Ring of Spies

by Alex Gerlis

  When he finally arrived at the park, five minutes late, there was no sign of Agent Donne. The rain, which had been intermittent all day, was now a downpour. When Jim finally turned up – stopping for too long by the statue and looking confused – it was nearly half past five.

  ‘What the hell kept you?’

  ‘And nice to see you too.’ Jim was drenched, his cheap raincoat covered in dark patches and water dripping from his nose and chin. ‘I told him it was too short notice. I was on a late shift today: due to start at noon and finish at nine. I rang them this morning and said I had a bad toothache and had managed to get a dental appointment at five, so they told me to come in for a nine thirty to four thirty shift and they’ve only gone and docked my pay.’

  ‘You should have called in sick. Look, we’d better get a move on. I presume you’ve a message for me?’

  Jim slowed down. ‘You’re to get details of Allied deployments and defences in an area with Malmedy in the north-east corner and Namur in the north-west corner, then follow the River Meuse down to Sedan and back across to the border between Luxembourg and Germany. Apparently if you look at a map it will make sense.’

  Milton nodded and repeated the message, then it was Jim’s turn to nod. ‘They say they want you to pass them on to me on Monday.’

  ‘Monday? That’s too soon, it only gives me two days. Tell them I’ve got the message but can’t meet you before next Wednesday. And I don’t think we should use either St James’s Park or Middle Temple again. Do you know the bandstand in Hyde Park?’

  ‘I’ll find it.’

  ‘Not difficult – it’s towards the south-east corner. We’d better make it five thirty, though.’

  * * *

  Working on new plans for an Allied crossing of the Rhine meant Agent Milton was in and out of the directorate’s map department on a daily basis. Holt, the man who ran MI4, was an unpredictable character: officious and awkward one day, the following one friendly to the point of oleaginous with nothing being too much trouble.

  That day he was in a helpful mood, keen to tell Milton about a new addition he was hoping to make to his stamp collection. His mind was clearly still on philately when Milton asked – apparently as an afterthought – whether he could perhaps see maps covering the area Jim had described.

  ‘The Ardennes, you mean? Not a hunting ground you’ve been interested in recently, Major.’

  Milton explained he was looking in more detail at the eastern approach routes to the Rhine.

  Holt opened the card index on his desk. ‘And would you be interested in terrain or position of Allied forces?’

  He sounded like a tailor giving a client a choice of material for a suit. Milton said the latter if that was possible, please.

  ‘Mainly US forces there.’

  He said that didn’t terribly matter.

  ‘Here’s the latest American map, Major: plenty on their deployments in the area.’

  * * *

  It was raining again when he met Jim near the bandstand in Hyde Park. It was the penultimate day of November and it felt as if it hadn’t stopped raining since they’d last met. He had to speak up against the beating of the rain and the whistling of the wind as the two men walked along, shoulder to shoulder.

  ‘You’re going to need to pay careful attention, Jim. It’s a long list. Starting in the north-east – round Elsenborn – the US 5th Corps… North-east of Dinant, the US 1st Army, then the 2nd US Armored Division just outside Dinant… Have you got all this? The US 101st Airborne Division is in Bastogne and the 4th Armored Division is just south of the town, the 3rd US Army further south in Luxembourg. Christ, if only it would stop raining for half a bloody day… Let’s go over it once more, Jim…’

  Chapter 11

  London, January 1945

  ‘You’ve been given all the necessary stamps of approval, Prince.’

  ‘Well that’s—’

  ‘You need to come to London on Monday morning to meet the chap you’ll be working for.’

  ‘Monday? That’s—’

  ‘The day after Sunday.’

  It was just after six o’clock in the evening and he’d only just returned home from work. He was standing in the hallway in his wet raincoat and was anxious to spend some time with his son before he went to bed. He was not in the mood for a telephone call with Hugh Harper. It was a curt call: no niceties enquiring how he was or pleasantries about the weather or his journey back to Lincoln the previous day.

  ‘What I meant, sir, was that it hardly gives me time to make arrangements. I need to make sure everything is sorted as far as Henry is concerned, and then there’s work – I’ve got a number of cases I—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, Prince. Your chief constable has already been made aware of the situation and will deal with your cases. As far as your domestic arrangements are concerned, you have a nanny, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir, but—’

  ‘You have a few days to sort all that out then.’

  * * *

  ‘So you’re the famous Prince we’ve been hearing all about, eh? Detective Superintendent Richard Prince.’

  The man who’d so carefully enunciated Prince’s rank and full name had been waiting for him at the entrance of the mews house in London’s Mayfair, a narrow building on a cobbled alley set between Brook Street and Grosvenor Street. Now they were in a bright room on the top floor, the sun streaming in through a large slanted window, wide open despite the January chill. The blackout curtains billowed like flags of distress.

  Harper had told him to ask for a man called King, and made a laboured joke about a Prince meeting a King. The man had introduced himself as Lance King and said little else as he led Prince up the staircase. He was a tall, round-shouldered man, perhaps in his early forties and thin to the point of looking unwell – an impression enhanced by a pale complexion. Prince’s mother would probably have described him as someone who spent too much time indoors.

  They sat on a pair of low armchairs, Lance King revealing a pair of scuffed brown brogues as he crossed his legs. ‘Just to dispose of any awkwardness, I’m assuming you do know who we are?’

  ‘Mr Gilbey introduced me to a Mr Harper: he said I’d be working for MI5. I know what MI5 is… of course.’

  ‘Of course. First things first: is it going to be Richard, or Prince, or Detective Superintendent Prince?’

  ‘Well, certainly no need for the latter: I’m very happy with Richard.’

  ‘Good, suits me – and you’ll call me Lance.’ He held his cigarette in front of him as if it were a dart and pointed it in Prince’s direction. ‘This place, by the way… it’s one of the many MI5 outposts. For reasons of security we tend to squirrel ourselves away in various buildings across central London. Hugh Harper has the rather large brief of being responsible for the detection of Nazi spies in this country. I’m one of his case officers. Tell me, Richard, what have they told you about this case?’

  ‘Very little – only that the mission will be in this country, and something about the role being a mix of police detective and intelligence officer.’

  Lance King carefully inspected the end of his cigarette, checking if it was still alight, eventually discarding it in an ashtray and lighting a fresh one.

  ‘Since the start of the war, the Abwehr – the German intelligence service – has sent a few dozen agents over to this country. It’s difficult to say exactly how many, because of course we don’t know about those who’ve not been captured or who went to ground as soon as they arrived here. But broadly speaking I’d estimate we’ve captured in excess of seventy German agents operating here. Some sixty of them have been turned into what we call double agents – in other words, we use them to pass false intelligence back to Germany, and of course by its nature that is most helpful to us and unhelpful to them. We used this double agent system to some significant effect with D-Day.

  ‘Some German spies aren’t suitable to be used as double agents or refuse to get involved, and in
their case they’ve been tried, found guilty and subsequently executed, as was the case with the spy you caught in Lincolnshire.’

  ‘Wolfgang Scholz.’

  ‘Yes, the late Herr Scholz. There’s one further small group: Germans we know about and catch up with but who die before we can do anything useful with them. The spies I’m going to tell you about now are from this group.

  ‘Early in 1940, we became aware of wireless transmissions being made from somewhere in London with a signal strong enough for them to reach an Abwehr receiving station in Cuxhaven in north-west Germany. For us to trace the source of a transmission a number of circumstances need to be in our favour. One of these is the length of the transmission: one that lasts more than three minutes will give us a very reasonable chance of tracing it. Then there’s their frequency and pattern. Even a short transmission stands a decent chance of being traced if it is made, for example, every third Wednesday evening between seven fifteen and seven thirty. But these transmissions we picked up were very short: always less than two minutes – not long enough for us to get a fix on them. And nor was there any pattern to them. They’d be made on different days and at varying times and – making it even more difficult for us – often weeks apart. Sometimes the gap between them was as long as two months.

  ‘The transmissions were, as I say, very short and of course heavily coded; likewise the messages from Germany when they switched to receive. Nothing was ever transmitted in clear, but then it would have been most unusual had it been. However, our analysts did pick up two recurrent words, most likely names: Byron and Milton. Because of the pattern in which they’re used, we believe Byron refers to the agent transmitting and receiving the messages, while Milton is another agent. Any questions so far?’

  ‘How do they know that Byron and Milton are agents?’

  ‘It’s to do with the frequency with which the names occur and their context in the messages. But as I say, the messages were too short, irregular and infrequent for us to trace them. The best our radio detection chaps could do was to say they were probably coming from the centre of London, and more likely to the west than the east, which as you imagine is still a large area. At the same time – and completely unbeknown to the Germans – we are intercepting their most sensitive communications and decoding them—’

  ‘Really! How on earth do we manage to—’

  ‘I’ll come to that another time, if you don’t mind. In the course of intercepting and analysing many thousands of hours of German transmissions, we also picked up references to Byron and Milton from sources in Berlin we’ve previously identified as being associated with the Abwehr.

  ‘In November 1943, someone spotted a reference to a Keats in a message to Byron that also mentioned Milton. This was a message from a source whose code we had broken, so our analysts were able to work out much of what it was saying. From what we could gather, an agent with the code name Keats had landed on the east coast of England and made his way to Chelmsford in Essex, from where he was going to travel to London by train. Byron was being instructed to make arrangements to meet him there. We even had a good idea of when he was going to be making his journey, so the local police were instructed to go to the railway station and check all the passengers travelling to London. Unfortunately, Agent Keats realised what was going on and tried to escape by running across the track, straight into the path of a train.

  ‘A few weeks later – December 1943 – another message was intercepted from that same Berlin source, now referring to a Shelley. It appeared this was another agent who’d arrived in England and was making his way to London to be met by Byron, and this time the analysts also picked up something about him meeting Milton. There were two or three intercepts we made where Shelley was mentioned; in one of them there was a reference to him being in Coventry, and then another a few days later suggesting Byron hadn’t heard from him. We were obviously worried at this stage – as you know from your experience, we don’t like German spies at the best of times, but what we really can’t abide are German spies who disappear.’

  ‘And there was no clue as to his identity?’

  ‘Even though they transmit in code, the bloody Germans avoid details like that. We did manage, however, to establish a clear connection between these messages and Byron in London: during the period when Shelley apparently arrived in this country and went missing there was increased traffic between Cuxhaven and Byron transmitting from London. We alerted the local police in Coventry, and a few days later they informed us that a body had been discovered in a boarding house. The papers turned out to be false, so we assumed this was Agent Shelley.’

  ‘Had he been killed?’

  ‘The pathologist said he had died of a heart attack. He was in his early fifties, not the kind of man one would have thought would be sent on a mission like this.’

  ‘So maybe he wasn’t Shelley after all?’

  ‘As I say, Richard, his papers were all forgeries, there was no record of the name he was using and the labels on his clothes had all been removed. Now, as you well know, when the Service sends an agent into Nazi-occupied Europe, they go out of their way to ensure their clothing is as inconspicuous as possible, even changing labels and the tailoring as I understand it. The Germans slipped up in this chap’s case, he wasn’t properly prepared.’

  ‘And did you hear any more from Byron, the radio operator?’

  King shook his head. ‘No – well not for a while anyway. The Germans must have taken the view that the deaths of Keats and Shelley called for a period of radio silence. However, in March, new transmissions mentioned Byron and Milton along with a new agent. This one was code-named Dryden – I imagine you’re seeing a pattern by now. Remember, Berlin is quite unaware of the extent to which we are able to intercept and decode their messages, especially the ones being sent within Germany, which are often in clear. From these transmissions we knew Dryden was already in this country and would be travelling from Birmingham by train to London on a particular date, making his way by a circuitous route to a pub in Kentish Town, where we understood he would be meeting Agent Byron.

  ‘We managed to tail him, but for reasons that are unclear, he aborted the meet outside the pub and went to what must have been a fall-back point in Hampstead. As he left there, we arrested him.’

  ‘Ah – so he’s still alive?’

  Lance King avoided looking at Prince as he spooned sugar into his teacup and stirred it vigorously.

  ‘If only he were.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘An interrogation went wrong.’

  ‘But surely you must have found something out about him?’

  ‘Precious little, I’m afraid. He was very, very good. He claimed he was a Polish refugee who’d come over here after the fall of France, worked in Manchester, where his factory and lodgings were bombed, after which he became an itinerant labourer. He stuck to his story, never wavered from it. You see, he’d been found with nothing incriminating on him and he knew that. Same with the other two: as clean as a whistle. We put some of our best people on him and they couldn’t shake him, so finally we got authorisation to be a bit more robust.’

  ‘Do you mean torture?’

  ‘Good heavens, no, absolutely not: we’re not the Germans, you know. As I say, something went wrong and Dryden died. We thought we were getting close to Byron and Milton, and instead we’re as far away from them as before.’

  ‘And that’s it? Not much to go on.’

  ‘There’s more, Richard, don’t you worry. Once Dryden died, we planted a story about him, along with his photograph, in some newspapers, hoping that might flush out Byron. But more radio silence, this time for the best part of six months. Then, at the end of August, there was a flurry of transmissions in Germany mentioning Milton in particular, and this time the name Donne kept cropping up as well. It soon became apparent that Donne had not only landed in England but had made his way to London and was in contact with both Byron and Milton.

  ‘There were
more transmissions by Byron, but again they were very short and there was no pattern as to when they were being sent. But certainly in the first half of September there was a good deal of traffic. It’s disappointing that our radio chaps couldn’t narrow it down more than they did. At one stage they thought the transmissions were from the Wandsworth area, then they said something about Fulham, but…’

  ‘Could Byron be moving around to make his transmissions?’

  ‘Doubtful: he’s going to be using a large and powerful machine and it would be too risky to lug around something as bulky as that. I think we lack a degree of expertise in this area, to be frank. The Germans seem to be much better at it than us; I suppose they get more practice.

  ‘We believe that Donne has been sent to London to act as a go-between, passing on intelligence given to him by Milton to Byron, who then transmits it back to Germany. For the Germans to go to such lengths shows that Milton must be a very highly placed agent. We have very good reason to believe he passed crucial intelligence to the Germans and alerted them to our attack on Arnhem in September, specifically where our landing and drop zones would be and that our objective was the two bridges over the Rhine. One of the early messages used the phrase Operation Market Garden in clear. Very few people were aware of the name of the operation at that stage. And I’m afraid it doesn’t end there.’

  King got up and paced the room, ending up back by the map. This time he tapped his pencil on southern Belgium.

  ‘The Ardennes: as you know, the Germans took us – more to the point our American friends – by surprise when they launched a major offensive there on 16 December. They did very well at first, moving quickly, capturing fuel supplies and creating a significant bulge eastwards into Belgium. They laid siege to the town of Bastogne, which is of major strategic importance because it’s the confluence of all major roads in the area. For a while it looked as if they were going to cause us very significant problems. It’s only since the weather’s cleared up and we’ve been able to attack from the air that we’ve managed to counter their offensive, but it’s been a close-run thing.