My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (21 page)

In preparation for my overseas tour of duty, I was attached to the training section of one of the officers’ courses. It was only the second or third course to be arranged under the aegis of the new Director of Training and Development, our old friend John Munn, and the syllabus has been drastically modified since. The training staff consisted in the main of officers drawn from SOE, and their tuition was conditioned by their experience of SOE in wartime. The course was of considerable interest, although I derived little immediate benefit from it. The conditions of peacetime espionage in Istanbul were far removed from the hazards of wartime work for SOE in Occupied Europe. I had personally drafted most of the lectures on the Soviet intelligence services, and was sometimes in the
embarrassing position of having to prompt the instructor from the floor of the lecture hall. It was frustrating to have to eliminate from my drafts all knowledge based on personal experience. As I had to spend half my time keeping an eye on R5, I missed the various tests and examinations to which the other students were subjected. That was perhaps fortunate. It would have been awkward if an officer of my seniority had regularly come bottom of the class.

The training course and the hand-over to Roberts were completed in January 1947, and at the end of the month I found myself at the Airways Terminal drinking what passed for coffee at a savage hour of the morning. There I stuck, off and on, for ten days. Snow and bitter cold gripped the country; the weather and mechanical trouble caused delay after delay. But I could call myself lucky. It was the period of the famous Dakota crashes, when every paper, it seemed, brought news of a fresh disaster. For several mornings, I shared the vigil with a group of nuns bound for Bulawayo. Their departure was finally announced one perishing morning—and perish they did, every one of them. I was a happy man when I felt the warm breath of the desert and Cairo airport under my feet.

Since joining the service over six years earlier, I had taken perhaps ten days’ leave. With the pressure of work momentarily lessened, I decided to fly down, en route for Istanbul, to visit my father in Saudi Arabia. He met me in Jidda and took me briefly to Riyadh and Al Kharj. It was my first acquaintance with the country to which he had devoted the greater part of his life. Neither then nor thereafter did I feel the slightest temptation to follow his example. The limitless space, the clear night skies and the rest of the gobbledygook are all right in small doses. But I would find a lifetime in a landscape with majesty but no charm, among a people with neither majesty nor charm, quite unacceptable. Ignorance and arrogance make a bad combination, and the Saudi Arabians have both in generous measure. When an outward show of austerity is thrown in as well, the mixture is intolerable.

I have indulged in this digression to answer certain writers who have attributed the unusual course of my life to the influence of my
father. It is possible that his eccentricities enabled me, in early youth, to resist some of the more outrageous prejudices of the English public-school system of forty years ago. But very little research would show that, at all the decisive turning-points in my life, he was thousands of miles out of reach. If he had lived a little longer to learn the truth, he would have been thunderstruck, but by no means disapproving. I was perhaps the only member of his wide acquaintance to whom he was never rude, and to whose opinions he invariably listened with respect—even on his own precious Arab world. I never took this uncritically as a compliment. I have heard it said, possibly wrongly, that Winston Churchill gave weight to the opinions of his own son, Randolph.

It was with no pain at all that I left the useless desert for the riotous wonder of Istanbul. My colleagues were scattered around the dreary apartment blocks of Pera, but I had no intention of following their lead. Within a few days I had found a delightful villa in Beylerbey, on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus, a place of such loveliness that I agreed without demur to pay an exorbitant rent. It was next door to the landing-stage, and for three years I was to commute daily between Asia and Europe by ferryboat, through the everchanging pattern of gulls and shearwaters, mists, currents and eddies. The old Turkey hands, of course, were aghast. But it is a good working rule, wherever you are, to ignore the old hands; their mentalities grow inward like toenails. I had no cause to regret the choice of my remote Asian hide-out. Indeed, my example was soon followed by some of the more imaginative spirits.

I was disguised as a First Secretary of the Embassy, and here I should indulge in a short digression. I have already mentioned that the cover of Passport Control Officer for SIS officers had become widely known before and during the war, and one of the recommendations of the Committee on SIS Reorganization had been that we should move away from it. Since that time the great majority of SIS officers abroad have been posted as First, Second or Third Secretaries, according to seniority. (Since my time, one or two of the more important posts, such as Paris and Washington, have been dignified
with Counsellor rank.) A few have been stashed away as simple attachés or as junior Information Officers. Meanwhile, most of the tainted Passport Control Officers working in the legitimate line of visa duty have been re-christened visa officers. Most of them are now formally free of intelligence duties, though in fact working links between the visa officers and SIS personnel are still maintained.

The change of disguise was accompanied by a change in the system of symbols designating overseas personnel. Until the reorganization, all countries had borne a two-digit number: for example, Germany was 12-land, Spain 23-land. The representatives in those countries bore the corresponding five-digit symbol: the head representative in Germany was 12,000, in Spain 23,000, while their subordinate officers and agents would have other five-digit symbols in the 12,000 and 23,000 brackets. This system, it was believed, had become as compromised as the Passport Control cover. There is the well-known legend that Abwehr officers in Istanbul had been heard singing: “Zwölfland, Zwölfland uber alles.”

Be that as it may, the system was completely overhauled. Each country was now given a symbol consisting of three letters of the alphabet, the first of which (for reasons unknown to me) was invariably B. Thus the United States was BEE-land, Turkey, BFX-land. The head representative in each country was distinguished by the addition of the figures 51, and his subordinates by other twodigit symbols, e.g., 01, 07, etc. Thus, as head of the SIS station in Turkey, I found myself wearing, with an odd sense of discomfort, the designation BFX/51. Whichever way you looked at it, in long-hand or typescript, it seemed horribly ungainly.

So I was First Secretary of the Embassy, with no known Embassy duties, alias BFX/51. In all, we were five officers, with the appropriate secretarial staff. In addition to a capable and companionable deputy and a sturdily enthusiastic junior (Second and Third Secretaries respectively), there was an ebullient White Russian of boundless charm and appalling energy (Attaché). Finally, there was the Passport Control Officer, who was responsible directly to Maurice Jeffes in London for visa affairs, but to me for his intelligence
duties. So far as I was concerned, he acted as liaison officer with the Turkish services. He was an old Turkey hand, bearing the honoured name of Whittall; he spoke fluent Turkish; but he was far too nice to liaise with the Turks. Short mention should also be made of Whittall’s secretary, who had a passion for cats and a highly personal filing system. When I asked her for a paper, she would say mildly: “I
think
it is under the white cat,” and by God, it would be.

The Turkish services were known as the Security Inspectorate, and our relations with them conditioned almost all our intelligence activity in Turkey. They knew of us, and tolerated our activity, on the understanding that it was directed solely against the Soviet Union and the Balkans, not against Turkey. As will be seen, this undertaking was often honoured in the breach. In order to ensure the benevolence of the Inspectorate, we paid its Istanbul office a monthly subsidy, camouflaged as payment for the enquiries carried out by the Inspectorate on our behalf. Since we got precious little return for it in terms of intelligence, it is fairly obvious that our subvention merely inflated the salaries of the senior Inspectors in Istanbul. It was worth it, if only as hush-money.

The headquarters of the Inspectorate were at Ankara, presided over at that time by a bulging, toad-like bureaucrat whom we referred to as Uncle Ned. It was my misfortune to visit him on duty about once a month. Our meetings soon took on a regular pattern of mutual frustration. I would start by requesting facilities for this or that operation, for passing an agent, for example, from Eastern Turkey into Soviet Armenia. He would clear his throat, whisper to his interpreter, shift his buttocks and call for coffee. He would then propose that I should give him the agent and the money. He would carry out the operation and give us the results. As simple as that. When I came to know enough Turkish to realize what was going on, these interviews usually ended in my having a row with my interpreter, whom nothing would induce to be sufficiently rude. He had some excuse. He was not on the diplomatic list, and had reason to fear Uncle Ned’s ill-will.

The head of the Istanbul office of the Security Inspectorate was
known to us as Aunt Jane. He was a person of considerable interest to me, as it was in his area that most of my clandestine activity would have to take place. But he never succeeded in filling me with excessive alarm. He was an easy-going, rather shop-soiled
roué
, interested above all in his gallbladder and, of course, money. After a few weeks, I was content to leave the routine contact with Aunt Jane to Whittall, intervening myself only on special occasions. About twice a year, I arranged a party for him, and he proved to be the ideal guest. He would arrive in a police launch half an hour before the appointed time, down two or three quick whiskies and vanish on a plea of urgent work while the other guests were arriving.

My contacts with Uncle Ned, Aunt Jane, and their colleagues confirmed a suspicion I had already formed, namely, that the security services of the minor powers lack the resources and experience for effective action. Even Tefik Bey of Erzurum, probably the best of the Security Inspectorate officers, made a sorry mess of the only operation I ever entrusted to him. Yet the Turks were supposed to have one of the better services. I have even read recently, in John Bulloch’s
Akin to Treason
,
^*
that Lebanese security is “very efficient”—a misuse of language by any standard. If they were really efficient, they would start by stamping out the trade in forged documents that flourishes under their noses in Beirut.

Aunt Jane’s office had certain supervisory functions over the Inspectorate office in Adrianople, which produced a trickle of low-grade information from Bulgaria, largely the product of tolerated smugglers and the odd refugee. But its importance was due principally to the fact that Istanbul was an active transit area. A large proportion of the refugees from the revolutions in the Balkans and Central Europe found their way eventually to Istanbul, where it was the responsibility of Aunt Jane and his officers to screen them and pump them for any information they might possess. Some of the reports derived from these sources were passed on to us by the Turks, but their quality was uniformly disappointing. This was
partly due to the ignorance of the refugees themselves, partly to the inexperience of the interrogators who failed to ask the significant questions. Repeated efforts to get official access to these refugees ourselves, before they dispersed to their various destinations, were frustrated by Turkish lethargy. We were driven to hunt them down on our own—a process which, quite unnecessarily, wasted an immense amount of time.

For much of our intelligence on the Balkan states, we had to rely on nationals of those states resident in Istanbul. A surprising number of Bulgarians, Yugoslavs and Rumanians claimed to have established espionage organizations in their own countries before passing into exile themselves. They were more than willing to put such networks at our disposal, provided we put up the necessary funds for activating them. The war, of course, had shown all Europe that there was money in espionage, and during the forties an unwary purchaser could have spent millions in Istanbul on intelligence fabricated within the city limits. The Americans had been largely responsible for pushing up the price of forgery, but by 1947 SIS’s appetite for faked intelligence had become jaded. Much of our time was spent in devising means of smoking such operations into the open, so that we could judge what sort of price to put on their work. We rarely succeeded, and I am pretty sure that, in spite of the care we took, several of the exiles made regular monkeys of us.

I had been told in London not to concentrate too much attention on the Balkans. My first priority was the Soviet Union. I played with several ideas of getting tip-and-run agents into the Russian Black Sea ports by means of merchantmen calling at Odessa, Nikolaev, Novorossisk and elsewhere. But the main assault, I decided, would have to be on the Eastern frontier, which offered the possibility of infiltrating agents into the Soviet Union along a wide front. Most of the summer of 1947, therefore, was devoted to a personal reconnaissance of the frontier regions, with a view to discovering what sort of help the Turks could offer us and what sort of obstacles we would have to meet. Such a reconnaissance also served a secondary purpose: a topographical survey of the frontier marches
of Turkey for which the armed services were clamouring. This was before the Americans took over Turkey and, among other things, carried out an aerial survey of the whole country. We were still pretty ignorant of the state of communications in the extensive region east of the Euphrates.

The topographical survey was of interest to SIS for different reasons. Our War Planning Directorate, thinking in terms of global war against the Soviet Union, was busy with projects for setting up centres of resistance in regions which the Red Army was expected by them to overrun and occupy in the early stages of war. Turkey was one of the first countries to be considered in this respect. The mountains of Anatolia are broken up by a series of level plains, lozenge-shaped and generally running along an east-west axis, ideal stepping-stones for a Soviet invader’s airborne troops. The prospects of successful resistance anywhere east of Ankara were rated very low. The best we could hope for in Turkey, therefore, was the establishment of guerilla bases from which Soviet communications, running through the plains, could be harried. Our planners needed far more detailed information than was available on the nature of the terrain in Eastern Turkey: how broken was it? How much forest cover? What water and food resources?