Almost his first move in office was to set sail on the Queen Mary to visit Truman and rekindle the fires of the wartime special relationship. In Washington, for the third time in his life he addressed both houses of Congress. He reminded the packed rows of senators and congressmen of Bismarck’s remark that the supreme fact of the nineteenth century was that Britain and the United States spoke the same language. ‘Let us make sure’, declared Churchill, ‘that the supreme fact of the twentieth century is that they tread the same path.’1 Early in 1953 the arrival in the White House of his old wartime comrade-in-arms and commander of allied forces at D-Day, Eisenhower, furthered his enthusiasm for marching in step with the Americans. Good intelligence would be essential for the road they trod.
Churchill feared that Stalin might accidentally or even deliberately provoke war in Europe, especially over the still bitterly contested future of Germany and Berlin. To his defence and intelligence chiefs he issued a stream of orders for the earliest possible hint of Soviet attack. ‘What is the opinion of the Chiefs of Staff about whether there is any more danger at the present time and how the harvest and weather fit in?’ he anxiously inquired over the summer of 1952.2 His advisers hedged their bets. They assured him that there was nothing to suggest any imminent aggression, and certainly no sign that the danger had increased. On the other hand, they pointed out, total war could still result if the West was forced to respond to some local Soviet action.3
Churchill continued to demand data. Reports on Soviet bloc military production, the size of the Soviet budget, the consumption of finished steel in the Soviet Union suitable for armaments and on the new ‘Sverdlov’-class cruisers that came into service with the Soviet navy in 1951 landed regularly on his desk. They induced as much anxiety as reassurance. Naval intelligence reported confidently that the Soviet navy was still far inferior to the combined navies of Nato. Yet its future potential should not be underestimated. The Director of Naval Intelligence even stressed that in the face of intense Soviet security measures it was becoming ‘progressively more difficult to gather intelligence’.4 No wonder Churchill was nervous. Even the most comprehensive of estimates made by the Joint Intelligence Committee provided no strategic guidance on the likelihood of general war or on Moscow’s willingness to take a gamble on some local offensive.5
Churchill was acutely aware that Britain’s code-breakers were working in the dark, or at least a crepuscular half-light in which the shape of targets was only dimly perceived. Only a few years earlier, Ultra – the rich intelligence harvest reaped from code-breaking – had kept him informed on a daily basis of Nazi plans through the stream of intercepts that poured in from Bletchley Park. Churchill called this source his ‘Golden Eggs’. But now the code-breakers, about to move to Cheltenham under the title Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), were no longer laying premium-quality eggs. They worked hand-in-glove with the Americans in efforts to crack Soviet codes and Black Friday had been a disaster for them too.
News of this catastrophe had reached Churchill, even though he was in opposition when it happened, through his former intelligence contact the dashing young former naval attaché in Madrid Alan Hillgarth. During the war Churchill and Hillgarth had worked closely on a cloak-and-dagger operation funnelling millions of dollars through New York to keep Spain neutral. Hillgarth had retired but still stayed in touch. Sometimes he visited Chartwell, Churchill’s country home in Kent, where for reasons of secrecy Churchill carefully ensured his name was never recorded in the official guest book.
More often Hillgarth kept him informed in a series of written reports based on leaks from friends still actively involved in intelligence. Information on what was happening inside the Soviet Union was deteriorating, reported Hillgarth on the eve of Churchill’s re-election. The code-breakers had failed to crack any significant Soviet ciphers, only some minor codes. The West possessed only a sketchy Soviet order of battle. Such was the dismal picture as the 1950s began.
As soon as he entered Downing Street, Churchill demanded an intensified intelligence offensive to find out more. Many of those who had directed Britain’s wartime machinery were still oiling its Cold War wheels. Kenneth Strong, a tough-minded Scot who had cut his intelligence teeth fighting Michael Collins’ Sinn Fein guerrillas in the 1920s and risen to become Eisenhower’s personal intelligence adviser during the D-Day landings, was now running Britain’s Joint Intelligence Bureau. Sir Edward Travis, head of Bletchley Park at the end of the war and a chief negotiator of the 1948 UK-USA treaty, was still in charge of the code-breakers. But if traditional code-breaking was not working, other ways must be found. Churchill knew this because it had been impressed on him by Hillgarth. Ultra had made British intelligence lazy. A radical reassessment of methods was now needed, urged Hillgarth. However powerful the West was, he told Churchill, ‘even a giant is blind in the dark’.6
Secret flights over Soviet territory to take high-level reconnaissance photographs were one solution, but they were risky. Attlee had hesitated but Churchill robustly gave them the go-ahead. American Tornado aircraft based at British airfields, but repainted with RAF markings and flown by British and American aircrews, were soon penetrating deep into Soviet territory, equipped with high-powered spy cameras. If one of the planes was detected or shot down, it could cause a crisis with the Kremlin. So Churchill made sure that he personally authorized each and every flight.7
But if aerial reconnaissance promised badly needed intelligence, so did the underground operations initiated by Lunn. By now Sir Stewart Menzies, Churchill’s trusted wartime head of intelligence, the man who had personally delivered the ‘Golden Eggs’ on his desk every day, had retired. His successor was Sir John (‘Sinbad’) Sinclair, a tall, lean and soft-spoken Scot with angular features and the habit of lunching daily on grilled herring and water. He told Churchill about the Vienna tunnels and won his permission to burrow under Berlin. Here, too, discovery by the Soviets could have serious political repercussions. Already fully briefed on bugging techniques being used by the Soviets, Churchill had given MI5 and SIS carte blanche to fight back. As a result the Joint Intelligence Committee urgently ordered a programme to develop offensive British eavesdropping techniques.8 Sinclair and SIS did as instructed.
SIS meets the US Army. Major-General Sir John Sinclair, the SIS chief who authorized the Berlin tunnel, seen here (right) with General Mark Clark, Commander of the Fifth US Army in Italy during the Second World War
Section Y was the equivalent in SIS to CIA’s Staff D. Its headquarters was at 2 Carlton Gardens, just off the Mall, which had once been the official residence of Field Marshal Lord Kitchener. At the top of the King George VI steps half-way between Buckingham Palace and Admiralty Arch, its columned entrance faced the former Free French headquarters of General de Gaulle. Behind stood the private residence of the Foreign Secretary. In 1953 its occupant was Sir Anthony Eden, Churchill’s impatient and nervous successor-in-waiting. Like his master he was keen to use SIS wherever and whenever he safely could. Section Y, at this epicentre of British power, was ready and eager to deliver.
Inside 2 Carlton Gardens a monumental staircase with gilded bannisters rose from a chandeliered marble entrance hall. Downstairs were public reception rooms. Above was a warren of smaller offices. Below, fronting on the Mall behind solid walls, was the basement where serious work was conducted. This was very special and secret business, closely protected from prying and curious eyes. Here was harvested the intelligence crop flowing in from the Vienna tunnel.
If the set was quintessential Whitehall, then the head of the section came from Ealing Studios central casting. Tom Gimson was a retired army officer whose final post had been as commanding officer of the Irish Guards. In his razor-creased shirt and impeccable pinstripes he kept order over an army of volatile and potentially unruly civilians. ‘He was a wonderful manager of men and women,’ recalled one colleague, ‘his subordinates loved him.’ These were the transcribers and translators who sweated day and night t
o keep pace with the tapes from Vienna being flown in three times a week on a special RAF flight. After the transcribers did their job the results passed on to a second team of a dozen or so army and air force officers with a good knowledge of Russian. They studied the transcribed conversations, extracted intelligence they thought important and compiled a regular intelligence bulletin on the state of the Soviet forces in Austria.
The statue of King George VI stands guard over the headquarters of SIS’s Section Y at 2 Carlton Gardens, just off the Mall. Here transcribers and translators toiled over the tapes from the Vienna tunnel operations
2 Carlton Gardens viewed from the Mall. It was here, in the basement, that SIS staff worked unseen on the Vienna tapes
‘The customers got very excited’, remembered one of those who was deeply involved. The ‘customers’ were mostly in War Office intelligence. But the Foreign Office was also an eager consumer. An officer from Gimson’s staff kept in regular touch with both of them, strolling across the Mall down Whitehall to deliver material by hand and chat about the results with his opposite numbers in the offices concerned. Sometimes they would ask the transcribers to look out for an especially promising item on the Soviet order of battle or any sudden and threatening moves that might herald an attack on the West.
Barely a decade earlier Churchill had harried Bletchley Park for similar intelligence about Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Britain. The turning-point then had come when the code-breakers had cracked a message revealing an order for certain key German units to be stood down. History now repeated itself. Lunn later recalled that one of the most important items in the Vienna harvest was a conversation between two Red Army NCOs discussing which of their units had been earmarked for demobilization. This was ‘clear proof’, stated Lunn, ‘that the Soviets had no intention of launching an attack’.9
The job of SIS itself was to run the enterprise. The production team in Carlton Gardens was a remarkable miscellany. Many of them belonged to the so-called ‘St Petersburg English’, the bilingual descendants of the great British merchant houses that had traded in the former Russian capital before the revolution. Others came from the families of White Russian émigrés who had fled the Bolsheviks, mostly middle-aged or elderly and all too happy to use their native tongue to fight the communists while also benefiting from some regular employment. Then there were a number of ex-Polish army officers, mostly former members of the Polish intelligence service fluent in Russian who had been stranded in London after their homeland fell to the communists.
Some were lonely and embittered. As they sat for hours wearing headphones, their work felt lowly, meaningless and tedious. Listening endlessly to tapes of idiomatic yet often highly technical Russian was exhausting and nerve-racking. ‘There was plenty of Slav temperament and moodiness about’, remembered one witness. Only Gimson’s bottomless supply of tact and diplomacy kept affairs running smoothly.
Gimson’s large and sunny office had French windows that opened on to a balcony overlooking the Mall. Next door, in a small space converted from a dressing room, sat his personal assistant. This was the formidable Pam Peniakoff. Tall, slim and elegant, she was the English-born widow of Vladimir Peniakoff, a Belgian-born Russian who had led a daring commando group (‘Popski’s Private Army’) in North Africa and Italy against the Germans. Immediately after the war ‘Popski’ had served in Vienna as British liaison officer with the Red Army, and it was here that he had met and married his wife. She possessed a sharp tongue and an eagle eye, which kept her flock obediently in order.10
Then, in the late spring of 1953, the Carlton Gardens team was joined by an exotic new member from SIS. The Vienna material was expanding so rapidly that Gimson was badly in need of a second-in-command. His arrival on the scene was to prove fateful for the entire tunnel project.
7
Agent ‘Diomid’
It was a fine Sunday morning in April 1953 when an RAF ambulance plane touched down at Abingdon airfield in Oxfordshire after a short flight from Berlin. Hardly had it taxied up when a Salvation Army chorus began singing the hymn ‘Now Thank We All Our God’. Waiting on the runway was a sizeable crowd of journalists, camera-popping photographers, grey-suited civil servants, solemn church dignitaries (including the Archbishop of Canterbury) and tear-stained family members of the six passengers on board.
A lean, bearded man in his thirties, dressed in a heavy thick-spun overcoat, hesitated briefly at the top of the stairs as if wondering whether he should wait for the music to end or descend to the official welcome below. Amid the sea of faces he could see his mother waiting in the crowd. After they had embraced and listened dutifully to formal speeches of welcome, he tumbled into a waiting car and they were driven off to her flat in Reigate.
The first British prisoners from Korea had finally returned home. All were civilians captured during the North Korean invasion of the south who had remarkable tales of hardship and endurance to tell. But none was to prove more fascinating than that of the man with the beard, George Blake. To the British public he was described as the British vice-consul in the South Korean capital, Seoul. In reality he was an officer in SIS, and the fate of the Berlin tunnel was to hinge on his actions.
George Blake being welcomed home by his beaming mother after his repatriation from North Korea, where he had been recruited by the KGB
Blake had been a catch for SIS. His father was an Egyptian-born Jewish trader and a naturalized Briton named Albert Behar, and his mother was Dutch. He was born in Rotterdam in 1922 and was named after King George V, for whom his father had fought gallantly in the First World War, during which he won both the OBE and Legion of Honour before going on to serve with Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s intelligence staff. Educated in the Netherlands until the age of thirteen, George was briefly sent to the English School in Cairo after his father’s premature death in 1936. Soon afterwards he returned home and was living in Rotterdam when the Germans invaded.
He joined the Dutch resistance and took part in several dangerous missions, mostly as a courier carrying messages by bicycle. Then, fearing the Gestapo was on his heels, he fled to Britain along an escape line through Belgium, France and Spain. After several months in the Royal Navy, during which he changed his surname to Blake, he worked briefly for SIS’s Dutch section before joining the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in London planning the invasion of Europe. Now a commissioned officer in the Royal Navy, Blake witnessed the surrender of German forces in north-west Europe at Lüneburg Heath before being transferred to Hamburg for intelligence work. His main task was to collect information for war crimes trials on Admiral Dönitz’s submarine service. But he was soon reporting on communist and Soviet activities along the Baltic ports and began to learn Russian.
SIS recruited Blake in 1947. Ironically in the light of what happened later, it was Andrew King who first spotted him in Hamburg during a visit to Germany the year before. On his return to London he mentioned Blake’s name to Kenneth Cohen, the overall director of Broadway’s European operations. Both he and King were attracted by Blake’s proficiency in languages and cosmopolitan background. People like him were hard to find in Britain and SIS badly needed new blood for its Cold War projects.
As a start Blake was sent to Downing College, Cambridge, for an intensive Russian language course. Then, in 1949, he joined the small British legation in Seoul. A year later North Korea invaded and within four days had captured the capital. Blake, along with other legation members, was sent to a POW camp, first in the north and then across the Yalu River into Chinese Manchuria. Life there was marked by deprivation, starvation and disease, with numerous attempts at brainwashing. When the survivors arrived in Abingdon they were received as national heroes.
Blake was no exception. After a routine debriefing to check that no SIS ciphers or documents had fallen into North Korean hands, he was told to report to the Far Eastern section in Broadway. Here he found himself treated as a celebrity by the young female secretaries. B
ut others were also starstruck. John Wyke, fresh from his Vienna tunnelling exploits, was typical in his admiration. Blake had survived real horrors, felt Wyke, and his reputation in Broadway rode high.1 Even the austere Sir John Sinclair, ‘C’ himself, was warm and sympathetic. After a brief chat about Blake’s hardships in Korea, he suggested he take a few weeks’ leave while they found him a posting at home.
Blake bought a car and took his mother and his newly wed sister and her husband on a holiday to Spain. On the way back he and his mother spent a week in Rotterdam with an aunt. In the summer, ever the family man and loving brother, he took his eldest sister for a holiday to France. By September he was installed with ‘Y’ section in Carlton Gardens. Soon after that he began to date the youngest of Pam Peniakoff’s brood, a tall and dark-haired secretary some ten years younger than himself, named Gillian Allan. They married a year later in St Peter’s, North Audley Street, a fashionable church in London’s West End. It was the sort of marriage SIS welcomed. Not only was Blake marrying a wife inside the service. Gillian’s father, a colonel, also worked for the firm. As Blake wryly noted, ‘it kept everything nicely in the family.’2
*
But what nobody in SIS knew was that Blake had already joined another intelligence family. During his imprisonment in Manchuria he had volunteered his services to the KGB. Some observers have claimed this was pure expediency, but Blake himself has always insisted it was a genuine conversion to communism. It seems to have been a bit of both. He possessed a strong ascetic streak and at one point seriously considered becoming a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. His cousin Henri Curiel became a leader of the Egyptian communist party. With his Dutch—Jewish background and slightly accented English, he sometimes felt, or was made to feel, an outsider in SIS. He was favourably influenced by learning about Russian life and literature at Cambridge and apparently shocked by the brutality of the South Korean regime of Syngman Rhee. The Western-backed dictator ruled over a feudal state with a wretched and impoverished peasantry and a police force that reminded Blake of the Gestapo. Communist partisans in the hills harassed government forces. ‘They seemed to me’, claimed Blake later, ‘not unlike our own resistance fighters in Europe during the war.’ This smacks of an ex post facto justification, for there was plenty to suggest that the North Koreans and the Chinese were even more Gestapo-like than their opponents.
Spies Beneath Berlin Page 7