Moneypenny Diaries: Guardian Angel

by Samantha Kate

  11 The proposed methods of assassination included drinks spiked with poisoned pills, booby-trapped seashells, a wetsuit infected with deadly germs – to be presented as a gift to the Cuban leader – and poisoned cigars, as well as the relatively prosaic high-powered rifle with telescopic sights. In addition, Mongoose detailed plans for political, economic and psychological warfare. Agent strength was to be built up, with Cubans in place, with Spanish-speaking CIA operatives and with possible third-country sources, particularly from those countries with a diplomatic presence in Havana. The main aim was to organise and incite small bands of anti-Castro Cubans to rebellion, as well as to undertake sabotage activities. The sugar harvest was a key target – attacking cane fields, mills, sacking and transport – as well as the contamination of essential imports into the country.

  By February 1962, the Americans had already begun to tighten export controls and were embarking on what was called ‘psychological exploitation of actions undertaken by the Project’, to ‘encourage world perception of the Cuban people as a “David”, battling against the “Goliath” as represented by the Communist régime’ (‘Operation Mongoose: Program Review by the Chief of Operations, Edward Lansdale’, Washington, DC, 18 January 1962).

  12 When Cuba was led by the corrupt Fulgencio Batista, Castro – still an undeclared Communist – was seen as a potential saviour and given support by the West.

  13 Jargon for the Soviet sphere.

  14 Private card club on Park Street, St James’s. Formerly known as the Savoir Vivre (est. 1774), renamed Blades 1778. Membership was restricted to 200, with a £100 subscription for new members, and an annual fee of £50. There were permanent tables for high-stakes bridge, poker and backgammon. Its kitchen and cellar were renowned, newspapers were ironed daily, and all banknotes were mint.

  15 M’s usual tipple, an Algerian red wine of such inferior quality that the wine committee of Blades wouldn’t have it on the wine list. Known as ‘The Infuriator’ in the Navy, for its propensity to send over-indulgers into a rage.

  16 The Services Club, 51 Piccadilly, favourite among serving and former high-ranking officers from the three recognised armed services.

  17 Other bees in M’s metaphorical bonnet included misuse of service resources (primarily human), beards, beatniks, unpunctual trains, people who were totally bilingual, and anyone trying to assert pressure through family relationships with Cabinet ministers.

  18 New recruits to the administrative division of the secret service were put through a two-month training course. Mornings were devoted to traditional secretarial skills, afternoons reserved for more specialised training. One afternoon JM was given the task of following a man to see where he dropped off his secret message. She waited on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields until she identified her prey, a bowler-hatted man carrying a newspaper and umbrella, then shadowed him for half an hour until he made the drop – in the gentlemen’s lavatory at Charing Cross station. She received a special commendation for this stage of her training activities.

  19 Rodney Porterfield, butler at Blades, served under M as chief petty officer on one of his last commands.

  20 The most powerful black criminal of his time, and a member of the inner echelons of SMERSH. He was eaten by a shark after Bond had blown up his boat.

  21 Former PA to Head of S (Soviet Union), assigned to 007 – against his wishes – at Royale-les-Eaux in 1952 to aid him in his task to bring down SMERSH agent ‘Le Chiffre’. Beautiful, with black hair, blue eyes and ‘splendid protuberances, back and front’ (Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (London, 1953)). She committed suicide while staying with Bond in a small coastal hotel, where he was recuperating from injuries sustained when he was tortured by Le Chiffre. He was distraught at her death. In her suicide note, she explained that she had been blackmailed into working as a double agent for the KGB. She took her own life to escape from her forced treachery.

  22 PA to the millionaire gold trader Auric Goldfinger. Bond took her back with him to New York as a ‘hostage’, after discovering that she had been helping her employer to cheat at cards. Goldfinger took his revenge by arranging for her to be killed by total immurement in gold paint.

  23 Agent Z2 – captured after infiltrating Blofeld’s mountain hideaway. Recognising Bond, there under cover as Sir Hilary Bray, he appealed to him for help. Rather than betray his own cover, Bond pretended not to know Z2, who was summarily executed by Blofeld’s men.

  24 Research officer (latterly senior agent-runner) and in 1962 one of only three women employed by the SIS outside administrative duties. After her retirement from the service, in 1985, she was awarded a peerage, and became an active member of the House of Lords.

  25 The Powder Vine, or PV, was the informal gossip network among the secretaries and personal assistants, whose centre of power was the first-floor ladies’ lavatory.

  March

  1 Major Jack Giddings, born Camberley 1925, ex-Royal Marine commando and number two to Bond in the 00 section. Blond hair, green eyes, expert in unarmed combat, with a workmanlike grasp of spoken and written Russian.

  2 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve – also known as the Wavy Navy, after the wavy gold stripes on the officers’ sleeves, which, it was sometimes noted, made them look like the man in the long-running Black Magic advertisements, giving rise to the flippant sobriquet of ‘chocolate sailor’.

  3 On the morning of 13 August 1961, Berliners had awoken to the presence of huge rolls of barbed wire strung around the ninety-six-mile border separating East from West Berlin. Over the days and weeks that followed, a permanent concrete wall was erected, which would become one of the most familiar landmarks in twentieth-century history. Much of the Berlin Wall’s eastern side ran along Zimmerstrasse. Known as the ‘death zone’, it was patrolled by guards based in the 293 watch towers and 57 bunkers built to check the escape of refugees bent on reaching the West. From 1961 until the wall was dismantled in November 1989, a total of 192 people were killed trying to cross the border.

  The 00 agents were routinely assigned as escorts across the border both for defectors from the Eastern Bloc and for British agents who had been undercover in the East. This involved either traversing the stretch of cleared land on either side of the Wall, often dodging bullets from snipers concealed in office buildings in East Berlin, or smuggling their charges through the checkpoints by vehicle.

  4 In 1962, a principal officer in the Civil Service received a salary of £2,000 p.a.

  5 Shortly after joining the service, using her share of the proceeds from the sale of the family farm in Kenya, JM bought a small, two-bedroom flat on the top floor of an elegant conversion in Ennismore Gardens, close to Hyde Park and the Royal Albert Hall.

  6 To mark her thirtieth birthday, JM bought a second-hand red Mini, which she kept in a garage in Ennismore Mews.

  7 Irene Greenfield Moneypenny, born in 1904 in Liverpool, only child of two doctors, both émigrés from Latvia. She read medicine at Girton College, Cambridge and while there met and fell in love with Hugh Moneypenny. While he was at naval college, she qualified and worked as a resident at a London teaching hospital. She continued to practise as a doctor when they moved to Kenya. When JM was born, she gave up her job at the hospital to become involved in developing rural health initiatives, throwing herself into her work with the same passion she exhibited in all areas of her life. A fluent Swahili and Kikuyu speaker, she felt more at home in the tribal villages than at the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi, where, despite her husband’s popularity, she still felt sidelined by her Jewish origins. She was at times a slightly distracted mother, but loved her daughters unreservedly. She was killed in the massacre at Lari on 26 March 1953.

  8 Blofeld orchestrated the hijacking of a NATO plane carrying two atomic missiles, which he attempted to ransom for £100 million. He was foiled by the combined efforts of 007 and CIA agent Felix Leiter.

  9 At the time of the Thunderball episode, Blofeld had weighed twenty stone and had a pale complexion, black crew-cut
hair, small eyes, the pupils completely encircled by white, a thin mouth and long, thin hands and feet. When Bond re-encountered him in Switzerland, he was a lithe twelve stone, with long, silvery-white hair, dark green eyes and full lips. Only his hands and feet looked the same.

  10 In 1964 Tanganyika was to merge with Zanzibar to form Tanzania.

  11 A small comfortable flat on the first floor of a converted Regency house, situated in a tree-lined square off the King’s Road.

  12 Thought to be Francisco ‘Pistols’ Scaramanga, also known as ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, after his gold-plated, long-barrelled single-action Colt .45. He worked predominantly for the KGB, but also as an independent operative for other organisations in Central America and the Caribbean. Based in Cuba since 1956, originally under Batista’s protection, he switched allegiances and worked undercover for Castro until the revolution, after which he was appointed foreign enforcer for the Department of State Security. Born with a third nipple, two inches below his left breast.

  13 JM/WAVE was the code name for the Miami operation. The head of station was Theodore ‘Ted’ Shackley, a senior and respected CIA agent, previously based in Berlin. In Miami, he became very involved in the attempt to overthrow Castro. Among the resources he had at his disposal were a multi-million-dollar budget, a navy of over 100 craft, including the 174-foot Rex, which was equipped with the latest electronic devices and 40-mm and 20-mm cannons, and access to F-105 Phantom fighter planes from the nearby Homestead Air Force Base.

  14 X Section, devoted to cross-examination both of foreign spies, captured abroad, and of suspected double agents within the secret service. In 1962, X Section was located in a redbrick townhouse in Kensington Cloisters, west London, and staffed by a team of twelve trained interrogators and scientists. The basement was equipped as a series of detention cells (in one of which Rosa Klebb was held for over a month until her death, allegedly of a heart attack). The identity of the Chief of Section, known to all just as X, was a closely guarded secret and remains unknown to this day. What does exist, however, are several – heavily censored – documents generated by X, detailing best practice for ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ interrogation. The key to success in the former, according to X, is ‘patience, a retentive memory and the interrogator’s ability to mask his intellectual superiority and flatter his adversary to the point where he feels compelled to reveal how clever he is’. The inventions and concoctions of the scientists based in the first-floor laboratory contributed heavily to successful strong-arm cross-examination – along with a detailed knowledge of physiology and the limits of human endurance. Although torture is against the terms of the Geneva Conventions, it is clear that ‘non-existent’ organisations did not feel themselves to be bound by the same codes of practices that applied to the declared services.

  15 On 1 February 1962, a high-ranking officer of the Stasi, the East German secret police, knocked on the door of the British secret-service station chief in West Berlin and announced that he wanted to defect. He had with him his wife and daughter and three small suitcases. It came as a complete surprise. The German officer – known as Kingfisher – had been identified by the British as one of the Stasi high command and photographed visiting the Kremlin on several occasions. That night, he told his British counterpart that he had long been dissatisfied with the methods of his organisation and had become disillusioned with the ideological underpinnings of his country. He had been planning his defection for four years, during which time he had photographed and microdotted a mass of information that he believed would be of great interest to the West. When asked why he hadn’t made contact earlier, he said he was afraid of raising suspicion. Head of WB immediately contacted headquarters and arrangements were made to fly Kingfisher and his family to a secret location in Stockholm for intensive interrogation – to ensure he was a genuine defector instead of a Stasi plant primed with disinformation.

  16 Patrick Summers, a young SIS high flyer, who later took a sideways jump into the Foreign Office, quickly rising to ambassadorial level.

  17 When Mary Goodnight took up the job as secretary to the 00 section, she became the subject of a sweepstake as to who would get her into bed first. Bond was initially a favourite, but dropped out of the running after he met Tracy.

  18 Although not officially encouraged, inter-office romantic liaisons were common and, from the service’s point of view, preferable to out-of-office relationships.

  19 Sydney Cotton’s dinner companion, and former colleague of Hugh Moneypenny.

  20 She was presumably searching for the file of R – Richard Hamilton.

  21 In October 1952, after widespread violence committed in the name of freedom, mainly by the members of a secret organisation which became known as Mau Mau, the colonial government of Kenya declared a state of emergency. Despite heavy-handed action by the colonial army and police, this did little to calm the situation. On the night of 26 March 1953, Naivasha police station came under attack. Half an hour later, a separate gang of armed Kikuyu warriors staged an ambush at Lari, a farming area just north of Nairobi and about twenty miles north-east of Maguga, near the edge of the high escarpment looking down into the Rift Valley. Their main target was the home compound of Chief Luka, a known sympathiser of the colonial government, where he lived with his eight wives, numerous children and loyalists. The results of the raid were devastating. The fighting spread over an area of forty square miles and when the authorities arrived the next morning they found piles of bodies, some burnt, many mutilated. One witness saw a Mau Mau warrior slit the throat of a young boy and lick his blood. A total of 97 residents were found dead, 32 grievously wounded. Two hundred huts were burned, and 1,000 cattle maimed. Among the dead was the visiting health adviser Irene Moneypenny.

  22 JM had written to him on 24 March at the address she had found in his file.

  April

  1 Each Friday, all agents in the field submitted reports to London HQ. The different station heads reported directly to their section chiefs, who forwarded anything of importance to M, along with a weekly summary of events in the geographical area which fell under their responsibility. The 00 agents reported directly to M. The communiqués came in by diplomatic bag, or were transmitted in code by radio to the Communications centre on the eighth floor, along the corridor from the Chief’s suite. Still encoded, they were delivered to everyone marked on the distribution list by girls from Records, who kept a copy of all outgoing and incoming signals for their files. JM was responsible for decoding the urgent signals marked for M’s eyes only – as well as for encoding the replies he dictated for her to send.

  2 Major Mark Carbon-Brown, an Old Etonian former SAS officer who had been earmarked as a future regimental Commander-in-Chief, before transferring unexpectedly to the intelligence services, reputedly at M’s personal entreaty.

  3 The reported sighting at the airport in the Madrid was attributed to one of the Madrid station’s local informants – presumably with the connivance of JM and Summers.

  4 In April 1962, in an operation code-named Landphibex, 40,000 US marines, supported by four aircraft carriers and more than 50 warships, stormed the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.

  5 The ‘Quartermaster’ – the section handling resources and technical support, located in the basement. In 1962 it was divided into three subsections:

  I. Gadgets – bugging equipment, lock-picking tools, jemmies, getaway cars, bikes, miniature helicopters and suchlike.

  II. Armoury – including the weapons store and firing range. Provided training and arms-maintenance services.

  III. Technical research – scientists (known as boffins) and analysts invented and developed new weapons and devices for use by intelligence operatives and provided up-to-date information on the equipment in current use by the opposition.

  6 From 1952 to 1979, Dr Desmond McCarthy, an industrial engineer and inventor, who began his career with Marconi. Specialist in communications equipment and the miniaturisation of weapons.

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bsp; 7 Included among several files of declassified Q Branch reports (1960–65), held in the National Archives and in part reproduced at the end of the April diary entries.

  8 The direct line between M’s office and the 00 agents’ desks.

  9 A light plastic radio receiver the size of a pocket watch and similar in function to the modern pager, developed by Q:III and introduced as standard equipment for senior staff in 1961. If an officer was within a range of ten miles of Headquarters, he could be bleeped on the receiver. When this happened, it was his duty to go immediately to the nearest telephone and contact his office, using the prescribed incoming telephone number.

  10 Bond’s pride and joy: a battleship-grey Bentley Mark II Continental, which he bought in parts for £1,500 and customised to his precise instructions, with a Mark IV engine, a new, convertible two-seater body, power-operated hood, with two large-armed bucket seats in black Morocco leather. It was meticulously maintained and referred to, by Bond, as ‘The Locomotive’.

  11 Bletchley Park, a former grand country house in Buckinghamshire, which in 1939 was taken over by the Government Code and Cipher School (later known as the Government Communications Headquarters – GCHQ). The code-breakers, operating out of makeshift huts in the grounds, played a critical role in the eventual Allied victory; once the Germans’ signals could be read, their plans and actions could be anticipated.

  12 The German coding machine, similar in appearance to a small manual typewriter, encased in a wooden box, with three scramblers positioned above the keys. When a letter of plain German was typed into the machine, electrical impulses were sent through a series of rotating wheels, electrical contacts and wires, to produce the enciphered letter, which lit up on a panel above the keyboard. Having received the resulting code message and typed it into his own machine, using the same scrambler settings, the recipient saw the deciphered message similarly light up letter by letter. The rotors and wires of the machine could be configured in 17,576 different ways; the odds against anyone who did not know the settings being able to break Enigma were a staggering 150 million million million to one. However, using captured German code books, the code-breakers of Bletchley, led by Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing, developed the ‘Bombe’, an electro-mechanical machine that greatly reduced the odds – and thereby the time required – to break the ever-changing keys to the Enigma codes.