Churchill's Iceman

by Henry Hemming

  Though it would not have been discussed at this meeting, his plan would also allow the Allies to stunt the growth of Germany’s atomic programme. The year before, a tenfold increase in the production of heavy water (deuterium oxide) had been reported at the Vemork HEP station in southern Norway. This was the first step towards building an atomic weapon. Vemork was another of Pyke’s targets.

  But there were problems with his proposal. The all-important snowmobile had not yet been invented. There was no exit strategy with which to remove these elite guerrillas from Norway. And of course there was the man behind it: a odd-looking civilian with no military experience at all.

  When Mountbatten asked for a show of hands, the result was unanimous: Pyke’s scheme was judged to be practicable and worthwhile, and it was agreed that the force he had proposed and their snowmobiles should be developed by Combined Operations without delay. Twenty-one months after its inception, this plan had arrived in the right hands at the right time. Committees were appointed to deal with staffing and resources and the meeting drew to a close, at which point Mountbatten asked Pyke to join him in his office for what was to be their first full-length conversation.

  Mountbatten’s rooms were probably in the basement of No. 1a Richmond Terrace, spacious without being large, well lit, and with a bed in the corner or next door. No doubt the CCO looked as he usually did, ‘handsome and breezy, like Brighton at its best’. Pyke was a mess. His shirt was neither crisp nor clean and if there were creases in his trousers they were not of the military variety. There was no pomade in what was left of his thinning hair and his goatee had become overgrown and shaggy, looking like seaweed on a rock. His eyes spoke of a frenetic, restless energy. One man who met him around this time described them as ‘unusually expressive’; for another they were ‘thoughtful and serious’; while the poet and biographer Peter Quennell called them ‘burning eyes’.

  The two men sat down on either side of a desk and, as legend has it, Pyke fixed the CCO with those burning eyes and said: ‘Lord Mountbatten, you need me on your staff because I’m a man who thinks.’

  Pyke would often start conversations like this. He was ‘trying to size you up by your reaction. If he felt you were sympathetic he took you into his confidence’ – which was what he did to Mountbatten. Within this opening salvo were two questions to which he had an answer. He asked what Combined Operations lacked, and what he could provide. This command needed more innovators, problem-solvers, free-thinkers or in-house dissidents, and this was a part that Pyke could play with distinction.

  Perhaps to test this, Mountbatten asked him to solve a military problem that was troubling him. The mighty German battleship SS Tirpitz had recently left the Baltic and was now at anchor in a Norwegian fjord. It was imperative that the Tirpitz did not break out into the Atlantic. Mountbatten asked Pyke what to do.

  ‘The untidy man with the beard hesitated a moment, and then said: “Lower the density of the water around her.” He demonstrated his point by calling for a bucket of water and a small model of a ship. It certainly sank.’ Whether or not he actually performed a demonstration – perhaps he added alcohol to the water to lower the density – what mattered was the speed with which he had come up with this counter-intuitive idea. The Tirpitz was not sunk by lowering the density of the surrounding water, yet this was precisely the kind of radical, innovative thinking that Mountbatten wanted on tap.

  Initially he had been wary of the man about whom Amery had raved. ‘I must confess, though, that after Pyke came and showed his very original turn of mind I began to appreciate the unusual qualities of that mind. I liked his mind,’ wrote Mountbatten, ‘and I was prepared to support him.’ He saw Pyke as ‘a chap with no scientific qualifications, but a crazy, independent thinker, and something of genius’. Everything about him appealed to Mountbatten’s characteristically Hessian affinity for those who thought beyond the bounds of convention. When asked about Pyke long after the war ‘there was genuine affection, as well as genuine respect, in Mountbatten’s voice when he shook his head and murmured: “Clever chap, Pyke. Very clever chap . . .”’

  Pyke was no less taken by the CCO, an affinity seen most obviously in the breathless rhythm of their conversations. ‘I fell into the habit straight away with you of talking and writing on what the US telephone system terms a “person to person” basis,’ he told Mountbatten, adding elsewhere: ‘You always rush me off my feet, we both think – and talk – so fast.’ He found the CCO ‘as receptive as a sponge and as quick as a knife’, and congratulated him on running a command which had taken just three weeks to accept a proposal that had been ignored by rival organisations for almost two years.

  ‘What I’ve done,’ replied Mountbatten, ‘is to take ordinary Service material, and make them more afraid to reject an idea than to accept it.’ Hearing this, for Pyke, was like discovering that they were related. ‘In face of a new idea,’ he had once written, ‘oughtn’t we to ask . . . “What is right with it”, before asking “What is wrong with it”?’ Here were the seeds of an unlikely friendship.

  Towards the end of that interview, on 23 February 1942, Mountbatten did something unusual: he offered Pyke a job at Combined Operations. As well as pushing ahead with Pyke’s proposal for a force of snow-borne guerrillas, Mountbatten wanted him on hand to solve other problems and help foster a new spirit of creative innovation. His title was to be ‘Director of Programmes’ but really, as Pyke explained, he would be a ‘Suggester of Programmes’.

  He accepted, but on the condition that the new force ‘be prepared with the same thoroughness, drive and imagination as the Germans would do it’. Then there was the question of payment. In his memorandum ‘Pyke on Money’ the new Director of Programmes told Mountbatten that he was willing to work for nothing but, if he was to be paid, it must be at the top rate.

  ‘My dear fellow, I am on your side,’ replied Mountbatten, before asking him to name his price.

  Pyke consulted Bernal who suggested a ridiculous sum: £3,000 a year. Mountbatten pointed out that he himself was earning just £1,977 a year. They compromised on £1,500, making Pyke one of the highest-paid members of staff at Combined Operations.

  So began one of the strangest appointments of the war. For Elias Canetti, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright who had got to know Pyke over the previous year, it was ‘an extraordinary, wholly unbureaucratic arrangement, unthinkable in any other country at war’. A suspected communist, with close connections to two men thought to be Soviet agents, had been given the ear of one of the Allies’ most senior military figures.

  News of the appointment would also come as a shock to those in MI5, where fresh intelligence had just come in about Pyke. It was still not clear to the Security Services whether this man was a patriotic boffin or someone whose first loyalty was to Moscow. There was also the slim possibility that he was in fact both.

  PYKE HUNT, PART 3

  MILICENT BAGOT, THE most influential woman in MI5, was quick, redoubtable and at times impatient with those who could not keep up. She sang in a choir on Tuesday evenings and would later inspire the Connie Sachs character in John le Carré’s ‘George Smiley’ novels. She was MI5’s expert on Soviet espionage and communism and, on 6 January 1942, she received an alarming report.

  On the day that 75,000 people piled into Wembley to watch England play football against Scotland, with the proceeds going to Mrs Churchill’s Aid to Russia Fund, an SIS report on the inner workings of Moscow’s Comintern arrived at MI5. The report confirmed what she had suspected: Hitler’s invasion of Russia had done little or nothing to change the scope or intensity of clandestine Soviet activities in Britain. The report also suggested that there was a Comintern propaganda bureau operating right under her nose in London. Bagot belonged to F.2b, the section responsible for monitoring Comintern activities.

  The Comintern, or Communist International, had been set up in 1919 by Lenin with the task of destroying capitalism. Over the next two decades its headquarters in Moscow opposit
e the Kremlin had become a haven for international dissidents and political refugees, many of whom went on to study at the Comintern’s Lenin School where revolutionaries were taught the finer points of Marxian dialectics, tradecraft, sabotage, agitprop and secret communication. The brightest and best, including Pyke’s friend Percy Glading, were cherry-picked to join the NKVD or GRU before being sent back to their native countries, sometimes under assumed names, to help local Communist Parties carry out Moscow’s bidding.

  Bagot had known for years about the threat posed by the Comintern. As early as 1933, MI5’s then Deputy Director of B Branch, Guy Liddell, wrote that ‘the Comintern remained a more serious problem than the Nazi regime’. Since then, MI5 had intercepted a glut of wireless traffic between the Comintern headquarters in Moscow and the CPGB, via the ‘MASK’ decrypts. More recently, an MI5 informant had expressed his amazement at ‘what a complicated and detailed Apparat the Comintern is building for itself and consolidating in England’ and ‘what vast sums of money it must have at its disposal’.

  Yet the Security Service was thin on detail. Bagot could only guess at the extent of Comintern operations, which was why the latest report from SIS was so interesting. As well as revealing the existence of an undercover Comintern propaganda bureau in London, it suggested that one of its employees was Rolf Rünkel, and that he worked under a senior Comintern operative who went by the cover name ‘Professor P’.

  Bagot was determined to unmask ‘Professor P’. She began by working through MI5’s voluminous card index. Her colleagues could look through the same material, yet none had the ability to process what they saw in quite the same way. Since 1931, when her position at Special Branch was transferred to MI5, Milicent Bagot had developed an intuitive understanding of communism. She knew the mindset of a ‘fellow traveller’ and his or her emotional attachment to the cause just as she recognised the dead-eyed detachment of Party cadres. She had the imaginative capacity to suggest and hold in her mind a bewildering array of connections within this maze of names and incomplete biographies, and to find meaning where others saw mere coincidence. Using her considerable expertise, Bagot reached a conclusion on the identity of ‘Professor P’. As she wrote in an internal minute dated 21 January, ‘Professor P. is, I think, identical with Geoffrey Nathaniel PYKE.’

  He was, in many ways, a perfect fit. A vital clue could be found in Special Branch’s investigation of Rolf Rünkel in which the subject was seen to be ‘gathering and translating material concerning the evolution of German public opinion’ for Geoffrey Pyke. This was the kind of work you would expect to take place in a propaganda bureau. Pyke also sounded like the sort of intellectual who might be given the nickname ‘Prof’ or ‘Professor’ by his friends. Further corroboration came from the smorgasbord of foreign Communists he was thought to be in touch with and the belief within MI5 that Pyke’s charity had been under Communist control.

  Bagot’s only concern was that the Special Branch report on Rünkel might have been based on just one source. To clear this up she sent out an internal minute and, not long after, MI5’s E Branch, responsible for foreigners classified as ‘Alien’, provided her with fresh intelligence on Professor P. One of its anonymous sources had recognised the name.

  He described Professor P. as ‘a very important man in the Comintern who worked on the Continent for a time and also in Germany’. In Berlin, Professor P. was part of what appeared to be an ‘economic and scientific bureau’ run by Professor Varga, later known as ‘Stalin’s Economist’, but was actually a ‘large and comprehensive Weitverzweigte [wide-ranging] Apparat’ where Comintern propaganda was prepared and distributed and counterfeiting took place. Of Professor P.’s work in Britain, the source warned that he ‘is doing the same job today as he used to do in that Apparat, provided of course, that he is identical with the person I have in mind’.

  Bagot’s mental picture of this figure was filling out fast. But did any of this new intelligence rule out an identification of ‘P.’ as Pyke? It depended really on whether Pyke could have been living in Berlin while Varga’s bureau was active, between the mid-1920s and 1933.

  There was nothing to rule this out. MI5’s biography of Pyke contained a gap which stretched from the Great War through to 1937, easily encompassing the period when Professor P. was said to have been in Berlin. Even today there is a similar fog in the middle of Pyke’s story, from his breakdown in 1929 through to the start of his work on anti-Semitism in 1934. While there are scraps of evidence here and there to suggest that during these years he was living in a tumbledown cottage in the Devil’s Punchbowl, long periods remain unaccounted for. So for Bagot in 1942, as much as for any researcher today, it was at least possible that Geoffrey Pyke had spent some time in Berlin during the early 1930s. The only question that remained was whether this identification of Professor P. as Pyke made sense.

  Very much so. It is hard to imagine anyone grasping the murderous potential of Nazi anti-Semitism as early as he did without the kind of affinity for a society which comes from having lived within it. There were other details that Bagot was unaware of which would only have strengthened her conviction. As well as the selection of Comintern agents with whom Pyke was in touch, such as Percy Glading and Claud Cockburn, the first two people he sought out in Paris, during the summer of 1939 – Richard Kisch and Frederick Fuller – were also Comintern agents.

  If there were others whom Bagot suspected of being Professor P. their names have not been released by MI5. By the middle of February 1942, just before Pyke was offered a job by Mountbatten, Bagot suspected this man of running an undercover Comintern propaganda bureau. All she needed now was proof.

  HOW TO CHANGE THE MILITARY MIND

  LIEUTENANT-GENERAL ARCHIE Nye, a former barrister and favourite of Churchill’s, was surprised to see Mountbatten arrive with a dishevelled civilian in tow. It was early March 1942 and in a matter of days Nye was due to chair a meeting of the Vice-Chiefs of Staff at which Pyke’s proposal would be on the agenda. Too often in the past senior army officers had taken one look at this plan and dismissed it as a trussed-up proposal for a snowmobile. Mountbatten was determined that this should not happen again, and had engineered this meeting with Nye so that Pyke could talk him through his idea for a snow-borne guerrilla force operating with specialist snowmobiles behind enemy lines in Norway. Nye was quick on the uptake and grasped the potential of the plan almost at once.

  Several days later, during the crucial meeting, Nye won over his fellow Vice-Chiefs of Staff to the benefits of the scheme. As if reading from a script prepared by Pyke – indeed, it was not uncommon for civil servants actually to prepare a script, so he might have been literally reading from Pyke’s notes – he insisted that producing the snowmobile ‘was only part of the problem’. No less important was ‘the tactical and strategical employment of this particular weapon’. It was agreed that the War Office should look into its implementation. Only a month after asking Leo Amery to contact the CCO about his idea, Pyke’s plan had been accepted by the Vice-Chiefs of Staff. It was a major coup.

  On the same day that Nye made the case for his snow-borne guerrilla force, Pyke was sitting at a desk 300 yards away in Richmond Terrace, revelling in his new career as a highly paid civil servant. The contrast between this new job and his solitary existence in Great Ormond Street could not have been greater.

  He was surrounded now by conversations, questions, introductions and new faces. When junior soldiers entered his office they would salute before looking to see who was in there – an experience which never failed to make Pyke laugh. His colleagues in Combined Operations included celebrated figures such as the land speed record-holder Sir Malcolm Campbell, the Hollywood actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr, the novelist and biographer Robert Henriques and the businessman Sir Harold Wernher, who employed his own secretary and walked to work each morning from the Dorchester Hotel.

  Indeed, from afar this command sounded like a glamorous, easygoing appointment. Certainly there were, as one
member of staff put it, ‘handsome social chaps who could always be relied upon to say “The champagne’s over here, Dickie,”’ men like the Cuban playboy and racing driver the Marquis de Casa Maury, then Mountbatten’s head of intelligence. But they were in a minority. The atmosphere elsewhere was busy and sharp. Evelyn Waugh, a liaison officer at Combined Operations, described it as a ‘surrealist whirligig’. For the academic, journalist and one-time NKVD agent Goronwy Rees: ‘To join this fish-flesh-fowl company was to find oneself almost literally at sea or up in the air; one felt oneself hopelessly earthbound, a clumsy and an ignorant landlubber.’

  Pyke experienced no such discombobulation. He was ‘excited and elated’ by his new surroundings. It was, after all, the job of his dreams. He was being paid to identify and solve problems which might help the Allies in their fight against fascism, and as he settled into his new career he found the range of his thought exploding, swapping ‘precaution for the lascivious beauty of progress’.

  Word spread fast about Pyke’s ability to solve problems. Like schoolboys asking the class swot for help, officers soon started to come to him with their knottiest questions. The afternoon on which the Vice-Chiefs of Staff discussed his proposal was typical in this sense. Pyke had been asked earlier that day to work out ‘how a plane can measure its drift particularly over enemy country when visibility is such that neither landmarks [n]or stars are visible’. He had no expertise in this, but he had a technique and usually it worked.

  He began by stripping the problem back. In the purest sense it involved a human being moving through the air who wants to measure his distance from static and invisible points below. Pyke spun this around. He pictured a static human on the ground trying to measure invisible atmospheric conditions above. The outline of a solution now emerged. Meteorologists on the ground measured atmospheric conditions using a ‘ballon sonde’, a miniature balloon with a wireless device attached which was sent up into the sky, whereupon it relayed a signal with details of the surrounding weather conditions. By doing the same in reverse, surely one could measure the drift of the aircraft. Rather than use a balloon to send the device up, allow gravity to take it down. Once it had reached the ground it could send up a signal to the plane’s radio operator. The difference between its position and that of the plane, given its speed, would allow for a calculation of the drift. ‘Prof J. D. Bernal FRS of the Ministry of Home Security, etc. etc. etc. thinks I have solved the problem,’ Pyke enthused to Mountbatten, ‘so does a Squadron Leader of the R.A.F.’