Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  Montagu appeared on camera in Madrid, standing in front of the duke of Alba’s palace, searching for proof that Franco was being directly supported by Hitler’s Germany. Shells poured overhead as the camera shivered from the explosions. Montagu stooped to cradle an unexploded device and turned it slowly to show the German markings to the camera. Suddenly, another shell came whining over his head. Montagu panicked and threw himself to the ground, his bulk landing directly on the shell. He stood up, dusted himself off, and later recorded it as “one of my luckier and certainly one of my more foolish moments.” Years later, he would fall out with Alfred Hitchcock over inserting a similar moment in the film Saboteur, which climaxes with an unintended explosion.

  There were many who thought of Ivor Montagu as a Pollyanna who wandered through the darkest times, a naïf who closed his eyes to the horrors being committed in the name of Communism and somehow managed to preserve his blind faith until the end of his life. For a man of Montagu’s intelligence, this image was a disservice. From his very first trip to Moscow, Montagu involved himself with the leaders of the Communist world. He could play the fool, play his class card or his race card, but he remained a Communist all his life. The bloodshed that he witnessed in the name of Communism, he excused and dismissed as inevitable. What was a betrayal of a family, of a country, compared to the betrayal of the people? What was one more war if it was the last war?

  CHAPTER 7 | Suspect

  Also in Spain was Montagu’s old friend J. B. S. Haldane, whom he’d first met on the streets of Cambridge when they were the only two people out in the streets on election night, booing a Conservative victory. Haldane, a “massive, towering” man whose receding hairline only emphasized his enormous forehead, used to come to Montagu’s parties wearing a floppy hat, sit down on a swivel chair, and declare himself the king of Scotland. Soon, they’d be partners in espionage. By the 1930s, Haldane had long been considered among the country’s preeminent scientists. Like Montagu, he had made a successful transition from an aristocratic education to a socialist sensibility. As Captain of the School at Eton College, he had regarded his fellow students “quite rightly, as intellectually sub-human.” A few years older than Montagu, he had fought in the trenches of the Great War and had found the experience “enjoyable, which most of my companions did not.” Among his soldiers, he had a reputation as a genial lunatic. Field Marshal Douglas Haig had called him “the bravest and the dirtiest officer.”

  In 1915, Haldane’s leg was shredded by steel splinters during a raid, and he was picked up behind the lines in an ambulance driven by the Prince of Wales. The Prince “turned to him and commented ‘Oh, it’s you’ ”; they had last met in Oxford, almost exactly a year before. Just as with Montagu, the assumption that Haldane was part of the establishment would give him extraordinary leeway to act against it.

  In 1918, Haldane had started working for military intelligence, a relationship that would continue on and off for twenty-five years. In the early twenties, he taught at Cambridge, living openly with his mistress and insisting on using his own body for all of his medical experiments, including the ingestion of hydrochloric acid and calcium chloride. The result of one of these experiments was “intense diarrhea, followed by constipation due to the formation of a large hard fecal mass. There was great general discomfort, pains in the head, limbs and back, and disturbed nights . . . the experiment was not unpleasant.”

  Like Montagu, Haldane had appeared in Moscow in 1926 and then headed to Spain at the invitation of her government at the outbreak of war. The Republican government hoped for advice on potential gas attacks that Franco might instigate through his German connections. Instead, Haldane’s experience in Spain turned him into one of the world’s experts on air defense, making him invaluable first to the British government and then as a spy for Soviet Russia.

  On a November afternoon in 1936, Haldane was sitting on a park bench in Madrid when an air raid alarm sounded. The park emptied until the only two remaining were Haldane, determined to gather firsthand data, and an elderly woman sharing his bench. Haldane smiled at her after the end of the raid, only to see that she had been killed instantly by a bomb splinter. It shocked him much more than the horrors he’d experienced in the trenches because he knew he “had so many things to do.”

  In between the intrigue and near-death moments, Montagu hadn’t forgotten about the importance of table tennis. It was his great fortune that MI5 was totally confused by his strange obsession. Montagu had one particular secret admirer, Colonel Valentine Vivian, the first head of MI5’s counterespionage unit. He was as close as anyone to tripping Montagu up, but became distracted by Montagu’s involvement with table tennis.

  It was testament to how seriously MI5 took Montagu that Vivian should personally inquire into his case. The first report to the colonel was almost apologetic, convinced that there was something sinister in Montagu’s relationship with a Hungarian named Zoltan Mechlovits:

  The reason of our tentative interest in these people will appear to you rather quaint. They write interminably to Ivor Montagu about table tennis and the trying out of table tennis balls. The exercise of his occupation over a period of many months has so eaten into Zoltan Mechlovits’ time that he has informed Montagu that he cannot go on with it. . . . [E]ven in England, which is not noted for sanity in this respect, we find it hard to believe that a gentleman can spend weeks upon weeks upon weeks testing table tennis balls. . . . [W]e should be grateful if you could tell us whether the individuals in Budapest I have named to you are known to be queer in any other way.

  It says little for table tennis’s impact that MI5 was unable to discover that Mechlovits had actually won the World Table Tennis Championships less than five years before. He’d even starred in Ivor Montagu’s first-ever directorial effort, a slow-motion, silent short of table tennis players showing off their finest strokes. The Hungarian police were also stumped by the correspondence but saw no link between Mechlovits and Communism.

  Both intelligence reports missed the connection. During the Bolshevik Revolution, Mechlovits had been a prisoner of war serving a sentence in Siberia. Liberated, he had made his way back to Hungary through Moscow, where he had “declined an offer by Lenin to stay and help organize the young republic’s sport.” Montagu must have been inspired by this. Lenin had known of table tennis, knew one of the world’s top players, and had been willing to include the game in the spread of Soviet sport before Montagu had even arrived at Cambridge. What was that but further proof that table tennis was destined to blossom in a Communist society?

  Vivian wasn’t willing to give up on Montagu quite yet. He remained convinced that table tennis was a cover for something darker. What if the problem didn’t lie with these Hungarian Jews? What if it could be traced through Montagu to Germany? Were the Communists communicating in code? If so, what were they saying?

  MI5 intercepted an angry letter from a German reproaching Montagu for not “having answered him about the Hanno-ball, also for not answering about . . . net stretchers.” It was absurd but also lucky for Montagu. When Montagu was working in film to spread Communism, the authorities centered on his table tennis obsession. When he advocated table tennis to spread Communism, they eyed the Film Society. When he spied on his country, they missed it entirely.

  March 1936 saw Montagu travel from the front lines of Spain to the World Championships in Prague, a seamless transition. It spared him his usual trip with the rest of the English team, who traveled third-class, including A. J. Wilmott, a university don who had invented a “sleeping harness” that he “attached to the rack above, and then under his armpits, and finally under his chin,” leaving him “all trussed up like a horse.”

  Montagu arrived just in time for the opening dinner; an elegant affair with tables for each nation marked by their national flags. “Just after the triumphant entry of the Hungarians, the Hon. Ivor Montagu, President of the ITTF, rose to make a welcome speech and to declare the tournament open.” The future
men’s singles champion, Richard Bergmann, remembered that the chairman “spoke in English, French and German, and I was much impressed at such a scintillating display. I sat agog and thought Mr. Montagu a miracle of human wisdom and knowledge.”

  Montagu watched the renowned Romanian chiseler, Arnon Paneth, from the front row. “Pushing” or “chiseling” was the dullest form of the game; playing to stay in a point, not to win it. It was entirely possible, as Paneth had been proving in Prague, that a game could be won without ever playing a single offensive stroke, an anathema to spectators. From the initial enthusiasm table tennis had stirred up, those crowds of eight and ten thousand were beginning to thin as men and women of mediocre talent adopted chiseling to survive deep into competition.

  Paneth was playing against Alex Ehrlich, one of the best in the world, a thoughtful, tall Polish Jew who preferred to play with one hand in his pocket. Ehrlich wanted to show Montagu the weakness of his own rules. No stranger to chiseling, Ehrlich had decided to mirror Paneth’s play. The knowledgeable crowd was immediately in on the joke. The stands “shook with mirth” as the ball slowly looped back and forth. The two men barely moved, patting the ball like a pair of arthritic grandmothers. The first point passed ten minutes, then twenty. Soon the booing began, but Paneth and Ehrlich played through the disapproval until the crowd lapsed into silence. Finally, men and women rose and began to leave the building.

  Montagu watched the point unfold in disbelief. Later on, his anger would only increase. Men and women who chose to chisel were “as table tennis players a menace, that must be humiliated, despised, sent to Coventry, driven out of public life, if table tennis is to survive.” Montagu leaned forward and pleaded with the players from the sidelines. He admired Ehrlich, understood what he was trying to do, but couldn’t he just speed things up? No, said Ehrlich, he’d “let his hand drop off before he would hit the ball.”

  After the first point reached its thirtieth minute, Ehrlich called for his teammates to set up a chessboard on a nearby table and started to call out his moves. After forty-five minutes playing the same point, the referee complained of a stiff neck and was replaced. Ehrlich was now sending up ridiculously high balls, tempting Paneth to smash, but back came the patted ball. Ehrlich called for lunch—a cheese baguette—and ate it as he played. Montagu stood, walked out, and sought a quorum of ITTF board members. To their shock, when they returned to the arena, the first point was still being played, two hours after it began. The meeting took place alongside Ehrlich as they discussed how to end the sort of performance the two men were subjecting the tournament to.

  There would be a time limit from now on. Twenty minutes of play, timed by a chess clock, then an extra five minutes, and whoever was ahead would win the match. Two hours and thirteen minutes after it began, the point ended in the now empty hall when Ehrlich’s soft shot hit the net, paused for a moment, and dropped onto Paneth’s side. Ehrlich won the rest of the match in under ten minutes.

  The last chiseler to win a world title was a young Austrian woman named Gertrude Pritzi, who would take the ladies’ singles the following year in the town of Baden, outside Vienna. She was the victor in a phenomenally dull final and, beaming, stepped up to receive her medal from Montagu. Watching was Bergmann, the men’s champion, who witnessed the look of mortification spread across her features as she was roundly booed by her own countrymen.

  It was a fascinating moment. Pritzi represented Austria, but would return the next year, 1938, after the Anschluss, to play for Nazi Germany in a championship of omens and premonitions. Pritzi played against Ruth Aarons, a bubbly, blond American Jew. On the eve of the competition, she’d been approached by a little boy. Aarons thought he was there for an autograph and leaned over. Instead, he raised a palm full of pepper and blew it into her eyes.

  At the World Championships there were also two journalists from Japan, “always smiling, always taking notes,” finally ready to connect the Asian game to the rest of the world. The Japanese had just captured Shanghai, but were now plotting domination not just on the Asian continent but in the World Championships as well. The international game would have to pause for the war on the horizon, but Ivor Montagu would become busier than ever. As he closed the tournament in 1938 with talk of peace for the world, Montagu was about to betray his country.

  CHAPTER 8 | Brothers

  When Montagu went up to Cambridge University, he had been happy to overlap with his favorite sibling, the middle brother, Ewen. At home in Townhill, they had conspired together as kids on homemade fireworks and schemes to create a huge autograph collection. They crashed their bicycles into country hedges and set fire to a car engine that singed their eyelashes.

  Ewen had a hound named Lancelot. Ivor had a rabbit named Ferocity. Ewen became a handsome, successful barrister, partial to pin-striped suits. Ivor became thicker around the waist and wore a trench coat and an old beret. The MI5 agents, who had now been following Montagu on and off for fifteen years, wrote increasingly offensive descriptions of him. In 1927 he had been described as “tall, gentlemanly,” a man who moved in “curious circles.” By 1940, he was described as “dirty, of distinctly Jewish appearance,” with a “hooked nose.” In the words of the Hertfordshire constabulary, he was simply that “particularly unpleasant Communist.”

  The two brothers shared a taste for soccer that the rest of the family found “common.” Ivor Montagu had felt a kinship to soccer ever since he heard that a fan in Russia was called a Bolelchik or sufferer. At sixteen, he became president of the Southampton Supporters’ Club with Ewen as his vice president. They brought a megaphone to the home games and used it to taunt the opposing team’s chairmen inside the director’s box. But there remained deep differences between the brothers. Ewen was a believer in constitutional democracy, while Ivor still wanted to overthrow the King, patron of English table tennis.

  No matter how tense relations had become between Ivor and his relatives, Montagu had always depended on Ewen as a diplomatic bridge; the discreet sounding board for just how far his left-wing activities had upset their mother. In 1941, Ivor had rocked the gilded family boat by accusing a fellow peer, the duke of Hamilton, of being a Nazi sympathizer. The duke brought legal action against Montagu. The families had tried to arrange a sit-down at a gentlemen’s club, but Ivor had refused to meet. MI5 followed the lawsuit closely, tapping not only Montagu’s phones but also Lady Swaythling’s. The suit was eventually settled, and Montagu was forced into a grudging apology, while his own covert work continued at pace.

  The two brothers had different problems at the outbreak of war. Ewen was courted by various branches of government, while Ivor was despised by them all. Since Russia and Great Britain were allied, Ivor was an open supporter of the war effort. He submitted an application for the Royal Air Force (RAF), presumably the service chosen for him by the Soviet Embassy.

  To his surprise, his application was accepted. He packed his bags and prepared to leave for St. Albans, where he would have direct access to an RAF air base considered vital to the Allied war effort. The error was caught at the last moment. A letter was written in the Home Office: “We have considerable information about this man, dating back to 1926, and it appears most undesired that he could be allowed to serve in HM forces.” Two weeks later, a letter marked SECRET arrived at the Ministry of Labour, requesting the “permanent suspension of his Calling Up notice.”

  Montagu was not wanted. Next, he tried to install himself in his local invasion committee in Bucks Hill, part of the Home Guard preparing for the possibility of a Nazi attack. Again, to his surprise, he managed to become the leader of his Hertfordshire branch.

  Letters began to fly at once. A local captain wrote to his major in February, horrified that a man such as Montagu could “assume the guise of patriotism, when in fact [he was] fully prepared to attack the well being of this country.” Montagu was removed from his post and offered the comically menial job of assistant food organizer of the Bucks Hill Invasion Committee. M
ontagu turned it down, citing a need to travel frequently to London. He applied regularly to be sent to Moscow to cover the Russian war effort, but his applications were denied.

  By 1941, his brother had one of the top jobs in naval intelligence, which he shared with another uniformed member of the British aristocracy, Lord Cholmondeley. Together, the two men sat on the Twenty Committee, chaired by John Cecil Masterman, a novelist and Oxford don. The British liked their pithy jokes: the committee was named after the Roman numerals XX—a double cross. Though it had “no real formal written agenda,” its purpose was to turn German agents and then run false information back to their intelligence services.

  In very different ways, the Montagu brothers were each going to have “a good war.” Ivor Montagu’s work would necessarily go unrewarded; Ewen Montagu and Cholmondeley were to succeed in a staggering way that would eventually be celebrated. Their masterpiece was called Operation Mincemeat. The idea had originally been suggested by James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, but it was Ewen Montagu and Cholmondeley who turned one brief line of fiction into fact. The goal was to deceive Hitler into believing that the Allied invasion destined for southern Italy would actually be aimed at Greece.

  The two men took the body of a Welsh alcoholic and constructed a painstakingly detailed false identity for the corpse. The cadaver was rechristened William Martin of the Royal Marines, and was provided with underpants from a former member of Lloyd George’s cabinet, letters to a fiancée written by Ewen Montagu, and “wallet litter” that included receipts for an engagement ring and a chiding note from his bank manager at Lloyds Bank. Martin was also attached by the wrist to a leather briefcase, which contained operation bulletins, photographs, and, most important, a letter written from one British general to another. If it sounded authentic, that’s because Ewen Montagu had requested that it be written by an actual general. It was a rambling mixture of gossip, the mundane aspects of work, and a vital slip—that the entire Allied invasion fleet would be landing in northern Greece, not Italy.