by Len Deighton
I am forming a ‘Brains Trust’ (as they say these days) of people who see eye to eye with me on these points so that when the country finally comes to its senses we will be in a position to do something about it.
You are right about Roosevelt’s crowd; now that he’s safely in for the third time they will foment the spiteful retaliatory attitude of the socialist mob here. However, Roosevelt isn’t America you know, and as long as your people don’t do anything foolish (like dropping a bomb on New York) only a small number will be willing to pick up a gun if it means putting down a cash register.
Burn this now,
Yours,
HENRY
58 To put it together hastily
Perhaps they are not typical of the letters that I took from the cylinder. I spread them all out across the table. Some were written under engraved headings, some on paper torn from exercise books. What did they all have in common?
I shook the tiny tin of silica gel crystals that had helped keep the documents dry and I flipped through the yellow-paged, rough-printed book of names and addresses. I wondered if I would have reasoned that these things were among the great treasures of the modern world. I decided that I wouldn’t have, but then da Cunha was more than a little dotty. Da Cunha who could sit and lecture me about the sanctity of the middle classes.
When Nazi Germany was falling about its creator’s ears the bigwigs were busy making a grab for a souvenir of something they had known and loved – like money.
Some liked big pictures and they took old master paintings; some liked little pictures and they took stamp collections; some liked luxury, they took gold; some liked la belle époque, they took heroin; but one had developed a taste for power. He took these letters.
When the Wehrmacht was straining its eyes to peer through the Channel mist, the order went out to form a British Puppet Government. German diplomatic circles were asked to contact likely sympathizers, using the individual approach as far as possible. So it was that earnest, charming, personal letters reached earnest, charming people who might be prepared to be a Member of Parliament in the Nazi-backed National Socialist Government that was to have its seat in the Channel Islands until London was made ready.
These letters were filed when winter set in. They were filed again at the end of the next summer, when letters about puppet governments were addressed to earnest, charming Bessarabians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. They had collected dust until, one day in 1945, a man realized that these letters from influential people might make life easier in an unfriendly world.
Fregattenkapitän Knobel, a scientific officer of the German Navy, took his packet of letters and his tin of heroin and went aboard the Type XXI U-boat at Cuxhaven. Da Cunha knew all about the meteorological buoys and he spent an hour sealing his package of blackmail ammunition into the canister and re-fixing the waterproof seal. Off Albufeira he ordered the commander of the U-boat to drop the canister, and then da Cunha went ashore in a rubber dinghy. The U-boat captain lost a dinghy and very soon after he lost his life, for the U-boat foundered with all hands.
What happened will probably never be known. Few Type XXIs ever came into contact with water. Most of them were packed tightly together, half-completed, on the slipways of Northern Germany, when the Allied armies reached them. As far as I know there isn’t a whole XXI anywhere in the world, unless we count the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean just off Albufeira.
Tomas realized that a U-boat full of high-ranking Nazis would contain valuable loot – if you don’t mind probing around rotting bodies. How much Tomas minded is another thing we shall never know. When he removed the canisters of heroin he needed help in disposing of it. He couldn’t have found a more suitable helpmate than H.K., but they both stayed clear of da Cunha’s preserves.
Tomas never lost his respect for da Cunha. He stiffened when da Cunha came near and answered him in the short monosyllabic tones of the German Navy. Like all Germans, da Cunha was able to master accentless Portuguese. How much Tomas knew about the cylinder is difficult to decide, but he guessed enough to blackmail at least one person named therein – Smith. Although Tomas went with da Cunha to check the meteorology cylinder every six months, until our voyage together he had made no attempt to retrieve the cylinder from the ocean bed. Tomas had only a radio receiver; from da Cunha we had stolen a transmitter which would summon the cylinder from the sea bed rather than just receive a signal every twelve hours. Tomas rushed to get the cylinder when he discovered that da Cunha had fled (as H.K. guessed he would).
Why did da Cunha keep the papers on the sea bed? He was a blackmailer. Smith was ‘persuaded’ to equip a research lab. for him. Smith was ‘persuaded’ to have me recalled from Albufeira. How many other people were persuaded to do things?
I took the file marked OSTRA. (An ‘oyster’: lying at the bottom of the sea with a pearl inside, that was da Cunha’s cylinder.) I added the letters I had taken from the buoy. They made a small mountain on Dawlish’s bright mahogany desk.
‘So this is the lot,’ Dawlish said. He sniffed contemplatively.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d guess that most of these people have donated money to the “Young Europe Movement” at one time or another.’
‘Jolly good,’ said Dawlish, ‘I knew you would manage.’
‘Oh sure,’ I said, ‘especially when you wanted to cancel the whole operation.’
Dawlish looked at me over his spectacles, which can get to be very irritating.
‘Furthermore,’ I said, ‘you knew that that girl was employed by the American Narcotics Bureau, and you didn’t tell me.’
‘Yes,’ said Dawlish blandly, ‘but she was a very low-echelon employee and I had no wish to inhibit intercourse among the group.’ We looked blankly at each other for two or three minutes.
‘Social,’ Dawlish amended.
‘Of course,’ I agreed. Dawlish disembowelled his pipe with a penknife.
‘When will Smith be arrested?’ I asked.
‘Arrested?’ said Dawlish. ‘What an extraordinary question; why would he be arrested?’
‘Because he is a corner-stone of an international Fascist movement dedicated to the overthrow of democratic government.’ I said it patiently, even though I knew that Dawlish was deliberately leading me on.
Dawlish said, ‘You surely don’t imagine that they can put everyone who answers that description in jail. Where would we find room for them, and besides, where would the Bonn government get another Civil Service?’ He gave a sardonic smile and tapped the pile of documents. ‘Our friends here are much more useful where they are – as long as they know that H.M. Government have this little pile in Kevin Cassel’s cellar.’
He opened the drawer of his desk and produced an even more enormous file of documents. Across the front it said ‘Young Europe Movement’ in Alice’s fuse-wire handwriting, and was bulging with months of work that Dawlish had never even told me about.
‘You didn’t understand your role, my boy,’ he said in his smug voice; ‘we didn’t want you to discover anything. Somehow we knew that you would make them do something indiscreet.’
Last Word
I took all the material down to Kevin Cassel in his Central Register last Tuesday. He signed and embossed the official receipt and wished me merry Christmas.
‘Well over the fast,’ I said. Why was he always smiling?
As I drove back through Ripley an old lady was sticking tufts of cotton wool into her shop-window to spell ‘Merry Xmas’. Outside a man was using a shovel to clear a path to the door.
‘Now you see what it’s like where the work is done,’ said Dawlish, and went on to make provocative remarks about lying around in the sun. Dawlish had convened the training structure sub-committee on my behalf. It was a master-stroke in his battle with O’Brien for control of the Strutton Committee. Dawlish had put every member of the Strutton Committee on the training structure subcommittee with the exception of O’Brien. In other words it was like holding meetings with O’Brien l
ocked out. Dawlish was all knees and elbows. He sat in his battered leather armchair and puffed clouds of smoke at the Duke of Wellington, and said that being successful was just a state of mind.
Bernhard had spread himself all over my office but had taken care not to do any of my paper work. The thirteen-centimetre lens for the Nikon had apricot jam on it, and my secretary was doing half the typing in the building. I kicked Bernhard and his twenty cardboard folders out, and although he protested volubly he set up shop elsewhere. ‘And I owe you a two-pound bag of sugar,’ he said as he left.
‘Stealing sugar is a felony,’ I grumbled. ‘Didn’t you learn any manners at Cambridge?’
‘The only thing I learned at Cambridge,’ said Bernhard, ‘was how to put on a pair of fifteen-inch trousers without first removing my chukka boots.’
Alice brought me some sugar.
On Friday I took Charly Christmas shopping in the West End. She bought her father a subscription to Playboy and I sent Baix an Eton tie. I suppose we were each in our own way fighting the establishment. She tried to make some joke at my expense about the ice-melting theories that I had believed; but I didn’t respond.
‘Your old man is an admiral, isn’t he?’ I asked.
‘Yes, dream man.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I want to speak to him about that diving equipment. Lisbon have lost part of it. It’s on my charge, you see. They want me to pay £250 towards it.’
‘Come back to my place,’ she said, ‘I’ll see what can be done.’
‘You’ll help?’ I said.
‘Console,’ she said, ‘console.’
Appendixes
1. Telephone-tapping
‘When you talk into a telephone, you shout from the roof,’ Ivor Butcher said one day. A tremendous number of phone calls are tapped in the U.K. In the U.S. wiretapping is an industry.
1. To tap (in comfort) get someone in the G.P.O. to alter wires on the frame so that your ‘victim’s’ phone rings yours as well as the number he is calling. All you do is listen in or record. N.B. If you want to know what number he has dialled you will need a Dial Recorder to count the digits.
2. To tap. Take your ‘tappers’ (box, hand-set and crocodile clips) to the B.T. (box terminal), ‘taste’ the terminals with a wet finger to get the one you want. Note: a friend inside the G.P.O. who can tell you about the ‘pairs’ and how far from the ‘victim’s’ phone they can be picked up will make life a little easier.
3. To tap one call only. You can brazenly do it from an outdoor green cabinet, but study the dress characteristics of G.P.O. engineers first.
4. Are you tapped? Do you get cut off in mid-conversation more often when using one particular phone? (N.B. Don’t be misled by old-fashioned inefficiency, all G.P.O. phones are subject to that.) Do you sometimes find that the clarity and amplification increase after a minute or so? This is all due to the eavesdropper carelessly replacing the handset. Moral: Don’t say anything confidential over a phone, but if you really must, discuss trivia for two or three minutes in the hope that the eavesdropper will hang up.
2. Austin Butterworth (Ossie)
In November 1938, D.S.T., which is the French M.I.5, wanted to open an English make of safe in a certain embassy in Paris. Special Branch brought Ossie out of Parkhurst and asked him to go there.
‘With the Nicks to help you,’ said Ossie incredulously, and volunteered like a shot. He got on all right with D.S.T. and they kept him for nearly four months. Ossie’s value to them came from his knowledge of British safes, which several of the embassies in Paris then had. Now of course any embassy in its right mind uses only safes made in its own country. However, back before the war Ossie earned himself a quite nice French civil medal, but some bureaucrat in the Home Office prevented its award.
Ossie has always been a very thorough worker, and often he would take a London office and register a firm at Bush House in order to write and inquire about the sort of safe he intended to crack. Once or twice he even bought and installed the same model to practise on. Perhaps this isn’t so extraordinary these days, but in the thirties it was really scientific crime.
It was in April 1939 that D.S.T. borrowed Ossie again. This time, without telling London what they intended (and very wise, too, for the Home Office would have gone out of their small minds), they sent Ossie to live in Berlin. Big expense account and an apartment in a beautiful block of flats in the Bayerischer Platz. All Ossie had to do was to study the literature of the safe manufacturers. Sometimes they would go to one of the showrooms to look at the real thing. When war began, Paris and London were fighting over Ossie and he spent the war years travelling around the world cracking safes for various Allied Intelligence organizations. All this experience meant that Ossie had made many important friends ‘across the grain’, as they say in Intelligence work; that is to say, he was a link between many separate organizations.
In the normal way of operations, such people disappear when their usefulness is past. Ossie’s influence was now great, and because of his friends he survived those fatal years for agents, 1945–8. Ossie had been back in prison several times since the war, even though the F.O. generally sent some tame V.C. along to the court to speak about his war record in what was ironically described as ‘the Resistance’. In the post-war world of Intelligence Ossie had become a specialist on documents. Common crime was no longer for him; he got secret documents out of safes. The document business was booming. He would ‘do’ an aeroplane factory for the Yugoslav Embassy or the Yugoslav Embassy for an aeroplane factory. Ossie didn’t play favourites among clients. ‘It wouldn’t be right,’ he once told me. By now Ossie could read enough of a dozen languages to ensure that he wouldn’t bring the wrong documents back. He had also studied photography at L.C.C. evening classes.
3. Operation Bernhard
The idea of producing counterfeit banknotes (£5, £10, £20, £50) in order to shake confidence in British currency is said to have been inspired by the dropping of forged clothing-and food-coupons by the R.A.F. over Nazi Germany. The original plan (to drop the notes from Luftwaffe aircraft) was named Operation Andreas but later was replaced by Operation Bernhard. This latter plan was to use the money to finance secret operations.
The notes produced at Oranienburg Concentration Camp (Special Wing 19) were used to:
Buy arms from Balkan partisans (so making them less dangerous).
Finance Hungarian radio-listening service.
Buy information concerning Mussolini’s whereabouts (in order to arrange rescue).
Pay Cicero (£300,000).
Supply presents for Arab sheiks.
In the latter stages of the war the production centre was moved to Ebensee and to an underground factory near the village of Redl-Zipf (between Salzburg and Linz). A young S.S. lieutenant moving a consignment of the currency (and some people say the plates too) is in a difficult position when one of the lorries breaks down. Acting on orders, he tips the packing cases into the River Traun and hands the broken lorry over to the Wehrmacht. After a little distance a second lorry breaks down; it is abandoned.
When British currency comes floating down the Traun to the Traunsee Lake the U.S. Army, who are by now in occupation, investigate the second lorry. In it they find £21 million in virtually perfect forgeries. It is accepted that the remaining lorries went to the German Naval Research Station (homing torpedoes were tested in the lake).
The sides of the lake are steep, and investigation of it rendered dangerous by a raft of waterlogged timber that hangs suspended about 100 feet below the surface of the water. Divers do not dare to go under it.
In March 1946 two bodies are found near by. Both men had been stationed at the Naval Research Station. In August 1950, another death: again an ex-member of the Naval Research Station.
Many people thought that the sites of these deaths indicated that the plates were hidden in the heights above the station rather than in the water. Rumours said that the Russians organized these attempts, but ther
e is nothing to connect them with either.
In 1953 the Reader’s Digest financed an investigation, and in 1959 a German magazine financed another and claims to have found plates, notes and secret records in a near-by lake. The material was placed in such a way that it could be recovered. There have since been several more.
Operation Bernhard was run by the S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst), the S.S. Security and Intelligence Unit which evoked much jealousy among the other Nazi intelligence units for its extravagant access to so much finance.
4. Olterra
The Olterra was a 4,900-ton Italian tanker which sank (although leaving its superstructure above the water-line) in Algeciras Bay at the beginning of World War 2. The Italian Government offered to raise it and sell it to the Spanish Government. The price was very reasonable. The Italian salvage men cut a door in the hull below water level. It then became a secret harbour for the tiny human torpedoes (called by the Italians Maiale – pigs) which had arrived dismantled among the new tubes and boilers for the Olterra. Gibraltar harbour was just across the bay.
5. Kurier
Invented by German Navy during World War 2. The original device enabled a semi-skilled operator to send high-speed signals (these could be read and decoded only by means of recording gear, it was far too fast for a human ear to interpret). The dials are set to arrange the signal, then the cylinder is attached to the transmitter and the crank turned to send a signal. During the war the messages were photo-recorded at Neumünster (Holstein). The R.N. were most anxious to acquire one. After the war this improved version was designed.
6. Lt Peterson, B.T., Court martial
The front page said ‘Court Martial’ and then a list of contents. First the report of the Court of Inquiry that had repatriated this officer from Germany. Under that was the Circumstantial Letter (a report about the need for a court martial). Then there was a list of witnesses, warrant for holding the court, statements by the accused, and a batch of pencilled shorthand originals.