And then there was Pyke.
As well as campaigning for deep chalk shelters, we know that before the war he also went to great lengths to encourage the publisher Victor Gollancz to put out the anti-appeasement pamphlet THEY Lied, and the following summer lobbied him to lower the proposed price of Guilty Men, a book-length denunciation of British appeasement written pseudonymously by Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard. He had even persuaded the editor of Tribune to pressure Gollancz into doing this, and at one point had lined up Allen Lane at Penguin to take on the book in case Gollancz pulled out. In the end it was published through the Left Book Club at the price Pyke had pushed for and did more than any other publication to shape the British understanding of 1930s appeasement.
We also know that Pyke tried to persuade Allen Lane to publish a book by Professor Alfred Meusel, alleged by SIS to have once been Chief of the German Communist Party and a key member of the Communist ‘anti-war’ campaign. As well as the chalk-shelter pieces, Pyke wrote numerous articles which more or less echoed the Party line, whether on the subject of interned refugees or appeasement.
Even more suggestive were his frequent meetings with Sydney Elliott, Editor of Reynolds News, and especially those moments when their relationship no longer resembled that of a typical freelance journalist and his editor. On the day of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, for example, while his conversationalists observed the giddy reaction in Germany, Pyke noted in his diary that this was ‘a most brilliant move which will, I think, in the long run result in the fall of Chamberlain’, adding ‘I must make a good effort to persuade Sydney Elliott to this view before he writes his leading article for Reynolds on Sunday. [. . .] Sydney is smart but influenced by the last person he has talked to and I suspect that the Labour Party people have been talking to him.’ Pyke appears to have been more interested in which line Elliott took than whether he himself would be commissioned to write an article.
There is also the mystery of what was going on in Pyke’s flat. Around the same time that MI5 was told about the unusual noises sounding like Morse code we know that he had apparently ‘transformed the whole of his top floor into a monitoring station for collecting radio messages from Resistance Movements all over Europe. He had gathered a substantial staff of refugees who could cope with the range of languages and dialects involved, and had organised all the necessary receiving equipment to enable him to edit a daily bulletin of news items from various corners of the Continent.’
What was more, he appeared to have a second office, or propaganda bureau, in Piccadilly. The Special Branch report alleging that Pyke ran Communist ‘action propaganda’ also stated that he and Rünkel, ‘a Communist agent with an unsavoury reputation among refugees’, operated out of a Piccadilly flat ‘filled with newspapers and files of every description’, including some which they thought might have been used for the hatchet job which appeared in the Sunday Dispatch.
The Piccadilly flat in question was not Cyril Ray’s, but one several hundred yards away on St James’s Square. It belonged to Leo Myers, a wealthy Old Etonian who had recently converted to communism. Just as Myers probably gave money to the Party he also offered Pyke money and a space in which to work. When Pyke was in the flat Myers ‘paid all his expenses – rent, lighting, telephone, etc.’, and according to MI5 ‘also paid Pyke’s personal bills, such as the milk bill’.
For all this, having a wealthy Marxist pay for his milk, writing articles in support of deep chalk shelters or gathering news from around Europe is not proof that Pyke was a crypto-communist. In no way does his journalistic record reveal him to have been running ‘action propaganda’ for the CPGB. Articles calling for chalk shelters appeared in more right-wing papers such as the Daily Mail or Evening Standard. What was more, Pyke’s first offering on deep chalk shelters was published well before the communist campaign began – indeed, his original article was probably where their idea came from.
Elsewhere he wrote or suggested articles about the need to remove the ‘railings from not just some London squares but all of them and in perpetuity’; and called for a more equitable system to determine which children should be evacuated to the United States. In other words, his views were socialist and Fabian as much as they were communist. They spoke to a broader sensibility which came alive in the wake of Dunkirk but is rarely stressed in popular accounts of that period.
In the early summer of 1940, with a Nazi invasion seemingly imminent, British society began to bank to the left. There were many of those outside the Communist Party who called for radical social change. Captain Tom Wintringham, expelled from the Party two years earlier, argued for the creation of a ‘People’s Army’ under a government which was unafraid of revolution. George Orwell, like Pyke a friend of Wintringham and Leo Myers (who had also offered him money and a space in which to work), saw the summer of 1940 as ‘a moment at which the willingness for sacrifice and drastic changes extended not only to the working class but to nearly the whole of the middle class, whose patriotism, when it comes to the pinch, is stronger than their sense of self-interest’. For men like Orwell, Wintringham and Pyke, establishing socialism was not an alternative to winning the war but a prerequisite. ‘Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out,’ wrote Orwell, adding famously: ‘I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right, let them, if it is necessary. But when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago and for such different reasons is somehow persisting.’ As Pyke’s friend Sir Stafford Cripps wrote to Sir Walter Monckton in September 1940, Russia and Germany seemed to represent ‘an attempt to get away from an effete civilisation which the countries we represent are desperately trying to cling on to and to revivify. It is indeed a revolutionary war and we are on the side of the past – for the moment [. . .] it will be more difficult then to make any change without a revolution [. . .] if only we would act in time to create a new order. But why preach to the converted?’
These views were not communist per se, but cut from the same cloth. They were inspired both by a socialist ideal and by the fear that the war might lead, ironically enough, to a more right-wing or even fascist government in Britain. While none of Pyke’s articles established him as a communist propaganda chief it seems that during the early stages of the war he, like so many others, experienced a shift to the left which resulted in him pushing for more radical social reform.
Yet for MI5’s Milicent Bagot, the idea that he might be responsible for communist ‘action propaganda’ was enough. It tallied with her earlier suspicion that he was Professor P. and she decided to act.
On 15 March 1942, just as Pyke was joined at Combined Operations by Bernal and Zuckerman, Bagot wrote to Harry Hunter, head of MI5’s B.6, asking him to have Pyke placed under surveillance. Only a handful of MI5 suspects could be shadowed like this at any time. As Bagot knew, it was an expensive procedure. But the evidence against Pyke had become much too strong to ignore.
Just three days later, on an overcast Wednesday in London, two MI5 ‘watchers’ took up position outside No. 19 St James’s Square. They had no photograph with which to identify their subject, just a written sketch:
‘Height: 6'1". Hair: black. Eyes: brown. No distinguishing marks. Has been described as Jewish in appearance and “a rather grubby-looking little man with a black beard.”’
Given Pyke’s height, the phrase ‘little man’ is striking. Along with ‘Jewish in appearance’ it was there to tell the two watchers that their man would stand out in this elegant pocket of London. Today it reads as something else: a reminder of MI5’s Achilles heel. For many of the staff at the Security Service the calculus of suspicion was calibrated by class. Secrecy and trust could be assumed within the upper reaches of society, so that anyone who spoke right, acted right and had gone to the right schools was beyond suspicion – just one of the re
asons why the Cambridge Spies got away with so much. The Security Service was hamstrung by this mawkish deference to the upper echelons. Jewishness, however, seemed to scramble their calculations of class. Though Pyke came from a distinguished family, had gone to Wellington and Cambridge and sounded ‘right’, being both Jewish and ‘Jewish in appearance’ placed him outside MI5’s traditional understanding of social background. Worse than that, it seemed to suggest for some of them that he should be watched more carefully.
At a quarter past nine, a man matching Pyke’s description stepped out of the house – a ‘tall, thin-bearded man, the kind of hatless, rapidly moving vagrant, who, wherever he goes and whatever the season, besides a bundle of papers beneath his arm, is always carrying a heavy knapsack’. He proceeded north towards Piccadilly. Invisibly, separately, the two watchers began their pursuit.
His first stop was Piccadilly Circus Tube Station where he bought two newspapers – that day’s and the previous day’s copy of The Times – all of which was carefully noted down and the transaction scrutinised for clandestine exchanges. Nothing. Pyke continued east, past the spot where Eros had stood before the war and on to the iconic Lyons Corner House at the start of Coventry Street. It was large, noisy and welcoming, a labyrinth of cafés and restaurants all exuding a cosmopolitan classlessness. The subject made his way to the Old Vienna Café on the mezzanine floor and ordered breakfast from a ‘nippy’ waitress. Perhaps he was about to be met by a contact? Or was the waitress communicating in some kind of code? He met nobody. His interactions were unremarkable. After a solitary breakfast he returned to St James’s Square.
There followed forays to nearby bookshops, lunch alone at the Chantecler Restaurant on Frith Street, then popular among scientists and engineers, a trip to Boots the chemist and tea at a nearby Chicken Inn, one of his favourite haunts. At about six the two watchers called it a day, as they did each evening. Pyke’s night-time activities would remain a mystery.
On Thursday, after his customary breakfast at the Old Vienna, Pyke worked from home until lunchtime when he shot out of the house and got into a taxi. The watchers did likewise. Curiously, Pyke’s cab pulled up on Frith Street, just ten minutes’ walk from his home. He must have been late for lunch – but with whom?
MI5’s men followed him into Mars Restaurant and took a table nearby, confident that Pyke would not have recognised them. Each of these MI5 watchers had been chosen for his chameleonic ability to disappear into most crowds and, as their boss later wrote, for ‘looking as unlike a policeman as possible’. One of the two men made a note of Pyke’s companion, a shortish man in his fifties with blond hair and a moustache. He wore a brigadier’s uniform and medals suggesting he had fought in the last war. But the watchers were too far away to overhear their conversation.
After the meal they followed them outside, at which point the brigadier took a cab towards Whitehall and Pyke disappeared. Not for the last time, the watchers had lost their target.
The next day they picked him up again as he took his breakfast at the Old Vienna Café and trailed him to Richmond Terrace where they spotted the same brigadier from the lunch in Soho. On another occasion they trailed their man to the Ministry of Economic Warfare, where he was seen with an RAF officer before carrying on to the Ministry of Information where he spent more than an hour. After this he rushed out into the street and hopped into a taxi before again being ‘lost to observation’.
Bagot’s job when picking over the minutiae of these reports was to pinpoint the salient detail, the unremarkable fragment which might unlock a more suspicious pattern of behaviour. She knew by now that Pyke had contacts in what she presumed to be the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Ministry of Information. Discreet enquiries could be made to determine the identities of the brigadier and the RAF officer. For now the Ministry of Information employee would remain unknown. Naturally she was frustrated by the lack of observable links between Pyke and any foreign communists, and she might have begun to doubt her instincts. Perhaps this man was merely a well-intentioned left-winger ‘along New Statesman lines’, as one MI5 report suggested, who possessed a strange ability to attract suspicion wherever he went. It was too early to say. Bagot decided to keep the observation going.
The following Wednesday, having lost Pyke twice the day before, the two watchers had their first triumph. They saw him have lunch with a woman they knew to be a contact of Rolf Rünkel, and who was now working as a secretary to David Astor. The next day they produced an even more valuable nugget of intelligence.
They had followed their subject to King’s Cross where he had lunch with a new contact. This man was trailed to a house near Golders Green. They described him as: ‘Age 38, 5'10/11", good build, dark hair, sallow complexion, large hooked nose, clean shaven. Jewish appearance. Dress grey suit and overcoat, black soft felt hat. Carries a portfolio. Speaks with a pronounced foreign accent.’ Bagot identified him immediately.
The man Pyke had met for lunch was Jürgen Kuczynski, leader of the illegal German Communist Party in exile and one of the most important Soviet agents in Britain at that time. During the war he passed on information to the NKVD, the GRU and the Soviet Embassy and, notoriously, helped to smuggle British atomic secrets to Moscow. Once the physicist Klaus Fuchs had decided to spy for the Soviet Union, he went first to Kuczynski, and it was Kuczynski who later brought in his sister, Sonya, a GRU officer, to run this prize asset. When working for the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, Kuczynski again supplied valuable intelligence to his sister who later became an honorary Colonel in the Red Army and remains the most decorated female agent in Russian history. Indeed, the work carried out by the two Kuczynski siblings in Britain changed the shape of the Cold War.
We will probably never know what Jürgen Kuczynski and Geoffrey Pyke discussed over lunch, only that Pyke would have looked forward to the conversation. After their initial meeting he described Kuczynski as ‘intellectually of the first order’ and ‘resembling Frank Ramsey in his method of approach’. We also know when that first meeting took place: when Pyke flew out to Paris in July 1939 he had gone to meet Jürgen Kuczynski.
In the months that followed they saw each other frequently in London. ‘I found our conversation of to-day most interesting and stimulating,’ wrote Pyke to Kuczynski in late 1939. ‘I hope I shall see you again. I may ring you up in the next few days.’ They also had at least one mutual friend in Leo Myers, who sent money to Kuczynski as well as Pyke, and in 1941 Kuczynski’s wife, Marguerite, had begun to work for Pyke as a researcher.
Though they were connected in many ways, that lunch in King’s Cross was the first that Bagot knew of the relationship between Pyke and Kuczynski. While she had numerous reports from SIS, Special Branch and MI5 describing Kuczynski as ‘a rabid Communist’ known to be doing ‘espionage work among refugees’, and who was ‘a direct agent of Moscow’, she was also aware of just how hard it was to pin this man down.
Early on in the war MI5 had managed to get Kuczynski interned on the basis that he was spreading communist propaganda geared towards impeding the war effort – one anti-fascist German émigré described his internment as ‘a very good stroke of work’. Around the same time SIS reported that Kuczynski ‘has brought out of Germany the whole funds of the German Communist Party. It is a very important sum.’ Allegedly £200,000, roughly £6 million today, this money had apparently been transferred to a Dutch bank account accessed by Kuczynski, his father and Professor Meusel – whose manuscript Pyke had offered to Allen Lane – and between them they were rumoured to have invested it in American securities. SIS concluded that the profits were used to fund communist propaganda in Britain such as the anti-war publication Inside Nazi Germany, edited by Heinz Kamnitzer. But almost as soon as Kuczynski’s internment had begun letters poured in to the Home Office, pushing for his release. They came from members of the Communist Party, fellow-travellers, and MPs such as Geoffrey Mander, Richard Acland, Vyvyan Adams and G. R. Strauss. Even the ‘Red�
�� Dean of Canterbury weighed in, as well as the Queen’s cousin Lilian Bowes-Lyon. Pyke was another of those who petitioned for Kuczynski’s release. The Home Office succumbed to this pressure and he was freed – much to the annoyance of Bagot.
In the months that followed MI5 continued to receive reports describing him as an ‘extreme Communist and fanatically pro-Stalin’, ‘one of Moscow’s most brilliant and dangerous propagandists’ and a man who was ‘in illegal contact with the Soviet Secret Service’. But they had no proof.
Rather than focus on Kuczynski, Bagot tried to identify the government contacts with whom Pyke had met during the days leading up to his lunch in King’s Cross. Guy Liddell tracked down the RAF officer. Colonel Lennox chased up the blond-haired, moustachioed brigadier – who turned out to be Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, Wildman-Lushington; yet for now the contact at the Ministry of Information could not be identified.
Bagot also delved deeper into Pyke’s history. She read about his father, the brilliant QC who had run for Parliament, and about his escape from Ruhleben which had led to suspicions in MI5 that he was a German agent. Nothing she found ruled out the possibility of Pyke being ‘Professor P.’, not least his application for a passport to travel to Europe in 1927. But there was no definitive detail, and in a note to Special Branch she betrayed a flash of doubt. Bagot referred to the source which had linked Pyke to the Comintern bureau in Berlin as one which in the past ‘has not always proved reliable’.
Nonetheless, the consensus in MI5 was that Pyke should have no further involvement with Combined Operations, where, they presumed, he was merely being consulted from time to time. It was hard to imagine that he could have been offered a job.
Colonel Lennox spoke to Mountbatten over the phone and told him that Pyke was ‘possibly a knave and definitely a fool’ and should be dropped. His timing was unfortunate. Several days earlier Mountbatten had introduced Churchill to Pyke’s proposal and already plans were afoot to have it developed in the US with Pyke overseeing its progress.
Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy Page 27