West Classified!

The Adventures of a Molehunter
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78590-881-1
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

Over the past fifty years, Nigel West has been involved in almost every espionage-related investigation, breakthrough or revelation that you can think of. His molehunts have led to the unmasking of spies within MI5, MI6 and the CIA and the identification of numerous others - some of whom were crucial to the Allied victory in the Second World War and would have died without any public recognition if not for him. His first encounter with the intelligence community was a lecture given at his school by John le Carré, the guest of a Benedictine monk who had recently retired from MI6. Later, West worked as a researcher for SOE agent Ronnie Seth, who was sentenced to death by the Nazis after being captured during Operation blunderhead, and exposed two of the Cambridge spies recruited by Anthony Blunt. For the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings, West traced the double agent codenamed garbo and brought him to London so he could be decorated at Buckingham Palace. As action-packed as the lives of the spies he has written about, this is the story of the most enthralling and significant post-war intelligence revelations as told by Britain's most authoritative writer on espionage and the secret services.

Nigel West is a military historian specialising in security and intelligence issues. He was voted 'the experts' expert' by a panel of other spy writers in The Observer, with the Sunday Times commenting: 'His information is so precise that many people believe he is the unofficial historian of the secret services. West's sources are undoubtedly excellent. His books are peppered with deliberate clues to potential front-page stories.' In 2003, he was awarded the US Association of Former Intelligence Officers' first Lifetime Literature Achievement Award, and until 2015, he lectured at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Alexandria, Virginia. His website can be found at www.nigelwest.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

West, Nigel

Leseproben

Introduction

By the age of fourteen, in 1965, I had acquired a reasonably comprehensive understanding of the role and structure of the Security Service, MI5, and some knowledge of its sister organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. This was unusual in those days, but there were two reasons for my interest. Firstly, in August 1960, my family had been drawn reluctantly and unexpectedly into what became known subsequently as the Profumo affair. My father, who had sat in the Commons since October 1959, had been appointed John ‘Jack’ Profumo’s parliamentary private secretary (PPS) when Harold Macmillan had promoted him to Secretary of State for War from the post of Minister of State in the Foreign Office. Profumo and his wife Valerie Hobson were among my parents’ closest friends, and they often brought their two boys, Mark Havelock-Allan and his half-brother David Profumo, to stay at our holiday home in Bembridge, on the Isle of Wight. Indeed, on the fateful day in August 1961 when Profumo broke off his short-lived affair with Christine Keeler, he promptly caught a train from Waterloo and joined us on the Isle of Wight. At that time, my parents had no knowledge of the brief relationship, although they had met Keeler, who had accompanied Claus von Bülow to one of their parties.

Thereafter, as rumours of Profumo’s indiscretion circulated in Westminster, my father became increasingly preoccupied by what he regarded as unjustified speculation, even persecution, by Fleet Street, fuelled by the personal animus of a spiteful political opponent, George Wigg MP. A former wartime colonel in the Educational Corps who had represented himself to the Labour Party as a great expert on army matters, Wigg always participated in the army debates, and in 1961, when Iraq threatened to invade Kuwait, Wigg had advised the Labour Party that Britain would be powerless to honour our defence treaty and mount an effective defence of the tiny, oil-rich, pro-British Gulf state. Being in opposition, he was unaware of the detailed contingency plans that had been drawn up at the War Office and knew nothing of the strategy of deterrence that had been adopted by Cabinet. Both infantry and artillery were flown into Kuwait from Bahrain, and a squadron of tanks had been shipped from Aden, bolstered by an airborne brigade sent direct from Britain. These measures proved very effective and achieved the desired result in Baghdad, where they hurriedly decided against an invasion. In his memoirs, Ringside Seat, my father explained Wigg’s hostility towards Profumo:

All continued to go well, but unfortunately two clueless servicemen in a truck ignored signs to keep away from the frontier and drove straight into Iraq, where they were arrested and accused of spying, prompting the inevitable Parliamentary Questions. My task, as Jack’s PPS, was to anticipate the likely supplementary questions that would follow the main question: I expected that the worst would be something like, ‘How well were these men trained?’ In the event the supplementary question asked was, ‘What were their orders?’ and in reply Jack improvised, ‘If they got lost they should return to their units,’ but it took Wigg a full two minutes to see the joke.

The success of the Kuwait operation left George Wigg looking foolish as his predictions had not been realised. On the contrary, the War Office had taken the crisis in its stride, and had deterred aggression with considerable professionalism. Nevertheless, Wigg had demanded a debate, to insist that although the army had reached Kuwait just in time, it would not have been able to mount an effective defence against an Iraqi invasion. This left Jack an opportunity to be conciliatory to Wigg, and he agreed to a debate, but instead the wretched Opposition back-bencher was comprehensively savaged by Jack’s junior minister, James Ramsden.

Wigg’s technique had been to ingratiate himself with ministers by offering them excellent racing tips, and he believed he was very popular, although he was the only person who thought this. Nevertheless, he had received a leaked medical report revealing some dehydration among the troops despatched from England, and he had attempted to use this document to show that the men were unfit for combat. Ramsden contradicted Wigg on every point, making him look like a bad loser, thereby leaving Wigg convinced he had been let down badly by Jack.

Although we had regarded this as one of the occupational hazards of politics, where personalities are bruised in the rough-and-tumble of Parliamentary debate, Jack and I were unaware that these minor victories had been achieved at a price which would be exacted later.1

When the Secretary of State finally confessed to his wife, over the Whitsun weekend in Venice, he also broke the news to my father, ever his faithful supporter. As it turned out, Profumo had tragically misinterpreted an encounter with the Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook, who had conveyed a request from MI5 for his assistance in entrapping the Soviet assistant naval attaché Eugene Ivanov. Profumo had thought Brook was warning him off Keeler and her companion Stephen Ward, and on the assumption that his love life had come to MI5’s attention, promptly penned a short but unambiguous note to Keeler, which she later sold to the News of the World.

For years thereafter, my father was deeply troubled by what he perceived as MI5’s interference in the political arena but grateful that his friend had never disclosed the full truth to him or sought his advice, which would have placed him in a difficult position. Mistakenly, he remained convinced, as did Profumo, that the Security Service had deployed Brook to deliver a subtle warning, but in August 1961, MI5 was only interested in persuading Ivanov to defect. It was a scheme that miscarried spectacularly.

It would take the unworldly Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, to unravel the intricacies of the Profumo saga, but as I read our well-thumbed copy of his report in the autumn of 1963, I was intrigued to learn that the Security Service had no legal powers, that it operated in the never-never land of the royal prerogative and that Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe’s 1952 directive, which had set out the organisation’s responsibilities and duties, had itself remained secret until Denning disclosed its existence.

The second reason for my fascination with intelligence was largely due to a Benedictine monk named Henry Coombe-Tennant, who had recently retired from MI6 and in 1961 had taken holy orders. Known by his monastic name, Dom Joseph, he had held a select group of boys enthralled as he regaled them with his adventures as an evading prisoner of war (PoW). As a Welsh Guards officer, he had been captured at Boulogne in May 1940 and sent to a camp at Warburg, Westphalia but had escaped in August 1942, with thirty other prisoners, by sabotaging the camp’s fence lights and then scaling the wire with ladders built from duckboards. He spent two months walking to the Dutch border where he made contact with the local resistance and the comet line, an escape network in occupied Europe. He was escorted across the Pyrenees to Spain and then was repatriated from Gibraltar.

Decorated with the Military Cross by King George VI, and promoted to the rank of major, Coombe-Tennant had joined Special Operations Executive’s (SOE) planning staff with a very personal understanding of conditions in Nazi-occupied Europe. Soon after D-Day, having volunteered to join Operation jedburgh team andrew, he was parachuted into the Belgian Ardennes in August 1944 and remained behind enemy lines for the next three months, liaising with the local Maquis circuit, codenamed citronelle, and harassing the enemy.

After the war, he returned to his regiment to be posted to Palestine and then joined MI6, which sent him first to The Hague and then to Baghdad in 1959, where he converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1961, he took early retirement from MI6 to be ordained as a priest and join the Benedictine order, and he fulfilled part of his vocation by running the school’s shooting club. At that time, it was considered entirely reasonable for the boys who possessed shotguns to bring them to school and take the opportunity to participate in weekly rough shoots on the monastery’s extensive estate during the Michaelmas term.

Coombe-Tennant’s best friend in MI6 had been David Cornwell, now better known as the novelist John le Carré, who would occasionally drop in at the school on Friday afternoons as he drove from his house in Hampstead to his cliff-top home, Tregiffian Cottage, near Land’s End. Cornwell had resigned from MI6 in 1965 following the unexpected success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his cover role at the Hamburg consulate being impossible to sustain after his true identity had been revealed in the Atticus column of the Sunday Times.2 Apparently, his chief, Sir Dick White, had offered him an alternative job but on the condition that he abandon his writing career, which was attracting so much attention. Cornwell opted for an author’s life, and his resignation was accepted.

Cornwell was cordially disliked by most of his MI6 colleagues, and a tempestuous affair in Germany with the wife of...