Pyke gave nothing away, to the extent that most of his young recruits did not even realise they were part of a larger team. Instead, they were kept apart from each other and merely told that they would be paid to visit Germany and interview ordinary Germans. If the answers to their questions matched certain criteria, a more complex operation would begin. Given the risks involved, some of these young recruits might have pulled out in the face of such opacity, but they reported to a man who seemed to have mastered the art of charming evasion. Pyke could bat away most enquiries with a self-deprecating authority which the young linguists found winning.
‘Most of us, I suppose, regarded Pyke at the time as a harmless eccentric who had given us a paid opportunity for a holiday with a difference’, wrote Smith, later recalling Pyke’s ‘mischievous eyes twinkling behind his spectacles’, and how he held court ‘in his seedy office-cum-flat in Great Ormond Street’ where the filing system was ‘stacked fruit trays from floor to ceiling’.
Cedric Hentschel was equally taken by Pyke, and was even moved to poetry:
With his gaunt frame and square-cut beard
He had the air of a Russian princeling.
His voice, silky and insinuating,
Came from some orient top-drawer,
A contrast to his shabby clothes,
To socks mismatched or simply lacking.
In a fine baritone he would hail me as Ceedrick,
The lengthened vowel conferring extra status.
Hentschel and the others were now ready to go, but there was a snag. Their Svengali had disappeared. On 26 July, Stanley Smith went to meet Pyke, as had been arranged, only to be told that he had flown to Paris.
In France we know that he stayed at the Royal Hotel, off the Champs-Élysées, and that he was away for two nights. The flight, at £6.6s., was expensive. Pyke’s reasons for going were less straightforward.
On his return, he explained that he had gone to see an exiled German statistician and had pumped him for advice on which questions to ask the German people. As Pyke wrote to Norman Angell, the Nobel Prize-winning author and campaigner, whom he had also seen in Paris, his journey had been ‘amply worthwhile’. It had also led to several changes in their operation.
In the days after his Parisian trip, Pyke instructed each of his linguists to visit at a certain time a house in Brixton or one in Hampstead where they were met by a German émigré introduced only as ‘Professor Higgins’. Following the successful film of Shaw’s Pygmalion the year before, this reference would not have been lost on them. In that version, Professor Higgins was played by Leslie Howard. Yet nobody seemed to know the identity of the man Pyke had playing the part.
Smith described him as ‘a 34-year-old German refugee’. Others remarked on his blond hair. ‘We had to converse with him,’ Smith explained, ‘and during the interview put ten questions to him and memorise the answers, which we then had to pass on to Pyke – or Uncle Geoffrey as he preferred to be called for the purposes of the exercise.’ It was a task at which Smith excelled, recalling every answer with schoolmasterly ease.
You might not think there was anything unusual about Pyke asking his linguists to do this – but for the fact that they had done so already. Just before his trip to Paris, Pyke had told Hentschel and Cunningham to test their fellow linguists like this. Now he was starting again. Everyone was to be put through their paces by this anonymous German émigré.
In another respect this episode jars. Throughout his life Pyke had shown himself to be wary of delegating responsibility, and would do so only after long consideration. This refugee was a stranger to him. His name does not appear in any of Pyke’s letters, address books, notes or diaries until after his trip to Paris, whereupon it appears more than any other.
August began in London with a downpour of rain. With the newspapers full of speculation about whether Japan would join the Axis, thunderclaps rang out around the capital like the sound of collapsing buildings. None of this dampened the collective desire to enjoy the coming Bank Holiday, and on Friday, 4 August, with the weather improved, some four million holidaymakers left the capital. The next day, lost among the crowds, Stanley Smith and Amy Cunningham began separate journeys to Nazi Germany. Soon after, Cedric Hentschel and Peter Raleigh did likewise. High above Great Ormond Street, in his latest incarnation as amateur spymaster, Pyke was left to contemplate their fate, and the broader question of whether his scheme stood any chance of success. The answer to this depended, to a large extent, on the quality of the idea behind it.
Pyke’s plan, in full, was to send a team of up to two dozen linguists into Nazi Germany to carry out a Gallup-style survey of German attitudes to war. He had read in the Manchester Guardian that most Germans did not want Hitler leading them to war. He planned to prove it with a scientific survey of German public opinion. If the results were as expected, they would be publicised at the highest level. Initially he had envisaged their release through a major newspaper syndicate or news agency – at one point he had in mind the American Institute of Public Opinion, or the BBC – yet by the time Smith and Cunningham set out for the Hook of Holland Pyke was certain that he could get the survey results to the White House for US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to use in one of his weekly ‘international’ speeches.
There were two things one could say about Hitler’s response to the results of this survey: it would be furious and public. ‘You would then have got the attention of the whole world – the German people to some extent included – focused on this question: “How far are the German people behind Hitler – or not?”’ Details from individual interviews could be leaked in later speeches, reinforcing the notion that Hitler did not have his country’s full support.
Even if most Germans proved to be against Hitler taking them to war, and Pyke’s ‘conversationalists’ were able to complete their survey without being picked up by the Gestapo – and were somehow able to get their results out of the country (a problem that remained unsolved) – what were the chances of the survey results having the desired effect? What difference would it make if you could prove that most Germans did not want war?
By the summer of 1939, one of three things needed to happen to prevent a war with Germany. Britain and France could agree to turn a blind eye to Hitler’s eastward expansion. The Polish government might accept Hitler’s demands regarding the status of Danzig. Or Hitler could back down from military confrontation, as it could be argued he had done at Munich, on the basis that the resistance to war was too great either within Germany or without.
Already the first two options looked unlikely. British foreign policy continued to gravitate away from appeasement and there was even the possibility of an Anglo-Soviet pact. Nor did the Polish government show any desire to accept Hitler’s demands; for Sir Edmund Ironside, inspecting Polish forces in July 1939, ‘the whole nation has made up its mind to fight’ with Poles everywhere gripped by a ‘mad spirit of optimism’. Pyke’s plan was aimed squarely at the third option: the idea that Hitler might come to see an invasion of Poland as a political mistake. A successful survey, if publicised internationally, might at the very least cause him to hesitate. In itself this would buy time for Germany’s putative enemies, Britain and France, both rearming at speed. It would also provide a shot in the arm for the German opposition, which remained hamstrung by an inability to gauge its collective strength. For those millions of Germans still ambivalent about the possibility of war, the idea that it was imminent might push them into a state of opposition. Pyke also believed that the survey would make it harder, if hostilities broke out, for the British government to caricature the German people, as it had done during the last war, as a nation of bloodthirsty Huns, and that this might shorten the conflict or make post-war reparations less severe. Unknown to Pyke, those German generals manoeuvring behind the scenes to avert an invasion of Poland would also benefit by gaining time, as would Adam von Trott and the Swedish businessman Birger Dahlerus, both trying to stave off the threat of war through h
igh-level informal diplomacy. All this, however, was predicated on Pyke’s team being able to steal what he described as the ‘most carefully guarded of all the Nazi secrets’ – German public opinion.
Here was a plan which drew on all Pyke’s obsessions: gathering masses of data; operating undercover; solving political problems using a scientific method; disregarding popular assumptions; understanding the importance of public opinion; combating fascism by any means; putting one’s faith in untrained amateurs; and not only identifying a looming crisis but doing one’s utmost to avert it. Above all, this was characterised by breathtaking ambition. ‘It was a private attempt to prevent the war’, he wrote. ‘It is true that it only stood a faint chance of success, but that, I think you’ll agree, was not a reason for not making the attempt.’
It did not take long for the German border guards to sense that something about Amy Cunningham was not quite right. After being asked how much money she was carrying – fourteen English shillings, ten German Marks and a handful of Registered Marks – the LSE lecturer was escorted out of the main hall and handed over to a sour-faced German woman.
‘I noticed that she had on a long white garment, and round her waist a belt with a bundle of twelve or so keys,’ Cunningham recalled. ‘She took me into a building, went along a little corridor [. . .] there were about eight small doors, all very similar. She unlocked one of them and told me to go in. She then locked the door behind us.’
‘Take off your clothes,’ she ordered.
Just weeks earlier, Pyke had asked various experts on Nazi Germany about the practicality of his scheme. Of these the best informed was undoubtedly Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office for most of the 1930s, and by 1939 part of MI6’s top-secret Z Organisation, sometimes referred to as ‘Vansittart’s Private Detection Agency’. Pyke had outlined his scheme, to which Vansittart’s response had been emphatic.
‘Ridiculous,’ he had said. ‘The Gestapo will have them all within twenty-four hours.’ Amy Cunningham, it seemed, had lasted only a matter of minutes.
As instructed she removed her clothes and watched, naked, as the guard picked through her bag, something she did with stony exactitude. At one point she removed the mirror from Cunningham’s compact to check for hidden material. There followed a ‘very thorough’ bodily examination, and ‘when she was quite finished, she promptly washed her hands with much swishing. This annoyed me really more than the actual examination.’
‘It must be very unpleasant for you to have to undress foreigners,’ Cunningham snarled.
‘On the contrary,’ came the reply.
There was a pause, before the woman’s arm swung up in a Hitler salute. Cunningham was free to enter the Third Reich.
Neither Stanley Smith nor Marjory Watson had any such trouble at the frontier and were soon wandering the streets of Frankfurt-am-Main, unaware of each other, as they began to look for potential interviewees. One of Pyke’s greatest worries was that nobody would talk to them. ‘It was even part of the general opinion of the time, that foreigners were watched, their contacts with the population noted and those to whom they talked, later questioned.’ He had asked his amateur spies to send him coded postcards giving an indication of their progress. Each was to be addressed to ‘Uncle’ and sent to one of four different correspondents in England, all friends of Pyke, who would forward the messages to Great Ormond Street. If they were finding it impossible to engage ordinary Germans in conversation then they were to complain in the postcard that the trip was ‘boring’. If the interviews were going well, the holiday was ‘interesting’.
‘Quite an interesting town,’ went Smith’s first postcard. The following day: ‘It is an interesting old town’. ‘This seems to be an interesting place,’ began Amy Cunningham’s card the day after she checked into the Hotel National. But still no word from Hentschel.
‘My dear Cedric,’ wrote Pyke, ‘you have disappeared into the blue. What is Germany like? It ought to be most interesting to see at first hand. [. . .] We have not had a single word from you. Do the young women of Germany leave you so little time that you cannot even spare a moment to send us some postcards?’ At last one arrived: ‘Life continues strenuous,’ he managed, ‘though interesting.’
‘It was not difficult to get Germans to talk,’ explained Smith. ‘For all their harsh and commanding exterior, [they] are sentimental enough underneath and love talking about their families.’ Cunningham was amazed at ‘how much they have to get off their chests’. ‘I had ridiculously over-rated the difficulty of making contact with the German population,’ wrote Pyke. What had made this easier was that each of his undercover pollsters was not just another tourist, but the embodiment of a lovable German stereotype – the eccentric Englishman abroad.
Before letting them go, Pyke had urged each member of his team to play up to their national caricature. Each one should ‘go grumbling incredulously to everyone, refusing to believe what he was told or to take “no” for an answer, to display an undue and obsessive concern with his own comfort, to behave as if his own habits were fixed and sanctioned by the universe and that it was the place and concern of other people to contribute to their satisfaction.’ As he saw it, ‘providing our behaviour did not go beyond the limit of credulity as conditioned by the behaviour – real, exaggerated or mythical – of our ancestors who had travelled in Germany, we were safe. We had something more than safety. We could use the myth positively. It could be used to give us elbow room – one might almost say lebensraum – to make contact with Germans of every class.’
Inspired by this advice, Raleigh had arrived in Germany carrying a full set of golf clubs. After ‘a tender farewell’ to his on-off girlfriend (and future wife) Ros, daughter of the Manchester Guardian Editor, C. P. Scott, he had made the relatively short trip to Frankfurt where he planned to play a lot of golf. But it was raining, so instead he sought out the nearest cabaret bar. Here he conducted an interview with one of the bar’s hostesses, who was ‘very intelligent’ and, on account of the army officers who frequented the place, particularly ‘well informed on politics’.
Raleigh soon found that cafés and bars were the best place to pick up strangers, the only problem being that he was required to drink ‘endless coffees or beers. Leaving the café table for the loo was both physically necessary and a means of jotting down answers to questions. But the sheer number of beers involved – given that 53 per cent, or whatever the percentage was, of those we interviewed had to be men – meant that I rarely got to bed sober.’
‘You are a disgusting pig not to have written,’ ran Pyke’s first note to Raleigh, in which he disguised himself as a rather Wodehousian ‘Aunt Marjory’. ‘David Allen’ – code for Pyke – ‘tells me that he may be going abroad for a few days holiday almost any day now. He asked me where you were and I told him you were in Frankfurt. He says he has half a mind to go somewhere like that, so you may hear from him. [. . .] At any rate, you monster of iniquity, the purpose of this letter is to say that we are dying for news of you, even if it is only a picture postcard of yourself drinking flagons of German beer.’
Pyke sent this clumsily coded message just two days after Raleigh had set out for Germany (it crossed with his first postcard back to Pyke). Evidently time was passing slowly in London. The amateur spymaster was desperate to be in the thick of things and, as he waited for news, he began to wonder if he could slide unnoticed into Germany as he had done twenty-five years earlier.
On the day that Raleigh received Pyke’s note, he had a strange encounter at breakfast. It began when he engaged a young German in conversation, only to find out that he was in fact a fellow English tourist. There was something familiar about him: a lively intelligence and an adventurousness which Raleigh might have recognised in himself.
‘Do you know a man called Geoffrey Pyke?’ he tried.
Stanley Smith replied that he did. Both men smiled. As they had both begun to suspect, they were part of a larger team. While they
agreed that it would be a mistake to operate for long as a pair, Smith and Raleigh decided to go to the golf course at Bad Schwallbach now that the weather had turned. They spent the rest of the day scooping balls out of bunkers under the watchful eye of the golf professional while conducting undercover interviews with club members.
Amid the ‘sweet-smelling pines’, which kept getting in the way of Raleigh’s drives, there were moments when the threat of war felt inexorably distant. This sunny reverie was broken only by ‘the rasp of the Messerschmitt fighters chasing their tails in the blue sky above’. War was close – but not so close as to keep Pyke out of the country.
Just before 13:00 on 13 August, a group of Pyke’s conversationalists met, as instructed by postcard, at the thirteenth green of Frankfurt’s main golf course. They saw a lanky figure advancing down the fairway. He was carrying a canary in a cage. It was Pyke. To Smith, he looked ‘as strange as a unicorn’.
‘It should have been no surprise that Geoffrey’s dress was the opposite of what most would expect,’ reflected Raleigh. ‘Whereas in London you found him walking the streets in wrinkled trousers, shapeless jacket over, maybe, a pyjama top with what looked like a bootlace at the neck, and sandal-shod feet, here on a sultry August day on the golf-course he wore the smartest of dark city suits.’
The canary was his disguise, an eye-catching prop to deflect attention. It had worked like a charm, and earlier that day Geoffrey Pyke had been welcomed into Nazi Germany posing as a canary buff.
The following day he sat down in a Frankfurt café with five of his conversationalists to discuss their findings. If Pyke had ever received any kind of espionage training, he must have forgotten it. Meeting like this in public with all his agents was not the work of a professional agent. ‘I suppose the best that could be said about this was that the Gestapo, if around, could hardly believe that we constituted any sort of threat to German security’, wrote a bemused Raleigh. Or was this by design? Pyke’s preference in disguise was always to hide onself in plain view and to behave as if incapable of subterfuge. If the Gestapo was looking for people who hid, they must be out in the open. Besides, he was feeling impatient and could not wait to hear the initial results of his survey.
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