The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  ‘C’ was ‘a regular officer in the Life Guards, sandy-haired, with a soft handshake and an air of indolence, belied by a glint of cunning in his brown eyes’.23 He was formidable and to be summoned by him was disturbing. Yet by nature he was gentle, even generous. Kim Philby, who had little genuine admiration for his superiors and colleagues, spoke of an ‘enduring affection’ for his old chief. Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper had good reason to remember ‘C’’s generosity because he was court-martialled in camera:

  I was secretly denounced as being probably in touch with the Germans, and more openly – and more justly – accused of consorting with the more immediate enemy, MI5. I was once summoned to be dismissed. How well I recall that ‘trial’ … with Colonel Vivian [deputy chief of the SIS] as prosecutor and ‘C’ as judge! … [Vivian] maintained with increasing urgency, and in lamentable tones, that whatever the merits of the case, it was quite impossible, after this, for me to remain in the organization. However, thanks to ‘C’, I did remain.24

  Greene used his experience of ‘C’ and his offices in his novel Our Man in Havana, as the epilogue reveals. Wormold has admitted to the SIS that he has been fabricating all his supposed secret activities, and that his agents, for whom he was being paid, were imaginary. He is brought home to be court-martialled, in camera, just as Trevor-Roper was, though Greene makes some minor changes. He takes us not to ‘C’’s offices on the fourth floor, but to a long basement corridor, where of course the red light has to change to green outside the chief’s door before Wormold has permission to enter. Greene has modified the appearance of ‘C’: no sandy hair, but a black monocle and a baby-blue glass eye, yet the mildness of response is quintessentially Menzies’s.

  Wormold doubts whether he can be charged under the Official Secrets Act: ‘He had invented secrets, he hadn’t given them away.’ No one shouts at him and there is only the chief in the room. Far from being threatened he is offered a job: ‘We thought the best thing for you under the circumstances would be to stay at home – on our training staff. Lecturing. How to run a station abroad. That kind of thing.’25 And further, incredibly, Wormold is offered an OBE, a decoration also awarded to Kim Philby, for his service. Sir James Easton said that if Philby had been detected as a Soviet spy at an early date, he would not have been shot or sent to prison: ‘‘C’ would have posted him out of Broadway as a tutor’ (like the offer to Wormold) and ‘then arranged that he be placed on permanent sabbatical’.26

  *

  From Ryder Street Greene carried on his work of counter-intelligence against the Abwehr in the Iberian peninsula: ‘By the end of the War, those Abwehr who were not working for us, we knew were working with completely imaginary agents and receiving pay to give to their agents, agents who did not exist. The Abwehr were wiped out in a sense.’27 Greene admitted in Ways of Escape that his Secret Service comedy, Our Man in Havana, is based on what he learned from his work in 1943–4.28

  The particular agent who inspired Greene’s Wormold was an agent named Paul Fidrmuc, alias Ostro. Fidrmuc, a Czech businessman in his twenties, looked like a blond German. In 1940 he became a German citizen, worked for the Abwehr for a number of years in Denmark and Rome, and then settled in Portugal. His reports to the Abwehr originated in Lisbon and were then passed on to Berlin. British intelligence officers who knew him in the field in Lisbon called him ‘the canoe man’ because he was always ‘hanging about the sea around Lisbon. We thought he was looking out for U-boats.’29 By the autumn of 1943 Paul Fidrmuc was fully operative.

  Fidrmuc first came to SIS notice when his secret reports to the Abwehr, found in the decrypts from Bletchley Park, reached St Albans.30 Even before Greene arrived in St Albans in March 1943, the British had, through the Radio Security Service (RSS), intercepted thirty-seven Ostro reports. Ostensibly they came from a wide scatter of countries – Egypt, South Africa, India, the United States and Britain. Ostro’s reports on Britain were recognised by British Intelligence as fraudulent, but they were well written, carefully structured to give the impression that the reports came from various agents in the field. Certainly the Abwehr believed that Ostro had four or five agents in England and regarded him as one of their best sources of information. His imaginary agents were supposed to be communicating with him in Lisbon by secret writing. British Intelligence considered discrediting him on several occasions, though that would have been difficult since he had such a high reputation with the Abwehr. And all the time, Fidrmuc was studying English press reports, cooking up his information and seemingly handling his completely phoney agents.

  Another agent, cover name Garbo, was as remarkable as Ostro and also contributed to the creation of Greene’s Mr Wormold. In 1942 Bletchley realised that the Abwehr Enigma traffic between Madrid and Berlin contained reports, supposedly from a German agent in the United Kingdom, which were too ludicrous to be true – about drunken orgies in Liverpool, Glasgow dock-workers prepared to sell anyone out for a litre of wine. The British were right to believe that the agent was not even living in England. It turned out that Garbo was a brilliant amateur called Juan Pujol Garcia, who was living in Lisbon. Garcia, a 29-year-old Spaniard of good family, deeply devoted to the cause of British victory, approached our man in Lisbon. He also approached the Abwehr, was recruited by them, provided with secret ink, questionnaires and an accommodation address in Madrid – this last as a place to send his reports from England! In his room in Lisbon, he operated with a map and a Blue Guide to the United Kingdom, a Portuguese study of the British fleet and an Anglo-French vocabulary of military terms.

  When the SIS arranged for Garbo to travel to the United Kingdom, he told the Abwehr that he was visiting London on behalf of the Spanish security services. Once in London, he continued his reports and his sub-agents grew in number to almost thirty, for many of whom Garbo asked payment. These non-existent agents were a mixed lot – a garrulous officer in the Royal Air Force, an official at the Ministry of Information of extreme left-wing views, a Venezuelan businessman living in Glasgow, a communist Greek sailor operating in eastern Scotland, a Gibraltese waiter working in service canteens, an Anglophobe sergeant with the US army service of supply and even Welsh nationalists in the Swansea area.

  Sometimes the information Garbo sent to his controller in Madrid was absolutely accurate and would have been of inestimable value to the Germans, if it had been received on time. For example, he correctly reported the hot tip – supposedly from his Ministry of Information agent – that the Allies were about to invade French North Africa. Alas, the letters were somehow delayed in the post and did not reach Lisbon until 7 November, after the convoys had been spotted by German reconnaissance, and a few hours before the landing took place. The Abwehr trusted their remarkable agent: ‘Your last reports are all magnificent but we are sorry they arrived late.’31

  *

  The business of spying, actual or fabricated, is not limited to the acts of individual agents – it extends to the highest levels of government. In order to prepare for the Portuguese desk, Greene’s first job was to produce what was called a Purple Primer, a handbook containing a list of all persons in Portugal known to have been employed by Axis intelligence services, with a description of the roles they had played. This entailed going through the card index, which had been built up over the years, sorting out the true information from the false and compressing it into a usable form. It was a monumental task, for there were on file almost 2,000 confirmed enemy agents (by VE Day, the figure had reached 3,000) and 200 Germans living in Portugal with known Intelligence connections. Greene also had to deal with forty-six commercial firms in Iberia identified as commercial covers for enemy espionage.32

  There was another reason for compiling the Purple Primer: it would have been immensely useful in the event of an Allied invasion of the peninsula. Working on the Purple Primer was an excellent preparation for dealing with the complications of Portuguese agents whom you could hardly trust, because, although they were working for the Allies, they were also
in the pay either of the German or Portuguese Intelligence.

  Greene’s main purpose at the Portuguese desk was to collect intelligence concerning the peninsula, a labyrinth of spies and intrigue, and make some sense of it – an exercise for which his special abilities and experience had prepared him. To give some idea of the complexities he faced: Lisbon was used by UK and American agents as a departure point; German Intelligence used Lisbon as a base for collecting information about Allied Atlantic convoys which was passed on to German submarines; the Portuguese authorities, particularly the dreaded German-trained security police, PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado) headed by pro-Nazi Captain Lourenço, turned a blind eye to German clandestine radio stations which reported on the movement of Allied shipping. So long as the Axis forces seemed to be winning the war, every assistance was provided.33

  German Intelligence activities were also condoned in ‘neutral’ Spain, not only because its government was fascist, but because the Spanish police force had been reorganised in 1940 by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The head of the Spanish police was on the German Intelligence payroll as were many of his subordinates. Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was a personal friend of General Franco and had set up observation posts at Algeciras and Tangier, on either side of the Straits of Gibraltar. Given the dominance of Himmler and the Abwehr, the Germans, in effect, had control over the intelligence and counter-intelligence of Spain.34

  By the time Greene took over the Portuguese desk, the war was already turning in the Allied favour. It was possible to provide irrefutable evidence that Portugal was assisting the Axis powers and taking a pro-German stance, although Portugal’s leader, Dr Salazar, was not initially receptive to the evidence that the British offered.

  There had already been secret talks (to be found in the OSS files) between Salazar’s Government and the British Foreign Office regarding the protection which could be given to Portugal in the event of an Axis invasion. They concluded that guerrilla warfare would follow an Axis invasion, including the active application of a scorched-earth policy and the turning over of the Azores and Portuguese colonies to the Allies for safe keeping and defence.35 Whilst the police in Portugal were pro-fascist and unfriendly to the British, the Portuguese Legion, numbering some 150,000, were actively pro-British and sought arms from the SIS. Salazar himself was wary of the British.

  To win Salazar over, the SIS built up a tremendous dossier proving that his police were not following a neutral policy. They named stevedores in sabotage operations, Portuguese police officers who were under German influence; they offered correspondence between the Abwehr and Portuguese agents proving how active the Abwehr was; they listed the known German networks and radio stations in Portugal, thus establishing that German activities against British convoys stemmed from Lisbon. They presented Salazar with such impressive proofs of Portuguese collaboration during the spring of 1943 that he finally exercised his authority and made the Germans close down their radio stations and informer networks. This effectively brought Salazar on to the Allies’ side. He became increasingly sympathetic to the Allies as it became apparent that they were winning the war.36

  Once the tide turned in the Allies’ favour, the SIS in Ryder Street had the brainwave of trying to ‘turn’ the German Security Service in Portugal, and Greene was involved in the operation as the head of the Portuguese desk. It was a daring procedure and great care had to be taken in selecting the type of German in the Security Service who could be approached to work for the Allies. Sir Dick White, then of MI5, told Philby that he had an agent, ‘Klop’ Ustinov,fn1 who was originally Russian and had worked at the German embassy in London in 1934 as press attaché. He was an ardent anti-Nazi and knew who were and were not Nazis in the Abwehr.

  Ustinov was sent to Lisbon in the spring of 1944. He had a comic-sounding cover name – Middleton-Pendleton. When he arrived, he was given a flat to share with an SIS officer and, with the names of the German embassy staff in Lisbon at hand, picked out various consular officials known to him as anti-Nazis who might respond to his overtures. He simply sent them ‘Greetings from Klop’ and arranged a meeting of the kind that seems to an outsider somewhat juvenile: ‘Meet me by the 3rd oak tree at the top of the mountain.’ Klop would return an hour later and say: ‘Yes. He’s willing to work with us.’ It wasn’t only high-ranking officers, but clerks and secretaries who were ‘turned’. Klop would invite a secretary to lunch and advise the SIS officer to leave the flat and not come back until 1.30, by which time the girl would be sobbing and willing to offer the SIS inside information.37

  As the Germans continued to lose the war, military and consular men who had also hated Nazis were increasingly willing to spy for the Allies. Some offered to work for the SIS without any persuasion. One was a German with the cover name Artist. Artist, a highly placed Abwehr official, had approached one of Greene’s men in Lisbon and had arranged to meet him in the Monserrate Gardens at Cintra. He arrived dressed in a pin-stripe suit and an Anthony Eden hat, yet was every inch the Prussian. His greeting startled the SIS officer: ‘I recruited three people to spy for me against Britain. I knew them to be pro-British and knew that they would double-cross me. I am pleased you are running my agents. Now run me.’

  Artist proved valuable to the SIS in many ways, not least in protecting those Abwehr men who had defected, telling the authorities that they were not double agents. He was a courageous man who provided information about the organisation and operations of the Abwehr, and about political and economic conditions in Germany and occupied Europe. He protected some of Britain’s best agents, some of whom escaped. Artist was not so fortunate. British Intelligence knew that he was not safe, but did not act promptly enough. He was kidnapped by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) under Himmler, and taken back to Germany in the false bottom of a trunk. Almost fifty years after the event, there was still anguish in the voice of the SIS man who related his fate in Germany: ‘Artist perished at Oranienburg concentration camp, hanged by Hitler not because his cover was blown, but because the SD were closing in on all people not of their sort. SIS could have warned him. We let him down.’38

  *

  Greene gave a terse and somewhat random account of his activities at London headquarters:

  It was an office job really … Giving directions to our man in Lisbon. For example, the thing which I have always wondered was whether Kim Philby smiled up his sleeve when I arranged to have Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, harassed. I had him harassed, when he went to Portugal, by giving the police information about the meetings he was holding and so on. My telegrams had to be passed by Kim and he didn’t prevent it and everyone knows now that Admiral Canaris was on our side. He was anti-Hitler. But there was talk on the German side of a separate peace which the Russians were very much afraid of. I wonder whether Kim knew this and was letting me harass him because the Russians feared a separate peace.39

  Moscow was afraid that, if Germany were released from her war with Britain, she would be able to concentrate on defeating the Soviet Union, thus bringing an end to communism. Philby explains his attitude at the time in My Silent War: ‘It often appeared that the British wanted a simple return to the status quo before Hitler, to a Europe comfortably dominated by Britain and France through the medium of reactionary governments just strong enough to keep their own people in order and uphold the cordon sanitaire against the Soviet Union.’40 Philby had been instructed to frustrate moves toward a separate peace with Germany, at any cost, and did so.

  These machinations are made clear in the intriguing defection of Otto John, the German who warned the British that plans were afoot to assassinate Hitler. Philby put paid to negotiations with John which, if they had succeeded, would have saved lives by bringing the war to a swifter conclusion.

  Otto John came to Lisbon from Madrid and met with Tony Graham-Maingott, an agent under Cecil Gledhill at the Lisbon station. At first, the meeting was indirect:

  I flew to Lisbon and Juan fetched me
from my hotel. We first took a zigzag walk through the centre of Lisbon and then a taxi into the suburbs where my British interviewer was waiting for us in a car belonging to one of his Portuguese agents. Tony Graham-Meingott [sic] was a middle-aged, tubby, decorous-looking gentleman, radiating bonhomie. We drove out of the city into rolling country, left the car by the roadside and walked along country lanes between stubble-fields and vineyards with our eyes skinned for the approach of any unwanted observer. As we talked I gained the impression that he was not speaking freely and had been briefed for our meeting by London [Philby] … Without giving names I outlined to him the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, its motives and aims together with its united political backing.41

  The leader of the conspiracy wanted to know whether or not the British Government would be prepared to negotiate with the new Reich Government led by him. Maingott’s answer was: ‘The German opposition must soon prove itself [emphasis added] by doing something if it wishes to get a hearing in London.’42.

  John gives no date, but the meeting probably took place in November 1943 – when Greene was handling the Portuguese desk and thus involved in organising the meeting, though Philby would be supervising. What ‘prove itself’ must mean was that the assassination of Hitler was overdue. If it happened, London would reconsider its position. It would help to bring about the end of the war and even if it failed, it could still bring about extraordinary disaster for the Axis cause.

  On 20 July 1944 Colonel von Stauffenberg made his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler which led to the death of thousands of Germans, including some of their great military leaders. Philby kept Otto John away from London for as long as possible so that the remaining opposition to Hitler was not precisely known, and the British Government was not enticed into making a separate peace with Germany. The communists wanted to install a puppet communist Government in Germany after the war and Philby, by scuttling Otto John’s overtures to the Allies, was instrumental in seeing that that in part came about.43