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General Category => General Radio Discussion => Topic started by: Fansome on January 27, 2012, 2152 UTC
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/8749894/Double-O-Who-Meet-historys-unsung-spies.html
By Nigel Farndale 9:45PM BST 10 Sep 2011
Ask most people to name a spy and they will say James Bond. If they are a little more cerebral they might say George Smiley, the spymaster who, having been immortalised by Sir Alec Guinness on the small screen, this Friday comes to the big screen in one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the autumn. In the latest version of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Gary Oldman is taking on the role of Smiley, with a supporting cast that includes John Hurt and Colin Firth.
But back to our question, which was name a spy. Such is the potency of literature that most people have long since blurred in their imaginations the difference between fictional spies and real-life ones. This is partly because some of the best spy novels were written by former spies, notably Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and, of course, John le Carré.
So let us phrase the question more clearly. Name a real-life spy… Most people will go with the big three: Philby, Burgess and Maclean. Others that pole-vault to mind are Anthony Blunt, George Blake, Dame Stella Rimington, Mata Hari, Eddie Chapman (Agent Zig-Zag), and Peter “Spycatcher” Wright. Those wishing to put the vaulting bar a little higher might also name Guy Liddell, Oleg Gordievsky, Vera Atkins, Melita Norwood, the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, Richard Sorge and that notorious Soviet spy Harold Wilson.
But what do all these real-life spies have in common? That’s right, they weren’t terribly good at their jobs, either because they got caught, they had a weakness for self publicity or they were downright indiscreet, as was the case with Michael Bettaney, an intelligence officer working in the counter-espionage branch of MI5, who was arrested (and convicted) on a charge of spying for the Soviets in 1984. It wasn’t his first arrest. A few years earlier he had been arrested for public drunkenness. On that occasion he had shouted: “You can’t arrest me, I’m a spy!”
What about the ones who were good at their job, for the wrong side as well as the right? The ones who managed not only to keep their identities secret, at least until their retirement or their deaths, but who also didn’t go on to become bestselling novelists, whistle-blowers, or prime ministers? Well, incredibly, there were some (relatively) unsung spies who didn’t become household names. And now, their stories can be told.
EILEEN NEARNE: The ‘little shop girl’ whose bravery almost went unnoticed
Perhaps the most unsung spy of all time was Eileen Nearne. Last year she died alone in her flat in Torquay at the age of 89. Having no surviving family and no one to pay for her funeral, she was about to be cremated unmourned when council workers searching her modest home found medals and other papers relating to her former identity as a British spy. It emerged that during the Second World War, at the tender age of 23, she had operated in France as “Mademoiselle du Tort” for the Special Operations Executive.
Nearne, who spoke fluent French, had been successfully sending back reports to Britain until she was caught using her radio set and arrested by the Gestapo. Though they tortured her for information, they were unable to break her and she convinced them she was just a “little shop girl” who knew nothing of undercover war operations. Upon her release she returned to her espionage work, only to be caught again. This time she was sent to a labour camp, from which she duly escaped, only to be captured again. Incredibly, she again managed to convince the Gestapo she was innocent and so they set her free to continue with her work.
When the circumstances in which she had died emerged, members of the public, moved by her heroic tale, inundated the local council asking for details of where her funeral would be taking place. They also offered money to help pay for it; in the end, there was a good turn out. The Royal British Legion placed a flag on her coffin.
MAXWELL KNIGHT: Eccentric who was the inspiration for Fleming’s ‘M’
Surely the most eccentric unsung spy was Maxwell Knight, known to his friends as Max or M. Although he did later become well known, it was not as a spymaster. To children growing up in the late Fifties and early Sixties he was Uncle Max, the BBC radio naturalist.
He had always had a passion for fauna; indeed, when he was head of B5(b), an autonomous department within MI5 in the Thirties and Forties, those who worked with him also had to work with his menagerie of animals. He could recite trivia about them endlessly, from the correct method of mounting a llama to the breeding cycle of the laughing hyena. His daily help, Mrs Leather, would complain of the way grass snakes used to flop down the stairs of his flat in Chelsea. He kept them in the bath. He also kept a blue-fronted Amazonian parrot in the kitchen and a Himalayan monkey in the garden. And he was known to have raised a nest of adder eggs in his pyjama pocket. Ian Fleming, who worked in the Department of Naval Intelligence, was fascinated by Knight’s mysterious persona and used him as the model for “M”, James Bond’s boss.
But for all his eccentricity he was an effective spymaster. As early as 1927, the bisexual Knight had been put in charge of infiltrating the Communist Party of Great Britain. To this end he recruited Tom Driberg, the (homosexual) writer and future MP, and ordered him to join the Communist Party while at Oxford. He also infiltrated the British Union of Fascists and developed a rather sinister fascination with the occult which he shared with his friends Dennis Wheatley and Aleister Crowley.
When war broke out he recruited an astrologer as an MI5 agent and sent him to Germany to infiltrate the occult court of Rudolf Hess. The agent is said to have briefed Hess that the Duke of Hamilton was prepared to meet him to act as a peace negotiator between the German government and the British. Hess’s fateful flight to Scotland followed in 1941.
With the war against the Nazis over, Knight became increasingly obsessed with the Soviet Union, specifically with the idea that a communist spy ring had infiltrated MI5. But his colleagues no longer took him seriously – indeed, they ignored the numerous reports he wrote on the subject. Knight was by then regarded as paranoid and unstable and, even though his theory was proved right in 1951 when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the Soviet Union, his reputation within the service never recovered. He left MI5 a few years later and embarked upon a successful second career as a naturalist on radio and television. He soon became a household name and was awarded an OBE. In 1967 he published How to Keep an Elephant, a guide to keeping off-beat pets. The following year he wrote a sequel: How to Keep a Gorilla.
AGENT KNOPF: Über spy who knew Hitler’s secret obsession
If anonymity equals success as a spy, surely one of the most successful and most unsung was Agent Knopf, the code name of an über spy operating at the heart of Hitler’s high command during the war. Newly discovered intelligence documents have revealed that “Knopf” provided MI6 not only with information on Hitler’s plans in the Mediterranean and on the Eastern Front but even the location of the Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia.
Because the MI6 archives remain closed, to this day little is known about “Knopf” other than that he was a German who had initially been recruited and run by Polish Intelligence. It is thought that he sent his reports by wireless because his files show there were “errors in transmission” such as misspelt names.
Indeed he is only really known for his deeds, which also included alerting British Intelligence to German plans for an invasion of Malta in 1942 as well as the failing health of Field Marshal Rommel. He also revealed that Hitler had a fatal obsession with capturing Stalingrad. Hitler’s disastrous and obsessive assault on the Russian city, which led to the destruction of the German Sixth Army, was a turning point in the war.
Knopf’s reports were read by Winston Churchill, and the intelligence he provided is thought to have underpinned significant chunks of the Prime Minister’s overall war strategy.
ARNOLD DEUTSCH: The Cambridge Five controller
Everyone has heard of the Cambridge Five: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Cairncross and Blunt. But what of their controller, who also controlled a further 15 spies? His name was Arnold Deutsch and like Agent Knopf, much of his life remains unknown or disputed. Variously described as Austrian, Czech, or Hungarian, he was an academic who may or may not have died in 1942.
What is certain is that he was a cousin of Oscar Deutsch, the millionaire proprietor of the Odeon Cinemas chain. It is also generally accepted that, at the age of 24, he was awarded a PhD in political science, from the University of Vienna. Under his academic cover he began working for the Soviet secret service or NKVD at some point in the Twenties and then, in 1933, he was arrested by the Nazi authorities in Germany, but was freed from custody with the help of a Soviet agent within the Gestapo. Deutsch then travelled to Britain under his real name and enrolled to do a degree in psychology at the University of London, another cover.
Using the code name Otto, he was the controller for the Cambridge Five from 1933 to 1937. In September 1937, in the middle of Stalin’s purges, he was summoned back to Moscow. The NKVD feared that because of the defections of the Soviet operatives Ignace Reiss and Walter Krivitsky, Deutsch would be exposed. He was extensively debriefed and employed as an expert on forgery and handwriting. In the early Forties, he was allowed to go abroad again.
After that? Well, two theories prevail. One is that he was captured and killed by the Nazis after parachuting into Austria, the other is that he was drowned when his ship was sunk by a U-boat en route to New York.
SIR DICK WHITE: Spymaster who was always immaculately dressed
The perfect English spy. The son of an ironmonger from Kent, he was so self-effacing that few among his friends and family even knew that for 35 years he was Britain’s top spymaster, serving under nine prime ministers as the head of both MI5 and MI6. He was described by Peter Wright as resembling David Niven: “the same perfect English manners, easy charm, and immaculate dress sense”. He was, said Wright, “tall with lean, healthy features and a sharp eye”. During the Second World War, White supervised the successful “Double X” programme in which MI5 organised counter-espionage and deception operations using captured Nazi agents to broadcast disinformation to their controllers. He was also the man in charge when the hunt was on for the Cambridge Five in the Fifties.
He was transferred to MI6 in the hope that he could limit the reputational damage caused to that service by the Crabb Affair (Commander Lionel Crabb’s headless corpse was discovered in Portsmouth water in 1956 after he allegedly went on an MI6 diving mission to spy on a Soviet cruiser). White’s management between 1961 and 1962 of the Soviet defector Colonel Oleg Penkovsky radically improved MI6’s standing in the world. Later it was White who paved the way for more openness in both services, believing they had suffered from a culture of secrecy that left apparent failures unexplained.
JACK JONES: Trade unionist with a double life
The inclusion of the trade union leader Jack Jones in a list of unsung spies may come as a surprise to anyone who didn’t read his obituaries when he died at the age of 96 two years ago. The son of a Liverpool docker, he had fought for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and had been wounded. Upon his return to England he became active in the trade union movement and rose to become general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in 1968, leading the trade union opposition to the Labour government’s prices and incomes policy in the late Sixties. He also led the campaign against the government’s plans to enforce a 28-day cooling off period before strike action could be taken.
In 1977, a Gallup poll found that 54 per cent of people believed that this quietly spoken and articulate man was the most powerful person in Britain, ahead of the Prime Minister. Jones didn’t always use his power wisely and was held responsible by many for creating the winter of discontent. His double life as a spy did not come to light until the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky revealed that Jones had regularly provided intelligence to the Soviet Union in return for money. In the authorised history of MI5 The Defence of the Realm, the author Christopher Andrew claimed that the payments to Jones continued until 1984, six years after his retirement from the TGWU.
PETER LUNN: Public school Olympian and phone tapping supremo
As an Old Etonian British alpine skier who competed in the 1936 Winter Olympics, Peter Lunn was the stereotype of the Cold War gentleman spy. His forte was the resourceful use of telephone tapping. According to the espionage writer Richard C .S. Trahair: “‘He had a slight build and blue eyes, spoke in a soft voice with a lisp, and appeared to be a quiet gentle fellow.”
However benign his appearance, he was a forceful man of strong will, hardworking, a devout Roman Catholic, and militant anti-Communist”. In 1941, Lunn joined MI6 where he supervised secret operations for 30 years. As head of the MI6 station in Vienna, he discovered that beneath the French and British sectors, there were telephone cables that linked Soviet Army field units and airports with the Kremlin. He began tapping these lines, and persuaded a private mining consultant to construct a tunnel from the basement of a police post to the main phone cable between the Soviet headquarters in the Imperial Hotel and the Russian military airfield at Schwechat. Operation Conflict, as Lunn’s plan became known, was the first Cold War tunnel operation and it garnered a wealth of secret message traffic from 1948 to 1951.
BORIS YUZHIN: Soviet agent who spied for the CIA
Described as “mild-mannered”, this former Soviet double agent now lives in retirement in California with his wife Nadia and grown up daughter Olga, an occupational therapist. In 1978, while working in America for the KGB, under the cover of being a Tass correspondent, he began spying on behalf of the CIA. In true spy fashion, Yuzhin would take pictures of sensitive documents using a tiny CIA camera disguised as a cigarette lighter. His most useful intelligence report revealed the existence of the KGB’s Group North, a unit of senior Soviet intelligence officers who specialised in recruiting American targets worldwide. His information led to the arrest of Arne Treholt, a Norwegian diplomat who was spying for the Soviets.
Yuzhin returned to Moscow for reassignment in 1982 but was arrested in 1986 after Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer who was spying for the KGB, identified him, along with two other CIA double agents, Valery Martinov and Sergei Motorin, both of whom were KGB officers based in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Martinov and Motorin were recalled to Moscow and executed but Yuzhin was let off with a six-year sentence in a Siberian prison. Thanks to his mild manners he managed to convince his interrogators that he was very low down the spy food chain and not worth bothering with.
RALPH IZZARD: Reporter and poker player who inspired ‘Casino Royale’
Being a journalist was always a popular cover for spies, and perhaps the most successful one – in the sense that his cover was never blown – was Ralph Izzard. After graduating from Cambridge in 1931, he went to work for the Daily Mail and stayed with the paper as a foreign correspondent for the next 31 years. Conveniently enough, he found himself working as the Mail’s Berlin bureau chief for a number of years during the Cold War. A true adventurer, Izzard once set out on his own, without a compass or map, to work out the route taken by John Hunt in his 1953 Everest expedition.
But it was during the Second World War that he really came into his own as a spy. Izzard’s duties included espionage and the interrogation of captured German agents, in which capacity he came up with a plan code-named Operation Ruthless. The objective of this was to get his hands on one of the German Navy’s encryption machines, better known as Enigma.
The plan was for an RAF crew dressed in Luftwaffe uniforms to crash a captured German bomber into the English Channel and wait to be rescued by a German U-boat. The “survivors” would then kill the German crew and steal one of the machines. Before the plan could be put into action, a British destroyer beat them to it, capturing an Enigma machine from a U-boat which the Germans thought had already been sunk.
But it was for something more mundane than this that Izzard would achieve a certain spying immortality. While serving with Naval Intelligence, he took part in a card game in which he found himself playing poker against his opposite number in German Navy Intelligence at a casino in Brazil. His commander at the time happened to be Ian Fleming, who was to draw on this episode as the inspiration for his first Bond novel, Casino Royale.