A Spy Called Cynthia E-Book

anonymous

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 196

Beschreibung

Elizabeth Thorpe, codenamed Cynthia, was a glamorous American socialite recruited by MI6 to obtain intelligence from the Polish Foreign Ministry and from the Italian and Vichy French embassies in Washington. Her method was to seduce whatever targets could provide her with vital intelligence, a practice in which she hardly ever failed, enabling her to secure first the French and then the Italian naval codes. In the landings in North Africa, she was credited with having saved the lives of hundreds of Allied soldiers. This unique account by a British spymaster of his relationship with Cynthia, detailing his subsequent involvement with Kim Philby and the Cambridge spies and his dealings with his counterparts in the CIA and French intelligence, was entrusted by him to a junior colleague on the basis that it was not to be published until everyone in it was dead. Necessarily anonymous and impossible to fully verify, though most of it undoubtedly did happen and is part of the historical record, A Spy Called Cynthia provides a special insight into the world of intelligence and one of its most effective practitioners.

Leseprobe

A SPY CALLED CYNTHIA

AND A LIFE IN INTELLIGENCE

ANONYMOUS

I was her controller, but it wasn’t long before I started to wonder who was controlling who.

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEEPIGRAPHFOREWORDA SPY CALLED CYNTHIAENVOICOPYRIGHT

vii

FOREWORD

This is the story of a British spymaster’s relationship with one of the most important female intelligence agents in the Second World War, of his involvement in the subsequent fiasco of Kim Philby and the Cambridge spies and his friendships with counterparts in the CIA and the remarkable Count Alexandre de Marenches in France.

You may feel that it should belong on the fiction shelves of your bookshop or library because, although virtually all of it undoubtedly did happen and is part of the historical record, I cannot guarantee its entire authenticity. Cynthia’s family were adamant that she did not have an affair with the author, who was for a while her intelligence controller, and who can say if they were not right. Perhaps he just imagined that aspect of this story – or made it up. I must leave it to the reader to form his or her own view. They also contended that the havoc she wreaked amidst the Italian and Vichy French embassy staffs owed more to her sparkling conversation than to her undoubted viiiphysical attractions; a theory I would have to take with a very large grain of salt.

But, if I cannot vouch for the personal aspects of this story, I can guarantee the accuracy of this account of the exploits of Cynthia as a secret agent of British intelligence in the War.

I too worked for the government, in close cooperation with the security agencies. This manuscript was given me by my far more senior colleague, who was a friend and mentor to me. It was not, he said, to be published ‘until everyone in it is dead, including me!’ As that has long since been the case, I have arranged for it to be published now, as I promised him I would.

I have made some amendments, for purposes of clarification and the avoidance of jargon, and interspersed some subheadings. Nowhere have I changed the sense of what he wrote.

Robin Renwick, former British ambassador to the United States

A SPY CALLED CYNTHIA

THE ALIBI CLUB

The snow was still on the ground in Washington DC on the February evening when I presented myself, as instructed, at the door of the Alibi Club, a small brownstone building in the capital. Membership was limited to fifty. I had been made an honorary member during my service there during the War. Another honorary member was said to be the Shah of Persia, though I never saw him there. He was proposed by Kim Roosevelt, who, by engineering the overthrow of the Prime Minister Mosaddegh, who was bent on nationalising the Western oil companies in Persia, had helped to make him the real ruler of his country.

During the War, the Club had been taken over by senior members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime precursor of the CIA. They had included Colonel ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, head of the OSS, and still did include Ambassador David Bruce, Richard Helms and other intelligence veterans of the War. The staff bore an uncanny resemblance to one another, all being rather venerable, grey-haired, dignified black Washingtonians, 2all of whom had been subject to security vetting by the Agency. They were not supposed ever to disclose what was discussed within the confines of the Club and, as far as I know, none of them ever did.

The Club’s name was based on the notion that if any lady rang up to enquire about the whereabouts of her husband, she would be told that he was within its doors, but could not be disturbed, whatever his whereabouts; a stratagem very rarely employed, and unlikely to fool anybody. The upstairs sitting room was full of memorabilia from exotic locations, with one or two African masks, plus numerous postcards of scantily clad ladies in Paris, Tangier and Istanbul.

Mr Allen Dulles, I was told, was running a bit late, but would be there shortly. And sure enough, soon I heard his booming voice, announcing his arrival and bursting into the dining room, followed by his cohort from the CIA. Prominent among them was Richard Bissell, Dulles’s current favourite, who had developed the U-2 spy plane programme, but who was to bring down himself and his boss through his mad adventure in the Bay of Pigs. I had of course heard the stories of some anti-Castro exiles being given military training in Central America. But I did not imagine that the Agency would be so foolhardy as to land a few hundred of them, with no air cover, on swampy ground on the Cuban coast, in the expectation that this would trigger a general uprising, of which, in the event, there was no sign whatever.

3Neither Dulles nor Bissell would ever have dared to propose such a hare-brained scheme to Eisenhower, but they had somehow persuaded the new President and his brother, Bobby, to let them try. It transpired that Bissell’s calculation had been that once the exiles were attacked, as they were, by Castro’s rickety aircraft, the President would order the US Air Force to intervene, which he declined to do.

But this was before that fiasco. Dulles still was in his pomp. He had not yet been deflated. Helms, who turned out to have opposed the entire scheme, barely spoke for the entire evening.

Having obliged us all to drink large martinis consisting, so far as I could taste, of straight gin, an olive and no vermouth, Dulles installed us at the large round table and announced that they were about to hear the story of the most important female agent in the Second World War and, in his judgement, one of the most valuable of all the agents we had ever had at our disposal.

I smiled inwardly at this, for there was never any question of according Cynthia precedence over Dulles’s favourite agent, Admiral Canaris, head of Hitler’s intelligence agency, the Abwehr, whom Dulles never met, but who had started sending messages to him in Switzerland at a late stage, once he had become convinced that Germany was bound to lose the War.

I was never entirely convinced that Canaris was really an agent at all. He was trying to hedge his bets and to 4ensure that as much of Germany as possible ended up under the Western powers and not under the Russians. But maybe I was mistaken, for he was disloyal enough to get himself executed on Hitler’s orders in the final weeks of the War. Dulles’s well-publicised liaison with Canaris had helped to propel him to the top of the CIA.

I was not, I was sure, alone in feeling that there was a ghost at this dinner – that of Frank Wisner, the Agency’s head of covert operations, who had been the ebullient life and soul of many similar gatherings. The can-do, hyperactive Wisner had landed successive teams of exiles in Albania, only for nearly all of them to be rounded up and shot thanks, as he later discovered, to the treachery of Kim Philby. But the nadir for Frank had come with the Hungarian uprising that was ruthlessly suppressed by Soviet tanks in 1956. Frank rushed to the Austria/Hungary border, traumatised by the fact that he felt that the Hungarians had been encouraged to revolt by Radio Free Europe, which the Agency had founded and funded, only for them then to find that there was nothing the US could or would do to help them. Frank never really recovered from this debacle. He had to be invalided out of the Agency (and, after a long period of depression, committed suicide).

Most of those present already knew something of the story of Cynthia and how close I had been to her. As I ran through her extraordinary achievements, omitting the 5personal elements, the whole story flashed at an accelerated pace through my brain.

But first I had better explain how it was that, by accident, I ended up in the shadowy world of intelligence and became Cynthia’s controller, though it was not long before I started to wonder who was controlling who.

NARVIK AND TRONDHEIM

On Sunday 3 September 1939, I and the other senior members of Rowe & Pitman had heard on a crackling radio the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announcing in a quavering voice that as Hitler had invaded Poland, which we had undertaken with the French to protect, we were now at war with Germany.

On the following afternoon, some of the younger members of the firm and I walked up the road to the headquarters of the Honourable Artillery Company in the City to see if we could enlist in the Army. It took an hour before I was summoned into the presence of a sergeant who, on taking down my particulars, said that, as I was thirty, my services would not be required any time soon, if – he implied – at all. There might be some sort of reserve role for me at home, depending on the requirements later.

I trudged back to the office well aware that, although 6I had tried, this news would not go down well with my wife Caroline’s very military family. For her father was a tough and weather-beaten retired Admiral, who had commanded a cruiser in the Battle of Jutland and felt that his daughter had married beneath her. I thought vaguely of the tales of women in the First World War presenting white feathers to men apparently of military age still in civilian clothes.

So when, on returning to Oxford, I explained this fiasco to my wife, I asked her to arrange a meeting with the old sea dog, her father, in case he could find a way to help to get me into the Navy. The response from the Admiral was an invitation to lunch at his favourite watering hole, the Army and Navy Club in Pall Mall.

He proved surprisingly helpful. One of his former colleagues, he said, had been drafted into the Admiralty in some kind of staff job. He would ask if he could think of anything for me.

There followed a further invitation to lunch at the Army and Navy Club, this time from the colleague he had described as Godfrey, which I thought must be his first name. In fact this turned out to be Rear Admiral John Godfrey, whose idea of lunch was decidedly Spartan (no wine).

Why was I so keen to join the Navy, he enquired. Because I had been turned down by the Army, I replied. Realising that this was not the right response, I added that 7I could not see myself just going on selling shares and bonds when there was a war on.

This showed the right spirit, in Godfrey’s view. He seemed mildly interested in the fact that I had a law degree, which might come in handy, he thought. I would be hearing from him.

Ten days later I received a letter from the Admiralty instructing me to procure two copies of the uniform of a temporary lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve from the naval outfitters in Piccadilly. I was then to present myself to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth for basic training.

Our training consisted of the endless repetition of naval drills, plus more interesting visits to have explained to us the equipment and modus operandi of a destroyer and a frigate in the harbour. We learned every detail of Nelson’s suicidal tactics in the Battle of Trafalgar, plus the fact that the French admiral, Villeneuve, had tried to persuade Napoleon that, despite having – with the Spanish – more ships, he should not go out to fight, as Nelson was not a normal adversary and would destroy them all.

I asked if it might not make more sense for us to study the Battle of Jutland, of which I had heard many accounts from my father-in-law. As the Germans had inflicted more damage on our ships than we had on theirs, how could we regard this as a victory? The instructor patiently replied that it was indeed a victory as the German fleet 8had never again ventured out into the North Sea until their great ships were escorted to Scapa Flow to be scuttled after the German surrender.

After eight weeks in Dartmouth I was told to report to the Admiralty in Whitehall. There I was escorted to the domain of Admiral Godfrey in Room 39, which was in fact a series of inter-connecting rooms, presided over by Ian Fleming, who had established himself as the Admiral’s personal assistant. I knew Ian from his not very successful stock-broking days. I had found him hard to like, as he had private means, could afford to live more grandly than me and appeared to look down on those of us who couldn’t. His Bentley was a decided step up on my MG. But during the War, he was an effective assistant to Godfrey and, as for his much later success as an author, I devoured his novels as enthusiastically as John F. Kennedy loved to do.

I was assigned to the Scandinavian desk, where the main issue was the fact that the Swedes were shipping vast quantities of iron ore to feed the German military machine. Our disgusted naval attaché in Stockholm had to be withdrawn for declaring that ‘the Swedish flag is blue, but has a yellow streak in it’. A covert attempt by us at sabotage had achieved nothing, other than to infuriate the Swedes.

Knowing nothing whatever about Scandinavia, I made little progress but in the New Year I had the good fortune to befriend the Norwegian naval attaché, Uwe Johannson, a huge sailor with a vast amount of facial hair. Two 9formal calls were followed by an invitation to meet him in a nightclub in Soho, where I found him accompanied by a Women’s Royal Navy (Wren) cadet about half his size. To make up the numbers, I invited Godfrey’s PA, who was quite attractive and had been helping me to find my way around the Admiralty.

After dancing with the Wren firmly attached to his chest, her feet barely touching the ground, Uwe ordered a bottle of Scotch and turned his attention to me. Did we not realise, he said, that Hitler was bound to attack Norway as soon as the ice melted within a few weeks? The reason was obvious. Without controlling Norwegian waters the Germans would be unable to get their warships out into and beyond the North Sea.

If we waited for the Germans to invade it would be too late. We absolutely must occupy the Norwegian ports of Narvik and Trondheim before the Germans did. The Swedes were shipping much of their iron ore through Narvik. His government were clinging to their neutrality, but that had no chance of saving them.

These trips to the unpretentious nightclub in Greek Street became regular outings for the four of us. By this time I was engaged in a mild affair with Godfrey’s friendly PA. Neither of us took it too seriously and I departed back to my family at the weekend. Inevitably, it transpired that Ian Fleming, of whom she did not have a high opinion, had preceded me in her affections. ‘A bit of a cad,’ was her opinion and that of some others too.

10Uwe became increasingly insistent about the imperative need for us to seize the Norwegian ports. The ice would be melting and very soon it would be too late.

So pressing was he that, in early March, I summoned the courage to write a memo to Godfrey summarising his plan, though, at his insistence, I left Uwe’s name out of it. Godfrey was sufficiently excited by this to send it up to the First Lord’s office. Two days later it came back with a scribbled note from Churchill on it: ‘An error – but very much in the right direction.’ His private secretary said that, in reality, he agreed. But King Haakon of Norway was best friends with our King and we could not just trample all over him. Nonetheless, Churchill did press for the mining of Narvik waters, which was resisted by Chamberlain until that too was too late.

On 9 April, the Germans launched their blitzkrieg into Denmark and Norway. The ensuing campaign went exactly as Uwe had predicted. It was the very model of how not to wage a war. We rushed ships and men across to the Norwegian ports, but not in sufficient time or numbers to stop the Germans, who had seized all the near impregnable strategic positions in and around the fjords we should have seized before them. Our ships were bombarded by well-positioned land-based artillery. By early June, we had to withdraw. The only benefit from this fiasco was Churchill displacing Chamberlain as Prime Minister.

This episode earned me a rare compliment from the 11Admiral: ‘We should bloody well have done what you advised.’

WILLIAM STEPHENSON

Several weeks later, I was told to report to Major General Stewart Menzies, head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Godfrey told me that Menzies had heard about the Trondheim and Narvik memo. I walked the short distance from the Admiralty to the SIS headquarters in Broadway wondering what this summons was all about.

Menzies, an Old Etonian who had served with distinction in the Life Guards in the First World War, received me rather stiffly. Was I available to go abroad at short notice? He explained that the new Prime Minister had appointed a Canadian wartime friend of his to head our operations against the Germans in the United States. William Stephenson was a splendid chap – a former fighter pilot – who had ‘dabbled’ in intelligence on his own account, said Menzies rather disapprovingly. It was in fact Stephenson who had got us into ‘a spot of bother’ in Sweden, with his plans to sabotage the iron ore supplies. He needed me to join his operation in New York to ensure a close relationship with and some guidance from the SIS headquarters in Broadway.

Having always wanted to go to America, I accepted 12forthwith. As I walked back across the park, I realised that I had just been given my first intelligence assignment – which was to report to Stewart Menzies on the activities of William Stephenson.

Menzies, I was later to discover, was more of a Whitehall warrior than a great spymaster himself, as Stephenson undoubtedly was, but an unrivalled operator vis-à-vis the government. His reputation with Churchill was based on the fact that it was Menzies who took him the most important intercepts from the ‘Ultra’ signals material produced by our cryptologists in their Nissen huts in Bletchley Park, though Menzies otherwise had no involvement there at all.

I made the tortuous journey to New York by air, refuelling in Reykjavik and Newfoundland. It was impossible not to be excited on arrival in this throbbing city, with no shortages and the lights on everywhere at night, which appeared to be and was oblivious to the War raging several thousand miles away.

I was installed in a comfortable hotel near the impressive offices of what described itself as the UK Passport Control Office, in fact British Security Coordination (BSC), on the thirty-sixth floor of the Rockefeller Plaza. Stephenson’s welcome was far warmer than my somewhat chilly encounter with Menzies. He invariably would end the day with his favourite martini, often in our company. He did not say much but he demanded action, frequently of an unconventional kind, especially in countering the 13German American Bund, which was active in insisting on US neutrality while seeking to harm us in every way they could.

I was taken by a colleague to a clandestine meeting with hard-boiled union officials in the port, who we were paying to help protect our shipping and inform us about that of the Germans. Before long they were engaged in some acts of sabotage on our account as well. Stephenson had established a cautious live and let live understanding with J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI because Hoover, on checking, had found that he had support from the Roosevelt White House, including from Robert Sherwood, who was far more than just a speechwriter to the President. Stephenson had been helped in making some very important contacts by his friend, the former heavyweight boxing champion, Gene Tunney. Hoover later sought and received confirmation that the President himself had met Stephenson.

One of Stephenson’s closest friends was Nelson Rockefeller. Visiting Stephenson years later in his retirement in Bermuda, I mentioned that his friend, sadly, had expired in the arms of a much younger girlfriend.

‘What a way to go!’ was Stephenson’s apparently approving comment.

I enjoyed the camaraderie of the Stephenson operation, and his assiduous cultivation of the US press, who in their vast majority were on our side. One of my favourite colleagues was David Ogilvy, who had playboy proclivities, 14but who later was to use his undoubted charm to become king of the advertising industry in the US.

Reminiscing after the War in his retirement in Bermuda, Stephenson was accused of embellishing his own legend (as most of us tend to do). The name by which he became known, ‘Intrepid’, was not his codename, but his telegraphic address, chosen for him by Stephenson himself. But it reflected the character of the man, and his legend was over 90 per cent true. For his achievements in the War far exceeded those of SIS elsewhere in the world. To have established a US-wide intelligence operation on the scale and with the influence that Stephenson succeeded in doing was as great an achievement as there ever has been in the world of intelligence. Overcoming the rivalries between them, BSC progressively incorporated the activities of SIS, MI5 and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in North America, integrating them far more effectively than in the UK. And Stephenson managed to do so in the face of extreme continued wariness from Hoover and the outright hostility of influential US dignitaries like Adolf Berle, who kept urging his boss, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, to close down ‘the British spy organisation in the United States’. Stephenson also played a crucial role in helping to persuade Roosevelt to agree to lend fifty American destroyers to us in August 1940.

By this time, however, my own role was being rather eclipsed, as Menzies appointed one of his deputies, Dick Ellis, to represent him in New York.

15I was saved by Admiral Godfrey, who sent me a message to say that his man in Washington, one of the assistant naval attachés, was being promoted to command a frigate. I was to replace him and was being promoted to lieutenant commander ‘to help the locals to take you seriously’, Godfrey declared.

So I migrated to a small clapboard house in Georgetown, close to the heart of Washington in a neighbourhood inhabited by many members of the Roosevelt administration. Later, I moved to a suite in the Shoreham Hotel. My office was not in the embassy but in an annex off Dupont Circle, which was intended to be more discreet.

To my relief, I found myself in the hands of a highly competent secretary, who was married to one of the vice-consuls. She put me in touch with my predecessor’s contacts in the US Navy. When I met his principal counterpart in the FBI, I got a frosty reception. ‘Please tell your friends in New York,’ he said, ‘that they need to stay on the right side of the law.’