Against the Wind
Page 12
Arrived in Athens, it was immediately obvious that nobody knew what Field Security was for, nor how it should be used. That was often so in the early days of war, and the general ignorance tended to make a section self-reliant and to weld it into a unit of enthusiastic specialists. We ourselves knew exactly what we were for, and how to sell our services to the doubtful or unwilling.
A Field Security Section consisted of an officer, a sergeant-major and twelve N.C.Os. Its transport was a truck and thirteen motor-cycles; its armament fourteen pistols and a typewriter; its other lethal weapons, its comforts, its blankets and its furniture, when it had any, were whatever it could more or less legally acquire. Being all men of a type to accept life as they found it, under the guidance of a sergeant-major chosen for his knowledge of army routine, a section prided itself on taking intelligent advantage of the military passion for papers and was hardly ever at a loss to account for its cherished, corporate possessions.
The primary duty of an F.S. section was to take precautions for the security of the division or corps to which it was attached—which meant in practice discreet supervision of all civilians with whom the formation came in contact, and, after successful action, the policing of enemy territory until the arrival of trained administrators. We also had to investigate leakages of information, deliberate or accidental, which could be an unpleasant duty. But serious cases were very rare, and security was more soundly assured by lectures and friendly contacts than by officious action. I do not think we were ever unpopular among the troops of the Middle East. Plain common sense showed that the protection we tried to give was necessary.
Instead of attachment to corps or division, a section could be posted to a capital, a port, a frontier or any district where the curiosity of enemy intelligence was likely to be active. This was far more interesting work than pure military security, for the section became the eyes, ears, languages and mobile reserve of I (b). It had nothing whatever to do with the employment of spies or the collection of information from enemy territory.
The section which left for Athens at the beginning of November 1940 was military, and attached to a force under R.A.F. command. After the Italian attack on October 28, five British squadrons were sent to the help of the Greeks together with port operating companies and detachments of all the base services. My duty was to look after the more elementary points of their security in a country which was not at war with Germany, where German agents, diplomatic or not, were therefore free from interference. It was a very limited freedom—as ours had been in Roumania—for the Greek secret police under the dictatorship of Metaxas were subtle and active.
I found that Lord Forbes, the Air Attaché in Bucharest, had flowered into a Wing-Commander and was the senior intelligence officer on the R.A.F. staff, so I decided that he should give us our orders and receive our reports. This was, in fact, partly correct, but I should also have been reporting to my Area Commander. He accepted my word that such a course would be most irregular.
That was a pity, for when in later years I came under Colonel Robinson in Beirut and Amman he handled his Field Security with a lovely light rein. Perhaps, unconsciously, I taught him; and he, in return, taught me how the Regular Army expressed its most violent feelings without ever, for one moment, being impolite.
I cannot remember why it was that we could never get an efficient guard on the Area Headquarters building. Certainly the fault was mine; but I was then too inexperienced to be able to afford that confident geniality which comes from a knowledge of the powers one has but does not use. Finally, to force the issue, one of my over-keen N.C.Os entered the building in civilian clothes, wandered where he would and stole the Area Commander’s current correspondence off his desk—none of it, somewhat to his disappointment, secret.
I thoroughly disapproved, but the wretched act was written down as permissible. So next morning I called with an apology to return the evidence that a proper guard was essential. The Area Commander was out and I was not prepared to hand back his papers to anyone else. I went off for the morning to visit my detachments and when I came back the correspondence had been missed and the world alerted.
With the now useless apology I presented myself. Clear-eyed, without passion, artistically, Robinson summed me up and lectured me. He quite understood, he said, the difficulty of my duties, but if security units were to wear the uniform of the Army and be considered part of it, they should share its standards, perhaps old-fashioned, of gentlemanly behaviour. I heartily agreed, but could not say so without putting the blame on a subordinate. When I had recovered my equanimity in the nearest bar—for I had never been on the mat before and was utterly terrified—I decided again that I liked the Army. This was not the verbal murder I expected, but more resembled a difference of opinion forcibly expressed.
Athens was a wonderful school in which to learn the procedure and customs of the military, for it was a GHQ in miniature, containing detachments of almost every branch. With this free staff course going on outside the office, and, inside it, my old Cornish sergeant-major with years of experience in the Military Police, I no longer had to fall back on guesses. By Christmas I felt pretty confident that I knew the ways of this hierarchical, socialist community, and that if a great many years of my life were destined to be spent in it, as seemed highly probable in those days when Russia was still an unfriendly neutral and America an unlikely ally, there was no reason at all why they should not be enjoyable.
The biggest daily job was the security of the airfields against sabotage or too close observation, and the protection of the crews from the results of their uninhibited gossip. They were out night after night in their old Blenheims and Gladiators and when they were not they would relax in the Athens cabarets. As soon as the young Squadron-Leaders realised that we were starry-eyed in admiration, well understanding that long hours of ironic conversation with death demanded an easier listener, they gave us wonderful co-operation. The R.A.F. officer has always seemed to me a better psychologist than his counterpart in Army or Navy. I suppose he has to be. The spirit of the individual is so important to him and so much more vulnerable.
There was, however, a line of defence more reliable than fatherly talks: control of the cabaret entertainers. This was done by the Greek Police, and mercilessly. The contacts of the artiste were watched day and night; the poor girl had to choose between enforced virginity and an official protector. The protectorate was a closed shop, and Field Security was not eligible.
Athens was a clumsy and difficult town for any such amusements. When our little force arrived, hospitality was overwhelming. To pay for a drink in a tavern was nearly impossible, and the troops were freely invited to Greek homes. They were not so over-civilised as to consider Greek womanhood a trifle primitive. On the contrary, they found the girls feminine, gay and virtuous. Sometimes they fell in love and pestered their commanding officers for permission to marry; sometimes they indulged in simple preliminaries which would appear quite innocuous at home, and were beaten up by soldier brothers.
Even Colonel Xenos, a formidable figure who held the whole of Greek security in his hands and had under the Metaxas dictatorship heaven-only-knew what powers of death and exile, was puzzled and embarrassed by the problem and used hesitatingly to discuss it with me. Not only did the Greeks, in peacetime, have a puritanism which elevated the virginity of a girl and the fidelity of a wife into symbols of inhuman importance, but they honestly felt that in their country’s extremity any indulgence of the flesh was wrong. The army, fighting in conditions of desperate cold and discomfort on the mountains of Albania, heard rumours of our luxurious living in Athens and reacted exactly as our own men in 1944 who, when they had not seen their wives or girl-friends for five years, read of the exploits of highly-paid American and Canadian troops in Britain. But the Greeks did more than grumble. When the bachelors came down on leave from Albania, they swore to have no pleasure that was unattainable for their comrades. And, by God, m
ost of them kept their word!
Requests for reasonable facilities for the troops were considered improper, and matters which could have been smoothly arranged in western Europe remained a cause of mutual embarrassment. Allied relations had begun with a difficult incident. To find room for headquarters and base units, schools, hotels and public buildings had been emptied in a hurry. Among the latter was a hospital for the ladies of the town. It did indeed form an excellent billet; but the Greeks, in their passion of welcome and patriotism, had not considered the effects of letting the ladies loose on the streets. Thereafter both sides were inclined to preserve a more than Victorian reticence about the facts of life.
All this straightforward military security—women, waiters, civilian employees, strangers hanging about Piraeus docks for no good reason, or questioning British troops with native Greek inquisitiveness which was almost certainly innocent but might not be—kept me busy consulting and contributing to the files of the Defence Security Officer—a civilian—and of the Greek Police.
Among the police themselves there was conflict. Some admired the professionalism and liberty of action of the Gestapo—an admiration which is common and perhaps inevitable in those responsible for the security of any strong central government, though usually unspoken except in drink. Others concerned themselves as little as possible with current politics and gave a straight loyalty to the Crown. A third party—and they of course were the most pro-British—loathed Metaxas with good liberal exaggeration of his comparatively mild and few iniquities. They were the best contacts and informants of my men, who were consequently troubled in mind. They had enlisted to destroy fascism in all its forms, and found themselves in fact collaborating with the secret police of a dictator. I had to impress upon them that if the devil were fighting Mussolini, the devil and no one else was our ally.
Though a mere observer of the intrigues, I was sometimes considered a person able to influence events and liable to take an interest in Greek politics. It was no use to insist that I knew nothing of politics and was only a junior officer in command of a handful of military specialists; I was still expected to keep up the Compton Mackenzie tradition. My profession had nothing to do with it. That was unknown, and almost forgotten by myself. It was just that Greeks always tend to hysteria in their view of Intelligence. In spite of the fact that I had no money to pay agents and, if I had, no notion of what to do with them, even I, in rare moments of depression, could think of myself as a spider in the centre of a web. But the clear sky of day and the heartening and bitter retsina of the nights never failed to convince me that in reality I barged through webs without seeing that they were there, and that I had no more ability to build one than a bluebottle.
No secrets, then? None at all in what we did. We were never nearer the heart of things than supplying guards on the Legation for the visits of Eden, Wavell and Wilson. In what we knew, however, there had to be much that was highly confidential—not such a mass in Athens as later, for Field Security was still considered to have more affinities with the Military Police than with Intelligence. But even then it occurred to me that the variety of information known to each F.S. officer—and never discussed unless in the way of duty among ourselves—was quite extraordinary. Nobody wanted to give it to us, but there was often no alternative. When you are the sole person who can produce a silent and reliable N.C.O. as an escort or a messenger, and when you are controlling the exits and entrances by a port or frontier, the wheels of Intelligence cannot run smoothly without telling you when to look the other way. You may not always know the why, but you must know the who and where and—sometimes most secret of all—by whose orders. In my four years’ experience I never remember a case where this confidence was abused.
About half the personnel of F.S. was drawn from commerce, teaching, journalism, the law, the stock exchange: men of education with languages or experience which specially fitted them for the work. In those early days promotion from lance-corporal to lieutenant and then to captain could be very rapid. We also had a stiffening of regular soldiers, some of them from the Military Police. As a general rule they were not much use on any Intelligence duties except routine controls; their years of training, however, were invaluable in any emergency, whether the section was operating under conditions of discomfort or of actual danger.
Besides these, we had a sprinkling of men who had lived in the Middle East and enlisted there, speakers of Greek, Arabic and Italian. We could never make soldiers of them—for we had not the time or the technique—but if they could be trusted to work alone and did not take too romantic a view of themselves, they were the most useful of us all. Other branches of Intelligence had a deplorable habit of stealing them for their own mysterious purposes, and we could seldom get them back.
We were never too military, and discipline was informal. When we did go through the traditional motions of parades and inspections, we performed them in a spirit of holiday—for the close, mutual trust between the section and its officer made the continual practice of obedience so obviously unnecessary. Daily relations in a crack section between the Field Security Officer and his N.C.Os much resembled those between a fatherly sales manager and his salesmen. But each section had its own individual character. In some the smartness of the men—when they were in uniform—and the atmosphere of the section office were reasonably regimental; in others the place looked and sounded like a salesman’s office in SoHo. And these were sometimes the best when it came to the real job of detecting enemy agents.
Our fairly leisurely Athenian life came to an end in early March when the British, Australian and New Zealand expeditionary force began to arrive at the Piraeus. The camps sprang up under the olive trees of Attica, and the German diplomats, whose forces were poised on the Bulgarian frontier and ready to strike, naturally showed an interest in the enemy. The most glorious row I ever was in occurred when I was ordered to send a motor-cyclist to tail the German Minister’s car and report what he did.
I put the N.G.O. in uniform. It still seems to me sensible. If the Minister, pretending to be a nice, kind uncle, were to talk to any of the troops, my man had only to warn them who he was. But apparently I should have put him in plain clothes and, by not doing so, had caused a diplomatic incident. Rockets from the diplomats descended upon the staff, and were passed on to me. I should certainly have been sent back to Egypt in disgrace if Colonel Xenos had not stood up for me. It was pleasant to know that the liaison between a junior captain and this powerful servant of the King had been friendly and useful enough to cause him to intervene.
On April 6 the Germans attacked, and with Yugoslavia overrun there was never a hope of holding them. The Military Mission which had been in Athens since the autumn knew that defeat was certain, though preserving in public set smiles of triumph and confidence. The planners in Cairo had done their loyal best to prevent any such pessimism gaining ground—and certainly it never reached the formations—but why they should have assumed that their colleagues in Athens with the same evidence in front of them would not come to the same conclusion I have never been able to understand.
If our history of the last sixty years could be plotted as a graph, the Greek disaster would fit neatly into the ever-recurring conflict between political idealism and the facts of power. To the microcosmic England of myself—at bottom far more typical of my countrymen than it pleases me to think—the conflict was as plain as in any leading article. I suppose it is now pretty generally agreed that our action in Greece had no effect whatever on the course of the war, and that the suggestion that it delayed Hitler’s attack on Russia is an excuse which will not hold water for a moment. Yet I am proud and I was proud then that we had permitted generosity, whether real or a political gesture, to overcome common sense. The value of the expedition, if it had any, was at bottom religious. It emphasised the fact that the British Commonwealth, now forced into a long, savage war of national defence, had at first intended and still intended a crusade.
The Greek armies in Albania collapsed and disintegrated. They were worn out. For six months they had exposed to the whole world the emptiness of Mussolini’s claim to have made of Italy a great military power. Humiliated before his allies and enemies, he had continually employed fresh reserves out of all proportion to the importance of the campaign; and still the Greeks held or advanced. But there was nothing left, in material or human spirit, with which to form a new front against the Germans.
I had watched the Greek civil and military refugees pouring back into Athens by the Eleusis road, and given hospitality to odd N.C.Os of the divisional sections who had become hopelessly separated from their units and ridden back to Athens for orders. I knew, too, that the more mysterious purveyors of Intelligence, who always appeared to place an excitable value on their lives, had secretly embarked for Egypt. But I could not really believe that final defeat was immediate and present in the room until on April 24 Patrick Wilson, son of the Commander-in-Chief, told me to take my section west, and to keep a professional eye on the security of the vital bridge over the Corinth Canal and the beaches near Megara where an Australian division would be embarked. That done, I was free to get the section out when and where I could.