A Spy Among Friends

by Ben MacIntyre

  In his report to MI6, Elliott described Vermehren as ‘a highly strung, cultivated, self-confident, extremely clever, logical-minded, slightly precious young German of good family’, who was ‘intensely anti-Nazi on religious grounds’. Elliott was ‘fully convinced’ of Vermehren’s sincerity.

  Vermehren flew back to Berlin and told his wife to prepare for the moment they had long discussed. Von Trott had arranged a job for her at the German embassy in Istanbul, where her cousin, Franz von Papen, was the German ambassador. This might provide some protection if the Gestapo demanded to know how husband and wife had travelled abroad together in violation of the rules. Elisabeth divided her bank accounts among her siblings, and the Vermehrens set off by rail for Istanbul. But as the train trundled through Bulgaria they learned, to their horror, that the man occupying the wagon-lit compartment next door was a Gestapo officer. They were already under surveillance. Sure enough, at the Bulgarian border, Elisabeth was arrested and taken to the German embassy in Sofia. Erich had no choice but to continue on to Istanbul alone. After a wait of two weeks, again with the help of Adam von Trott, Elisabeth wangled her way onto a courier plane to Istanbul, and was finally reunited with her husband. Leverkühn knew Frau Vermehren was on the Gestapo blacklist, and he was distinctly alarmed to find her turning up, unannounced, in his city; he instructed Vermehren to write a memo to Berlin explaining exactly how, and why, his wife had come to Istanbul.

  The Vermehrens had to move fast, and so did Elliott. Under the pretence of familiarising himself with the office paperwork, Vermehren began extracting what seemed to be the most important Abwehr files, including an organogram of ‘the complete Abwehr setup in Istanbul’ and a ‘quantity of detailed information’ about Abwehr operations in the Near and Middle East. These were photographed by Elliott, and then returned to the Abwehr office by Vermehren. Leverkühn gave his new assistant full access to the files, and Vermehren was soon passing on huge quantities of information every night. But time was running out. On 25 January, one of Elliott’s informants in the Turkish police tipped him off that they knew Vermehren was in contact with the British; Leverkühn had his own police spies, and ‘it would not be long, therefore, before the Germans got wind’ of what was afoot.

  Two days later, Erich and Elisabeth Vermehren attended a cocktail party at the Spanish embassy. As the couple left the building, they were seized by two men and bundled into a waiting car. The scene was stage-managed by Elliott to make it appear that they had been kidnapped, in order to buy time and perhaps limit reprisals against their families. The Vermehrens were driven southeast to the coast near Smyrna, transferred to a fast motor launch, which then accelerated into the Mediterranean darkness. Twenty-four hours later they were in Cairo, still wearing their party clothes.

  Paul Leverkühn reacted to the Vermehrens’ disappearance with bafflement, followed by anger, and then sheer, paralysing panic. The Abwehr chief, MI6 reported happily, was in ‘a hell of a flap’. Von Papen cut short a skiing holiday in the Bursa Mountains to take personal command of the crisis, and demanded that the Turkish police track down the fugitives. The Turks politely agreed to help, and did nothing at all. Leverkühn was ordered back to Berlin. As the Germans scoured Istanbul, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Hitler’s brutal security chief, gave orders that the Istanbul Abwehr be thoroughly investigated and purged, since more enemy spies must be lurking there. He was right. Several of Luverkühn’s colleagues now also decided to bolt. Karl Alois Kleczkowski, a forty-three-year-old journalist who had worked as a German propagandist and rumour-collector for the Abwehr, went into hiding in a safe house on the city’s outskirts. Wilhelm Hamburger, the heir to an Austrian paper fortune, was one of Leverkühn’s most trusted deputies. Posing as a flax buyer, he had spent much of the war gathering intelligence on the Middle East, while seldom leaving his table at the Park Hotel. He was also in touch with the Allied intelligence services. On 7 February he was woken by two German officers and told he was under arrest. Hamburger asked if he could call his most important Turkish agent ‘lest his disappearance provoke controversy’.

  Bizarrely, he was allowed to do so: Hamburger dialled a prearranged number, got through to his OSS contact, and uttered the following words: ‘I am going to Berlin for a week and will be back. Tell it to the Marines.’ (Slang for nonsense.) Half an hour later, with Hamburger still packing and stalling, a car pulled up outside his house. Hamburger raced out of the front door before his captors could stop him, jumped in the back seat, and was driven at high speed to the British consulate, where ‘he was given breakfast and a new identity’. The two defectors followed the Vermehrens’ secret escape route to Egypt. Packy Macfarland of OSS sent a jubilant message to Washington, reporting that Cairo was in danger of being ‘swamped by an invasion of evaders and turncoats’. Kaltenbrunner conveyed the bad news to Hitler: Vermehren’s defection had ‘gravely prejudiced the activities not only of the Abwehr-Istanbul but of our other military agencies in Turkey. The entire work of the Abwehr station has been exposed and its continuation seems impracticable.’

  Having spirited no fewer than four defectors out of Istanbul, Elliott followed them to Britain. He travelled by train to Lebanon, and then on by air via Cairo, Algiers and Casablanca, before finally arriving at Newquay, Cornwall, after an ‘exceedingly tedious and uncomfortable’ journey lasting more than a week.

  Kim Philby, ever helpful, had offered the use of his mother’s Kensington flat as a place to house the Vermehrens on their arrival in London. The defection was so secret that not even MI5 knew they were in the country. Elliott went straight to Dora Philby’s flat in Drayton Gardens, South Kensington, where he was greeted by a beaming Philby, and reunited with the Vermehrens. Over the next fortnight, Philby and Elliott put the couple through a friendly, detailed and rigorous debriefing. Vermehren had worked for the Abwehr for only a few months, yet the information he had to impart was supremely valuable: the structure of German intelligence, its operations in the Middle East, the identities of its officers and agents; Elisabeth Vermehren furnished chapter and verse on the Catholic underground resistance in Germany. The Vermehrens’ piety made them quite irritating. Whereas most spies are compelled by a variety of motives, including adventure, idealism and avarice, and can thus be manipulated, the Vermehrens served only God, which made them unpredictable and occasionally uncooperative. ‘They are so God-awful conscientious you never know what they’re going to do next,’ Elliott complained to Philby in exasperation, after sitting through another of Vermehren’s religious homilies. Vermehren was codenamed ‘Precious’, because that is what he was, in more ways than one.

  During a break in the debriefing process, Elliott at last had an opportunity to meet his parents-in-law, which might have been a confusing experience for someone less familiar with the eccentricities of the British upper class. Sir Edgar Holberton turned out to be convivial, pompous and distinctly odd. Years in the tropics had left him with a peculiar verbal habit: every so often, and quite without warning, he would say something entirely inappropriate. Elliott met Sir Edgar for lunch at his club. The older man launched into an exceptionally boring disquisition on the Chilean economy, and then suddenly observed, without breaking stride: ‘I don’t mind telling you, my boy, that I too kept a Burmese girl in Rangoon. Didn’t cost me a penny more than £20 a month.’ Conversation with Sir Edgar, Elliott reflected, was an ‘obstacle race with frequent jumps’.

  Some of the material extracted from the Vermehrens was deemed of sufficient value to be passed on to Britain’s allies. Moscow was informed that Vermehren had revealed that certain Turkish officials were passing information to the Abwehr. The Soviets protested loudly over this violation of Turkish neutrality, and Turkey immediately ceased all ‘German-Turkish intelligence exchanges regarding the USSR’. But many of the defectors’ revelations, notably those relating to the anti-communist resistance organisation in Germany, were considered far too sensitive to be shared with the Soviet Union. More than a year later, Moscow was still complai
ning that it had not seen a full account of Vermehren’s debriefing.

  The news of Vermehren’s defection was carefully leaked. The Associated Press reported: ‘The twenty-four-year-old attaché and his wife declared that they had deserted the Germans because they were disgusted with Nazi brutality. He is said to possess detailed information of the greatest value.’ MI5 was annoyed to discover that the defection was being exclusively handled by MI6. ‘If an enemy alien is to be brought here solely for the purposes of his being pumped for information he should, I think, be under our control,’ wrote Guy Liddell. This was pure professional jealousy. In securing Vermehren’s defection, MI6 trumpeted that Elliott had struck an ‘outstanding blow’ against the enemy: the information he brought was useful enough in terms of intelligence, but the symbolic impact of his defection on Germany was quite shattering.

  Hitler is said to have ‘exploded’ when told of Vermehren’s defection. For some time, he had suspected (rightly) that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and many of his fellow Abwehr officers were less than fully loyal to the Nazi project, and secretly conspiring with the enemy. Here was proof. Hitler also believed (wrongly) that Vermehren had taken the Abwehr’s secret code books with him. Anyone who had aided, or even merely known the Vermehrens, was now under suspicion. Vermehren’s father, mother, sisters and brother were all rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps. Hitler summoned Canaris for a ferocious dressing down, and told him the Abwehr was falling apart. With more bravery than tact, Canaris replied that this was ‘hardly surprising given that Germany was losing the war’. Two weeks later Hitler abolished the Abwehr, and created a new, over-arching intelligence service under Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst. Canaris was shuffled into a meaningless job, placed under effective house arrest and finally, following the failure of the July Plot in 1944, executed. The Abwehr might have been corrupt, inefficient and partly disloyal, but it was, at least, a functioning worldwide intelligence service. The defections set off a chain reaction that destroyed it utterly, just three months before D-Day. In the words of the historian Michael Howard, German intelligence was ‘thrown into a state of confusion just at the moment when its efficient functioning was vital to the survival of the Third Reich’.

  *

  Nicholas Elliott was now the darling of MI6. An internal assessment concluded that he had handled the case with ‘consummate skill and sympathy, but with just the necessary touch of firmness’. Some of the glory rubbed off on Philby, who had helped orchestrate the defections from afar, and then debriefed the Vermehrens in his mother’s flat. The operation, it seemed, had ended in complete triumph. Elliott would ‘dine out’ on this success for a very long time, but the wining and dining began immediately, in celebration of Elliott’s ‘dazzling coup’.

  It was through Philby that Elliott met the gaunt but convivial young American, James Jesus Angleton. The three intelligence officers became firm friends, and spent a good deal of time in each other’s company, from which Elliott emerged ‘formidably impressed both by Jim’s intellect and his personality, as well as by his enjoyment and capacity for food and drink’. Angleton had taken to wearing a Homburg, like Philby, and he peered out from underneath it through heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Beneath the rather sinister mystique was a very likeable man,’ Elliott recorded, ‘with a formidable personality and breadth of vision.’ Angleton and Elliott had much in common: fierce ambition, daunting fathers and, of course, a shared admiration for Kim Philby.

  Before heading back to Istanbul, Elliott was summoned to MI6 headquarters by the head of security, a former soldier newly appointed to oversee vetting and secrecy procedures within the diplomatic service and MI6. This was an issue that had never been raised before with Elliott, who was almost pathologically discreet. ‘At that time, secrets were secrets,’ he wrote. But he now wondered if he had let his guard down in some way, or spilled some information to the wrong person. He need not have worried. The ensuing conversation, which he wrote down afterwards, said a great deal about the organisation of which Elliott was now a most valued part:

  Security officer: ‘Sit down, I’d like to have a frank talk with you.’

  Nicholas Elliott: ‘As you wish colonel.’

  Officer: ‘Does your wife know what you do?’

  Elliott: ‘Yes.’

  Officer: ‘How did that come about?’

  Elliott: ‘She was my secretary for two years and I think the penny must have dropped.’

  Officer: ‘Quite so. What about your mother?’

  Elliott: ‘She thinks I’m in something called SIS, which she believes stands for the Secret Intelligence Service.’

  Officer: ‘Good God! How did she come to know that?’

  Elliott: ‘A member of the War Cabinet told her at a cocktail party.’

  Officer: ‘Then what about your father?’

  Elliott: ‘He thinks I’m a spy.’

  Officer: ‘Why should he think you’re a spy?’

  Elliott: ‘Because the Chief told him in the bar at White’s.’

  And that, once again, was that.

  Elliott and Philby existed within the inner circle of Britain’s ruling class, where mutual trust was so absolute and unquestioned that there was no need for elaborate security precautions. They were all part of the same family. ‘For centuries the Office had operated on trust,’ said George Carey Foster, the Foreign Office security officer. ‘In that family atmosphere they couldn’t conceive that there was a wrong ’un among them.’ Elliott trusted his wife to keep a secret; Elliott’s employer trusted his father to keep a secret; and Elliott trusted his friend Philby to keep his secrets, never suspecting that those secrets were now being put to murderous use.

  The information passed on by the Vermehrens included a detailed description ‘of all their contacts in the Catholic underground in Germany, and the role they could play in a post-war democratic and Christian Germany’. This was intelligence of the greatest value, since it listed the names, addresses and occupations of all those who, like the Vermehrens, opposed Hitler but wished to prevent a communist takeover of their country – the ‘leading Catholic activists who could be instrumental in the post-war period in helping the Allies establish an anti-communist government in Germany’. For obvious reasons, with the Red Army poised to march into Germany from the East, MI6 did not pass this list on to Moscow.

  But Philby did.

  After the war, Allied officers went in search of the anti-communist activists identified by the Vermehrens, people who ‘could have formed the backbone of a Conservative Christian post-war German political leadership’. They found none of them: ‘All had been deported or liquidated.’ The final months of the war were bloody and chaotic: Nazi loyalists killed some 5,000 people in the wake of the July Plot, including many in the Catholic resistance. It was not until years later that MI5 worked out what had really happened: Philby had passed the list to his Soviet controller, who had passed it to Moscow Centre, which had sent in the killers with a readymade shopping-list of influential ideological opponents to be eliminated as Stalin’s armies advanced. ‘Because Moscow had decided to eliminate all non-communist opposition in Germany,’ writes Phillip Knightley, ‘these Catholics had been shot.’

  No one knows how many died as a consequence of Philby’s actions, because MI5 and MI6 have never released Vermehren’s list. In his diary, Liddell of MI5 noted reports that Soviet forces were liquidating opposition in East Germany in the ‘drive against the Catholic Church, which the Russians recognise as the most powerful international force in opposition to communism’. Years later, Philby observed: ‘I was responsible for the deaths of a considerable number of Germans.’ It was assumed he was referring to Nazis, but among his victims were also an unknown number of German anti-Nazis, who perished because they did not share Philby’s politics. Any lingering doubts Moscow may have had about Philby seem to have evaporated at this moment.

  The Vermehrens believed they were alerting the Allies to the men and women who might save Germany from communism;
unwittingly, they were handing them over to Moscow. Through Philby’s betrayal, Elliott’s greatest triumph was a secret, sordid tragedy.

  See Notes on Chapter 6

  7

  The Soviet Defector

  D-Day was approaching, the Allies were advancing and Kim Philby, Nick Elliott and their OSS colleague Jim Angleton, like so many others who had come of age in war, began to wonder what they would do with their lives when it was over. Each was determined to remain in the intelligence game, and make a career of it; each had found success in the arcane art of espionage, and all three were destined for rapid promotion, two through merit, and one by an office putsch.

  As the Nazi threat receded, the fear of Soviet espionage revived. Before the war, MI5 and MI6 had expended considerable energy, resources and anxiety on combating the communist menace, both inside and outside Britain. But the overwhelming challenge of the war with Germany, and the alliance with Stalin, had diverted attention from Moscow’s covert activities. By 1944 the Soviet espionage threat was coming back into sharp focus. ‘We’ve been penetrated by the communists,’ Sir Stewart Menzies told Angleton, ‘and they’re on the inside, but we don’t know exactly how.’ Waking up to the threat of communism from within, the chiefs of British intelligence were increasingly aware that new weapons, and a restructured service, would be needed to take on ‘the next enemy’, the Soviet Union. The battle lines of the Cold War were being drawn.