by Mark Colvin
Chapter 7
The View from the Back Seat
YOU COULD DESCRIBE my birth as an accident of Empire. My mother grew up in western Victoria, my father in the English county of Hampshire. The cause of their meeting, albeit indirect, was that my paternal grandfather, an admiral in the Royal Navy, was posted to Australia in the years leading up to World War II to command and rebuild the RAN, which had been much depleted of both ships and officers during the Depression. I don’t believe my maternal and paternal grandparents ever met during this posting, and my father, John Colvin, was still in England at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. But his sister Prudence was at school with my mother, Anne Manifold, and that connection was what would ultimately bring the two families together. When, after the war, my mother escaped what she had begun to find the stifling and parochial atmosphere of 1940s Melbourne and sailed for Britain, that tenuous link would eventually lead her to meet and fall in love with my father.
They married on 18 December 1948, my father distinguished in naval uniform complete with sword, my mother elegant, slim and beautiful in pleated white satin. They honeymooned in Paris, a blissful short break from the rigours of postwar British rationing: staying at the Royal Hotel in the Avenue de Friedland; eating a Christmas dinner at the Brasserie Perigourdine Rouziers Freres, which styled itself ‘The Temple of Gourmets’: oysters, foie gras, turkey and a buche de Noel—Yule log cake.
I was born just over three years later, by which time the deep chill of the Cold War had really settled in. And it was the Cold War that dictated our movements as a family and defined the first half of my life, because my father was a warrior in its front line.
My earliest memory is of looking through the back window of my parents’ car at a white chalet against a background of green forest. It is early 1954, less than a decade after the end of World War II, and I am two years old. The visual memory is now a little indistinct, but the emotion remains strong: we are leaving our family home—the first I can remember—in Krumpendorf, just west of Klagenfurt in the melodiously named region of Carinthia in south-eastern Austria.
The Gasthof Jerolitsch, where we lived, was a popular summer resort for Austrians and Germans: it still is, though the hotel and its chalets are now slightly overshadowed by a large motorway overpass. The picturesque lake called the Woerthersee was nearby, beautiful in summer and winter and the inspiration for a thousand postcards. Our view was of the Karawanken mountains, beyond which lay Yugoslavia.
The retreating back-seat image in my mind is tinged with sadness because, my memory tells me, I have been happy here: photographs show me tobogganing in winter with my mother, or sitting in my pram with our dachshund cross Otto. My mother has since often told me how affectionately the people in Krumpendorf treated the small, ash-blond English toddler whose father had some unspecified diplomatic role ‘on attachment to the British Army’.
I have thought about this single flash of memory so often over time. I think it has remained with me because it was my first conscious realisation that things change, that the ground can shift, after which life will never be the same. There’s a lovely Portuguese word that describes the feeling of the constant traveller: saudade, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as ‘a feeling of longing, melancholy or nostalgia’. A ridiculously large concept for a tiny child, but something of that sense of melancholy and nostalgia has permeated my consciousness, and perhaps infuses the consciousness of all those who are forced by circumstance to move in childhood—army brats, diplomatic brats, refugees—and who spend half their lives trying to work out what ‘home’ really means. Along with that picture in my head of the white house growing smaller in the window, somehow, there is the clear knowledge that my parents and I are not ever going to come back here. A part of my existence has ended.
It wasn’t the first life upheaval I had gone through: we had moved from Norway when I was one. But it was the first I was old enough to remember. Now, my parents told me, we were on our way to Vienna, where as it turned out I would also be perfectly happy, but it’s hard to convince a child of that. Somewhere in my little head was the inchoate idea that we were heading out of Paradise and into the Unknown.
* * *
My father’s identification card for 1949 reads: ‘Marina Mercante Nacional, Republica de Panama’. John Colvin: National Merchant Marine, Republic of Panama. It gives his age as twenty-seven, his hair as castaño (chestnut), his colour as blanco (white) and his status as casado (married). The photograph shows a lean, good-looking young man with large ears and a slightly receding hairline, in a dark suit and spotted tie. He’s looking up and off camera, with a slightly sardonic expression.
Most oddly, in a handwritten addition, this yellowing card describes my father—who studied at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth from the age of thirteen, joined the navy as a midshipman six years later at the outbreak of World War II, and rose to the rank of lieutenant-commander before leaving the service—as an ‘official trainee’. What is this experienced naval officer doing, four years after the war, as an apprentice on a tramp steamer sailing under the Panamanian flag?
Now we enter the realm of detective work, pieced together from scraps, first- and second-hand, including the testimony of my mother (usually careful and reliable); the anecdotes (often unreliable, sometimes positively misleading) that my father sparingly doled out; the official silence of his employer, the SIS, better known as MI6: the difficult job of making sense of a life that was lived on two levels, the public and the secret.
For much of the first half of my life, I believed that Dad had left the navy a few years after the war to join the Foreign Office in Whitehall. His story was that they’d sent him to London University on a language course to learn Serbo-Croat, then to work on a tramp steamer plying the Yugoslav ports of the Dalmatian coast in the Adriatic, for six months, to get language experience. He claimed that he worked as a stoker on this steamship, shovelling coal into the boilers, and that the Srpski and Hrvatski language training he got was mostly curse-words from his below-decks colleagues. My uncle Colin, who retired from the navy as a commander in the 1960s, used to tease Dad, who was rather proud of his lieutenant-commander’s braid, with the nickname ‘Stoker John’. Looking back over a long time spent with them over Christmases and school holidays, I rather think Colin and my father’s sister Prudence knew quite well what his real profession was, and that they often talked above the children’s heads in a sort of teasing code.
Because of eye problems that developed during the war, Dad’s naval career had been blocked: he could remain in the service, but only as a paymaster, or ‘pusser’. He was the kind of person who loved books, not bookkeeping: for most of his life he was fairly irresponsible with money—a boy who had at one stage run away from Dartmouth to go on the stage, and been hauled back by his father, Admiral Sir Ragnar Colvin, then president of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. He told me he’d never particularly wanted to be in the navy, but if he had to be, he wanted to be a proper sea officer.
Somewhat frustrated, by 1949 he was looking for a way out. But, my mother tells me, it was a period when, unless you were sacked, the only way out of the navy for an officer was to transfer to another government department. So when, staying with friends in the country, my recently married parents went to a hunt ball and Dad was approached by an SIS recruiter, he was keen.
If that sounds like the classic Old Boys’ Club recruiting system that produced the Cambridge spy ring, I suspect there was an element of that, but it’s certainly not the whole picture. It was, admittedly, a couple of years before Burgess and Maclean’s defection and the suspicion which that threw onto Philby, but I’ve come to the conclusion that my father’s recruitment was probably based more on his own service record than questions of class and contacts.
In the mid-1990s, after my father had been named in print as a retired senior intelligence officer (with a nod and a wink from his former bosses at SIS), it became possible to talk a little more freely about
his life. In the last year of the Pacific War, he’d been seconded to South East Area Command under Earl Louis Mountbatten, based in Colombo—the jumping-off point for a plan to retake South-East Asia from the Japanese. Dad told me that, several months before the war’s end, he’d been dropped into Vietnam on a midget submarine, and once ‘in-country’ he ran a ring of resistance agents against the occupying Japanese. Indeed, one Sunday lunch, he told my eldest son Nicolas, then eleven, a (to Nicolas) satisfyingly grisly story about using cheese-wire to garrotte Japanese guards. At any rate, when the atomic bombs were dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese in Vietnam surrendered, he was able to emerge from the shadows and, as the most senior British officer in the country, receive the ceremonial swords of the officers commanding the Japanese garrison in Saigon. He was twenty-three years old.
Incidentally, he nurtured to his grave a deep disappointment that somewhere between Saigon and Southampton, the Royal Navy managed to lose those swords, which again led to family teasing, there being apparently no other proof of this extraordinary story. But over four decades after the loss, a photograph surfaced of the very scene he’d always described, the young RN lieutenant flanked by resentful French majors and colonels (the British being the senior invading power, this was the protocol).
While writing this book, a dozen years after his death, I discovered another aspect of my father’s wartime Special Operations work, clearly undertaken before he went to Saigon. The intelligence specialist Professor Richard Aldrich, of Warwick University, who knew my father and hosted him at seminars, wrote to me to confirm some of what I knew, and more, including that ‘John Colvin ferried agents across to Yugoslavia in motor gunboats during World War Two’.
This must have been roughly in the same period Evelyn Waugh, Fitzroy Maclean and Randolph Churchill were working with Tito and his Yugoslav partisans against the Nazis and the Croatian Ustashi crypto-Nazis they backed. Waugh and Maclean in particular were deeply disillusioned with the way they were ruthlessly used to help bring in a communist dictatorship, and that bitterness suffuses the last volume of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, one of my father’s favourite books. But Dad never once told me of his own experience in that theatre of war.
I remained sceptical until I came across a passage in his memoir, Twice around the World, that I’d managed to skip over on previous readings, about the store in Hanoi called ‘The State Department’, as it was in 1967:
The State Department was, in fact, the State Shop. It was always crammed with customers, sometimes fifty to a line, for the meagre stock of goods dispensed by one or, rarely, two young female assistants to each counter, but it made a wartime British Woolworth’s or the Balkans in 1945 seem like Asprey’s [my emphasis].
These, it seems to me, are clearly references to first-hand experiences, so it is certainly possible that Aldrich’s account is correct. Yet another reminder of how little I knew about my father in his lifetime. And given the deep secretiveness of his employer, there is no doubt much more that I will never know, however hard I dig.
Given his record in Special Ops, the recruitment of Lieutenant-Commander John Horace Ragnar Colvin would have made some sense in the postwar world. He was if anything sentimentally patriotic about a dream of England that was already on the verge of disappearing, what Orwell described thus:
When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air … the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning—all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.
One day in conversation about the 1930s, I quoted WH Auden’s line about that ‘low dishonest decade’, to which my father took exception. He was vehement in his insistence that for him, the 1930s—his teens, in effect—had been dominated by a growing sense of the need to defend Britain against fascism. This came partly from his naval cadet schooling; partly from his own father, who as a high-ranking naval officer himself was firmly convinced of the need to re-arm; and partly from the influence of Winston Churchill’s long campaign in the wilderness years against the appeasement of Hitler.
From Churchill, my father also learned to detest communism. This passage from his memoir is heartfelt and represents what was his consistent position for decades:
Behind the communist order lay a horrible idea, the conviction that mankind, God’s creatures, should be bent to a single, disproven economic theory, to whose requirements all nature, love, frivolity, laughter, decency, truth itself should be subdued, to which indeed the virtues as well as the defects of humanity were irrelevant, even hostile. To dedicate the spirit to a cause, even a wrongheaded cause, was one thing. To submerge the spirit to the exclusion of everything but the mechanics of the cause was another.
Dad was recruited when the Cambridge Five—Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Cairncross and Blunt—were still burrowing deep inside the system, but even in the far more paranoid years that followed, I doubt his loyalty would ever have been in question. From every conversation we ever had about politics, the one thing I’m sure my father could never have been was a double agent.
So was he actually a ‘stoker’ on that ship in the Adriatic in 1949, four years on from his apparent Special Operations work in the navy? I don’t think so. As a new recruit in the SIS, was he just in training, or using that war experience from his navy years to recruit and run agents in Dalmatian ports, this time against communists instead of Nazis? Or was he genuinely just honing his language skills? Questions I may never answer.
There is now, however, a description available of the training he would have undergone between his recruitment in 1949 and the ‘official’ date of his joining the SIS, 1951. Adam Sisman, in his biography of John le Carré, who joined the SIS a few years later, describes the field operations centre in Hampshire, Fort Monkton. There, would-be officers practised the ‘tradecraft’ familiar to readers of spy fiction. They learned to use dead-letter boxes and safe houses; they were taught pistol shooting; they were put through their paces on the techniques of surveillance; they learned how to blow things up, how to code and decode enciphered communications and transmit them secretly by wireless. And, as my father used to mention in occasional mysterious asides, they learned how to fight and if necessary kill, using unarmed combat, or such lethal but silent weapons as lengths of cheesewire.
By 1953 (after his first posting in Oslo), in Klagenfurt, just north of the border with what was then Yugoslavia, my father was a fully trained intelligence officer, running agents against Tito’s communist regime. Ljubljana, now the capital of Slovenia, was not far to the south; Zagreb, now the capital of Croatia, was a little further but still within striking distance. The purpose of my father’s agent-running job in Klagenfurt was to find out as much as possible not only about the politics of Yugoslavia, but especially the state of military preparedness, equipment and plans in that country and whatever other Soviet satellite states he could penetrate. I don’t know much about how he did it, but he did tell me that much.
He also once told me that he had an agent who discovered a fatal flaw in Eastern Bloc military security, literally through the rear. This weakness consisted of a paper shortage. It was so acute in the Yugoslav military, he said, that the monthly tactical plans and ‘order of battle’ showing the disposition of troops, tanks and artillery were being recycled when only a month or two old: the recycling consisted of cutting them up into small squares and hanging them on hooks in the soldiers’ latrines, to be used as toilet paper. My father said his agent was able to get his hands on enough of these to provide intelligence gold.
As I understand it, this copious source, straight from the army’s privies, was reliable enough that it became one of the factors that got my father noticed and promote
d. And that was why, at the beginning of 1954, we were on our way from the SIS sub-station in Klagenfurt to the central one in Vienna.
Chapter 8
Maximum Ambiguity
GLIMPSES AND SNAPSHOTS, faces looming out of the haze. The feeling of love and warmth; the first moment of extreme pain when my finger gets accidentally slammed in a car door; Italian sun and sand and gelato after the greyness of a postwar Central European city; kicking out my legs in my mother’s firm grasp in the warm Adriatic, or floating along in a blow-up ring. From my three-year-old self, I can’t retrieve memories so much as a blurred series of little filmstrips, some of them burned at the edges by the projector bulb, too many of them melted and lost forever.
I remember leaving Klagenfurt, but not the rest of the journey to our new home in Vienna. My mother remembers it clearly, though, especially the moment of slight dread at a Russian checkpoint. When we lived in Austria, the country was still divided into four parts: the Russian, American, French and British zones. Only the central part of Vienna, the Inneren Stadt, was neutral. To get from Klagenfurt to Vienna, you had to drive through the Russian zone.
The Soviet Army had been the first into Austria at the end of World War II, and the whole country found itself for the next ten years in a strange state of limbo between East and West. Stalin was reluctant to leave: he wanted a ‘string of pearls’—buffer states around the Soviet Union that would stand between Mother Russia and another invasion. ‘We’ were the West, and our forces had not ‘liberated’ Austria (which had in any case fulsomely welcomed Hitler in the Anschluss): the Russians had. And ‘we’ were not welcome guests in the Russian zone.
