Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  If they admired him at work, they positively worshipped him at play. In the Nut Club, their brains infused with whisky, his junior staff stood in awe of his stamina. ‘A great party man’, noted one exhausted follower.22 Not until the most youthful were dropping on their feet would Gubbins summon his ‘marvellous and devoted’ batman23 and be driven home to Notting Hill, slipping into the marital bed an hour or so before dawn.

  His longest-standing admirer was Nonie, his childhood sweetheart, whom he had married at the age of twenty-three. But now, as the working day increased from fifteen to eighteen hours, Nonie Gubbins began to feel much the same way as Ruth Jefferis. Her elder son, Michael, was based in Arisaig, working alongside Sykes and Fairbairn. Her younger Rory, was away at boarding school and only returned during vacations. The family home in Campden Hill Road felt desperately empty in the evenings, when the lights were dimmed and blackout blinds secured.

  War placed strains on many marriages, but Colin and Nonie’s relationship was dangerously close to breaking point. The camaraderie of Baker Street only served to accentuate their differences. Nonie was the very opposite of her gregarious husband. She disliked sports (which he loved) and dreaded grand social occasions (at which he excelled). She was the first to admit that she lacked her husband’s ‘blythe spirit’,24 but she had her reasons. Her mother had died when she was seven and her father three years later. Now, it looked as if she were to lose her husband as well, not to his secretary or a mistress, but to a band of public school-educated guerrillas.

  Much of Gubbins’s working day was spent in the Operations Room at the very heart of the Baker Street headquarters. He had placed the strategic planning in the capable hands of Douglas Dodds-Parker, one of the first people he had recruited almost three years earlier. ‘He had not only an extraordinarily wide acquaintance,’ wrote Joan Bright of Dodds-Parker, ‘but his manipulation of the old boy network was exceptional.’

  Efficiency was Dodds-Parker’s byword. Everything he ran ‘was reminiscent of a bracing north Oxford preparatory school’,25 which was just as Gubbins wanted it to be. But to the select few who were allowed into the Operations Room, the overall impression was one of unstudied calm. Dodds-Parker had installed it in the drawing room of one of Norgeby House’s Edwardian apartments: it was spacious and high-ceilinged, the sort of room in which (in happier times) Dodds-Parker and his chums might have retired for cigars and brandy.

  The room had internal windows overlooking the central staircase of Norgeby House, but Gubbins insisted that these were blacked out in order that no one could peer inside. He felt that ‘it was essential to have the highest possible security on all our hundreds of individual operations.’26 This security had to begin and end in the Operations Room. Every inch of wall was covered in maps, many of them festooned with little coloured pins. Each pin denoted an agent who had been dropped into Nazi-occupied territories.

  As an additional layer of security, Dodds-Parker had the maps themselves covered in black curtains. These were only opened when a particular country was due for scrutiny. Then, once an operation entered the planning stage, scores more maps would be brought out, as well as large-scale plans of towns and cities. These would be laid out on the long wooden table that ran down the middle of the room.

  One of secretary Margaret Jackson’s work colleagues, Daphne Maynard, was excited to be given a peek inside the Operations Room and noticed a large map spread out on the table. ‘Everyone was bent down over it,’ she said, ‘pushing little bits of stuff across.’ There was a hushed silence, as if it were the reading room of a private library. The electric lights were burning brightly, even though it was daytime, and everyone was studying the maps in concentrated silence, ‘planning where the plane was going to land and take off’.27

  Gubbins and Dodds-Parker were assisted in their work by serving pilots, who were brought in to give advice on airstrips, landing grounds and potential dropping sites. Daphne was appalled to see the terrible battle scars on these men. ‘One of them, Bill Simpson, had no hands and no eyelids.’ She didn’t dare to ask what had happened, but it brought home to her the dangers of guerrilla warfare. ‘He had a hook on one hand and could get the telephone off, the other hand was covered in leather.’ She later learned that the hook had been made by specialists at Queen Victoria Hospital, which was pioneering primitive plastic surgery.

  A second pilot, also working in the Operations Room, was more forthcoming about the occupational hazards of his work. He told her an extraordinary tale of how his parachute had failed to open as he bailed out of his stricken plane. ‘He heard this noise and realized that it was himself screaming. And then he had a feeling of euphoria, laughing and throwing things out of his pocket.’ He had a miraculous escape from death, landing in a tree with no injuries. He had been posted to the Operations Room ‘while he got his nerve back’.28

  It was not the best place to unwind, for this was the most stressful place in Baker Street. The pressures of work got to everyone, even Gubbins. On one occasion, he emerged from his office and noticed that a member of staff had left a bicycle in the atrium outside his door. He ‘took one look at this bicycle, jumped on it and went off at high speed round the fountain about six times’.29 He then replaced the bike against the wall and calmly returned to his desk, his stress levels marginally reduced.

  Although the work was exhausting, Margaret found it exhilarating. ‘Things were moving terribly fast,’ she said. ‘It was like a fast train and you had to get aboard. There was a sense of urgency.’30

  There was also a sense of heady excitement, for Margaret had just discovered something that almost no one else knew: a spectacular assassination was in the offing.

  12

  Czech-Mate

  IN THE NINE months that Margaret Jackson had been working for Colin Gubbins, she had come to realize that there was something extraordinary about her job. Unlike everyone else in the country, who were ‘dependent on newspapers or what had been censored’ for their daily news, she was ‘in direct touch with what was happening abroad’.1 She also knew of decisions being taken at the highest level, for it was she who typed up the notes about the work being undertaken at the secret stations and she who kept the records of Gubbins’s meetings with the chiefs of staff. Indeed she was privy to all the undercover operations being planned across Europe. If ever she had been abducted by the Nazis, she could have revealed priceless information.

  One of Gubbins’s responsibilities was to liaise with the Czech government-in-exile, which Winston Churchill had recognized as a representative body in the summer of 1941. Baker Street had already agreed to start training the Czech soldiers who had fled to Britain more than a year earlier and had also accepted ‘that an essential pre-condition of any future operations was the establishment of a secure radio link with the Protectorate’.2 A Czech volunteer was trained for this role, but it took many months and ‘several false starts’ before he was finally dropped into the country by air. He was accidentally landed in Austria, instead of Bohemia, but eventually managed to slip across the border. Henceforth, London and Prague were in radio contact.

  As early as September 1941, the Czechs had revealed to Gubbins that they were planning a mission of such secrecy that neither MI6, nor any senior British politician, was to be informed. The secret came directly from Colonel Frantisck Moravec, the wily head of Czech intelligence, who was based in London and working alongside his government-in-exile. Moravec and his staff had fled their native Czechoslovakia eighteen months earlier, flying out in the teeth of a blizzard at the very moment Hitler’s storm-troopers were marching across the frontier.

  Moravec had been deeply depressed to flee his native land, for he was leaving everything behind. ‘My wife and children were lost to me, abandoned in the stricken country below, somewhere under the swirling flakes, left to the mercies of the invaders.’3 There was just one cause for optimism. He had spent several months directing the activities of a German double agent who was working against the Nazis: t
he experience had taught him that ‘even a brutal police state like Hitler’s could be penetrated’.4

  The penetration he was now planning was little short of spectacular, as he confessed to Gubbins at their September meeting. The Czech president-in-exile, Eduard Beneš (who was nominally running Czechoslovakia from a suburban villa in Gwendolen Avenue, Putney), ‘had sanctioned a terrorist attack on some prominent personality’5 in the Nazi government in Prague. When Gubbins pressed Moravec further, he learned that this prominent personality was none other than the Reichsprotektor, Reinhard Heydrich.

  Heydrich was a spectacular target, as Gubbins well knew. Appointed Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia – the lands incorporated into the Third Reich in the spring of 1939 – he was proving utterly ruthless. ‘Intelligent, ambitious, cunning and cruel’, is how Moravec described him. Heydrich was one of the principal architects of the extermination of the Jews and was in the process of undertaking the racial cleansing of his fiefdom ‘with sadistic zeal’.6

  Within days of taking office, he vowed to ‘Germanize the Czech vermin’,7 but he was only intending to Germanize those who had been confirmed, by X-ray screening, to be Aryans. The rest were to be liquidated. Ever since arriving in Prague, his rule had been ‘an unbroken chain of murders’ and his ruthlessness fully justified the Führer’s description of him as ‘the man with the iron heart’.8

  Gubbins was enthusiastic about the plan to assassinate Heydrich, aware that it would be a much needed coup for the beleaguered President Benes. He was facing constant criticism from the Russians for not doing enough to sabotage the factories in Bohemia that were mass-producing weaponry for the Third Reich. Assassinating Heydrich would show that he meant business.

  Gubbins told Moravec that ‘he had no hesitation in agreeing’, but he expressed a word of caution. Assassination was frowned upon by many in Whitehall and ministers had previously objected to a Baker Street plan to murder Nazi-supporting leaders in the Middle East. Anthony Eden went so far as to call it ‘war crimes business’. Gubbins suggested that Moravec should ‘restrict the knowledge of the Czech approach, and above all of the identity of the probable target, to a very small circle’.9 Moravec agreed. ‘The fewer persons involved the better,’ he said, especially if the assassination ‘was to be regarded as a spontaneous act of national desperation’. The hope was that ‘the spontaneity would become genuine when Heydrich was dead’.10

  Gubbins also warned of the likely cost of the assassination, even if it were unsuccessful. It would provoke ‘wholesale reprisals’11 that could cost the lives of thousands of innocent Czechs. Moravec had a ready answer. Heydrich was already killing civilians on an unprecedented scale. Some 5,000 people had been arrested since his arrival in the country and all the principal resistance leaders had been ‘swiftly and systematically eliminated’. Moravec also told Gubbins that he was receiving regular news from undercover agents, thanks to the wireless link, and their reports made for grim reading. ‘Police cars drove daily out of the grim Pankrac prison in Prague on their way to the shooting range in Kobylisy and the airport fields at Kuzyn where German execution squads waited.’12 In short, mass killings of civilians were already taking place.

  Colonel Moravec now had a question for Gubbins, one on which the entire operation was to depend. He asked whether he ‘would help in this project by providing facilities for training and supplying special weaponry that was required’. Moravec knew that without access to the specialists, the assassination stood very little chance of success.

  Gubbins ‘had no hesitation about agreeing’,13 giving Moravec the green light he needed. Within weeks, Eric Sykes and Cecil Clarke would become involved in the assassination project, along with a small number of other individuals. These included Gubbins’s secretary, Margaret Jackson, who found herself writing reports of a most surprising nature.

  ‘The object of the operation,’ she typed on to notepaper headed MOST SECRET in red ink, ‘is the assassination of Herr Heydrich, the German Protector in Czechoslovakia.’ Initial research suggested that there were several possible means by which he could be killed, including blowing up his private train or ‘shooting him when he is appearing at some ceremony’.14 But further study suggested a rather different option, one that was far more enticing. Heydrich had elected to live on the baroque country estate of Panenské Břežany, which lay some twelve miles to the north of Prague. The estate was guarded by an SS company stationed in the nearby village. Although Heydrich liked to work on his official papers at Panenské Břežany, he was obliged to travel into Prague on most days. He always refused an escort on the grounds that it would damage German prestige: he had no wish to give the impression that he feared for his safety. Instead, he travelled to Prague accompanied only by his driver, Oberscharführer Johannes Klein, ‘a strapping six-footer’.15

  As Margaret typed up the various intelligence reports, she learned that an attack on Heydrich’s car, while en route between Panenské Břežany and Prague, had become the favoured option for the assassination. ‘Practical experiments proved that such an anti-personnel attack on a car must be carried out at a corner where it is forced to slow down,’ she wrote.16

  Colonel Moravec managed to lay his hands on a large-scale map of the road from Panenské Břežany to Prague and this was studied ‘in minute detail’.17 There was one obvious place to strike. As Heydrich’s Mercedes entered the Prague suburb of Holešovice, there was a crossroads with a sharp bend on a hill that led down to Troja Bridge. The car would be obliged to slow down as it approached the crossroads, leaving Heydrich dangerously exposed.

  Holešovice offered an additional advantage: it was at a considerable distance from the SS garrisons in both Panenské Břežany and at Prague Castle in the centre of the city. In theory, the assassins would have time to get away.

  Gubbins offered to have these assassins trained at the killing school in Arisaig, an offer that Moravec was only too happy to accept. But first, he had to find two men willing to undertake an operation of extreme danger.

  There were some 2,000 Czech soldiers in England, most of whom were based in barracks at Leamington Spa. A small group of these had already formed themselves into an elite. Moravec interviewed them all and selected two dozen of the most promising men for special training. They were given no information about the proposed mission: all Moravec told them was that they would need ‘all the qualities of a commando, such as physical fitness, mental alertness and various technical aptitudes’, along with one additional quality. When the men asked what this was, he said: ‘Are you ready to die for your country?’18

  The men who signalled their agreement were taken by train to Arisaig in order to be taught the art of silent killing. William Fairbairn was absent at the time of their arrival, leaving the training in the hands of Eric Sykes. He was quick to recognize that Moravec’s men were professionals, ‘a disciplined lot’ who were ‘a very different ball-game to the French section’.19 Yet he nevertheless said that they would require a minimum of six weeks’ training in fitness, killing and shooting practice.

  Colonel Moravec watched as the bespectacled Sykes put them through their paces. He was impressed by what he saw. ‘The men were kept in isolation from the outside world, taught the use of small arms of every kind, manufacture of hand-made bombs, ju-jitsu, survival in open country on synthetic foods, topography and map-reading and concealment devices.’ Even by commando standards, Sykes’s programme was ‘very exacting’ and pushed the men to the very limits of their endurance.20

  They undertook punishing training in rock climbing and were then thrown headlong into unarmed combat. ‘Stretched to the utmost, harried, prodded, tested, the trainees were probed for any hidden physical or psychological weaknesses which might cost them their lives.’ Sykes pushed them ‘to their psychological limits’, not because he was a sadist but because he wanted to know the point at which each man would crack. It was the only way to weed out those ‘who could not function under the crushing pressures they wou
ld face in the field’, when they would be at constant risk of exposure by informers.

  At the end of six weeks, it became clear that two of the men were outstanding. Josef Gabčik was short, tough and ‘absolutely reliable’, with a fine sense of leadership. Just twenty-eight years of age and an orphan since he was a small boy, he could be provoked into a fury by the most trivial things, such as spilling a drink. ‘Up he soared like a rocket, spurting rage, to burst effectively, briefly and brightly at a high altitude; then, with a wry appraisal of his own ridiculousness, he would laugh himself down to ground level again.’ His temper might have proved a handicap, but it was offset by his bravery and determination. If anyone could be trusted to kill Heydrich, it was Gabčik.

  The second candidate was Jan Kubis, ‘a shy and softly spoken man who never lost his temper’. He was the perfect counterfoil to Gabčik: ‘well disciplined, discreet and dependable’. He was also an ardent patriot who told his superiors that he wanted ‘to help the Czechoslovak cause as much as I could’.21 If that meant being dropped into his native land on a near-suicidal mission, then he was keen to take part.

  Colonel Moravec wanted to be absolutely sure that he had got the right men for the job and had a private chat with Eric Sykes. Sykes had trained hundreds of men over the previous twelve months, yet he had rarely come across such a talented pair. ‘He said that in ju-jitsu they were almost perfect. They had passed their discretion test with flying colours.’ Moravec himself had watched them on the shooting range. ‘I could see that they were artists with pistols, rifles and sub-machine guns.’ More importantly, ‘they threw hand grenades with precision at a hundred yards.’

  Moravec was satisfied that he had found the right men: now, he had to be certain that they were undertaking the mission of their own free will. He took them to one side and spoke to them individually, explaining that they were the favoured candidates for an assassination attempt that would place them in grave danger. ‘If they were lucky enough to escape death during the attempt,’ he told them, ‘they would have two alternatives: to try to survive inside the country or try to escape abroad and return to their London base.’ He said it was most likely they would be killed. ‘I thought they deserved complete honesty.’