The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Writing to his mother, he recalled counting ‘a slow procession of four hearse-like corpses: you couldn’t see the ants underneath’.14

  In 1959, seventeen years later, when visiting the leper colony at Yonda, Greene returned to his hut to find the floor covered with big flying ants and remembered how in Freetown they fell in showers over his food just before rain.

  Still, the house suited Greene’s notion of himself, someone who didn’t quite fit in, who objected to his own class, bound by conventional values, instinctively. Greene had a longing to be an ‘undesirable,’ indeed thought of himself as such. Like Scobie, he regarded himself ‘as a man in the ranks, the member of an awkward squad’.15

  Greene used his ‘creole house’, which he described as just across the road from a transit camp in the process of erection with two steam shovels going all day, as the home of Scobie and his wife Louise in The Heart of the Matter. He kept descriptively close to it:

  [Scobie] found himself relegated to a square two-storeyed house built originally for a Syrian trader on the flats below [the main European quarter] – a piece of reclaimed swamp which would return to swamp as soon as the rains set in. From the windows he looked directly out to sea over a line of Creole houses; on the other side of the road lorries backed and churned in a military transport camp and vultures strolled like domestic turkeys in the regimental refuse.16

  Greene’s life was a solitary one. Every afternoon he walked, before dusk fell, along an abandoned railway track up the slope towards the European bungalows. On one occasion, arriving back for a bath later than usual, he found a rat on the bath’s edge defecating. Lying alone in bed under a mosquito net, at night he would watch the rats swing on his bedroom curtains. On nights of the full moon, the starving pye dogs kept him awake with their howling and he would rise, pull his boots over his pyjamas and throw stones at them in the lane behind his house. His boy told him he was known by the local poor as ‘the bad man’. Before he left Freetown, he sent some bottles of wine to a wedding in the poor quarter hoping to leave a better memory behind.17

  *

  Greene started his life as secret agent 59200, by using a book code announcing his safe arrival: ‘I had chosen a novel of T. F. Powys from which I could detach sufficiently lubricious phrases for my own amusement, and a large safe came in the next convoy with a leaflet of instructions and my codes.’18

  When Greene returned to Freetown, he was unable to adopt the persona of an inspector of the Department of Trade (DOT) because the department refused to provide him with cover as a ‘phoney inspector’. The British Council were then asked to provide a cover, but that came unstuck too. He was offered a naval or an air-force rank, but it was discovered that he’d need the higher rank of either commander or group captain before he could have a private office and a safe for his code-books. Thus it was that he turned up in Freetown, with what he describes as ‘a vague attachment to the police force’, a little difficult to explain to those who anticipated the arrival of an Inspector of Overseas Trade. In his archives I found his identification card, no. 395, used for travel by ‘European British Subjects’. His address is given as Police HQ, Freetown, and his occupation CID Special Branch, and only as a member of the CID would Greene be known during his sojourn in Freetown. The card is dated 24 April 1942. Curiously it is printed on the reverse of an invitation card to the Governor’s ‘At Home’ dated 8 March.

  Greene spoke of the sense of unreality of living in Freetown; perhaps it was more a sense of not belonging because of his ambiguous position. He was not to be found on the Colonial Office list (where everyone’s salary and position were set down);19 he did not belong to the DOT; he was a curious member of the CID who spent very little time in the police headquarters.

  But at least he was settling into his house, which was beginning to look habitable. He turned the minute dining room into an office, leaving the downstairs with one large living room. Upstairs were two bedrooms.20 From letters to his mother we know how he entertained: ‘It’s pleasant having a house of one’s own – one can relax. None of my china, cutlery, etc. & my car have yet turned up, so I live on a few things borrowed from my cook & in a taxi. If anyone comes to dinner, they have to bring their own plates, etc. so that I live a fairly retired life.’21 Borrowing from his black cook! He would have been expelled from the club if fellow members had even suspected. To his sister, he expressed his anger more openly: ‘My car and all my china, etc. have been sitting in Lagos for ten weeks waiting shipment. An energetic little man, my boss!’22

  In another letter, he wrote of having been ‘frantically social with dull people in every night for dinner or drinks, but this week thank God looks like being a little quieter’.23 And then, we have recorded a simple bucolic African scene forever transfixed in memory:

  I see my cook approaching in the distance proudly escorting two carriers: the Lord knows what he’s been buying: one has a pail on his head and the other a large box. Things are a bit short here as we haven’t had any ships in for a good while. Milk (tinned of course) has been unobtainable, and butter too. (I see now it’s logs for the stove and not a box.)24

  *

  Greene started his day at six in the morning with breakfast, drove his little Morris into Freetown (his boy also drove him) to the market at seven, shopped for groceries at the Patterson Zachonias Company (known as PZ) or Oliphant’s and then collected his telegrams at the police station, to which he was fictitiously attached.

  The telegrams arrived in a code unintelligible to the police and were handed over to him by the Police Commissioner, Brodie. He would then return home, decode and reply to the telegrams, write reports, and rearrange the reports of his agents in an acceptable form. His work was normally over by lunchtime – unless an urgent telegram arrived or a ship in convoy brought a bag to be opened and dealt with.25 But he could be (as his journal and letters tell us) ‘ferociously’ busy: ‘I have no assistant or secretary, and God knows how I shall get through the work.’ His work from London came in spasms: ‘A day or two will be quite slack and then one will be hard at it round the clock from 8.30 to bedtime.’26

  Part of Brodie’s gentle character was used by Greene as a model for his hero Scobie. To begin with, there is a pseudo rhyme between the names Brodie and Scobie, suggesting that Greene had his friend in mind when creating the character. However, in Greene’s time there was a railway station in Sierra Leone called ‘Scobie’. Of course, there is much of Greene in Scobie, as there is in all of his scapegoat heroes. Brodie’s friendship with Greene was, as he has said, ‘the human thing I valued most during fifteen lonely months’.27

  Greene’s journal deliberately contains little about his activities as an agent. Like other agents, he would have acquired background knowledge of local conditions; he would have learned about fake documents for himself and his sub-agents, and would have mastered methods of recruiting and organising agents in the field. It is probable that he was also trained in sending secret encrypted radio transmissions, codes, and ciphers. Several methods of covert communications taught the use of secret inks, and should the raw material not be available, the use of an ink codenamed BS (bird shit). Greene made the ironic observation that ‘vultures were the most common bird … but I doubt whether their droppings had been contemplated’.28

  In The Human Factor, Davis asks Castle (who is also in part based on Greene) if he knows about secret ink:

  ‘I did once – even to the use of bird shit. I had a course in it before they sent me on a mission at the end of the war. They gave me a handsome little wooden box, full of bottles like one of those chemistry cabinets for children. And an electric kettle – with a supply of plastic knitting needles.’ ‘What on earth for?’ ‘For opening letters.’ ‘And did you ever? Open one, I mean?’ ‘No, though I did once try. I was taught not to open an envelope at the flap, but at the side, and then when I closed it again I was supposed to use the same gum. The trouble was I hadn’t got the right gum, so I had to burn the letter after
reading it. It wasn’t important anyway. Just a love letter.’29

  Asked by Davis if in the old days he had been issued with a Luger or an explosive fountain-pen, Castle replied (as Greene, if asked, would have had to answer), ‘I wasn’t allowed to carry a gun, and my only car was a second-hand Morris Minor.’30 But he would have had the standard issue of a potassium cyanide capsule in case he was captured by the Vichy enemy in French Guinea.

  At this time Greene used a gold ring, which he wore on his left hand, as his private seal, dipping it in wax to seal his secret correspondence. The ring was a gift from his father on his twenty-first birthday and had a heraldic design on its surface.

  Greene’s main concern in Sierra Leone was the condition of the battleship Richelieu, which was being repaired in Dakar and was seen as a potential threat to British shipping:

  I think MI6 at that period was a little hazy in their geography because I was well over a thousand miles away from Dakar, and it was very difficult to know how one was going to get one’s information of Dakar from a distance of over a thousand miles.

  Then one was trying to get information out of the Vichy colony next door, in French Guinea. I needed to know about the state of air fields and so on, in case the Germans took over there and one was sort of organising, one had information about the smuggling of commercial diamonds on the Portuguese boats coming in for search in Freetown harbour on the way home, and agents were sometimes travelling on the boats there.31

  Kim Philby, writing to me from Moscow, spoke of Greene’s knowledge and preparation for his work in Africa, for Greene was under Philby before going out to Africa:

  At that time I was responsible for counter-espionage in the Iberian peninsula and parts of NW Africa. Graham’s destination, Freetown, fell within my area, and it was my business to tell him what we knew of the German Intelligence services and of their connections with the corresponding services of the Vichy French. The latter, and a few Germans in the Spanish and Portuguese possessions in West Africa, were to be the main objects of his attention.32

  Greene mentioned other MI6 schemes he tried unsuccessfully to initiate: ‘the rescue by bogus Communist agents of a left-wing agitator who was under house-arrest.’33 He was a communist gaoled in Freetown, and Greene intended to have him planted in Vichy-held Conakry. In Greene’s journal, we find an entry that looks strikingly like initial notes for a novel, but in fact these are notes, with some deliberate distortion, of an actual SIS operation:

  The letter to the African agitator in his internment who has married again. In England he seems to have had relations with an ardent humanitarian Englishwoman who financed him. The letter is from an African in Gower Street – Gray’s Inn district. First about letting him have collars left at the laundry. Reference to the agitator’s new romance. ‘Oh, she will be jealous when she hears the news. You are a real heart-breaker.’ The photo of the heart-breaker on the files. The respectable humanitarian names chiming in the right places – Victor Gollancz, Ethel Mannin …34

  A month before Greene died in April 1991, he provided me with further details:

  An African intellectual, a friend of Victor Gollancz, had been put in prison under the iniquitous 18B regulation which also imprisoned my cousin Ben. My idea was that he should be rescued from his prison by two purported Communists and in return for getting him out he would have to agree to send some harmless economic information from French Guinea. When we had sufficient of this, we would blackmail him and threaten to show it to the French if he did not provide more interesting material. The Commissioner of Police was ready to work with me on this, but London wasn’t. Their objection was that a question would be asked in Parliament.35

  Greene also intended to open a brothel in Bissau for visitors from Senegal. In his last days, he spoke further about this proposal:

  My other rather wild plan was to open a brothel on a Portuguese territory Bissau just down the coast from Dakar where the Richelieu was stationed. The French were apt to take holidays on the Portuguese island. I had found an admirable Madame, French by origin but very patriotic, who was ready, given the money, to open the brothel. I felt that valuable information could be obtained from many of her visitors.

  Of course, it wasn’t a ‘wild plan’ but a very clever one. What better way to ferret out espionage information than by using local prostitutes? But it was not to be: ‘The reply [from his headquarters in London] to that was that all brothels were very strictly under French Intelligence control which seemed to me dubious in the case of a Portuguese brothel.’36

  When I asked Kim Philby about Greene’s activities in Freetown, he replied: ‘the only communication from him I remember was an operational plan to make use of a Madame who ran a peripatetic brothel much patronised, he reported, by Vichy officials and garrisons. For kicks, I put the plan to my superiors, and we discussed it seriously before rejecting it as unlikely to be what is now called cost-effective. When later I told Graham the story, he was loudly gratified.’ The reason for rejection given by Greene differs from Philby’s, but the one doesn’t exclude the other. However, perhaps Philby was being descriptively careless. In the seventeen years I knew Greene, I never witnessed him being ‘loudly gratified’ about anything. Perhaps Greene was too law-abiding here. At least two former SIS field agents I spoke to indicated that they would have ignored the fact that prior approval had not been given and gone ahead with the plan, hoping that the action would be a success.

  It was certainly a pity that London did not allow Greene to establish a brothel in Bissau. If he had done so, what would he have uncovered?

  Although Vichy France had a price on the head of any supporter of the Free French and their leader de Gaulle, ninety French citizens out of every hundred in Dakar wished success to the Free French. Governor-General Boisson was not trusted and his deputy was known to be pro-German. The British on the whole were not liked because they had tried unsuccessfully to take Dakar by storm in September 1940. Vichy power there lasted until November 1942 (at which time Greene was trying to leave Freetown for home), but that did not mean that de Gaulle and his Free French were welcomed by everyone. The following excerpt from a secret American report, written before French West Africa joined the Allied cause, gives some indication of this: ‘We vomit de Gaulle – he has surrounded himself with dirty people from central Europe and with Jews.’37 And when the British (an RAF contingent) and the Americans arrived, it was reported that practically every night in rue Raffnel (the red-light district of Dakar) there were fights between French and English sailors and between French soldiers and sailors and blacks. Though this report was from an American agent, its ring is authentic: ‘“The American is blunt and to the point,” said French civilians: “a poor diplomat, but you can trust him. You can never tell what an Englishman thinks. He says something with his mouth, but one is sure that he means something else.”’38

  As for the intelligence on the condition of the battleship Richelieu being repaired in Dakar which MI6 had requested Greene to obtain, Greene’s brothel scheme would have probably uncovered the information which I found in the National Archives in Washington. The report of an American visiting the Richelieu in November 1942 revealed that the damage to the ship had been slight – a bent propeller shaft and a bent engine-room floor – and that even in that condition it was capable of twenty-six knots without difficulty, and was therefore a great threat to British shipping if it left port on active service.

  Greene also tried to arrange a rendezvous with missionaries at Bolahun whom he had originally had contact with when he was travelling through Sierra Leone and Liberia before the war in 1935. The Holy Cross Mission was run by American Episcopalian monks. To visit the mission Greene would have had to cross the border into Liberia, and that country had not forgiven his destructive attack on it in his travel book Journey Without Maps. Instead, Greene arranged for the monks to visit him at Kailahun just across the Sierra Leone border. It was at this time that a crisis developed between Greene and Alexis Fo
rter, his boss in Lagos, 2,000 miles away.

  It was the old argument: Forter, the professional at the last stage of his career, found himself having to deal with Greene, the amateur brought into the service as a result of the war. To make matters worse, Forter and Greene had disliked each other on sight. Forter was a sick man totally unacquainted with Africa. At that time, Greene didn’t know how sick Forter was, or even that Forter would keep the Freetown bag sent by Greene unopened on his desk for days through fear of its contents. To clip Greene’s wings, Forter tried to discipline him by cutting off his funds (funds Greene badly needed to pay his agents in the field). The crisis came when Forter interfered with Greene’s operations. The date of Greene’s rendezvous with the monks had already been fixed, and he intended to provide them with a radio transmitter so that information valuable to the SIS could be passed on to him.

  Just prior to his journey to the border, Forter sent Greene a telegram forbidding him to leave Freetown because of the imminent arrival of a Portuguese liner. Portuguese ships from Angola had to be searched for industrial diamonds and illicit correspondence. The attempt by the Allies to reduce significantly Germany’s stock of industrial diamonds was a matter of vital importance. They came almost entirely from South and Central Africa by illegal channels. It was the job of MI5 and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and to a lesser degree MI6, to block these clandestine supply lines.

  By 1943, Germany had only enough diamonds for eight months. Without them, precision tooling would not be possible and smuggling was the only source of replenishment. There were enemy smuggling channels throughout the Gold Coast, Mozambique, Angola, Cairo, the Belgian Congo, South Africa and Sierra Leone. Once a whole year’s supply reached Germany from the Congo by way of Red Cross parcels organised by a Belgian Chief of Police. Germany desperately needed the diamonds, not least to meet the agreed date for their first operational rockets. It was known that Portuguese liners coming in and out of port, often from Angola, were used to smuggle them. Yet, in spite of careful searches, from the rice in the holds to the cosmetics in the cabins, few stones were ever turned up. Greene was involved in such searches, although he saw it as a police job belonging to his friend Brodie and MI5, and did not enjoy being involved in them.