Moneypenny Diaries: Secret Servant

by Samantha Kate

  R hasn’t forgotten me. The day after he left, a parcel was delivered early in the morning. It was tightly wrapped and taped. The lad who brought it insisted I showed him my passport before he would hand it over. ‘Orders, miss,’ he said, before smoothing back his greasy hair and climbing aboard his motor cycle.

  I cut through the tape and opened the parcel with interest. Inside the first layer, I found more tape and more brown paper, along with a covering note from R:

  My darling J,

  I haven’t left yet, but already I miss you. Know only that you will be in my thoughts as I try to close this piece of business with all due speed. Here is the information I promised. Against all rules, I made a photographic copy – and broke several more to give it to you. If either of our outfits were to discover this contravention, I’m afraid it would mean certain trouble. Still, they have enough black marks against me already to fill a coal scuttle. What difference can another make?

  I wish you all luck, and more love,

  Forever yours, R

  Beneath further layers I found a file. Opening it, I was confronted with a facsimile of my father’s face and, beside it, his name: HUGH DAVID MONEYPENNY, LIEUTENANT RN; aka HUGH STERLING. I was almost shaking as I read what was written below. Along with a brief service record and copies of various commendations from his seniors and professors at Greenwich, I found the first black and white evidence of his involvement in Ruthless. The outline of the operation was there, in an extract from a document prepared for the Director of Naval Intelligence by his assistant, Ian Fleming: the names – both actual and operational – of the men involved, the equipment they took with them, even a script of the distress plea that my father was to broadcast from the radio of the Heinkel bomber after its forced landing in the channel. Everything concurred with Patrick Derring-Jones’s4 description of the course of events which led to Pa’s capture.

  The last page detailed the steps taken to trace the whereabouts of my father and the pilot, Miles Pitman, after the unhappy conclusion to the operation. It consisted of various enquiries, made via the Red Cross, to the Wehrmacht. Each met with a negative response. My father had apparently vanished. The last entry was one line, dated February 15th, 1941: ‘Informed family that Lieutenant Moneypenny presumed dead.’ Such a short line; such a catastrophic impact.

  Reading it, I couldn’t fail to recall my mother’s desperation, the feeling that we had of being alone, on a rudderless boat in a stormy ocean. My mother never fully recovered. I have never had a lasting relationship, while Helena has attached herself, with the gritty determination of a barnacle, to a man old enough to be our father.

  Appended to the file was a note in R’s hand: ‘Lieutenant Hugh Sterling on list of officers resident at Colditz POW camp on April 13th, 1945, three days prior to its liberation by US forces.’

  I was filled with excitement. Here, at last, was the clue I had been looking for. I jogged down to Kensington library. In the military-history section I found two books by a Major Pat Reid and one by Major Roddy Parks. I took them all out and am already engrossed in The Colditz Story. No mention yet of Hugh Sterling.

  Saturday, 26th October

  I finished the Colditz book last night. What an amazing tale. What extraordinary men. At times, you get so carried away by the adventure of it all, the ingenious escape attempts and occasional successes, that it sounds almost like boarding-school high jinks. Then you are dragged back to the grim reality of life incarcerated in a forbidding castle deep behind enemy lines. Many of the inmates began to lose their minds; it’s extraordinary that any stayed sane. They were driven by the desperate desire to escape. It was their duty as officers to find their way back to their regiments.

  Reid did not write about Pa, but in Roddy Parks’s book I found a passing mention of a Hugh Sterling. I started shaking. I wrote immediately to Parks, care of his publishers, to ask whether we might meet. At the moment, however hard I try, I can’t imagine Pa in Colditz. If he was there, Parks will know.

  Wednesday, 30th October

  M called me into his office this morning, to ask whether I had heard from Eleanor Philby. When I assured him that he would know the instant I had, he asked me to convene a meeting to discuss the Philby situation. So it was that this afternoon I found myself sitting at his table, alongside Bill, Dingle [CME], and Bookie [CS].

  ‘This can’t go on any longer. Every day that he’s there, he’s giving away more secrets,’ M said, banging his fist on the table. ‘We can’t afford to let it happen. Agent rings are being compromised all over Europe and the Middle East.’

  ‘Sir, with respect,’ Bookie began, ‘the damage has already been done. He hasn’t been into the Office for twelve years. We’ve kept an eye on him since then. He was given nothing of importance in Beirut, isn’t that correct, CME?’

  Dingle inclined his head, gracefully. ‘Under your instructions, sir, I used Philby mainly for analysis – for which he had considerable flair. He knew none of our agents over there, even though, I must confess, I never believed in his perfidy.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s not a matter of placing blame,’ M said. ‘He’s a damned clever man – perhaps the most successful Russian spy of all time. As we’re beginning to appreciate, hundreds of people died as a result of his actions – people who trusted us and risked their lives to help us.’

  ‘We’re offering him immunity?’

  ‘It’s that damned rock and hard place. We need him back and it’ll humiliate the Russians if he comes. What will his life be like here anyway? It won’t all be Oxford marmalade and cricket scores. He’ll be reviled by everyone he counted as a friend. It’ll be living punishment. It looks as if he’s worked that out for himself. The bait’s been dangling for long enough and he’s shown no sign of grabbing it. Miss Moneypenny, do you think Mrs Philby will be able to persuade him?’

  ‘I fear not, sir,’ I replied. ‘By all accounts they have a happy marriage, but he’s already demonstrated where his loyalties lie. He abandoned his wife and children to go to Moscow. She’s beginning to doubt that he ever loved her. My guess is that she will do anything now just to hang on to him. I don’t think the power lies with her.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like it. Thank you, Miss Moneypenny. So we have to come up with an alternative plan. Mr Philby will be coming home. Chief of Staff?’

  ‘Sir. I’ve discussed this at length with CS. As we see it, there are two options. The first is to persuade him to come home of his own accord; the second, to enforce the persuasion, so to speak. Let’s take the latter first. Kidnap is never an easy operation, especially from Redland. In this case, it will be triply difficult. We must assume that the Philbys are under constant guard. They will have minders outside their apartment, and whenever they leave they will be under surveillance. The KGB will have taken every precaution to prevent a kidnap attempt. That’s not to say it’s impossible. In anticipation of this eventuality, I have consulted both our station in Moscow and Special Forces. Through the good work of CS’s men out there, we’ve managed to locate the Philbys’ apartment. It’s on an upper floor of a large block in a residential suburb of the city, some fifteen minutes out of the centre, near the Sokol metro station. On the advice of the commanding officer of the Special Air Services, I contacted our Cousins [the CIA] to ask if one of their birds [spy planes] could be targeted on this very address. They agreed and we are now waiting for detailed pictures and blueprints of the building. When we have them, we’ll be able to start drawing up plans for an operation to extract Mr Philby.

  ‘At the same time, we can continue to work on ways to persuade him of the benefits of returning home willingly – a reverse defection, as it were. So far, we have tried two approaches. The first was the offer of immunity through CME, in Beirut, which patently failed. The other is the on-going attempt to persuade his wife of the advantages of their return to this country, assuming further contact through Miss Moneypenny. This can be regarded as still in play, though we have no way
at present of controlling this from our end. Which leaves us with a third action: we can try to make Moscow unattractive to Philby.’ He paused.

  ‘Yes, Chief of Staff. You have some suggestions?’

  ‘This would be the work of Sov Section’s planners, of course, but CS and I wondered how his Russian hosts would take to some well-placed rumours that Philby is – and always was – a double? That even now he’s being run by London and passing back details of KGB debriefing techniques? They don’t have to believe it, of course, but even a tiny seed of doubt in the minds of those on the fringes of the intelligence community could be cause for considerable embarrassment in Moscow and a reason to make Philby’s stay uncomfortable.’

  M looked around the table. ‘CS?’

  ‘The odds are against it, certainly, but it’s worth a punt. I’ll get on to drawing up outlines for both operations. Shall we call them, let’s see … MARMALADE 1 and 2?’

  ‘Fine by me. Good work, Bill. Thank you. Any other ideas, CS? CME? Very well then. We will meet again in one week to discuss further action, Thank you, gentlemen.’

  Gentlemen? I was not asked for my ideas. In truth, I had none, just one question: what about Mrs Philby? What will happen to her? Will she be abandoned in Moscow this time, and left to the mercy of the Russians when her husband is ‘extracted’? Poor Eleanor.

  Q BRANCH REPORT 1963:III [abridged]

  Q Branch has acquired a copy of the KGB’s main training manual. Entitled ‘THE FOUNDATION OF SOVIET INTELLIGENCE WORK’ it details the basic terminology, methodology and tradecraft of KGB officers worldwide. With careful study, this should enable officers of this organisation to recognise and thwart the actions of enemy agents. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that it is imperative that the KGB does not discover that we have this manual in our possession, lest they change their working procedures accordingly.

  A. KGB: TERMINOLOGY

  Officers are always Soviet citizens and referred to, in covert communications, as WORKERS or CADRES. Whether working abroad under diplomatic cover, or illicitly as an ILLEGAL, their over-riding aim is the recruitment of agents, known as PROBATIONERS.

  B. KGB: SURVEILLANCE TECHNIQUES

  Directorate 7 – known as Semyorka – is responsible for surveillance in Moscow and is comprised of 1,000 officers. An additional 500 men and women from the Moscow Oblast Directorate are involved in watching and tailing alien diplomats, media, businessmen and suspected spies. The minimum team number for a surveillance operation is three, working out of one car. In extreme cases, up to three teams can be deployed for one suspect. Teams are composed of men and women, all competent drivers. They should have in their possession various disguises, including hats, spectacles, different coloured coats and false moustaches, which should be employed in rotation. Every team member has a personal radio; the microphone is hidden under the shirt or tie and the transmitter concealed in a pocket. The car contains a more powerful base station. Teams work on an eight-hour rotation.

  B. II: EVADING SURVEILLANCE

  When embarking on a covert operation, to meet a contact or agent, or deliver a message or signal, the officer must first undertake proverka (known to the Americans as dry-cleaning), to ensure he is not under surveillance. In optimal circumstances, this should take a minimum of three hours, and include multiple forms of transport. The officer should never appear to show concern; the aim is to make every action appear natural. If a tail is identified, it is standard KGB procedure to abort the operation immediately. The officer should ideally work with a partner, whose mission it is to identify possible tails.

  C. TRADECRAFT

  DEAD LETTER DROPS: These should be clearly designated in advance and located in an area which both officer and agent have reason to visit without suspicion, and out of eye range of any possible watcher. A message could be concealed in a rock in a park, or a matchbox, fitted with a magnet, which could thus be attached to the underside of a bridge, for instance.

  SIGNALS: These take two main forms: a signal of personal identification, or a cryptic signal posted at a pre-arranged site. The preferred method is a chalk mark on a lamppost, wall, notice-board or signpost. This could be a cross, numeral or V inside a circle; the recipient must be aware of the meaning of the signal. It might signify that there is something ready to be collected in a dead letter box, that the dead letter box has been emptied, a request for an urgent meeting, or that the signaller intends to leave the country the next day. Once received, the message must be removed with a damp cloth.

  November

  I soon dismissed the warning I had received from the senior history professor as a product of gossip and professional jealousy. He obviously had connections in SIS, in common with half of the middle-aged and middle-class white male academics at Cambridge. Someone, somewhere – probably within the Firm – had presumably tipped him the wink about the forthcoming publication of the diaries. Realising that they would cause a stir in the history world and bring attention to someone who was not in the club, he decided to try to intimidate me into pulling the book.

  There was no way I was going to allow him to succeed. I had already learned a huge amount through my aunt’s diaries, not only about her personal bravery, but also about her parents’ – my grandparents’ – strength and determination. I would not let them down.

  More than any other Second World War prisoner-of-war camp, Colditz Castle has lingered in the public consciousness – a legacy of the books written by Pat Reid, Roddy Parks and later Airey Neave, and the films based upon them. Before I discovered that my grandfather had been an inmate, I regarded Colditz more as a movie backdrop for the now-legendary tales of derring-do than as a grim and gruelling prison, where men starved and lost their minds.

  Jane Moneypenny must have been horrified when she discovered that her father had spent over a year under German guard in a cold and barren camp. There was perhaps an initial stab of euphoria at the knowledge that he hadn’t died in 1940. But this would have been closely followed by shivers of despair at the suffering that he must have undergone there.

  Although I never met my grandfather, I was brought up on stories about him: his sense of fun and good humour; his ability to ‘read’ the bush for any trace of animal activity. My mother always said that he could see a lion print and tell not only the age and sex of the beast, but when it had passed by, to within an hour. He taught my mother and aunt to ride and to shoot, and also how to creep up on the most fragile infant impala without causing alarm. My grandmother Irene, who also died long before I was born, was by all accounts a worrier: intense, passionate, fiercely protective of her children, she saw potential hazards around every corner. Hugh Moneypenny was her ballast, the silver lining in her every imagined cloud. When he disappeared, she was devastated and, according to my aunt, never recovered. She threw herself into her work, providing healthcare for native Kenyans, almost as if by alleviating their suffering she could atone for her own.

  Everything I know about Irene and Hugh Moneypenny I learned from my mother and Aunt Jane, and from the few fading photographs they brought back from Kenya. Having never met them, I found it hard to picture Hugh’s predicament in Colditz.

  After reading the diaries, I went to the library and got out all the books about the castle’s wartime incarnation, and once I’d devoured them I was filled with a desire to find out more. Since my father died nine years ago, I have had no living family. Neither side were prolific breeders; I’d no cousins, and the passing of time had taken what few great-aunts and uncles I’d once had. My family consisted only of the dead; it didn’t seem too odd to want to know them better.

  The week after my ‘warning’, I booked myself a ticket to Berlin. From there, I took a train down to Leipzig, where I was met by a jolly English import, who advertised his taxi tours on the Colditz Castle website. As we drove out of town and through the bland middle-European countryside, he waxed lyrical about the joys – predominantly economic and female – of living in the former East and aske
d why I was interested in the castle. I told him that my grandfather had been an inmate. ‘Thought it must’ve been something like that,’ he said. ‘Don’t get many women coming down here – certainly not on their own.’

  We drove around a corner and over a bridge, and suddenly there it was, perched on a rocky crag to our left. My first thought was how small it was, like a castle from the Brothers Grimm. It was perhaps only a hundred feet from the lower ramparts to the river below. I had imagined it as a huge, forbidding fortress, its turrets permanently shrouded by cloud. We wound up cobbled lanes, and parked in front of the heavy wooden gates. Winter was already entrenched in southern Germany, and I pulled my coat belt tighter as we walked through the outer courtyard and into the prisoners’ court. The guide was muttering statistics and stories that I already knew from the books, as we walked from the chapel to the cellar, up to a dormitory, and into the old canteen, criss-crossing the small, irregularly shaped courtyard that in winter never saw the sun, and which was the centre of the prisoners’ lives.

  The cold bit at my cheeks and fingers, and what had on first impression seemed almost disappointingly small began to take on a more forbidding aspect. I pictured the hundreds of men, far from home, huddled in this claustrophobic place. I was struck again by their ingenuity and resourcefulness and bitter determination to find some way to break free. They must have longed for their families, hundreds – in my grandfather’s case, thousands – of miles away. It would have taken a brave man to withstand that deprivation. One of those brave men was my grandfather.