Art of Betrayal (6 page)

Austria lived in fear of being next. At first, the Soviets had co-operated hesitantly with the other occupiers. But when the Communist Party was trounced in elections in November 1945, the Soviets responded with a slow squeeze, particularly of Vienna, where they controlled all the road and rail access points including to the airports.
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By 1948 tension was rising. The city watched fearfully as the Soviets blockaded Berlin. CIA officers began preparing escape plans involving donning lederhosen and walking through the Viennese woods.
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British officers drew up top-secret plans to confront a putsch with military force, leading to arguments
about whether such plans were realistic.
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Britain's military had begun to push for Special Operations in the form of propaganda and the spreading of rumours to try and undermine Soviet influence in Austria and fuel anti-Russian sentiment.
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Young had tried to recruit agents within Austria's Communist movement and wanted to send Czechoslovak and Hungarian refugees back home to work their way up the ranks of their Communist parties.
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By the end of 1948, his agents reported that the Kremlin seemed to be pulling back from its most aggressive revolutionary activity in Europe, partly in the face of a tougher line from the West over the Berlin blockade. Young's progress in planting agents was slow. Not many people were willing to sacrifice the best years of their lives to infiltrate Communist parties.
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Young had a staff of about twenty officers and secretaries, most of them, he knew, blown to the Russians.
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Even though it was given extra resources, the MI6 station in Austria struggled to keep up with the demands placed on it. MI6 stations do not decide their own priorities. These are agreed back in London by the different government departments, based on what intelligence they are seeking. By 1953, there were a total of nineteen different ‘Top Priority' requirements for intelligence, ranging from Soviet order of battle to intelligence on individuals travelling to the UK. Further down the list were another thirty-nine requirements. The station could ‘barely cope with responsibilities', officials noted.
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If Young sat at the top of the intelligence tree and Cavendish in the middle, at the bottom were the grunts from Field Security who carried out the mundane tasks. During the Soviet military's spring and autumn manoeuvres, they would wait for a tip-off from a contact who worked on the railways and then stand along the line to count carriages go past in the middle of the night. When two Field Security men went to check out the registration numbers of vehicles in one boxcar, its door was suddenly opened and they were forced to hide behind a hoarding. The Red Army soldiers who emerged proceeded to urinate in the dark against the hoarding, prompting a complicated expenses claim for dry cleaning.

The day-to-day debriefing of the stream of desperate defectors and frontier crossers, men like Jan Ma
Å¡
ek, was the domain of Field Security. Up to 160 individuals a month were picked up and every
possible scrap of intelligence extracted.
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The identity documents they had brought with them were also valuable as MI6's forgers could use them as models to create their own sets for people being sent back. When defectors had been sucked dry, they would be put into a ‘ratline' out of the country. The British smuggled them out of Vienna past the Soviets to the British zone and the Semmering Pass on a local train. Then they would be housed in a pub until Field Security Graz could pick them up and take them to a Displaced Persons camp where they would wait – often for a year or two – to get a visa and a boat ride from Italy to a new life in Britain, North America or Australia. The chance to see the West up close in Austria provided temptations for Soviet soldiers which the US and UK encouraged. In one twelve-month period, the US handled a hundred Soviet soldiers and officers.
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US Army intelligence ran one ratline for defecting Red Army soldiers by using a corrupt, fascist Yugoslav priest in the Vatican who was willing to provide visas to South America for deserving Catholics if they were willing to pay $1,500. A motley crew of Croatian war criminals, Nazi collaborators and Red Army soldiers scurried on to freighters bound for Latin America.
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The same ratline would later be used to get Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyons' who had tortured, killed and sent countless people to Auschwitz, off to Bolivia via Austria after he had worked with the Americans. Other Nazis who worked with American intelligence were also protected.
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The biggest ratline operating in Austria was also the most problematic for the British. Up to 2,000 Jewish refugees were arriving in Vienna every month from the East in early 1946. Many ended up on board boats from Yugoslavia and Italy and went to fight the British to force them out of Palestine. British intelligence responded by placing spies among the refugees in order to look at these routes and try to close them down.
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Late in the evening of 19 March 1948, thirty to forty kilos of dynamite exploded at the Park Hotel, where many British officers, including Cavendish, would stay.
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It followed an attack on the Hotel Sacher a few months earlier and the discovery of a rucksack bomb buried by tracks near where a British military train passed.
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The suspects were the Jews bringing their fight in the Middle East into Middle Europe. MI6 did not have clean hands either. Approved at the highest political level, it ran Operation Embarrass
to blow up ships in European ports due to take Jewish refugees to Palestine. MI6 even planted fake documents in Casanova, a Viennese nightclub believed to be under KGB control (the same club was frequented by Graham Greene while he wrote
The Third Man
and it became Harry Lime's haunt).
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The documents falsely claimed that the Jewish refugees from the East were providing MI6 with valuable intelligence, in the hope it would persuade the Russians to stem the flow.
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Britain's closest ally was not altogether helpful with this problem. The Jewish head of station for the Israeli secret service Mossad LeAliyah Bet, who was masterminding the ratlines using forged Red Cross documents, sheltered in the American zone where he worked under cover as a newspaper reporter.
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Some American officers conducted clandestine training for the Jewish refugees and there was a semi-official policy of turning a blind eye to Jewish activity including even arms shipments.
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Jewish groups also began hunting war criminals. One group called the Avengers used British uniforms, documents and vehicles to get inside the POW camps holding SS officers to exact their vengeance.
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Scavengers of many different stripes hunted in the bleak human wasteland of the refugee camps. One of the most remarkable was a forceful twenty-three-year-old British woman called Daphne Park.
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Where Field Security looked for those coming from the East, Park sought out the remains of Nazism and its secrets. Park had grown up on a farm in Africa, digesting the great Edwardian writers of British imperial spy fiction like Kipling and Buchan, and had decided she wanted to be a spy. War had opened up new paths for women and, with a fierce ambition and a willingness to talk directly to her superiors, she had carved out a role with the Special Operations Executive training French resistance agents. She had been rejected by MI6 when hostilities ended and so she joined the closest thing she could find, a body called Field Intelligence Agency Technical. That dull bureaucratic title masked its job of tracking down war criminals in the refugee camps and finding valuable scientists. Its progenitor was a group called 30AU founded during the war by Ian Fleming, a Naval Intelligence officer with an active imagination who maintained an interest in Park's FIAT as it came into being.
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In the first year or two of occupation British intelligence hunted those who had run
the concentration camps, including doctors who had carried out experiments on the living. The woefully under-resourced team would chase down rumours of Nazis holding clandestine meetings in restaurants or of Martin Bormann having been spotted living in the 12th district under an assumed name.
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One professor committed suicide before he could be handed over for trial in Nuremberg.
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It did not take long before the search for Nazi scientists who could help in the future superseded the desire to deliver justice for the past.
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There were few rules as each of the four occupying powers raced to grab the individuals behind Germany's industrial and scientific advances, many of whom had become members of the SS. Their secrets would be shared openly with commercial companies back home.
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The top targets were experts on biological and chemical warfare, electronics, guided weapons, aerodynamics and underwater warfare.
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Daphne Park had two half-colonels and a major who were specialists in rockets working for her along with a sergeant major and twenty drivers, as well as a terrifying woman from the Auxiliary Territorial Service who bullied Park mercilessly but licked her into shape.
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Park's lack of German led to a few problems. She was told of one professor who had worked on guided missiles and was now living in the depths of a forest in a Hansel-and-Gretel-type cottage. When she arrived, he proved very excited to see her and enthusiastically started drawing diagrams and talking about flights. Park picked up the word ‘Blumen' which she thought meant flowers. So she woke up her dozing sergeant and told him to listen properly and translate. He explained that unfortunately the professor was studying the flight path of the bumble-bee rather than the V2 rocket.
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In Germany, where the battle for scientific secrets was fiercest, everyone played dirty. German industrialists were ‘invited' to Britain and then interned and not allowed out until they had spilled commercial secrets to their British rivals.
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The Americans were more than happy to take on for their own rocket programme men who had developed the V2 rockets that had bombed London. In Austria, there were desperate attempts to get rocket scientists and research chemists out of the Russian zone before the Russians got their hands on them. ‘It was quite important to get there fast
because if the Russians got there first they simply kidnapped them and took them away and they were never seen again,' recalled Park.
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Vienna was a lawless city in which the police could not always be trusted and in which the rules of the Cold War espionage game had yet to be codified. As a result, the city was known to spies as ‘the shooting gallery' – a body found in a park or floating in the Danube was an everyday occurrence. Amid the darkened alleys of Vienna, one fear in particular haunted not just those involved in the secret world but ordinary citizens. And that was kidnap. It had begun immediately after the war when people suspected of being involved in certain German units or helping the Nazis disappeared (one woman who had allegedly been a Gestapo informer was kidnapped from her apartment rolled in a rug). As the Soviets lost control of the Viennese police, the trend intensified for targeted kidnapping.
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By 1948 the spate of kidnappings had become a hot political issue with up to three people a day disappearing.
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Increasingly the victims were those suspected of being spies for the West. One Austrian public official was forced into a waiting car on his way home in December 1947 and never seen again. An English university student was kidnapped after a spurned lover told the Soviets she was the mastermind of an alleged ring of British intelligence agents.
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In all, 400 people were kidnapped in three years, most by the Soviets, although the Americans were not averse to kidnapping people in the Soviet zone and taking them west.
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The US and UK were particularly worried about the pattern of kidnapping, which suggested that Moscow was looking for help in building an atomic bomb.
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America's bomb was its only counter to the perceived conventional strength of the Red Army. Intelligence officers were sent out with the specific remit of finding out what scientists the Soviets were after as a clue to understanding their progress. MI6 had found intelligence that the Soviets were mining uranium near the Czech border with Germany and there were reports of further deposits sought in Bulgaria, leading to urgent intelligence-gathering operations to investigate further. One of the more popular of the multitude of swindles employed by those on the make in Vienna were those of the ‘uranium salesmen' who swamped Britain and America with ‘samples' wrapped up in cotton
stuffed into pill bottles and the promise of more.
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The failure to predict the Soviet atomic test of 1949 only increased paranoia about what else lay unknown. What London and Washington would only slowly realise was that the Soviets had help from inside the West's own atomic programme, thanks to Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo, whose Communist pasts had been overlooked or ignored.
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Daphne Park watched the Russians' ruthlessness with horror but also with growing fascination. ‘Many of the scientists were being kidnapped by the Russians. It was this that made me want to learn Russian and serve in the Soviet Union, and see what it was really like there,' she later recalled. ‘I watched them swallow up Czechs, Poles – people I had known. I wanted to meet and understand the people who lived under such a regime.'
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She would get her chance. Daphne Park's stint in Vienna was short-lived. One day a woman turned up and explained that her friend, who happened to be a Russian major, was being sent home but he was reluctant to return. Would Daphne Park see him? She went to pay a visit to the members of the MI6 station with whom she occasionally worked. They were extremely interested. But they had some trouble finding an escape route fast enough. Daphne used her military contacts to get the Russian out. That got her noticed. George Kennedy Young decided she had what it took. In 1948, in a brief nod to the modern world which would not be repeated for another two decades, she became one of the only women to be allowed to join MI6. She was made the stay-behind officer for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In a small office, under particularly tight security, she acted as the point of contact for the stations, including the work of Anthony Cavendish, who respected her as capable, if a touch ‘unfeminine'. Her year and a half in Vienna was formative for a woman who would eventually rise to become a controller at MI6. Decades later when she was asked where her deep-seated and vociferous hatred of Communism and the Soviet regime – which she always called simply ‘the enemy' – came from, she would answer, ‘I had seen them on the streets of Vienna and how they behaved and I felt anger.'
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