After an inner debate, Greene decided against keeping the rendezvous with the missionaries. Instead, he wrote London an account of the unfortunate event which had kept him from his trip up-country and then offered his resignation, which was refused. This was both fortunate and unfortunate. London freed him from the control of Lagos, but his failure to keep the promised rendezvous made him an enemy.
In arranging for the missionaries to cross into British colonial territory, Greene suggested to them the excuse that they were collecting food brought specially from Fortnum & Mason, and held at Kailahun. He now had to telegraph the District Commissioner of the area, Richard Cox, to say that he was not coming. Cox, who had been party to the arrangement, was furious, taking Greene’s failure to keep his appointment as an example of MI6’s casualness, discourtesy, even sloppiness, in time of war. Greene anticipated the District Commissioner’s response: ‘I had to have his letters opened by the censor. I warned London that this would happen in my report and it did. He wrote such furious private letters that he had to be reprimanded by the Governor.’ Cryptically, Greene mumbled in interview: ‘He was an enemy from the beginning. I must have offended him in some way at Balliol.’39
Greene learnt that nothing pleased head office more than an addition to their agent’s card in their Intelligence files. His report on a Vichy airfield in French Guinea was based on information from one of his agents, who was illiterate arid could not count over ten (the number of his fingers and thumbs). Nor did the agent know any of the points of the compass except the east (he was a Mohammedan). A building on the airfield which he said housed an army tank was, Greene believed from other evidence, a store for old boots. He emphasised the agent’s disqualifications, so that he was surprised when he earned a rating for his report of ‘most valuable’: ‘Somebody in an office in London had been enabled to add a line or two to an otherwise blank card – that seemed the only explanation.’40
Greene felt a similar irritation when receiving coded instructions from London. His attitude towards his superiors is revealed in Wilson’s receipt of materials in The Heart of the Matter, and the humour implicit in this passage reappeared in full flood in 1958 in Our Man in Havana:
[Wilson] took out the code books, 32946 78523 97042. Row after row of groups swam before his eyes. The telegram was headed Important, or he would have postponed the decoding till the evening. He knew how little important it really was – the usual ship had left Lobito carrying the usual suspects – diamonds, diamonds, diamonds. When he had decoded the telegram he would hand it to the long-suffering Commissioner, who had already probably received the same information or contradictory information from S.O.E. or one of the other secret organizations which took root on the coast like mangroves. Leave alone but do not repeat not pinpoint P. Ferreira passenger 1st class repeat P. Ferreira passenger 1st class. Ferreira was presumably an agent his organization had recruited on board. It was quite possible that the Commissioner would receive simultaneously a message from Colonel Wright that P. Ferreira was suspected of carrying diamonds and should be rigorously searched. 72391 87052 63847 92034. How did one simultaneously leave alone, not repeat not pinpoint, and rigorously search Mr Ferreira?41
One of the things Greene disliked about his job was that he seemed to be taking over what was traditionally the province of MI5. In a letter to me fourteen days before his death, he recalled an incident, minor to an interrogating policeman, but which continued to disturb him: ‘All Portuguese boats had to be searched for commercial diamonds and information. In the papers on one boat I learnt that my friend and [French] literary agent Denise Clairouin had been arrested by the Germans as a member of the Resistance. One interrogation that I had to make of a prisoner disgusted me so much that I never made another.’42
The interrogation was of a young Scandinavian seaman from Buenos Aires who was suspected of being a German agent. Greene could not record the interrogation in his journal, but he elaborates on the event which sickened him in Ways of Escape:
I knew from a report about the girl he had loved in Buenos Aires – a prostitute probably, but he was really in love in his romantic way. If he came clean he could go back to her, I told him, if he wouldn’t speak he would be interned for the duration of the war. ‘And how long do you think she’ll stay faithful to you?’ It was a police job, an MI5 job again. I was angry that I had been landed with it. It was a form of dirty work for which I had not been engaged. I gave up the interrogation prematurely, without result, hating myself. He may even have been innocent. To hell, I thought then, with MI5.43
A note in his journal is probably related to this search: ‘The suitcase of the suspect – the squalor and intimacy of a man’s suitcase.’44 Yet it was necessary work to identify German spies who were passing on intelligence about British shipping to German submarines.
Even five years after the incident, Greene’s sense of disgust at the way he’d had to interrogate and search the man’s cabin still strongly affected him. In The Heart of the Matter, he changed the character from a young Scandinavian seaman to a fat Portuguese ship’s captain. On this occasion, one of the field security men has private information from the steward (who is under notice of dismissal), that the captain has letters concealed in his bathroom. Scobie searches the captain’s cabin: ‘A man’s bedroom was his private life. Prying in drawers you came on humiliations; little petty vices were tucked out of sight like a soiled handkerchief.’45
Scobie comes to the end of his search of the cabin (‘closing the box of French letters and putting them carefully back in the top drawer of the locker with the handkerchiefs’) and comes to the bathroom. The captain assures him that there is not much cover there to conceal anything: ‘The bathroom was bare and extraordinarily dirty. The bath was rimmed with dry grey soap, and the tiles slopped under’ Scobie’s feet. He begins to think the information might be false. Scobie opens the medicine-cabinet, unscrews the toothpaste, opens the razor box, dips his finger into the shaving-cream, he examines the taps (each funnel with his finger), the floor, the porthole, and the big screws. Each time Scobie turns he catches the captain’s face in the mirror, ‘calm, patient, complacent’. ‘It said “cold, cold” to him all the while, as in a children’s game.’ Finally, Scobie comes to the lavatory, he lifts the wooden seat, he checks between the porcelain and the wood and he puts his hand on the lavatory chain. He notices in the mirror for the first time a tension in the captain, the brown eyes no longer on his face, they are fixed on something else. He pulls it and checks the ‘gurgling and pounding in the pipes, the water flushed down’. He turns away and there is a relaxation of tension in the captain’s face, even smugness: ‘You see, major.’ ‘And at that moment Scobie did see … He lifted the cap of the cistern. Fixed in the cap with adhesive tape and clear of the water lay a letter.’46
It is Scobie’s duty to take the letter and report it to the authorities, especially as it is a letter to a Frau Groener in Friedrichstrasse, Leipzig. The captain insists it is a letter to his daughter, and of course, in wartime, as the captain says, he could be ruined because he had written a letter to his daughter: ‘Open it and read. You will see.’ Scobie, a stickler for duty, tells him he must leave that to the censors, but Scobie is touched though he does not tell the captain this:
The man had lowered his bulk on to the edge of the bath as though it were a heavy sack his shoulders could no longer bear. He kept on wiping his eyes with the back of his hand like a child – an unattractive child, the fat boy of the school. Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.47
The captain discovers Scobie is also a Catholic, and he begins to plead for the first time, talking about his daughter and the way his mistress ill-treats him: ‘“she will take away my trousers so that I cannot go out alone; every day it will be drink and quarrels until we go to bed. You will understand. I cannot write to my daughter from Lisbon. She loves me so much and
she waits.” He shifted his fat thigh and said, “The pureness of that love,” and wept.’48 Scobie takes a last look at the captain before leaving the cabin and sees him beating his head against the cistern, the tears running down his face. As Scobie joins the field security man in the saloon, he feels as if a millstone is weighing him down: ‘How I hate this war, he thought, in the very words the captain had used.’49
‘The letter to the daughter in Leipzig, and a small bundle of correspondence found in the kitchens, was the sole result of eight hours’ search by fifteen men.’50 In not reporting the letter, Scobie’s ‘own heart-beats told him he was guilty – that he had joined the ranks of the corrupt police officers’, telling them that it was the usual thing: ‘A dismissed steward with a grudge.’51
In the case of the Scandinavian seaman, Greene, like Scobie, burnt the letter, but not without qualms of guilt. His training in Oriel College and in Lagos was ignored for sentiment:
Scobie felt no doubt at all of the sincerity of this letter. This was not written to conceal a photograph of the Cape Town defences or a microphotograph report on troop movements at Durban. It should, he knew, be tested for secret ink, examined under a microscope, and the inner lining of the envelope exposed. Nothing should be left to chance with a clandestine letter. But he had committed himself to a belief. He tore the letter up, and his own report with it, and carried the scraps out to the incinerator in the yard – a petrol-tin standing upon two bricks with its sides punctured to make a draught.52
Greene was dismayed by the pressure brought to bear on the innocent: ‘The story was sufficiently irrational to be true. Even in wartime, one must still exercise the faculty of belief if it is not to atrophy.’53 It seems likely that this incident in the novel reflects Greene’s own sense of guilt in allowing a possible German agent to slip through his hands. To the extent that Scobie is Greene, he does not handle the situation effectively. As an MI6 officer he should have employed the right mixture of flattery and threats, warmth and ruthlessness. Once Scobie found the offending letter his decision to take it to the censors should have been adhered to. Indeed, fifteen men had wasted their time searching the ship and Greene/Scobie had, through his sense of humanity, ruined the outcome of the operation. No wonder Greene felt he had to return home and that he could no longer be an officer in the field.
Greene’s journal shows that enemy agents were found aboard ship. Again Greene suitably disguised his material in his journal so that it could easily be mistaken as notes for a future novel, since he was breaking strict rules in keeping a journal: ‘The German agent’s letters. Tell so-and-so he’s too optimistic when he says no big ships can call here. The touch of pacifism: “What would Livingstone have said?”’54 The only material which authentically refers to an SIS operation and the successful detection of incriminating material during a search of a Portuguese ship in port appears in the first sentence: ‘The German agent’s letters’. In the autumn of 1942, three Portuguese subjects who had accepted Abwehr [German Intelligence organisation] missions in southern Africa were arrested when their ship docked in Freetown.55
*
Greene badly needed secretarial assistance: ‘I long for a secretary’, he wrote to his mother on 4 May, ‘to take off the donkey work of typing, etc.’; on 22 July he again wrote of the need for an assistant: ‘I’ve been rushed off my feet as a result of being up in the Protectorate for a week. Stuff accumulates so, and although I’ve been promised an assistant, he or she hasn’t materialised yet.’56
But on 12 August, when he knew that his assistant was aboard a ship bound for Freetown, he reported to his mother his anxiety (an anxiety typical of Greene): ‘I’m expecting an assistant any day now, but in some ways I’m unenthusiastic. The office is very tiny and if we don’t like each other it will be rather nerve-racking. However it will enable me to get about more.’ To ‘get about more’ was essential as he was setting up agents across the border in French Guinea. Little is said about the young woman when she did arrive, but in a letter to his mother on 14 October, he wrote of returning from Bathurst (now Banjul) in Gambia to rather heavy arrears of work, ‘I have an assistant now.’ He also commented in the same letter about the amount of Intelligence work to be done: ‘Even on Sunday there’s work, and I always give my assistant Sunday off.’ Her job was to do the coding and decoding and to send off reports.
Who was his secretary? When asked, Greene could no longer remember her name. However, surprisingly, a clue appears in an undated letter (probably written in June 1942) to Greene from his brother Hugh:
A girl called Doris Temple will be leaving soon for a government job in Freetown. She’s a very nice piece & a good drinking companion. I think she might be quite a comfort to you … Don’t be put off by the rather wide-eyed manner she puts on … I am telling her to apply for you at the Bank.
Greene’s reply was unusually abstemious. He began by admitting that while in the ordinary course of things he should have been most grateful for Hugh’s ‘tasteful and reliable pimping’, he had become ‘terribly one-idea’d’, and was ‘getting grey, more and more bad tempered, and rather a bully’. Greene, normally at a high level of sexual excitement, disposed of his brother’s suggestion in the following way:
I’ll look out for the girl, but I don’t feel inclined really for a playmate. Life’s complicated enough as it is … A drinking companion would be a boon, if there was anywhere to drink and anything to drink. But there’s only one hotel, and nothing to get but bad bottled export beer of uncertain kinds, Scotch if you are lucky, gin which is a depressant, and South African wines that make you feel like hell next morning … I should certainly warn the poor thing off these parts. They really are not a catch, unless she likes being swarmed around by subalterns.57
What Hugh could not know was that his brother’s reply was disingenuous.
When I was in Freetown in 1980 trying to track down, among other things, policemen who had worked under Police Commissioner Brodie at the time Greene was in Freetown, my contacts found Peter Turnbull, who, like Greene’s fictional Deputy Commissioner Scobie, was known for his rigorous honesty. It is likely that Greene had Turnbull in mind when he told me that, before Brodie had a nervous breakdown, there was only one man he felt he could trust among his officers. The rains had begun and Brodie was under tremendous pressure from work, while dealing with the strain of controlling corrupt officers (most of them recruited from the British police serving in Palestine), and exposed to the badgering of MI5 bureaucrats at home.
Turnbull, in retirement in Sussex, had this to say about Greene and his secretary: ‘Greene did not circulate amongst the resident European community. His secretary who was known as Shirley Temple – her name may have been Temple – was a pretty girl and very popular among the men.’ Clearly, the subalterns did ‘swarm around her’. Turnbull then added: ‘She was looked upon as the eyes and ears of Graham Greene, in so far as local gossip was concerned.’58
The woman that Hugh Greene thought of as an ‘ideal drinking companion’, and who was expressly rejected by Greene as a possible ‘playmate’, was already known to him as his future assistant. Greene must have known about Doris Temple – the dates suggest that – because it had already been determined that she was to be his assistant in Freetown. London would have given Greene this information prior to her arrival. Perhaps with permission from London, or maybe out of a simple desire to know something about her new boss before she departed for Freetown, Miss Temple approached Greene’s younger brother, Hugh. In his naïveté Hugh had thought he was just looking after his brother’s interests, putting him on to ‘a very nice piece’.
No doubt Doris was Greene’s ‘eyes and ears’, picking up gossip at cocktail parties for him. In Freetown, government officials, officials from neutral countries, would be susceptible to her charms, and she would report to Greene. Greene told me that she helped in body searches of women on the various ships that had to be searched for industrial diamonds. However, up-country journeys were ma
de by Greene alone.
Although she was attractive and good at providing him with information from a number of sources, alas, she was not efficient. In a letter written in his last days, Greene stressed that he ‘was sufficiently overworked for them to send me a secretary, a young woman who unfortunately was very bad at coding which only added to our work. Too many telegrams were sent back asking for a repeat.’59
Rodney Dennys often wondered why Greene was sent out to a comparatively unimportant station like Freetown: ‘My God, we could have used him in Cairo. He could have done wonders there.’60 Philby also viewed Freetown’s importance with some scepticism, and in covering Greene’s career from trainee to officer in the field suggested that Greene’s views chimed with his:
After very few sessions, I came to like and respect him as someone quite out of the ordinary run of SIS trainees. As I try to remember Graham’s reactions to such ‘training’, the word ‘bewilderment’ occurs to me most readily. The mechanics of the work presented no problem to a man of his intelligence. But he showed, in flashes, profound doubts about the relevance of whatever he might do in Freetown to the war against Hitler. I confess I shared his doubts, although at the time I tried to dispel them with the suggestion that any of the ports of West Africa (Dakar, Bissau, Conakry) might harbour enemy agents doing us no good in the Battle of the Atlantic, and that Freetown should be a good observation post. He listened with invariable courtesy, but I am quite sure he remained unconvinced. I am also fairly sure that he sensed my own skepticism, though again he was too polite to say so. Or perhaps he realised that I was just saying my piece, and extended to me a slice of charity.61
The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Page 17