Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  From Ewen Montagu’s point of view, the mission was a race against time. Their dead alcoholic had begun to rot. His body was sped across England by a professional race car driver. In Portsmouth it was packed in a metal canister, covered in blocks of ice, and lowered into a submarine that hurried through the Strait of Gibraltar, past layers of Nazi mines, until it reached the coast of Spain. British intelligence knew that one of Hitler’s top spies in that country, the wealthy butterfly collector Adolf Claus, was based in the port of Huelva. If the documents ended up in his hands, it was expected that they would move rapidly through the system all the way to Hitler’s desk in Berlin.

  When the submarine surfaced two miles from the Spanish coast, William Martin was placed into a launch, motored across the Gulf of Cadiz toward Huelva, and tipped into the ocean. The morning tide would bring him to shore. Either he would be found by one of Huelva’s fishermen, or the body would be carried back out into the Atlantic on the evening tide and three months of intricate work would be exposed as an expensive folly. Back in London on April 15, Winston Churchill was talked through the plan and told that the chances of total success remained slim. “In that case,” he said, “we shall have to get the body back and give it another swim.”

  Ewen Montagu wasn’t the only member of the family working for a secretive group named after a Roman numeral. Ewen had no idea that his brother had been contacted by a member of the GRU, the Soviet Army’s vast foreign intelligence service. It had originally been sponsored by Montagu’s friend Leon Trotsky and was much larger and much more secretive than the NKVD, with a distinct appetite for military intelligence. Ivor had been asked to form the X Group to gather information vital to the British war effort and report to a contact in the Soviet Embassy, Simon Davidovich Kremer, whose official post was secretary to the Soviet Military Attaché in London. Montagu’s code name was INTELLIGENTSIA, and soon he had recruited his old friend and socialist sympathizer J. B. S. Haldane, who would be known by the moniker NOBILITY.

  The Soviets had at least four groups working out of England that were directed by the GRU. The first was run by a printer, the second by a Polish woman skilled at recruiting RAF officers “who had access to the newest developments in airplane constructions,” and the third by a concert pianist with connections to the Air Ministry. But it was Montagu’s X Group that showed off Russia’s understanding of the British class system. From the beginning, the Soviets relished the prospect of “his influential relatives.”

  At first Montagu did not move fast enough for Kremer. By August, Kremer was tired of pressing Montagu for more action and was leaning toward replacing him. “I have taken the opportunity of pointing out to the X group that we need a man of different caliber and one who is bolder than INTELLIGENTSIA,” he wrote. A month later, Montagu had been detailed to make contact “with the British Army colonel picked out for work” but had failed to do so. Kremer concluded that “I have told the X group via NOBILITY to give us someone else because of this. INTELLIGENTSIA lives in the provinces and it is difficult to contact him.”

  Despite his slow start, Montagu had an exceptional autumn, supplying details of the damage caused by the Blitz, British defense capabilities, copies of Haldane’s confidential reports, and three particularly important pieces of information. Through Montagu, the Russians learned that the British had discovered how to interrupt Luftwaffe radio signals and that British scientists had perfected delayed-action bombs. Most important, INTELLIGENTSIA had explained “that a girl working in a government establishment noticed in one document that the British had broken some Soviet code or other.” Thanks to Montagu, Kremer knew that the entire Russian intelligence system might have been compromised. He wrote immediately to Moscow, saying that he had told INTELLIGENTSIA that “this was a matter of exceptional importance and he should put to the group the question of developing this report.” Montagu would, of course, be a beneficiary of his own work. Any effective breakthrough by his brother’s friends in British intelligence would mean he’d be arrested for treason.

  CHAPTER 9 | The End of the Game?

  The international table tennis scene may have died out during the war, but the game persisted in every combat zone. One RAF flyer remembered playing in South Africa, Iraq, Egypt, Uganda, Kenya, Southern and Northern Rhodesia, Ceylon, and Burma. Things were harder at home in England. A single poor-quality ball was so rare that it could be traded for a minimum of three fresh eggs. For a good ball, according to one player, “generations of unborn chickens must mortgage their output.”

  Bizarrely, the game also spread thanks to the Geneva Convention. One of the great fears for prisoners was monumental boredom. To combat that, the Red Cross recommended board games and table tennis sets. Their standard package included “24 balls, 4 bats, 2 nets and a pair of posts.”

  Perhaps inspired by British intelligence’s close study of Montagu, MI9 designed a table tennis set. The bats had hollowed-out handles hiding silk maps and tiny compasses. These would be sent into camps inside what the Germans called “love parcels,” separate from the Red Cross’s efforts. It was hoped they’d go unnoticed in the plethora of Ping-Pong equipment.

  Table tennis’s survival might have impressed Montagu, but as a source of propaganda it wasn’t useful to him during the war. Montagu had by now written extensively for the Communist organ the Daily Worker, a declaration of his open involvement with the Communist Party of Great Britain. Most doubted that a graduate of Westminster College or Cambridge University could actually be anything other than a “drawing room Communist,” dabbling as an intellectual diversion. Still, John Cecil Masterman leaned across the table in the middle of a meeting of the Twenty Committee and asked a confused Ewen “how the table tennis was coming along.” Ewen Montagu looked up. “That’s my communist younger brother. He’s the progenitor of table tennis, not me.”

  If this was supposed to be a provocation, outing a pair of Communists, Masterman was disappointed. Ewen Montagu was a straight arrow. His relations with Ivor were fraternal. They would meet for dinner in London, and Ewen would speak affectionately about him in letters to his wife. “He is simply enormous, almost all tummy.”

  Ewen had special permission from naval intelligence to carry confidential documents back and forth from work in a pannier on his bicycle as long as he always wore “a shoulder holster and an automatic pistol.” It was breezy presumption for a man who had access to the country’s top secrets.

  Ivor had confided to Ewen that he was “really bad on this war,” revealing his involvement with the Comintern, but drew the line at confessing that he was now working for the GRU. But what line had Ewen drawn with his brother? If he truly thought of him as a harmless eccentric, had he amused him with the adventures of William Martin? When they were both dining at their mother’s house in Kensington Court, where was his briefcase? Besides, Ivor would have rationalized that even though the two men had started the war on different sides, Russia and England were allies from the moment Hitler had driven his panzers onto Russian soil in June 1941.

  MI5 took a more serious approach. The amount of information on Ivor Montagu increased, and his file now ran to hundreds of pages. Neighbors and the local constabulary added to the layered information, spying on everyone from his mother to his adopted daughter on her trips to their local pub, the Rose and Crown. Informers reported that Montagu had access to gasoline and that his stepdaughter had boasted of being related to Lady Swaythling. At the bar, chatting casually, she’d told locals that Montagu “got up at all hours of the night” and had a “hut built in the garden” where he kept a radio and “makes a lot of expensive calls.”

  A letter arguing for a warrant to search the premises was flatly refused. MI5 remained wary of Montagu’s connections. The last time they’d obtained a warrant for him, he’d not only become quickly aware of it, but had written directly to the home secretary to have it quashed, leaning on his cousin Herbert Samuel, a former home secretary himself.

  The extent of MI5�
�s knowledge of Montagu’s home suggests that agents did gain entrance, whether legally or illegally. They knew who entered and left, how his house was decorated, where his telephones were, the books in his library. They knew how many radios he had and when he listened to them and suspiciously noted that he was “always very keen to listen to the Foreign News, especially at 20.00 [and] midnight.”

  Off the coast of Spain, William Martin’s body, still strapped to the briefcase, bobbed up and down on the morning tide close to Punta Umbria, a tiny town a short drive from Huelva. A small boat searching for sardines spotted Martin before noon. Its owner called over neighboring boats, but no one wanted to touch the rotting, blackened body. Eventually, the fisherman managed to drag William Martin aboard and headed back to the coast with the dead man’s legs trailing in the water. On the beach, he hauled the body up into the dunes and placed him in the shade of a pine tree.

  The British code breakers at Bletchley Park monitored the German lines nervously as Martin’s papers moved slowly around Huelva. Finally, the photographed documents were rushed to German High Command in Berlin, the center of German military intelligence, and found their way to their intended target, Adolf Hitler, possibly the one individual despised in equal measure by both Montagu brothers.

  Hitler sided with German intelligence’s conclusion that “the genuineness of the captured documents is above suspicion.” Almost twenty thousand men, a Panzer division, and numerous torpedo boats were redeployed to the Greek coast. When the Allies landed in Sicily, there were fourteen hundred casualties in the first week instead of the expected ten thousand. Ewen Montagu had helped to start a domino effect that would see Italian dictator Benito Mussolini swinging from the end of a rope within three months. As a direct result, Hitler would call off the offensive in Russia. One brother had inadvertently helped the other.

  The level of information the Russians received on Operation Mincemeat was extraordinary. Ewen Montagu had an unimpeachable record, pre, post and during the War. Whether that information came from brother Ivor, or other sources, is unknown. As the end of the war accelerated, thanks to Ivor Montagu and his fellow agents in England, the Russians were well prepared for the coming Cold War because they were incredibly well informed as to British strategies of deception.

  CHAPTER 10 | The Jewish Question

  On the south coast of England, the reigning world table tennis champion, Richard Bergmann, stood as one soldier among 160,000 awaiting D-Day. For the last five years he’d sought refuge as a “friendly alien,” an Austrian Jew who had been taken in by the English Table Tennis Association under Ivor Montagu’s direction. To Bergmann’s frustration, the association had done little with him, doling out dribs and drabs of money. The world champion had had to work as a waiter and night porter. Finally, Bergmann had been allowed to join the RAF as a physical training instructor, toiling alongside English county cricketers and Scottish hammer-throwers. Bergmann had also qualified as a signals officer, “directly responsible for giving information to our front line fighters and bombers as to the strength, positions and types of enemy aircraft likely to be encountered during any specific flight.”

  On June 3, 1944, amid the chaos of the invasion preparations, Bergmann was lost on the base, looking for the right building to drop off his application for the job of sports officer. Bergmann opened the wrong door. He saw a large room filled top to bottom with shiny white Ping-Pong balls. He closed the door. Then he opened it again to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. Finally he understood why his table tennis supplies during the last five years had been so grudgingly limited. Ping-Pong balls had been produced exclusively for the RAF to pack into the wings of seagoing aircraft as an inexpensive flotation aid.

  Bergmann sped across the English Channel in a landing craft less than a day after the beaches of Normandy were stormed. He carried his table tennis equipment in his backpack. He had burned all his own personal papers before leaving England. Should there be a German counterattack, Austrians like Bergmann would “unceremoniously be shot out of hand.” Bergmann made it to Berlin intact. There he befriended a German photographer who warmed to the Austrian. He told him he had something he must share because it was acting like “corrosive acid on his mind.” It was a picture the photographer had taken while working for the German Army. “The snap showed a dump of human corpses with two uniformed German soldiers smilingly posing in front of it. There were thousands of dead bodies piled up in a ghastly heap.” He gave Bergmann the photograph, and the Austrian turned it over to the military. The dump was eventually found five hundred miles away in eastern Poland.

  Prewar table tennis had been the domain of Central European Jews, who were often smuggled into Aryan sporting clubs under pseudonyms. It was no surprise that many would fail to emerge after 1945. Some were simply recorded as lost, but here and there little pieces of information emerged. Mechlovits, whose correspondence with Montagu had so baffled British intelligence, escaped “twice from transports to the death camps,” once by leaping from a moving train. Adolf Herskovich, a Yugoslav who had played in front of Montagu at World Championships in Baden, London, and Cairo, ended the war in a concentration camp, having watched his brother being beaten by German soldiers and thrown off a cliff. His father and sister died at Auschwitz.

  Alex Ehrlich, the player of the longest point in the history of the game, staggered back into the international table tennis arena. At Auschwitz, he’d survived by foraging during work details. Finding a beehive one day, he’d split it in two, stripped, rolled in the honey, dressed, and walked back into the camp to let his fellow prisoners lick precious calories from his body. Still, his body weight halved. He’d been pulled from a gas chamber by a Hungarian guard who’d seen him play Ping-Pong in the 1930s. When Montagu got the World Championships up and running again in 1948, there stood Ehrlich behind the table, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his numbered tattoo visible on his forearm. Ehrlich would make it to another semifinal before he eased into coaching.

  Montagu was back to his busiest. His portly bearing, his family, and his warmth continued to divert suspicion. Of course, everyone knew he was a Communist, but gentlemen of the era were forgiven their eccentric interests. He was like an uncle with an extravagant collection of Victorian pornography. Nobody had ever confused him with a traitor.

  And yet, as the war ended, the three brothers and their sister moved in circles that rarely intersected. They would see each occasionally at their mother’s birthday parties, or at a lunch to celebrate their original nursemaid spending sixty years with the family. If Ivor and Ewen continued their deep friendship, it was without witnesses. Ewen’s children, Jennifer and Jeremy, have only two memories of their uncle in the postwar years: first, the two brothers heading off to see their favorite soccer team play in Southampton; second, the brothers sharing a car at their grandmother’s funeral. Few words were spoken.

  As Montagu resumed his travels for the sake of the ITTF in countries behind the Iron Curtain, a team of hundreds was working hard at sites in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, trying to unravel the web of Soviet agents that they suspected now covered the West. The program devoted to putting names to code names was called Venona.

  Montagu had no idea that Venona existed. Even presidents Truman and Roosevelt had been kept in the dark. Started in 1943, Venona lassoed enormous amounts of diplomatic intelligence coming in and out of Soviet embassies around the world. By the time the existence of the Venona program was leaked to the Soviets in 1945, the Americans had already stored thousands of messages. Incriminating evidence about the agent known as INTELLIGENTSIA sat on the desks of dozens of code breakers; the only problem was that they hadn’t yet broken the code.

  In August 1945, Montagu flew to Nuremberg and covered the war crimes trial for the Daily Worker. He was housed in the Faber Schloss, a grand house built with a fortune gathered from manufacturing pencils. It promised steam heating in all rooms, but Montagu worked in his quarters, always accompanied “by
a small blizzard” that swirled through the windows. The table in the Ping-Pong Room was long gone. At least the rooms had running water, though, according to Montagu, it tasted “as though it’s been strained through a bag that someone had been sick in.” Food was provided by the Americans, and Montagu described it as “invariably a piece of old leather made out of egg powder.” Montagu suffered through his lodgings at the castle, was sick with diarrhea, and was then marked with a boil on his nose.

  As a Jew, Communist, and aristocrat, Montagu had a unique perspective on the Nuremberg Trials. He sat with his fellow journalists and heard the testimony, felt the scorn, shared the incredulity about the Holocaust.

  At the trials, Montagu complained that the only thing to drink was Coca-Cola; he developed a loathing of American journalists, especially the women. “They are worse than raisin bread,” he told his wife. They charmed men Montagu couldn’t charm, were told things they shouldn’t have heard, and sat in courtroom seats they shouldn’t have sat in. It was obvious which side of the Cold War Montagu would take, despite the increasingly anti-Semitic actions of Stalin’s government.

  Montagu was always the first British journalist to leap to Stalin’s defense. Despite the facts that Stalin had emptied his cabinet of Jews after his pact with Hitler and that the top Yiddish writers were all executed on the same night, Montagu held the Moscow line. The religious rigor of his grandfather’s will had been utterly rejected. To a true Communist like Montagu, Judaism and Christianity were just another pair of beams holding up the status quo.