by Adam Sisman
Prompted by Gollancz’s lawyer, David also changed the name of an East German assassin working in London under diplomatic cover from Wolff to Mundt, after discovering that the head of the East German Trade Delegation in London was called Wolf.† In his response to the publisher’s libel reading David was careful to maintain the pretence that he was a simple civil servant, with no inside knowledge of the world in which his book was set.
The Characters are wholly fictitious, and so is the Secret Service setting – so far as I am capable of judging. I know of no Govt office at or near Cambridge Circus, but I do not suppose that the Secret Service publishes the location of its offices. My reading on the subject has always led to the belief that Intelligence work is divided between separate services and you will notice that in my book there is only one service, which I suppose reduces the risk of a chance similarity.12
The publishers were not enthusiastic about the pseudonym David had chosen, and proposed that instead he should adopt one made up of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables suggesting an American provenance, such as Chuck Smith‡ or Hank Brown; but David resisted this advice.
Visiting him at the flat in Prince of Wales Drive, Rubinstein was puzzled by the drawings and poems pinned to the boys’ bedroom door – until he realised that David himself had drawn and written them all, in a child’s hand.
Before the book was published David had received his first posting – to Bonn, capital of the Federal Republic. He would be ‘undeclared’, meaning that his presence as an MI6 officer would not be admitted to the German authorities, or indeed to any but his most senior Embassy colleagues. His cover was as a second secretary, reporting to the Head of Chancery, and his overt role would be to travel around Germany, trying to win support for Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community, the precursor of the European Union, then generally known in Britain as the Common Market.
David took an advance on his salary to buy a car, a green Hillman Husky, which he drove to Bonn, taking the ferry from Dover to Ostend, with an overnight stay in Brussels. At the German border his diplomatic visa produced ‘a comic show of deference’, an indication perhaps of the respect still shown by Germans towards representatives of the former occupying powers. He arrived at the British Embassy in Bonn before lunch on 6 June 1961. ‘I’ve got a nice office looking on to open fields,’ he told Ann. She would remain behind in London with the two boys until he was settled. In particular he needed to find somewhere to live. Since David’s job was a new one, he had no predecessor from whom he might otherwise have inherited a house.
The Bonn Embassy was large, with a minister as the Ambassador’s deputy and several counsellors, plus a substantial MI6 station. The Minister would chair a meeting every morning to discuss recent events and the challenges of the day ahead, attended by seven or eight senior aides. There were five first or second secretaries in Chancery, plus Lance Pope, the Counsellor with special responsibility for German internal politics, who knew all the members of the Bundestag and was friendly with several ministers in the German government. David hugely admired Pope, who had worked in Germany during the 1930s, spoke flawless German and could sing German marching songs. During the war he had escaped from Colditz by dressing in a German officer’s uniform that he had made himself. Before walking out of the gate, he had summoned the guard and reprimanded him for some minor misdemeanour.
The First Secretary (Political) in Chancery was James Bennett, who shared a house with another young bachelor diplomat, David Goodall: these two became David’s closest friends in Bonn. Another of his Embassy colleagues, Tony Duff, though not a ‘spook’, would eventually become head of MI5. At a lower level were the ex-Control Commission local staff, including a small community of naturalised German Jews. David found them among the most hard working of the Embassy personnel and deplored the fact that these ‘temporaries’ had no employment rights or pension entitlement.
The Ambassador, Sir Christopher (‘Kit’) Steel, was a tall, heavily built, choleric man who had served in the British Embassy in Berlin before the war. When Ted Heath, the Cabinet Minister responsible for negotiating British entry into the Common Market, came out to Germany on a visit, Steel arranged a dinner party for him, to which the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maurice Couve de Murville, was also invited. It fell to David Goodall to explain to the Ambassador that Heath had come to Germany without bringing a dinner jacket. ‘Bloody barbarian!’ growled Steel.
Before leaving London David had had a morning coat made by a local tailor, which he wore for the first time at a garden party in Bonn. Various foreign diplomats introduced themselves, and David spoke convincingly about his work as a second secretary in Chancery. A Soviet diplomat took a particular interest, so David reached into his pocket and produced an engraved visiting card. On being handed the card, the Soviet diplomat scanned it with a puzzled expression – as well he might, because it bore the name of a Gentleman’s Bespoke Tailor in Battersea.
The head of the MI6 station in Bonn was Peter Lunn, a devout Roman Catholic and fierce anti-Communist, who disapproved of David’s more liberal political views. Lunn had been captain of the British ski team at the 1936 winter Olympics, and would seize every opportunity to ski, even in old age when he found it hard to walk. Slight in build, with blue eyes, he spoke in a soft voice with a lisp, every inch the gentleman spy, an image enhanced by the fact that he lived in a schloss down the Rhine, where he sometimes gave parties. During one of these David was shocked to overhear the Ambassador ask some German guests, ‘What do you think of this thieves’ kitchen?’ There was a Foreign Office tradition that one never referred to clandestine activities in public.
The revelation of George Blake’s treachery had hit Lunn particularly hard. Blake had been Lunn’s protégé when he was head of station in Berlin; it had been Lunn’s card index of agents which Blake had copied one night while acting as duty officer. As head of the SIS station in Vienna in the late 1940s, Lunn had masterminded a tunnelling operation that had enabled Soviet telephone lines to be tapped, providing a stream of valuable intelligence. It turned out that the Americans were planning something similar in Berlin, but on a much more ambitious scale. Lunn had offered to share the British expertise gained in Vienna; he acted as host for an Anglo-American meeting to plan the operation at a house in Carlton Gardens in London. Unfortunately he had asked Blake to attend and take the minutes. Blake’s confession rendered the intelligence gathered from the Berlin telephone taps of questionable value. It now seemed obvious how the Russians had ‘discovered’ the tunnel, only eleven months after it had been dug. Blake later admitted that the full details of the operation, which would cost the Americans millions of dollars, had been known to the Soviet authorities ‘before even the first spade had been put in the ground’.
The British were concerned about the security of their own communications in Germany. Diplomats were advised to close their curtains to minimise the possibility of electronic eavesdropping. While David was serving in Bonn it was decided to build a secure cipher room within the Embassy, with thick, sound-proofed walls and protected cabling.
‘The work is interesting and by no means chairbound,’ David wrote to John Margetson, soon after he arrived.13 Until a suitable house could be found, he was billeted in a gloomy pension in Bad Godesberg, a short distance up the Rhine from Bonn, which he pictured to Ann as ‘a pretty, dignified residential area … with expensive shops’.14
Bonn had been chosen in 1949 as the capital, rather than a bigger city such as Frankfurt or Hamburg, as a temporary measure, since the new Federal Republic took the line that the German Democratic Republic was an illegally constituted state, and that sooner or later Berlin would again become the capital of a reunified Germany. The choice of Bonn had owed much to the advocacy of West Germany’s first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, a former mayor of Cologne and a native of the Rhineland, still in power after almost a dozen years, though by 1961 he was in his mid-eighties and nicknamed der Alte (‘the Old One’). T
he city had been too small to accommodate all the necessary buildings, which stretched up the left bank of the Rhine towards Bad Godesberg. David would later provide a satirical portrait of the German capital in his novel A Small Town in Germany:
To accommodate the immigration of diplomats, politicians and government servants … the townspeople have built a complete suburb outside their city walls … a jumble of stodgy towers and lowflung contemporary hutments which stretched along the dual carriageway almost as far as the agreeable sanatorium settlement of Bad Godesberg, whose principal industry, having once been bottled water, is now diplomacy … the seat of the Federal government and the great majority of the ninety-odd missions accredited to it, not to mention the lobbyists, the press, the political parties, the refugee organizations, the official residences of Federal Dignitaries, the Kuratorium for Indivisible Germany, and the whole bureaucratic superstructure of West Germany’s provisional capital, are to be found either side of this one arterial carriageway between the former seat of the Bishop of Cologne and the Victorian villas of a Rhineland spa.
The British Embassy was an unlovely building, erected on the site of a former gravel pit to a specification from the Ministry of Works. Diplomatic staff complained about long corridors and poor construction standards.
Imagine a sprawling factory block of no merit, the kind of building you see in dozens on the Western by-pass, usually with a symbol of its product set out on the roof; paint about it a sullen Rhenish sky, add an indefinable hint of Nazi architecture, just a hint, no more, and you have portrayed with fair accuracy the mind and force of England in the Federal Republic … Built as the Occupation drew to its premature end, it catches precisely that mood of graceless renunciation; a stone face turned towards a former foe, a grey smile offered to the present ally.15
David depicted Bonn as perpetually wreathed in the fog that clings to the Rhine valley, while teams of barges ground blindly up and down the river, shaking the buildings as they passed. Opposite Bad Godesberg on the right bank the Petersberg mountain towered above the resort town of Königswinter, capped by the hotel where Neville Chamberlain had stayed during the Sudetenland crisis, from which he had descended to Bad Godesberg to confer with Hitler. In A Small Town in Germany the looming mountain symbolises the past that everyone is striving to forget. ‘We’ve got the big memory and the small memory,’ observes Leo Harting, one of the few characters in the book with a conscience. ‘The small memory’s to remember the small things and the big memory’s to forget the big ones.’16
Only sixteen years after the end of the war, Germany’s past was hard to forget. Former Nazis were everywhere: in the police, the judiciary, the intelligence fraternity and the armed services, in industry and science and the teaching professions, and, most particularly, in the bureaucracy. Hans Globke, one of Adenauer’s closest aides, had helped to draft the Nuremberg Laws. Reinhard Gehlen, head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the Federal Intelligence Service, had learned his trade as head of German military intelligence in the killing grounds of the Eastern Front. Ernst Achenbach, a member of the Bundestag and a senior figure in the Free Democratic Party, had helped to organise the deportation of French Jews from Paris. And so on. ‘Bonn in the early 1960s was a spooky place,’ David would write in retrospect. ‘Sometimes the very streets of the city seemed like a perilously thin surface laid hastily upon the recent dreadful past, like one of those nicely mown grass mounds at Belsen concentration camp, covering the mute agony of the innocent dead.’17
Bonn was a nest of spies. Former Nazis were vulnerable to blackmail: those with access to sensitive information were targeted from the East. Every prominent West German politician had contacts in the GDR. The BND itself was riddled with moles. Heinz Felfe had been head of its department of Soviet counter-espionage, until he was arrested in 1961 and shown to be a Soviet spy himself. He had risen rapidly within the BND because of his success in uncovering Soviet agents. It is possible that the cynicism of Soviet policy in sacrificing less important agents to further Felfe’s career inspired the similar operation at the heart of The Spy who Came in from the Cold.
David’s overt role required him to cultivate German politicians and journalists. For a sometimes idealistic young diplomat, the omnipresence of former Nazis was repellent. The fact that he was forced to consort with such people in his daily work was hard to stomach.18 Many of his colleagues shared his distaste for their hosts. The British Embassy was ‘a bastion of English phobias about the country in which it was situated’, David would write in the foreword to A Small Town in Germany; it was ‘a place made schizophrenic by Britain’s continuing self-perception as victor in the ’39–45 war, and by our much humbler and more realistic role as supplicant for German support for our belated entry into the European Community’.19 Britain had only reluctantly supported America in endorsing and promoting German rearmament, which remained a controversial issue at home. Though officially committed to the goals of the Federal Republic, the British were nervous of any prospect of German reunification. ‘I love Germany so much that I would like three or four Germanies,’ quipped one British diplomat. When Hans Kroll, the German Ambassador to Moscow, proposed a unified, unaligned Germany, he was quickly replaced.
The action of A Small Town in Germany takes place against the background of a revival of the extreme right. As British diplomats struggle to negotiate entry into Europe, young Germans chant anti-British slogans and burn a library of British books. A neo-Nazi movement led by a figure ‘from the old days’ is poised to take power. In the early 1960s there were real fears that something like this might happen. With the benefit of hindsight we can now say that these fears were unfounded; but less than a generation after the most terrible war in human history, the prospect could not be ignored. Indeed in 1966 Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former Nazi who had joined the Party within weeks of Hitler coming to power, would become Chancellor, though as leader of a cross-party coalition, not of the extreme right. At a political meeting in November 1968, Kiesinger would be slapped in the face by a young woman activist who shouted at him, ‘Nazi!’
David’s covert role had been created out of such fears.* His task was to investigate and detect potential Nazi cells or organisations, and to recruit German sleepers who would join any such groupings in order to provide information on them. But since the Germans were extremely sensitive about the possibility of any British interference in their politics, David’s function had to be concealed from all but a very few senior members of the Embassy staff. Most of them were not even aware that he was SIS. Nor did he have much to do with the station itself, because his work was peripheral to its main effort against the Eastern bloc countries, the Soviet Union in particular. He never had anything to do with running agents into East Germany, for example. His remit left him his own master, on his own for much of the time. As it turned out, there was very little for him to do, because the feared Nazi revival never materialised.20 Parties of the extreme right failed to gain popular support, and at their rallies the neo-Nazis were usually outnumbered by the police.
After David had been in Bonn a month or so, Ann arrived with their two boys. At first they all lived together in the pension, but the landlady found them too noisy, so they moved first to a flat and then to a tiny, three-bedroomed house in Bad Godesberg, 42 Gringstrasse. David had enquired about housing in Königswinter, but had been warned that living on the ‘wrong’ side of the river was frowned upon. ‘H.E. has more or less banned it on principle,’ he had written to Ann while she was still in England. ‘Apparently the Germans don’t like it either – it’s a bit like being asked to a diplomatic reception in Clapham …’21 The last ferry crossed at 11.30 in the evening: if you missed that, you were forced to make a detour to the nearest bridge.
The difficulty in finding somewhere to live was exacerbated by David’s anomalous position. The Head of Chancery resented the presence of an outsider in his domain. David had to overcome a general prejudice against ‘Friends’, as MI6 people were m
isleadingly known. Indeed some of those alongside whom he was working suspected that he might have been sent to spy on them. Despite these obstacles David soon made himself a popular member of the Embassy staff. His intelligence was obvious, and his quick wit appealing. Everything that happened to him became an anecdote, and he had an eye for everybody’s foibles. One of his colleagues had a tic, which David imitated to entertaining effect. He did a faithful impression of the Ambassador’s schoolboy German, which his German contacts found especially hilarious. One of his party pieces reproduced the conversation when the Prime Minister had come to Bonn in a forlorn attempt to solicit German support for Britain’s Common Market application and was staying as a guest of the Ambassador. Both men drank steadily. After half a bottle of kirsch, Macmillan had become philosophical. ‘Well, I see no hope,’ he had said. ‘We’re the chaps of whom our children will say, we brought the world to ruin.’ Afterwards David was charged with escorting the PM to bed, following his liver-spotted hand up the rail of the grand staircase. They reached the royal apartments, where the guest was sleeping.
‘What did you say your name was, my dear fellow?’ enquired the Prime Minister.
‘Cornwell,’ replied David, imagining promotion, even a knighthood. ‘Cornwell. David Cornwell.’
‘Cornhill,’ Macmillan repeated. ‘I’ll bear that in mind, my dear chap.’
The social life of the Embassy was conformist and restrictive, a caricature of the manners of the nation. ‘Its styles and prejudices were informed by an expatriate vision of suburban England which was certainly long out of date, and had probably never existed anyway,’ David would write in the foreword to A Small Town in Germany.22 On at least one occasion he was taken aside and told that he was not behaving in the manner expected of a diplomat. When, at an informal dinner with colleagues, he congratulated the housekeeper on the dish she was serving, his host brought him up short. ‘Can’t you act like a gentleman and not talk to the servants?’ David was stunned into silence; Ann wanted to leave immediately.