The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Greene was not even pleased with the production of the play: ‘The production is extraordinarily careless. Time & again, Bird [the producer] ruins a good scene – the carving of the bookmaker. This is most effective, but is spoilt at the end because the bookmaker is allowed to drop the handkerchief from his face & we can see it isn’t bleeding. The whole tension is lost in his exit.’15

  Did anything please him? ‘The gangsters are good & Harcourt Williams [as Prewitt] very good. It’s a pity they should be spoilt by Hermione. Of course, the woman for Ida was Laura Cowie – who has been looking for a play.’ Anything else? – yes. ‘Pinkie is a most promising young actor. But he shouldn’t be made so violent. He should be much more repressed – nerves coming out in the twisting of the string (a good touch this).’16

  This led to another cable from poor Pollinger: ‘EVERY LAST MINUTE EFFORT BEING MADE TO CARRY OUT YOUR WISHES … LINNIT AGGRIEVED BECAUSE YOU FAILED TALK WITH HIM AT OXFORD.’17 Greene had not talked to Linnit because he could not face him in his anger. He did not go backstage after the performance but left the theatre, unable to praise hypocritically that which he intended to censure. In any case, Greene would always rather write out his anger than speak it. There was always in him this mixture of extreme sensitivity, polite reserve and excitability.

  The reviews were not good. Greene wrote to Pollinger thanking him for his efforts, but maintained a defeatist attitude: ‘So far the News Chronicle seems to possess the only dramatic critic of sense able to penetrate the awful eye-wash.’ But the play did not sink; it prospered once it appeared at the Garrick Theatre. Greene, ever vigilant about his financial affairs, wrote to his agent on 5 May: ‘Brighton Rock has now been on for 10 weeks (7 in London) & the Vosper has not yet produced figures. Would you hurry her up & say that these must be produced regularly.’

  *

  Greene’s ultimatum was written from the Clifton Place Hotel, Sidmouth, where he and his wife had gone for a fortnight’s holiday. But he was not left alone. Paul Soskin wanted to see him about doing a film script of Howard Spring’s Fame Is the Spur, as did Michael Balcon and Cavalcanti. Whilst Greene turned down the offer to do Fame Is the Spur (‘I shall be at work about ten hours a day on a six day week [for the Secret Intelligence Service] for as far ahead as I can see’18), he was interested in meeting Soskin and Balcon in a general way.

  Greene was so busy upon his return that he neglected friends and associates. In an undated letter to Charles Evans of Heinemann (probably written in April), he apologised guiltily for not getting in touch earlier: ‘The truth is that after a couple of weeks’ holiday with my family, I was pushed into really hard work [for SIS]’; he suggested dinner at the Reform Club and ended with a reference to Evans’s cable: ‘I never thanked you for your … cable which cheered me a lot in that God forsaken hole, Freetown.’

  A letter from Vivien to Pollinger shows just how overwhelmed with work Greene was: ‘We had only 10 days at Sidmouth & then G. was recalled. He is lent to the F.O. &is often out of London. He hopes to come to Oxford for the day next month.’ Vivien suggested that Pollinger should let enquirers know that Greene had no time for private pursuits, worked on a Sunday and couldn’t see anybody. Finally she explained how she would deal in future with her husband’s correspondence: ‘I am putting all letters for G. into a small suitcase & when it is full I’ll send it to the Reform Club, where it can be picked up! Anyway, I am forwarding letters in one big envelope once a week. (No more secretarial work for me! – I’d rather clean windows or scrub steps!)’19

  Vivien was irate, as was Pollinger. He wrote to Greene, telling him that Cavalcanti was desperately anxious to contact him and threatened to come to Sidmouth himself!20 And a further letter, addressed to the Reform Club, ends, ‘Cavalcanti is cross with me because you are too busy to see and talk with him.’21 But why Vivien’s anger?

  It developed in part because neither of them could escape from the demands made on Greene even on their first holiday together for many years. Undoubtedly Vivien had planned the holiday without the children carefully as a return to the ‘love nest’, but it failed. Greene was back in London working for MI6, and, most disturbing for Vivien, had returned to his old address, 19 Gower Mews, Dorothy’s home. This is clear because the undated letter to Charles Evans has Dorothy’s address on it. If in the past Vivien had hoped she could remain the loved one, in spite of his mistress in London, a feeling reinforced by Greene’s warm letters from West Africa, she now knew that the affair had not died or even subsided. She sent his mail to the Reform Club because she couldn’t countenance sending it to his lover’s home. She knew she had failed.

  13

  Agents Three: Greene, Muggeridge and Philby

  They can decipher a close-stool to signify a Privy Council, a flock of geese a senate, a lame dog an invader …

  –JONATHAN SWIFT

  BY THE TIME the monsoon rain was falling upon Freetown and the land around Greene’s home had become a quagmire, the spirits of the British were low. Tobruk had fallen to the Germans on 21 June 1942, and over 30,000 troops had been captured: ‘Defeat is one thing, disgrace is another,’ wrote Churchill. The British had lost 50,000 men in a fortnight and Field-Marshal Rommel had advanced almost 400 miles towards Cairo.

  The turning point of the war was to be here, in North Africa. General Montgomery, newly appointed, raised the morale of the defeated British, though September and most of October were anxious months. Then battle was joined at El Alamein on 23 October 1942. A thousand guns bombarded the enemy lines at dawn. This time, Montgomery outnumbered Rommel’s forces in men, tanks and armament. The British proved irresistible.

  Yet, ironically, it wasn’t only the British superiority in men and weapons or Montgomery’s leadership that led to the defeat of the German forces; the secret activities of British Intelligence substantially helped to win the day. Since February 1940 some of the best minds in the country had been assembled at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire to break the cipher system of the German Enigma machine. Within weeks of doing this, the cryptoanalysts were decrypting, translating, and interpreting 1,000 intercepts of high-grade signals every twenty-four hours. A senior analyst remembered: ‘What a moment it was! It was pure black magic.’1 By March 1943, when Greene returned from Africa to work at SIS headquarters, there was confidence that the Allies would win the war.

  Greene was posted to the headquarters at St Albans, where he was busy beyond expectations. Of his experiences here he wrote: ‘I’m only allowed to come up for air at 8 every evening.’2 The SIS complex was made up of three country houses on Lord Verulam’s estate – the first, Prae Wood, was both the home and office of Felix Cowgill, head of Section V. The middle building, Glenalmond, housed the rest of the officers of Section V, and the third building was the General Registry, which served the whole of the SIS.

  There was little formal training in counter-intelligence, rather one sat down at a desk and got on with it, and was asked if there were any questions or problems. Malcolm Muggeridge recalled:

  My instructions at St. Albans were to familiarise myself with the working of Section V and generally … put myself in the picture. This involved going from room to room and from desk to desk, and listening to particular officers explaining what they were at; whether directing and supervising the operations of agents in the field or devising and planting deception material …3

  Essentially, MI6 gathered enemy information and disseminated false information; the ultimate goal was to penetrate the enemies’ secret operations, to become a part of them, to know their intentions. If you can persuade your opponents to believe the disinformation provided so completely that it enters their files and comes to be accepted, then the enemy can be misled and their reactions controlled.

  Greene saw the work of MI5, which was more straightforward than that of MI6, as a form of spying on his colleagues. His dislike came out sharply in a letter to his friend David Low, the bookseller, who had accidentally suggested Greene was with MI5:
‘You insult me when you suggest that I was ever MI5. I’ve never spied on my own countrymen!’4

  Kim Philby wrote to me of Greene’s work in Section V: ‘We were six officers working in what had been a spacious drawing-room, so our paper work was interrupted by much shop-talk – little of it memorable.’5 In those early days of 1943 Watts looked after Spain, Charles de Salis Portugal and Portuguese possessions, and Trevor Wilson Gibraltar, Tangier and Morocco. Trevor Wilson and Greene were both Catholics and friends. In the early 1950s it was to be Wilson, then British consul in Hanoi, who would open up Vietnam to Greene. Philby and Tim Milne (nephew of A. A. Milne) sat opposite each other at a large desk close to the window, which looked out on to a pond.6 Milne handled special material related to Enigma. As de Salis’s understudy, Greene worked at the Portuguese desk and when de Salis was drafted to Lisbon in August 1943, he took over.

  Recruited for the duration of the war, these men were amateurs. Unlike the leading members of the SIS, experienced professionals who acted and dressed like diplomats, the men under Philby were more free-wheeling. Muggeridge explained their outlook:

  The prevailing fashion among the war-time MI6 intake … was to aim at being as unlike the conventional idea of a diplomat as possible; slouching about in sweaters and grey flannel trousers, drinking in bars and cafés and low dives rather than at diplomatic cocktail parties and receptions, boasting of their underworld acquaintances and liaisons. Philby, in this sense, may be taken as the prototype of them all and was, indeed, in the eyes of many of them, a model to be copied.7

  At lunchtime the whole group retired to the local pub, The King Harry. They sat in the garden if it was fine, eating sandwiches and drinking draught beer and talking. It was the best moment of the day: ‘I remember with pleasure those long Sunday lunches at St Albans [Greene wrote] when the whole sub-section relaxed under his leadership for a few hours of heavy drinking …’8 Greene’s estimate of Philby’s character must have been formed in these favourable circumstances. As leader of the group and as a British intelligence officer, Philby was brilliant and won the respect and affection of all his colleagues.9 He seemed to be against the Government, yet maintained relations with his tedious superiors, and was very much the new ‘casual man’.

  Philby praised Greene for working ‘quietly, coolly and competently’. Moreover, according to Philby, Greene wrote ‘terse, sometimes devastating, marginalia’ on incoming correspondence: ‘By some freak of memory, one of his marginal comments remains in my mind verbatim. “Poor old 24000, our Man in Lisbon [probably Cecil Gledhill, head of station in Lisbon] charging around like a bull in a china shop, opening up vast vistas of the obvious.”’10

  The purpose of Section V was to counter enemy intelligence activities.11 Information would come in part from agents in the field – in Greene’s case, chiefly from Lisbon and the SIS field officers in neutral Portugal – but much of it came from Enigma decodes.

  Muggeridge, then SIS man in Lourenço Marques in Mozambique, provided evidence of the relationship between the officer in the field and Enigma. He was given the task of stopping the enemy’s flow of information about convoys sailing to North Africa, where they were being torpedoed by German submarines. Both the German Consul-General, Wertz, and the Italian Consul-General, Campini, were, through their agents, providing German submarines with accurate information as to the whereabouts of British shipping. On arrival in Lourenço Marques, where he stayed at the same hotel as Wertz and Campini, Muggeridge first deciphered a long telegram from London:

  It came from Philby, as I knew from the style, and provided a résumé of the espionage scene in Lourenço Marques in the light of Wertz’s and Campini’s latest telegrams. All their traffic was being intercepted and cracked at Bletchley; so I had the advantage of knowing just what they were up to … It also meant, of course, that my activities showed in the Wertz-Campini traffic, so that any … pretence practised on my account without reference to London was bound to become known there at once … The Philby directive suggested that it might be a good idea to concentrate on infiltrating the Campini apparat rather than the Wertz one, since the personality of Campini, to judge from his boastful, high-flown style, seemed the more vulnerable of the two.12

  Though Muggeridge judged the source of his directives to be Philby, his conclusion was based solely on his recognition of Philby’s style. It must have been Greene controlling Muggeridge, among other agents, since he was in charge of the Portuguese desk, although his telegrams would need to be passed by Philby. Whilst suggesting that Greene was not entirely successful as an officer in the field in Freetown – ‘He would need to have the qualities of gangsterism and he was too nice to be a gangster really, though he’s good at describing them’13 – Muggeridge none the less allowed that Greene was very able at headquarters:

  I mean he was tremendously good at dealing with agents and working out cover plans and things like that and justifiably was very highly thought of. He understood what he was about as his novel Our Man in Havana shows. It’s the most brilliant book on intelligence that’s ever been written because it gets inside the whole fantasy of the thing. He gives you the whole feeling of it, the ludicrousness of it and yet the way people get caught up in it. You have to take it seriously and yet it’s all based on a fantasy.14

  Even recruitment into the service had this sense of absurd fantasy. Greene had been brought into the ‘firm’ by attending special parties given by a Mr Smith. Another intelligence officer at St Albans recalled his recruitment into the SIS when he was an army officer with one pip. The ‘firm’ was looking for someone who could speak Spanish, and the interviewer, a Mr Carter, asked if he could pass himself off as a businessman in Madrid. He wasn’t told what it was about, only that it was a War Office appointment. He had no idea of the set up, but was simply told that he’d just signed the Official Secrets Act and was to go downstairs at 5.30 and catch a bus.

  ‘Someone shouted, “Anyone for Yoicks,” and a lot of secretary types got up and finally we got to St. Albans, drawing up to a house called Yoicks.’ Next morning a car took him to the Glenalmond office, and the recruit discovered that his Mr Carter was Kim Philby.15 Another prospective agent also had little explained to him about his future work in SIS: ‘I can’t tell you what sort of a job it would be. All I can say is that if you join us, you mustn’t be afraid of forgery, and you mustn’t be afraid of murder.’16

  Often MI6’s devious work demanded that an agent give the enemy vital information prior to offering misinformation, thus, in a sense, acting out the part of a traitor. For example, Muggeridge’s task in Lourenço Marques was to persuade the Abwehr (German Secret Service) that a highly regarded informer, successfully supplying the Germans with important information about British shipping, was in fact passing on suspect material. His immediate aim was to plant acceptable deception material. To do that he had to find out the German informer (his codename would already be known by the British through Enigma), find his sub-agents and suborn them by offering them information which in the first instance would be real and believable. Only later would false information be provided, making the German agent suspect to his masters.

  Muggeridge did not have the best reputation as an agent in the field.17 Greene, who was his direct contact man in London, and other ex-SIS officers, thought he was unreliable: ‘In Lourenço Marques’, Greene said, ‘he tried to run a double agent in the German embassy. He was giving much too much information of greater value to his double agent than he was receiving in return. He was not a success which made him very anti the SIS and he knows that he was a bit of a flop.’18

  Muggeridge returned to England and joined Greene and Philby in London in 1944. The SIS officer who succeeded him in Lourenço Marques inherited Muggeridge’s car and found in it a loaded pistol and a top secret document.19

  *

  During the summer of 1943 Section V moved to London, to 7 Ryder Street, later to be the offices of The Economist. The front entrance carried the sign ‘Charity Ho
use’. It was a building of some mystery. To gain entry, a pass was necessary which stated that the holder was a member of the Greenwood Country Club. Ryder Street runs into St James’s Street close to White’s. Sir Stuart Menzies (‘C’ – the head of the SIS) was a member of this exclusive club, as were other senior wartime intelligence officers.

  ‘C’ had his offices on the fourth floor of 54 Broadway. Set in one wall was a concealed door that led to a passage connecting his office to his official residence at 21 Queen Anne’s Gate and he came through a door into his drawing room at Queen Anne’s Gate. Thus ‘C’ could come and go between headquarters and his apartment without being seen.20

  A number of visitors to this inner sanctum have given their impressions of it. Muggeridge described his first meeting with ‘C’: ‘I made my way … [to] where I found two sedate, middle-aged secretaries who gave an immediate impression of being exceptionally well-bred.’21 Muggeridge didn’t give their names, but they have been identified as Kathleen Pettigrew (the model for Miss Moneypenny, secretary to ‘M’ in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels) and her assistant, Evelyn Jones. Jones was physically attractive, but Miss Pettigrew, according to Robert Cecil, was a ‘formidable gray-haired lady with a square jaw of the battleship type’.22 Every visitor had to wait until the red light outside ‘C’’s door changed to green before entering. The door was of double thickness, one of the layers being padded with quilted leather to make it sound-proof.