In February 1938, on the second day of criminal proceedings against Percy Glading and his accomplices, a welder had gone to the police with what appeared to be an important tip-off. The summer before, he had seen Geoffrey Pyke in the offices of the Amalgamated Engineers Union where he was frequently in conversation with ‘Communists, particularly J. R. Scott and J. R. Longworth’. Of these two, the welder went on, Scott ‘was in very frequent telephonic communication with Glading’.
The welder had been following the Glading trial in the press where he had read about the shadowy ‘Mr Stevens’ – to whom Glading seemed to report. Stevens’s identity was a mystery, one which the welder thought he had solved. He wondered ‘if Pyke was identical with “Mr Stevens” and if Scott had acted as intermediary’.
Later that month another member of the public came forward as a result of the Glading case to raise concerns about Pyke. This time it was an insurance agent who had gone to Great Ormond Street to discuss Pyke’s cottage in the Devil’s Punchbowl. ‘As I was about to enter I heard PIKE read aloud, as if dictating, “We have been attacking the AEC and we are now working on Negretti and Zambra.” PIKE asked me when I entered what I wanted and appeared disturbed at my appearance. There was nothing to show to whom he had been speaking, no typist, no report that he could have been reading aloud and no apparent telephone.’ This insurance agent ‘received a bad impression’ and decided not to insure the cottage. Only when he read about the Glading trial did he think that Pyke might somehow be mixed up in all this.
So what was Pyke up to? Was he recording a secret message, or rehearsing a report to give in a cell meeting? Who was the ‘we’ he referred to, or indeed the AEC, and Negretti and Zambra?
‘AEC’ was either the Associated Equipment Company, which made buses and lorries, or ‘AEU’ – the Amalgamated Engineers Union – either misheard or wrongly transcribed. The other names are perhaps more revealing. Negretti and Zambra was the name of a company which specialised in gun-sights, aviation gauges, thermometers and flow meters, and whose principal client by 1937 was the Air Ministry.
At the time, most Russian espionage activity against Britain was geared towards the capture of scientific and technological intelligence. Glading had provided his Soviet handler with the blueprints of specialist military instruments, and, in the year that he was convicted, Mihel Kaptelsev, a Soviet agent attached to a trade delegation, had tried to acquire technical information from a Vickers Armstrong employee. His replacement, Aleksei Doschenko, another Soviet agent, did almost exactly the same thing, approaching a worker at Rollston’s aircraft factory. Negretti and Zambra was precisely the kind of company that Soviet agents might be told to ‘attack’. Was this what Pyke was up to? Indeed, was he using his charity as a front to conceal these activities?
Pyke certainly understood that Voluntary Industrial Aid for Spain (VIAS) might be mistaken for a Communist front organisation, and went out of his way to refute the idea. He characterised it instead as ‘a strong autonomous body to the right of the CP [Communist Party]’. One trades union official described him as ‘particularly anxious that [VIAS] work should not get into the hands of the Communist organisation’. Of course this proves nothing. By definition a ‘front’ organisation must conceal its agenda.
At the very least, Pyke’s charity had clear Communist associations. It was later described as ‘closely linked’ to the Aircraft Shop Stewards National Council, a militant ginger group set up by a Comintern agent, and we know that three of its most energetic figures – Harry Adams, Joe Scott and Jack Tanner – belonged to the Party and moved as one. This hints at the idea that Pyke’s charity might have been subverted to a Communist agenda, without him necessarily being involved.
MI5, however, was in no doubt that VIAS was ‘under Communist control’ but they had no concrete evidence. Their interest in Pyke was stepped up after these two tip-offs from members of the public and his case was taken up by Jane Sissmore, the legendary MI5 officer later described by Soviet agent Kim Philby as being almost without exception ‘the ablest professional intelligence officer ever employed by MI5’. Sissmore began by asking for Pyke’s passport papers, presumably in the hope of identifying suspicious patterns of travel. Nobody got back to her, other cases came up and the trail went cold.
Although Pyke wondered occasionally if the ‘English sicherheits polizei’, i.e. MI5, ‘were listening in on the telephone conversations and opening the letters of all the organisations which by helping Republican Spain were trying to stem the Fascist tide’, in other words, organisations like VIAS, the reality was far less impressive. Staff and funding continued to be in short supply, and for almost a year Pyke fell off the MI5 radar. In 1939 he appeared in an SIS report on Spain, which remains classified, before being linked to the woman in Golders Green who boasted of belonging to the ‘secret service’.
This had come to the attention of MI5 in late August 1939, by which time this secretive government department was readying itself for war and moving to a new location. Evidence of the suspicious remark was filed away and forgotten about, in part because it concerned Communist networks at the time when the Soviet threat was not a top priority.
MI5’s longtime Director-General, Vernon Kell, the parrot-owning asthmatic who had asked in 1916 for Pyke’s post to be opened, had recently assured representatives of the Deuxième Bureau, the French equivalent of SIS, that ‘[Soviet] activity in England is non-existent, in terms of both intelligence and political subversion’. This was reflected in the fact that MI5 had just one officer working on Soviet espionage at the start of the war.
Within the Foreign Office, MI6 and to a lesser extent MI5, there was a gently dismissive attitude towards the idea that the fabric of British society might be riddled with Soviet spies. Thinking like this could be taken as evidence of a touchingly antique paranoia. The suspicion that had hung for a moment over Geoffrey Pyke was probably proof of nothing more than the public’s tendency to see ‘reds under the bed’.
The mood in London on 30 August 1939 was lively and industrious. Windows were being busily blacked out, barrage balloons had begun to bob up and down and heaps of sand were appearing on street corners, there to fill sandbags or put out fires once the bombs had begun to fall. Meanwhile in the offices of the BBC German Service a group of men went over their script for the last time.
Broadcasting as ‘Peter Salter’ and ‘Stanley Fry’, Peter Raleigh and Stanley Smith proceeded to describe their ‘holiday’ in the Third Reich. Both men would later become well-known BBC foreign correspondents. Raleigh made his name in the Algerian Civil War while Smith, then known as Patrick Smith, was for many years the BBC’s man in Rome. Yet their first BBC broadcast proved to be their least accurate.
Stanley Smith hamming it up in Nazi uniform while on holiday in Germany, 1936
Peter Raleigh, in 1940
The script they read from had been liberally supplemented and redacted by a man introduced to them as a Foreign Office official. In fact he was Sir Campbell Stuart, Director of Propaganda to Enemy Countries, and from the moment he met Pyke and his young charges he took against them, dismissing Smith and Raleigh as ‘“pink” Cambridge undergraduates [‘pink’ meaning left-wing here], Grammar School boys, I should think of a scholarly disposition, but undoubtedly naive to a degree’. He described their script as ‘quite unsuitable’ and decided ‘to rewrite it almost entirely’. Raleigh and Smith remembered things differently, recalling only that this crusty official told them to describe England on their return as ‘stiff with uniforms and sandbags’ – which it was not.
Two days later German forces poured into Poland. ‘One of my personal complaints against Hitler,’ wrote Raleigh, was ‘that he paid no attention to our broadcast.’ The following night a storm of strange, bullying intensity swept over the capital, and the next morning, as tens of thousands of Sunday services began all over the country – vicars welcoming the faithful, announcing the first hymn, organ pipes starting to blast – the Prime Minister de
clared in a weary voice that Britain was at war with Germany.
The scheme was effectively over. This courageous band of linguists, along with Professor Higgins and Pyke, had been just days away from releasing their preliminary findings, and their results were astonishing. Using a modified version of the Gallup technique, based on 232 completed conversations, they estimated that just 16 per cent of the German population felt that territorial conquest justified war. If there was a conflict, incredibly, just over a third of those interviewed wanted Hitler and Germany to lose. Only 19 per cent imagined Germany was capable of victory if facing an alliance of Britain, France, Russia and Poland, while more than half the German population felt the Nazi Party was unjust in its treatment of society, failing to treat rich and poor alike. Sixty per cent of those Germans they spoke to disapproved of the government’s attitude towards Jews.
Even today, given what we know, these results are startling. They are the result of the only serious attempt to gauge public opinion in Nazi Germany on the eve of war and are remarkable both for their content and for the fact that they were gathered at all. Pyke’s amateurs had managed to work undetected in an environment so hostile that it had scared off all professional British intelligence agents. His idea that the members of his team would not be found out if they presented themselves as indisputably and eccentrically English – friendly, loud and even pompous – had worked perfectly.
The extended accounts of their interviews provide a detailed and at times moving portrait of a nation sleepwalking towards the brink. We meet the crooked timber of German humanity, from reluctant garage workers and gregarious road sweepers through to tailors, innkeepers, waiters and lawyers, students and teachers, steel workers, shoemakers, artists and decorators, pianists and violinists, librarians and bookbinders, salesmen and farmers; Catholics, Nazis, communists and socialists. They are generous, they are funny, they are serious, they are hospitable. There is a wide-eyed woman with enormous hands who urges Raleigh to feel her biceps; the secretary who was only interested in talking about the speed of her touch-typing; the middle-aged businessman who read The Times every day; those Germans who pretended not to hear when greeted with ‘Heil Hitler!’ through to the ball-bearing factory-worker with his political views lifted straight out of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. At times this disparate group seemed to be united by nothing more than a willingness to share their thoughts with a friendly English tourist.
But there were aspects of this survey and how it came about which did not add up. Why did Pyke fly to Paris in late July? Who was the mysterious ‘Professor Higgins’ and why did he play such an important role? Was Marjory Watson a Nazi agent, as MI5 suspected, and how did the likes of Fred Fuller and Kenneth Spencer, his contact in Berlin, come into Pyke’s orbit? Moreover, where did the money come from to fund this elaborate operation?
With only a handful of people aware of the survey, and most of them sworn to secrecy, these were not questions that Pyke was required to answer. Instead, in the days after the outbreak of war, he turned to the future. The question he asked himself now was familiar: how should he fight fascism? With the nation at war he knew that there was ‘no hope for private organisations and still less for private individuals like myself’. Perhaps it was time for a different approach.
Meanwhile in MI5, now that the Soviet Union was in league with Nazi Germany, the focus of their counter-espionage activities had begun to shift. London was fast becoming a hub for Soviet espionage, on a scale that the Security Service would not understand for years, and it would soon become clear that somehow Geoffrey Pyke was caught up in it.
PYKE HUNT, PART 2
IN THE EARLY hours of a cold February morning in 1940 a volunteer police constable cycling through Bloomsbury heard a strange sound. He squeezed on his brakes and paused to listen. The streets were empty, unlit and silent, apart from this electronic fluttering noise. It sounded like a message being tapped out in Morse code. The policeman made a note of the building from which it came and pedalled back to the station as fast as he could. Fifteen minutes later two officers from Special Branch were parked outside the house, straining to hear more of those tell-tale sounds. But they were too late. The street was again dark, deserted and still.
A report of this incident was passed on to MI5, followed by a list of those living in the house from which the suspicious noise had come. The British Puppets Model Theatre had an office on the ground floor. It was probably safe to rule them out. The publisher Mervyn, later Lord, Horder was also based in the building; as were a compositor, an architect and the cartoonist Arthur Ferrier, then drawing the glamour cartoon strip ‘Our Dumb Blonde’ for the Sunday Pictorial; while the occupant of rooms on the second floor was none other than Geoffrey Pyke, now described by MI5 as ‘a known Communist’.
Two Special Branch officers were dispatched to investigate. They spoke to the housekeeper at No. 32 Great Ormond Street, a Mrs Lipschitz, who explained that Pyke was ‘in the habit of listening to foreign broadcasts even in the early hours of the morning’. But it was hard to imagine why these broadcasts would sound so much like Morse code.
Whatever was going on in Pyke’s rooms, it did not stop, and three weeks later more suspicious noises were reported from his flat. Again ‘investigations failed to produce any evidence of transmitting, and the case was closed’.
By this stage of the war the country had been plodding for more than six months through what was known as the Bore War or, in America, the Phoney War. After the devastating German invasion of Poland, London had not been flattened by the Luftwaffe, as so many had predicted. Indeed, there was a cautious sense that this might not happen after all. Noticeably fewer Londoners carried around their rubber gas-masks and waves of evacuees had started to return to the capital. But all this began to change in early April 1940 after German forces launched Operation Weserübung, their assault on Denmark and Norway. Not long after there was, in the case of Geoffrey Pyke, what MI5’s Colonel Malcolm Cumming called ‘an interesting, or possibly even significant, development’.
MI5’s Lady Superintendent, the ‘rather terrifying’ Miss Dicker, had received a job application from a would-be secretary that came accompanied by ‘a glowing testimonial from no other than Geoffrey Pyke’. Equally intriguing was the identity of the woman who had suggested that the applicant should get in touch with MI5: Philippa Strachey, sister of one of Pyke’s oldest friends, James Strachey. The woman who hoped to work at MI5 was one of Pyke’s undercover pollsters, Marjory Watson.
‘The plot thickened considerably,’ Cumming went on, ‘with a look-up on Miss Watson, who, we find, is the proud possessor of a fat “Personal File” here.’ Watson’s file made out that she was a Nazi agent. Very soon MI5 would learn that during the 1920s she had belonged to the British Union of Fascists, had claimed to be ‘on excellent terms with a large number of Nazi officials’ and ‘never ceased from spreading German propaganda’. Meanwhile Pyke was supposed to be a Communist. Was their collaboration the strange fruit of the Russo-German pact? Was one duping the other? Or had MI5 and Special Branch simply got their wires crossed?
‘In view of this rather curious link-up,’ remarked Cumming to MI5’s liaison with Military Intelligence, ‘I think you will agree that we ought to try to get to the bottom of Master Pyke’s activities.’
Malcolm Cumming was later described by a colleague as ‘a short man, not overly endowed with intellectual skills but intensely loyal to MI5. Like the policemen in John Buchan novels, he seemed as likely to be chasing the hero as the villain.’ He now recommended that Watson be asked to fill out the standard questionnaire for potential MI5 secretaries, ‘in the hope that we might glean something from it’, before contacting SIS to see if ‘Master Pyke’ was working for them.
Meanwhile the complexion of the war changed further. The Wehrmacht had now achieved stunning victories not only in Denmark and Norway, but in Belgium, Holland and France. These had been so resounding that many observers were convinced that there must be
an explanation beyond the purely military. Perhaps the Germans had had help from Fifth Columnists – Nazi agents hidden among the population of those countries under attack who passed intelligence to the advancing forces or committed small acts of sabotage. In Britain, as the threat of invasion grew during May 1940, so did the feeling that the country must be full of undercover fascist agents. With the population starting to be gripped by spy fever, a telephone operator in a City of London shipping firm listened in to a conversation she found so suspicious that she went straight to the police.
An unidentified man had called up Marjory Watson, then working as secretary to the Managing Director of the United Baltic Corporation, which for years had run routes between London and the Soviet Union.
‘You see some of our members are now in power,’ the man had told her. ‘I wanted to get in touch with you to see if you would go to America to continue instructing.’
Watson had replied that she was ‘in a new position but it was quite interesting’.
The man said that he would ‘bear her in mind’ before asking ‘if she had seen anything of “Siegfried”’.
She had not. ‘But his duties at the BBC are very awkward,’ she went on, ‘and I will get in touch with him if possible.’
To this, the man said that he was doubtful of Siegfried being ‘absolutely trustworthy’.
The telephone operator made a note of the man’s number. It was Holborn 6119 – to which the only subscriber was Geoffrey Pyke.
This raised all sorts of questions. Who did Pyke mean by ‘our members’? In what way were they ‘in power’? What sort of ‘instructing’ did he want Watson to continue in America and, if this was a continuation, what instruction had she implemented so far? Perhaps these comments related to the group he had mentioned in 1937 ‘attacking’ the specialist arms manufacturer Negretti and Zambra? Then there was ‘Siegfried’ at the BBC: why was his work ‘awkward’? What made him untrustworthy? Indeed, why was there the need for trust in the first place? More to the point, who was he?
Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy Page 20