Moneypenny Diaries: Guardian Angel

by Samantha Kate

  ‘We need to get someone over there immediately, Chief of Staff. Miss Moneypenny, send signals to all our stations in the Pacific; find out who’s closest to the scene. Then contact Henderson and get him to wire over any information he can extract from the Japs, including whatever they’ve got on Shatterhand. Until we’ve evidence of 007’s death, we must assume that he escaped. God knows, he’s crawled from the jaws of death on countless occasions. Keep me informed of any developments.’

  It was a dismissal and once we were back in the car Bill put his hands up to his temples and started massaging them. ‘I hope to God 007’s all right. The Old Man’s obviously in a state about it. He was never intended to succeed at this mission – it was just something we cooked up on Molony’s advice to try to get James to snap out of whatever gloom he was wallowing in. He’s already achieved more than we expected with the intercept about the nuclear test. I can’t believe he would have gone barrelling into the lion’s den without some thought of how he was going to get out.’

  Thursday, 27th December

  Facsimiles of the passport photographs of Dr Shatterhand and his wife arrived today. They were on my desk, awaiting circulation, when 006 walked in. He took one look at them and exclaimed, ‘By George, that’s Blofeld and Bunt.’ He peered more closely at them: ‘He’s had a nose job and grown a moustache, but it’s definitely him – no doubt about it – and no amount of plastic surgery could make a difference to Bunt’s ugly mug.’

  By this afternoon, his identification had been confirmed by Q Branch, after they’d run it through their Image Comparison Determinator.5 I felt the emotion that I’ve been trying to suppress suddenly well up: so 007 had taken his revenge on Blofeld for Tracy’s death. If he’d died in the process, he would have thought it a fair bargain. Not for us, though. I can’t begin to contemplate a world without 007. I do not want to.

  New Year’s Eve, 31st December

  The clock is inching towards midnight and I’m filled with excitement. R fell asleep soon after we’d finished the hospital’s execrable New Year’s Eve ‘Feast’, still protesting that he was going to see in the new year. I stayed for a while, mulling over what he’d told me before he dropped off.

  Pa did not die in 1940. R told me as he was shaving this afternoon – he’d discovered it the day before he leapt on a plane back to London to tell me. He’d been attached to the war crimes investigative unit. He was searching through the archives for the original blueprints of Colditz6, when he found a list of names, tucked between the pages of a long document detailing the facilities installed in 1945 when it reverted to medical use. ‘One jumped out at me: Lieutenant Hugh Sterling. I have to confess I did undertake a bit of independent research into your father’s wartime activities after you told me about him. I’ve access into files you wouldn’t have seen. One of them was the Ruthless file – and among the planning documents I found a list of the cover names they’d use in case of capture. Your father’s was Sterling. Sterling – Moneypenny. You see the connection.

  ‘It was a very thin piece of paper, and the writing had faded to a pale sepia, but it was definitely his cover name, halfway down a list of what I soon realised must have been Allied officers interned in the castle.’

  I felt my heart swell and my eyes fill. I started grinning madly as I asked whether he was sure.

  ‘Yes. And there was a date at the top of the page …’ he paused and smiled gently. ‘It was 13 April 1945. That’s just days before it was liberated by the Americans.’

  Does this mean my father was alive at the end of the war? That was the question that kept spinning round my head as I walked home through the cold winter night. It must. If so, I’m going to find him.

  This has been an extraordinary year – for love, adventure, disappointment, danger, and now hope. I feel stronger, more alive, more useful than ever before. And I’m excited about next year. Whatever it may hold, I’m ready for it.

  I was suddenly grabbed by the idea that James is not dead. I don’t know why, but I have this feeling, deep in my bones, that he escaped and one day will pop his face around my office door and say, ‘Hello, Penny,’ as if nothing had happened.

  And if he doesn’t, I’m going out there to look for him too.

  Afterword

  A diary, by its nature, is not a complete document. Life is episodic, but those episodes really conform to the cycle of seasons. In choosing my aunt’s 1962 journal, I was fortunate that the central drama – the Cuban Missile Crisis and her role in it – did not bleed into the following year. But much else did. How much neater it would have been, for instance, had irrefutable evidence about my grandfather’s final days surfaced in the dying gasps of December; had Prenderghast been tried and his contact within the service unearthed; had Bond not apparently disappeared without trace in a remote corner of Japan.

  A diary contains one person’s eye-view of the world, and is restricted to what he or she wishes to commit to the page. This, in turn, is influenced by their motivation for keeping a record of their lives. For some it is an outflow pipe for their emotions; for others a stab at immortality. My aunt, I suspect, used her journal as a trusted confidant in a world of secrets, a friend on whose shoulder she occasionally felt the need to cry, but who, when times were tense, did not require her to spell out her feelings.

  The Moneypenny Diaries has marked the beginning of a major new episode in my life. The search for verification has consumed most of my spare time and a larger proportion of my thoughts. As that early lecture about the Cuban Missile Crisis brought so forcefully home, the diaries have spilled into my work. I find myself looking for an extra dimension to even the most well-worn of historical events. My aunt has introduced me to a parallel world of half-truths and subterfuge, adventure and peril – to the story behind history.

  I am not sure I can ever return. Certainly I cannot leave now. I have taken a sabbatical from teaching to devote my full time to finding the answers to the questions raised in her diaries. And so it is with my aunt, hand in hand, that I will open the leather cover of her 1963 journal and plunge back into her world.

  About the Author

  Samantha Weinberg

  Kate Westbrook is the pseudonym of Samantha Weinberg, frustrated spy and author of the best-selling A Fish Caught in Time: the Search for the Coelacanth, and Pointing from the Grave, which won the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-fiction.

  Also by Samantha Weinberg

  Last of the Pirates: The Search for Bob Denard

  A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth

  Pointing from the Grave: A True Story of Murder and DNA

  January

  1 Richard Hamilton – architect, and since October 1961, when they met on a rainy day under the half-built arches of Gaudí's cathedral of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, JM’s suitor and consort.

  2 M – Admiral Sir Miles Messervy, aka the Old Man, or OM. Appointed head of the Secret Intelligence Service in 1956, after a successful career in the Royal Navy and Naval Intelligence. He wrote in green ink (a tradition emanating from the first chief), smoked a pipe (Old Havana tobacco), and favoured bow-ties (blue-and-white spotted). His hobbies included trout fishing, bridge, painting wild orchids, and the evolution of the naval cutlass.

  3 Colonel Bill Tanner – M’s Chief of Staff (CoS), 007’s best friend in the service, and occupant of the Office adjoining JM’s. Slight in build, with sandy hair and deep blue eyes. Never married, he lived until his retirement from the service, in 1980, in a second-floor mansion-house flat in Earl’s Court.

  4 Blonde beauty with a passion for fast cars and high-stakes gambling. In September 1961 Bond rescued her from the baccarat table in the casino at Royale-les-Eaux, where she was attempting to gamble with money she didn’t have. They spent the night together, and the next day he followed her to the beach and prevented her from committing suicide.

  5 Tracy’s father, a charming and powerful man, with a face like a creased walnut. Leader of the Union Corse, an underground org
anisation older and possibly more deadly than the Mafia, controlling most organised crime – protection, smuggling and prostitution – throughout France and its colonies. He arranged to have Bond and Tracy kidnapped, then offered Bond £1 million to marry his daughter and make her happy. Bond refused the money – saying that Tracy needed first to go to a clinic to dry out – and instead asked Draco for help in tracking down Blofeld.

  6 M’s country residence, a small Regency manor house on the edge of Windsor Forest, where he was looked after by Chief Petty Officer Hammond and his wife.

  7 Ex-Leading Stoker Smith was M’s chauffeur and proud custodian of his 1946 black Silver Wraith Rolls-Royce.

  8 To indicate that he was not to be disturbed, M flicked a switch on his desk, which illuminated a small red light positioned over the outside door to his office. When it was on, only CoS and JM were allowed to interrupt him, and only on matters of utmost urgency.

  9 Irma Bunt, Blofeld’s personal secretary and probable consort, was physically unattractive, with a square, brutal face, hard yellow eyes, and a smile like an oblong hole.

  10 The latest-generation cipher machine, incorporating three independent scrambler dials, which would be rotated to the appropriate settings as dictated by the daily code book. Messages were translated into ciphertext, then transmitted by radio in five-figure groups. The recipients would decipher them into plain text using an identical machine with identical settings.

  11 Mary Goodnight, secretary to the 00 section. Replaced Loelia Ponsonby in 1961. Former WREN, with blonde hair, blue eyes and an hourglass figure. Non-smoker, she drank really and wore Chanel No. 5 daily.

  12 Commander Phillip Ross, RN – Head of Jamaica Station. Replaced Commander John Strangways, who was killed by the mysterious Chinaman Dr No in 1957.

  13 Loelia Ponsonby, former secretary to the oo section. Tall and dark, with an air of cool authority, she emerged unscathed from numerous assaults upon her virtue by ‘her men’. She left the service in 1961, after becoming engaged to Gerald Gardiner, a member of the Baltic Exchange and heir to a dukedom.

  14 Helena Moneypenny, JM’s younger sister by three years, her closest friend and confidante. In 1953, aged nineteen, she moved with JM to London, where she finished her degree in Botany at London University. Subsequently worked in Cambridge, as research assistant to her then fiancé – later husband – Lionel Westbrook. Mother of Kate Westbrook.

  15 Hugh David Moneypenny, born 1903, Rhodesia, educated at Cambridge University and the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. In 1929 he married Irene Greenfield and was appointed naval attaché for the east coast of Africa, based in Nairobi. Qualified pilot, fluent German-speaker, renowned shot. Reported missing in action on 25 October 1940.

  16 Dated 25 September 1940, received by JM 18 October and stuck into the front of her first diary. Hugh wrote to his daughter, ‘I am going on a big adventure, like the one we went on to Turkana [lake in northern Kenya – the Moneypennys flew there in a borrowed seaplane for a weekend in 1938]. It will be tremendous fun. I should be back soon, but if I am gone some time, please promise me that you will look after your mother and sister, and don’t worry. I am sure it will end with great success.’

  17 Lionel Regis Westbrook (1910–91), fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge, Disney Professor of Archaeology, winner of the Huxley Medal, authority on East African cultural change, author of Heat and Dust: An examination of early Kenyan Society (Cambridge, 1992).

  18 He did. Almost.

  19 In late April 1961 the Cubans arrested and deported Peter Hughes-Onslow, correctly surmising that he was running a local intelligence network for the British secret service.

  20 Shortly before midnight on 16 April 1961, a US-backed invasion force of 1,500 men, mainly Cuban émigrés, approached the beach at Playa Girón on the south coast of Cuba. However, two of their ships ran aground and the planned landing was delayed, allowing the Cuban air force time to strike at dawn. The US refrained from air back-up, and by 19 April the invaders had been repelled by the Cuban army; 200 rebel soldiers were killed, and 1,197 captured. The US repeatedly denied any involvement in the coup attempt.

  21 Employees of the intelligence services were prohibited from visiting countries under Communist rule, except on official business. This was essentially a security provision, based on the assumption that many intelligence operatives would be identifiable as such and therefore vulnerable to capture in hostile territory.

  22 Office jargon for the CIA.

  23 JM had a photograph of her and R in Barcelona, which she kept tucked into her Spanish phrase book. They are standing arm in arm in front of the cathedral. JM is dressed quietly, in a dark-green twinset and skirt, but her hair is wavy and tied back with a brilliant orange scarf. She is smiling at a tall, slim man, with slightly floppy dark hair, green eyes and tortoiseshell-framed spectacles, which give him a bookish air. At a glance, he looks unobtrusive, but in the diary entry describing their meeting JM wrote of the way his eyes sparkled with ‘a hint of the Devil that I find enormously attractive’.

  24 A 1960 fictionalised celluloid portrayal, starring Spencer Tracy, of a famous 1925 courtroom battle in the American South about the right to teach the theory of evolution.

  25 The commonly used acronym for Smyert Shpionam, ‘Death to Spies’, the Soviet chief directorate for counter-intelligence activities, set up in April 1943. Thought to be responsible for the death of Trotsky. Purged in 1946 and restructured as five sections operating out of Moscow HQ.

  26 Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion: a private enterprise run for private profit by Blofeld, at the head of a group of twenty-two men – former members of SMERSH, Mafia, Gestapo, etc. experts in conspiracy, for hire to the highest bidder.

  27 Former Head of T (Turkey) Section, based in Istanbul and one of M’s best operatives. Became close to 007 during an operation to depatriate a Russian Spektor cipher machine. He was killed in action on the Orient Express, 1956.

  28 Paymaster Captain Roger Troop, RN retd, chief administrative officer of the SIS.

  February

  1 Sir James Molony, prominent English neurologist of the time, and nerve specialist by appointment to the secret service.

  2 Following an attack of lumbago in 1960, M spent ten days at Shrublands, a health farm on the south coast, returning with crystal-clear eyes and the proselytising zeal of the newly converted. He gave JM a detailed account of his régime there, and ordered her tins of treacle and wheatgerm, which she fed to her dog. The following week M dispatched Bond to Shrublands in an attempt to curb his overdrinking and excessive smoking. Despite being almost stretched to death by a SPECTRE agent on a traction machine, he returned to work full of energy. Both he and M, however, lapsed after several weeks.

  3 JM’s iron-filing-grey standard poodle. While she was at work he was looked after by Maura, a widowed Polish émigré living in the basement flat of JM’s building.

  4 The Moneypennys’ dairy farm – in a wooded area fifteen miles west of Nairobi.

  5 Colonel Rosa Klebb, former head of Otdyel II, the department in charge of operations and executions for SMERSH. A toad-like figure, recipient of the Order of Lenin, probable lesbian. She sent an operative to assassinate Bond on the Orient Express, as part of a plot to humiliate the British secret service. Bond survived and kept his would-be murderer’s appointment with Klebb in a Paris hotel room, where he evaded her attempts to kill him with a gun disguised as a telephone and poisoned knitting needles. He managed to overpower her and call for reinforcements. However, as she was being led away, she kicked him with shoes impregnated with the deadly fugu poison, extracted from the sex organs of the Japanese globe-fish. While he made a rapid physical recovery, he remained mentally fragile until sent on another assignment, on Molony’s advice. Klebb died thirty-three days later, while in British custody.

  6 May Davidson, Bond’s housekeeper and ‘treasure’, a widowed Scotswoman with steel-grey hair and a handsome closed face, who
looked after his flat in a tree-lined square off the King’s Road. Fiercely loyal, she had known Bond since childhood, when she cared for his dying uncle.

  7 Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess (1911–63), Cambridge-educated former BBC broadcaster and MI6 agent. Defected to Moscow in May 1951.

  8 Donald Duart Maclean (1913–83), British diplomat and double agent. Defected with Burgess in 1951.

  9 JM’s great-aunt, her maternal grandfather’s younger sister. Former fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, eccentric and collector of antique glass. When JM and Helena came to London in 1953, following their mother’s death, they spent nine months living with Great Aunt Frieda and her canary, Caruso. After moving out, they remained in close contact with her, frequently spending Sunday evenings in her Kensington basement apartment, enjoying her famous chicken soup.

  10 The name of the operation is not, as widely believed, a reference to Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi. Instead, it was initially conceived as a bluff. The CIA assigned a two-letter designation (a diaph) to every country in the world, and the code name for any operation in that country began with the appropriate diaph. In this case, seeking to confuse, the Americans chose to use the diaph of a country on the other side of the world from Cuba: Thailand or, in CIA double-speak, MO. From there, ‘Mongoose’ was chosen at random.