FOREWORD
Historians and aficionados of wartime intelligence operations have known for years that Lisbon was one of World War II’s great centres of espionage, and the reasons for the city’s dubious reputation are clear. Unlike the neutral capitals of Madrid and Berne, Lisbon is not land-locked, and its geographical location made it an international crossroads. Travel to Stockholm from London, at the height of the war, took weeks because the safest route was via Tehran or Vladivostok. And whereas Istanbul may have rivalled Lisbon, and was similarly a significant entrepot, the Portuguese capital was truly the gateway to the Americas from Europe. Accordingly, refugees and escapees, ranging from Balkan royalty to evading prisoners of war, congregated in Lisbon waiting to gain permission to travel to Britain, the United States, South America or the Caribbean, and those privileged enough make the transatlantic flight from Baltimore were obliged to land on the Rio Tejo and switch planes for the final leg of the journey to Bristol. But unless they were considered priority passengers, the required travel permit might take days or weeks to be granted.
While soldiers queued at the British Repatriation Office, and displaced princes bided their time at the Palace Hotel in Estoril, Axis and Allied intelligence personnel rubbed shoulders in the local restaurants and cafes. The German embassy, seething with Abwehr officers working under diplomatic cover for the Kriegsorganisation Lisbon, liaised closely with their Italian, Vichy, Japanese and Hungarian counterparts, operating with the consent of the omniscient PVDE security apparatus, based at the feared organisation’s sinister headquarters on the Rua António Maria Cardoso. Led by Albrecht von Auenrode, alias Ludovico von Karstorf, they trawled the bars of the waterfront, anxious for information about convoys from indiscreet seamen, keen to recruit new agents to send to London. Von Auenrode’s KO managed spies principally on behalf of the Abstelles in Bremen and Hamburg, and had close ties with his counterparts in Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, although much of the Abwehr’s network in Brazil, headed by Albrecht Engels, working under AEG commercial cover, would be closed down by the local DOPS secret police in June 1943. The KO would receive regular visitors from the Reich, including that well-known spy-master Nikolaus Ritter, alias ‘Dr Rantzau’, to hold conferences and attend the occasional rendezvous with his agents. Usually based in Hamburg, Ritter became a familiar figure to his adversaries, and having spent some years living in the United States before the war, he was quite formidable.
British knowledge of von Auenrode’s activities was derived from the many double agents run by MI5 and MI6, physical surveillance, interception of mail addressed to known cover-addresses and, most importantly of all, ISOS, which often disclosed in considerable detail the KO’s current operations from decrypted radio messages exchanged with Berlin and Madrid. Every signal, intercepted by a world-wide chain of ‘Y stations’ was processed by a large MI6 staff based at St Albans, Hertfordshire, where Section V analysts deciphered and translated every text, and then added individual cards to a massive index which covered any operations or personalities mentioned, and allowed cross-referencing with previous telegrams to clarify any ambiguities. Any additional information required was sought through field enquiries conducted by specially-indoctrinated Section V officers posted to MI6 stations overseas. Gradually, as the volume of ISOS grew, Section V acquired the status of a secret service within a secret service, scrutinising the enemy’s most secret messages with experts operating on a geographical basis. Thus Section V’s Iberian sub-section, designated V(d) and headed by Kim Philby and then Tim Milne, consisted of six officers dedicated to monitoring ‘the operations of the intelligence services of unfriendly powers in the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish Morocco, Tangier and the Balearic and Atlantic islands’. Thus, in effect, V(d) became a vast reference library in which enemy personnel, their agents and other suspects were ‘carded’ so that their messages could be placed in their proper context and, should the opportunity arise, they could be detained whenever they came within reach, either during a ship inspection in Trinidad, Gibraltar or Capetown, or a document check in some other jurisdiction under Allied control.
ISOS
was responsible for compromising RICARDO, an interpreter employed by both the British
and American legations who claimed to the KO to enjoy access to accurate
information about future convoys. Such advance intelligence was considered
vital for relaying to the U-boats cruising in waters near the Azores, waiting
to sink Allied shipping carrying crucial material to the Middle and Far
East theatres. Although there were suspicions that RICARDO occasionally
invented some of his reports, he would come to be regarded as a dangerous
source, haemorrhaging Allied secrets until he was eventually identified and
dismissed. Nevertheless, the KO succeeded in penetrating the local Polish,
Czech and Dutch Deuxième Bureau, and
the clandestine conflict was not unequal for the Germans knew how to apply
pressure to those with families still under occupation, and could be utterly
ruthless in extracting cooperation. Of course, coercion is not always the best
motivator, so some reluctant spies took the first opportunity to declare their
predicament to the appropriate Allied authorities. Latterly, as the United
States became a favoured destination for refugees, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation legal attaché, Ivan W. Newpher, would attempt to screen the visa
applicants for suspected enemy agents.
ISOS was also pivotal in clearing up the debacle of Robert Solberg’s ciphers, which were copied by the KO and exploited to considerable advantage. Solberg, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) representative in Lisbon, had a reputation for amateurish behaviour and the occasional indiscretion, but the loss from his study of his confidential codes allowed the Abwehr to read considerable quantities of his communications traffic to OSS headquarters in Washington, D.C. until the leak was belatedly plugged. Fortunately Solborg had not been indoctrinated into ISOS, so that at least was one secret he could not jeopardise, but one of his hare-brained schemes, to steal some German cryptographic equipment, could have had long-lasting repercussions if he had not been stopped in time.
Deployed
against the Abwehr and SD were the British, American, Dutch, Yugoslav, Polish
and Czech intelligence professionals who ran networks that stretched into
occupied France and across the Mediterranean to Vichy-controlled North Africa.
The rivalries provided the perfect environment for opportunists, freelancers,
fabricators and counterfeiters to ply their trade, peddling false material,
informing on colleagues and negotiating defections.
The atmosphere of intrigue began when France fell, with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) convinced the Duke of Windsor, then sheltering in Portugal, might be persuaded into disloyal acts against the country he had ruled so briefly prior to his abdication in December 1936. An operation codenamed WILLI was launched by Walter Schellenburg to prevent the former King Edward VIII from taking up his new role, as governor of the Bahamas, but the attempt failed. This incident, however, set the scene for ensuring that Lisbon would be the focus of numerous plots and schemes and thereafter, as the capital filled with the detritus of war, intelligence professionals from a dozen countries conspired to disadvantage each other, planting false information, recruiting defectors, cultivating sources and developing double agents. Every diplomatic mission was a target, and so were the travellers with valid documents, the businessmen seeking to exploit the war, and the families fleeing persecution. The city attracted small-time hustlers, international tycoons and other displaced persons, all linked by the need to exploit their perilous situation. The result was a fetid atmosphere in which the oil billionaire Nubar Gulbenkian1 took up temporary residence before undertaking a secret mission into France’s unoccupied zone, accompanied by his valet, and a Yugoslav fabricator, Paul Fidrmuc, codenamed OSTRO, invented information to sell to whichever side would pay him. The actor Peter Ustinov’s father, known as Klop, moved mysterious on the fringes of the diplomatic circuit, seeking to find fellow anti-Nazis willing to sell out the Reich, in much the same way that Gestapo deployed its agents to sniff the wind for potential traitors. These were the components in a unique wartime environment rich in plots and counterplots enough to inspire a dozen novelists. Indeed, John Masterman, the wartime chairman of MI5’s XX Committee, would do precisely that, and base his only spy thriller, The Case of the Four Friends2, in Lisbon.
An indication of Lisbon’s importance to British intelligence may be found in the number of different agencies represented there. Apart from the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), operating behind the Passport Control Office in the Rua da Emenda, both MI9 and Special Operations Executive (SOE) maintained permanent offices in the capital. MI9’s Donald Darling ran the escape and evasion service, assisting former German prisoners and airmen downed over Nazi-occupied territory to return home. Most had trekked across the Pyrenees, and some had endured internment in the notorious Spanish Miranda del Ebro prison, as Darling recalled in his 1975 memoirs, Secret Sunday3, but they were determined to rejoin their units. Some, of course, possessed valuable intelligence about the escape lines, up-to-date information about conditions in occupied Europe, and vital details of the enemy’s travel restrictions and security checks. SOE’s man in Lisbon was Jack Beevor, attached to the embassy in the Rua do Sacramento à Lapa, who would later describe his experiences in his 1981 autobiography, SOE Reflections4. His task was to assist SOE personnel on their clandestine missions, and to expedite the repatriation of agents on their way back to London.
Another component of the large British intelligence presence in Lisbon was the naval attaché, in constant independent contact with the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division (NID), and responsible for issuing the Royal Navy’s authorisation, known as ‘Navicerts’ to allow non-belligerent merchantmen to sail without interference at sea from Allied warships. Thus the naval attaché was himself a useful source of information, and enabled the NID to identify those supposedly neutral ships carrying strategic material, including cargos of invaluable Spanish wolfram, to Axis ports.
The MI6 station in Lisbon was one of the organization’s most important, and was headed successively by Austen Walsh, Richman Stopford, Cecil Gledhill, and finally Philip Johns, who would later write his memoirs, Within Two Cloaks5. Of the four, Gledhill was the only non-professional intelligence officer, but having spent many years in Brazil his fluency in the language made up for his relative lack of experience. However, the pressure of work accounted for the uniquely high turnover of station commanders in Lisbon during the war.
The station was vitally important, not least because it was virtually the only one left in Europe, after the collapse of France, to enjoy an almost neutral, relatively benign local environment. In contrast, the Madrid station, many miles from the nearest frontier, was surrounded by a hostile host government and handicapped by an equally unenthusiastic ambassador, Sir Sam Hoare, who feared his diplomatic status would be undermined by some MI6 embarrassment. As a former MI6 officer himself, Hoare knew only too well how some debacle could wreck his policies, and as a former Cabinet minister he had the power to ensure his prejudices were respected. The small Gibraltar station was equally isolated, linked occasionally by dangerous sea and air routes to Britain, but closely monitored and overlooked by enemy installations in Algeciras and Tangier, with the town and dockyard teeming with spies. Operations at the Stockholm station were severely restricted by a large German presence and a suspicious Swedish secret police that early in the war had implicated MI6 in a botched attempt to sabotage exports of iron ore to the Reich. As for Berne, the station existed in almost an Axis vacuum, with no practical channels to the outside world apart from shortwave radio, and certainly no covert assistance from the Bundespolizei. And since Istanbul was subordinate to MI6’s regional headquarters in Cairo, and was too distant to influence events in western Europe, the station became preoccupied with Middle Eastern affairs, leaving Lisbon to carry the burden of being MI6’s frontline confronting their Axis protagonists.
MI6’s
Lisbon staff included Rita Winsor, evacuated in 1940 from the hurriedly
abandoned Geneva station, and Jack Ivens, a fruit merchant with a wealth of
knowledge about conducting business in Iberia. Graham Maingot had worked under
commercial cover in Italy before the Rome station had been closed when
hostilities were declared, and Gene Risso-Gill came from a prominent
Anglo-Portuguese merchant family, Together they reported to a regional
controller in London, Basil Fenwick, who had been a Shell Oil executive, and
later to Dick Brooman-White who would be elected after the war to the House of
Commons. In addition, MI6’s Section V had Charles de Salis and then Ralph
Jarvis mount counter-intelligence operations based on information derived from
intercepted enemy signals codenamed ISOS. This permanent establishment strength
was enhanced occasionally by visiting ‘firemen’, such as MI5’s Ian Wilson, and
Frank Foley, the former MI6 station commander in prewar Berlin6, who
flew over to handle the crisis created by ARTIST.
MI6’s supervision of ARTIST was particularly delicate because he was a serving Abwehr officer, Johannes Jebsen, the scion of a famous shipping family from Hamburg. He had made contact with MI6 through Dusko Popov, codenamed TRICYLE7, who had indiscreetly disclosed his role as a double agent to his old friend whom he had known since they had been students at Heidelberg University before the war. Fortunately Jebsen had proved trustworthy, but MI6 calculated that if he defected the Abwehr would inevitably conclude that Popov had been contaminated. On the other hand, if he was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, he might compromise Popov, and perhaps others too, for he was also connected to another Abwehr defector, the journalist Hans Ruser. A futher reason for extreme caution was MI6’s fear that if he defected, Jebsen might inadvertently blow ALARIC, arguably the most important Abwehr agent of all.
Originally recruited by the Abwehr in Madrid, ALARIC was Juan Pujol8, a Spanish anti-Fascist who whose first offer to help the Allies had been rejected by the British embassy. Undeterred, Pujol had approached the Germans who had sent him to Lisbon in the mistaken belief that he had a visa to travel to Britain. In reality, Pujol had settled in Cascais to fabricate reports purporting to come from London, and eventually, after a plea from the U.S. naval attaché. Edward Rousseau, MI6’s Gene Risso-Gill had made contact with him and arranged his passage to England where, renamed GARBO by MI5, he built a large Abwehr network codenamed ARABEL. By 1944 the ARABEL spy-ring had developed into twenty-two sub-sources, submitting regular reports from across the country, and was playing a key role in the FORTITUDE9 deception campaign for D-Day. Any threat to GARBO placed in jeopardy the lives of 150,000 troops who to storm ashore in Normandy on 6 June 1944, so the stakes could not have been higher.
Indeed, GARBO was but one British-run double agent with strong Lisbon connections, and although none knew about the others, several were either located permanently in Portugal or transited through the city on their assignments. Thus the German embassy became a regular venue in which Axis spies received their final briefings before they departed for Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, the Belgian Congo, Lourenço Marques, Portuguese Guinea in West Africa, or North America, while MI6 preferred safe-houses in which to conduct their business with agents working for both sides. In addition, there were the many ‘letter-boxes’ used for agents communicating by post to ostensibly innocent addresses, which simply forwarded the mail, containing secret writing or microdots, to the intended recipient. By the end of the war MI5 had logged 135 cover-addresses used by such diverse spies as SPRINGBOK in South Africa and the mysterious FUNDUS, a German spy whose true identity was never fully determined.
As well as a major European port offering opportunities for transatlantic travel, Lisbon would also be the clandestine gateway to Gibraltar, often the most direct route to Britain, especially for defectors and others unable to legitimately acquire a Portuguese exit visa. Among those who were secretly exfiltrated to the British colony were the legendary double agent Juan Pujol, then codenamed BOVRIL by MI6, the Abwehr defector Hans Ruser who negotiated his exfiltration in March 1942, and Otto John, one of the 20th July plotters impacted in the attempt on Hitler’s life.
While the Allied agencies were always conscious that the PVDE took a close interest in their activities, and made little effort to conceal an observation post bristling with cameras directly overlooking the British Passport Control Office, their Axis opponents acted with impunity. ARTIST would be abducted and bundled into a car trunk for the journey back to Paris when the Gestapo suspected him of embezzlement, and Petra Vermehren, posing as a journalist, would also disappear from her Lisbon apartment when her son and daughter in law, also Abwehr officers, would defect in Istanbul in December 1943.
The fact that British intelligence maintained such a large staff in Lisbon is not to suggest that all their operations were successful. Indeed, the attempt in January 1942 to burgle the offices of a senior Abwehr officer, Kuno Weltzein, who operated under commercial cover, is just such an example. The break-in proved to be a trap and MI6 was heavily implicated in the fiasco which left the embarrassed burglars in the hands of the PVDE. On another occasion the wily Weltzein arranged for several cards from his agent index to reach the British who wasted weeks on fruitless investigations into suspects who turned out to be entirely innocent. Weltzein was but one of several members of the local German business community who had been co-opted by Abwehr and the SD to transform their commercial contacts into useful sources of intelligence. Another was Hans Bendixen, a well-known figure who had been well established before the outbreak of war, and thereafter had engaged in espionage for Berlin. Through their local links it was easy for the Abwehr to subvert local bankers, including the Banco Espírito Santo, into providing channels to support German spies on their secret missions.
Hano Grimm was another Abwehr co-opted responsible for collecting Allied shipping information from the crews of British ships through a large network, and also engaged in the same work was Cândido Raposo, a Portuguese with access to the Marconi radio station at Madeira. Similarly, Gastão de Freitas, the wireless operator on the Gil Eannes who, having been compromised by ISOS, was arrested and eventually admitted to having taken notes of the sea defenses at St John, Newfoundland.
The scale of Nazi espionage conducted in Lisbon was unequalled by any other neutral capital, although Madrid probably came a close second. Numerous spies with Portuguese connections were caught in London, including Ernesto Simões, who travelled to England to work at the Percival Aircraft factory in Luton in November 1943. Under continuous surveillance from the moment he landed at Filton, Simões had been betrayed by ISOS and was arrested before he could do any harm. After a lengthy interrogation, he confessed his true role for the Abwehr and revealed his cover-address in Lisbon where he had been instructed to send messages in secret writing. The Abwehr also recruited a journalist, Manoel Dos Santos, who was taken off his ship in Freetown as he tried to return to Portugal from Mocambique. Once again, ISOS had shown him to be an important Nazi spy and Sierra Leone, like Trinidad, was a British intelligence outpost where such individuals could be taken into custody and then escorted to London for intensive interrogation at Camp 020.10
Another,
more serious case was that of a Portuguese diplomat, Rogério de Menezes, who
was sentenced to death. Having arrived in London in July 1942 to work at the
Portuguese legation de Menezes began writing letters to his sister in Lisbon,
enclosing another note using secret ink addressed to a man named Mendez. His
mail had been included in the Portuguese diplomatic bag, which was
surreptitiously opened and examined by MI6 personnel in a highly secret
operation codenamed TRIPLEX. His mission for the SD had been betrayed by an
ISOS intercept even before he had landed, and he was watched inside the
legation by an MI5 agent, and outside by MI5 surveillance teams. According to
Jack Bingham, an MI5 officer who befriended him, he seemed particularly interested
in anti-aircraft defenses. In February 1943 the evidence was presented to
Ambassador Monteiro who was reminded that three other Portuguese, Gastão de
Freitas, Maria dos Santos and Ernesto Simões, had been caught spying and, after
he had consulted Lisbon, agreed to withdraw de Menezes’ immunity. When
arrested, Menezes claimed that he had spied under duress because he had
relatives in Germany who were under threat. In his confession he identified
Mendez as a man named Marcello who worked for an Italian intelligence officer
named Umerte. He claimed to have been introduced to them by a Portuguese
Airforce officer, Colonel Miranda, and also mentioned a cipher clerk named
Ramos in the Portuguese foreign ministry. Nevertheless he was convicted under
the Treachery Act in April 1943, sentenced to death, and reprieved after a plea
from his ambassador. He was imprisoned at Dartmoor and, on the instructions of
the Lord Chief Justice, no public statement was made concerning the trial or
the reprieve.
Another, less fortunate spy was Duncan Scott-Ford who had been dismissed from the Royal Navy in Alexandria before the war for dishonesty, and was questioned at Salford Docks in August 1942 about a merchant seaman identified in ISOS with the codename RUTHERFORD. Two months earlier Scott-Ford had reported having been approached in Lisbon by a German who was interested in information, but Scott-Ford insisted that he had turned the offer down. Under interrogation at MI5’s Camp 020 Scott-Ford admitted that he had passed details of convoys to the Germans, and had taken notes concerning HMS Malaya to pass on to them at the next opportunity. Unrepentant, Scott-Ford was tried at the Old Bailey in October 1942 and hanged at Wandsworth prison in November.
Another example of German espionage emanating from Portugal was Joseph Laureyssens, a Belgian seaman who in April 1941 was discovered to be corresponding to a known ‘letter-box’ in Lisbon. Under interrogation he admitted putting other seamen in contact with a woman who habitually exchanged her favours for allied shipping information, and he was detained for the remainder of the war, only because the evidence against him was accidentally mislaid. Otherwise he too would have been sent to the gallows.
The extent to which Lisbon dominated the thoughts of senior British intelligence personnel can be seen from the daily journal dictated each evening of the war by MI5’s Director of Counter-Espionage, which incidentally was never intended for publication, and the contents were read only by selected MI5 officers as a training aid to give an idea of how the Security Service had risen to the challenge of Axis intelligence operations. Taken down his secretary Margot Huggins after work, and then typed onto small, loose-leaf pages which were inserted into ring binders, The Guy Liddell Diaries11 act as a war diary for an agency which kept meticulous personal and subject files on suspect spies, subversives and organisations. Throughout the Cold War they were considered so sensitive that they were codenamed WALLFLOWER and retained in the Director-General’s personal safe, to be shared with, among others, Peter Wright who would later refer to the document in his notorious memoirs SpyCatcher.12
Until
Wright’s disclosures, the existence of the Diaries was nothing more than
an unsubstantiated rumour which suggested that Liddell had buried all MI5’s
skeletons in the same grave, and the document was too explosive ever to be
disinterred.
If
one of the motives for allowing greater freedom to study Bletchley Park’s
original intercepts had been a desire quench a thirst for greater knowledge
about Britain’s secret history, it was unsuccessful, for in the early 1980s
numerous authors, biographers and historians turned their attention to a field
of research hitherto neglected, mainly because of the paucity of official
records available to public scrutiny. The startling announcement by Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher in November 1979 that Professor Sir Anthony Blunt
had been a life-long Soviet mole who had accepted an immunity from prosecution
in April 1964 prompted more research into an area that hitherto had been
avoided and actively discouraged. Blunt, of course, had served in the Security
Service from June 1940 until September 1945, and had confessed to having
haemorrhaged to the NKVD every secret that had passed his desk. This news came
as a devastating blow to his friends, his family, his surviving wartime
colleagues and to an intelligence establishment that had attempted to salvage a
reputation tarnished by the defections in May 1951 of Guy Burgess and Donald
Maclean.
Although Guy Liddell himself was not alive to endure the pain of Blunt’s public exposure, having died unnoticed in 1958, he was to become the focus of intense speculation and criticism. He had joined Mi5 from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch in 1931, and in 1940 had been appointed director of B Division, the counter-espionage branch. After the war he would be promoted to Deputy Director-General, the post he held when he switched in 1953 to head the Atomic Energy Authority’s security department.
Liddell had known Guy Burgess, who had worked secretly for MI5 in 1940 running, among several other agents in his homosexual coterie, Eric Kessler, the Swiss journalist and diplomat codenamed ORANGE. Naturally Burgess’s covert role for the Security Service had been hushed up at the time of his disappearance, when he had been described as a mere junior diplomat, and the official White Paper on the defection had not even hinted at his wartime links with MI6’s Section D and MI5. Liddell’s friendship with Burgess had been embarrassment enough, but he had actually employed Anthony Blunt as his personal assistant, and had entrusted him to conduct the most sensitive inquiries on his behalf. For example, when Blunt first joined Liddell’s personal staff he was assigned the task of reviewing the performance of Harry Hunter’s embryonic and ineffective Watcher Service, thus enabling him to give his Soviet contacts an authoritative assurance that their rezidentura in London had nothing to fear from MI5 surveillance which was fully occupied in keeping suspected Fifth Columnists under observation. Checks in MI5’s registry showed that Blunt had also completed a lengthy study of TRIPLEX13, the highly secret operation in which the diplomatic bags of target neutral embassies were routinely diverted and opened. Worst of all, Blunt had been authorized by Liddell to identify, and report on, MI5’s entire stable of agents inside foreign embassies in London. Naturally, Blunt’s conclusions were devoured in Moscow almost as quickly as they were read in St James’s Street.
The discomfort of Liddell’s many friends and admirers turned to anger when his loyalties were questioned. The first to reinterpret some of Liddell’s greatest successes as dubious triumphs was Richard Deacon, the author of The Greatest Treason published in 198914 in which he suggested that although the Woolwich Arsenal case had resulted in the conviction of Percy Glading and two other members of his network, the big fish had been allowed to escape. There was some truth to this allegation, in that the Soviet illegals who had controlled the spy-ting had evaded MI5 surveillance and avoided both arrest and identification. Deacon suggested this was a consequence of treason at a high level inside MI5, and not sheer ill-fortune, and he roundly denounced Liddell as ‘the fifth man’.
As Anthony Blunt had not joined MI5 until June 1940, more than two and a half years after Glading’s arrest, Deacon’s candidate for the traitor had been Liddell. The allegation had stirred Dick White to protest his mentor’s innocence, but the scent had been laid eight years earlier by David Mure in Master of Deception15 in which he had drawn a scenario with Liddell masterminding one intelligence failure after another, a veritable genius of duplicity helping other moles to burrow deep into the British establishment. Mure’s unsubstantiated charges were all the more grave because although Deacon, the pen-name of Donald McCormick, a former foreign editor of The Sunday Times, and a wartime naval officer, had not served in intelligence, Mure had been based in Cairo during World War II and had been engaged in deception operations across the Middle East. While Deacon’s book could be dismissed as journalistic speculation, Mure knew what he was talking about and had been involved with CHEESE, the celebrated double agent. Mure’s theory was enhanced by the Cambridge historian John Costello who, in his impressive biography of Blunt, Mask of Deception16, named Liddell as a Soviet spy, but only on the basis that there was no other rational explanation for Blunt’s prolonged treachery. Once again, the allegation caused dismay among Liddell’s former colleagues, especially when Peter Wright revealed that several molehunts had been conducted in the 1960s on the assumption that the Security Service had suffered high-level penetration. Prompted by Mrs Thatcher’s inaccurate statement to the Commons in November 1979, drafted for her by MI5, that all the incidents of penetration could be attributed to Anthony Blunt, Wright revealed to his co-author Chapman Pincher in Their Trade is Treachery17 that the Deputy D-G, Graham Mitchell, had been a suspected mole before his retirement in September 1963 and, most explosively, that the Director-General himself, Sir Roger Hollis, had also been investigated as a possible spy. Wright was to go into further detail in SpyCatcher, co-authored with the television producer Paul Greengrass, in which he remarked that anybody who read the Liddell Diaries could not remotely suspect him of having betrayed his country.
We can now say, based on what has been released from the Soviet archives, and evidence from the KGB defectors Oleg Gordievsky18 and Vasili Mitrokhin19, that there is nothing to support the assertion that Guy Liddell did anything other than serve the Crown faithfully, and his Diaries show a humanity and commitment to democratic ideals which might seem an anathema to most secret policemen.
So, on the assumption that Liddell was always loyal to his country, what is the true content in which his Diaries should be read? Sir Harry Hinsley’s magisterial oeuvre20 was followed by an extraordinary development which occurred as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The KGB archive, opened to a group of western historians, were found to include a vast collection of secret documents removed from MI5’s registry during the war by Anthony Blunt. Among the papers was an early draft of Jack Curry’s internal history of MI5, written in 194521 covering the period from 1909, and when this was declassified in Moscow, the Director-General, Dr Stephen Lander, himself a Cambridge-educated historian, approved the release of the final version to the Public Record Office at Kew. Curry’s history was to be published, but it had been redacted and gave a very partial view of MI5’s performance, skating over the difficulties experienced by Liddell, who was scarcely mentioned. Also released was Colonel Robin (‘Tin-Eye’) Stephens’ postwar account of Camp 020, MI5’s secret interrogation centre at Ham Common. Stephens had been the camp’s controversial commandant and, as might be expected, his views were colourful and robust. However, although the author gave individual pen-portraits of some of the inmates, he was unaware of the bigger counter-intelligence scene so his section’s history gave a less than comprehensive picture, and of course omitted any references to Liddell.
So what makes the Liddell Diaries so important? Firstly, there is the information that can be found nowhere else. When referring to ‘special material’ he inadvertently reveals the countries, including France, Eire, Persia, Finland, Sweden and the Soviet Union, whose confidential communications were the subject of regular interception and decryption. Hinsley exercised considerable, understandable discretion over diplomatic targets, and doubtless was under an obligation to avoid identifying the countries monitored regularly and successfully. Yet Liddell’s comments prove the communications of certain embassies were read on a regular basis and circulated to senior intelligence officers.
As
well as describing investigations conducted by MI5 unmentoned elsewhere,
Liddell also gave an insider’s account of the tensions that existed between the
government, Whitehall and other agencies. Whereas Liddell’s Director, Jasper
Harker, evidently worked well with the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home
Office, Sir Alexander Maxwell, he found the creation of the Home Defence
Security Executive in June 1940 as a major irritant. The Security Executive was
established because of what Churchill perceived as chaos in MI5’s management
when he dismissed the Director-General, Sir Vernon Kell in June 1940. The exact
constitutional role of the Security Executive was never fully established and
Liddell certainly resented the interference of (Sir) William Charles Crocker,
an influential City solicitor who had little idea of MI5’s work and
disastrously transferred a group of Scotland Yard detectives into B Division,
much to the irritation of Special Branch. Crocker had been imposed on MI5 to
shake up the organization, but his activities, combined with the interference
of another outsider, Malcolm Frost from the BBC, was to cause lasting
resentment within the Security Service.
Liddell makes no attempt to conceal the internal rivalries and friction that at times threatened to paralyse the entire organisation. Miss Paton-Smith’s all-important Registry seethed with discontent and the imposition of a Wireless Branch to supervise illicit communication with the enemy proved a short-lived and wasteful experiment in duplication and bureaucratic ineptitude. The arrival of Reg Horrocks, a management expert, and his assistant, Mr Potter, to advise on improvements, did little to alleviate the tension.
The Guy Liddell Diaries are of enormous significance for two reasons. Firstly, very few people were in a position to take a broad over-view of the conduct of the war from a vantage-point that included access to all the most secret information available. Churchill, of course, saw plenty of ULTRA decrypts and enjoyed poring over the original Enigma intercepts that the MI6 Chief, Stewart Menzies, selected for his inspection each morning, but few other members of his War Cabinet were privy to the source of his sometimes eerily prescient knowledge of the enemy’s intentions. None of the other published war memoirs, including those of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke22, referred to golden eggs laid at Bletchley, so on the basis of a global perspective, the Liddell Diaries are important historical documents. The second reason, already mentioned, is the paucity of material available from inside the Security Service. Whereas three of the wartime double agents wrote about their adventures, being Lilly Sergueiev23 (codenamed TREASURE), John Moe24 (MUTT), Dusko Popov25 (TRICYCLE) and Eddie Chapman26 (ZIGZAG), none of their case officers broke their silence. The lacuna is all the more remarkable given the number of authors who worked in the Security Service. Max Knight 27, John Bingham28, William Younger29, Gerald Glover30, Kenneth Younger31 and Derek Tangye32 were all to write books, and although some of them published spy novels, none gave non-fiction accounts of the cases they had run, or even disclosed the true nature of their employment. The single exception was Joan Miller, one of Max Knight’s secretaries who was used to penetrate a group of suspected Fifth Columnists in 1940, and later gave a brief version of her experiences in One Girl’s War33, an innocuous memoir eventually published in Ireland after legal injunctions prevented it from being released in England.
In short, there has never been any authoritative insider’s account of what it was like to work in the wartime Security Service, nor any candid commentary on the counter-intelligence conflict fought by MI5 against both the Axis and the Soviets. So what do the Diaries, so secret for sixty years, tell us? To summarise the impact of the Diaries one can divide the material into personalities and operations. In terms of MI5 activities, the Diaries reveal the clandestine roles played by MI5 personnel, their agents in England, and disclose the activities of dozens of individuals hitherto unknown. Liddell was an intensely social counter-intelligence professional and relied upon both his family and social contacts. He employed his two brothers, David and Cecil, and lent heavily on cousins and other contacts, including the banker Sir Edward Reid who advised MI5 on financial espionage, and Tommy Lascelles, King George’s private secretary. Eminently well-connected, Liddell drew on his many connections to develop an impressive private network that transcended class strata to reach from Buckingham Palace to whorehouses in Soho. Add onto this matrix the complexities of handling the Home Office lawyers, inter-agency rivalry, diplomatic sensibilities and the lives of agents risking their lives in enemy territory and you begin to glimpse the burden under which Liddell lived, but still found time to compose humorous rhymes about colleagues, and spend an evening gossiping with friends in the Travellers Club in Pall Mall.
The
Diaries are full of extraordinary gems, and among them are some very
entertaining incidents. In September 1939 Wolfgang zu Putlitz, MI5’s top
double-agent inside the German Embassy in The Hague, who had defected to
London, was spotted at a cinema by a member of the public, mistaken for a Nazi
and arrested by police. A month later the Government Code & Cypher School
refused entry to Britain for a group of nine Polish cryptographers claiming to
have broken the Enigma code. The Poles were forced to remain in France and the
Enigma remained unbroken for another year before it was finally cracked with
the help of the same men. A British army general proposed to destroy the German
economy by distributing counterfeit currency. Princess
Stephanie von Hohenlöhe, a close friend of Hitler, and a paid advisor to the Daily
Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere, was prevented from leaving Britain to join
her Nazi lover in the United States.
In January 1940 MI5 negotiated directly with Sir
Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. In March Lord Rothschild, a
prominent Jewish aristocrat soon to join MI5 as an expert on sabotage,
advocated the extermination of the entire German race. Among the other
vignettes is the advice Churchill gave the French in May 1940 on how to halt
enemy tanks: “shoot the drivers when they climb out to relieve themselves”.
Liddell’s observations about Churchill are remarkable. In May 1940, in a
controversial meeting with the Labour opposition leader Clement Attlee, Liddell
revealed that the Churchill government had ignored MI5’s hard-line advice on
alien internment policy. Four months later Churchill jeopardized MI5’s
relationships with German double agents by demanding that all Nazi spies must
be shot.
Liddell’s
diary entries include plenty of indiscreet gossip, such as his tale in August
1940 of a conversation between the aircraft production minister Lord
Beaverbrook and Lord Rothschild, who fell out over the use of Jewish firms for
aircraft production contracts. Finally, and exasperated by his fellow peer’s
intransigence, Beaverbrook accused the Jewish Rothschild of anti-Semitism.
In September 1940, at the height of worries over an
imminent German invasion, Irish President Eamon de Valera, considered
abandoning Eire’s neutrality to join the Allies and a trusted journalist was
despatched to Dublin to establish his true intentions. Later, in January 1941,
MI5 proposed Operation BLUE BOOT, a plan to fool Germany into believing that
British troops paint their left boots blue in order to identify each other. It
was hoped that Germany would swallow the story and that any invading troops who
disguise themselves in British uniforms would give themselves away by their
blue boots!
Among the more bizarre episodes is the panic as a British Expeditionary Force officer, Colonel Gribble, who had served in France in 1940, published The Diary of a Staff Officer.34 His book, analyzing the French collapse, unwittingly reveals secret British interception of Luftwaffe communications. MI5 scrambled to buy and destroy every copy released. In another incident, in the summer of 1941, a battalion of Polish soldiers in Scotland persuaded a British army officer, Alfgar Hesketh-Pritchard, to help them assassinate Rudolf Hess before he can complete his mission to negotiate a separate peace with the Allied. The Poles believed they were about to be betrayed so they planned to kill the deputy Fuhrer. The attempt was foiled at the last moment by MI5 as Hesketh-Pritchard led his troops onto a train, heading for Hess’s secret prison in Aldershot.
Because the Diaries vary from the trivial to
descriptions of momentous events, the author’s essential humanity emerges very
clearly. One moment he is inserting an extract from a Joint Intelligence
Committee assessment of progress on the Russian Front, and the next he is
retailing an amusing anecdote based on a telephone conversation intercepted
between the Turkish ambassador in London and his English mistress.
In terms of entirely new information disclosed by the
Diaries, we learn about hitherto unknown defectors, such COLOMBINE and
HARLEQUIN, and who would have imagined that the British embassy in Ankara not
just been penetrated by famous SD spy, codenamed CICERO, but the Germans also
had the ambassador’s chauffeur on their payroll. These are the tales that were
hushed up for decades. For those seeking contemporary lessons, it is worth
noting that my September 1944 plans for the Allied occupation of the Third
Reich were well-advanced, and that the Control Commission for Germany had
already earmarked property and personnel for the task nine months before the
final Nazi surrender.
From
a counter-intelligence perspective, the Liddell Diaries represent the
most comprehensive insight into Allied operations since the publication of
Masterman’s Double Cross System in 1972. Although that detailed account
revealed the scope of the double agent operations conducted by MI5, and was in
part complimented by the almost simultaneous publication of Ladislas Farago’s Game
of the Foxes35, it was hard to put the case histories in their
proper context because Masterman had deliberately limited himself to the work
of the B1(a) German counter-espionage section, and had excluded parallel
networks run abroad by MI6. He had also been obliged, at Whitehall’s
insistence, that references in the original manuscript to ULTRA should be
omitted. In Farago’s case, he had been dependent not on Allied sources, but on
captured Abwehr records which had been compiled when Allied manipulation of
what had been termed “special means” channels had been at its height.
Accordingly, Liddell’s version encompasses both the impact of rival MI6
activities in neutral countries, the vital role of signals intelligence to
verify the standing in the enemy’s eyes of particular agents, and the
importance of the interrogators at Camp 020. Uniquely, benefiting from his
over-view, Liddell weaves all these disparate strands together to provide a
perspective in which all the various branches of counter-intelligence were
deployed against the Axis. Many of these dimensions are available elsewhere
separately, but only the Diaries
bring them all together so the links between a Contraband Control search of a
merchantman in Trinidad, an Imperial Censorship case in Bermuda, an enemy
wireless intercept and an accidental indiscretion in a Lisbon bar can be
established as facets of the same investigation.
NIGEL WEST
Historian
Notes
1 Nubar Gulbenkian, Pantelaria
(London: Hutchinson, 1965)
2 J,C, Masterman, The
Double Cross System of the War of 1939-45 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1974); The Case of the Four Friends (Oxford University Press,
1954)
3 Donald Darling, Secret
Sunday (London: William Kimber, 1975)
4 Jack Beevor, SOE
Reflections (London: Bodley Head, 1982)
5 Philip Johns, Within
Two Cloaks (London: William Kimber, 1979)
6 Michael Smith, Foley
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999)
7 Dusko Popov, SpyCounterSpy
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975)
8 Juan Pujol, GARBO:
The Greatest Double Agent of World War II (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1985)
9 Roger Hesketh, Operation
FORTITUDE (London: St Ermin’s Press, 1998)
10 Camp 020: MI5 and the
Nazi Spies by Robin Stephens (London: Public Record Office, 2000)
11 The Guy Liddell Diaries
Vol. I, 1939 –42; Vol. II, 1942-45 (London: Routledge, 2005)
12 Spycatcher by Peter Wright (New York:
Viking 1986).
13 TRIPLEX
(London: Yale University Press, 2008)
14 The Greatest Treason
by Richard Deacon (London: Century Hutchinson, 1989)
15 Master
of Deception by David Mure (London: William Kimber, 1980)
16 Mask
of Deception by John Costello (London: Collins, 1989)
17 Their Trade is Treachery
by Chapman Pincher (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1981)
18 Inside the KGB by
Oleg Gordievsky and Christopher Andrew (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990)
19 The Mitrokhin Archive
by Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew (New York: Basic Books, 1999)
20 British Intelligence in World War II by Harry Hinsley (London:HMSO, 1979)
21 The British Security
Service 1908-45: The Official History by Jack Curry (Public Record Office,
1999)
22 War Diaries 1939-45
by Sir Alan Brooke (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001)
23 Secret Service Rendered
by Lily Sergueiev (London: William Kimber, 1966)
24 John
Moe: Double Agent by Jan Moe (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1986)
25 SpyCounterspy by
Dusko Popov (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974)
26 The Real Eddie Chapman
Story by Eddie Chapman (London: Library 33, 1966)
27 Crime
Cargo by Max Knight (London: Phillip Allan, 1934)
28 The Double Agent by John Bingham
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1966)
29 The Skin Trap by
William Younger (London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1957)
30 115
Park Street by Gerald Glover (London: Privately, 1982)
31 Changing Perspectives in
British Foreign Policy by Kenneth Younger (Oxford University Press, 1984)
32 The Way to Minack by
Derek Tangye (London: Michael Joseph, 1978)
33 One
Girl’s War by Joan Miller (Eire: Brandon Books, 1986)
34 A Staff Officer’s Diary by Philip
Gribble (London: Hutchinson, 1940)
35 The
Game of the Foxes by Ladislas Farago (New York: McKay, 1972)
