Moneypenny Diaries: Secret Servant

by Samantha Kate

  About Kate Westbrook

  Kate Westbrook was born in 1970 and educated at Cambridge and Harvard. She has a doctorate in history, specialising in the emergence of post-colonial political structures. She has worked in Africa and Latin America and is the author of numerous articles, as well as two novels, as yet unpublished. She is a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

  Also by Kate Westbrook

  The Moneypenny Diaries: Guardian Angel

  The Moneypenny Diaries: Final Fling

  The Moneypenny Diaries

  Secret Servant

  Edited by Kate Westbrook

  Ian Fleming Publications

  IAN FLEMING PUBLICATIONS

  E-book published by Ian Fleming Publications

  Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, Registered Offices: 10-11 Lower John Street London

  www.ianfleming.com

  First published by John Murray 2006

  John Murray, 338 Euston Road, London, NW1 3BH

  Copyright © Ian Fleming Publications, 2006

  All rights reserved

  Moneypenny is a registered trademark of Danjaq, LLC, used under licence by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd

  The moral right of the copyright holder has been asserted

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-1-906772-58-1

  To Amber Lily Fletcher,

  and with thanks to the Fleming family

  and all at IFP

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  1963

  January – July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  1964

  January

  February

  March

  April

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Introduction

  I was leaving for the library one morning, the manuscript of my aunt Jane Moneypenny’s 1964 diaries almost ready for the publisher, when a letter arrived. It was typed on official Cambridge University Department of History writing paper, and was short and brutal:

  Dear Dr Westbrook

  We have recently received several official communications from government sources, to the effect that you are guilty of contravening the Official Secrets Act with the proposed publication of The Moneypenny Diaries, on which you are named as editor. Further, that you intend to release additional volumes. After some considerable intervention from this Department, they have decided not to prosecute. However, since you did not inform us of your intention to publish – which, under section C2, subsection 4, you are bound by the terms of your contract to do – we have no option but to withdraw your junior lectureship forthwith. You have therefore been struck from the staff register of this department.

  Yours sincerely

  By the time I got to the familiar signature at the end, I was shaking. I felt both humiliated and furious. I wanted to hide away in a burrow for a decade, but also to catch the next train up to Cambridge to bang on my former boss’s door and tell him exactly what I thought of his cowardly kowtowing to the secret forces of authority, his downright bloody rudeness. Instead, I took a deep breath and made a vow to myself that I would not be beaten. My aunt’s diaries would be published. I would brave any threats to see that they were.

  It was a fateful moment when Jane Moneypenny’s diaries were delivered to my rooms in Cambridge on 10 October 2000, wrapped in scarlet tissue paper and locked in a large metal chest. It kick-started a chain of events that have overturned my life, slamming shut familiar doors while opening up new worlds.

  One of my first feelings, on opening that Pandora’s box and reading the confessional letter that accompanied the diaries, was of betrayal. I thought I knew my aunt as well as I knew anyone. It turns out I hardly knew her at all. Throughout all those birthdays and Christmases, those long summer holidays when I would travel by train and boat to her small island hideaway in the Outer Hebrides, the time we spent together travelling through East Africa, I had no clue. Throughout weeks and months and years of talking, when I confided everything to her and thought she did to me, she never told me that she worked for British intelligence.

  I wish I had known. I wish she had lifted the veil of secrecy for a moment. She might have sat me down and said, ‘This is who I am really; this is what I want to tell you.’ Her diaries tell the story of her hidden life, but I would have loved to have heard it all from her.

  She started writing a diary when she was a child, growing up semi-wild in Kenya in the early 1940s. Her father, Hugh Moneypenny, had been called back to England to join the war effort. One of his last acts before disappearing, apparently killed in action, was to send Jane the first soft red leather journal and urge her to commit her thoughts and observations to paper. For the next fifty years – until shortly before her death on 10 October 1990 – she obeyed him.

  It was not a strict diary; she did not write every day, nor record much of the routine stuff of life. She chose what she found interesting, and used the pages as a confidante – much as most women would use a friend or sister. She concealed the growing pile of identical journals in a safe built into the bathroom wall, covered by a cabinet, retrieving them only when she was alone, behind a bolted and chained door.

  I must have glanced in that mirror a thousand times, never once guessing the cache it concealed.

  She came into the secret world by chance, but once there she was hooked, drawn in by the excitement and sense of being at the centre of events that most people can only read about. She loved the feeling of close community between her colleagues, particularly her fellow secretaries, whose centre of gravity was the Powder Vine, the first-floor ladies’ cloakroom. It was in the Powder Vine that office romances were discussed, and rumour and scandal dissected; where the safe return of a missing agent was celebrated and grief permitted to flow when someone didn’t come back. But it wasn’t just of that she wrote.

  Even secretaries and administrative staff at the Secret Intelligence Service – the Office, or the Firm, as those on the inside refer to it, or MI6 as it is also known – are required to sign the Official Secrets Act the day they join. They are then sent on a training course, to give them a grounding in the basic skills of an intelligence operative: shadowing, evading surveillance, cryptology and secret signals. Jane Moneypenny excelled at them all. And recorded her experiences in her diary.

  She described the tension and barely suppressed frenzy of the eighth-floor Communications room where she was working as a junior cipher clerk in 1956, when the Suez situation turned into a Crisis. She found herself spending fourteen straight days at the shoulder of the then deputy chief of the Service, Admiral Sir Miles Messervy.

  Two weeks later she was summoned to his office’. He informed her that he had been appointed the next chief of the service, and offered her the job of his personal secretary. As the guardian at his gate, Miss Moneypenny was privy to most of the secret machinations of state: she saw all the papers that passed his desk; she was present at meetings with ministers and spymasters from England and afar; she typed his letters, decoded the ‘Top Secret – Eyes Only’ incoming signals, and encoded those that M sent to his agents posted around the world.

  Although I did not want to believe that my aunt would lie to me, her diaries were so potentially explosi
ve that I needed to be absolutely sure they were genuine. I hired a document expert in the East End, and took him one volume to examine. It was clear, even to me, that some entries were hurried, some written at a more leisurely pace. I was fascinated as the old gentleman in white cotton gloves was able to decipher fear or anger, contentment or distraction. When she was tired, her loops were exaggerated; if she was uncertain, they disappeared. Without studying the content, he showed me a large chunk of entries which, he said, had been copied into the journal at the same time. I glanced at the section he was talking about; all referred to a trip abroad when she had presumably left her journal at home.

  ‘As far as I can determine, by the ink and natural wear of the paper, this journal was written some time in the mid-1960s,’ he pronounced. ‘It was written by one person, almost certainly female, not under duress and over a period of time.’ It was enough to satisfy me that the journals were authentic. But other obstacles soon presented themselves.

  During the last year, I have been forced to make major changes in my life; I have lost my job, and have had to move out of my house, abandon my students, and, for the present at least, wave goodbye to the prescribed and secure life of academia. All as a result of the diaries. It is not my aunt’s fault: she never asked me to follow this path. But, as an historian and her only living relative, once I read what she had written I felt compelled to dig deeper.

  Jane Moneypenny would have understood that. She too had committed herself to discovering the truth: about what had happened to her father – my grandfather.

  In October 1940 her mother, Irene, received the telegram that every wartime relative dreads: Commander Hugh Moneypenny had been reported missing in action. He was later presumed dead, and a death certificate was issued. Despite an active campaign of letter bombardment and banging on ministry doors by his widow, the details of his disappearance were never released. Jane and her sister, Helena, had a secret dream that he had not died and would someday walk back into their lives with a smile on his face and great adventures to relate. As the years passed, however, their hope faded. In time they stopped talking about it. But Jane had not forgotten.

  When she came to London and started working for SIS in 1953, she made a private pledge: to do everything in her power to find out what had happened to him. She searched through files, and dredged the fading memories of old colleagues and acquaintances. It was not until 1962 that she came upon the first hints that he had not died in action.

  My aunt could find no written records of her father’s last mission, but, as she confided to her diary, her hope was reignited by some evidence that suggested that he had been taken captive by the Germans and locked away under an assumed name. His death – like so many aspects of her life – had not been what it first appeared to be.

  The same is true of Harold Adrian Russell ‘Kim’ Philby, the man dubbed ‘the greatest traitor of his generation’. This volume of my aunt’s diaries describes the time when she became entangled with this master deceiver.

  By the time of his flight to Moscow in January 1963, Philby had been married three times and had five children. During the war, he had worked for the Special Operations Executive, from where he joined MI6, rapidly climbing the ranks to become head of the Soviet Section, and tipped as a future chief. Throughout all this, for twenty-seven years he had been reporting to the KGB. For him, every day had been a deception; every action or utterance was preceded by a check, a furtive glance from side to side. It took its toll: he drank increasingly heavily; he had sweating, screaming nightmares. But, until the day he was finally unmasked as a Soviet agent, he never let slip his true allegiance.

  Forty-two years later, I can see the parallels between my aunt’s life and Philby’s. As I study her diaries and spend more time with the inhabitants of their secret world, so I find myself increasingly estranged from my own circle, the people I thought were my friends. By choosing to reveal my aunt’s life – at least an edited version of it – I have been drawn into her world, and taken on new secrets of my own.

  Kate Westbrook

  Kenya, 2006

  1963

  January – July

  Six years ago I read my aunt’s diaries for the first time. I initially found them almost impenetrable, filled with acronyms for places and people I did not know. But gradually, as I have read them again and again, her world has come alive for me. Her friends and colleagues have risen off the page to enter my life.

  During that first reading I kept a piece of paper beside me at all times, and whenever she mentioned a new person I made a note of who they were, along with some of their key characteristics, which I would add to when I learned more. It seems strange now that I ever thought of them as strangers:

  • M. Pipe-smoking ex-admiral and Chief of SIS. Brilliant strategist, respected by all. Loved and hated by JM (Jane Moneypenny) in equal measure. Bald patch on back of head. Favourite tipple: cheap Algerian wine.

  • Bill Tanner. M’s Chief of Staff (CoS). In practice, number two at SIS and responsible for keeping the ‘War Book’, a daily account of the workings of the Office, so that, in the event of both of their deaths, the whole story would be available to their successors. Devoted to JM, whose office adjoined his. Best friend of James Bond.

  • 007. James Bond, legendary seducer and agent, with a licence to kill. Head of the 00 section. Drives a custom-converted Bentley; fond of expensive wines and fine food (half an avocado for pudding). Habitually smokes seventy bespoke Morlands cigarettes per day. Reported missing in action in December 1962, after blowing up the fortress hideaway of his old adversary Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Ongoing flirtation with JM.

  • CS. Dr John ‘Bookie’ Booker, Chief of Soviet Section – the largest and most important foreign section of SIS. Tall and thin, with one arm and a patch on his left eye. Adored by his secretary, Pamela. Gambler???

  • CME. Chief of the Middle East department – Alexander ‘Dingle’ Delavigne: old-school SIS, polished, aristocratic, charming. Speaks six languages. Dresses immaculately, plays piano – show tunes – smokes Turkish cheroots. Married to Margaret. Secretary: Janet d’Auvergne, queen of the Powder Vine and close friend of JM.

  • ‘Bobby’ Prenderghast. Chief of Southern Africa Section until 1962, when it emerged that he had been recruited as a Soviet agent after falling into a KGB-laid ‘honey trap’ while on holiday in the Greek islands ten years earlier, and had been supplying the Soviets with information ever since.

  • Dorothy Fields. Broad-beamed chief research officer and mole-hunter. One of only three women intelligence officers. Drives a Citroën 2CV; wears hats at all times.

  The complete list covered two pages. The vast majority of names belonged to colleagues of my aunt’s. It seemed that she saw few people outside the Office apart from her immediate family: her sister, Helena Moneypenny, and Lionel Westbrook (my mother and father), and her great aunt Frieda Greenfield. Jane Moneypenny’s parents had both died when she was young; her father, Commander Hugh Moneypenny, a renowned sportsman, had worked as a naval attaché in the colonial government in Nairobi before the war. Her mother, Dr Irene Moneypenny, was involved in developing rural health initiatives in Kenya when she was killed in the Mau Mau uprising on 26 March 1953.

  One notable exception was Richard Hamilton, whom she referred to in her diaries as R, and of whom she wrote with increasing regularity – and fondness – from the time of their first meeting, in Barcelona in 1961. By the middle of 1962, however, their relationship had faltered in an atmosphere of distrust. Neither, it transpired, had been entirely honest about what it was they did for a living. But it wasn’t until December 1962 that he made the extraordinary revelation that he was not, as he’d maintained, an architect, but in fact an agent of the British domestic Security Service, M15. She learned of this in dramatic circumstances: Boris, a pale-eyed KGB officer, had broken into my aunt’s flat and, after a struggle, tied her to her bed and threatened to kill her if she did not reveal office secrets. R arrived unannounced a
nd leaped on Boris, who shot R in the chest, before he, in turn, was shot by my aunt.

  These were just some of the individuals on a list which grew ever longer as I read the forty volumes my aunt had written over a period spanning half a century. It became covered with more notes, scribbles and scrawls about their backgrounds and behaviour, until I realised that it was no longer just a cast of characters, but a list of suspects.

  Friday, 18th January

  This afternoon, M called me in and, without warning, swivelled his chair to face the clock and dictated James’s obituary, which he ordered me to send directly to The Times: ‘A senior officer of the Ministry of Defence, Commander James Bond, CMG, RNVR, is missing, believed killed, while on an official mission to Japan,’ he dictated. ‘It grieves me to have to report that hopes of his survival must now be abandoned. It therefore falls to my lot, as the Head of the Department he served so well, to give some account of this officer and of his outstanding services to his country …’

  He showed no emotion as he recounted, fluently, the sparse details of the life of the man we both knew so well. As I turned to leave, my hands were shaking and for a ghastly second I lost control. ‘Sir,’ I blurted out, ‘you can’t do this. You’re burying him alive. We have to search more. If you’ll give me leave, I’ll go myself. He can’t have just been blown into dust.’

  I can’t believe I said it. As my mouth snapped shut, I felt the colour drain from my face. It was all I could do to stop crumpling to the floor. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘I forgot myself. Please forgive me.’ Without looking at him, I turned and rushed towards the door. My hand was on the handle, when he called, ‘Jane.’ He had never before used my first name. ‘I know you were fond of 007, but I’m afraid there is no hope. Tanaka’s1 been over there twice and 006 spent a week out there, talked to everyone and found no sign of him. We have that woman’s – Kissy Suzuki, I believe her name is – first-hand testimony of watching the castle explode. There is absolutely no point in your going. I expressly forbid it. Believe me, he would have given his life willingly if he took Blofeld with him. We will miss him, but he left the world a safer place. Now, we’re going to have to start thinking about a memorial service, and I would like you to be in charge of drafting a suitable response to the letters of sympathy.’