The Best of Our Spies

by Alex Gerlis

  So Preuss’s ‘You can trust Georg, sir’ was his way of saying that the man was not a Party member.

  The colonel continued.

  ‘Georg was already working in our Embassy well before June 1940, sir. He recruited a number of agents and as you are aware, sir, we have had mixed fortunes with them. I will let Georg take up the story.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Georg sounded unusually confident, in the circumstances. Canaris placed his accent from the Frankfurt area.

  ‘We recruited an agent in 1938, sir. We had very high hopes for her. We gave her the code name Magpie ... Elster. She was very committed to the German cause and is a most beautiful woman. Very intelligent, very quick to learn and a good temperament. The story of how I found her is very interesting. In fact, she ...’

  ‘That is for another day, Lange. Continue with the matter under discussion please,’ said Preuss.

  ‘No,’ said the Admiral. ‘I want to hear how you found her.’

  ‘The point is, sir, I didn’t really find her. She found us. She turned up at the Embassy in Paris. She spoke reasonable English and is also a nurse, so her cover story more or less wrote itself. We managed to slip her over to England during the Dunkirk evacuation. We were fortunate that she panicked as half of France did and headed north, so instead of losing her we were able to pick her up in Picardy, in a town called Abbeville. Most convenient for Dunkirk, as I say.’

  ‘Can we trust her then?’ asked Canaris. ‘If she fled, that is. Presumably her instructions were to wait until you contacted her – standard procedure?’

  ‘I am certain we can trust her, sir. Her story was credible. She believed that the French police were after her. She was travelling under her own identity. She is sharp enough that if she had she been fleeing from us, she would have used another identity. Then we would never have found her.

  ‘The plan for her was to get to England and find work in a hospital and when the time was right, apply for a transfer to a military hospital and then supply us with information. We felt that this would be a good source of steady information. She would be able to find out about casualties, what units had been posted where and where people were going to be sent when they were released from the hospital. It would be good information to have – not top grade, but it would all be very useful.

  ‘We did have a concern about her ability to get the information back to us, so we gave her a radio man. He is a Belgian who could not wait to lick our arses the minute we rolled into Brussels. When we found out that he had a passion for radios and could speak good English, we decided to make use of him. We gave him the code name Sparrow. It is a small and common bird in England; we felt it was an appropriate name.

  ‘So, Magpie travelled to England in June 1940. For a year, we hear nothing of her. We had told her to take her time, not to rush, but we did not expect it to be that long. Then at the end of April last year, we get our first contact.

  ‘To be honest, sir, it was nothing much. She wanted us to know that she was working as a nurse at St Thomas’s Hospital in the centre of London and that she had applied for a transfer to a military hospital. She was hopeful. Apparently she had heard that there was a shortage of nurses who could work in the area of physiotherapy and there was a need for that as they try to get soldiers fit enough to fight again as quickly as possible. She had told them that she trained to work in physiotherapy in France.

  ‘For a few months, nothing happened. She kept in touch with Sparrow. Every Sunday he goes to a park on his way back from church and when she has something to report, she goes to meet him there. They bump into each other in the park. Apparently, that is a very English pastime. Then in January, she hears she is to be transferred to a military hospital. It is called...’

  Georg put on a pair of reading glasses and read from his notebook.

  ‘... Calcotte Grange. It is in the countryside, just north of London. Not a big hospital, but a specialist place where Royal Navy officers are sent to recover. Apparently the aim of the hospital is to get them fit as soon as possible so that they return to active service and fight your former navy comrades, Admiral.’

  Canaris nodded: please carry on.

  ‘So they have a big physiotherapy unit and Magpie is well suited. We are in business. The only problem is that it makes it difficult for her to contact Sparrow, but she can take some Sundays off, so when she has information to pass on, she is able to take a day trip to London. Not a perfect solution, but in the circumstances, a safe one.

  ‘We start to get some good information. Not top class, but decent. You know the kind of thing: what ships are where, casualties, how well ships are equipped. Useful information on the convoys and especially on what they think of the weaponry on the ships: what guns jam, what they rate, what they dislike. No information that is going to change the war, but it all helps to build up a bigger picture and can fill in gaps in our knowledge. It has all been gratefully received by the different recipients we have sent it to – especially, of course, the Navy.’

  Jürgen collected a jug of water from a table at the back of the room and poured six glasses. Georg drank gratefully from his before continuing. Canaris knew full well that everything Georg had said so far was very routine. It was the kind of information that normally would not come anywhere near him. He gestured for the man from Paris to continue.

  ‘Then ...’ he was allowing a dramatic pause, during which he sipped carefully from his glass, his hands very slightly shaking ‘... a young Royal Navy officer falls in love with Magpie!’

  Canaris nodded for him to continue. He would forgive the dramatic telling of the story if he found it justified.

  ‘Of course, we knew that with such a beautiful woman ... that men would be attracted to her. That was part of her attraction – to us! And Magpie was not a naive woman. She was experienced with men, shall we say. But this officer was different.

  ‘He is two years younger than her and only a lieutenant. The relationship is no coincidence, Admiral. Magpie had surpassed herself. She managed to gain access to all of the patient records in the hospital and she discovered from a note in his file that this young lieutenant was due to be transferred to Naval Intelligence when he was released. On a “top secret project” according to a note on his file. Even he was not aware of it at the time, he was hoping to go back to sea. It also seems, according to his file, that he specialises in navigation and his ability to analyse coastlines and sandbanks is very highly regarded. So she put herself in a position to encourage the relationship, you might say. If you met her, Admiral, you would not be surprised that a healthy young man so eagerly took the bait.’

  The silence hummed around the already very silent room. No one in it was in any doubt at the significance of what Georg was saying; least of all Georg himself who seemed to have grown in stature as he spoke and now had a certain smugness about him as he continued.

  ‘Magpie decided to reciprocate this officer’s interest in her. She ...’

  ‘I presume we know his name?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Quinn. Owen Quinn. Not easy to pronounce. Magpie allowed herself to be attracted to this man. She allowed him to fall in love with her and she allowed their affair to become ... fully consummated, shall we say. Events then moved very fast. She feared that he would be discharged from the hospital and that he would then disappear. He would go and work in Intelligence; she would have no way of keeping in contact with him.

  ‘Then something remarkable happened.’ Lange paused again while he sipped from his glass.

  ‘Quinn proposed to Magpie! And she, I do not need to add, accepted.’

  ‘They allowed him to do that?’ This was Oster speaking.

  Major Schmidt spoke now.

  ‘Remember, sir, that Magpie would have received security clearance to go to this hospital in the first place. She applied for a transfer to a military hospital around March, April 1941 and the transfer came through in January. Nine months. Presumably they used that time to check her out.’

&
nbsp; ‘And also,’ said Georg, ‘she was clean when she came to England. Nothing incriminating on her whatsoever. That was the job of Sparrow. Let him carry the risk for her. She had no radio, no codebook, nothing. To all intents and purpose, she was exactly what she appeared to be, a French nurse.’

  ‘I still find it remarkable,’ said Generalmajor Oster, ‘that within what seems like days of their meeting as nurse and patient, they are apparently sleeping with each other and then weeks later get married. Are we certain about this, Lange?’

  ‘But as Lange has told us, Generalmajor, Magpie was clean. There would be absolutely no reason for the British to suspect her,’ said Schmidt. ‘Lange has done a good job. She had an excellent cover story and he took the very wise precaution of sending her over clean.’

  ‘Gentlemen. Can we not argue please. I know you find it remarkable Oster, but we need to remember this: we spend our time thinking as intelligence officers. It is our job to be suspicious of everything, all of the time. Not everyone else is like that, as we know. The British would see this girl as having had full security clearance and would hardly be surprised at a young man falling in love with her. Please continue, Lange.’ Canaris was no longer tired. The Italians and the SS were a distant memory, a quiet night by the Wansee a distant hope.

  ‘The Royal Navy are obviously a very romantic service, Admiral. They did agree to the marriage. Quinn moved to London in April and started his new job. Magpie returned to her old job at St Thomas’s Hospital and in June they married and now Magpie is Mrs Quinn.’

  ‘To live happily ever after,’ said Generalmajor Oster, shaking his head.

  Major Schmidt now took over.

  ‘Thank you, Georg. You work is of the highest quality that the service expects.’ There were murmurs of agreement around the table.

  ‘Admiral. Magpie is proving to be an outstanding agent. We are only getting small bits of information so far, but what we are receiving is top quality. We have every reason to expect that in the future, we will get more information. The lieutenant tells his wife very little, but as the months have gone on he does tell her more. She knows to take it very slowly, not to show too much interest in his work.’

  ‘So what do we know?’

  ‘His unit is commanded by a Captain ...’ Schmidt was looking through a file in front of him, searching for the name. ‘Archibald. John Archibald. Saw active service in the ...’

  ‘... Battle of Jutland.’ Canaris had finished the sentence for him. ‘I know of Archibald. Outstanding captain. Injured but continued to fight.’

  ‘We know for a fact that this Captain Archibald worked in Royal Navy Intelligence after the war. Came out of retirement in 1940. We know that Quinn has been working on planning routes for the Arctic convoys, but we only found out about that after he finished that work. We did not get much, but what we did get was all accurate.’

  ‘The big news,’ said Preuss, taking over now from Schmidt, ‘is that Quinn worked on the Dieppe raid in August. We got a whisper that he was working on something big, no details, but afterwards Quinn told Magpie that he was heavily involved in the planning. Did a lot of the work on the landings, had to put together a report of the coastline and the weather. Apparently he was very upset afterwards. What were the figures? Six thousand Canadian and British troops went over? One thousand killed, two thousand taken prisoner I think. No wonder he was upset.

  ‘It is evident that he is working at the highest levels of Naval Intelligence. The projects that he works on are the most important ones. If we are very lucky, Admiral, it can only be a matter of time before the Navy puts Quinn onto working on the Second Front. All of our intelligence, as you know, tells us the invasion of northern Europe is the priority for the Allies. All their planning effort is going into it. Magpie could not be in a better place.’

  Canaris got up slowly and paced around the room, deep in thought. The news from the east was bad. The Russians – aided by their great ally, the winter – were now not only holding the German advance but beginning to repel it in places. This meant that an Allied invasion somewhere in mainland Europe was increasingly likely. It was the big obsession among the planners here in Berlin and in German Army headquarters throughout Europe. When would the British and their allies launch an invasion of mainland Europe – and where would that be? To have someone in the position that Magpie was seemed, to Canaris, to be almost too good to be true.

  ‘Is Sparrow functioning normally?’ he asked.

  ‘All his transmissions are in order. He has two or three opportunities in each transmission to let us know if he has been compromised, but he is as clean as a whistle, as they say. We would know if he wasn’t,’ replied Lange.‘And no one else knows about Magpie. Not the SD, no one?’

  ‘No one, sir,’ said Schmidt.

  ‘Let’s make sure that it stays that way. Excellent work, Lange.’

  ooo000ooo

  CHAPTER TEN

  London

  June 1943

  Against his better judgement, Owen Quinn had to admit – if only to himself – that he was enjoying his work. The truth was that if he was now given the option of going back to sea he would hesitate. It would be a dilemma, whereas back at the beginning of 1942 there would have been no question that he would rather go back to sea on active service.

  It was not just that he was living with the woman he loved in what were, considering that there was a war on, close to idyllic circumstances.

  It was also that as he became busier and more involved, the more interesting and stimulating he found the work. Dieppe had been a blow, of course. Not that he had blamed himself and Archibald insisted that nothing he had done had helped contribute to the disaster. But no one wants to be involved in an operation where half the men who go out on a mission don’t return.

  But if it was a set-back, then it was one that seemed to act as a spur for the work of the small team on the sixth floor of Lincoln House. Their brief was to identify possible landing places for the Allies by studying the sweep of the northern coast of Europe from the Bay of Biscay in the west to the Westerschelde that marked the Belgium–Dutch border in the east. Quinn could spend a week looking at a single port or one beach that to be honest he would not recommend attempting with a rowing boat in peacetime and perfect weather conditions. But they all needed to be looked at, if only to be eliminated.

  Porter was forever bringing in new charts and maps and Quinn was spending less time in the small office he shared with Riley and more time at the large chart table, pouring over the sheets in front of him. At times he would have Porter on one side of the table like an assistant at an operation, pulling off one map, replacing it with another or going to find another one stacked only he knew where on the map shelves that had recently been installed. On occasions he would have English Rose, which, of course, was a name he never called her to her face, stand dutifully by the table as he dictated notes and observations on what he was looking at and she would take them down in shorthand before typing them up. He would then amend the report, Riley, inevitably, would check it and Rose would type up the final version.

  By June 1943 the work had taken on a different dimension altogether.

  Most days he would leave work by six o’clock. If Nathalie was on a night shift he would leave a bit earlier, the incentive being that if he could get home before six she would still be in bed, where he would give in to her entreaties to join him with no resistance whatsoever. But if Nathalie was on a late shift that meant she would not be home until midnight, he was in the habit of staying late at Lincoln House. He preferred to absorb himself in his maps and charts without Rose fussing around him, without Riley’s ubiquitous presence and without Porter forever trying to be helpful, but all too often getting in the way.

  Archibald tended to leave the office by five o’clock in the afternoon. One evening in June Quinn was deeply absorbed in a study of Quiberville-Plage in Normandy. The charts were particularly reliable as a resistance cell in that area had managed to obtai
n up to date copies from the Mayor’s office in Quiberville itself and they had found their way to London courtesy of a returning RAF Lysander. They were especially good quality; beach gradients, distances from shoreline at different tides. Gold dust. He was struggling a bit with the text on the chart. If rampe meant an upward gradient, as he seemed to remember it did, then he guessed that pente was a downward gradient. No point in guessing though. If only Nathalie was allowed to help him, it would save so much time. It was not exactly a word he could casually introduce into their everyday conversation. Now he would have to ask Riley to get it translated, which was an unnecessarily cumbersome process. Perhaps he could raise the matter of being able to use Nathalie for some translation again with Archibald.

  ‘Late watch, Quinn?’

  He had been so engrossed in the chart that he hadn’t noticed that Captain Archibald had appeared behind him. Despite the warm evening, he was wearing his Navy greatcoat, which he was now unbuttoning. The large wall clock on the left showed it was just after seven thirty. The one next to it showed it was an hour later in Quiberville-Plage.

  ‘Useful?’ Captain Archibald was looking at the chart.

  ‘Very useful, sir. Part of that batch that the RAF brought back last month. Much more detail than we have had before. My French not totally up to it though. Need to get some translations done. All these charts we’re getting in from France are ideal, just what we need. But obviously the text on them is all in French. The translation is slowing down the whole process. There’s an example here. I do need to know what pente means. I think it signifies a downward gradient, but I have to be sure. There’s another one here – peu profond.’

  ‘Well,’ said Archibald, tapping a large dictionary on the desk, ‘I’m sure it’s all in here.’

  ‘To an extent, sir, but it sometimes needs more of an understanding of the context for the words to make sense. We need to be one hundred per cent certain, as I’m sure you’d expect.’