“I am pleased for you,” he said. “You need a break, we all do, but you’re right, I can’t get away.”
He leant over to kiss her. She raised her mouth, pursing her lips to meet his. He felt the taste of wine on her lips. She put her arms around him and gave him a quick hug. He felt her cheek against his, wet with tears.
24
No one in the British embassy had ever seen Roger Halliday smile. He would return morning greetings with a nod and sombrely thank people for the occasional courtesies bestowed upon him by way of a chocolate biscuit with his morning coffee or a gift of flowers on his birthday.
In spite of his dour manner, Halliday was generally liked, especially by the secretarial and junior staff, who admired the nonconformist manner in which he dressed, his inevitably late appearances at important meetings and his ill-disguised contempt for diplomatic protocol in general.
The shabby dress and the lack of personal hygiene were dismissed as the eccentricities of an homme sérieux and it was generally accepted that Halliday had much to be sérieux about in the Berlin of March 1939.
So Macrae was surprised to see his colleague smile broadly as he paced the drawing room in his Charlottenburg house one evening in late March. A nearby church had just struck six o’clock. It was still light outside and there was a lingering warmth at the close of the day that gave a hint of the spring to come.
“Do you mind if I have another glass of that fine Alsace wine?” said Halliday. He spoke in the manner of someone who had thought of a good joke and was waiting for the right moment to tell it.
Macrae poured the wine and followed Halliday onto the balcony. Together they looked silently out through the trees to the broad avenue. To the east, the soaring Siegessäule was being hung with long white streamers edged in red and carrying symbols of the imperial eagle and the swastika.
It was three weeks before the Führer’s birthday celebration, but Goebbels had ordered a long and lavish build-up to the event. Workmen were already constructing the stands and seating for thousands of important guests.
The Victory Column, a reminder of the iron fist with which Bismarck had crushed France, was to be a focal point of the march-past. The column carried intricate carvings showing the triumph of German arms as they dictated peace terms to the French at Versailles in 1871. Searchlights were to illuminate these frescoes on the night of the celebrations while fireworks arced overhead. It was known to be Hitler’s favourite monument in Berlin, which is why Albert Speer had ordered the whole edifice to be transported stone by stone so that it now faced that other monument to past German glory, the Brandenburg Gate, along the Charlottenburger Chaussee.
“See that reviewing stand through the trees?” he asked Halliday.
“Yes.”
“It is almost exactly five hundred and fifty yards,” said Macrae. He had paced the distance only that morning.
Halliday stepped back into the room. He was definitely smiling now. He put a finger to his lips.
“Not another word,” he said.
Halliday closed the window, still smiling. Macrae was irritated. Perhaps he was being mocked.
“Why are you smiling?”
“Because I’ve watched you these last few months, Macrae. Anyone who knew your record in the war, knew where you lived in Berlin, knew your views on these gangsters here and above all knew what you thought of the policy of appeasement would know what was going through your mind. My only worry was that the Gestapo might work it out as well, but they don’t seem to have done.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about what you plan to do with that old army rifle of yours – the one you used when you shot all those boar.”
Macrae sat down, hoping to give the appearance of calm he certainly did not feel. Halliday had been talking to Koenig. The German colonel had been bypassing him and giving secret information to British intelligence. And now Halliday had guessed what he planned to do. He felt a fool, no he was a fool, but it didn’t matter, did it?
Halliday watched him, saying nothing while the minutes passed.
“You approve?” said Macrae finally.
And then Halliday laughed, a long laugh that ended with a choking splutter. He sipped his wine, still smiling.
“That’s not my job. But I know a man in London who would be very interested. Whatever you do, don’t tell the ambassador.”
“What should I do?”
“There’s a flight tomorrow morning. Tell Primrose it is an urgent recall from the War Office.”
“She’s skiing.”
“Ah, yes. By the way …”
“Yes?”
“I’m coming with you.”
Sir Stewart Menzies spent his weekends on the country estates of ennobled and wealthy landowners in Gloucestershire, where fox hunting was more a presiding passion than an occasional sport. Every Thursday or Friday evening, he would take the express train from London to Bath. By special arrangement, the train would stop at a private railway station owned by the Duke of Beaufort, where Menzies would alight, often to be personally welcomed by the duke himself. It was with the Beaufort hunt, the most famous in the country, that Menzies took to his horse and followed the master and his hounds every weekend in the season. When the season ended, in May, the duke and his friends would spend their evenings recounting the glories of past hunts and eagerly looking forward to the start of the next season.
It was a curious convenience for Sir Stewart Menzies and his friends that interest in the sport was not confined to their social class. Fox hunting had a wide following among country people of all classes. The young would trail boisterously after the hounds on foot across field, stream and hill every weekend, while their elders gathered to admire the spectacle of the weekly meet, when riders, horses and hounds gathered under the direction of the master. Scarlet-jacketed men with white riding breeches mingled with ladies riding side-saddle, wearing bowler hats and skirts flowing down to their stirrups. They would be handed small glasses of cherry brandy to stiffen their resolve for the hard riding ahead while the onlookers mingled with the hounds and drank glasses of beer served from a local pub.
Menzies liked to think of this weekly pageant as the quintessence of England – a coming together of grandees and yeomen, rich and poor, men and women, all gathered to pursue and celebrate a sport that was born when the great forests of England were cleared in the medieval ages.
Menzies was well aware of the critics of the “mink and manure” set. He knew that the outdated lifestyle of the privileged few on their country estates presented easy propaganda victories for socialists and their communist allies. The fact that fox hunting was a popular country sport that created jobs where few were to be found cut no ice with the metropolitan intelligentsia.
His own answer to such critics came every week on the Monday-morning train back to London. Once in his office on the narrow street off Parliament Square quaintly named Broadway, he liked to think of himself as the mastermind of a piratical enterprise organising deception, theft, blackmail, kidnapping and the occasional murder.
The object was not money but information – secret information held by enemies of the United Kingdom. Menzies enjoyed this double life as a fox-hunting grandee and a swashbuckling pirate, because the first gave him very good cover for the second and both gave him immense pleasure and power.
That Monday morning in March he was due to meet his own highly regarded man in Berlin and the military attaché at the embassy there. The day had begun well. He had been gratified by finally being confirmed as C, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. His predecessor Sinclair had died after a long illness the previous November and it had taken the intervening months for the prime minister’s office to agree to appoint a fox-hunting friend of the Duke of Beaufort as head of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
There had been those who doubted the wisdom of the appointment. That political outcast and troublemaker Winston Churchill had been fiercely o
pposed, for one thing. Menzies had been told that any doubts in the cabinet committee overseeing the Secret Service were immediately removed with the remark “When has Churchill been right about anything?”
Macrae and Halliday were ushered into C’s office, where a coal fire burnt brightly and a tray of coffee and biscuits had been placed on a low table. Their plane had arrived that morning and they were due to return early the following day. They had just twenty-four hours to win sanction for the plan.
Menzies listened to both men carefully as in turn they explained their proposal. The SIS did not balk at the occasional killing of enemy agents or, on rare occasions, its own traitors, but never before had C been presented with a plan to murder a head of state. And Hitler was not just any head of state. The assassination of the Führer of the Third Reich on his fiftieth birthday was a plan so bold, so freighted with risk, so utterly unimaginable, so terrifying in its possible consequences yet so rich in potential reward, that it immediately appealed to Menzies.
He knew that critics such as Churchill had claimed that a London clubman who spent his time fox-hunting at weekends lacked the ruthless capacity for dirty work required of a spymaster. This would be his answer.
Roger Halliday’s advocacy of the plan was a brilliant analysis of the consequences of doing nothing. Hitler was bent on a war for which the British and French were unprepared. The United States would stay out of a European conflict unless directly attacked herself. There were alarming reports that Germany and Russia were seeking a rapprochement that would give Stalin a large portion of Poland and allow the Nazi generals to fight a one-front war in the west.
As for the disaffected generals in the German High Command, all hopes of a coup against the regime had turned to dust. They collectively despised Hitler but lacked strong leadership. They would only act against the regime, Halliday claimed, if Hitler was somehow removed from power. Menzies admired Halliday. He was a highly effective agent and someone who stood up to that recklessly pro-appeasement ambassador in Berlin.
The doubts in Menzies’s mind lay not in the assassination itself. If Colonel Macrae was the excellent shot he was said to be, and if his firing position was indeed between five hundred and six hundred yards of Hitler’s reviewing stand, he could see that, technically, the killing could easily be accomplished.
There were two problems. Both were political. There was a good chance the assassination would be traced to Macrae and thus to the embassy. Dismissing Macrae as a lunatic extremist who acted on his own would lack credibility. Britain would stand before the world as an exemplar of murderous hypocrisy, a supposedly civilised Christian nation that carried out the extrajudicial murder of its political enemies abroad.
Against that, the concentration camps would be opened and the ghastly apparatus of Hitler’s tyranny would be exposed. The generals would reveal secret military plans for an invasion of Poland and probably Russia as well. Europe and the world would see that Britain had acted to free mankind from a monster and to prevent a second European war.
Menzies was confident that, with a cooperative British press and the worldwide reach of the BBC, this view would win international acceptance, not least because it was true. The facts would speak for themselves.
The real political problem lay in Downing Street and the Foreign Office: how to persuade Sir Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, both men of high Christian principles, that there was a moral as well as a strategic case for Hitler’s assassination?
As on the hunting field, Menzies deemed that the best tactic was to tackle the problem head on. A high stone wall or a stream in flood were best crossed at the fastest gallop a well-whipped horse could muster.
He thanked the two men and told them their journey from Berlin had been well worthwhile. However, he neither sanctioned their plan nor committed himself to its merits, beyond saying that their proposal required further discussion.
He told them to await confirmation of an appointment with the foreign secretary, maybe as soon as that afternoon. There was no time to lose, Menzies said. If, as he hoped, the plan was approved, much secret work would have to begin on how best to deal with a Germany without Hitler.
The appointment was made for 3 p.m. and switched from the Foreign Office to 10 Downing Street. The prime minister had been briefed on the mission of the men from Berlin and wished to hear their plans first-hand. Roger Halliday was not included in the meeting because, much as Menzies admired his man in Berlin, he did not think it wise to expose a prime minister who was all class and starch to a man who despised social convention. Halliday was a mustard man, thought Menzies, an unconventional outsider without the manners or background of a gentleman. That is what made him such a good agent in the field.
Before the meeting at Number 10, Halliday gave Macrae a final piece of advice. “Don’t criticise the appeasement policy, don’t even hint that it has failed or that Hitler has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes. Just remind them that we once executed our king in the name of freedom, and surely we can do the same to free the Germans from their tyrant.”
They arranged to meet later that day at 6 p.m. on the bridge over the lake in St James’s Park, just four hundred yards from Downing Street.
“Don’t be late. I’m going to give you a decent dinner,” Halliday said, and was gone.
“Colonel Macrae and Sir Stewart Menzies,” said the usher, opening the door to the Cabinet Room. Sir Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax rose from their seats and welcomed the two men. Macrae was nervous and tripped on the carpet before taking his seat, while Menzies acted as if he was reclining in an armchair at his club and was about to discuss the afternoon’s racing with a couple of fellow members.
Macrae looked out of the window and noticed that the view had changed since he had last been in this room. It had been August and the trees in the park were in full leaf. Now, the branches were bare but speckled with green buds. Spring was coming and so was Hitler’s birthday. He craned his head, trying to see the bridge over the lake where he would meet Halliday that evening. They would get drunk tonight whatever happened, deliriously drunk.
“We have met before,” said a voice, and Macrae turned to see a long hand extended over the table. Mr Edward Bridges, the cabinet secretary, had taken his place and the same stenographer as before had also joined them. Macrae shook the hand and nodded.
“Shall we begin?” said the prime minister. He was looking at a paper that Menzies must have prepared. It was just one side of foolscap and, turning his head to read the upside-down script, Macrae could see the title was suitably vague: “Closing the Road to War.”
Menzies began by revealing what he termed new information that showed how decisively the balance of power was tipping against Britain in Europe. Every move made by the Third Reich pointed to war in September. The latest rumours of a German invasion of Holland and a sudden air attack on London launched by the Luftwaffe from Dutch airfields was fanciful nonsense, said Menzies. What he could say with confidence was that a German attack on Poland had been planned in detail and that it would be carried out in connivance with Russia no later than September. That was not a rumour, he said firmly. The information was based on hard, verifiable facts.
Lord Halifax sat quite still, arms crossed, his beak-like face showing no signs of interest. Rimless reading glasses hung from a loop around his neck. From the corner of the room came slight tapping sounds as the stenographer’s fingers flew over her keyboard. The prime minister merely looked down at the document before him and said nothing.
He raised his head as Menzies finished and looked at Halifax.
“Well, Arthur?” he said.
Lord Halifax uncrossed his arms and picked up the paper. He adjusted his spectacles and looked at it for several moments. He too was a countryman at heart, finding the greatest pleasure in walking the moors of his native Yorkshire at weekends. As a fellow Old Etonian and member of White’s, he had supported Menzies’s appointment as C.
“If I understand you cor
rectly, Sir Stewart, you’re telling us this in order to justify the assassination of Hitler,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“And Colonel Macrae here is the man who will carry out the killing.”
The word “killing” seemed to galvanise the prime minister, who looked at his intelligence chief.
“Are you serious, C?”
“Deadly serious, Prime Minister.”
“What would the world say if it were revealed that we had actively carried out the assassination of a legally elected European head of state?”
“By the time the world finds out, if they ever do, Germany will be in the hands of the generals, the Nazis will have been driven from power and the world will be a safer and better place,” said Menzies.
“Well, I have heard of many strange things in this room, but I think this paper takes the biscuit. Arthur, what do you think?”
The reply was well prepared and calculated to end the meeting. The prime minister and his foreign secretary had planned this response, Macrae realised.
“We have not yet reached a point in our diplomacy where we can substitute assassination for negotiation,” said Lord Halifax.
“I agree absolutely. We can’t go round killing foreign leaders because they behave badly, besides …”
Here the prime minister got to his feet, drew a pen from his inside pocket and wrote something in the margin of the briefing paper. He handed it across the table to Menzies.
“I thank you both for coming and I apologise, Colonel Macrae, that you have had a wasted journey.”
At six that evening, Macrae stood on the bridge in St James’s Park looking towards Buckingham Palace. It was dusk but the Royal Standard was clearly visible above the building, which meant that King George and Queen Elizabeth were in residence. They would be preparing for the evening ahead: drinks perhaps with foreign dignitaries and then a formal dinner. They would talk about their regular Easter visit to the royal lodge in Balmoral and maybe the forthcoming summer tour of the United States. They would be as insulated from the world around them as an Egyptian mummy in the British Museum.
Midnight in Berlin Page 34