by Adam Sisman
As David’s overseas posting approached, Ann’s anxiety that he would stray while they were apart became manifest. Her fears were exacerbated by a morbid dread of venereal infection. David pledged himself to be faithful, but he would continue to tease her with stories of other women.13
He took some leave at the end of his Intelligence Corps training before going abroad. He stayed a few days with another member of the Downhill Only Club racing team, Michael Barnard-Hankey, at his family’s Dorset manor house, Plush, a name which David would later borrow for Mary Pym’s family home in A Perfect Spy. This was a feudal village; even the pub was named the Hankey Arms. David had never before stayed in a house where one was expected to dress for dinner. He found himself seated next to Betty Kenward, the notoriously snobbish ‘Jennifer’ whose social ‘diary’ then appeared regularly in the Tatler. Perhaps fortunately, the Cornwell family was beneath her notice.
David left England in the middle of March 1951. With Gerald Peacocke and another British officer, he took a ‘Med Loc’ (Mediterranean location) military train up the Rhine into southern Germany, and then across the eastern Alps into Austria. Much later David would rhapsodise about the sight of bare-breasted peasant women working in the fields, though it seems odd that Peacocke has no memory of these, and it was a little early in the year for such a display. David would later claim that these were the first breasts that he had ever seen, perhaps forgetting his girlfriend’s.
They separated at Villach, near the Yugoslav border, then a very sensitive region; Peacocke continued to Trieste, while David was stationed at Graz, capital of Styria, the most easterly of the regions overseen by Western powers in Europe. Like so many soldiers, he had taken up smoking – cigarettes, cigars and a pipe. Graz was widely held to be an ideal posting, where the price of almost everything – especially alcohol and cigarettes – was about half the English equivalent. Only clothing cost more. In these circumstances, rackets proliferated, and plenty of military supplies went missing.
David was designated a field security officer, based in the Palais Meran, an elegant neo-classical villa on the outskirts of Graz. There telephone interceptions were written in shorthand, translated and transcribed, for later processing. In the evenings listeners could sometimes hear drunken Russian technicians singing on the line. David inherited from his predecessor a string of informants (‘joes’), who regularly passed on low-grade information in return for sweeteners of various kinds.
From the balcony of a small hotel outside Villach David wrote to Ann. ‘This is life!’ he enthused. ‘This great transformation from the grey indifference of England to the bewitching colour and the bright rebirth of Spring in Austria.’ On his limited acquaintance he thought the Austrians ‘wonderful people … kinder and happier than the Swiss or the French – or even the Germans’. A few days later he was aboard a sleeper, bound for Vienna, passing through the Russian zone. ‘It’s amusing to say to oneself, “out there are Russians”,’ he reflected. ‘If I got off this train now I would be interrogated, tortured and shot.’14 Perhaps this was an exaggeration, but it was certainly true that relations between British and Russian soldiers, congenial after the war, had deteriorated sharply by the early 1950s, especially along the Yugoslav border. While in Vienna he dressed in civilian clothes to attend a ‘very interesting’ Communist meeting.15
‘Did you read in the paper about the Napier case?’ he asked Ann in another letter. Captain Neville Napier, a transport officer married to an Austrian-born countess, had received a nine-year prison sentence from a British military court at Graz for supplying information to a Czech spy, on the flimsy pretext that he had been appointed ‘military correspondent’ for a Middle European press agency.* Perhaps this sensational spy trial came as a salutary warning to David; he seemed to hint as much. ‘If I had not made the mistake of getting to know people too well, I should be very happy,’ he wrote to Ann. ‘As it is I shall change my routine and my company and, apart from my work, start again.’16
The Napier trial, itself relatively insignificant, was one of a succession of scandals that shook confidence in British security. In 1949 it had been revealed that the Russians had successfully tested an atomic bomb. The defection of the experimental physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, who had been working on the British nuclear energy project at Harwell, followed only six months after the confession of the British theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs that he had passed atomic secrets to the Russians. Some years earlier Alan Nunn May, who like Fuchs had worked on the Manhattan Project, had confessed to passing samples of uranium isotopes to the Russians. Taken together, these revelations had led to a crisis in intelligence co-operation with the Americans, who doubted whether the British could be trusted with their secrets. The Americans deplored what they saw as lax British procedures, while the British were resistant to what seemed to them anti-Communist hysteria. Nevertheless, the British government took steps to tighten security after Fuchs’s confession and subsequent conviction.17
A few weeks after the Napier trial, David was summoned by his commanding officer and shown two photographs. ‘If you see either of these men you will report that information to a senior officer immediately, do you hear?’ If he could not find a senior officer, he was ordered to arrest the pair himself. Their names, he learned a few days later, courtesy of the Daily Express, were Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, members of the British Foreign Service suspected of spying for the Soviet Union.
One of David’s principal tasks was to interrogate illegal frontier crossers (IFCs), being held in camps while their fate was decided. Hundreds of thousands of people were on the move, most trying to escape from countries under Communist control. In A Perfect Spy David would provide a vivid picture of this exodus:
For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects.
David travelled in his jeep from camp to camp interrogating such people. In doing so, he had to ask himself several questions. Is this man who he says he is? Is he a security risk? Is he a criminal? Does he have any intelligence that we need? In fact most of those whom he interrogated were merely desperate refugees. Many of them were subsequently passed on to bodies such as the International Relief Organisation or the Jewish Resettlement Agency. In liaising with the Austrian authorities about the fate of such refugees, David was conscious that almost every official he dealt with had previously worked for the Nazi regime. This was a period of extraordinary reversals, when former foes became friends, and former friends foes. The Germans, against whom the British had poured out all their strength only a few years previously, had been co-opted into the Cold War against Communism; while the Russians, who had done so much to slay the Nazi monster, had become adversaries in a worldwide ideological struggle. This turnaround had occurred with shocking rapidity. The same pilots who had bombed Berlin in 1945 were running the Berlin airlift in 1948. This inversion of alliances led some to question what they were being told by their masters. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) imagined a world of perpetual warfare, in which the state cynically manipulates the patriotic fervour of the populace, a world in which an orator could change the identity of the hated enemy in mid-sentence, without pause or protest.
‘At first his sensitivity was offended by so much misery and he had a hard time disguising his sympathy for everyone he spoke to,’ David wrote of his fictional doubl
e Magnus Pym in A Perfect Spy. But he soon became hardened to it, and confessed to Ann that he was ‘beginning to get frightened’ by his own indifference towards other people’s suffering. ‘Sometimes I almost welcome the misfortunes of people around me, for when a man is sad he is weak.’18 He would consult his own nature to assess when someone was lying to him, or at least not telling him the whole truth, making small talk while he watched and read the signals that came back to him. If the person he was interrogating seemed to be lying, he would take rapid back-bearings on likely versions of the truth with the aid of his own mental compass:
Questions teemed in him and, budding lawyer that he was, he learned quickly to shape them into a pattern of accusation. ‘Where do you come from? What troops did you see there? What colour shoulder boards did they wear? What did they drive around in, what weapons did they have? Which route did you take, what guards, obstructions, dogs, wire, minefields did you meet along the way? What shoes were you wearing? How did your mother manage, your grandmother, if the mountain pass was so steep? How did you cope with two suitcases and two small children when your wife was so heavily pregnant? Is it not more likely that your employers in the Hungarian secret police drove you to the border and wished you luck as they showed you where to cross? Are you a spy, and if so, would you not prefer to spy for us? Or are you merely a criminal, in which case you would surely like to take up spying, rather than be tossed back across the border by the Austrian police?’19
In the middle of his tour David returned to England on leave. It had been arranged that he would spend a weekend with Ann’s family. After so many loving letters, Ann had been eagerly anticipating his arrival, so she was disappointed that their time together was repeatedly interrupted by telephone calls from Ronnie, and she was bemused when David left prematurely on the Sunday morning. He explained that his father had paid for his trip back to England and required his presence at home.
If David was surprisingly compliant to his father’s wishes, he nevertheless resented Ronnie’s attempts to dictate what he would do after he left the army. ‘Daddy sent me a whole lot of nonsense about legal study and what have you,’ he grumbled to Ann, and continued, ‘I’ve written to Daddy demanding independence and a room in town when I get back.’20 He was determined not to be bullied into submission, as he felt his brother had been. Tony had gone up to Cambridge on a classical scholarship, and had succumbed to paternal pressure to switch to law, though his heart was never in it; he had suffered the humiliation of being summoned to appear before the Master of his college when one of Ronnie’s cheques had bounced. After two years at Cambridge Tony had left in 1951 without taking his degree, going on to Bowdoin College in Maine on a scholarship to study creative writing. Though afterwards he kept his promise to his father to return and complete his course, studying alongside Learie Constantine at Gray’s Inn, Tony would leave England again, this time for Canada, the day after he was called to the Bar. He would never practise law.
‘Our world means freedom from the sordid and beastly grind of the “dark satanic mills”,’ David insisted. ‘I’m damned if I’ll be hemmed in like a rat in a trap.’ He emphatically did not want a conventional career. ‘They can keep their stiff collars and paper cuffs, their quills and files, test-tubes and blue-prints …’ In a frisky, sometimes incoherent letter to Ann, David tried to:
make you dream of the things I dream of – independence, divorce from tiresome people, far away lands flowing with milk & honey. Pictures and poems. Vast and beautiful paintings – light and wonderful poetry. And then suddenly something happens: like a falling rafter, a crash of the inevitable practical resounds like an explosion among the rivers and banks of the Lethe:* parents, bar-exams, money. Then finally – revolt.
I shall always end up as a revolutionary.21
Gerald Peacocke bumped into David again during a period of leave in Vienna in September. From David’s demeanour he gained the impression that his old schoolmate was concerned with ‘hush-hush’ matters. In fact David’s most vivid experience of a clandestine intelligence operation had been a fiasco, as he would later readily concede.
He had been recruited for a top-secret mission by the Air Intelligence Officer, or AIO, a man called Joe Kraemer, a mysterious, solitary figure within the Graz headquarters about whom little definite was known, but who, so it was hinted, was a member of MI6, involved in agent-running. The mission required a trip to the frontier to meet a high-ranking officer in the Czech air force, apparently willing to supply precious intelligence in exchange for cash.
‘Why me, Sir?’ David had asked, as they took a quiet stroll along the river together.
‘Because you’ve got what it takes,’ the AIO replied tersely.
David persisted. ‘How do you know I have, Sir?’ he asked.
‘Been watching you.’
For the operation David decided to wear a green loden coat, plus, for additional cover, a green Tyrolean hat, purchased at personal expense.
The AIO collected him in an unmarked Volkswagen Beetle with civilian number plates. On the back seat lay a brown briefcase containing, he told David, 10,000 US dollars. They drove across country as darkness fell. At first David could think of nothing but the heavy 9mm Browning automatic jammed down his waistband against his left hip, as instructed by the AIO, so that he could draw it easily across his body. Now and then he fingered the safety catch nervously.
The rendezvous was a bar in a frontier village just inside Austria. The AIO entered first, followed by David carrying the briefcase. In a single, low-ceilinged room, the inhabitants stared through the tobacco smoke at the two Englishmen in mute amazement. The AIO ordered two beers from the landlord, and then gestured towards a billiards table. ‘Fancy a game?’ he asked from the corner of his mouth. David muttered his assent. By this time he had become accustomed to the presence of the Browning automatic on his hip. As he stooped to play the ball, he was startled by the clang of metal on the tiled floor; by the time he realised what had happened and bent to retrieve his weapon, the inn had emptied. ‘Abort,’ ordered the AIO, pausing only to finish his beer.
Afterwards David reflected on what had happened. Had the Czech airman attempted to cross the frontier? Had there ever been a Czech airman? The AIO had vanished two days after the operation, so there was no one to ask. David concluded that the AIO might not have been an MI6 officer at all, but simply a forgotten soul, living in a secret bubble of his own, dreaming the Great Spy’s Dream. ‘He imagined himself at the Spies’ Big Table, playing the world’s game. Gradually, the gap between the dream and the reality became too much for him to bear, and one day he decided to fill it. He needed a believer, so I got the job.’22
This is the story as it was published in the New Yorker in 2008. But the magazine’s fact-checkers failed to notice a troubling detail: the Czech border was in the Soviet zone. It seems scarcely credible that two plain-clothed British officers, armed with at least one weapon and carrying a suitcase full of dollars, could have driven a hundred miles or more through the Soviet zone for a rendezvous with a Czech agent. Perhaps David misremembered the details; perhaps he and the AIO met the Czech airman on the Yugoslav border, indeed perhaps he was a Yugoslav airman. Or perhaps the whole story is imaginary.
Some time after this confusing episode, David received a visit from a uniformed officer, ‘from Vienna’, who introduced himself as ‘Major Smith’. He represented the Secret Service, he said. ‘We are thinking of you down the line,’ the Major told him. But first, he made clear, David would need to obtain a degree.
Towards the end of 1951 David returned to Switzerland, to rejoin the Downhill Only Club’s racing team at Wengen. He hoped to do well enough to gain selection for the British team for the 1952 winter Olympics. In a letter to Ann he confessed to ‘a rather cheap little affair in Graz before I left, which made me feel rotten – and realise how much you really meant to me’.23 By ‘affair’ he meant not a sexual relationship, but what would more usually be called a flirtation. There w
as an element of braggadocio in his letters to Ann.
After a few weeks’ training with the team in Wengen, David went ahead to St Moritz, the location for their first race, to find accommodation for the others. This was not easy. St Moritz was so full over the New Year that, as one newspaper reported, ‘Maharajahs were sleeping in bathrooms!’ Somehow David was able to persuade the ever-helpful Herr Badrutt to find places for them. In his report on the 1951–2 season, the team captain congratulated David on doing ‘an excellent job as Billeting Officer’.
In Wengen David had already shown himself to be one of the two fastest members of the team, and in St Moritz he raced faster and faster. On 6 January 1952 he was the quickest British entrant in a race organised by the local Skiclub Alpina, despite taking a bad fall and suffering severe concussion. To get up again and finish the race in these circumstances, and in such a quick time, was, in the words of the team captain, ‘an amazing display of courage and determination’. The team then moved on to Klosters, where the British Championships were due to be held, leaving David to recover in the care of the St Moritz clinic – or so they thought, but he climbed out of a window and followed them, appearing in Klosters the next evening. By 12 January David was racing again – inadvisedly, because he took another fall, which was enough to bring on the concussion in an aggravated form, blinding him for thirty-six hours. ‘His courage in insisting on continuing to race after his accident at St. Moritz should have been restrained,’ commented the team captain in his annual report.24
‘No cause whatever for worry – except that there is no earthly chance of going to the Olympics or anything else,’ David wrote to assure Ann, who was once again in Chamonix with the RAF Winter Sports Association. A few days later he was back at Tunmers. ‘I’ve got to take a month’s complete rest, and so I don’t think I shall go back to Austria at all,’ he told her. This would be the end of his active service in the army, though like other National Servicemen he would remain a reservist, required to undertake two weeks’ refresher training at Maresfield annually, for several successive summers. A week later David sent Ann another bulletin. ‘As far as I can make out I shan’t be able to race again, so I shall just have to ski prettily instead. How foul …’ He passed the time by trying to paint, drawing caricatures of ‘Wengen Faces’ for the Downhill Only Club’s journal, and writing ‘bad poetry’.25
