The life of a junior MI6 officer, like Cavendish, in Vienna, was taken up to a large extent with the routine work of maintaining an infrastructure for espionage – looking for locations for dead-letter drops where documents could be stashed by an agent and then picked up by his British case officer or checking out new safe houses to replace old, blown ones (the demand for such apartments must certainly have kept the Viennese property market buoyant, the spies reckoned). There was also the work of recruiting support agents, the musicians in the beer cellars, the hotel porters, the taxi-drivers who could be useful in operations or when it came to meeting the agents from the other side who were passing on secrets.
Attempts to recruit agents who could pass on secrets were painfully difficult and reflect the amateurishness of the service of the time. By the lavish baroque abbey in Melk, Cavendish struck up a conversation with a young Russian artillery captain called Grigori on the terrace of a pub on the banks of the Danube, which led to a drinking competition involving a near-lethal mix of two-litre glasses of beer and vodka. Perhaps they could meet again? A fortnight later they were back at the pub chatting about their background and Cavendish wondered if he had found a source in Soviet Military Headquarters. Two weeks on and Grigori failed to show. The landlord was asked to make some discreet inquiries among a group of Russian officers about Captain Grigori by saying he had left something behind on his last visit. He had been sent back to the Soviet Union, he was told. He was not the only Russian officer whom Cavendish befriended who would soon afterwards disappear. A colonel he encountered at the Opera one evening agreed to meet three days later at a local beer cellar. All went well, and another meeting was agreed in a week’s time at a restaurant in the inner city. A team watched the restaurant in case an attempt were made to kidnap Cavendish but the Colonel never showed. A phone call by a third party to his office revealed that he too had been suddenly recalled to the Soviet Union. Something was not quite right, Cavendish sensed, maybe a bad apple was in the mix somewhere. Field Security felt the same. One time a truck carrying an agent was stopped at a checkpoint. The agent was in disguise, with another twelve men in uniform. Yet a Red Army officer held a photo up and spotted the agent and beckoned him out.48 At one point, MI6 activities virtually ground to a halt amid fears of Soviet penetration, and a senior officer came out from London. Laxness in Field Security was the problem, it was concluded.49
Along with recruiting and running agents to look for signs of the impending war, Cavendish’s other task was to prepare for the war itself by building a so-called stay-behind network. This consisted of recruiting sleeper agents and burying weapons and communications systems which would be activated only in the event of Austria being overrun by the Red Army. The men and munitions would then provide the core of a resistance network, modelled on those the Special Operations Executive had supported in the Second World War. Setting this up involved acting like pirates on Treasure Island, by finding a quiet spot in the park or the countryside and then counting paces from a tree or other landmark, burying a box three feet deep and then producing a map with instructions on how to retrieve the radio or ammunition. Cavendish purchased a large American Chevrolet car, changed the plates and took it to a garage where a secret compartment was fitted in the boot into which weapons could also be stuffed to get them past Soviet checkpoints as he headed out to Lower Austria. Across Europe and the Middle East, gold ingots were dropped into lakes, guns hidden in caves and radio sets buried as part of these efforts. Some were dug up later. Some were not.
There were other distractions in Vienna, which would get Cavendish into trouble. ‘My social activities at this time were devoted mainly to two of the young women working for the CIA, and I have to admit that coping with both of them at the same time diverted some of the energy that I should have been putting into intelligence,’ he recalled. When not wooing the American girls, Cavendish would occasionally engage in his own bit of spying by taking a drive out of Vienna through the Russian zone of Austria to get to the British zone. His destination was a little pub by a river where he could go fishing. The route conveniently took him past the Soviet-controlled airport. At just that moment, his car engine would splutter and he would have to stop, lift up the bonnet and rummage around. While doing so, he would aim a long-range camera at the airfield and snap off as many shots as possible of the Soviet aircraft so that some poor soul in London could count whether there were any more or less than there had been the previous weekend and try to work out what that meant.
Scratch beneath the thin veneer of glamour and much of the routine work of MI6 was a form of glorified train-spotting – with a little plane- and boat-spotting thrown in. This was true from the service’s inception in 1909 when its primary task was to gather intelligence on the German naval build-up as it recruited people to stroll around harbours. During the First World War, networks of agents behind enemy lines would watch coaches move down the rail tracks as they did their knitting. Drop one for a troop car, purl one for something else. Send the resultant pullover back for analysis. In postwar Vienna, the methods of intelligence gathering had changed only a little.
Recruiting agents was proving hard, so the next best thing was a defector coming over. Every defector from the Soviets, however lowly, was asked the same initial question. ‘Did they have any knowledge of an impending attack on the West?’ This was because it was the question asked again and again at Whitehall at the weekly meeting of Britain’s intelligence chiefs. They demanded the answers from every Secret Service station in the field: ‘are there signs of Russian preparations for war?’50 This was the number-one requirement and the first question dealt with in the weekly summaries of current intelligence. The reason it was asked so often and so urgently at the start of the Cold War is that there was no hard intelligence to summarise. Britain was blind.
When it came to intelligence from inside the USSR, the US and UK both had absolutely nothing. Not one source. Not one agent. The Whitehall mandarins frequently expressed their frustration at the poverty of information as they struggled to understand how far Stalin was willing to push a crisis. A March 1946 Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) analysis recorded that conclusions on Russian intentions were ‘speculative’ as ‘we have practically no direct intelligence of a detailed factual or substantial nature, on conditions in the different parts of the Soviet Union, and none at all on the intentions, immediate or ultimate, of the Russian leaders’.51 MI6 had been banned from running agents against an ally during the war and the ban remained in place after the war, much to the frustration of officers who were itching to try.52
The blindness was especially painful because it was in sharp contrast to the all-seeing eye that the service had provided in the Second World War. The reputation of MI6 had been salvaged by the box that the Chief hand-delivered to the Prime Minister. Inside it was intelligence derived from the breaking of the German codes (such as those generated by the Enigma machine) at Bletchley Park. That information allowed Britain to get inside German intentions and operations and turn their agents back against them as part of the famous Double-Cross System. But as the gaze shifted from one enemy to another, it lost all focus. The Soviet Union was a giant black hole out of which no intelligence was to come for well over a decade until the combination of satellites and the first spies provided an initial glimpse. Without that insight, train-spotting and snapping pictures of airfields was the only fall-back.
The threat of the Red Army steamrollering into Western Europe was ever present in those first years of the Cold War, before nuclear-tipped missiles and mutually assured destruction. Fear and insecurity were heightened by ignorance. Because of the reliance on scraps and morsels, intelligence estimates were way off the mark. In 1947, the Joint Intelligence Committee thought the Soviets had an army of 170 divisions which could reach the Atlantic coast in forty days while also seizing the whole of the Middle East. In reality at least half those divisions existed only on paper.53 But no one knew that. The fear that at any moment the S
oviets could invade was visceral and real, and the desire to know about it was urgent. If those divisions were to head west some would come through Austria. MI6 was asked to construct an elaborate tripwire to give as much warning as possible of any sign they might be on the move.
The network of train-spotters had been established after the war by MI6’s station chief in Vienna, George Kennedy Young, one of the service’s most aggressive operators. A tall, independent-minded Scot with red hair and a sharp intellect, Young had served with intelligence in Italy in the Second World War and after a brief spell in journalism had been recruited by an old friend from St Andrews University. Vienna was to mark the beginning of his rapid rise up the ranks of the Secret Service and nurture a profound hatred for Communism which would later draw him to the political right.
Young had a taste for bravura operations, even if they involved a little risk. ‘Keeping the Russians annoyed is rather an important part of intelligence work,’ he later said. ‘We are trying to breed insecurity and uncertainty about their own people.’54 In Vienna, he learnt that the Germans had carried out photographic reconnaissance of the Soviet Union and that the valuable information had been buried in the Soviet zone of Austria right next to a Red Army checkpoint. He organised for a newsagent run by his team to send its delivery van to the checkpoint and drop off a copy of a girlie magazine to the guard at the post. While the guard thumbed through its pages, the former Luftwaffe officer who had originally buried the photographic plates frantically dug them up and stowed them in a secret compartment in the back of the van before quickly driving off.55 ‘The professional skill of espionage’, Young later wrote, ‘is the exploitation of human weakness.’56
As head of station, Young’s main task was to take a strategic overview. He favoured action to confront Soviet aggression. He would complain that the Foreign Office and politicians were far too cautious when his agents reported that the Soviets were using their proxy secret services to bring Czechoslovakia and Hungary under their heel. ‘We were not prepared to take the minimal risks of exploiting internal weaknesses in the Soviet Bloc by active political warfare,’ he later recalled. ‘In autumn of 1947 it was apparent that the next Communist take-over would be in Czechoslovakia, but nothing was done to bolster up the will of those Czechs who might have resisted what was in fact a skilfully conducted bluff.’57
Stalin was reasserting his authority at home and abroad, determined to show that he would not be cowed. Nothing was more dangerous, he thought, than the hint of weakness. Stalin’s advantage was a deluge of intelligence about his opponents. This, if it had been adroitly handled, could have allowed him to calibrate even more successfully his mix of pressure and bluff to maximum effect, to know when to push and when to back down. Stalin did not want a war but, as Churchill had said, he wanted the fruits of war, a series of pliant buffer states across Eastern Europe. Crackdowns, purges and coups would deliver Soviet control of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania in the years after the war.
Austria lived in fear of being next. At first, the Soviets had co-operated hesitantly with the other occupiers. But when the Communist Party was trounced in elections in November 1945, the Soviets responded with a slow squeeze, particularly of Vienna, where they controlled all the road and rail access points including to the airports.58 By 1948 tension was rising. The city watched fearfully as the Soviets blockaded Berlin. CIA officers began preparing escape plans involving donning lederhosen and walking through the Viennese woods.59 British officers drew up top-secret plans to confront a putsch with military force, leading to arguments about whether such plans were realistic.60 Britain’s military had begun to push for Special Operations in the form of propaganda and the spreading of rumours to try and undermine Soviet influence in Austria and fuel anti-Russian sentiment.61 Young had tried to recruit agents within Austria’s Communist movement and wanted to send Czechoslovak and Hungarian refugees back home to work their way up the ranks of their Communist parties.62 By the end of 1948, his agents reported that the Kremlin seemed to be pulling back from its most aggressive revolutionary activity in Europe, partly in the face of a tougher line from the West over the Berlin blockade. Young’s progress in planting agents was slow. Not many people were willing to sacrifice the best years of their lives to infiltrate Communist parties.63
Young had a staff of about twenty officers and secretaries, most of them, he knew, blown to the Russians.64 Even though it was given extra resources, the MI6 station in Austria struggled to keep up with the demands placed on it. MI6 stations do not decide their own priorities. These are agreed back in London by the different government departments, based on what intelligence they are seeking. By 1953, there were a total of nineteen different ‘Top Priority’ requirements for intelligence, ranging from Soviet order of battle to intelligence on individuals travelling to the UK. Further down the list were another thirty-nine requirements. The station could ‘barely cope with responsibilities’, officials noted.65
If Young sat at the top of the intelligence tree and Cavendish in the middle, at the bottom were the grunts from Field Security who carried out the mundane tasks. During the Soviet military’s spring and autumn manoeuvres, they would wait for a tip-off from a contact who worked on the railways and then stand along the line to count carriages go past in the middle of the night. When two Field Security men went to check out the registration numbers of vehicles in one boxcar, its door was suddenly opened and they were forced to hide behind a hoarding. The Red Army soldiers who emerged proceeded to urinate in the dark against the hoarding, prompting a complicated expenses claim for dry cleaning.
The day-to-day debriefing of the stream of desperate defectors and frontier crossers, men like Jan Mašek, was the domain of Field Security. Up to 160 individuals a month were picked up and every possible scrap of intelligence extracted.66 The identity documents they had brought with them were also valuable as MI6’s forgers could use them as models to create their own sets for people being sent back. When defectors had been sucked dry, they would be put into a ‘ratline’ out of the country. The British smuggled them out of Vienna past the Soviets to the British zone and the Semmering Pass on a local train. Then they would be housed in a pub until Field Security Graz could pick them up and take them to a Displaced Persons camp where they would wait – often for a year or two – to get a visa and a boat ride from Italy to a new life in Britain, North America or Australia. The chance to see the West up close in Austria provided temptations for Soviet soldiers which the US and UK encouraged. In one twelve-month period, the US handled a hundred Soviet soldiers and officers.67 US Army intelligence ran one ratline for defecting Red Army soldiers by using a corrupt, fascist Yugoslav priest in the Vatican who was willing to provide visas to South America for deserving Catholics if they were willing to pay $1,500. A motley crew of Croatian war criminals, Nazi collaborators and Red Army soldiers scurried on to freighters bound for Latin America.68 The same ratline would later be used to get Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyons’ who had tortured, killed and sent countless people to Auschwitz, off to Bolivia via Austria after he had worked with the Americans. Other Nazis who worked with American intelligence were also protected.69
The biggest ratline operating in Austria was also the most problematic for the British. Up to 2,000 Jewish refugees were arriving in Vienna every month from the East in early 1946. Many ended up on board boats from Yugoslavia and Italy and went to fight the British to force them out of Palestine. British intelligence responded by placing spies among the refugees in order to look at these routes and try to close them down.70 Late in the evening of 19 March 1948, thirty to forty kilos of dynamite exploded at the Park Hotel, where many British officers, including Cavendish, would stay.71 It followed an attack on the Hotel Sacher a few months earlier and the discovery of a rucksack bomb buried by tracks near where a British military train passed.72 The suspects were the Jews bringing their fight in the Middle East into Middle Europe. MI6 did not have clean hands either. Approved at the highest
political level, it ran Operation Embarrass to blow up ships in European ports due to take Jewish refugees to Palestine. MI6 even planted fake documents in Casanova, a Viennese nightclub believed to be under KGB control (the same club was frequented by Graham Greene while he wrote The Third Man and it became Harry Lime’s haunt).73 The documents falsely claimed that the Jewish refugees from the East were providing MI6 with valuable intelligence, in the hope it would persuade the Russians to stem the flow.74
Britain’s closest ally was not altogether helpful with this problem. The Jewish head of station for the Israeli secret service Mossad LeAliyah Bet, who was masterminding the ratlines using forged Red Cross documents, sheltered in the American zone where he worked under cover as a newspaper reporter.75 Some American officers conducted clandestine training for the Jewish refugees and there was a semi-official policy of turning a blind eye to Jewish activity including even arms shipments.76 Jewish groups also began hunting war criminals. One group called the Avengers used British uniforms, documents and vehicles to get inside the POW camps holding SS officers to exact their vengeance.77
Scavengers of many different stripes hunted in the bleak human wasteland of the refugee camps. One of the most remarkable was a forceful twenty-three-year-old British woman called Daphne Park.78 Where Field Security looked for those coming from the East, Park sought out the remains of Nazism and its secrets. Park had grown up on a farm in Africa, digesting the great Edwardian writers of British imperial spy fiction like Kipling and Buchan, and had decided she wanted to be a spy. War had opened up new paths for women and, with a fierce ambition and a willingness to talk directly to her superiors, she had carved out a role with the Special Operations Executive training French resistance agents. She had been rejected by MI6 when hostilities ended and so she joined the closest thing she could find, a body called Field Intelligence Agency Technical. That dull bureaucratic title masked its job of tracking down war criminals in the refugee camps and finding valuable scientists. Its progenitor was a group called 30AU founded during the war by Ian Fleming, a Naval Intelligence officer with an active imagination who maintained an interest in Park’s FIAT as it came into being.79 In the first year or two of occupation British intelligence hunted those who had run the concentration camps, including doctors who had carried out experiments on the living. The woefully under-resourced team would chase down rumours of Nazis holding clandestine meetings in restaurants or of Martin Bormann having been spotted living in the 12th district under an assumed name.80 One professor committed suicide before he could be handed over for trial in Nuremberg.81
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