fact has
enormous implications for Sonia’s career in espionage after that date. Moreover,
Farrell appears to disappear from the picture after this episode
Beurton:
And how was Beurton to handle this fresh requirement made on him? Farrell
expects him to have made contact with him since his departure, although perhaps
not immediately by ‘air’. Is that an evasion, a subtly coded wish that he
should have communicated by wireless by now? Beurton apparently did not hear
from Farrell for eight months. Maybe he thought that, without a firm agreement
on schedules, frequencies, callsigns, etc., or even knowledge of the
capabilities of any wireless transmitter he might acquire or construct, he
could safely avoid trying to make wireless contact with Farrell. But what about
Dansey and SIS? If Farrell’s approach to Beurton had been authorized by Vanden
Heuvel, but not by Dansey, it would explain why Dansey and his minions did not
discreetly try to ensure that Beurton was following up. But Beurton’s status in
the whole drama is now elevated: Soviet wireless operator, confidant with
connections to the opposition to Hitler, clandestine communicant with – or even
agent of –
SIS, and decoy for an important Soviet spy.
Sonia:
One of the most significant conclusions must be that, if Farrell had tried to
open a communication channel with Beurton, Sonia would have known about it as
well. And, even if she knew nothing of the programme to manipulate her, the
realisation that SIS was aware of Len’s capability for using wireless in the UK
would make any attempt by her to perform clandestine transmissions pointless.
The only other explanation would be that Sonia had left for the UK as a
compliant accomplice in some disinformation exercise towards the Soviet Union,
and went along with it, while all the time planning to pursue courier
activities of which SIS was unaware (i.e. meeting with Fuchs). That hypothesis
is unlikely, but not outrageous. I would not discard it immediately, and offer
a possible scenario as to how it might have rolled out.
It
is quite possible that SIS, having abetted Sonia’s marriage, then threatened
her, when she applied for a passport, that they would reveal her subterfuge and
return her to a probable death in Germany unless she agreed to work for them.
The motive here would be to learn more about Sonia’s contacts, feed her
disinformation, and, by using her transmissions as a crib, acquire clues to
Soviet ciphers and codes. Sonia would have gone along with this scheme, of
course, and, once she was in the UK, would have had to cooperate for a while.
Yet, a ‘double agent’ (which, strictly speaking, she would not have been) cannot
be relied upon unless his or her handler has exclusive control of the subject
agent’s communications. Sonia would have alerted her true bosses of the
situation via her brother and his conduit to the Soviet Embassy, and Military
Intelligence would have adjusted plans and expectations accordingly.
Sonia
& Len: In that temporary twilight world, the outcome would
be that Sonia would have had to stifle her own transmissions (or deliver
completely harmless messages, to fool her surveillers), and that Len would have
managed to deceive or shake off his would-be SIS controllers, and transmit to
the Soviet Union (or the Soviet Embassy) until he was called up for national
service. While Len’s actual role with SIS remains very murky, Sonia may then have
turned to couriers and the Soviet Embassy for delivering her intelligence from
Fuchs.
The
exploits of Sonia and Len in going to Switzerland, later escaping from there to
the United Kingdom, and then surviving in Britain undetected, are so packed
with incidents of unmerited good fortune, complemented by a massive series of
untruths declared to immigration officers and others by the married pair, that
one can come to only one reasonable conclusion: they were remarkably stupid, or
they were abetted by an extraordinarily naïve British intelligence
organisation. And, if they were allowed to get away with such obviously
refutable false claims, they must have themselves concluded that the opposition
was either simply incompetent, or believed that it could manipulate them
without it’s being suspected. I shall cover the whole farrago of lies in a future
piece.
SIS:
The inescapable fact is that the existence of the letter proves that SIS was
trying to manipulate Sonia (and Len), in a futile effort to control her
broadcasts, and learn more about Soviet tradecraft and codes. What the letter
and the surrounding information on file show is that, contrary to earlier
analyses, which have focused on MI5’s negligence in not detecting what
Sonia was up to, and thus allowing her to operate as a courier scot-free, is
that MI5’s senior officers were colluding with SIS and allowing her to operate
without hindrance. Beurton’s arrival caused a worrying flurry of unwanted
interest from an eager junior in F Division (Shillito) at a time when B
Division had studiously been ignoring her activity and movements. Ironically,
Beurton was at this time, in 1942 and 1943, the probable real wireless operator
transmitting Sonia’s messages, while Sonia was able to roam around with MI5 casually
‘keeping an eye on her’. All the time, however, she was able to distract her
surveillers from the main illicit activity. Sonia outwitted both MI5 and SIS.
The
pattern in KV 6/41 reinforces the major theme of ‘Sonia’s Radio’ – that SIS developed a scheme to place Sonia in
a position where she would be encouraged
to spy for the Soviets, but where her every move would be known to the Secret
Intelligence Service. In order to execute this plan, SIS had to gain the
co-operation of senior MI5 officers, who were responsible for the surveillance
of possible threats, whether German or communist, on home soil, so that Sonia’s
life would not be interfered with. Every time a junior officer pointed out Sonia’s
background and communist ideology, or her connections with strident
rabble-rousers like her brother, that officer was quashed, and instructed to
lay off. Yet the corporate discomfort was obvious: in one very telling detail
from after the war, the same John Marriott who worked for the Double-Cross
operation in B1A, and then returned to communist counter-espionage in F
Division as F2C (Shillito’s old job), wrote to Kim Philby of SIS on April 15,
1946. The FBI had contacted MI5 wanting information about Sonia in relation to
her husband Rudolf Hamburger, who had been captured in Tehran, and the FBI
wanted MI5 to question Sonia. Marriott wrote to Philby: “For
a variety of reasons I do not feel able to comply with this request . . .” Indeed.
Postscript
I
wonder whether any readers can help with the following questions:
What was the staff organisation in the
Geneva consulate from 1939-1943?
Who were the owners of the bungalow in
Kidlington, and did they really eject the Beurtons and move in?
What route did mail from Switzerland to
the UK take in 1943?
What other interpretations might one place
on the message in the letter?
What was Beurton’s exact role supposed to
be in making wireless contact with Switzerland?
Can anyone point me to details of
Falkenhausen’s activities in the first years of the war?
As
with all these intelligence mysteries, one has to believe there exists a
logical explanation – unless, of course, the archival record itself is
fallacious. One has to assume that each agent in the story was acting in the
belief that what he or she did was in furtherance of his or her own interests,
or those of their employer. The Geneva Letter is in the same category as the
memorandum on Guy Burgess’s going to Moscow to negotiate with the Comintern, or
the report from the Harwich customs officer querying Rudolf Peierls’s passport,
or Dick White’s instructions to Arthur Martin to brief Lamphere on Philby. A
convincing explanation will eventually be winkled out.
[I
thank Professor Anthony Glees, Emeritus Professor of Security and Intelligence
Studies at the University of Buckingham, and Denis Lenihan, distinguished
analyst of intelligence matters, for their comments on earlier versions of this
report. Professor Glees came to Roger Hollis’s defence in ‘The Secrets of the
Service’, and can safely be described as a supporter of my theory that SIS
manipulated Sonia: Mr Lenihan is overall a supporter of Chapman Pincher’s
claims in ‘Treachery’ that Hollis was the Soviet mole ELLI, and is sceptical of
the SIS-Sonia conspiracy theory. Neither gentleman has endorsed my argument,
and any errors or misconceptions that appear in it are my responsibility alone.]
I
thank Denis Lenihan for his kind words, and for his thorough and perceptive
investigation into the stories about Hugh Shillito, Len Beurton and Sonia. I
sincerely welcome such challenges, as that is the only way that knowledge will
evolve. I would be the first to jettison any of my pet theories should new evidence
to undermine it arrive [Is this right? You don’t need to go overboard! Ed.],
and I am always prepared to modify my conclusions in the light of new facts.
But I wonder whether it would still be a bit premature to do so. Denis’s counter essentially boils down to Shillito’s slowness on the uptake, in pursuing, in September 1942, a request for telephone taps, and inspection of correspondence at 134 Oxford Road, Kidlington, when Len Beurton and Sonia had evidently both moved into new accommodation at Avenue Road, George Street, in Summertown, Oxford. That would (Denis claims) invalidate any suggestion that Len was using the Kidlington address for serious wireless work, while Sonia’s establishment of a wireless apparatus (receiver/sender) at the Laskis’ cottage was intended as a decoy. (I have since studied the file on the Loefflers at KV 2/2927: in fact my analysis simply required a close re-examination of KV 6/41.) Yet we need to ponder over a few questions.
Was Shillito ‘dim’? In general, I would say ‘definitely not’. Pincher described him as ‘terrier-like’. He engaged in a very serious study of the Oliver Green case, and his analysis of it brought him to the attention of Director-General of MI5, David Petrie, for whom he wrote a special report in August 1942. Yet we must recall his career history, and the reorganization of MI5 in July 1941. His initial treatment of Sonia is admittedly casual. Soon after her arrival, in March 1941, Shillito was informing Ryde, of Special Branch in Reading, that he considered that no further action be taken over her, but that ‘an eye should be kept on her’. We can also read that Shillito at that time passes the file on to B4, ‘as her father, Professor Kuczynski, holds Communist views’. This judgment, and the transfer of paperwork, are not surprising, since Shillito was at that time representing B10E, which, according to Curry, was responsible for ‘Preliminary Investigation of Cases of German Espionage in the U.K.’. I do not understand why a specialized section was required for this task, but the implication is clear: suspected spies were considered in terms of their being Nazi agents, and B4 presumably took care of those with communist links. In any case, B10 was disbanded in July 1941, and Shillito became a member of the new F Division. Shillito thus became detached from the Sonia investigation, which was handled by the not very determined Vesey, and Shillito correctly focused on the Oliver Green network until Len arrived from Switzerland in July 1942. (Pincher makes no mention of Vesey, so far as I can gather.) Shillito then started to pick up the pieces. He soon came to the conclusion that Sonia and Len Beurton were probably agents of the Comintern, yet the Beurton files are conspicuously lacking in any coverage from Vesey, or any other B4A officer from this point, as if Shillito, Vesey and others were all being discouraged from peering any further. For what it is worth, Roger Hollis, having earlier expressed enthusiasm for Shillito’s work, complained to Guy Liddell on December 9, 1944, that Shillito was ‘lazy’ – a palpable untruth, but, since that judgment was prompted by a request for Shillito’s assistance from Anthony Blunt, the motivation behind the characterisation must be questionable. In any case, Shillito became very frustrated, and left MI5 before October 1945.
Why would Shillito want to pursue
Beurton in Kidlington, when it was apparent that the Beurtons had moved to
Summertown? There is no doubt that Sonia was living
at Kidlington in July 1942, when Len arrived at Poole Airport from Lisbon (on
the 29th). Len knew of the address: he and Sonia had exchanged
letters (although, rather strangely, Sonia could reproduce in her memoir only
hers, not his). But note that Shillito, in the report of November 30, 1942,
indicates that ‘Beurton has gone to live there (Kidlington)’, as if he had
intelligence that Len had made the move to set up there alone since arriving in
the United Kingdom. He does not say that ‘the Beurtons live there’: he talks
about ‘this man’s number’, not ‘the Beurtons’ number’. He must surely have
known about the move to Summertown by then. His report of December 19, 1942,
shows that he is familiar with the claims that Sonia had been making about Len’s
detention in Switzerland. If, as Denis claims, he was misled by a previous paper on
file, an intercepted letter from Lisbon to Beurton, he would have seen the
other information concerning Avenue Cottage. In July 1943, Shillito even states
to Curry that the Beurtons ‘have been living together since their return to
this country’, which is wrong in two aspects. Was that simply careless? Or was
he covering up an earlier mistake for Curry’s sake? Whatever the explanation,
it does show that he was aware of their shared address in Summertown.
Why would Shillito duplicate and
overlap the surveillance work of Vesey? Vesey was in B4A, under
Major Whyte (head of B4A), and Major Dick White (chief of B4, responsible for
‘Espionage’). Shillito was F2B, responsible for Comintern agents, under Roger
Hollis, head of F2, at that time reporting to John Curry, who in May 1943 was
seconded to SIS, allowing for Hollis’s promotion. Thus Shillito was undertaking
a completely separate investigation. By December 1942, he was advertising
himself as F2B/C, thus incorporating ‘Russian Intelligence’ as well. (On June
23, Anthony Blunt had informed his Soviet masters that Shillito was responsible
for counter-intelligence against the Soviets.) One might well ask, however, why
the task of counter-espionage was so dramatically split: it was because Petrie,
in 1941, had wanted B Division to focus solely on enemy (i.e. Nazi) spies, and
have other subversive threats handled by a different group – hence the creation
of F Division. Yet the fragmentation of the attention to Soviet agents clearly turned
out to be a dreadful mistake.
Would Petrie and Liddell not have
been aware of the possibly duplicated effort? Almost certainly.
There is evidence in the archive of Shillito’s working closely with Petrie, who
admired Shillito’s investigation into Green. Roger Hollis was indeed away on
convalescence for several months in the summer of 1942, and his stand-in was
the not totally impressive Roger Fulford. It seems as if F Division was working
closely with B Division – or, at least, some effort was being made. During the
war, Liddell and Hollis met regularly. Hollis returned from his illness just
before October 7, 1942, on which date he
dined with Liddell: they discussed continued Comintern activity. On November
29, Shillito passed to both Liddell and Hollis his suspicions of Sonia and Len,
and Hollis enthusiastically received Shillito’s report on Green a few days
later. On December 20, Shillito made his first definitive assertion that he
thought Len was a spy. Yet we then have to deal with the a very provocative series
of events: the inquiry into Sonia within B4A is cooled, but as soon as Shillito
becomes involved, writes a very well received report on Oliver Green, and is
then led to the Sonia case through Len, his energies also appear to be quashed.
What evidence is there that Len
‘moved back’ to Kidlington? Admittedly little. But a
close inspection points to a minor paradox. In her memoir, Sonia informs us
that the owners of the bungalow gave her and Len notice, as they required it
for their own use, and that she and her husband consequently found ‘Avenue
Cottage’. Since JM (John Marriott?) of B2A (under Maxwell Knight’s ‘Agents’ –
another group with a finger in the pie) made a request for correspondence to be
intercepted at Avenue Cottage from September 15, the Beurtons must have found
new premises quite easily. That was an achievement in those days: Sonia had
described how difficult it was finding the Kidlington bungalow. Thus the
example of letters arriving between September 19 and October 3 proves that Len
and Sonia were installed in Summertown at least by mid-September. [You
weaken your own case, Denis, by indicating that the surveillance occurred
between August 19 and September 3, when it in fact took place a month later.]
On September 9, when Vesey asks Michael Ryde, of Special Branch in Reading, to
contact Beurton so that he and an officer from SIS may interview him, Vesey
gives him the Kidlington address. We must bear in mind that Shillito was not the
prime Sonia-watcher: when Pincher lists his claims that Sonia was a probable
spy, I believe he should have been identifying Shillito’s suspicions about her
husband. Yet Shillito kept track of their movements, as his forwarding a copy
of the notorious March 3, 1943 letter from the Oxford constabulary shows. He was
informed about the discovery of the wireless set by Major Phipps. Why would
Shillito, if he was mistaken about the Beurtons’ move, assume that only Len had
moved back to Kidlington, and specifically mention the need to intercept Len
Beurton’s communications alone, instead of those of the pair of them?
Why did the GPO not respond sensibly
to the conflicting requests? We note that both
Vesey’s and Shillito‘s requests were sent to Colonel Allan of the G.P.O. One
might have expected Allan to have noticed the anomaly, and pointed it out to
Shillito. But he apparently did not. Allan would also, had new owners moved in
(as Sonia claimed) have informed MI5 that their subject of surveillance was no
longer at that address. But he did not. It is not surprising that Shillito’s
searches were ‘unremunerative’, as Beurton would not have been expecting any
mail at the Kidlington address, but it is surprising that the GPO kept open a
watch on the address without any mail at all being recorded. Nevertheless (contrary
to your claim, Denis), a letter to Beurton from Geneva was registered and
opened on March 9, 1943, in which the sender laments lack of any communication
from Beurton. So the search was not entirely fruitless.
Why did the Beurtons move to
Summertown? In her memoir, Sonia writes that ‘the
owners of the bungalow gave us notice as they required it for their own use’.
This message is intensified in John Green’s A Political Family, where he
writes that ‘on top of it all, and before he even had time to unpack his bags,
the owners of the cottage decided to give them notice as they required it
themselves’. That suggests a speedy departure, perhaps in a matter of days.
Chapman Pincher judges that it is all a fraud: “Sonia was to explain that she
moved into Oxford because the owner of her Kidlington bungalow wished to return
there, but that may have been another part of her legend.” Pincher suggests
that moving to Oxford made it easier for Sonia to meet Fuchs in Birmingham. Yet
he overlooks the fact that Kidlington had a train station that lay directly on
the line between Birmingham and Oxford. There may have been another reason, as
I outlined. Moreover, Len Beurton received a hefty tax demand from the Inland
Revenue days after he arrived. If SIS had truly been managing the premises as a
safe house, they would have wanted to divert attraction from it.
Why would Shillito behave so obstinately over the Summertown address? I accept there are some puzzling aspects to Shillito’s behavior. It carries on until December 1943, when Shillito requests that the Home Office Warrant for Kidlington be cancelled. Moreover, Shillito’s wording is often so obscure and unusual that one wonders what was going through his mind. For example, he writes to Denniston of E5 on August 16, 1943 (after another MI5 reorganisation: E5 is Alien Control, under Colonel Brooke-Booth), seeking opinions on the Beurtons from any contact the group has ‘in their circle’. He continues to maintain, however, that Len lives at 134 Oxford Road, while adding that the Kuczynskis live next door to Neville Laski. Maybe he did not want to give anything away, but his assertion that Len had gone to ‘live’ in Kidlington, while maintain a residence with his wife, without any evidence of his following up to see what was happening in Kidlington, is very problematic. Len Beurton, if he did spend time at Kidlington, had to abandon it by late 1943, as he was enlisted in the RAF as a trainee wireless operator, and thus the trail went cold.
One lesson from all of this is the need to keep in mind a clear understanding of the organisation of MI5 when trawling through the archives. There is a crisper story to be told about the shared responsibilities of B and F Divisions in the surveillance of the Beurtons, and how Sonia appeared to be protected by some agency at a level higher than Hollis.
In
the meantime, I believe that part of the key to unlocking the Riddle of
Kidlington must be determining the identity of the owners of 134 Oxford Road,
and who lived there immediately before and after Sonia took up the lease. If,
as I suspect, the domicile was an SIS safe house (like that of the Skripals in
Salisbury), it may have been registered as being owned by a friendly name. (We should
recall that two of Sonia’s residences were owned by Neville Laski, and the MP
for Oxford University, Arthur Salter.) Two-and-a-half years ago, I pursued this
line of inquiry, and sent a letter to HM Land Registry Citizen Centre in
Gloucester, as an on-line search had indicated that the records did not go back
very far, and offered to pay for a professional search. I never received a
reply.
And then, about a year later, I received an out-of-the-blue email from a coldspur-watcher, Mr Alan Anderton, after which (for one day) we held an intense discussion. I reproduce it in full here (with minor edits):
The 1939 Register of 134 Oxford Road, Kidlington
Hello Mr Percy
I have been reading your
Misdefending the Realm and also Sonia’s Radio. An impressive
amount of work has gone into them.
There was a comment in
Sonia’s Radio about finding the owners of 134 Oxford Road, well I can’t quite
do that but the 1939 Register of England and Wales is now available online. I
took a look and in Enumeration District DJZA and there is 134 Oxford Road in
Kidlington.
The 1939 Register is a
bit weird, they used it to keep tabs on people , my parents married in 1950 and
her new surname has been pencilled in on my mum’s entry.
So there is a Sidney and
Violet Haynes, rather getting on in years and presumably their granddaughter
Diana Haynes who was 21. The black line usually means it was a child. The
Heineken and Carne are the names of Diana’s first and second husbands , I found
a marriage to a Cyril Carne in 1958 but no idea who Heininen was. There is also
a reference to “RADIO SHOP” written in, I guess at some point after
1939 she started working at a radio shop , bit convenient perhaps.
Anyhow, as usual in your
line of investigation , this probably poses more questions than it answers. If
I could be of any further use you are welcome to ask , I have a subscription to
Ancestry which is the reason I can find this
Best wishes , Alan
Anderton
(Percy to Anderton, 8/8)
Dear
Alan (if I may),
How
kind of you to get in touch with me! I hope you are enjoying the slog through
MTR. Yes, there was an enormous number of sources to go through, and the
process continues . . .
It is a
fascinating entry you sent me. I must confess, when I first looked at it, I
assumed that the items ’88’, ’94’ and ’21’ must be years-of-birth, especially
as one would expect the wife in those days to be younger than the husband, and
which would make the arrangement more credible. But I am sure you are right,
familiar with the column headings. Yet what does the ‘July’ indicate,
overwriting a numerical ’11’?
And the
black line means what? That someone was living there who had subsequently died?
And is it not amazing that officials would use the Register to record facts
about persons who had subsequently moved on elsewhere? Did they do this for
everybody, I wonder, or only those who ‘needed to be kept an eye on’? Heininen
appears to be a Finnish name.
The
radio shop connection is odd, is it not? So it all does come back to whoever
the owner of the property was, who next leased it to the Beurtons. I never
heard back from the Land Registry . . . It will probably have to wait
until my next trip to England.
Please
let me know of any fresh information you turn up on ancestry.com or
elsewhere. Do you have a professional interest in all this spy stuff? It amazes
me how many unexplained riddles still exist after all these years.
Best
wishes, Tony.
(Anderton
to Percy, 8/8)
Hello Tony
You may of course call
me Alan , the 1939 Register is entirely weird. It was used until at least the
1950s and was updated. My mum’s entry was annotated with the date 12.10.56
which means nothing to me (I was 5 at the time). She certainly was nobody the
powers would need to keep tabs on. The original entries were quite heavily
modified after the Register was compiled so the JULY has been added sometime
afterwards as has the RADIO SHOP entry. The 88 , 94 and 21 are the years of
birth – where JULY has been added I think the 11 is actually a crossing out ,
it is usually the birth day and month and. The black line is usually children
under a certain age , something to do with not being released for 100 years ,
or as it seems 90 now. Why all three birthdates would be changed to JULY is a
mystery.
There is also a CR283
and 5.9.83 OX plus MIC where the address goes. They only wrote the address once
, all others at the same address had a blank entry there. Diana May H Carne
died in Q3 1986 aged 65 in Cheltenham , maybe she moved there in 1983 ? It is
suspicious that this list was apparently updated for several decades after it
was produced. I have to say that it seems that Diana was still living there
until 1958 at least. My mum’s entry has her new surname (acquired in 1950) and
we lived there until 1957. I would hazard a guess that Mr & Mrs Beurton
stayed there along with Diana and possibly Mr Heininen though I don’t know when
Diana became Mrs Heininen. This is only conjecture based on what my mother’s
entry looks like.
Sorry I can’t help with
the name of the owner , the Land Registry moves in mysterious ways. I have no
professional interest but have always been intrigued by the bland statement
that there were no Nazi spies transmitting from the UK during the war other
than the double cross ones. It seems the Germans had more than one source of
intelligence here though they may have been sending less than accurate data.
Having read your research it is hard to see how they can justify such statements
since it seems all and sundry could transmit with almost impunity.
It may be that Diana
moved out for a while , it may be that the Beurtons lived with her , maybe the
other Haynes had passed on or moved away but I feel certain that Diana was
there in 1958 but I have been known to be wrong before. Having had another
quick look it seems that Diana and Cyril Carne were living in Western Road
Cheltenham in 1962 and 1968 (from the electoral roll). As usual, every answer
generates more questions
It is a national scandal
that the commies were able to penetrate our supposed security services to such
a level, if you wrote a thriller with that story you would be laughed out the
door.
I will try and dig out
something about the uses the 1939 Register was put to
Best wishes , Alan
(Percy to Anderton, 8/8)
Thanks, Alan.
I just read up the
explanation of the National Registry at TNA. I had never realized how it was
undertaken and then modified later. I understand better now why they kept tabs
on everybody.
So Diane was certainly a
daughter of Sydney and Violet, if those numbers are birth-years, not ages?
Obviously more useful to maintain an absolute. You seem confident that Diane
was still at that address: do you think her parents were, too? If not, why not?
The fact that there were other residents there would rather scotch my theory
that it was a safe-house for Len Beurton – unless, of course, they were
complicit somehow. I shall have to return to this topic when I have finished my
research into the radio-detection of the Abwehr agents – which is all related,
as you know!
I am now delving into
the very mysterious cases of Bjornson/Hans Schmidt and ter Braak (Fukken) who,
according to some sources, were for a while able to transmit undetected from
English soil in 1940/41. I believe MI5 was being rather devious in the records
on ter Braak that were eventually released. Look out for the September Coldspur
for an update.
Best wishes, Tony.
(Anderton to Percy,8/8)
Hi Tony
Yes , they are birth
years and Diana was born in 1921. I suspect they were somehow involved , she
presumably went to work in a radio shop after September 1939 and then ends up
in Cheltenham in perhaps the 1950s. I can’t say for sure if they were still
there when the Beurtons moved in but somebody somewhere was keeping tabs on
just about everyone , probably the local councils. I can’t find any trace of
her marrying Mr Heininen , maybe she went to Finland.
MI5 being devious, I’m
shocked
Have a good evening ,
Alan
(Anderton to Percy, 8/8)
Hi Tony
Just found something on
lostcousins dot com
When the National Health
Service was founded in 1948 the National Register was used as the basis of the
NHS Central Register, and this continued in to the early 1990s. As a result
many name changes were recorded as the result of marriages (and divorces) that
took place in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
I can’t believe they
were still updating that register in 1970 , that is extremely weird – still , I
suppose they couldn’t use the normal census data so were stuck with this
National Register.
It’s a strange old world,
Alan
(Percy to Anderton, 8/8)
Now when did computers
come in, Alan? You’d think the NHS would have digitized all this at some stage.
I wonder what they kept and what they dropped . . . I suspect the answer must
be out there somewhere.
I enjoyed our exchanges
today, Tony.
* * * * * * * * *
Diana
Haynes? Heininen? Carne? Can anyone shed any light on her?
And
then, a few weeks ago, I also received the name of a sleuth who might be able
to track down the owners, this person having performed similar work. He expressed
great interest, but was completing another project. And I suspect the virus
pandemic will close down any research for a while.
I
was reading, in the Times Literary Supplement of January 17, a review of
a book titled The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet
Politics, Political Thought, and Culture. The author of the book was one
Jay Bergman, the writer of the review Daniel Beer, described as Reader in
Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. I came across
the following sentences: “The Bolsheviks could never admit that Marxism was a
failed ideology or that they had actually seized power in defiance of it. Their
difficulties, they argued, were rather the work of enemies arrayed against the
Party and traitors in their midst.”
This
seemed to me an impossibly quaint way of describing the purges of Stalin’s
Russia. Whom were these Bolsheviks trying to convince in their ‘arguments’, and
where did they make them? Were they perhaps published on the Letters page of
the Pravda Literary Supplement or as articles in The Moscow Review of
Books? Or were they presented at conferences held at the elegant Romanov
House, famed for its stately rooms and its careful rules of debate? I was so
taken aback by the suggestion that the (unidentified) Bolsheviks had engaged in
some kind of serious discussions on policy, as if they were an Eastern variant
of the British Tory Party, working through items on the agenda at some seaside
resort like Scarborough, and perhaps coming up with a resolution on the lines
of tightening up on immigration, that I was minded to write a letter to the
Editor. It was short, and ran as follows:
“So who were these
Bolsheviks who argued that ‘their difficulties were rather the work of enemies
arrayed against the Party and traitors in its midst’? Were they perhaps those
‘hardliners in the Politburo’ whom Roosevelt, Churchill and Eden imagined were
exerting a malign influence on the genial Uncle Joe Stalin, but whose existence
turned out to be illusory? Or were they such as Trotsky, Kirov, Radek, Kamenev,
Zinoviev, Bukharin, etc. etc., most of whom Stalin had murdered simply because
they were ‘old Bolsheviks’, and knew too much? I think we should be told.”
Now the Editor did not
see fit to publish my offering. Perhaps he felt that, since he had used a letter
of mine about the highly confused Professor Paul Collier in the December 2019
issue, my quota was up for the season. I can think of no other conceivable
reason why my submission was considered of less interest than those which he
did select.
Regular readers of coldspur
will be familiar with my observations about the asymmetry of Allied
relationships with the Soviet Union in World War II. See, for instance, https://coldspur.com/krivitsky-churchill-and-the-cold-war/,
where I analysed such disequilibrium by the categories of Moral Equivalency,
Pluralism vs. Totalitarianism, Espionage, Culture, and Warfare. The
misunderstanding about the nature of Stalin’s autocracy can be viewed in two
dimensions: the role of the Russian people, and that of Stalin himself.
During the war, much
genuine and well-deserved sympathy was shown in Britain towards the
long-suffering Russian people, but the cause was often distorted by Soviet
propaganda, either directly from such as ambassador Maisky and his cronies, or
by agents installed in institutions such as the Ministry of Information. The
misconceptions arose from thinking that the Russians were really similar to
British citizens, with some control over their lives, where they worked, the
selection of those who governed them, what they could choose to read, how they
were allowed to congregate and discuss politics, and the manner in which they
thus influenced their leaders, but had unfortunately allowed themselves to sign
a pact with the Nazis and then been treacherously invaded by them. Their
bravery in defending their country against the assault, with losses in the
millions, was much admired.
Yet the catastrophe of
Barbarossa was entirely Stalin’s fault: as he once said to his Politburo, using
a vulgar epithet, ‘we’ had screwed up everything that Lenin had founded and
passed on. And he was ruthless in using the citizenry as cannon fodder, just as
he had been ruthless in sending innocent victims to execution, famine, exile, or
the Gulag. For example, in the Battle of Stalingrad, 10,000 Soviet soldiers
were executed by Beria’s NKVD for desertion or cowardice in the face of battle.
10,000! It is difficult to imagine that number, but I think of the total number
of pupils at my secondary school, just over 800, filling Big School, and multiplying
it by 12. If anything along those lines had occurred with British forces,
Churchill would have been thrown out in minutes. Yet morale was not universally
sound with the Allies, either. Antony Beevor reports that in May 1944 ‘nearly
30,000 men had deserted or were absent without leave from British units in
Italy’ – an astonishing statistic. The British Army had even had a mutiny on
its hands at Salerno in 1943, but the few death sentences passed were quickly
commuted. (Stalin’s opinions on such a lily-livered approach to discipline
appear not to have been recorded.) As a reminder of the relative casualties, the
total number of British deaths in the military (including POWs) in World War II
was 326,000, with 62,000 civilians lost. The numbers for the Soviet Union were
13,600,000 and 7,000,000, respectively.
As my letter suggested,
Western leaders were often perplexed by how Stalin’s occasionally genial
personality, and his expressed desire for ‘co-operation’, were frequently
darkened by influences that they could not discern. They spoke (as The
Kremlin Letters reminds us) of Stalin’s need to listen to public opinion,
or deal with the unions, or heed those hard-liners on the Politburo, who were
all holding him back from making more peaceful overtures over Poland, or Italy,
or the Baltic States. During negotiations, Molotov was frequently presented as
the ‘hard man’, with Stalin then countering with a less demanding offer, thus
causing the Western powers to think they had gained something. This was all
nonsense, of course, but Stalin played along, and manipulated Churchill and
Roosevelt, pretending that he was not the despot making all the decisions
himself.
Thus Daniel Beer’s
portrayal of those Bolsheviks ‘arguing’ about the subversive threat holds a
tragi-comic aspect in my book. Because those selfsame Bolsheviks who had
rallied under Lenin to forge the Revolution were the very same persons whom
Stalin himself identified as a threat to him, and he had them shot, almost
every one. The few that survived did so because they were absolutely loyal to
Stalin, and not to the principles (if they can be called that) of the Bolshevik
Revolution.
I was reminded of this distortion of history when reading Professor Sir Michael Howard’s memoir, Captain Professor. I had read Howard’s obituary in December 2019, and noted from it that he had apparently encountered Guy Burgess when at Oxford. The only work of Howard’s that I had read was his Volume 5 of the History of British Intelligence in the Second World War, where he covered Strategic Deception. (The publication of this book had been delayed by Margaret Thatcher, and its impact had thus been diminished by the time it was issued in 1999. I analysed it in my piece ‘Officially Unreliable’. It is a very competent but inevitably flawed analysis of some complex material.) With my interest in Burgess’s movements, and his possible involvement in setting up the ‘Oxford Ring’ of spies, I wanted to learn more about the timing of this meeting, and what Burgess was up to, so I acquired a copy of Howard’s memoir.
Captain Professor
The paragraph on Burgess
was not very informative, but I obviously came to learn more about Howard, this
acknowledged expert in the history of warfare. He has received several plaudits
since his death. In the January issue of History Today, the editor Paul
Lay wrote an encomium to him, which included a quotation from the historian’s
essay ‘Military Experience in European Literature’. It ran as follows: “In
European literature the military experience has, when it has been properly
understood and interpreted, immeasurably enriched that understanding of
mankind, of its powers and limitations, of its splendours and its miseries, and
not least of its relationship to God, which must lie at the root of all societies
that can lay any claim to civilization.”
Now what on earth does that
mean? I was not impressed by such metaphysical waffle. If I had submitted a
sentence like that in an undergraduate essay, I would not have been surprised
to see it returned with a circle of red ink. Yet its tone echoed a remark by
Howard, in Captain Professor, that I had included in my December 2019
Commonplace file: “I had written a little about this in a small book TheInventionofPeace,
a year earlier, where I tried to describe how the Enlightenment, and the
secularization and industrialization it brought in its wake, had destroyed the
beliefs and habits that had held European society together for a thousand years
and evoked a backlash of tribal nationalism that had torn apart and reached
climax with the two world wars.” (p 218) Hallo, Professor! ‘Beliefs and habits
that had held European society together for a thousand years’? What about all
those wars? Revolutions? Religious persecution? Specifically, what about the
Inquisition and the Thirty Years War? What was this ‘European society’ that cohered
so closely, and which the Professor held in such regard? I wondered whether the
expression of these somewhat eccentric ideas was a reason why the sometime
Regius Professor of History at Oxford University had not been invited to
contribute to the Oxford Illustrated History of Modern War, or the Oxford
Illustrated History of World War II.
Apparently, all this has to do with the concept
of ‘War and Society’, with which Howard is associated. Another quote from Captain
Professor: “The history of war, I came to realize, was more than the
operational history of armed forces. It was the study of entire societies. Only
by studying their cultures could one come to understand what it was they fought
about and why they fought in the way they did. Further, the fact that they did
so fight had a reciprocal impact on their social structure. I had to learn not
only to think about war in a different way, but also to think about history
itself in a different way. I would certainly not claim to have invented the
concept of ‘War and Society’, but I think I did something to popularize it.” Note
the contradiction that, if these ‘societies and cultures’ were fighting each
other, they could hardly be said to have ‘held together for a thousand years’. I
am also not sure that the Soviet soldiers in WII, conscripted and harassed by
the NKVD, shot at the first blink of cowardice or retreat, thought much about
how the way they fought had a reciprocal impact on Soviet culture (whatever
that was), but maybe Howard was not thinking of the Red Army. In some sense I
could see what he was getting at (e.g. the lowering of some social barriers
after World War II in the United Kingdom, because of the absurd ‘officers’ and
‘men’ distinctions: no one told me at the time why the Officers’ Training Corps
had morphed into the Combined Cadet Force). Nevertheless, it seemed a bizarre
agenda.
And then I came on the following passage,
describing Howard’s experiences in Italy: “In September 1944, believing that
the end of the war was in sight, the Allied High Command had issued orders for
the Italian partisans to unmask themselves and attack German communications
throughout the north of Italy. They did so, including those on and around Monte
Sole. The Germans reacted with predictable savagery. The Allied armies did not
come to their help, and the partisan movement in North Italy was largely
destroyed. It was still believed – and especially in Bologna, where the
communists had governed the city ever since the war – that this had been deliberately
planned by the Allies in order to weaken the communist movement, much as the
Soviets had encouraged the people of Warsaw to rise and then sat by while the
Germans exterminated them. When I protested to my hosts that this was an
outrageous explanation and that there was nothing that we could have done, they
smiled politely. But I was left wondering, as I wondered about poor Terry, was
there really nothing that we could have done to help? Were
there no risks that our huge cumbrous armies with their vast supply-lines might
have taken if we knew what was going on? – and someone must
have known what was going on. Probably not: but ever since then I have been
sparing of criticism of the Soviet armies for their halt before Warsaw.”
My initial reaction was of astonishment, rather like Howard’s first expression of outrage, I imagine. How could the betrayal of the Poles by the halted Soviet forces on the banks of the Vistula, in the process of ‘liberating’ a country that they had raped in 1939, now an ally, be compared with the advance of the Allied Armies in Italy, trying to expel the Germans, while liberating a country that had been an enemy during the war? What had the one to do with the other? And why would it have been controversial for the Allies to have wanted to weaken the Communist movement? But perhaps I was missing something. What had caused Howard to change his mind? I needed to look into it.
Her Majesty & Professor Sir Michael Howard
The poignant aspect of this anecdote was that
Howard had been wounded at Monte Sole, only in December 1944, some two months
after the Monte Sole massacre. Howard had been commanding a platoon, and had
been sent on a reconnaissance mission with ‘poor Terry’ (an alias). Returning
from the front line, they had become disoriented, and stumbled into an ambush,
where Terry was mortally wounded by a mine, and Howard, having been shot in the
leg, managed to escape. He was mortified by the fact that he had chosen to
leave Terry to die, and felt his Military Cross was not really deserved. He had
fought courageously for the cause of ridding Italy of fascism, yet the fact
that he had not known at the time of the Massacre of Monte Sole (sometimes
known as the Marzobotto Massacre) was perplexing to me.
These two closely contemporaneous events – the
Warsaw Uprising, and the Monte Sole Massacre – were linked in a way that Howard
does not describe, as I shall show later. They could be summarised as follows:
The Warsaw Uprising
As the Red Army approached Warsaw at the end of July of 1944, the Polish government-in-exile in London decided that it needed to install its own administration before the Communist Committee of National Liberation, established by the Soviets as the Lublin Committee on July 22, could take over leadership. Using its wireless communications, it encouraged the illegal Polish military government in Warsaw to call on the citizenry to build fortifications. On July 29, the London leader, Mikolajczyk, went to Moscow, whereupon Moscow Radio urged the Polish Resistance to rise up against the invader. A few days later, Stalin promised Mikołajczyk that he would assist the Warsaw Uprising with arms and ammunition. On August 1, Bor-Komorowski, the Warsaw leader, issued the proclamation for the uprising. In a few days, the Poles were in control of most of Warsaw, but the introduction of the ruthless SS, under the leadership of von dem Bach-Zelewski, crushed the rebellion with brutal force. Meanwhile, the Soviets waited on the other side of the Vistula. Stalin told Churchill that the uprising was a stupid adventure, and refused to allow British and American planes dropping supplies from as far away as Italy to land on Soviet territory to refuel. The resistance forces capitulated on October 2, with about 200,000 Polish dead.
The Monte Sole Massacre
In the summer of 1944, British and American forces were making slow progress against the ‘Gothic Line’, the German defensive wall that ran along the Apennines. Italy was at that time practically in a stage of civil war: Mussolini had been ousted in the summer of 1943, and Marshall Badoglio, having signed an armistice with the Allies, was appointed Prime Minister on September 3. Mussolini’s RSI (the Italian Social Republic) governed the North, as a puppet for the Germans, while Badoglio led the south. Apart from the general goal of pushing the Germans out of Italy, the strategic objective had been to keep enough Nazi troops held up to allow the D-Day invasion of Normandy to take place successfully. In late June, General Alexander appealed to the Italian partisans to intensify a policy of sabotage and murder against the German forces. The Germans already had a track-record of fierce reprisals, such as the Massacre at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome in March 1944, when 320 civilians had been killed following the murder of 32 German soldiers. The worst of these atrocities occurred at Monte Sole on September 29-30, where the SS killed 1830 local villagers at Marzabotto. Shortly after that, Alexander called upon the partisans to hold back their assaults because of the approach of winter.
Site of the Monte Sole Massacre
Now, there are some obvious common threads woven
into these narratives (‘partisans’, ‘reprisals’, ‘invasions’, ‘encouragement’,
‘SS brutality’, ‘betrayal’), but was there more than met the eye, and was Howard
pointing at something more sinister on the part of the Western Allies, and
something more pardonable in the actions of the Soviets? I needed some
structure in which to shape my research, if I were to understand Howard’s
weakly presented case. Thus I drew up five categories by which I could analyse
the events:
Military Operation: What
was the nature of the overall military strategy, and how was it evolving across
different fronts?
Political Goals: What
were the occupier’s (‘liberator’s’) goals for political infrastructure in the
territories controlled, and by what means did they plan to achieve them?
Make-up, role and goals
of partisans: How were the partisan forces constituted, and what drove their
activities? How did the respective Allied forces communicate with, and behave
towards, the partisan forces?
Offensive strategy: What
was the offensive strategy of the armed forces in approaching their target? How successful was the local operation in
contributing to overall military goals?
The Aftermath, political
outcomes and historical assessment: What was the long-term result of the
operation on the country’s political architecture? How are the events assessed
seventy-five years later?
The Red Army and Warsaw
Military Operation:
The most important
resolution from the Tehran Conference, signed by Roosevelt, Churchill and
Stalin on December 1, 1943, was a co-ordinated approach to ensuring that the
planned D-Day operation (‘Overlord’) would be complemented by assaults
elsewhere. Such cooperation would prevent German forces being withdrawn to
defend the Allies in eastern France. Thus an operation in the South of France
(‘Anvil’) was to take place at the same time that Stalin would launch a major
offensive in the East (‘Bagration’). At that time Overlord was planned to occur
in late May; operational problems, and poor weather meant that it did not take
place until June 6, 1944.
Stalin’s goal was to
reach Berlin, and conquer as much territory as he could before the Western
Allies reached it. Ever since his strategy of creating ‘buffer states’ in the
shape of eastern Poland, the Baltic States, and western Ukraine after the
Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 had been shown to be an embarrassing calamity
(although not recognized by Churchill at the time), he realised that more
vigorously extending the Soviet Empire was a necessity for spreading the cause
of Bolshevism, and protecting the Soviet Union against another assault from
Germany. When a strong defensive border (the ‘Stalin Line’) had been partially
dismantled to create a weaker set of fortifications along the new borders with
Nazi Germany’s extended territories (the ‘Molotov Line’), it had fearfully
exposed the weaknesses of the Soviet armed forces, and Hitler had invaded with
appalling loss of life and material for the Soviet Union.
In 1944, therefore, the
imperative was to move forward ruthlessly, capturing the key capital cities
that Hitler prized so highly, and pile in a seemingly inexhaustible supply of
troops. When the Red Army encountered German forces, it almost always
outnumbered them, but the quality of its leadership and personnel were
inferior, with conscripts often picked up from the territories gained, poorly
trained, but used as cannon fodder. Casualties as a percentage of personnel
were considerably higher than that which the Germans underwent. The Soviet
Union had produced superior tanks, but repair facilities, communications, and
supply lines were constantly being stretched too far.
On June 22, Operation
‘Bagration’ began. Rokossovsky’s First Belorussian Front crossed the River Bug,
which was significantly on the Polish side of the ‘Curzon Line’, the border
defined (and then modified by Lewis Namier) in 1919, but well inside the
expanded territories of Poland that the latter had occupied and owned between
the two World Wars. On July 7, Soviet troops entered Vilna to the north, a
highly symbolic city in Poland’s history. On July 27, they entered Bialystok
and Lvov. By July 31, they had approached within twenty-five miles of the
Vistula, the river that runs through Warsaw, and four days later, had actually
crossed the waterway 120 miles south of Warsaw. At this stage, exhausted and
depleted, they met fiercer opposition from German forces. Exactly what happened
thereafter is a little murky.
Political Goals:
The Soviets’ message was
one of ‘liberation’, although exactly from what the strife-worn populations of
the countries being ‘liberated’ were escaping from was controversial. The
Baltic States (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) had suffered, particularly, from the
Soviet annexation of 1940, which meant persecution and murder of intellectuals
and professionals, through the invasion by Nazi forces in the summer of 1941,
which meant persecution and murder of Jews and Communists, to the re-invasion
of the Soviets in 1944, which meant persecution and murder of anyone suspected
of fascist tendencies or sympathies. Yet the British Foreign Office had
practically written off the Baltic States as a lost cause: Poland was of far
greater concern, since it was on her behalf that Great Britain had declared war
on Germany in September 1939.
The institution favoured by the British government to lead Poland after the war was the government-in-exile, led, after the death in a plane crash of General Sikorski in June 1943, by Stanisław Mikałojczyk. It maintained wireless communications with underground forces in Poland, but retained somewhat unreasonable goals for the reconstitution of Poland after the war, attaching high importance to the original pre-war boundaries, and especially to the cities of Vilna and Lvov. The London Poles had been infuriated by Stalin’s cover-up of the Katyn massacres, and by Churchill’s apparent compliance, the British prime Minster harbouring a desire to maintain harmonious relations with Stalin. Mikałojczyk continuously applied pressure on Winston Churchill to represent the interests of a free and independent Poland to Stalin, who, like Roosevelt, had outwardly accepted the principles of the Atlantic Charter that gave the right of self-determination to ‘peoples’. Mikałojczyk was adamant on two matters: the recognition of its traditional eastern borders, and its right to form a non-communist government. Stalin was equally obdurate on countering both initiatives, and his language on a ‘free and independent Poland’ started taking on clauses that contained a requirement that any Polish government would have to be ‘friendly’ towards the Soviet Union.
Stanislaw Mikolajcyzk
On July 23, the city of
Lublin was liberated by the Russians, and Stalin announced that a Polish
Committee of National Liberation (the PCNL, a communist puppet) had been set up
in Chelm the day before. Churchill was in a bind: he realised which way the
wind was blowing, and how Soviet might would determine the outcomes in Poland.
He desperately did not want to let down Mikałojczyk, and preferred, foolishly,
to trust in Stalin’s benevolence and reasonableness. Churchill had been
pressing for Mikałojczyk to meet with Stalin, as he was beginning to become
frustrated by the Poles’ insistence and romantic demands. Stalin told Churchill
that Mikałojczyk should confer with the PCNL.
When Stalin made an
ominously worded declaration on July 28, where he ‘welcomed unification of
Poles friendly disposed to all three Allies’ (which made even Anthony Eden
recoil in horror), Churchill convinced Mikałojczyk to visit Moscow, where
Stalin agreed to see him. On July 29, Moscow Radio urged the workers of the
Polish Resistance to rise up against the German invader. Had Mikałojczyk
perhaps been successful in negotiating with Stalin?
The Partisans:
On July 31, the Polish underground, encouraged
by messages from the Polish Home Army in London, ordered a general uprising in
Warsaw. It had also succeeded in letting a delegate escape to the USA and
convince the US administration that it could ally with Soviet forces in freeing
Warsaw. (It is a possibility that this person, Tatar, was a Soviet agent:
something hinted at, but not explicitly claimed, by Norman Davies.) It was,
however, not as if there was much to unite the partisans, outside a hatred of
the Fascist occupying forces. The Home Army (AK) was threatened by various splinter
groups, namely the People’s Army (AL), which professed vague left-wing
political opinions (i.e. a removal of the landowning class, and more property
rights for small farmers and peasants), the PAL, which was communist-dominated,
and thus highly sympathetic to the Soviet advance, and the Nationalist Armed
Forces (NSZ), which Alan Clark described as ‘an extreme
right-wing force, against any compromise with Russian power’. Like any partisan
group in Europe at the time, it was thus driven by a mixture of motivations.
Yet for a few short weeks
they unified in working on fortifications and attacking the Nazis. They mostly
took their orders from London, but for a short while it seemed that Moscow was
supporting them. According to Alexander Werth (who was in Warsaw at the time),
there was talk in Moscow that Rokossovsky would shortly be capturing Warsaw,
and Churchill was even spurred to remind the House of Commons on August 2 of
the pledge to Polish independence. On August 3, Stalin was reported by
Mikałojczyk to have promised to assist the Uprising by providing arms and
ammunition – although the transcripts of their discussions do not really
indicate this. By August 6, the Poles were said (by Alan Clark) to be in
control of most of Warsaw.
The Home Army was also
considerably assisted by Britain’s Special Operations Executive, which had
succeeded in landing hundreds of agents in Warsaw and surrounding districts,
with RAF flights bringing food, medical supplies and wireless equipment. This
was an exercise that had started in February 1941, with flights originating
both from Britain and, latterly, from southern Italy. By the summer of 1944, a
majority of the military and civilian leadership in Warsaw had been brought in
by SOE. Colonel Gubbins, who had been appointed SOE chief in September 1943,
was an eager champion of the Polish cause, but the group’s energies may have pointed
to a difference in policy between SOE’s sabotage programme, and Britain’s
diplomatic initiatives, a subject that has probably not received the attention
it merits.
Yet
the Rising all very quickly turned sour. The Nazis, recognizing the symbolic
value of losing an important capital city like Warsaw, responded with power.
The Hermann Goering division was rushed from Italy to Warsaw on August 3. Five
days later the SS, led by von dem Bach-Zelewski, was introduced to bring in a
campaign of terror against the citizenry. After a desperate appeal for help by
the beleaguered Poles to the Allies, thirteen British aircraft were despatched
from southern Italy to drop supplies: five failed to return. The Chiefs of
Staff called off the missions, but a few Polish planes carried on the effort.
Further desperate calls for help arrived, and on August 14 Stalin was asked to
allow British and American planes, based in the UK, to refuel behind the Soviet
lines to allow them more time to focus on airdrops. He refused.
By
now, however, Stalin was openly dismissing the foolish adventurism of the
Warsaw Uprising, lecturing Churchill so on August 16, and, despite Churchill’s
continuing implorations, upgraded his accusations, on August 23, to a claim
that the partisans were ‘criminals’. On August 19, the NKVD had shot several
dozen members of the Home Army near the Byelorussian border, carrying out an
order from Stalin that they should be killed if they did not cooperate. Antony
Beevor states that the Warsaw Poles heard about that outrage, but, in any case,
by now the Poles in London were incensed to the degree that they considered
Mikałojczyk not ‘anti-Soviet’ enough. Roosevelt began to tire of Churchill’s
persistence, since he was much more interested in building the new world order
with Uncle Joe than he was in sorting out irritating rebel movements. By
September 5, the Germans were in total control of Warsaw again, and several
thousand Poles were shot. On September 9, the War Cabinet had reluctantly
concluded that any further airdrops could not be justified. The Uprising was
essentially over: more than 300,000 Poles lost their lives.
Offensive
Strategy:
Accounts differ as to how close the Soviet forces were to Warsaw, and how much they were repulsed by fresh German attacks. Alexander Werth interviewed General Rokossovsky on August 26, 1944, the latter claiming that his forces were driven back after August 1 by about 65 miles. Stalin told Churchill in October, when they met in Moscow, of Rokossovsky’s tribulations with fresh German attacks. Yet that does not appear to tally with Moscow’s expectations for the capture of Warsaw, and it was a surprising acknowledgement of weakness on Rokossovsky’s part if it were true. Soviet histories inform us that the thrust was exhausted by August 1, but, in fact, the First Belorussian Front was close to the suburb of Praga by then, approaching from the south-east. (The Vistula was narrower than the Thames in London. I was about to draw an analogy of the geography when I discovered that Norman Davies had beaten me to it, using almost the exact wording that I had thought suitable: “Londoners would have grasped what was happening if told that everyone was being systematically deported from districts north of the Thames, whilst across the river to Battersea, Lambeth, and Southwark nothing moved, no one intervened,” from Rising ’44, page 433). Rokossovsky told Werth that the Rising was a bad mistake, and that it should have waited until the Soviets were close. On the other hand, the Polish General Anders, very familiar with Stalin’s ways, and then operating under Alexander in Italy, thought the Uprising was a dangerous mistake.
General Rokossovsky
Yet
all that really misses the point. It was far easier for Stalin to have the
Germans exterminate the opposition, even if it contained some communist
sympathisers. (Norman Davies hypothesizes that the radio message inciting the
partisans to rebel may have been directed at the Communists only, but it is
hard to see how an AL-only uprising would have been able to succeed: such a
claim sounds like retrospective disinformation.) Stalin’s forces would
eventually have taken over Warsaw, and he would have conducted any purge he
felt was suitable. He had shamelessly manipulated Home Army partisans when
capturing Polish cities to the east of Warsaw (such as Lvov), and disposed of
them when they had delivered for him. Thus sitting back and waiting was a
cynical, but reasonable, strategy for Stalin, who by now was confident enough
of his ability to execute – and was also being informed by his spies of the
strategies of his democratic Allies in their plans for Europe. Donald Maclean’s
first despatch from the Washington Embassy, betraying communications between
Churchill and Roosevelt, was dated August 2/3, as revealed in the VENONA
decrypts.
One
last aspect of the Soviet attack concerns the role of the Poles in the Red
Army. When the captured Polish officers who avoided the Katyn massacres were
freed in 1942, they had a choice: to join Allied forces overseas, or to join
the Red Army. General Zygmunt Berling had agreed to cooperate after his release
from prison, and had recommended the creation of a Polish People’s Army in May
1943. He became commander of the first unit, and eventually was promoted to
General of the Polish Army under Rokossovsky. But it was not until August 14
that he was entrusted to support the Warsaw Uprising, crossing the Vistula and
entering Praga the following day – which suggests that the river was not quite
the natural barrier others have made it out to be. He was repulsed, however, and
had to withdraw eight days later. The failed attempt, with many casualties,
resulted in his dismissal soon afterwards. Perhaps Stalin felt that Polish
communists, because they were Poles, could be sacrificed: Berling may not have
received approval for his venture.
The
Aftermath:
With
Warsaw untaken, the National Council of Poland declared Lublin as the national
capital, on August 18, and on September 9, a formal agreement was signed
between the Polish communists and the Kremlin. In Warsaw, Bach-Zelewski,
perhaps now concluding that war crimes trials might be hanging over him,
relented the pressure somewhat, and even parleyed with the survivors. He tried
to convince them that the threat from Bolshevism was far more dangerous than the
continuance of Fascism, even suggesting that the menace from the East ‘‘might
very well bring about the downfall of Western culture’ (Clark). It was not
certain what aspects of Western culture he believed the Nazi regime had
enhanced. (Maybe Professor Howard could have provided some insights.)
The
Lublin administration had to wait a while as the ‘government-in-waiting’, as
Warsaw was not captured by the Red Army until January 17, 1945. By that time,
imaginative voices in the Foreign Office had begun to point out the
ruthlessness and menace of the tide of Soviet communism in eastern Europe, and
Churchill’s – and even more, Roosevelt’s – beliefs that they could cooperate
with the man in the Kremlin were looking very weary. By the time of the Yalta
conference in February 1945, any hopes that a democratically elected government
would take power in Poland had been abandoned.
Stalin had masterfully manipulated his allies, and claimed, through the
blood spent by the millions who pushed back the Nazi forces, that he merited
control of the territories that became part of the Soviet Empire. There was
nothing that Churchill (or then Attlee), or Roosevelt, rapidly fading (and then
Truman) could do.
The
historical assessment is one of a Great Betrayal – which it surely was, in the
sense that the Poles were misled by the promises of Churchill and Roosevelt,
and in the self-delusion that the two leaders had that, because Stalin was
fighting Hitler alongside them, he was actually one of the team, a man they
could cooperate with, and someone who had tamed his oppressive and murderous
instincts that were so evident from before the war. But whether the ‘Soviet
armies’ deserved sympathy for their halt on the Vistula is quite another
question. It was probable that most of the Ivans in the Soviet armed forces
were heartily sick of Communism, and the havoc it had brought to their homes
and families, but were instead conscripted and forced to fight out of fear for
what might happen if they resisted. By then, fighting for Mother Russia, and
out of hatred for the Germans because of the devastation the latter had wrought
on their homeland, they were brought to a halt before Warsaw to avoid a clash
that may have been premature. But they were Communists by identification, not
by conviction. Stalin was the sole man in charge. He was ruthless: he was going
to eliminate the Home Army anyway: why not let the Germans do the job?
Alan
Clark’s summing-up ran as follows: “The story of the Warsaw uprising
illustrates many features of the later history of World War II. The alternating
perfidy and impotence of the western Allies; the alternating brutality and
sail-trimming of the SS; the constancy of Soviet power and ambition. Above all,
perhaps, it shows the quality of the people for whom nominally, and originally,
the war had been fought and how the two dictatorships could still find common
ground in the need to suppress them.”
The Allies in Italy
Military Operations
The invasion of Italy (starting with Operation ‘Husky’, the invasion of Sicily) had always been Churchill’s favoured project, since he regarded it as an easier way to repel the Germans and occupy central Europe before Stalin reached it. It was the western Allies’ first foray into Axis-controlled territory, and had been endorsed by Churchill and Roosevelt at Casablanca in January 1943. Under General Alexander, British and American troops had landed in Sicily in July 1943, and on the mainland, at Salerno, two months later. Yet it was always something of a maverick operation: the Teheran Agreement made no mention of it as a diversionary initiative, and thereafter the assault was regularly liable to having troops withdrawn for the more official invasion of Southern France (Operation Anvil, modified to Dragoon). This strategy rebounded in a perhaps predictable way: Hitler maintained troops in Italy to ward off the offensive, thus contributing to Overlord’s success, but the resistance that Alexander’s Army encountered meant that the progress in liberating Italy occurred much more slowly than its architects had forecast.
Operation ANVIL
Enthusiasm for the
Italian venture had initially been shared by the Americans and the British, and
was confirmed at the TRIDENT conference in Washington in May 1943. At this
stage, the British Chiefs of Staff hoped to conclude the war in a year’s time,
believing that a march up Italy would be achieved practically unopposed, with
the goal of reaching the ‘Ljubljana Gap’ (which was probably a more durable
obstacle than the ‘Watford’, or even the ‘Cumberland’ Gap) and striking at the
southern portions of Hitler’s Empire before the Soviets arrived there. Yet, as
plans advanced, the British brio was tempered by American scepticism. After the
Sicilian campaign, the Allied forces were thwarted by issues of terrain, a
surprising German resurgence, and a lack of coordination of American and
British divisions. In essence, clear strategic goals had not been set, nor
processes by which they might be achieved.
Matters were complicated
in September 1943 by the ouster of Mussolini, the escape of King Emanuel and
General Badoglio to Brindisi, to lead a non-fascist government in the south,
and the rescue of Mussolini by Nazi paratroopers so that he could be installed
as head of a puppet government in Salò in the North. An armistice between the
southern Italians and the Allies was announced (September 3) the day before
troops landed at Salerno. The invading forces were now faced with an uncertain
ally in the south, not fully trusted because of its past associations with
Mussolini’s government, and a revitalized foe in the north. Hitler was
determined to defend the territory, had moved sixteen divisions into Italy, and
started a reign of terror against both the civilian population and the remnants
of the Italian army, thousands of whom were extracted to Germany to work as
slaves or be incarcerated.
The period between the
armistice and D-Day was thus a perpetual struggle. As the demands for
landing-craft and troops to support Overlord increased, morale in Alexander’s
Army declined, and progress was tortuously slow, as evidenced by the highly
controversial capture of Monte Cassino between January and May 1944, where the
Polish Army sustained 6,000 casualties. The British Chiefs of Staff continually
challenged the agreement made in Quebec that the Anvil attack was of the
highest priority (and even received support from Eisenhower for a while). Moreover,
the Allies did not handle the civilian populace very shrewdly, with widescale
bombing undermining the suggestion that they had arrived as ’liberators’. With
a valiant push, Rome was captured on June 4, by American forces, but a rivalry
between the vain and glory-seeking General Clark and the sometimes timid
General Alexander meant that the advantage was not hammered home. The dispute
over Anvil had to be settled by Roosevelt himself in June. In the summer of
1944, the Allies faced another major defensive obstacle, the Gothic Line, which
ran along the Apennines from Spezia to Pesari. Bologna, the city at the center
of this discussion, lay about forty miles north of this redoubt. And there the
Allied forces stalled.
Political Goals
The Allies were
unanimous that they wanted to install a democratic, non-fascist government in
Italy at the conclusion of the war, but did not really define what shape it
should take, or understand who among the various factions claiming ideological
leadership might contribute. Certainly, the British feared an infusion of
Communism into the mix. ‘Anti-fascism’ had a durable odour of ‘communism’ about
it, and there was no doubt that strong communist organisations existed both in
the industrial towns and in the resistance groups that had escaped to the
mountains or the countryside. (After the armistice, a multi-party political
committee had been formed with the name of the ‘Committee of National
Liberation’, a name that was exactly echoed a few months later by the Soviets’
puppets in Chelm, Poland.) Moreover, while the Foreign Office, epitomised by
the vain and ineffectual Anthony Eden, who still harboured a grudge with
Mussolini over the Ethiopian wars, expressed a general disdain about the
Italians, the Americans were less interested in the fate of individual European
nations. Roosevelt’s main focus was on ‘getting his boys home’, and then concentrating
on building World Peace with Stalin through the United Nations. The OSS,
however, modelled on Britain’s SOE, had more overt communist sympathies.
Yet there existed also
rivalry between the USA and Great Britain about post-war goals. The British
were looking to control the Mediterranean to protect its colonial routes: the
Americans generally tried to undermine such imperial pretensions, and were looking
out for their own commercial advantages when hostilities ceased. At this time,
Roosevelt and Churchill were starting to disagree more about tactics, and the
fate of individual nations, as the debate over Poland, and Roosevelt’s secret
parleys with Stalin, showed. Churchill was much more suspicious of Soviet
intrigues at this time, although it did not stop him groveling to Stalin, or singing
his praises in more sentimental moments.
The result was a high
degree of mutual distrust between the Allies and its new partners, the southern
Italians, and those resisting Nazi oppression in the north. As Caroline Moorehead
aptly puts it, in her very recent House in the Mountains: “Now the cold
wariness of the British liberating troops puzzled them. It was, noted Harold
Macmillan, ‘one vast headache, with all give and no take’. How much money would
have to be spent in order to prevent ‘disease and unrest’? How much aid was
going to be necessary to make the Italians militarily useful in the campaign
for liberation? And what was the right approach to take towards a country which
was at once a defeated enemy and a co-belligerent which expected to be treated
as an ally?”
The Partisans
The partisans in
northern Italy, like almost all such groups in occupied Europe, were of very
mixed origins, holding multitudinous objectives. But here they were especially
motley, containing absconders from the domestic Italian Army, resisting
deportation by the Nazis, escaped prisoners-of-war, trying to find a way back
to Allied lines, non-Germans conscripted by the Wehrmacht, who had escaped but
were uncertain where to turn next, refugees from armies that had fought in the
east, earnest civilians distraught over missing loved ones, Jews suddenly
threatened by Mussolini’s support of Hitler’s anti-Semitic persecution, the
ideologically dedicated, as well as young adventurists, bandits, thieves and
terrorists. As a report from Alexander’s staff said: “Bands exist of every
degree, down to gangs of thugs who don a partisan cloak of respectability to
conceal the nakedness of their brigandage, and bands who bury their arms in
their back gardens and only dig them up and festoon themselves in comic opera
uniforms when the first Allied troops arrive.” It was thus challenging to find a way to deal
consistently with such groups, scattered broadly around the mountainous
terrain.
The British generally
disapproved of irregular armies, and preferred the partisans to continue the important
work of helping POWs escape to Switzerland, where they were able to pass on
valuable information to the SIS and OSS offices there. As Richard Lamb wrote: “However,
the Allies wanted the partisan activities to be confined to sabotage,
facilitating the escape of POWs, and gathering intelligence about the
Germans.” Sabotage was encouraged,
because its perpetrators could not easily be identified, and it helped the war
effort, while direct attacks on German forces could result in fearful reprisals
– a phenomenon that took on increasing significance. Hitler had given
instructions to the highly experienced General Kesselring that any such
assaults should be responded to with ruthless killing of hostages.
Yet
the political agitators in the partisans were dominated by communists – who
continuously quarreled with the non-communists. The British did not want a
repeat of what had happened in Yugoslavia and Greece, where irredentists had
established separate control. The CLN had set up a Northern Italian section
(the CLNAI) in January 1944, and had made overt claims for political control of
some remote areas, seeing itself as the third leg of government. Thus the
British were suspicious, and held off infiltrating SOE liaison officers, and
parachuting in weapons and supplies, with the first delivery not occurring
until December 1943. This encouraged the partisans to think that the Allies
were not interested in widespread resistance, and were fearful of communism –
which was largely (but not absolutely) true. Tellingly, on July 27, 1944, in the
light of Soviet’s expansive colonial intentions, Chief of the Imperial General
Staff Alan Brooke first voiced the opinion that Britain might need to view
Germany as a future ally against the Soviets.
Churchill
expressed outwardly hostile opinions on the partisans in a speech to the House
of Commons on February 22, 1944, and his support for Badoglio (and, indirectly,
the monarchy) laid him open to the same criticisms of anti-democratic spirit
that would bedevil his attitude towards Greece. Ironically, it was the arrival
of the Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti from Moscow in March 1944, and his
subsequent decision to join Badoglio’s government, that helped to repair some
of the discord. In May, many more OSS and SOE officers were flown in, and acts
of sabotage increased. This interrupted the German war effort considerably, as
Kesselring admitted a few years later. Thus, as summer drew on, the partisans
had expectations of a big push to defeat and expel the Germans. By June, all Italian partisan forces were co-ordinated
into a collective command structure. They were told by their SOE liaison
officers that a break through the Gothic Line would take place in September.
Meanwhile,
the confusion in the British camp had become intense. Churchill dithered with
his Chiefs of Staff about the competing demands of Italy and France. General
Maitland Wilson, who had replaced Eisenhower as the Supreme Commander in the
Mediterranean in January 1944, was in June forecasting the entry into Trieste
and Ljubljana by September, apparently unaware of the Anvil plans. He was
brought back to earth by Eisenhower. At the beginning of August 1944,
Alexander’s forces were reduced from 250,000 to 153,000 men, because of the
needs in France. Yet Churchill continued to place demands on Alexander, and
privately railed over the Anvil decision. Badoglio
was replaced by Bonomi, to Churchill’s disappointment. Alexander said his
troops were demoralized. There was discord between SOE and the OSS, as well as
between SOE and the Foreign Office. It was at this juncture that the controversy
started.
Offensive Strategy
On June 7, Alexander had made a radio appeal to the partisans, encouraging sabotage. As Iris Origo reported it in, in War in Val D’orcia (written soon after the events, in 1947): “General Alexander issues a broadcast to the Italian patriots, telling them that the hour of their rising has come at last. They are to cut the German Army communications wherever possible, by destroying roads, bridges, railways, telegraph-wires. They are to form ambushes and cut off retreating Germans – and to give shelter to Volksdeutsche who have deserted from the German Army. Workmen are urged to sabotage, soldiers and police to desert, ‘collaborators of fascism’ to take this last chance of showing their patriotism and helping the cause of their country’s deliverance. United, we shall attain victory.”
General Alexander of Tunis
This
was an enormously significant proclamation, given what Alexander must have
known about the proposed reduction in forces, and what his intelligence sources
must have told him about Nazi reprisals. They were surely not words Alexander
had crafted himself. One can conclude that it was perhaps part of the general
propaganda campaign, current with the D-Day landings, to focus the attention of
Nazi forces around Europe on the local threats. Indeed the Political Warfare
Executive made a proposal to Eisenhower intended to ‘stimulate . . . strikes,
guerilla action and armed uprisings behind the enemy lines’. Historians have
accepted that such an initiative would have endangered many civilian lives. The
exact follow-up to this recommendation, and how it was manifested in BBC
broadcasts in different languages, is outside my current scope, but Origo’s
diary entry shows how eagerly the broadcasts from London were followed.
What is highly significant is that General Alexander, in the summer of 1944, was involved in an auxiliary deception operation codenamed ‘Otrington’, which was designed to lead the Germans to think that an attack was going to take place on the Nazi flanks in Genoa and Rimini, as opposed to the south of France, and also as a feint for Alexander’s planned attack through the central Apennines north of Florence. (This was all part of the grander ‘Bodyguard’ deception plan for Overlord.) Yet in August 1944, such plans were changed when General Sir Oliver Leese, now commanding the Eighth Army, persuaded Alexander to move his forces away from the central Apennines over to the Adriatic sector, for an attack on August 25. The Germans were misled to the extent that they had moved forces to the Adriatic, thus confusing Leese’s initiative. Moreover, the historian on whom we rely for this exposition was Professor Sir Michael Howard himself – in his Chapter 7 of Volume 5 of the British Intelligence history. Yet the author makes no reference here to Alexander’s communications to the partisans, or how such signals related to the deception exercise, merely laconically noting: “The attack, after its initial success, was gradually brought to a halt [by Kesselring], and Allied operations in Italy bogged down for another winter.”
Perhaps
not surprisingly, the message provoked even further animosity from the Germans
when Alexander made three separate broadcasts through the BBC, on June 19, 20
and 27, where he encouraged Italian partisans to ‘shoot Germans in the back’. The
response from Kesselring, who of course heard the open declaration, was
instantaneous. He issued an order on June 20 that read, partially, as follows:
“Whenever there is evidence of considerable numbers of partisan groups a
proportion of the male population of the area will be arrested, and in the
event of an act of violence these men will be shot. The population must be
informed of this. Should troops etc. be fired at from any village, the village
will be burnt down. Perpetrators or ringleaders will be hanged in public.”
The
outcome of this was that a horrible series of massacres occurred during August
and September, leading to the worst of all, that at Marzabotto, on September 29
and 30. A more specific order by the German 5 Corps was issued on August 9,
with instructions as to how local populations would be assembled to witness the
shootings. Yet this was not a new phenomenon: fascist troops had been killing
partisan bands and their abettors for the past year in the North. The
requirement for Mussolini’s neo-fascist government to recruit young men for its
military and police forces prompted thousands to run for the mountains and join
the partisans. Italy was now engaged in a civil war, and in the north Italians
had been killing other Italians. One of the most infamous of the massacres had
occurred in Rome, in March 1944, at the Ardeatine Caves. A Communist Patriotic
Action Group had killed 33 German soldiers in the Via Rasella, and ten times
that many hostages were killed the next day as a form of reprisal. The summer
of 1944 was the bitterest time for executions of Italians: 7500 civilians were
killed between March 1944 and April 1945, and 5000 of these met their deaths in
the summer months of 1944.
The
records show that support for the partisans had been consistent up until
September, although demands had sharply risen. “In July 1944 SOE was operating 16 radio stations
behind enemy lines, and its missions rose from 23 in August to 33 in September;
meanwhile the OSS had 12 in place, plus another 6 ready to leave. Contacts
between Allied teams and partisan formations made large-scale airdrops of
supplies possible. In May 1944, 152 tons were dropped; 361 tons were delivered
in June, 446 tons in July, 227 tons in August, and 252 tons in September.”
(Battistelli and Crociani) Yet those authors offer up another explanation:
Operation ‘Olive’ which began on August 25, at the Adriatic end of the Gothic
Line, provoked a severe response against partisans in the north-west. The
fierce German reprisals that then took place (on partisans and civilians,
including the Marzobotto massacre) by the SS Panzer Green Division Reichsführer
contributed to the demoralization of the partisan forces, and 47,000 handed
themselves in after an amnesty offer by the RSI on October 28.
What
is not clear is why the partisans continued to engage in such desperate actions.
Had they become desperadoes? As Battistelli and Crociani write, a period of
crisis had arrived: “In mid-September 1944 the partisans’ war was, for all practical
purposes, at a standstill. The influx of would-be recruits made it impossible
for the Allies to arm them all; many of the premature ‘free zones’ were being
retaken by the Germans; true insurgency was not possible without direct Allied
support; and, despite attacks by the US Fifth and British Eighth Armies against
the Gothic Line from 12 September, progress would be slow and mainly up the
Adriatic flank. Against the advice of Allied liaison officers, the partisan
reaction was, inexplicably, to declare more ‘free zones’.” Things appeared to
be out of control. Battistelli and Crociani further analyse it as
follows: “The summer of 1944 thus represented a turning-point in partisan
activity, after which sabotage and attacks against communications decreased in
favour of first looting and then attacks against Axis troops, both being
necessary to obtain food and weapons to enable large formations to carry on
their war.” And it thus led to the deadliest massacre at Marzabotto, south of
Bologna, where the SS, under Sturmbannführer Walter Reder, shot about 770 men,
women, and children.
The wholesale deaths
even provoked Mussolini to beg the SS to back off. On November 13 Alexander
issued a belated communiqué encouraging the partisans to disarm for the winter,
as the campaign was effectively coming to a halt. Alexander’s advice was
largely ignored: the partisans viewed it a political move executed out of
disdain for communism. The Germans viewed it as a sign of weakness, and it
deterred any thoughts of immediate surrender. Thus the activity of the
partisans continued, but less vigorously, as air support in the way of supplies
had already begun to dwindle. And another significant factor was at work.
Before he left Moscow, Togliatti, the newly arrived Communist leader, had made
an appeal to the Italian resistance movement to take up arms against the
Fascists. Yet when he arrived in Italy in March 1944, Togliatti had submerged
the militant aspects of his PCI (Communist Party of Italy) in the cause of
unity and democracy, and had the Garibaldi (Communist) brigades disarmed.
Moorehead points out that the Northern partisans were effectively stunned and
weakened by Togliatti’s strategic move to make the Communists appear less
harmful as the country prepared for postwar government.
In addition, roles
changed. Not just the arrival of General Leese, and his disruption of careful
deception plans. General George Marshall, the US Chief of Staff, took the view
that Italy was ‘an expensive sideshow’ (Brian Holden Reid). In December,
Alexander had to tried to breathe fresh life into the plan to assault the
Ljubljana Gap, but after the Yalta
Conference of February 1945, Alexander, now Supreme Commander in the
Mediterranean, was instructed simply to ensure that the maximum number of
German divisions were held down, thus allowing the progress by Allied troops in
France and Germany to be maintained. Bologna was not taken until April 1945, after
which the reprisals against fascists began. Perhaps three thousand were killed there
by the partisans.
The Aftermath
The massacres of
September and October 1944 have not been forgotten, but their circumstances
have tended to be overlooked in the histories. It is difficult to find a sharp
and incisive analysis of British strategy and communications at this time. Norman
Davies writes about the parallel activities in Poland and Italy in the summer
of 1944 in No Simple Victory, but I would suggest that he does not do
justice to the situation. He blames General Alexander for ‘opening the
floodgates for a second wave of German revenge’ when he publicly announced that
there would be no winter offensive in 1944-45, but it was highly unlikely that
that ‘unoriginal thinker’ (Oxford Companion to Word War II) would have
been allowed to come up with such a message without guidance and approval.
Davies points to ‘differences of opinion between British and American
strategists’, which allowed German commanders to be given a free hand to take
ruthless action against the partisans’. So why were the differences not
resolved by Eisenhower? Moreover, while oppression against the partisans did
intensify, the worst reprisals against civilians that Davies refers to were
over by then.
Had Alexander severely
misled the partisans in his encouragement that their ‘hour of rising’ had come
at last? What was intended by his open bloodthirsty call to kill Nazis in the
back? Did the partisans really pursue such aggressive attacks because of
Alexander’s provocative words, or, did they engage in them in full knowledge of
the carnage it would cause, trying to prove, perhaps, that a fierce and
autocratic form of government was the only method of eliminating fascism? Were
the local SOE officers responsible for encouraging attacks on German troops in
order to secure weapons and food? Why could Togliatti not maintain any control
over the communists? And what was Alexander’s intention in calling the forces
to hold up for the winter, knowing that the Germans would pick up that message?
Whatever the reality, it was not a very honourable episode in the British war
effort. Too many organisations arguing amongst themselves, no doubt. Churchill
had many things on his mind, but it was another example of where he wavered on
strategy, then became too involved in details, or followed his buccaneering
instincts, and afterwards turned sentimental at inappropriate times. Yet
Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander, and clearly had problems in enforcing a
disciplined approach to strategy.
At least the horrendous reprisals
ceased. Maybe, as in Warsaw, the SS realised that the war was going to be lost,
and that war crimes tribunals would investigate the legality of the massacre of
innocent civilians. Yet a few grisly murders continued. Internecine feuds
continued among the partisans during the winter of 1944-45, with fears of
collaborators and spies in the midst, and frequently individuals who opposed
communism were persecuted and killed. It is beyond the scope of this article to
describe the events of this winter in the north (see Moorehead for more
details), but a few statements need to be made. The number of partisans did
decline sharply to begin with, but then ascended in the spring. More supplies
were dropped by SOE, but the latter’s anti-communist message intensified, and
the organisation tried to direct weaponry to non-communist units. Savage
reprisals by the fascists did take place, but not on the scale of the September
massacres. In the end, the communists managed to emerge from World War II with
a large amount of prestige, because they ensured that they were present to
liberate finally the cities of Turin, Milan, and Bologna in concert with the
Allied forces that eventually broke through, even though they were merciless
with fascists who had remained loyal to Mussolini and the Nazis. As with Spain,
the memories of civil war and different allegiances stayed and festered for a long
time.
And the communists
actually survived and thrived, as Howard’s encounter forty years later proved – a dramatic difference from the possibility of
independent democratic organisations in Warsaw enduring after the war, for
example. Moreover, they obviously held a grudge. Yet history continues to be
distorted. Views contrary to the betrayal of such ‘liberating’ communists have
been expressed. In his book The Pursuit of Italy David Gilmour writes: “At the
entrance of the town hall of Bologna photographs are still displayed of
partisans liberating the city without giving a hint that Allied forces had
helped them to do so.” He goes on to point out that, after the massacre of the
Ardeatine Caves, many Italians were of the opinion that those responsible (Communists)
should have given them up for execution instead. Others claim that the murders
of the German soldiers were not actually communists: Moorhead claims they were
mainly ‘students’. It all gets very murky. I leave the epitaph to Nicola
Bianca: “The
fact is that brutalization was a much part of the Italian wars as of any other,
even if it was these same wars which made possible the birth of the first true
democracy the country had known.”
Reassessment of Howard’s
Judgment
Professor Howard seemed
to be drawing an equivalence between, on the one hand, the desire for the Red
Army to have the Nazis perform their dirty work for them by eliminating a
nominal ally but a social enemy (the Home Army), and thus disengage from an attack
on Warsaw, and, on the other, a strained Allied Army, with its resources
strategically depleted, reneging on commitments to provide material support to
a scattered force of anti-fascist sympathisers, some of whom it regarded as
dangerous for the long-term health of the invading country, as well as that of the
nation it was attempting to liberate. This is highly unbalanced, as the Home
Army had few choices, whereas the Italian partisans had time and territory on
their side. They did not have to engage in bloody attacks that would provoke
reprisals of innocents. The Allies in Italy were trying to liberate a country
that had waged warfare against them: the Soviet Army refused to assist
insurgents who were supposedly fighting the same enemy. The British, certainly,
were determined to weaken the Communists: why was Howard surprised by this? And,
if he had a case to make, he could have criticised the British Army and its
propagandists back in London for obvious lapses in communications rather than switching
his attention to expressing sympathy for the communists outside Warsaw. Was he
loath to analyse what Alexander had done simply because he had served under
him?
It is informative to
parse carefully the phrases Howard uses in his outburst. I present the text
again here, for ease of reference:
“In September 1944,
believing that the end of the war was in sight, the Allied High Command had
issued orders for the Italian partisans to unmask themselves and attack German
communications throughout the north of Italy. They did so, including those on
and around Monte Sole. The Germans reacted with predictable savagery. The
Allied armies did not come to their help, and the partisan movement in North
Italy was largely destroyed. It was still believed – and especially in Bologna,
where the communists had governed the city ever since the war – that this had
been deliberately planned by the Allies in order to weaken the communist
movement, much as the Soviets had encouraged the people of Warsaw to rise and
then sat by while the Germans exterminated them. When I protested to my hosts
that this was an outrageous explanation and that there was nothing that we
could have done, they smiled politely. But I was left wondering, as I wondered
about poor Terry, was there really nothing that we could have
done to help? Were there no risks that our huge cumbrous armies with their vast
supply-lines might have taken if we knew what was going on? – and someone must
have known what was going on. Probably not: but ever since then I have been
sparing of criticism of the Soviet armies for their halt before Warsaw.”
‘In September 1944, believing
that the end of the war was in sight, the Allied High Command . . ’
Did the incitement
actually happen in September, as opposed to June? What was the source, and who
actually issued the order? What did that ‘in sight’ mean? It is a woolly,
evasive term. Who actually believed that the war would end shortly? Were these
orders issued over public radio (for the Germans to hear), or privately, to SOE
and OSS representatives?
‘ . . had issued orders
to unmask themselves’.
What does that mean?
Take off their camouflage and engage in open warfare? The Allied High Command
could in fact not ‘order’ the partisans to do anything, but why would an
‘order’ be issued to do that? I can find no evidence for it in the transcripts.
‘ . . .and attack German
communications’.
An incitement to
sabotage was fine, and consistent, but the communication specifically did not
encourage murder of fascist forces, whether Italian or German. Alexander admittedly
did so in June, but Howard does not cite those broadcasts.
‘The Germans reacted
with predictable savagery.’
The Germans engaged in
savage reprisals primarily in August, before the supposed order that
Howard quotes. The reprisals took place because of partisan murders of soldiers,
and in response to Operation ‘Olive’, not simply because of attacks on
communications, as Howard suggests here. Moreover, the massacre at Marzabotto
occurred at the end of September, when Kesselring had mollified his
instructions, after Mussolini’s intervention.
‘Allied armies did not
come to their help’.
But was anything more
than parachuting in supplies expected? Over an area of more than 30,000 square
miles, behind enemy lines? Bologna only? Where is the evidence – beyond the
June message quoted by Origo? What did the SOE officers say? (I have not yet
read Joe Maioli’s Mission Accomplished: SOE in Italy 1943-45, although
its title suggests success, not failure.)
‘The partisan movement
in northern Italy was largely destroyed’.
This was not true, as
numerous memoirs and histories indicate. Admittedly, activity sharply decreased
after September, because of the Nazi attacks, and the reduction in supplies. It
thus suffered in the short term, but the movement became highly active again in
the spring of 1945. On what did Howard base his conclusion? And why did he not
mention that it was the Communist Togliatti who had been as much responsible
for any weakening in the autumn of 1944? Or that Italian neo-fascists had been
determinedly hunting down partisans all year?
‘It was still believed . . .’
Why the passive voice? Who? When? Why? Of course the communists in Bologna would say that.
‘ . . .deliberately
planned to weaken the communist movement’.
Richard Lamb wrote that
Field Marshal Harding, Alexander’s Chief of Staff, had told him that the
controversial Proclama Alexander, interpreted by some Italian historians
as an anti-communist move, had been designed to protect the partisans. But that
proclamation was made in November, and it encouraged partisans to
suspend hostilities. In any case, weakening the communist movement was not a dishonourable
goal, considering what was happening elsewhere in Europe.
‘. . . much as the Soviets
had encouraged the people of Warsaw to rise and then sat by while the Germans
exterminated them’.
Did the Bologna
communists really make this analogy, condemning the actions of communists in
Poland as if they were akin to the actions of the Allies? Expressing sympathy
for the class enemies of the Polish Home Army would have been heresy. Why could
Howard not refute it at the time, or point out the contradictions in this
passage?
‘ . . .was there really nothing that we could have done to help?’
Aren’t you the one supposed to be answering the questions, Professor, not asking them?
‘. . . huge cumbrous
armies with their vast supply-lines’
Why had Howard forgotten
about the depletion of resources in Italy, the decision to hold ground, and
what he wrote about in Strategic Deception? Did he really think that
Alexander would have been able to ignore Eisenhower’s directives? And why
’cumbrous’ – unwieldy? inflexible?
‘Someone must have known
what was going on’.
Indeed. And shouldn’t it have been Howard’s
responsibility to find out?
‘Ever since then I have
been sparing of criticism of the Soviet armies’
Where? In print? In
conversations? What has one got to do with the other? Why should an implicit
criticism of the Allied Command be converted into sympathy for Stalin?
The irony is that the
Allied Command, perhaps guided by the Political Warfare Executive, did
probably woefully mismanage expectations, and encourage attacks on German
troops that resulted in the murder of innocent civilians. But Howard does not
make this case. Those events happened primarily in the June through August
period, while Howard bases his argument on a September proclamation. He was
very quick to accept the Bologna communists’ claim that the alleged
‘destruction’ of the partisans was all the Allies’ fault, when the partisans
themselves, northern Italian fascists, the SS troops, Togliatti, and even the
Pope, held some responsibility. If Howard had other evidence, he should have
presented it.
Why was Howard not aware
of the Monte Sole massacre at the time? Why did he not perform research before
walking into the meeting in Bologna? What did the communists there tell him
that convinced him that they had been hard done by? Did they blame the British
for the SS reprisals? Why was he taken in by the relentless propagandizing of
the Communists? Why did he not explain what he thought the parallels were
between Alexander’s actions and those of Rokossovsky? The episode offered an
intriguing opportunity to investigate Allied strategy in Italy and Poland in
the approach to D-Day and afterwards, but Howard fumbled it, and an enormous
amount is thus missing from his casual observations. He could have illustrated
how the attempts by the Western Allies to protect the incursions into Europe
had unintended consequences, and shown the result of the competition between
western intelligence and Togliatti for the allegiance of the Italian partisans.
Instead the illustrious historian never did his homework. He obfuscated rather
than illuminated, indulging in vague speculation, shaky chronology, ineffectual
hand-wringing, and unsupported conclusions.
Perhaps a pertinent
epitaph is what Howard himself wrote, in his volume of Strategic Deception,
about the campaign in India (p 221): “The real problem which
confronted the British deception staff in India, however, was that created by
its own side; the continuing uncertainty as to what Allied strategic intentions
really were. In default of any actual plans the best that the deceivers could
do as one of them ruefully put it, was to ensure that the enemy remained as
confused as they were themselves.” He had an excellent opportunity to inspect
the Italian campaign as a case study for the same phenomenon, but for some
reason avoided it.
This has been a fascinating
and educational, though ultimately sterile, exercise for me. It certainly did not
help me understand why Howard is held in such regard as a historian. ‘Why are
eminent figures allowed to get away with such feeble analysis?’, I asked
myself. Is it because they are distinguished, and an aura of authority has
descended upon them? Or am I completely out to lunch? No doubt I should read
more of Howard’s works. But ars longa, vita brevis . . .
Sources:
War
in Italy 1943-1945, A Brutal Story by Richard Lamb
Russia
at War1941-1945 by Nicholas Werth
Barbarossa
by
Alan Clark
The
Second World War by Antony Beevor
War
in Val D’Orcia by Iris Origo
Captain
Professor by Michael Howard
The
House in the Mountains by Caroline Moorehead
World War II Partisan
Warfare in Italy by Pier Paola Battistelli & Piero Crociani
The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour
Between Giants by Prit Buttar
Winston Churchill: Road
to Victory 1941-1945 by Martin Gilbert
Rising ’47 by Norman Davies
No Simple Victory by Norman Davies
The Oxford Companion to
World War II edited by Ian Dear and M. R. E. Foot
The Oxford Illustrated
History of World War II edited by Paul Overy
British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 5, Strategic Deception by Michael Howard
One of the most stressful days of my life occurred at the end of July 1980. I had been spending the previous few months commuting between the UK and the USA, courtesy of Freddy Laker, spending three weeks in Connecticut before a break of a week at home in Coulsdon with Sylvia and the infant James, and then flying back to the USA for another sojourn. For some months, we had been trying to sell the house, while I looked for a place to live in Norwalk, CT., and began to learn about US customs, banking practices, documentary requirements for applying for a mortgage, etc. etc.. Meanwhile, I started implementing the changes to the Technical Services division of the software company I was working for, believing that some new methods in the procedures for testing and improving the product with field enhancements, as well as in the communications with the worldwide offices and distributors, were necessary. Sylvia successfully sold the house. I had to arrange for our possessions to be transported and stored, and decide when and how we should eventually leave the UK. On the last decision, Sylvia and I decided that using the QEII for the relocation would be a sound choice, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, perhaps, and one that would be less stressful for the three of us. We thought we would stay in the USA for a few years before returning home.
And then, three days
before we were due to sail, I discovered that our visas had still not come
through. I had been told by my boss (the CEO of the company) that an attorney
who specialised in such matters would apply for an L-1 visa (a training visa,
of limited duration), and that it would later be upgraded to a resident alien’s
visa. I had met the attorney, and given him all the details, and he had
promised me that I would be able to pick it up at the American Embassy in
London. But when I went there, the officials knew nothing about it. Some
frantic phone-calls across the Atlantic followed, and I was eventually able to
pick up the visas the day before we left Southampton. Such was the panic that I
cannot recall how we travelled from home to Southampton, or how we packed for
the week’s cruise with a ten-month old son, but we made it. The cruise itself
turned out to have its own nightmares, as my wallet was stolen (probably by a professional
pickpocket who funded his trips by such activities), and I spent the last three
days on the ship desperately looking for it, since it contained my driving
licence (necessary for applying for a US driver’s license), as well as a few
other vital items. It was not a comfortable start to our new life.
Fortunately, we still had our passports and visas intact. We were picked up in New York, and I was able to show Sylvia her new house (which, of course, she had never seen before). If she had any qualms, she was very diplomatic in suppressing them. We settled in: the neighbours were kind. They were Jews originally from Galicia, Bill and Lorraine Landesberg. I recall that Bill named ‘Lemberg’ as his place of birth – what is now known as Lvov, in Ukraine. (Incidentally, I recall a school colleague named Roy Lemberger. I conclude now that his forefathers must have moved from Lemberg some generations before in order for his ancestor to be given the name ‘the man from Lemberg’.) I suspect that the Landesbergs found us a bit exotic, even quaint.
I recall also that my
boss had encouraged me to rent, not buy (‘Interest rates will come down in a
couple of years’), but I had thought that he was probably trying to cut down on
relocation expenses. That conclusion was solidified by another incident. During
the summer, he had succeeded in selling his outfit to a local timesharing
company (‘timesharing’ being what was not called ‘cloud computing’ at the
time). I obtained a copy of the parent company’s Personnel Policies, and
discovered that it offered a more generous overseas relocation allowance, and
presented my findings to my boss. He was taken by surprise, and somewhat
crestfallen, as he knew nothing of the policy, and the expenses had to come out
of his budget.
In any case, this windfall
helped with the acquisition of new appliances, required because of the voltage
change. I must have applied for a re-issue of my UK licence, and soon we
acquired two cars. We chose General Motors models, a decision that my
colleagues at work also found quaint, as they were buying German or Swedish
automobiles, and stated that no-one would buy an American car those days.
Gradually, we found a pace and rhythm to life, a reliable baby-sitter, and the
changes I had made at the company seemed to have been received well –
especially by the support personnel I had left behind in Europe. My parents
were coming out to visit us that Christmas.
Indeed, I was next
recommended (by my predecessor) to host and speak at the key product Users’
Group being held that autumn/fall. I later learned that relationships between
the company management and the Users’ Group were very strained, because of
failed promises and indifferent support, and I was thus a useful replacement to
address the group – a fresh face, with a British accent, an expert in the
product, with no corporate baggage. I thus quite eagerly accepted the
assignment, prepared my speeches, and set out for Toronto, where the meeting
was being held. It all went very well: the group seemed to appreciate the
changes I was making, and I was able to offer several tips on how to diagnose
the system expertly, and improve its performance.
Thus I made my way back
through Toronto airport with some glow and feeling of success. Until I
approached the US customs post, after check-in. There I was told that I was not
going to be allowed to re-enter the United States, as I was in possession of an
L-1 visa, and as such, had committed an offence in leaving the country, and
could not be re-admitted. (My visa had not been checked on leaving the US, or
on entry to Canada, where my British passport would have been adequate.) I was
marched off to a small room to await my fate. Again, the experience must have
been so traumatic that I don’t recall the details, but I believe that I
pleaded, and used my selling skills, to the effect that it had all been a
harmless mistake, and Canada was really part of the North-American-GB alliance,
and it wouldn’t happen again, and it was not my fault, but that of my employer,
and I had a young family awaiting me, so please let me through. The outcome was
that a sympathetic officer eventually let me off with an admonishment, but I
could not help but conclude that a tougher individual might not have been so
indulgent. What was the alternative? To have put me in a hotel, awaiting a
judicial inquiry? This could not have been the first time such a mistake
occurred, but maybe they didn’t want to deal with the paperwork. And I looked
and sounded harmless, I suppose.
I eventually acquired the much cherished ‘Green Card’, which gave me permanent resident status, and the ability to change jobs. (That became important soon afterwards, but that is another story.) This was an arduous process, with more interviews, forms to fill out, travelling to remote offices to wait in line before being interrogated by grumpy immigration officials. Many years later, we repeated the process when we applied for citizenship. It was something we should have done before James reached eighteen, as he had to go through the process as well on reaching that age. One reason for the delay was that, for a period in the 1990s, adopting US citizenship meant a careful rejection of any other allegiance, and we were not yet prepared to abandon out UK nationality. At the end of the decade, however, we were allowed to retain both, so long as we declared our primary allegiance to the USA. (Julia was born here, so is a true American citizen, as she constantly reminds us.) More questions, visits to Hartford, CT., citizenship tests on the US constitution and history, and then the final ceremony. I noticed a change: when I returned from a visit abroad, and went through the ‘US Citizens’ line, the customs official would look at my passport, smile and say ‘Welcome Home’.
Illegal Immigration
All this serves as a
lengthy introduction to my main theme: what is it about ‘illegal immigration’
that the Democratic Party does not understand? I know that I am not alone in
thinking, as someone who has been through the whole process of gaining
citizenship, that such a firm endorsement of an illegal act is subversive of
the notion of law, and the judicial process itself. When, at one of the early
Democratic Presidential Candidate debates held on television, all the speakers
called not only for ‘open borders’ but also for providing free healthcare to
all illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers, I was aghast. Did they really think
that was a vote-winner, or were they all simply parading their compassionate
consciences on their sleeves, hoping to pick up the ‘progressive’ or the
‘Hispanic’ vote? For many congresspersons seem to believe that all ‘Hispanics’
must be in favour of allowing unrestricted entry to their brethren and sisterhood
attempting to come here from ‘Latin’ America. (Let us put aside for now the
whole nonsense of what ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ means, in relation to those
inhabitants of Mexico and South America who speak Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl,
Zapotec, German, Portuguese, etc. etc.) Many ‘Hispanic’ citizens who are here
legally likewise resent the entitlements that others from south of the border
claim, suggesting that it is somehow their ‘right’ to cross the border
illegally, and set up home somewhere in the USA. There should either be a
firmer effort to enforce the law, as it is, or to change it.
Moreover, the problem is
by no means exclusively one of illegal immigration. It concerns authorized visitors
with temporary visas who outstay their welcome. Almost half of the undocumented
immigrants in the USA entered the country with a visa, passed inspection at the
airport (probably), and then remained. According to figures compiled by the
Center for Migration Studies, ‘of the roughly 3.5. million undocumented
immigrants who entered the country between 2010 and 2017, 65% arrived with full
permission stamped in their passports.’ The government departments responsible
can apparently not identify or track such persons. I read this week that an
estimated 1.5 million illegal immigrants reside in Britain.
The problem of mass
migration, of refugees, of asylum-seekers affects most of the world, in an
environment where asylum was conceived as a process affecting the occasional
dissident or victim of persecution, not thousands trying to escape from poverty
or gang violence. But we do not hear of throngs of people trying to enter
Russia, China, or Venezuela. It is always the liberal democracies. Yet even the
most open and generous societies are feeling the strain, as the struggles of EU
countries trying to seal their borders shows. It is not a question of being
‘Pro’ or ‘Anti’ immigration, but more a recognition that the process of
assimilation has to be more gradual. A country has to take control of its own
immigration policy.
I was reminded that this cannot be made an issue of morality, instead of political pragmatism, when I recently read the obituary of the Japanese Sadako Ogata, the first woman to lead the U.N. Refugee Agency. She was quoted as saying: “I am not saying Japan should accept all of them [people escaping from Syria]. But if Japan doesn’t open a door for people with particular reasons and needs, it’s against human rights.” The statement contained the essence of the dilemma: Ogata recognised presumably inalienable human ‘rights’ to move from one country to another, but then immediately qualified it by suggesting that only ‘particular reasons and needs’ could justify their acceptance. And who is to decide, therefore, which reasons and needs are legitimate? Not an Open Borders policy, but some form of judicial investigation, presumably.
. . . and Healthcare
The Democratic candidates then compounded their confusion by their demonstration of ‘compassion’ for claiming that they would allow such illegal immigrants free access to healthcare. Now here is another controversial example of the clash between ‘rights’ and pragmatism. Heaven knows, the healthcare ‘system’ in this country is defective and ‘broken’, but then I suspect that it is in any other country where, alternatively, medical treatment is largely controlled by the state. I read last week that Britain’s National Health Service has 100,000 vacancies, and that 4.4 million persons are now on waiting lists. (We have the antithesis of the problem over here. While a patient needing a knee-replacement has to wait six months or more in the UK, when I was referred to a knee specialist a few months ago, within ten minutes, without even calling for an MRI, the doctor recommended, because of arthritis showing up on X-Rays, that I needed a knee-replacement, and, before you could say ‘Denis Compton’, he would probably have fitted me in for the operation the following week if I had pursued it. His prosperity relies on his doing as many operations as possible. I am successfully undertaking more conservative treatments. Moreover, the American insurance system is littered with incidents where insurance companies pay absurd sums for processes that never happened.) France, I read, is having similar problems as the UK: is Finland the current model for how welfare and enterprise coexist successively? Maybe we should all migrate to Finland.
‘Medicare for all’. Apart from the fact that such a program is estimated by its champions to cost about $30 trillion over the next ten years, where will all the doctors and medical practitioners come from to satisfy the new demands? Will they be raided from ‘developing’ nations, who would surely ill afford the loss? Again, this matter is often represented as an ‘entitlement’ issue, one of ‘basic human rights’. Consider what the UN says. Article 25 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.’ Well, one can regret the obviously sexist language here – what about ‘every person and his or her wife or husband, and members of their blended or rainbow family, including members of the LGBQT community’ – but let that pass. It also did not state that subscribing nations should appoint a Minister for Loneliness. This was 1948, after all.
Reflect also on what the Declaration does not
say: “Every individual should
have access to healthcare, including the ability to gain, in a matter of four weeks,
an appointment with a reputable gastro-enterologist whose practice is within
twenty miles of where he or she lives.” “Every individual has the right to be
treated by a qualified shaman who can recite the appropriate incantations over
the invalid for an affordable fee.” “Every individual has the right to decline
approved immunization processes for their children out of religious
conviction.” I do not make these points as a frivolous interjection, but again
to point out how the provision of healthcare in any country has to be based on
pragmatics and economics, and will often clash with religious opposition and
superstitions.
It is bewildering how
many of the electorate in the USA appear to have swallowed the financial
projections of Senators Warren and Sanders for their expansive plans. To
suggest that such money can be raised by taxing what are mostly illiquid
assets, and that such government programs could presumably be permanently
funded by the continuance of such policies, is economic madness. Some
commentators have pointed out that wealthy individuals would find ways of
avoiding such confiscation, yet I have noticed very little analysis of the
effect on asset prices themselves in a continued forced sale. The value of many
assets cannot be determined until they are sold; they would have to be sold in
order to raise cash for tax purposes; if they are to be sold, there have to be
cash-owning buyers available; if a buyers’ market evolves, asset values will
decline. (One renowned economist suggested that the government could accept
stocks and shares, for instance, and then sell them on the open market . . .
. !) The unintended consequences in the areas of business investment and
pension values would be extraordinary. Yet the Democratic extremists are now
claiming that such a transfer of wealth will provoke economic growth, quickly
forgetting the lessons of a hundred years of socialism, and also, incidentally,
undermining what some of them declare concerning the deceleration of climate
change.
In summary, we are
approaching an election year with a Democratic Party desperate to oust Donald
Trump, but in disarray. The candidates for Presidential nominee are a
combination of the hopelessly idealistic, the superannuated and confused, and
the economically illiterate. I believe that those who stress the principles of
Open Borders and a revolutionary Medicare for All program seriously misjudge
the mood and inclinations of what I suppose has to be called ‘Middle America’.
But now Michael Bloomberg has stepped into the ring. As [identity alert]
‘an Independent of libertarian convictions with no particular axe to grind’, I
have found it practically impossible to vote for either a Republican or a
Democratic Presidential candidate since being granted the vote, but here comes
someone of proven leadership quality, a pragmatist (for the most part), and one
who has changed his political affiliations – just like Winston Churchill. In a
recent interview, he described himself as ‘a social liberal, fiscal moderate,
who is basically nonpartisan’. I could vote for him. But Michael – you will be
78 next February! Another old fogey, like Biden and Sanders! Why didn’t you
stand four years ago?
The Kremlin Letters
‘The Kremlin Letters’
I started this bulletin by referring to experiences from thirty-nine years ago, and conclude by describing events thirty-nine years before that, in 1941. This month I started reading The Kremlin Letters, subtitled Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt, edited by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov, which was published last year. It is proving to be an engrossing compilation, since it exploits some previously undisclosed Russian archives. The Acknowledgements inform readers that ‘a carefully researched Russian text was revised and rewritten for an Anglophone audience’. The core material is therefore what historians prefer to base their interpretations on – original source documents, the authenticity and accuracy of which can probably not be denied. A blurb by Gabriel Gorodetsky on the cover, moreover, makes the challenging assertion that the book ‘rewrites the history of the war as we knew it.’ ‘We’? I wondered to whom he was referring in that evasive and vaguely identified group.
Did it live up to the challenge?
A crucial part of the editing process is providing context and background to the
subjects covered in the letters. After reading only one chapter, I started to
have my doubts about the accuracy of the whole process. David Reynolds is a
very accomplished historian: I very much enjoyed his In Command of History,
which analysed Winston Churchill’s questionable process of writing history as
well as making it. I must confess to finding some of Reynolds’s judgments in The
Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century a little dubious, as
he seemed (for example) to understate what I saw as many of Stalin’s crimes.
What caught my attention
was a reference to the Diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador in
London for much of WWII. I have previously explained that I think Maisky’s
Diaries are unreliable as a record of what actually transpired in his conversations
with Churchill and Eden, in particular, and regretted the fact that certain
historians (such as Andrew Roberts) have grabbed on to the very same Gabriel
Gorodetsky’s edition of the Diaries (2015) as a vital new resource in
interpreting the evolution of Anglo-Soviet relations. (see https://coldspur.com/guy-liddell-a-re-assessment/) Now David Reynolds
appears to have joined the throng. Is this another mutual admiration society?
The controversy (as I
see it) starts with Stalin’s initial letter to Churchill, dated July 18, 1941,
a few weeks after Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany),
following Churchill’s two messages of support communicated via Ambassador
Cripps. Stalin’s message included the following paragraph:
“It is easy to imagine
that the position of the German forces would have been many times more
favourable had the Soviet troops had to face the attack of the German forces
not in the region of Kishinev, Lwow, Brest, Kaunas and Viborg, but in the
region of Odessa, Kamenets Podolski, Minsk and the environs of Leningrad”. He
cleverly indicated the change of borders without referring to the now embarrassing
phenomenon of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (Stalin then went on to request,
absurdly and impertinently, that Great Britain establish ‘fronts’ against
Germany in northern France and the Arctic.)
What is this geographical lesson about? Reynolds introduces the letter by writing: “And he sought to justify the USSR’s westward expansion in 1939 under the Nazi-Soviet Pact as a life-saver in 1941, because it had given the Red Army more space within which to contain Hitler’s ‘sudden attack’.” My reaction, however, was that, while Stalin wanted to move very quickly on justifying the borders defined by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, his military analysis for Churchill’s benefit was poppycock. For what had been a strong defensive border built up during the 1930s, known as the Stalin Line, had effectively been dismantled, and was being replaced by the Molotov Line, which existed as a result of aggressive tactics, namely the shared carve-up of Poland and the Baltic States by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. (See diagrams below. In all the historical atlases I possess, I have not been able to find a single map that shows the Stalin and Molotov Lines, and the intervening territory, clearly, and have thus taken a chart from Read’s and Fisher’s Deadly Embrace, which does not include the border with Finland, extended it, and added the locations Stalin listed.)
The Stalin LineThe Molotov LineThe Area Between the Stalin Line and the Molotov Line
I was confident, from my reading of the histories, that the Soviet Union’s annexation of the limitrophe states (as Hitler himself referred to them) had weakened the country’s ability to defend itself. After all, if the ‘buffer’ states’ that Stalin had invaded (under the guise of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) had been allowed to remain relatively undisturbed, Hitler’s invasion of them on the way to Russia in the spring of 1941 would have warned the Soviet Union that Hitler was encroaching on the Soviet Union’s ‘sphere of influence’ and that its traditional, internationally recognised border would soon be under attack. ‘More space’ was not a benefit, in other words. Thus the analysis of this period must address how seriously Stalin believed that forcing the buffer states to come under the control of the Soviet army would impede a possible invasion (which Stalin expressly still feared) rather than facilitate it. Reynolds does not enter this debate.
Ambassador Maisky
delivered this message from Stalin to Churchill at Chequers. Reynolds then
echoes from Maisky’s diary the fact that Churchill was very pleased at
receiving this ‘personal message’, and then goes on to cite Maisky’s impression
of Churchill’s reaction to the border claims. “Churchill also expressed
diplomatic approval of Stalin’s defence of shifting Soviet borders west in
1939-40: ‘Quite right! I’ve always understood and sought to justify the policy
of “limited expansion” which Stalin has pursued in the last two years’.”
Now, my first reaction
was that Churchill, as a military historian and as a politician, could surely
not have expressed such opinions. I seemed to recall that he had been highly
critical of both the Nazi invasion of Poland as well as the Soviet Union’s
cruel takeover of the Baltic States, where it had terrorized and executed
thousands, as well as its disastrous war against Finland in the winter of 1940.
(Lithuania was initially assigned to Germany, according to the Pact, but was
later transferred to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.) Churchill must also
have known that dismantling a strong defensive wall, and trying to establish a
new one, under pressure, in countries where Stalin had menaced and antagonised
the local citizenry, would have been a disastrous mistake as preparation for
the onslaught that Hitler had long before advertised in Mein Kampf. Did
he really make that statement to Maisky? Had these assertions of Maisky’s been
confirmed from other sources?
Then I turned the page
to read Churchill’s response to Stalin, dated July 20. Here was the evidence in
black and white: “I fully realise the military advantage you have gained by
forcing the enemy to deploy and engage on forward Western fronts, thus
exhausting the force of his initial effort.” This was astonishing! What was
Churchill thinking? Either I was completely wrong in my recollection of how
historians had interpreted the events of Barbarossa, or Churchill had been woefully
ignorant of what was going on, and insensitive to the implications of his
message, or the British Prime Minister had been tactfully concealing his real
beliefs about the annexations in an attempt to curry favour with Generalissimo
Stalin. Which was it? In any case, he was shamelessly and gratuitously expressing
to Stalin approval of the brutal invasion of the territory of sovereign states,
the cause he had gone to war over. Churchill’s message consisted of an
unnecessary and cynical response to Stalin’s gambit, which must have caused many
recriminations in negotiations later on. As for ‘exhausting the force of his
initial effort’, Churchill was clutching at Stalin’s straws. Where was the
evidence?
I decided to look up evidence
from sources in my private library to start with. First, Maisky’s Diaries.
Indeed, the details are there. Maisky indicates that he translated (and typed
up) the message himself, and that, since he told Anthony Eden that it dealt
with ‘military-strategic issues’, the Foreign Secretary did not request that he
be in attendance when it was read. Maisky adds that ‘the prime minister started
reading the communiqué ‘slowly, attentively, now and then consulting a
geographical map that was close at hand’. (Those placenames would certainly
have not been intimately familiar.) Maisky singles out, rather implausibly,
Churchill’s reaction to the ‘expansion’ policy. When Churchill had finished
reading the message, however, Maisky asked him what he thought of it, and
Churchill ‘replied that first he had to consult HQ’. One thus wonders whether
he would have given anything away so enthusiastically in mid-stream, and why he
would have concentrated on the geographical details when the substance of the
message related to more critical matters.
What other records of
this visit exist? I turned to John Colville’s Fringes of Power: 10 Downing
Street Diaries,1939-1955. Colville records the meeting, albeit briefly. “At
tea-time the Soviet Ambassador arrived, bringing a telegram for the P.M. from
Stalin who asks for diversions in various places by English forces. It is hard
for the Russians to understand how unprepared we still are to take the
offensive. I was present while the P.M. explained the whole situation very
clearly to poor, uninformed Maisky.”
Maisky records Churchill’s protestations about the futility of trying to
invade mainland Europe without admitting his own miserable ignorance: Colville
makes no reference to the exchange over the Baltic States.
Did Churchill or Eden
make any relevant observation at this time? I have only my notes from Eden’s The
Reckoning, which refer to Maisky’s demands for the Second Front, but
indicate nothing about the Baltic States at this time. (The matter would
surface ominously later in the year, when joint ‘war aims’ were discussed.). I
own only the abridgment of Churchill’s war memoirs, which contains no
description of the meeting with Maisky. And what about the biographies? The
Last Lion, by William Manchester and Paul Reid, while spending several paragraphs
on Stalin’s demands for a second front, makes no mention of the telegram and
the Maisky meeting, or the contentious issue of Soviet borders. Roy Jenkins’s Churchill
is of little use: ‘Maisky’ appears only once in the Index, and there are no
entries for ‘Barbarossa’ or ‘Baltic States’. I shall have to make a visit to
the UNCW Library in the New Year, in order to check the details.
Next, the military
aspects of the case. Roger Moorhouse, in The Devil’s Alliance, provides
a recent, in-depth assessment. “Since
the mid-1920s, the USSR had been constructing a network of defenses along its
western border: the ukreplinnye raiony,
or ‘fortified areas,’ known colloquially as the ‘Stalin Line.’ However, with
the addition of the territories gained in collaboration with the Germans in
1939 and 1940, those incomplete defenses now lay some three hundred or so
kilometers east of the new Soviet frontier. Consequently, in the summer of
1940, a new network of defenses was begun further west, snaking through the
newly gained territories from Telŝiai in Lithuania, via eastern Poland, to the
mouth of the Danube in Bessarabia. It would later be unofficially named the
‘Molotov Line’.” These were the two boundaries to which Stalin referred,
obliquely, in his telegram.
Moorhouse explains how
the Soviets were overwhelmed in the first days of the invasion, partly because
of Stalin’s insistence that his forces do nothing to ‘provoke’ Hitler, but also
because his airfields and troops were massively exposed. “After two days, the
capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic, Vilnius, fell to the Germans; a week
after that, the Latvian capital, Riga, the Byelorussian capital, Minsk, and the
western Ukrainian city of L’vov (the former Polish Lwów) had also fallen. By
that time, some German units had already advanced over 250 miles from their
starting position. Already, almost all the lands gained under the pact had been
lost.” The Red Air Force had been annihilated on the ground, with thousands of
aircraft destroyed because they sat in airfield in rows, unprotected and
unguarded. “Facing the full force of the blitzkrieg, the Red Army was in
disarray, with surviving troops often fleeing eastward alongside columns of
similarly leaderless refugees. In some cases, officers attempting to stem the panic
and restore order were shot by their own troops.”
This account is echoed
by Antony Beevor, in The Second World War: “The
Red Army had been caught almost completely unprepared. In the months before the
invasion, the Soviet leader had forced it to advance from the Stalin Line
inside the old frontier and establish a forward defence along the
Molotov-Ribbentrop border. Not enough had been done to prepare the new
positions, despite Zhukhov’s energetic attempts. Less than half of the
strongpoints had any heavy weapons. Artillery regiments lacked their tractors,
which had been sent to help with the harvest. And Soviet aviation was caught on
the ground, its aircraft lined up in rows, presenting easy targets for the
Luftwaffe’s pre-emptive strikes on sixty-six airfields. Some 1,800 fighters and
bombers were said to have been destroyed on the first day of the attack, the
majority on the ground. The Luftwaffe lost just thirty-five aircraft.” Michael
Burleigh, in his outstanding Moral Combat, reinforces the notion of
Soviet disarray: “On 22 June three million troops, 3,350 tanks, 71.146
artillery pieces and 2,713 aircraft unleashed a storm of destruction on an
opponent whose defences were in total disarray, and whose forces were deployed
far forward in line with a doctrinaire belief in immediate counter-attack.”
Yet I struggled to find detailed
analysis of the effect of the moved defensive line in accounts of the battles.
Christer Bergstrom’s Operation Barbarossa 1941: Hitler Against Stalin,
offers a detailed account of the makeup of the opposing forces, and the
outcomes of the initial dogfights and assaults, but no analysis on the effect
on communications and supply lines that the extended frontier caused.
Certainly, owing to persecutions of local populations, the Soviet armies and
airforce were operating under hostile local conditions, but it is difficult to
judge how inferior the Soviet Union’s response was because of the quality of
the outposts defending the frontier, as opposed to, say, the fact that the military’s
officers had been largely executed during the Great Purge. The Soviet airfields
were massively exposed because German reconnaissance planes were allowed to
penetrate deep into the newly-gained territory to take photographs – something
they surely would not have been permitted to perform beyond the traditional
boundaries. On the other hand, I have found no evidence that the Soviet
Union was better able to defend itself in Operation Barbarossa because of the
movement of its western border, as Stalin claimed in his telegram.
I have also started to
inspect biographies of Stalin. Dmitri Volkogonov’s Stalin: Triumph and
Tragedy (1998, English translation 1991) is quick to list several causes
for the disaster of Barbarossa: Stalin’s hubris in wanting to restore the old
imperial borders too quickly, the lack of attention to defensive strategies, the
fact that, in January 1941, General Zhukov recommended unsuccessfully that the
‘unfavourable system of fortified districts’ be moved back 100 kilometres from
the new border, the overall zeal in meeting production quotas resulting in too
many defective aircraft, and high crash rates, and their poor protection on
exposed airfields. But while criticising Stalin, Volkogonov appears the
inveterate Communist, claiming equivocally that
‘while the moral aspect of the annexation of the Baltic states was
distinctly negative, the act itself was a positive [sic!] one’, that
‘the overwhelming majority of the Baltic population were favourable to their
countries’ incorporation into the Soviet Union in August 1940’, and even that
‘the decision to take over Western Ukraine and Byelorussia . . . was broadly in accord with the desire
of the local working class population’. These statements are highly
controversial, and further study is called for. Meanwhile, Marshall Zhukov in
his Memoirs (1969) offers a mostly propagandist account of the
tribulations of 1941, but does provide the scandalous information that German
saboteurs had cut the telegraph cables in all of the Western Frontier
Districts, and that most units had no radio back-up facilities.
How did Churchill’s attitudes
over the Baltic States evolve over time? Anthony Read’s and David Fisher’s Deadly
Embrace contains an indication of Churchill’s early opinions cited from the
latter’s Gathering Storm: “The British people . . . have a right, in conjunction with the
French Republic, to call upon Poland not to place obstacles in the way of a
common cause. Not only must the full co-operation of Russia be accepted, but
the three Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, must also be brought
into the association . . There is no means of maintaining an eastern
front against Nazi aggression without the active aid of Russia. Russian
interests are deeply concerned in preventing Herr Hitler’s designs on Eastern
Europe.” Yet that was said in April 1939, well before the pact was signed.
Churchill at that time was surely not considering that the Baltic States had to
be occupied by the Soviet Union in order to provide a bulwark against
the Germans. In any case, the States (and Poland) were more in fear of the
Bolsheviks than they were of the Nazis.
I turned to Robert
Rhodes James’s edition of his speeches, Churchill Speaks 1897-1963, and
was rather astonished by what I found. On October 1, 1939, after war had been
declared, and after the dismemberment of Poland, Churchill referred to
‘Russia’s’ interests without referring to the fate of the Baltic States. “What
is the second event of this first month? It is, of course, the assertion of the
power of Russia. Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could
have wished that the Russian armies should be standing on their present line as
the friends and allies of Poland instead of as invaders. But that the Russian
armies should stand on the line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia
against the Nazi menace.” A highly inflammatory and cynical opinion expressed
by the future Prime Minister, who quickly turned his attention to the Balkans
in his ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ oration.
A few months later,
Churchill picked up his analysis with commentary on the Finnish war, where the
Soviet invasion (part of the exercise to create a buffer zone between Leningrad
and hostile forces) had provoked a robust reaction in Britain, and even calls
to send troops to help the Finns. Again, Churchill evinced more rhetoric than
substance. “Only Finland – superb, nay sublime – in the jaws of peril – Finland
shows what fine men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is
magnificent. They have exposed, for all to see, the military incapacity of the
Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been
dispelled in these fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle. Everyone can
see how Communism rots the soul of a nation: how it makes it abject and hungry
in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war. We cannot tell what the
fate of Finland may be, but no more mournful spectacle could be presented to
what is left to civilized mankind than this splendid Northern race should be at
last worn down and reduced to servitude by the dull brutish force of
overwhelming numbers.” Well, it surely did not take the invasion of Finland to
show how a nation subjugated by Communism could be ruined, as the famines of
the Ukraine and Stalin’s Gulag had showed.
On March 30, 1940,
Churchill was again critical of the two totalitarian states. “What a frightful
fate has overtaken Poland! Here was a community of nearly thirty-five millions
of people, with all the organization of a modern government, and all the traditions
of an ancient state, which in a few weeks was dashed out of civilized existence
to become an incoherent multitude of tortured and starving men, women and
children, ground beneath the heel of two rival forms of withering and blasting
tyranny.” Indeed, sir. Yet Churchill could be remarkably selective in
identifying the places suffering under extremist cruelty: Britain was at war
with Germany, not with the Soviet Union, and he would come to soften his
criticism of Stalin’s variety of tyranny.
For the year after his
appointment as Prime Minister, Churchill was concentrated primarily on the war
in western Europe, and the threats of invasion, and his speeches reflect those
concerns. All that time, however, he was welcoming the time when the Soviet
Union would be forced to join the Allies. In February, 1941, he reminded his
audience that Hitler was already at the Black Sea, and that he ‘might tear
great provinces out of Russia.’ In April, he said that the war ‘may spread
eastward to Turkey and Russia’, and that ‘the Huns may lay their hands for a
time upon the granaries of the Ukraine and the oil-wells of the Caucasus.” By
this time he was warning Stalin of the coming German invasion, advice that the dictator
chose to ignore.
When the invasion
occurred, Churchill immediately declared his support for the Soviet Union. This
was the occasion (June 22, 1941) when he professed that ‘no one has been a more
consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the past twenty-five years’.
But then he dipped into his most sentimental and cloying prose: “I see the
Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the
fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. [Actually, not.
Millions of peasants had been killed and persecuted by Stalin, whether by
famine or deportation. Their fields had been disastrously collectivised.] I
see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray – ah yes, for there
are times when all pray – for the safety of their loved ones, the return of
their bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten
thousand villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly
from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens
laugh and children play.”
This is all romantic tosh,
of course. Stalin had so monstrously oppressed his own citizens and those in
the countries he invaded that the Nazis, from Estonia to Ukraine, were initially
welcomed as liberators by thousands who had seen family members shot or
incarcerated, simply because they were bourgeois or ‘rich peasants’, who had
seen their churches destroyed and their faith oppressed, and who had
experienced their independent livelihood being crushed. As Christopher Bellamy
writes, in the Oxford Companion to Military History. “The next biggest
contribution [to Soviet victory] was made by Hitler, who failed to recognize
the importance of the fact that his armies were initially greeted as liberators
in Belorussia and the Ukraine.” Some maidens did indeed start laughing when the
Germans arrived, as Georgio Geddes’s extraordinary account of Ukraine in 1941
to 1943, Nichivó: Life, Love and Death on the Russian Front, informs us.
Moorhouse and others
have written of the dreadful purges and deportations that took place after the
Soviets invaded the Baltic States, and the portion of Poland awarded to it
through the Pact. From The Devils’ Alliance, again: “In the former Polish eastern regions, annexed
by Stalin in 1939, at least 40,000 prisoners – Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorusians,
and Jews – were confined in overcrowded NKVD prisons by June 1941. As
elsewhere, some were released or evacuated, but around half would not survive.
The worst massacres were in L’vov, where around 3,500 prisoners were killed
across three prison sites, and at Lutsk (the former Polish Ĺuck), where 2,000
were murdered. But almost every NKVD prison or outpost saw a similar action –
from Sambor (600 killed) to Czortkov (Czortków) (890), from Tarnopol (574) to
Dubno (550).” Moorhouse continues: “Latvia had scarcely any history of
anti-Semitism prior to the trauma of 1939 to 1941; it had even been a
destination for some Jews fleeing the Third Reich, including Russian-born
scholar Simon Dubnow. Yet, in 1941 and beyond, it became the scene – like its
Baltic neighbors – of some of the most hideous atrocities, in which local
units, such as the infamous Arajs Kommando, played a significant role. It seems
that the Soviet occupation – with its informers, collaborators, denunciators,
and persecutions – had so poisoned already fragile community relations that,
even without Nazi encouragement, some sort of bloody reckoning became
inevitable.”
These facts were all revealed with the benefit
of hindsight, and access to archives. I need to inspect diplomatic and
intelligence reports to determine exactly how much Churchill knew of these
atrocities at the time. After all, the deportation and execution of thousands
of Polish ‘class enemies’ was concealed from Western eyes, and the Katyn
massacre of April-May 1940 remained a secret until April 1943, to the extent
that Stalin claimed that the Germans were responsible. By then, his British and
American allies were too craven to challenge him, even though they knew the
truth. Yet Churchill’s previous comments showed he was under no illusions about
Soviet persecution of even nominal opposition. If ‘communism rots the soul of a
nation’, it presumably rotted the Baltic States, too.
I started this exercise
in the belief that I would be uncovering further mendacity by Maisky, and soon reached
the stage where I was astonished at Churchill’s obsequious response to Stalin.
Stalin laid a trap for Churchill, and he walked right into it. One cannot
ascribe his appeasement of Stalin solely to his desire to encourage the Soviet
leader to continue the fight against Hitler, and his need to rally the British
public behind a regime that he had condemned for so long. Churchill acted meanly,
impulsively, and independently. In his recent biography of Churchill, Andrew
Roberts writes: “Churchill announced this full-scale
alliance with Soviet Russia after minimal consultation with his colleagues.
Even Eden had precious little input into the decision. Nor had he consulted the
Russians themselves. Over dinner at Chequers that evening Eden and Cranborne
argued from the Tory point of view that the alliance ‘should be confined to the
pure military aspect, as politically Russia was as bad as Germany and half the
country would object to being associated with her too closely’. Yet Churchill’s
view ‘was that Russia was now at war; innocent peasants were being slaughtered;
and that we should forget about Soviet systems or the Comintern and extend our
hand to fellow human beings in distress’. Colville recalled that this argument
‘was extremely vehement’.” He does not mention whether anyone brought up the
fact that Stalin himself was responsible for the deaths of millions of peasants
in his own homeland.
Throughout,
Churchill showed as much disdain for the fate of the Baltic States as
Chamberlain had done over the rape of Czechoslovakia. I believe that it is a
topic that cries out for re-assessment. Churchill certainly did not know the
extent of the disaster in the Soviet Union’s defences in July 1941, but,
knowing so little, he did not need to go overboard in agreeing with Stalin’s
claims. We thus have to face the possibilities: either a) Churchill knew all
along about the cruelty of Soviet oppression in the areas between the Stalin
Line and the Molotov Line, and chose to suppress them in his desire to rally
Stalin to the cause of fighting Hitler, or b) he had managed to remain ignorant
of what persecutions were occurring in these buffer states, sandwiched between
the infernal machines of Nazism and Bolshevism. And, whichever explanation is
correct, he omitted to explain why he, a military man, believed that the Soviet
Union had managed to contain better the onslaught of the Nazi war machine by choosing
to defend remote boundaries created in a campaign of aggression.
It
is hard to accept the second thesis. The famous cartoon by Low, published in Punch
in September 1939, where Hitler and Stalin rendezvous over dead bodies, with
Hitler saying ‘The scum of the earth, I believe?’, and Stalin responding ‘The
bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?’, reflected well the mood and
knowledge of the times. In the USA, Sumner Welles was much more hard-nosed
about the menace represented by the Soviets. As the excellent Moorhouse again
writes: “Nonetheless, in British government circles the
idea of de facto recognition of the annexations was soon floated as a
possible sop to bring Stalin onside. The American reaction was more principled.
Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles issued a formal statement – the Welles
Declaration – condemning Soviet Aggression and refusing to recognize the
legitimacy of Soviet control in the region, citing ‘the rule of reason, of
justice and of law,’ without which, he said, ‘civilization itself cannot be
preserved.’ In private he was even more forthright, and when the Soviet
ambassador, Konstantin Oumansky, opined that the United States should applaud
Soviet action in the Baltic, as it meant that the Baltic peoples could enjoy
‘the blessings of liberal and social government,’ his response was withering.
‘The US government,’ Welles explained, ‘sees no difference in principle between
the Russian domination of the Baltic peoples and the occupation by Germany of
other small European nations.’”
David Low’s Cartoon on the Nazi-Soviet Pact
The research will continue. I believe an opportunity for re-interpretation has been missed, contrary to Gorodetsky’s bubbly endorsement. (And I have read only one chapter of The Kremlin Letters so far. What fresh questions will it provoke?) Can any reader out there point me to a book that carefully dissects the implications of the defence against Barbarossa from the Molotov line, and maybe a study of virtual history that imagines what would have happened had Stalin been able to restrain himself from moving his defensive line westwards? Did Basil Liddell Hart ever write about it? In the meantime, I echo what I wrote about the Appeasement of Stalin a few months ago (see coldspurappeasement), except that I admit that I may have been too generous to Churchill in that piece. What was really going on in his mind, apart from the sentimentality, and the desire to capture some moving sentences in his oratory? It seems to me that Hitler inveigled Stalin into exposing his armies where they would be more vulnerable to his attack, that Stalin hoodwinked Churchill into making a calamitous and unnecessary compliment to Stalin’s generalship, and that Churchill let down the Baltic States by mismanaging Stalin’s expectations.
The last point to be made is to draw parallels with these times. The question of borders is all very poignant in view of current geopolitics. NATO was designed to provide concerted defence against westward extensions of the Soviet Empire. When communism died, NATO’s mission became questionable. Then Putin annexed the Crimea, supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, and this month forged a tight embrace with Belarus. Largely because of the reoccupation by the Soviet Empire after World War II, both Estonia and Latvia have 25% Russian ethnicity. Could Putin, in his desire to ‘make Russia great again’, possibly have designs on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?
I wish all coldspur readers the compliments of the season. I leave for two weeks in Los Altos, CA on December 17.
[Important
Notice: If any reader posts a comment, and does not see it after a couple of
days, please will he or she contact me directly. In recent weeks, the number of
spam comments posted to the site increased to over a thousand a day, all of
which I had to investigate, and then approve or reject, which was a highly
time-consuming process. I have now installed some spam-prevention software, but
it is possible, I suppose, that the software will trap some genuine comments.
Thank you.]
A
Rootless Cosmopolitan
A few weeks ago, at the bridge table at St. James, I was chatting between rounds, and my opponent happened to say, in response to some light-heated comment I made: ‘Touché!’ Now that immediately made me think of the famous James Thurber cartoon from the New Yorker, and I was surprised to learn that my friend (who has now become my bridge partner at a game elsewhere) was not familiar with this iconic drawing. And then, a few days ago, while at the chiropractor’s premises, I happened to mention to one of the assistants that one of the leg-stretching pieces of equipment looked like something by Rube Goldberg. (For British readers, Goldberg is the American equivalent of W. Heath Robinson.) The assistant looked at me blankly: she had never heard of Goldberg.
James Thurber’s 1932 Cartoon
I
recalled being introduced to Goldberg soon after I arrived in this country. But
‘Touché’ took me back much further. It set me thinking: how had I been
introduced to this classic example of American culture? Thurber was overall a
really poor draughtsman, but this particular creation, published in the New
Yorker in 1932, is cleanly made, and its impossibly unrealistic cruelty did
not shock the youngster who must have first encountered it in the late 1950s. A
magazine would probably not get away with publishing it these days: it would be
deprecated (perhaps like Harry Graham’s Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes)
as a depiction of gratuitous violence, likely to cause offence to persons of a
sensitive disposition, and also surely deemed to be ‘an insult to the entire worldwide
fencing community’.
Was it my father who showed it to me? Freddie Percy was one of the most serious of persons, but he did have a partiality for subversive wit and humour, especially when it entered the realm of nonsense, so long as it did not involve long hair, illicit substances, or sexual innuendo. I recall he was fan of the Marx Brothers, and the songs of Tom Lehrer, though how I knew this is not certain, as we had no television in those days, and he never took us to see a Marx Brothers movie. Had he perhaps heard Tom Lehrer on the radio? He also enjoyed the antics of Victor Borge (rather hammy slapstick, as far as I can remember) as well as those of Jacques Tati, and our parents took my brother, sister and me to see the films of Danny Kaye (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty – from a Thurber story – and Hans Christian Andersen), both of which, I must confess, failed to bowl me over.
Freddie and Mollie Percy (ca. 2004)
What
was it with these Jewish performers? The Marx Brothers, Lehrer, Borge (né
Rosenbaum) and Kaye (né Kaminsky)? Was the shtick my father told us about
the Dukes of Northumberland all a fraud, and was his father (who in the 1920s worked
in the clothes trade, selling school uniforms that he commissioned from East
London Jewish tailors) perhaps an émigré from Minsk whose original name was
Persky? And what happened to my grandfather’s Freemason paraphernalia, which my
father kept in a trunk in the attic for so long after his death? It is too late
to ask him about any of this, sadly. These questions do not come up at the
right time.
I
may have learned about Thurber from my brother. He was a fan of Thurber’s
books, also – volumes that I never explored deeply, for some reason. Yet the
reminiscence set me thinking about the American cultural influences at play in
Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and how they corresponded to local traditions.
Movies
and television did not play a large part in my childhood: we did not have television
installed until about 1965, so my teenage watching was limited to occasional
visits to friends, where I might be exposed to Bonanza or Wagon Train,
or even to the enigmatic Sergeant Bilko. I felt culturally and
socially deprived, as my schoolmates would gleefully discuss Hancock’s Half
Hour, or Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and I had no idea what they were talking
about. (It has taken a lifetime for me to recover from this feeling of cultural
inferiority.) I did not attend cinemas very often during the 1950s, although I
do recall the Norman Wisdom escapades, and the Doctor in the House
series featuring Dirk Bogarde (the dislike of whom my father would not shrink
from expressing) and James Robertson Justice. Apart from those mentioned above,
I do not recall many American films, although later The Searchers made a
big impression, anything with Audrey Hepburn in it was magical, and I rather
unpredictably enjoyed the musicals from that era, such as Seven Brides for
Seven Brothers, Oklahoma!, Carousel, and The King and I.
It
was perhaps fortunate that I did not at that stage inform my father that I had
suddenly discovered my calling in the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of
the crowd, as the old meshugennah might have thrown me out of Haling
Park Cottage on my ear before you could say ‘Jack Rubenstein’. In fact, the
theatre had no durable hold on me, although the escapist musical attraction did
lead me into an absorption with American popular music, which I always thought
more polished and more stimulating than most of the British pap that was produced.
(I exclude the Zombies, Lesley Duncan, Sandy Denny, and a few others from my
wholesale dismissal.) Perhaps seeing Sonny and Cher perform I Got You Babe,
or the Ronettes imploring me to Be My Baby, on Top of the Pops, led
me to believe that there was a more exciting life beyond my dreary damp
November suburban existence in Croydon, Surrey: California Dreaming
reflected that thwarted ambition.
We
left the UK in 1980, and, despite my frequent returns while I was working, and
during my retirement, primarily for research purposes, my picture of Britain is
frozen in a time warp of that period. Derek Underwood is wheeling away from the
Pavilion End, a round of beers can be bought for a pound, the Two Ronnies
are on TV, the Rolling Stones are just about to start a world tour, and George
Formby is performing down the road at the Brixton Essoldo. [Is this correct?
Ed.] I try to stay current with what is going on in the UK through my
subscriptions to Punch (though, as I think about it, I haven’t received
an issue for quite a while), Private Eye (continuous since 1965), the Spectator
(since 1982), and Prospect (a few years old), but, as each year goes by,
a little more is lost on me.
We
are just about to enter our fortieth year living in the USA. As I wrote, we
‘uprooted’ in 1980, although at the time we considered that the relocation
would be for just a few years, to gain some work experience, and see the
country, before we returned to the UK. My wife, Sylvia, and I now joke that,
once we have settled in, we shall explore the country properly. We retired to
Southport, North Carolina, in 2001, and have thus lived here longer than in any
other residence. Yet we have not even visited famous Charleston, a few hours
down the road in South Carolina, let alone the Tennessee border, which is about
seven hours’ drive away. (The area of North Carolina is just a tad smaller than
that of England.) We (and our daughter) are not fond of long journeys in the
car, which seems to us a colossal waste of time overall, and I have to admit
there is a sameness about many American destinations. And this part of the
world is very flat – like Norfolk without the windmills. You do not drive for
the scenery.
Do
I belong here? Many years ago we took up US citizenship. (I thus have two
passports, retaining my UK affiliation, but had to declare primary loyalty to
the USA.) My accent is a giveaway. Whereas my friends, when I return to the UK,
ask me why I have acquired that mid-Atlantic twang, nearly everyone I meet over
here comments that ‘they like my accent’ – even though some have been known to ask
whether it is Australian or South African. (Hallo! Do I sound like Crocodile
Dundee?) Sometimes their curiosity is phrased in the quintessential American
phrase: ‘Where are you from?’, which most Americans can quickly respond to with
the name of the city where they grew up. They may have moved around the country
– or even worked abroad – but their family hometown is where they are ‘from’.
So what do I answer? ‘The UK’ simplifies things, but is a bit dull. To jolly up the proceedings, I sometimes say: ‘Well, we are all out of Africa, aren’t we?’, but that may unfortunately not go down well with everyone, especially in this neck of the woods. Facetiousness mixed with literal truth may be a bit heady for some people. So I may get a bit of a laugh if I respond ‘Brooklyn’, or even ‘Connecticut’, which is the state we moved to in 1980, and the state we retired from in 2001 (and whither we have not been back since.)
What
they really want to know is where my roots lie. Now, I believe that if one is
going to acknowledge ‘roots’, they had better be a bit romantic. My old
schoolfriend Nigel Platts is wont to declare that he has his roots in Cumbria
(wild borderlands, like the tribal lands of Pakistan, Lakeland poets: A-),
while another old friend, Chris Jenkins, claims his are in Devon (seafarers,
pirates, boggy moors: B+). My wife can outdo them both, since she was born in
St. Vincent (tropical island, volcano, banana plantations: A+). But what do I
say? I grew up in Purley, Coulsdon, and South Croydon, in Surrey: (C-). No
one has roots in Purley, except for the wife of the Terry Jones character in
the famous Monty Python ‘Nudge Nudge’ sketch. So I normally leave it as ‘Surrey’,
as if I had grown up in the remote and largely unexplored Chipstead Valley, or
in the shadow of Box Hill, stalking the Surrey Puma, which sounds a bit more
exotic than spending my teenage years watching, from a house opposite the AGIP
service station, the buses stream along the Brighton Road in South Croydon.
Do
I carry British (or English) culture with me? I am a bit skeptical about these
notions of ‘national culture’. One might summarise English culture by such a
catalogue as the Lord’s test-match, sheepdog trials, pantomime, fish and chips,
The Last Night of the Proms, the National Trust, etc. etc., but then one ends
up either with some devilish discriminations between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture
or with a list of everything that goes on in the country, which makes the whole
exercise pointless. And what about ‘European’ culture? Is there such a thing,
apart from the obvious shared heritage and cross-influences of music, art and
literature? Bullfights as well as foxhunting? Bierfests alongside pub quizzes? The
Eurovision Song Contest? Moreover, all too often, national ‘culture’ ends up as
quaint customs and costumes put on for the benefit of the tourists.
Similarly,
one could try to describe American culture: the Superbowl, revivalist rallies,
Fourth of July parades, rodeos, NASCAR, Thanksgiving turkey. But where does the
NRA, or the Mormon Church (sorry, newly branded as the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-Day Saints), fit in? Perhaps the USA is too large, and too new, to
have a ‘national culture’. Some historians have claimed that the USA is
actually made up of several ‘nations’. Colin Woodard subtitled his book American
Nations ‘A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America’,
and drew on their colonial heritages to explain some mostly political
inclinations. Somewhat of an oversimplification, of course, as immigration and
relocation have blurred the lines and identities, but still a useful pointer to
the cultural shock that can occur when an employee is transplanted from one locality
to another, say from Boston to Dallas. Here, in south-eastern North Carolina,
retirees from Yankeedom frequently write letters to the newspaper expressing
their bewilderment and frustration that local drivers never seem to use their
indicators before turning, and habitually drive below maximum speed in the fast
lane of the highway. The locals respond, saying: “If you don’t like how we do
things down here, go back to where you came from!”.
And
then is the apparent obsession in some places about ‘identity’ and ‘ethnicity’.
The New York Times, leading the ‘progressive’ (dread word!) media, is notorious
on this matter, lavishly publishing streams of Op-Ed articles and editorial
columns about ‘racial’ identities and ‘ethnic’ exploitation. Some of this
originates from the absurdities of the U.S. Census Bureau, with its desperate
attempts to categorise everybody in some racial pigeonhole. What they might do
with such information, I have no idea. Shortly after I came to this country, I
was sent on a management training course, where I was solemnly informed that I
was not allowed to ask any prospective job candidate what his or her ‘race’
was. Ten minutes later, I was told that Human Resource departments had to track
every employee’s race so that they could meet Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission guidelines. So it all depended on how a new employee decided to
identify him- or her-self, and the bureaucrats got to work. I might have picked
‘Pacific Islander’, and no-one could have questioned it. (Sorry! I meant
‘Atlantic Islander’ . . .) Crazy stuff.
A
few weeks ago, I had to fill out one of those interminable forms that accompany
the delivery of healthcare in the USA. It was a requirement of the March 2010
Affordable Care Act, and I had to answer three questions. “The Government does not
allow for unanswered questions. If you choose not to disclose the requested
information, you must answer REFUSED to ensure compliance with the law”, the
form sternly informed me. (I did not bother to inquire what would happen to me
if I left the questions unanswered.) The first two questions ran as follows:
1.
Circle the one that best describes your RACE:
American
Indian or Alaska native
Asian
Native
Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
Black
or African American
White
Hispanic
Other
Race
REFUSED
2.
Circle the one that best describes your ETHNICITY:
a. Hispanic or Latin
b. Non-Hispanic or Non-Latin
c. REFUSED
What
fresh nonsense is this? To think that a panel of experts actually sat down
around a table for several meetings and came up with this tomfoolery is almost
beyond belief. (You will notice that the forms did not ask me whether the
patient was an illegal immigrant.) But this must be one of the reasons why so
many are desperate to enter the country – to have the opportunity to respond to
those wonderful life-enhancing questionnaires created by our government.
This
sociological aberration leaks into ‘identity’, the great hoax of the 21st
century. A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an editorial in
which it, without a trace of irony, announced that some political candidate in
New York had recently identified herself as ‘queer Latina’, as if that settled
the suitability of her election. The newspaper’s letter pages are sprinkled
with earnest and vapid statements from subscribers who start off their
communications on the following lines: “As a bald progressive Polish-American
dentist, I believe that . . . .”, as if
somehow their views were not free, and arrived at after careful reflection, but
conditioned by their genetic material, their parents, their chosen career, and their
ideological group membership, and that their status somehow gave them a
superior entitlement to voice their opinions on the subject of their choice. (I believe the name for this is
‘essentialism’.) But all that is irrelevant to the fact of whether they have
anything of value to say.
The
trouble is that, if we read about the views of one bald progressive
Polish-American dentist, the next time we meet one of his or her kind, we shall
say: “Ah! You’re one of them!”, and assume that that person holds the same
opinions as the previously encountered self-appointed representative of the bald
progressive Polish-American dentist community. And we end up with clumsy
stereotypes, which of course are a Bad Thing.
Identity
should be about uniqueness, not groupthink or unscientific notions of ethnicity,
and cannot be defined by a series of labels. No habits or practices are
inherited: they are all acquired culturally. That doesn’t mean they are
necessarily bad for that reason, but people need to recognize that they were
not born on predestinate grooves to become Baptists or Muslims, to worship
cows, to practice female circumcision, or to engage in strange activities such as
shooting small birds in great numbers, or watching motor vehicles circle an
oval track at dangerous speeds for hours on end, in the hope that they will at
some time collide, or descending, and occasionally falling down on, snowy
mountainsides with their feet buckled to wooden planks, while doing their best
to avoid trees and boulders. It is not ‘in their blood’, or ‘in their DNA’.
Social
workers are encouraged (and sometimes required) to seek foster-parents for
adoption cases that match the subject’s ‘ethnicity’, so as to provide an
appropriate cultural background for them, such as a ‘native American’ way of
life. Wistful and new-agey adults, perhaps suffering from some disappointment
in career or life, sometimes seek out the birthplace of a grandparent, in the
belief that the exposure may reveal some vital part of their ‘identity’. All
absolute nonsense, of course.
For
instance, I might claim that cricket is ‘in my DNA’, but I would not be able to
tell you in what epoch that genetic mutation occurred, or why the gene has
atrophied in our rascally son, James, who was brought to these shores as a ten
month-old, and has since refused to show any interest whatsoever in the great
game. On the other hand, did the young Andrew Strauss dream, on the banks of
the blue Danube, of opening the batting for England? Did Michael Kasprowicz
learn to bowl outswingers in the shadow of the Tatra Mountains?
Yet
this practice of pigeon-holing and stereotyping leads to deeper problems. We now
have to deal with the newly discovered injustice of ‘cultural appropriation’. I
read the other day that student union officials at the University of East
Anglia had banned the distribution of sombreros to students, as stallholders
were forbidden from handing out ‘discriminatory or stereotypical imagery’.
Well, I can understand why Ku Klux Klan hoods, and Nazi regalia, would
necessarily be regarded as offensive, but sunhats? Were sombreros
introduced by the Spanish on reluctant Aztecan populations, and are they thus a
symbol of Spanish imperialism? Who is actually at risk here? What about solar
topis? Would they be banned, too?
We
mustn’t stop there, of course. Is the fact that Chicken Tikka Masala is now
viewed by some as a national British dish an insult to the subcontinent of
India, or a marvellous statement of homage to its wonderful cuisine? Should
South Koreans be playing golf, which, as we know, is an ethnic pastime of the
Scots? Should non-Maori members of the New Zealand rugby team be dancing the
haka? English bands playing rhythm ‘n’ blues? Should Irving Berlin have written
‘White Christmas’?
The
blight has even started to affect the world of imaginative fiction. I recently read,
in the Times Literary Supplement, in an article on John Updike, the
following: “Is self-absorbed
fiction always narcissistic, or only if it’s written by a straight white male?
What if it’s autofiction, does that make it ok? What are the alternatives? If a
writer ventures outside their own socio-cultural sphere, is that praiseworthy
empathy or problematic cultural appropriation? Is Karl Ove Knausgaard more
self-absorbed than Rachel Cusk? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
(‘Autofiction’ was a new one on me, but it apparently means that you can invent
things while pretending to write a memoir, and get away with it. Since most autobiographies
I have read are a pack of lies planned to glorify the accomplishments of the
writer, and paper over all those embarrassing unpleasantnesses, I doubt whether
we need a new term here. Reminiscences handed down in old age should more
accurately be called ‘oublioirs’.)
The
writer, Claire Lowdon, almost nails it, but falls into a pit of her own making.
‘Socio-cultural sphere’? What is that supposed to mean? Is that a category anointed
by some policepersons from a Literary Council, like the Soviet Glavlit, or
is it a classification, like ‘Pacific Islander’, that the author can provide
him- or her-self, as with ‘gay Latina’? Should Tolstoy’s maleness, and his
‘socio-cultural sphere’, have prevented him from imagining the torments of Anna
Karenina, or portraying the peasant Karatayev as a source of wisdom? The
defenders of culture against ‘misappropriation’ are hoist with the petard of
their own stereotypes. (And please don’t ask me who Karl Ove Knausgaard and
Rachel Cusk are. Just because I know who John Updike, James Thurber and Rube
Goldberg are, but fall short with these two, does not automatically make me nekulturny,
and totally un-cool.)
The
whole point of this piece is to emphasise the strengths and importance of
pluralism, and diminish the notion of multiculturalism. As I so urbanely wrote
in Chapter 10 of Misdefending the Realm: “In a pluralist society,
opinion is fragmented – for example, in the media, in political parties, in
churches (or temples or mosques), and between the legislative and the executive
arms of government. The individual rights of citizens and their consciences are
considered paramount, and all citizens are considered equal under the law. The
ethnic, cultural, religious or philosophical allegiances that they may hold are
considered private affairs – unless they are deployed to subvert the freedoms
that a liberal society offers them. A pluralist democracy values very highly
the rights of the individual (rather than of a sociologically-defined group),
and preserves a clear line between the private life and the public sphere.”
Thus,
while tracing some allegiance to the cultures of both the UK and the USA, I do
not have to admit to interest in any of their characteristic practices (opera,
horse-racing, NASCAR, American football, Game of Thrones, etc. etc.) but
can just quietly go about my business following my legal pursuits, and rejoice
in the variety and richness of it all.
It
was thus refreshing, however, to find elsewhere, in the same issue of the TLS,
the following statement – about cricket. An Indian politician, Shashi
Tharoor, wrote: “And yet, this
match revealed once again that cricket can serve as a reminder of all that
Indians and Pakistanis have in common – language, cuisine, music, clothes,
tastes in entertainment, and most markets of culture, including sporting
passions. Cricket underscores the common cultural mosaic that brings us
together – one that transcends geopolitical differences. This cultural
foundation both predates and precedes our political antipathy. It is what
connects our diasporas and why they find each other’s company comforting in
strange lands when they first emigrate – visibly so in the UK. Cricket confirms
that there is more that unites us than divides us.”
Well, up to a point, Lord Ram. That claim might be a slight exaggeration and simplification, avoiding those tetchy issues about Hindu-based nationalism, but no matter. Cricket is a sport that was enthusiastically picked up – not appropriated – in places all around the world. I cannot be the only fan who was delighted with Afghanistan’s appearance in the recent World Cup, and so desperately wanted the team to win at least one game. I have so many good memories of playing cricket against teams from all backgrounds (the Free Foresters, the Brixton West Indians, even the Old Alleynians), never questioning which ‘socio-cultural sphere’ they came from (okay, occasionally, as those readers familiar with my Richie Benaud experience will attest), but simply sharing in the lore and traditions of cricket with those who love the game, the game in which, as A. G. McDonnell reminded us in England Their England, the squire and the blacksmith contested without class warfare getting in the way. Lenin was said to have despaired when he read that policemen and striking miners in Scotland took time off from their feuding to play soccer. He then remarked that revolution would never happen in the UK.
For a while, I considered myself part of that very wholesome tradition. I was looking forward, perhaps, to explaining one day to my grandchildren that I had watched Cowdrey and May at the Oval (‘Oh my Hornby and my Barlow long ago . . .’), and that I could clearly recall an evening in late July 1956 where I overheard a friend of my father’s asking him whether he had heard that ‘Laker took all ten’. But Ashley, and the twins Alexis and Alyssa (one of their maternal great-grandfathers looked just like Ho Chi Minh, but was a very gentle man with no discernible cricket gene in his make-up) would surely give me a quizzical look, as if it were all very boring, and ask me instead to tell them again the story of how I single-handedly tracked down the Surrey Puma . . .
Alyssa, Alexis and Ashley reacting to the story of Jim Laker’s 10-53 at Old Trafford
Uprooted and rootless I thus remain. My cosmopolitan days are largely over, too. Even though I have never set my eyes on Greenland’s icy mountains or India’s coral strand (or Minsk), I was fortunate enough to visit all five continents on my business travels. I may still make the occasional return to the United Kingdom: otherwise my voyages to major metropolitan centres are restricted to visits to Wilmington for appointments with the chiropractor, and cross-country journeys to Los Altos, California to see James and his family.
So
where does that leave me, and the ‘common cultural mosaic that binds us
together’? A civilized culture should acknowledge some common heritage and
shared customs, while allowing for a large amount of differences. Individuals
may have an adversarial relationship in such an environment, but it should be
based on roles that are temporary, not essentials. Shared custom should
prevent the differences becoming destructive. Yet putting too many new stresses
on the social fabric too quickly will cause it to fray. For example, returning
to the UK has often been a strange experience, revealing gradual changes in common
civilities. I recall, a few years ago, walking into the branch of my bank in
South Croydon, where I have held an account since 1965. (The bank manager
famously gave me what I interpreted as a masonic handshake in 1971, when I was
seeking a loan to ease my entry into the ‘property-owning classes’.) The first thing I saw was a sign on the wall
that warned customers something along these lines: “Abuse of the service staff
in this bank will not be tolerated! Offenders will be strictly prosecuted.”
My,
oh my, I thought – does this bank have a problem! What a dreadful first
impression! Did they really resent their customers so much that they had to welcome
them with such a hostile message? Was the emotional well-being of their service
staff that fragile? Did the bank’s executives not realise that customer service
requires a thick skin? And perhaps behind all that lay a deeper problem – that
their customer service, and attentiveness to customers’ needs, were so bad that
customers too often were provoked into ire? Why would they otherwise advertise
that fact to everyone who walked in?
I
can’t see that happening in a bank in the United States, where I am more likely
to receive the well-intentioned but cringe-making farewell of ‘Have a blessed
day!’ when I have completed my transaction. That must be the American
equivalent of the masonic handshake. (No, I don’t do all my bank business via
my cell-phone.) Some edginess and lack of trust appear to have crept in to the
domain of suburban Surrey – and maybe beyond. Brexit must have intensified
those tensions.
Another
example: In North Carolina, when walking along the street, we residents are in
the habit of engaging with strangers as we pass them, with a smile, and a ‘Good
Day!’, or ’How are you doin’?’, just as a measure of reinforcing our common
civility and good humour. When I last tried that, walking around in South
Croydon, where my roots are supposed to be, it did not work out well. I got a
scared look from an astonished local, as if to say: ‘Who’s that weird geezer!
He clearly doesn’t belong here’. And he would be right.
In conclusion: a list. As a retired Anglo-American slightly Aspergerish atheist ex-database administrator, I love lists, as all persons with the above description predictably do. My choice below catalogues fifty cultural figures (including one pair) who have influenced me, or for whom I hold some enthusiasm, a relationship occasionally enhanced by a personal encounter that contained something special. (I should point out, however, that I was brought up in a milieu that stressed the avoidance of showing excessive enthusiasm: ‘Surtout, pas trop de zèle!’. Somehow I survived American business without being ‘passionate’ about anything.) That does not mean that these persons are idols, heroes, icons, or role-models – they simply reflect my enthusiasms and tastes. But they give an idea of how scattered and chaotic any one person’s cultural interests can be in a pluralist society. Think of them as my cosmopolitan roots. Rachel Cusk did not make the list, but she would probably have beaten out J. R. R. Tolkien and Eric Hobsbawm.
