by Seb Spence
“Miss Harrison?” Minton interjected.
“That’s right. Of course, you’ll have heard of her through your man Barton. Elliott liked to throw parties and invite along people who might know something useful: government officials, boffins, senior service personnel and the like. Miss Harrison’s an attractive girl and he felt that, working in the club, she would be in a good position to entice these people to his little get-togethers and prompt them into loose talk. Furthermore, he had learnt that she was half Irish and so might have some anti-British sentiment, which could make her amenable to joining his cell. He planned to invite her to a weekend house party and sound her out. Cheyne had learnt all this from conversations his team had listened in to, so before Elliott made his initial overtures, Cheyne moved in: he warned Miss Harrison that Elliott would be trying to recruit her for his spy ring and urged her to work for our side. He asked her to pretend to go along with whatever Elliott proposed so that she could penetrate the cell, thereby giving us someone on the inside. At first, Miss Harrison was reluctant to get involved, as she has an elderly father who is dependent on her, but Cheyne prevailed in the end.”
“How did he persuade her?”
“I don’t think that matters.”
“I disagree, sir. If Miss Harrison is not working for us out of a sense of duty, she may prove to be unreliable.”
“I have absolute confidence in Miss Harrison. She has done some first-rate work for us, often at great risk to herself. I believe she is completely loyal. However, if you must know how Cheyne secured her cooperation, he had to lean on her a bit. She was unwilling to sign up at first because of her father, who is very ill. She needed to work to pay for his care, which is why she had two jobs: one on stage as a magician’s assistant and the other working at this club. So initially, Cheyne offered her money. However, she still didn’t want to take the assignment on because if anything happened to her, her father would have no one to look after him, so at that point Cheyne had to try another tack.”
“What was that?”
“The dancers and hostesses at the Silver Masque Club are always being asked out to parties and week-ends away by the clients. Inevitably, they often end up spending the night with whoever invited them and the client in turn will usually make the girl a gift. Some of the girls have been ‘formalising the arrangements’, as Cheyne put it.”
“Soliciting, you mean?”
“Yes, to put it bluntly. Now there is no evidence that Grace Harrison was involved in this, but Cheyne did find out that she had accepted presents from one or two clients she had been out with. He told her that if she didn’t cooperate she and the other girls would be arrested for immoral conduct and could face a lengthy jail sentence.”
Minton found Cheyne’s methods distasteful. “So basically he blackmailed her into working for him. I’d say that makes her a potential security risk.”
“Normally I’d agree, but Miss Harrison is an exception. Since coming on board she has cooperated fully with Cheyne; she is totally committed and, as I said, she has shown great courage and initiative.
“To continue with Elliott’s story, the day after she agreed to work for us, Elliott went to the club in the evening and invited her to the house party. There he sounded her out and was sufficiently taken in by her responses that he asked her to join his cell. I have to say that since then, Miss Harrison has obtained some excellent intelligence for us. One of the first things she was able to discover was the book he was using for his book code, and so we were able to decipher not only the messages he was sending and receiving but also all the other traffic he had sent and received since he started operating. His previous transmissions had been recorded by the Radio Security Service and stored, awaiting decipherment. The code name he used was ‘Argon’.”
Minton remembered Cobalt’s last message had said all future contact would be via Argon. “So, Elliott was the one who took over transmission after Cobalt had supposedly died.”
“That’s right. She couldn’t continue transmitting because we would have recognised her ‘fist’ and realised she was still alive. Little by little, we were able to piece together from his messages, and also from the information Miss Harrison was unearthing, what he had been up to since the start of the war. The more we discovered about Elliott, the more we realised how inept he was. He had recruited into his gang a number of his right-wing cronies, mainly selected from among his amateur dramatics pals. They had been gathering low-level information – hanging about airfields, ports and army installations, sending back reports on bomb damage, gun emplacements and so on. Then he had had the idea of putting on plays at military bases, trying to encourage personnel into careless talk. The Germans thought this was a promising plan, but I think they also realised Elliott and his friends were a fairly useless bunch and needed organising, so they sent over a trained and very competent agent.”
Cunningham took a 6” x 8” photograph from the folder on the table and pushed it across to Minton. It was a publicity headshot of a very attractive, fair-haired young woman. “Her codename was ‘Cobalt’. Another of Miss Harrison’s coups was to discover her real name, so we’ve been able to investigate her background. It turns out she was a professional actress before the war, though not a particularly successful one. Vivian Adair is her current stage name. Her real name is Marion Esmond – or to be precise, that’s her maiden name. Her married name is Marion Schönbeck. She was born and brought up in Surrey but in 1938, while on tour in Germany with a Shakespearean theatre company, she met a Wehrmacht officer. She married him a few months later and the pair took up residence in Berlin.”
“Is she a Nazi sympathiser or is she spying for money?”
Cunningham shrugged. “We don’t know how, but it looks as if the Germans have managed by some means to persuade her to work for them. As she is a professional actress, she seemed the ideal person for them to send to Elliott’s cell. She was parachuted into Norfolk in June 1940 along with a transmitter, a satchel full of money to bankroll Elliott’s Kingsmead Players, and a canister containing an assortment of weapons.”
This last comment prompted Minton to voice a concern that had been in his mind since hearing of the plan to leave Elliott at liberty. “What about all the casualties? There were at least five: Pilot Officer Kemp; Lucy Walker’s aunt and Ralph Pickering, her employer; the caretaker at Brown’s Warehouse and the police officer. These are just the one’s we know of. Were Elliott and his gang really a suitable choice for this plan? Surely it was clear there was a risk of more killings?”
“It was an acceptable risk. There’s a lot at stake here, Minton: this ‘Double Cross’ scheme we’re running is of huge importance – we have the capability to confuse and mislead the Germans about some very important issues. A small number of casualties is tolerable.”
The mathematics of war; Minton wondered how many deaths Cunningham would be prepared to accept as the price for his plan.
“To get back to the point,” Cunningham continued, “everything went smoothly for the first few weeks. We had established Miss Harrison in the cell and they were doing little damage to our interests. But then, in February, they received orders to find out what was going on at Bletchley Park. They started putting on their play at venues in the area, so that they could mix with the locals and surreptitiously pump them for information on BP. This was a worrying development – it’s vital the Germans don’t discover what’s being done there. On the other hand, it was also an opportunity for us: if we could feed Elliott’s people false information about BP, it would put the Germans off the scent. There was a delicate balance between risk and reward.”
“I have to say, allowing Cobalt and her accomplices anywhere near Bletchley Park sounds reckless to me.”
“Speaking with hindsight, I admit you might be right. The gang has been sniffing around BP for over three months now and Vivian Adair, in particular, has been getting closer to some very sensitive information. She managed to sink her claws into one of the technical st
aff there – a fellow called Carrington – although we don’t know what, if anything, she has found out from him. It was a worrying state of affairs. We were on the verge of pulling the plug on the operation, but then the Germans contacted Elliott to say that they wanted to recall both him and Cobalt as soon as she had completed her mission. So, rather than abandon our operation, we decided to feed the gang some disinformation on BP as soon as possible.
“We got the boffins at Station X to put together a file of blueprints and other material that looked genuine but which made BP out to look like an unimportant target – the aim was that the Germans would be satisfied and lose interest in the place. We arranged for the file to be passed on to a member of the gang. Unfortunately, however, things have backfired. We discovered a few hours ago that as a result of this operation there has been a very serious breach of security at Bletchley.”
“How serious?”
“It has the potential to lose us the war. Cobalt and her associates have got hold of some ultra-sensitive information about what goes on at BP and have now flown the coop. As soon as we got the news about Cheyne and Maxwell, we guessed our cover had been blown, and we decided to call off the operation and have all of them arrested. We moved in straightaway, but we were too late. The whole gang sneaked out of their lodgings in Northampton during the night. As you know, according to your man Barton, Vivian Adair is heading north. From messages we’ve intercepted, we know that within the next few days she and Elliott are to be picked up by submarine somewhere along the Scottish coast, and it’s my guess that’s where she’s heading now. Two members of the gang – Joan Wilks and Robert Mitchell – we arrested at a station in Northampton a few hours ago. Incidentally, Minton, that’s why you’re being called in. I want you to interrogate them. The six other members of the cell are god knows where.”
“What about Grace Harrison?”
“Miss Harrison has the phone number for Cheyne’s base office; she was directed to ring them if she needs to report urgently. So far, they have not heard anything from her: either she’s been unable to reach a phone or else ... she’s been eliminated.”
For Barton’s sake, Minton hoped that nothing had happened to her. “How was it possible for the whole gang to slip away unnoticed?”
“That will become clear presently. I said someone would be joining us – I think it’s time to call him in.” General Cunningham stood up and went over to the intercom, which sat next to a phone on a small side table along the wall. Pressing a button on it, he instructed: “Send in Morgan.”
Within a minute, there was a knock at the door and an orderly ushered in a rather unkempt looking man in his mid twenties. He was wearing a grey suit and cream-coloured shirt with a tie that looked as if it had been put on in a hurry. He seemed nervous.
“Morgan, this is Colonel Minton – he will be carrying out the interrogations of the two spies we caught this morning.”
Morgan nodded in Minton’s direction but said nothing.
“Take a seat,” Cunningham told him, indicating the chair across the table from Minton. “Morgan is head of Hut 6B at Bletchley Park. He’s come up from BP this morning to fill us in on what’s happened there. Tell the Colonel what you told me over the phone earlier about the recent security breach at BP.”
Morgan looked across at Minton apprehensively and began. “The Wren who operates the teleprinters in our hut failed to appear for duty at 8am this morning. She phoned in sick yesterday as well, so I thought I’d contact her and find out when she might be returning. I rang her billet and was surprised to learn from her landlady that the girl had not been home for two days. This started the alarm bells ringing. We had opened up the hut’s safe for a visitor yesterday and although there was no obvious connection between this and the Wren’s disappearance, I decided to check that none of the contents was missing. I soon found that some important documents had in fact been taken. I reported this immediately to the acting head of BP, Commander Travis, and we called in the security people. In the course of investigating the events, we discovered we had been victims of an elaborate deception.”
“Tell us more about your visitor,” the General directed.
“At 2pm yesterday, a Brigadier Vaughan from Military Intelligence appeared at my office. He said they had intercepted blueprints form a German agent and had good reason to believe these were from Bletchley Park. According to the Brigadier, the agent had disclosed that they were from a safe in Hut 6B.”
Minton’s face took on a grim aspect when he heard the name Vaughan. He could see what was coming and looked at Cunningham questioningly. Cunningham nodded back.
“I was stunned when I heard this,” Morgan continued. “It was obviously a very serious matter. Vaughan requested to be shown the contents of the safe so that he could check them against the blueprints he had. As I’d seen the Brigadier at GC&CS on several previous occasions, I assumed his credentials were authentic. Even so, I told him there was no way we could allow him to see the documents in the safe. But he was insistent: he said that if there was a leak then someone at BP was responsible and he couldn’t just take my word for anything – he needed to check for himself that his documents didn’t match those in the safe. I still refused, so he suggested I ring Commander Travis, to get his authorisation. I did this straightaway.”
Cunningham interrupted: “Tell Colonel Minton why you thought it was Commander Travis you were speaking to.”
Morgan looked embarrassed. “It was his office phone number I rang – who else would be answering it? I spoke first to his assistant and then to Commander Travis himself. I’ve spoken to them many times over the phone – I’m familiar with their voices. I would have sworn it was Travis I was speaking to. Anyway, whoever it was I spoke with said that it was alright to let Vaughan see the documents in the safe, but that the Brigadier should be thoroughly searched for weapons and photographic equipment, and had to be accompanied at all times. On no account was he to be left unsupervised in the presence of the documents. It all seemed perfectly genuine.”
“But things were not as they appeared?” Minton prompted.
“No. It turns out that at the same time Vaughan arrived at Hut 6B, three men turned up at the office of Travis’s assistant claiming to be GPO technicians. They said there was a fault with the phones and that they needed to check the lines to the building. It would only take a few minutes. They had a van with them. It looks as if they cut into Travis’s phone line and temporarily re-routed his calls to equipment in their van. They intercepted Morgan’s call and someone with a talent for mimicry impersonated Travis and his assistant.
“After contacting Travis’s office, I called in two MP’s and the Brigadier was searched – he was completely clean, so we opened up the safe and allowed him to view the contents. The three of us were watching him at all times, and he was thoroughly searched again before he left. He had not taken anything.”
“Tell the Colonel about the teleprinter operator.”
“As I said, our usual operator called in sick yesterday morning, so the staff pool sent over a replacement. It’s come to light that the girl they sent over never reached the hut – we think she was waylaid en route so that Vaughan’s accomplice could take her place.”
“Could you describe the woman who appeared?” Cunningham asked.
“Tall, mid twenties, fair hair done up in a bun. She had green eyes and was immaculately turned out in a Wren’s uniform. Oh yes,” he added as an afterthought, “she had a smattering of freckles.”
“Very observant, Mr Morgan. Is this the woman?” Cunningham asked, pushing over the photograph of Vivian Adair.
“Yes that’s her,” Morgan declared excitedly. “Unmistakeable. Do you know who she is then?”
“Just continue,” Cunningham said, ignoring the question.
“Shortly after the Brigadier started looking through the contents of the safe, there was a disturbance in the outer office. I sent one of the MP’s out to ascertain what had happened – a filing cabi
net had fallen over. I suspect this woman pulled it over deliberately to cause a distraction. Brigadier Vaughan must have used the opportunity to switch documents.”
“What do you mean ‘switch documents’?” Minton asked.
Unsure whether he was permitted to divulge this information, Morgan looked at Cunningham for confirmation.
“It’s alright, Morgan, you can give the Colonel the full details. I’ve already told him about the plan to supply Elliott’s people with the wrong information.”
“One of the items in the safe was an envelope containing false information about our activities at BP. It had been produced by our technical people in Hut 6B. The arrangement was that I was to hand it over to a BP worker later on yesterday afternoon – he was then to rendezvous with a member of Elliott’s gang at Bletchley Station and pass on the envelope to him. Somehow, Brigadier Vaughan must have known about this arrangement, and when we were distracted by the commotion in the outer office, he swapped the contents of the envelope for a research report that was in one of the other folders in the safe. Later in the afternoon, the envelope was passed on to the German agent at Bletchley Station as per the plan. The research report had some very sensitive information in it, and basically we just handed it straight to Elliott’s man. I have to say, it was an audacious and skilfully executed plan – you have to give them credit for it.”
“Yes, thank you Morgan. That will be all for the time being. Wait outside – we may need to speak to you again.”
Morgan left the room looking dejected. He clearly blamed himself for the disaster.
“So, Vaughan was the mole,” Minton observed when they were alone. “He was the one who passed Elliott’s people information about our operations and tipped them off that Miss Walker was still alive after she supposedly took her suicide pill.”
“So it seems. Have to say, though, I didn’t see that one coming. When you told us your suspicions that your organisation had a mole, we investigated everyone, including Vaughan, but he had an impeccable record, and a lot of people spoke up on his behalf. He’s a senior man. We were convinced the culprit was one of your interrogation staff.”
