Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy

by Henry Hemming

  Rünkel’s ‘residence’ was the home of Bobby Carter, an architect who had recently joined the Party. It was a pretty, delicately proportioned house on Keats Grove in Hampstead, which was, explained Pyke, ‘unfortunately, now rather full, and you may have to sleep down in the air raid shelter for the first few days until we have discussed what you’d like to do and where you’d like to go and so on’.

  Pyke also mentioned that he had arranged this accommodation ‘after consulting my cousin’. Yet there is no evidence of him being in touch with any of his cousins at the time. He then told Rünkel that he had been consulting with ‘mutual friends’ about his future. ‘We know how devotedly you worked at forestry and how you enjoyed it, but we all now feel that you should devote your energies to something even more useful to the public interest. At any rate for a month you will be my guest and this will give time to discuss and make all arrangements.’

  Again there is a clear sense here that Pyke was acting as a conduit between Rünkel and others. Or is this a case of seeing ‘reds under the bed’?

  Rünkel had played a crucial role in Pyke’s survey and had asked for no fee, so naturally the Englishman would have felt indebted to him. What’s more, Pyke knew first-hand about the helplessness of being detained in a foreign country during a time of war. It is at least possible that Pyke was doing this out of friendship and was simply unaware of Rünkel’s past. As a professional intelligence agent, it is not inconceivable that Rünkel was capable of keeping this from his well-meaning English host. Their ‘mutual friends’ might have been just that – friends they had in common.

  Rünkel became a popular fixture at No. 2 Keats Grove and was adored by the Carters’ children, who called him ‘Uncle Rünkel’ (he would later name his son after the Carters’ boy, Tom). While it was accepted there that Rünkel might disappear for up to a week on ‘work’, nobody pressed him too hard about these unexplained trips.

  ‘B[obby] and I always thought that probably he was a Communist spy,’ wrote Carter’s wife, Deborah, ‘but we had learnt not to ask questions.’ Her use of the word ‘learnt’ hints at the closed, secretive nature of life at the extremes of the British Left. You ‘learnt’ not to ask too many questions and to trust that while you might all be pulling in the same direction there were those with connections and duties which you could never understand, nor should you try to. For a movement rooted in an egalitarian ideal, life within the Party could be surprisingly hierarchical and prone to conspiracy. Being in the penumbra of all this, as the Carters were, was like belonging to the congregation in a medieval church; Rünkel was a man of the cloth.

  As well as Rünkel’s going off for unexplained trips, Deborah Carter recalled their houseguest being shadowed by Special Branch. ‘Two plain-clothes men stood outside our house until Rolf went to work.’ Every day they ‘followed him to the bus and got in too and stayed outside the office where he worked until 5.30 when they knocked off and went home.’ Subtle it was not. Yet Rünkel did not find the experience too troubling, and was soon cheerily pointing out his two shadows to friends.

  When Pyke heard about the two detectives trailing his friend he did not exactly panic – rather, he complained to the police. This led to a long interview with one of the men investigating Rünkel. Pyke followed up with a letter in which he offered to send him copies of Shaw’s Pygmalion and St Joan ‘where there is a dramatic and I think you will agree sympathetic portrait of some of your distinguished predecessors – and their methods’. The policeman’s response was to tell MI5 that there was probably a stronger connection between Rünkel and Pyke than had previously been imagined. Again, Pyke hardly comes across as an experienced secret agent.

  Towards the end of 1941 Special Branch’s observation of Rünkel was called off. Following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the shape of the war had changed and with it the scope of communist activities across the Continent, which provided the British authorities with new targets.

  At around the same time that Special Branch ended its observation, one of MI5’s informants was told by a reliable source that throughout Europe communists had been instructed to ‘see to it that any revolutions or mutinies would lead not only to the downfall of Hitler, but to universal revolution in Europe’. In Britain, the source went on, the ‘next important step’ was ‘the penetration of the Communists into the key positions of propaganda (the BBC), the Civil Defence, war industries and the Army’. Already there were ‘some signs of good success in this direction, which in the coming weeks and months will be improved upon’.

  MI5 received this intelligence in November 1941. Unbelievably, as the German Army drove deep into the Russian steppe, orders were issuing out of Moscow concerning the political shape of Europe after Hitler’s defeat and the need for communists to infiltrate important British institutions. As the MI5 controller of this source added, with stony understatement, ‘I consider this to be not uninteresting.’

  Over the twenty-two months leading up to the receipt of this report, starting with the debrief of an ex-GRU officer, MI5 had been given momentary, tantalising aperçus into the demi-monde of Soviet espionage. They had been told about Soviet moles in Whitehall, the inner workings of rezidenturas, Russian courier systems, methods of payment, letter codes, false identities and ‘decomposition’ work. They knew that the NKVD claimed to have had ‘great success’ in Britain during the 1930s, and that when a former Soviet intelligence agent was told that the CPGB was treated like any other British political party he was ‘genuinely astonished’ and ‘most emphatic that the existence of the Communist Party organisation is a very real danger’. One senior communist later said it was a ‘colossal joke’ that the Party was not closed down at the outbreak of war since Hitler and Stalin were in league with one another at that point. But MI5’s approach continued to be libertarian and hands-off. It had a characteristically English preference for watching and waiting rather than stamping out any subversion in its infancy.

  Soon after this report was filed Pyke wrote to the Aliens War Service Department, the body responsible for granting work permits to ‘enemy aliens’, stressing the ‘complete reliability and trustworthiness – and a much rarer quality – discretion’ of Rolf Rünkel, ‘in my opinion a first-rate example of a person fit to be employed in work affecting the security of this country in the war.’ Kamnitzer, meanwhile, applied for a job at the BBC. MI5 would soon remark on the uncanny number of German communists applying for positions at the Corporation’s German Service. Other communists were trying to find employment in trades unions or government departments, and so was Geoffrey Pyke.

  In early 1942 he set out to join a military command at the heart of the Allied war effort. On the face of it, this was bizarre. The idea of a bearded, ‘pink’ civilian with a bulging MI5 Personal File offering his services to the British military was little short of cartoonish. Pyke would never succeed – unless, that was, he could offer them something that proved impossible to turn down.

  HOW TO DEFEAT NAZISM

  ON AN INSIPID day in February 1942, Geoffrey Pyke approached the sentries standing outside No. 1a Richmond Terrace, the headquarters of Combined Operations, and asked to be let in. His chin was invisible beneath a goatee beard. He wore a wrinkled Homburg and no tie. Filing in and out of the building before him went bluff, clean-shaven officers from each of the three military services, some of whom must have done a double take at the sight of this scarecrow-like figure. Pyke was hoping to speak in private with the most senior man in the building, Commodore Lord Louis Mountbatten, the great-grandson of Queen Victoria, later described by his biographer as ‘intensely elitist’ and ‘proud of his royal birth’. Pyke was a suspected communist whose recent journalism included the article ‘Are Tories Sadists?’ What he hoped would be his passport into Mountbatten’s office was a document that he had written twenty months earlier. It contained his proposals for how to turn the tide in the war against against Nazi Germany.

  Neither Pyke nor anyone in Combined Operatio
ns could have predicted what happened next. Indeed, it would take a wild imagination to guess that by going to Richmond Terrace on that day Pyke would set in motion a train of events that would lead to the creation of today’s US Special Forces.

  How to Turn the Tide in the War Against Nazi Germany

  This was the question that Pyke had asked himself back in 1940, as German forces powered north through Denmark and Norway. Britain was on the back foot. The problem faced by the government, as he saw it, was: ‘How can a weak and undeveloped power hold and put pressure (near to home) on a strong and already developed power?’

  As well as putting pressure on the enemy, this weaker power needed to strike by the end of the year, but could not call upon large supplies of manpower and physical resources – ‘because you won’t get them and we haven’t got them’. In short, the question appeared to be: ‘how to do something with nothing which would be so offensive as to be serious to the enemy almost at once.’

  Pyke wrote this at the start of May 1940, at a time when it was widely accepted that most of Norway was under German control.

  Or was it?

  The next stage in Pyke’s reasoning was so important that he set it out in capital letters:

  IN A FULL MILITARY SENSE THE GERMANS DO NOT OCCUPY THE COUNTRY. THEY ARE “OCCUPYING” THE POPULATION, NOT THE COUNTRY (with exceptions noted). THIS MEANS THAT THE GERMANS HAVE NOT TIED UP IN NORWAY AN UNDULY LARGE ARMY.

  Fine, but could you not say the same historically of any occupying force? It will always be impossible physically to occupy every square metre of enemy territory. Yet the implications in Norway were special. This was the most sparsely populated country in Europe. By ‘occupying’ no more than its tiny population, German forces controlled a minuscule proportion of the country’s land mass.

  Pyke reformulated the problem again: ‘Providing always that it can be done simply enough, we should compel the Germans to occupy the country [Norway], completely in a full military sense, thus immobilising more men and material than are immobilised at present.’ As it stood, Germany had all the advantages of controlling Norway for a fraction of the potential cost. This led logically enough to Pyke’s next question: ‘What are the factors that would compel the Germans (within the limits imposed on us by our military situation elsewhere and assumed above; i.e. only very small calls for help from Navy, Army or Air Force) fully to occupy Norway and to put in a fairly large amount of men and material?’

  The answer: they must be made to feel that their military superiority was threatened. ‘The Germans had complete mastery on land. They had partial mastery in the air. Our mastery on sea was incomplete. If we had complete mastery of one element we could perhaps use it to modify and even disrupt his superiority in the others.’ So which element – land, air or sea?

  This appeared to be the next question, unless, of course, there was a fourth military element, one which did not exist, in the sense that it had not yet been thought of as a military element. This might sound pointless, like searching for a fourth primary colour. Nonetheless Pyke paused to consider it. Remaining open to questions like this no matter how silly they might sound was a rudimentary part of his technique. ‘The mathematical physicists have given us the correct pattern of thought. They are always taking as a hypothesis what seems absurd, excluding the appearance of absurdity from their minds, and then asking what happens if it were so, irrespective of whether it seems to be so. I am not a mathematical physicist. I can hardly add. But there had been enough popularisation of their thought for everyone to know how they think.’ In which case, absurd as it might sound, was there a fourth military element to consider in addition to land, air and sea?

  Pyke cast his mind back to a conversation he had had recently with the renowned military strategist Basil Liddell Hart. In relation to the Spanish Civil War they had agreed that control of the Spanish Pyrenees would have given one side a distinct advantage. Pyke had been reminded of this conversation by a report in the Evening Standard which had mentioned a strategically important road in Norway. No car could move along it ‘without being bombed or machine-gunned’, and nor could anyone escape the road because the surrounding country was buried beneath snow. ‘Note the obvious implication,’ he wrote. ‘They were tied to the road.’ (Note also that Pyke had once again taken inspiration from a detail in a newspaper.)

  What tied them to the road? Snow. It was an immobilising factor, or at least it appeared to be. Was there a way of reimagining snow from a military point of view, and seeing it as an opportunity rather than a hindrance?

  In theory, yes. If you could find ways of moving through, into or over the snow which your enemy did not possess then you would have a military advantage. ‘Mastery of the Snows was the next, and one of the key formulations of the problem. It was no mere phrase. It was susceptible to almost arithmetic definition. It meant three things. (1) the ability to go up steeper slopes than could the enemy. (2) to move more quickly than he could, even on the flat, and (3) the ability to move cross-country.’ You would need a force of guerrilla troops armed with specialist vehicles allowing them to outrun, outclimb and outmanoeuvre the enemy; ‘to travel fast and far, not through but on the snow, over and down the slopes of the Norwegian mountains, able to carry arms for attacking, explosives to destroy bridges, tunnels, railway tracks, hydroelectric stations, etc., etc., equipped to maintain themselves in any part of the country, however high and desolate, to launch frequent attacks on vital objects simultaneously or in quick succession.’

  Pyke envisaged this force attacking ‘like pernicious gadflies’ – elsewhere he compared them to ‘a cloud of mosquitos’. When possible they could ski silently downhill towards their targets, an image which gave Pyke an idea for this force’s motto: ‘The Assyrians came down like the Wolf on the Fold.’ Their snowmobiles should be agile and light like skiers – for ‘how often could an aeroplane hit a skilful skier zigzagging rapidly down a hill?’ Petrol tanks for refuelling could be disguised as felled trees. The vehicles might be designed to throw up clouds of snow to act as screens. ‘Principles of attack should be: (1) complete surprise (2) complete confusion (3) complete distraction’ and, most importantly, ‘never be brave where foresight and intelligence can be used instead’.

  Twenty-five years after smuggling himself out of Germany, Pyke had applied his principles of escape to military insurgency. Outnumbered and outgunned, this tiny force would confound the enemy’s expectations in its style of attack and the way it had turned the inhospitable snowy conditions to its advantage. It was an idea that owed everything to a single conceptual reverse. Pyke had challenged himself to think of snow as a fourth military element rather than a natural hazard. Just as prehistoric man must have thought to himself one day, as he rowed across a choppy sea, that perhaps his enemy, the wind, could become his friend – and without this it would have been impossible to imagine a sail – Pyke had done nothing more than reverse an everyday assumption.

  The logic here was compelling, but without the revolutionary snowmobile it was merely science fiction. Pyke maintained that the machine he envisaged was ‘no more an invention than the tank in 1915 was an invention. The tank was an adaptation to a military problem of an already existing mechanism: the Holt Tractor and the Diplock Caterpillar.’ A snowmobile such as the Armstead Snow Motor, with a Ford tractor engine set above two helically flanged cylinders to control its direction and speed, could easily be adapted to the strategic needs of guerrilla warfare in Norway, ‘similar to the adaptations which animals make to their environment and to competition with one another’.

  The Armstead Snow Motor

  Pyke concluded that ‘with relatively slight help from home and without protection from the air, a small force from a maximum of about 4,000 down even to a handful – say 50 or 100 men – for six months could compel the enemy to devote continuously resources of men and material 500 to 1,000 times as great as those which would be needed from us’. The goal was simple: ‘Make every one of the 125,000 square
miles of Norwegian territory not already fully occupied in the complete military sense of the term, an area from which dangerous surprise attacks may be launched.’

  Yet this must not be a prelude to full-scale invasion. ‘Far from wanting to drive the Germans out of this area we want, under certain conditions, as many as possible of them to come in [. . .], to treat the Nazis in Northern Norway as Pharaoh treated the ancient Jews. On no account must we let these people go [. . .]. We want the enemy to keep his head in the halter. But, I submit, if he should succeed in taking it out, we should not be so foolish as to put ours in, merely because the halter is empty.’

  His proposal was ambitious and radical, a masterpiece of counter-intuitive military thought which combined a series of small technical innovations within a single daring strategy. It was elegantly paradoxical. Britain would strike while on the back foot, ‘military ju-jitsu’, in Pyke’s phrase. ‘Consider the political consequences of having won the war without the use of overwhelming weapons. Let us show the Germans, and indeed the world, that we can beat them even when we are weaker.’

  Four days after the start of Blitzkrieg, 14 May 1940, as German forces fought their way through the Low Countries and France, Pyke finished his paper and had it typed up in double-spaced, narrow-columned text (designed to make it easier to read). He then dispatched copies to a group of individuals who might be able to act upon it. Pyke had always been willing ‘to make a fool of himself’, as he reminded Liddell Hart in his covering note, and it would soon become clear which was more foolish: his strategy, or the idea of an amateur like him suggesting such a thing.

  One of the men to receive a copy of Pyke’s paper, just days after his legendary speech in the House, was Leo Amery MP. This well-turned-out Tory might have been politically poles apart from Pyke, but the two men came together in their intellectual curiosity and the way they talked about the future. Amery was an un-conservative Conservative, an amateur futurologist who had recognised as early as 1904 the military importance of air power; in the following summer he would propose that when the Imperial War Cabinet was unable to meet in person its members should gather virtually by using television and radio, effectively presaging the modern-day Skype conference. (This plan was dismissed out of hand by Churchill’s curmudgeonly scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann.)