In Secret Service

by Mitch Silver

  In the spring, the Germans would overrun the Low Countries and then wheel through the “impassable” Ardennes forest to kill two birds with one enormous sledgehammer: threaten Paris by breaking through the Maginot Line in the very sector Edward had so obligingly pinpointed in his reports, and trap the 350,000-man British Expeditionary Forces between the advancing Wehrmacht and the sea at Dunkirk.

  But tonight, the Windsors’ party would be a grand affair. With every light ablaze, the house glittered like a Christmas tree. There was the tinkling of a piano, the groaning of bagpipes (Edward loved nothing better than to put on his ceremonial kilt and parade through a party blowing into his “pipes” and wreaking havoc), and the laughter of thirty very select guests. Wallis had somehow put her hands on hundreds of orchids, lilies, and white chrysanthemums and several pounds of foie gras. Noël Coward was called on to sing his ever-popular “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” and, later in the evening, to sing it again, this time accompanied by Maurice Chevalier. I could have done without the off-key caterwauling of the vaguely familiar-looking and very tipsy young man in a British Navy uniform who made it a trio. Or the tiresome English ritual of wearing silly-looking party hats. Mine was a particularly loud shade of pink.

  Despite the war, everyone agreed, the party was a great success. Charles Bedaux and his wife had joined the merrymakers. He now carried an American passport but gave everyone to understand he had been a French soldier wounded in the Great War. At one point I saw him off in a corner in ardent conversation with General Sikorski of the Free Polish Forces, headquartered at Fort Vaux. Later I was pulled aside by our number two man, Sir Richard Howard-Vyse.

  “Ian, have you been watching that Bedaux fellow? He just asked Sikorski what he thought of Fort Vaux. Apparently he served there in the Great War and thought it had been too badly damaged to be used again.” Howard-Vyse was in rather a state. “No one is supposed to know the Poles are at Vaux. Surely the point is, the Duke must have told him.”

  I thought over what he said, but I suppose I didn’t look agitated enough to suit him because he went right on. “This begs the serious question, is HRH’s value to us outweighed by his inability to keep a confidence? I’ll have to inform Command that we’ve come across this American. Or shall I leave you to do it?”

  Putting a calming hand on his shoulder, I said, “Let me handle it.”

  I watched Bedaux like a hawk for the rest of the evening, but he was very good at acting Mr. Hail-Fellow-Well-Met (although the experience taught me that evil people still look evil in Christmas party hats). His exit had its comical moments. When the servant was slow to retrieve Bedaux’s snap-brim fedora, he announced he would find it for himself. When he reemerged from the walk-in closet, he had two hats: his own and a Navy officer’s cap. “J’ai ton chapeau, Philip,” he said, and the tall young naval officer who had so badly harmonized with Coward and Chevalier stepped forward. As a jest, Bedaux gave “Philip” his own fedora and put the young man’s headgear on himself. In English he announced, “These party hats never fit,” before swapping them back.

  As I said, it was a very successful party, especially as Bedaux’s Vaux pas led us to finally put a tail on him. Had we not, we would never have known about the scrap of paper Blunt and I had to grab from the Hesse family at the end of the war.

  Chapter 31

  PROVENANCE

  It’s one thing, in peacetime, to disagree with the foreign policy of one’s government. It’s quite another to give “aid and comfort” to the enemy in time of war. Any ordinary Englishman who did so would expect to be hanged. Or, if the courts were feeling especially lenient, shot. Edward, HRH the Duke of Windsor, clearly expected to be crowned.

  To accuse a member of the British royal family of treason, one needs what Conan Doyle called “the smoking pistol.” We wouldn’t get such a pistol for another sixteen months. And then it would literally fall out of the sky.

  On Saturday night, 10 May 1941, the Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party of Germany, Rudolf Hess, bailed out of his specially fitted-out Messerschmitt Me-110 into a field at Floors Farm, Eaglesham, Scotland. The flames from the crash of his plane were visible eight miles away at Dungavel, the ancestral home of the Duke of Hamilton. The Duke was conveniently not receiving visitors (being held in temporary custody nearby), but we were. By “we” I mean myself and a handful of officers from the various intelligence services, a detachment of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Home Guard, and RAF officers from Turnhouse and Abbotsinch, near Glasgow.

  The Hess flight was the first great sting operation of the war. We had discovered that Adolf Hitler planned to attack the Soviet Union in June of 1941. Winston personally gave Uncle Joe the nod, but Stalin rightly distrusted us as much as he did the Germans, and nothing came of the information. But Hitler’s plan required a cessation of hostilities with Britain so he could throw the full weight of his armies against Russia. The “bloody nose” hadn’t worked in 1940; now he tried to get through diplomacy what he couldn’t take with arms. (And it must have seemed a delicious irony that he might arrange a nonaggression pact with us to use against his then-current partner in nonaggression.) So Rudolf Hess, with Hitler’s approval, started a correspondence with the fourteenth Duke of Hamilton, Scotland’s preeminent peer.

  As the Marquess of Clydesdale, Hamilton had been one of the British pilots who first flew over Everest in 1933. Hess, a Great War “Knight of the Air” himself, one who had been shot down in 1918 and had survived a Rumanian soldier’s bullet to the chest, had caused Clydesdale’s The Pilot’s Book of Everest to be translated into German and made mandatory reading in Germany’s aviation schools. Now, believing he was in contact with “a fellow internationalist and peace lover,” Hess wrote Hamilton suggesting a meeting in neutral Lisbon to discuss a “comprehensive peace plan”—the condition being that a member of the royal family, possibly Edward’s youngest brother, the Duke of Kent, attend as a proof of English good faith.

  Sadly, good faith was in short supply in 1941. We discovered that Hess would suggest a twenty-five-year mutual nonaggression treaty with us, if only Winston Churchill were removed from office and the “warmaking” George VI ceded the throne back to his older brother. The carrot they dangled was that, in return, the Junkers in the officer corps would guarantee the removal of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

  You can imagine what Winston made of such an offer, especially when Agent 54, shortly before he was captured by the Germans, told us Hitler had signed off personally on every detail of the plan. Deception can be a two-way street, and it was in this case. We had taken over the correspondence from Hamilton weeks before Hess suggested the Lisbon meeting. With the pretext that the Duke of Kent could not risk leaving the British Isles, we lured Hess into a solo flight to Scotland, ostensibly to parley with Kent, Hamilton, and other pro-German aristocrats at Dungavel. We’d even stand down the usual RAF coastal defences to make the flight easier. Hess fell for it lock, stock, and barrel.

  It was after eleven when an airplane approached from the east and circled directly over my head as I stood in the West of Scotland Signals HQ. Then it headed off towards the west coast before returning and circling twice more. On the second pass the engine cut out and the pilot parachuted to safety into a farmer’s field. We jumped into a car and drove towards the fireball that showed us where the plane had crashed.

  The usual accounts of the next two hours have assorted locals and ragtag members of the Royal Observer Corps, drawn by the flaming wreckage, dropping by, chatting up the Deputy Führer, and offering him tea. Not quite. As the designated German-speaking debriefer, I had half an hour with the man in the tiny bedroom of the ploughman’s cottage before any locals got a word in edgewise.

  Hess sat down in a chair by the fire and spoke to me in a slightly accented German that I later learned was as a result of his growing up in the German colony of Alexandria, Egypt. His first words were “My name is Hauptmann Alfred Horn. I am on a special mission (der Sonderauftrag). Please te
ll the Duke of Hamilton I have arrived.”

  In the interest of honesty, I told him he was not Alfred Horn but Walter Richard Rudolf Hess, deputy party leader and the third-ranking government official in Nazi Germany. And then, in the interest of dishonesty, I told him I was the Duke of Hamilton’s personal representative. It was as easy as that. He handed me two letters. Or rather, one and a half letters. The first was addressed to Hamilton with a suggested agenda for the “peace conference” he was still expecting to attend. The other was the fragment of a handwritten note that I have included above. It was torn down the left side and bore neither the name of the addressee nor the writer’s signature.

  Hess explained. “When you hand this half of a letter to your master, please say that the person to whom it was originally written retains the other half. At the successful conclusion of this peace conference, and the formation of the new British government that is to follow, the left side of the letter will be returned as well.”

  As that son of Scotland Robert Burns once put it, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men / Gang aft a-gley; And leave us naught but grief and pain / For promised joy.” I took the torn, crème-coloured note carefully from Hess and placed it in my satchel. Then I just as carefully handed Hess over to the Home Guards. I’m afraid he never did attend that “peace conference.”

  In translation, the fragment of the letter I took from Hess reads:

  from an eventful trip to the

  I managed to hear some interesting

  since taken the liberty

  acquaintance Mr. B. my

  cannot stress enough the strategic

  our common friend in such great detail in

  find your ideas for the future welcome

  available, the interrupted stewardship

  upon the end of hostilities

  and the success of Sea Lion.

  Mr. B. acts for me

  Garbled? Of course. But the handwriting is the Duke of Windsor’s, he was obviously passing some information to a German reader, and it’s clear he knew about “Seelowe” when no one else but the enemy did.

  The next day I personally put that torn bit of paper into Winston Churchill’s hands. I was impertinent enough to ask what he intended to do with it. He said straight out, “We’ll let the King decide. It’s his brother.”

  Why not just scoop up the Duke and sweat the truth out of him? Unfortunately, by 1941 the Duke and Duchess had already been scooped up (ahead of the advancing enemy) and deposited thousands of miles away in the Bahamas as the new Governor-General and wife. Winston had given the order and Bertie had signed it because neither man had wanted the couple to pop up in Berlin, flapping their gums. And neither man now wanted to explain to anyone—not even the Bahamians—precisely what kind of man was living in Nassau’s Government House. So I presumed that Winston gave the King the incriminating missive we’d taken from Hess and that no more would be said about it.

  The exiled Windsors’ war would be a comfortable one of whitewashed villas and golden sands, punctuated by clothing drive luncheons and lavish dinner parties in “the St. Helena of the Caribbean,” as Wallis put it. By summer’s end of 1945 they would be back in Paris at Boulevard Suchet, their home miraculously untouched by five long years of German occupation.

  Chapter 32

  The ping Amy heard was the signal it was time to fasten her seat belt for landing. They had left the bad weather behind them over the Atlantic, and she had been engrossed in Ian Fleming’s tale for more than two hours. There were several chapters to go, and the flight attendants were collecting the glasses and trays.

  She’d have been done by now if her mind hadn’t kept wandering to the flaming wreck of a car on a Dublin street. Who’d want to get their hands on Provenance enough to kill for it? If Fleming was to be believed, there was the royal family, for starters. In the eyes of his people, Edward’s treason might be the straw that would break the present-day Windsors’ backs. Especially with Princess Diana gone and Charles re-married to his own divorcée. Or did it have something to do with Churchill? He’d dismissed a peace mission out of hand, hadn’t he? And that was well before North Africa and the Italian campaign and D-Day had cost so many lives.

  And what about the other side, people who’d kill to make sure the story got out? You could start with neo-Nazis, bent on reworking Hitler into a classic German politician—one who was ahead of his time in trying to defeat “the evil empire” before Reagan gave it the name. Well, you couldn’t be named Greenberg and think that idea was gonna fly. Or maybe the surviving members of Rudolf Hess’s family. He’d made a dangerous flight across the channel on a mission of peace (even if it was to be a dictated one), and it had all been a ruse by British intelligence. They’d have plenty of reasons to get Fleming’s story out. Or even, how about some leftover Communists who might want the world to know how elements of the English nobility had secretly worked to help Germany defeat the Russians?

  The little girl, Samantha, in row 38 was kneeling on her seat, trying to get Amy’s attention. “I have a journal. Wanna see?”

  Relieved to be taken out of her thoughts for the moment, Amy leaned forward to look at the girl’s diary. Samantha tried to hand it back to her but dropped it instead at Amy’s feet. Picking it up, Amy could see there were crayon drawings on some of the pages. She was just about to tell Samantha about her own day planner and its drawings when she realized she couldn’t sit back in her seat again. Something big and bulky was digging into her back.

  It was Sheridan. When she had leaned forward, the big man had slid all the way to his left, so his torso was actually behind Amy. Time for his wake-up call. In frustration, she half turned in her seat.

  In death, his skin was gray and his lips were blue. Sheridan’s mouth had fallen open, and a white spittle was coming out of it. It was wetting Amy’s back, right in the middle. Of course she screamed.

  Chapter 33

  The last call from Delta flight 106 before its final approach to New York’s JFK Airport reached a one-time-use cell phone on the ground in New York.

  “We have a problem.” Siobhan Farrell’s Irish-accented voice on the phone was lowered, as if she were speaking where others could hear.

  The mobile phone’s owner felt his temper rise. Lord save us from the amateurs. “Don’t say ‘we,’ ” he told her. “Say, ‘There is a problem.’ ”

  “Okay, there is a problem…that we have.”

  He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. “I know that, or you wouldn’t be calling. Damage?”

  “Just one.”

  What did they teach them at flight attendant school—stupidity? “Which one?”

  “Him. Permanent damage.”

  “And her?”

  “No damage.”

  It didn’t make sense. Airline food, what there was of it, was bad. But who doesn’t take a single bite? “And the material?”

  There were loud voices behind her on the phone. He distinctly heard a male voice say, “Row thirty-nine.” She finally answered. “She still has it.”

  “Well, can you get it?”

  “I’ll have to improvise.”

  What he wanted was to tell her to improvise a way to jump out of the plane and kill herself, so he could save himself the trouble of going out to her pathetic apartment near the airport and doing it there. What he said was “You’re still landing on schedule?”

  “We’re dropping wheels now. Luckily the guy’s in the back row, so we’ll be able to exit the passengers—”

  “And the bracelet?” he asked impatiently. This woman really got his Irish up.

  “First thing I did. We’re in the clear.”

  There was that “we” again. He tried counting to ten.

  After a few seconds, she said, “You still there?” Her voice had its own irritation now. “Look, I have to go. What do you want me to do?”

  “Get the package. And leave the rest to me.”

  He clicked off. No one in the terminal saw the man drop his
cell phone in the trash.

  Chapter 34

  The chaos had begun with Amy’s scream. Within seconds, all the people sitting around her had pressed their flight attendant call buttons, and the din of the resultant pinging just added to the confusion. A dentist two rows ahead of her had been the first medical professional to prod and poke James Sheridan. An Irish gynecologist pulled rank on him and then, when the furor had reached the front of the plane, a New York cardiologist strode back from business class. Siobhan Farrell accompanied him all the way to row 39, ineffectually suggesting he return to his seat.

  For several minutes, no one paid any attention to Amy, trapped next to the window, her hysteria building. Finally, the black flight attendant clasped both hands around the dead man’s wrist and pulled his bulk off Amy. A tall man with a blond brush cut finally identified himself as a federal sky marshal and persuaded most of the passengers to return to their seats.

  Right then, Amy pretty much stopped thinking. Like one of those motorized toys that runs into a wall, grinding its gears and getting nowhere, Amy’s mind kept insisting to herself that Scott, the original before-all-the-doubts Scott, was going to walk onto the plane any minute now and rescue her from this nightmare. That they were still several hundred feet over Long Island on the glide path to JFK didn’t make any difference: she needed him to be here, take her into his arms, and make everything else just go away.