by Mark Colvin
My mother remembers the British Government Humber car stopping, and the hard faces of the Russian soldiers, and the examination of the diplomatic passports, and a sense that, whatever the rules laid out in international treaties, they just might still not apply here. She remembers too how, in shops in the Inneren Stadt, when a Russian walked in, the Viennese would walk out. And how, stopped at a traffic light, you would see a Russian Gazik, or jeep, pull up beside you, and the hostility in the soldiers’ faces, and the way they held their Kalashnikovs or their pistols with no real care about who they might be pointing them at.
I myself remember none of that, nor anything of what my father was doing: that I can only reconstruct from the experiences of other SIS agents during that period.
Gordon Corera, in his book MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service, describes the SIS officer in Vienna, Anthony Cavendish:
His task, like that of every MI6 officer, was the recruiting and running of agents. MI6 officers only occasionally spy themselves in terms of collecting secret information. More often than not, they gather intelligence by recruiting agents—people with access to secrets who are willing to risk their lives by passing it on.
Vienna was a place of maximum ambiguity, ‘filled with its own tricksters, fraudsters and charlatans on the make’, says Corera. ‘Intelligence was a commodity for sale like everything else on the black market and often just as fake, with refugees running paper mills churning out fabricated documents to satisfy the demands of the spies.’
This was the Vienna Graham Greene depicted in The Third Man, a city full of touts and shysters, blackmailers and black marketeers, a city where, as Corera points out, Greene got his inspiration for the film’s climactic tunnel chase scene from reality: ‘The Russians controlled the sewers and refused to lock the entrances, which were disguised aboveground as kiosks. These allowed their agents to disappear from one part of the city and suddenly emerge ghost-like somewhere else.’
The Russians weren’t the only ones using tunnels for espionage. Daphne Park was an SIS contemporary of my father’s, and was in Vienna not long before him. In his biography of Park, Queen of Spies, Paddy Hayes describes how the Vienna station had
figured out a way to build a tunnel under the streets of the city that could be used to tap into all telephone and telegraph communications between the Soviet High Commission in the Imperial Hotel and the Soviet Central Commandant in the Epstein Palace, and between those two locations and the Kremlin.
When my family was in Vienna, Hayes says, this system was in full operation: ‘An underground control and recording centre, called “Old Smoky” because of its poisonous atmosphere, was established underneath a shop selling Scots tartan and Harris tweed. Here banks of recorders recorded all voice and signal traffic passing though the monitored cables.’
I am three. None of this means anything to me. My world is a warm kitchen, and a boxer puppy called Bamse—Norwegian for ‘little bear’—who had replaced Otto and become my dearest childhood friend. The wonder of the ocean, never to be extinguished, enters my life during our first beach holiday, at Caorle, just north of Venice. That beach is still vivid to me, and not only because of the family albums. I’m walking up a little flight of steps off the sand into a hut on stilts where there is dark sacking instead of windows, keeping out the heat and light. A man hands me a cornetto of something cold and white: gelato di limone. Even today, it only takes one taste of lemon gelato to catapult me back into that moment: a tiny person holding his father’s hand, standing in a dark mysterious space out of the hot sun.
I had words that would remain in my family’s vocabulary for years: ‘eckybock’ for apricot, ‘num-nums’ for food of any sort, ‘diggun’ for drink. To the end of his life, my dad would say, ‘It’s news time, switch on the la-la’, because in Vienna that was my word for the radio. And a little of my toddler talk was in German: I remember that for months after we left Austria, I habitually said mittagessen instead of ‘lunch’.
Mittagessen was a good word. I definitely liked to eat. The classic family story, from those days of currency restrictions all over Europe, was of another Italian holiday when my father had brought enough Italian currency from Vienna to pay for our board and lodging, on the basis that he would pay full price for him and my mother, and half-price for me. When the time came to settle up, he was shocked to see that he’d been charged full price for three people. Remonstrating with the hotelier, he was finally forced to concede and pay up when told, ‘Signor, if your son had only eaten half as much as you and your wife, naturally I would have charged you half, but as it was, signor, he ate as much as either of you.’ As a result, my parents spent a nail-biting few hours on the drive back, wondering if the fuel tank would last until the Austrian border, putting the car into neutral when going downhill in a desperate bid to save petrol. (They did make it back into the land of the Austrian Schilling: just.)
Despite these indications of a gargantuan appetite, photos from that time show a healthy toddler, certainly not thin, but not unhealthily fat. Nonetheless, a love of Italian food is one childhood addiction that has never left me.
My grandfather Ragnar Colvin had died in early 1954 while we were in Klagenfurt. The heart trouble that invalided him out of running the Royal Australian Navy in 1941 had not been severe enough to stop him serving for most of the rest of the war in a quieter job, as the naval adviser to the Australian High Commission. The doctors who treated him had advised that he should rest as much as possible, and on no account take vigorous exercise—advice which would horrify modern cardiologists, but then again, they have far more pharmacological weapons in the fight against heart disease.
I have no memory of him, but my grandmother Sibyl was a big presence in my childhood. She visited us in Vienna and would often tell me about how bad an influence my father, who habitually swore like a sailor, had been on me. In the back seat of our car one afternoon in those pre-seatbelt days, aged three, I had stood up, waved my fist at a passing truck, and shouted ‘GO TO BUGGERY’. As anyone who works with me knows, variations of this sentiment are muttered to this day, loudly or under my breath, generally at obstreperous spin doctors or politicians. (I’m still blaming Dad.)
* * *
In my father’s world, dark doings were afoot. They involved two of the most effective traitors in the history of espionage.
One, Kim Philby, became a household name when he was named in the British Parliament as The Third Man in a Soviet espionage ring, only to be cleared by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan, who told the House of Commons in 1955: ‘I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him as the so-called “Third Man”, if indeed there was one.’
The other, George Blake, was not even under suspicion at this time, and would not be unmasked until 1961. He was a hero inside the SIS, having endured three years of imprisonment in North Korea. The service appears to have harboured no suspicion that Blake had in fact converted to Marxism during his imprisonment and volunteered to spy for the KGB. But for the next few years, he would indeed feed vast amounts of information from his jobs in London and Berlin straight back to Moscow: he would say later that he had betrayed so many agents that he’d stopped counting. We know from his confession that the numbers of agents ‘blown’ in East Germany alone ran into the hundreds.
More relevant to my father’s work, George Blake’s first job on return from North Korea was at Y Section in London’s Carlton Gardens. This was, according to the Encyclopaedia of Cold War Espionage, ‘an especially secret section of the SIS to exploit special technical information sources by using sophisticated listening devices’. The SIS’ Vienna tunnel should have been one of the great intelligence coups of the century, but Blake’s presence at Y Section, where his job was overseeing the translation and transcription of the tapes from Vienna, meant it was compromised from the start.
Rather as Winston Churchill had deliberately refrained at times from
saving some lives by acting on decrypted Enigma machine information during the war, because doing so could alert the Nazis to the breaking of their codes, the KGB were very careful at first not to act on their knowledge of the tunnel. According to Daphne Park biographer Paddy Hayes, ‘the KGB waited a full year before even alerting the Soviet military to the possibility that the conversations of their soldiers were being monitored by Western intelligence. Even then they were careful to avoid saying anything that could point to Blake’s existence.’
In Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence, Jonathan Haslam says the Vienna tunnel let the British re-create the Soviet order of battle in the Balkans. ‘Discovering the Soviet order of battle in the Balkans’ happens to be the precise phrase my father used when I asked him what his job was when we lived in Klagenfurt. However, Haslam says, ‘The Balkans was not the crucial theatre of battle, so the information obtained was not of the greatest value’, thus explaining why the KGB felt able to hold back before acting on it: because when the Americans and British followed up the Vienna success with tunnels under Berlin, the Soviet forces started rolling up agent networks.
But Blake’s total access to the Vienna intercepts raises the possibility that my father’s own cover was blown as early as 1954–55, and that the KGB would have known that he was an intelligence officer, rather than, say, a mere third or second secretary in the embassy, throughout his career. It would help explain why he never had a posting in Moscow itself. And there’s another reason to speculate on this: according to a number of sources, the Vienna head of station when we were there was Nicholas Elliott, who happened to be one of Kim Philby’s closest friends.
When, in 1955, Philby was ‘cleared’ in the British Parliament of being a double agent, it was over the vociferous protests of MI5, the domestic counter-spying agency, up to and including its head, Dick White. They were convinced he was guilty as hell, and frustrated that his conviction was overruled. The old guard at SIS/MI6 had run a ‘fair play’ defence of Philby, on the grounds of innocence until proven guilty—grounds which are legitimate in a court of law but more dubious in the defence of a country. Philby’s bland denials and the absence of anything but circumstantial evidence, no matter how strong, had meant that he could, however, be ejected from the service without being prosecuted—or ever quite disgraced. Kim Philby still had strong defenders in the service, and one of them was his old and close friend Elliott. Philby, to his backers, could not be guilty because he was ‘One Of Us’.
You can get the flavour of this way of thinking from the transcript of a vetting session with Nicholas Elliott which has appeared in more than one intelligence history of the time:
Security Officer: Sit down, I’d like to have a frank talk with you.
Nicholas Elliott: As you wish, Colonel.
Officer: Does your wife know what you do?
Elliott: Yes.
Officer: How did that come about?
Elliott: She was my secretary for two years and I think the penny must have dropped.
Officer: Quite so. What about your mother?
Elliott: She thinks I’m in something called SIS, which she believes stands for the Secret Intelligence Service.
Officer: Good God! How did she come to know that?
Elliott: A member of the War Cabinet told her at a cocktail party.
Officer: Who was he?
Elliott: I’d prefer not to say.
Officer: Then what about your father?
Elliott: He thinks I’m a spy.
Officer: So why should he think you’re a spy?
Elliott: Because the chief told him in the bar at White’s [exclusive gentlemen’s club in London’s St James’ Street].
The intelligence histories which cover Elliott’s career, most recently and comprehensively Ben Macintyre’s A Spy among Friends, do not suggest that Elliott himself was on any level a traitor. But they do paint a picture of someone who could easily be construed as thoroughly incompetent and in some areas naive, especially by intelligence community standards. Macintyre’s book suggests that Elliott may have been one of the two interrogators whose kid-glove treatment and helpful suggestions of less damning answers to difficult questions finally led to the foreign secretary’s 1955 parliamentary exoneration of the country’s worst traitor.
Even after Philby’s ejection from the service, Elliott’s relationship with his old friend continued to be warm and strong: Elliott actually helped Philby reforge his relationship with the service, this time not as an intelligence officer (agent handler), but as an agent. MI6 used its close relationship with David Astor, owner of The Observer, to get Philby appointed as the paper’s Middle East correspondent. There in Beirut, Philby also reactivated his KGB contacts. His guilt—as a double agent recruited in Vienna in the 1930s who rose to become MI6’s man in Washington, apparently destined for the organisation’s top job, ‘C’ (controller)—would not become irrefutable in MI6’s eyes until 1963 when, after an apparently botched interrogation by—again—Nicholas Elliott, Philby disappeared into the night: he boarded a Russian ship and eventually resurfaced in Moscow.
As it turned out, Nicholas Elliott would not only be my father’s head of station in Vienna. He would also be head of the London station when Dad returned to SIS headquarters in 1956.
Chapter 9
The Last Roar
IF LIFE CAN be hard for a spy’s wife, it was very hard in the 1950s—I use the word ‘wife’ deliberately: there were no spies’ husbands then, because although there were a few women in the service, they were forced to resign if they got married. A spy’s wife had to maintain the fiction that her husband was a conventional diplomat, knowing that this was a lie, but never allowed to know much more than that.
During my father’s first posting in Oslo, when I was a tiny baby, my mother remembers SIS colleagues arriving from London and going out all night with him, clad all in black from gloves to balaclavas, on what was clearly a mission of burglary. Of what? An embassy? A Russian diplomat’s home? She didn’t know, but she held a long vigil wondering if they would get home unscathed.
Fortunately, Elizabeth Anne Manifold was a strong, intelligent and resilient woman. Raised on a sheep station in Victoria during the Depression, a lover of horses who became an accomplished rider for practical reasons, rather than for show, and a voracious reader, she might in another era have pursued any number of careers. In the last years of World War II, she briefly attended the University of Melbourne, but seeing the tide of wounded soldiers coming home, she left to train as a nurse.
She was already finding Melbourne suffocating, however, and as soon as she turned twenty-one, at the end of 1946, she decided to get out. She and some friends, accompanied (or chaperoned) by an older friend of the family, Ines Thornthwaite, boarded a Blue Funnel Line steamer, the Nestor, en route for London via South Africa. The ship was crammed with passengers and cargo. Britain had won the war, but the peace had brought austerity and rationing. In the holds were goods from Commonwealth countries like Australia that were at a premium. And in the cabins, my mother and her friends were among the first of that wave of young Australians who wanted to see a bigger world than their own country in the 1940s had to offer.
The group landed at Durban, where the ship was to take on coal, and made their way across South Africa to rejoin the Nestor at Cape Town. My mother, who had been brought up in a family with a tradition of charity and philanthropy, remembers the shock, not only of the rules of racial segregation but of its realities. In Johannesburg, where at 1753 metres the nights are cold, poor black miners slept on the streets, many of them showing what she recognised as the signs of tuberculosis. And she remembers the misery evident in the black shantytowns, seen from the train to Cape Town.
The Nestor’s penultimate stop was the Canary Islands, where the deck cargo load became even heavier with produce such as bananas, which during the war had been a dreamed-of impossibility for the British, and even now were still a luxury. My mo
ther’s first sight of Old Blighty was of little white houses dotting green fields in northern Wales as the Nestor ploughed towards Liverpool. Then, on the starboard side as they sailed up the Mersey, with Liverpool to port, there appeared Cheshire’s Wirral Peninsula—the place her great-grandfather had left more than a century before. Two years later, she was married, in London’s Savoy Chapel, to a dashing young British naval officer she’d met in Hampshire, John Horace Ragnar Colvin. There was then no hint in either of their minds of the clandestine world that lay ahead.
* * *
By mid-1955, returning to London from Vienna with a three-year-old in tow to prepare for her second child, my mother was relatively used to the espionage life. There had been the long absences, during my father’s ‘language training’ in the Adriatic and his ‘tradecraft training’ in centres in London and Hampshire; he had often been away when they lived in Klagenfurt and Vienna too. And when you’re married to a spy, the question ‘How was your day, darling?’ is never going to get an informative answer.
There’s also doubtless an element of not really wanting to know. Espionage is a form of licensed villainy: burglary, blackmail and bribery are tools of the trade, and with a few exceptions almost everybody is greedy for money.
My father told me one story of his time in Vienna, about an assignment on which he was a third-party observer of an exchange between a CIA agent and an Eastern Bloc informant, at an outdoor restaurant by a lake. The informant had brought a briefcase full of documents. The CIA man had brought a case full of greenbacks. My father was looking down from a table on a slightly higher terrace when, as the men opened their respective cases, a sudden, violent gust of wind blew up. Documents and dollars fluttered into the air, towards the lake. ‘And you know what?’ grinned my father. ‘Both of them grabbed for the dollars.’