First edition

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., GARDEN CITY, N. Y., 1949

Printed in the United States at The Country Life Press, Garden City, N. Y.

ENTRANCE TO ESPIONAGE

It was a perfectly ordinary front door. Its shining brass knocker, its neat but slightly faded green paint did not distinguish it from thousands of others of its kind. But that door was my entrance to espionage. Beyond that door lay the dim passageway leading through a twilight labyrinth of international intrigue. Once past that door, my feet were set on the road which led me to Germany, to Switzerland and a Swiss jail, beyond the Iron Curtain to Moscow, and back again to Berlin and freedom. When the door closed behind me there began a ten-year episode which was to end with my being condemned as a spy by the courts of one country and sentenced to death by the decrees of another.

It was an autumn day in October 1938. The leaves were still on the trees lining that pleasant road in St. John's Wood, and there was still something of summer in the air as I walked toward the house with the green door – the door of the flat where I was to be recruited into the Russian Secret Service.

As a result of my call I was for three vital years of the war a member and, to a large extent, controller of the Russian spy net in Switzerland which was working against Germany. The information passed to Moscow over my secret transmitter affected the course of the war at one of its crucial stages. I was a key link in a network whose lines stretched into the heart of the German high command itself; and it was I who sent back much of the information which enabled the Russians to make their successful stand before Moscow.

This story is entirely factual; every incident and every character is true and genuine. The result may prove disillusioning to those who believe that every brunette is a spy and every blonde a virtuous woman in distress. Actually, of course, the life of a spy is often extremely dull and prosaic. It is the ambition of the good spy to be as inconspicuous and ordinary as possible. Anything out of the ordinary is liable to attract attention or, worse still, arouse suspicion. A suspected spy is well on the way to being an arrested spy, so it can be understood why a spy has a liking for the cloak of mediocrity.

No one trained solely on spy fiction would recognize a spy. It would be possible to parade the whole of the Swiss network before such a man and he would not give them a second glance. What was unusual in wartime Switzerland about a respectable publisher, a well-known military commentator, and an embusque Englishman? Yet these three were the essential core of the Russian spy net against Germany. Nowadays, in peacetime England, the businessman from Canada, the little tobacconist round the corner, or the hearty commercial traveller on the eight-fifteen are far more likely to be Russian spies than any dumb blonde or sinister baron met in Grand Hotel.

It would be equally wrong to regard every Communist as a paid and trained member of the Russian Secret Service. Yet it would be highly injudicious to whisper the secrets of the atom bomb into the ear of a pretty Party member at a cocktail party. She would probably pass the information on as a matter of Party discipline, but she would not be a Russian spy. Spies will have no obvious links with the Communist Party. If they ever were Communists, you will find that they dropped out some time ago – at the time of their recruitment. If this seems unbelievable, it is only necessary to look at the various Soviet agents mentioned in this book or in the report of the Canadian spy case. On the face of it they are, or were, nearly all highly respectable members of society with at most only vague leftish leanings. The danger of the avowed Communist lies not in his espionage activities but in his divided loyalty. He is perfectly prepared to be recruited as an agent or to pass on any information which he thinks the Party should know.

So much for the characteristics, or rather lack of characteristics, of a spy. As regards the work, it is not so full of escapes and hurried journeys as fiction would lead one to imagine. The hours are long, much of the work is monotonous, and the pay is not excessive considering the risks. The only excitement a spy is likely to have is his last, when he is finally run to earth. An emotion similar to that experienced by the fox. We are assured that the fox really likes being hunted. I have been hunted; and though the sensation is certainly acute, I can hardly describe it as pleasant and as a fellow sufferer my sympathies are entirely with the fox.

I have attempted to describe the workings of a Soviet spy ring and to indicate the dangers and weaknesses of the Soviet Espionage Service. It would have been easy to embellish the whole thing and produce a sensational document, but I have adhered to the truth. Where the laws of libel permit, and where I knew them, I have used real names. The press cuttings regarding my trial provide the only written evidence I have of the truth of the narrative. If any reader has an entree to the Swiss police archives he will find there an admirable dossier containing much regarding the activities of our organisation. Another easier proof could be provided if I cared to take a journey to Germany and walk into the Soviet Zone. This would perhaps provide only negative evidence, since I would never be heard of again, and it is a step I am reluctant to take at the moment. The condemned criminal seldom prefers to adjust the noose himself.

Condemned I certainly am. When I walked out of the Soviet Zone and gave up my career as a Russian spy I was as surely condemned to death by the Russians as any criminal by a black-capped judge and through the due processes of law. The Soviet system knows only one penalty for failure or treachery – death. My colleague Rado failed and is dead. I betrayed and as a result am equally condemned; and the sentence would be executed without mercy or delay were I ever to fall into Russian hands. History has shown the fate of other "traitors," like Krivitsky and Trotsky, who managed to get out and live at liberty for some time. A Russian wall at dawn or the death camps of the N.K.V.D. have seen many who did not achieve even that degree of freedom.

But to return to that flat in St. John's Wood. I pressed the bell and walked in.

SO EASILY YOU

"You will proceed to Geneva. There you will be contacted and further instructions will be given you." The voice of my vis-a-vis was quiet and matter-of-fact; and the whole atmosphere of the flat was one of complete middle-class respectability. Nothing could have been more incongruous than the contrast between this epitome of bourgeois smugness and the work that was transacted in its midst. Those seventeen words recruited me into the Red Army Intelligence. That I did not know at the time; nor did I even know exactly what I was expected to do. Indeed, looking round at the room, at those chintz-covered armchairs, those suburban lace curtains, it would have been more appropriate to imagine that I was being engaged as a Cook's courier. But before dealing with the events which succeeded my recruitment, a little background must be given. This will show the stages in the journey which led me to that London flat.

A psychoanalyst would be hard put to find anything in my early life which would indicate that one day I should be running a portion of a Soviet network. My upbringing was as ordinary as that of any child of middle-class parentage brought up between the wars. On leaving school I tried my hand at many jobs, ranging from managing a small business to running a garage, but never found anything which satisfied me for any length of time. I moved from job to job hoping that I would one day find something which suited me.

It is difficult for anyone, including myself, to look back dispassionately and objectively at those times and to try to analyse the feelings one had and the motives for one's actions. It was not really political sense or political education which shaped my decisions, leading me from the industrial Midlands to Switzerland, to post-war Russia, and ultimately back to England again. From a restless sales manager to a Russian spy is a difficult game of consequences and I can only hope that these pages will explain why and how, and the subsequent metamorphosis from a spy into a gentleman of leisure with much time to reflect and little to do.

However, it was almost inevitable that my early discontent and restlessness and desire for something new, preferably exciting, would lead me toward the Communist Party. While still in business I had attended Communist Party discussion groups and gradually was led to believe that international Communism was the panacea for all the world's ills. Others have travelled the same road - as the Royal Commission's report on the Canadian spy case shows - but at the time I had no idea as to where the road would end, and indeed, in all fairness to my fellow members, neither had they.

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War crystallised my somewhat inchoate thoughts on the whole matter. Until that time I had been convinced that something was wrong but had found precise analysis difficult. The Civil

War in Spain seemed to show everything up in neat black and white, and I was convinced that the Rebels were inspired and supported by the German-Italian Fascists with the idea of their gaining control first of the peninsula and ultimately of Europe and the entire world, with the resultant suppression of freedom and democratic thought. Ranged against these enemies of democracy were the Spanish Republican government, almost alone, with the Western democracies standing by, busily tying their own hands in the red tape of non-intervention. Rallying to their aid were only the freedom-loving individuals of the world and the Soviet Union. It all seemed as simple as that. I did not realise then that the Soviet Union, just as much as Germany and Italy, was using Spain as the European Salisbury Plain for trying out their own war machines, or that the freedom-loving individuals were to sacrifice their lives in thousands for some propagandist's whim or to gain a political battle desired by the politicos in Barcelona or some commissar from the Kremlin.

In those days Spanish affairs divided themselves into right and wrong for me - as indeed I think they did for everyone. It was the bounden duty of anyone who valued democracy to do his best to support the existing government in Spain by whatever means he could. I had no other means than my two hands, and I was prepared to use them for the purpose. Many others felt the same way and travelled by the same road. Many did not return; they died in the dusty trenches round Madrid and Fuentes de Ebro.

Not till many years later was I told in Moscow that it had not been in the interests of the Soviet Union for the Republicans to win the Civil War. The Soviet policy was to provide only such a dribble of arms and ammunition as would keep the Republican forces in the field while allowing the Germans and Italians to install themselves firmly in the peninsula. The Russian idea was that any power which had a predominant influence in Spain was automatically the enemy of Great Britain, and the Russians desired to prevent any possible alliance between Britain and the Rome-Berlin Axis; which alliance the crystal-gazers in the Kremlin had deemed possible and which they regarded as fatal to Russian interests. This was Realpolitik with a vengeance but after years of working for the Russians I was not surprised when it was told to me. I think that had I been told this when in Spain I would have rejected it as so many Fascist lies. My comrades fell believing that they were fighting for freedom. In some ways their lot was enviable.

This preamble may seem dull, but so many books have been written about what a spy does and so few as to how he came to do it: and fewer still as to why he ever decided to become a spy. Both the operations of a spy and the method of his recruitment are matters which can be laid down in textbooks, whether English, German, or Russian. They are merely technical methods. The reasons for becoming a spy may range from greed through fear to patriotism or idealism, depending on whether the individual believes in a country or a cause. The average German spy who came to this country during the war was impelled by either greed or fear – fear of reprisals on his family – or both. The mercenary in any profession is not an attractive character – not even in espionage – and my German opposite numbers in the last war do not seem to have been actuated by any but the most mercenary of motives in most cases. I think I can say, speaking for myself and my colleagues, that the mercenary motive was subsidiary. Patriotism was obviously not applicable when one had English, German, Hungarian, and Swiss subjects all working for the same cause. Nor can it be said that in every case idealism was the primary cause. It was certainly not so in my case, since it was some time before I realised for whom I was working. Many conversations that I have had since with others who were "in the net" have shown that they, too, at first had little if any idea of the identity of their masters- save that their work was for the Communist ideal as a whole, which is, after all, the vaguest sort of master to have.

In my case I was recruited out of the dark into the dark- a sort of blind catch-as-catch-can- and went into the arena of international espionage with my eyes open, but under a black bandage. I knew that I was a spy and against whom I was supposed to be spying, but at first had no idea of the why and wherefore or of the directing hand. I wonder how many of my colleagues on the other side of the fence, who died in the early morning at Wandsworth Gaol, were in a similar position and died wondering.

IT ALL BEGAN IN SPAIN

It all really began in Spain. On a cold wet night in December 1936, I embarked for France. Most of my fellow volunteers were Party members, and most of them are dead. I myself, though not a Party member, had been vouched for by two responsible members of the Party, and as such departed to fight for my clear-cut ideals; to fight to prevent Fascism from overrunning Europe.

The journey into Spain was uneventful. We made our rendezvous in Paris and were incorporated in a larger body of volunteers already collected there, and then sent on into Catalonia with responsible Party members as bear leaders. In Albacete, which was the headquarters of the International Brigade, we were all sorted out and I was posted to the nearby village of Madriguerras, where a British battalion was being formed.

Too many books have been written about the Spanish Civil War for me to say more than is necessary to my story. Too many of my comrades have died to make it easy for me to write about it at all. It was for me merely a halting place on my way. The fact that I did not realise that it was only a halting place and regarded it as the be-all and end-all of my existence at the time is neither here nor there. For me the war was a struggle where my friends fought and died. For others it was merely a testing ground and a suitable place for talent spotting.

The man in charge of the formation of the battalion was Wilfred Macartney. The political commissar was Douglas Springhall, who played a more vital part in my life later, when he recruited me for the Red Army Intelligence. Battalions were formed approximately on language groups and in our battalion we had British and dominion troops and a sprinkling of Swedes whose only other language was English. We even had an Ethiopian who claimed that he was the son of Ras Imru, one of the Negus' chieftains. After the preliminary flurry, however, it was discovered that he was merely a Lascar sailor who had picked up his English on British ships, and he then faded out of the propaganda limelight. Despite the occasional bad egg that is as inevitably attracted toward a cause where there is a possibility of loot as a fly is to honey, the morale of the battalion was high. Whatever were the motives of the Republican equivalents of brass hats, the rank and file fought magnificently. The casualty lists are sufficient evidence of this; almost half of the thousand-odd British who served with the International Brigade were killed.

I remember Professor J. B. S. Haldane, when for a short period he served with the brigade as a private soldier, standing in a trench, brandishing a tiny snub-nosed revolver, and shouting defiance at the advancing Franco infantry. Luckily for science, we managed to repel the Rebel attack and the professor was spared for his further contributions to world knowledge.

I was posted as battalion transport officer. Ranks at that time bore little relation to fact. I was not "politically reliable" and as such ranked lower in the political hierarchy than the fellow comrade who had sold the Daily Worker with distinction in North Shields. Though I never achieved commissioned rank, I performed all the duties for my battalion which would have been carried out in the British Army by a transport officer. The work was as varied as it was dangerous, ranging from the prosaic bringing up of the rations to the evacuation from an encircled town of the Republican alcalde with the entire civic funds. In this case the alcalde abandoned us first and fell promptly into the hands of skirmishing Moorish cavalry. The funds, however, lingered for days in the boot of the car, as we had rashly supposed that the mayor had been evacuating his wardrobe rather than his revenue. It was on such a trip, with Franco planes machine-gunning the road, that, bundling without dignity into a nearby shell hole, I was stepped softly on by Slater, then on the Planning Staff, who was similarly hurrying for shelter from the back seat of my car. He curled himself gracefully down on top of me with an exquisitely polite "Excuse me" which I have always treasured as a fine example of courtesy under difficulties.

There were not unnaturally preliminary teething pains in the battalion. One of these resulted in the Irish contingent's transferring in a body to the American Lincoln Battalion; they refused to serve under Macartney because he had been an officer in the Black and Tans in Ireland after World War I. Eventually the British Battalion was included in the 6th International Brigade, which for the greater part of the Civil War formed part of the 11th Division of the Republican Army.

This division was commanded by a Russian-trained General "Walter, " who recently became Minister for War in the Polish government. By using his Christian name he was following the example of his Soviet colleagues, who preferred to veil their identities behind a noncommittal first name. I myself came into close touch with only one Red Army officer while in Spain; this was a certain "Max" who, despite his junior rank of captain and his function as "observer, " wielded great authority. He came into my life again later when his endorsement of my suitability for work for the Red Army Intelligence helped to establish me in the confidence of the Russian D. M. I.

As an infantry soldier the strategy and politics of the war naturally passed me by. We, fighting in the line, knew little or nothing of Barcelona and Valencia politics and intrigues, and less still of their international ramifications. We only knew that we fought, always ill equipped and frequently under-armed, against an enemy who appeared to be furnished with a multiplicity of modern weapons. Our task was not made easier by the frequent "purges" of our officers which took place. After every reverse we could be certain that one or more of our colleagues would vanish- failure and "Trotskyist inclinations" being almost synonymous. Attacks did fail. This is hardly surprising when an army, often with only five live rounds a day to fire off, is thrown against a well- equipped force with modern weapons and stiffened with foreign troops. Not all our failures, however, can be attributed either to the Republican General Staff or to the lack of equipment. The "Moscow Operation" of Fuentes de Ebro will long be remembered by those who were lucky enough to survive it.

It appeared that Moscow had evolved a new tank theory which they wished tried out, not in mock combat but in battle conditions, which were found, conveniently and economically, in Spain. (I have no more bitterness toward the Russians for this technique than I have toward the Germans and the Italians, who did exactly the same thing. The only difference is that the Germans were publicly arraigned for it at Nuremberg. ) The idea was to throw some forty tanks against the enemy during the siesta. These tanks were to break through the infantry front line and push straight forward to the artillery and, having disposed of the latter, turn back and take the infantry in the rear. The tanks were brand-new and the crews were Germans newly trained in a Russian tank school. It was in vain that our chief of staff, Malcolm Dunbar, pointed out that the rebel position had been heavily plastered with artillery fire, with the result that the irrigation ditches had been broken and the place was a quagmire. Moscow orders were orders, and the attack went in. Some twelve out of the forty tanks returned; the majority of the rest were captured intact by the enemy. I trust that the lesson was instructive to the Russian observers. It was certainly so to the surviving tank crews, who drove their Russian commander back to the base area never to be seen again.

This is, however, all past history, and the average person nowadays has forgotten the Civil War or remembers it merely as a curtain raiser to the second Great War. Of course it was such, and my comrades in their unmarked graves round Teruel were merely the first skirmishers in the great encounter to come.

After two years' continual service with the International Brigade, I was sent back on leave to England in September 1938 to be present at the Communist Party Congress at Birmingham. The political commissariat at the brigade must have regarded me with some favour to allow me, a non-Party member, to be selected to return. My job as transport officer made me less vulnerable to accusations as a "Trotskyist" and my personal friendship with my own particular commissar may have helped. I left the brigade, decimated by losses and beginning to be demoralised by "purges" never to return.

The original intention had been that I should return to Spain- though not as a fighting member of the I. B. The Party had decided that I was a suitable person to run a Red Cross truck which was to go to Spain from England at regular intervals, carrying medical supplies and comforts. This part of the assignment was highly respectable. The organisation which ran the service was non-Communist and the funds were raised by public subscription. This was to be only my "cover." My real job was to have been as a courier between King Street (the headquarters, then as now, of the British Communist Party) and the Communist command of the British Battalion of the brigade. I was also to have acted as a passeur for unauthorised persons who wished to enter Spain (it will be remembered that by this time non-intervention was in full swing and frontier control had been tightened up) and as a smuggler of unauthorised goods. I was also to ensure that the lion's share of the goods in my truck went to the politically enlightened. This job, however, fell through.

To this day I do not know whether it in fact ever existed or whether it was merely put up to me to see my reactions to employment which was, to say the least, not quite what it seemed and definitely illegal Party work. Whether the offer was genuine or not does not really matter. The job was stillborn and that particular move in the undercover game of chess was over. It was Red's turn to move again and another pawn was put out temptingly. I accepted the move and the real game began.

After the Congress in Birmingham and a few days' leave, I returned to London and reported to King Street to discuss the Red Cross job. I was there met by Fred Copeman, who told me that the whole project had fallen through. Fred was an old friend, as he had been at one time commander of the British Battalion of the I. B. He invited me to his flat in Lewisham for a meal with him and his wife. After supper the next move was made.

"Springhall has been asked to recommend someone for an assignment. We have discussed various people and think that you might fit the bill. I know nothing about the assignment save that it will be abroad and will be very dangerous. "

I think that was all Fred Copeman did in fact know. He was in this case merely acting as the mouthpiece for Springhall. Though the latter remained in the background, his role as talent spotter and recruiter was clear. I always- and events have so far not proved me wrong-regarded him as the contact man for the Red Army in the British Communist Party. Gossip in Spain went so far as to state that he had held Red Army rank in his time. As far as his part in my recruitment went, I know no more than I have already stated. As any reader of the newspapers will remember, Springhall was later tried and convicted for a similar offence during the war. Fred Copeman's part in these preliminary flirtations was obscure. He was, I believe, merely on the fringe of the Soviet net and was used by Springhall and the others as an innocent cover for their contact work. Certainly my subsequent questioning of him seemed to show that he was as much in the dark as I was. Later, of course, Cope- man split with the Party and joined the Oxford Group.

Despite the vagueness of the offer I jumped at it. Looking back on the whole affair in cold blood, it is a little difficult to understand why I should have accepted such an assignment with no notion that I was working for or for what purpose. If someone had told me at the time that after six months at the work I should still have no idea as to the identity of my masters, I should have laughed at them. But such is in fact the case, and I think that many of those who were on the fringes of, for example, the Canadian case must have found themselves in a similar predicament.

However, I soon realised that the work for which I was destined was illegal, and very soon afterwards it became clear to me that I was ultimately intended for espionage work. It was soon apparent that I could not be working for the British Communist Party. I thought that perhaps I was working for the German Communist Party (K. P. D. ) or perhaps for the Comintern (as regards the inner workings of the latter I knew little more than did the average reader of the papers). But here I am slightly outrunning events. I may ultimately have been a good spy, but as regards my early career I was certainly an innocent abroad.

After my acceptance of the offer Copeman told me to go to an address in St. John's Wood. There I went one fine October morning and duly found myself inside the flat with the green door.

I have already related the instructions that I received there. They were not illuminating, and I learned no thin, much more from the respectable housewife with a slight foreign accent who interviewed me. Her name I never knew for certain, though I have my own ideas on the subject. She was certainly friendly with, if not actually related to, my contact and spy master, or rather spy mistress, in Switzerland. Our business was done with briskness and despatch. I do not suppose that I was in the house more than ten minutes. I was dealt with by the lady of the house as briskly and impersonally as she would have engaged a housemaid.

Apart from the directions as to where I was to go, I also received a few further instructions to enable me to make contact with the person who was to deal with me in the future. I was to present myself outside the General Post Office in Geneva. (A favourite rendezvous, as a G. P. O. is easily found and provides an admirable excuse for loitering. ) I was to be wearing a white scarf and to be holding in my right hand a leather belt. As the clock struck noon I would be approached by a woman carrying a string shopping bag containing a green parcel, and holding an orange in her hand. One would have though: that this would have been sufficient to enable anyone to contact anyone, even an unknown, in the middle of a Swiss street. But to avoid any possibility of error the whole rendezvous was made even more precise. The woman would ask me, in English, where I had bought the belt; and I was to reply that I had bought it in an ironmonger's shop in Paris. Then I was to ask her where I could buy an orange like hers, and she was to say that I could have hers for an English penny. Hardly sparkling dialogue, but sufficient to ensure that the meeting was foolproof and an example of the usual thoroughness of my employers. For a similar type of rendezvous I refer the reader to the details of the contact which Professor Nunn May was to make with an unknown outside the British Museum. The technique and indeed the choice of locale are exactly parallel.

I left this snug little St. John's Wood spy nest in some confusion of mind. I had no objection to the illegality and obviously clandestine nature of the mission which I had accepted. Looking back, I do not think that espionage even entered my head at the time. The average person does not think immediately of a spy mission when he is offered a job, even when it is hedged round with such Oppenheim secrecy as this one was. Nowadays I suppose that one would merely think one had fallen in with a particularly well-organised gang of black marketers. At that time, if I did think, I probably imagined that I had been cast for some Scarlet Pimpernel-like role of rescuing prisoners from Dachau. In fact I do. not believe that I thought at all. I was pleased enough to be offered a job, and satisfied that since it came from the Party it would not clash with my political opinions.

It was as neat a piece of recruiting as I met throughout my career with the Russians. Admittedly I was a small fish and an easy one to hook and land at that; but the technique showed considerable experience. First the offer of the job which, though illegal, was in fact straight Party work; then the change of assignment to something quite unknown but obviously even more illegal. The fish was well hooked and my employers could be certain that if I accepted a shot in the dark such as this Geneva appointment must appear to a tyro, they could be equally- sure that I would not balk at anything further. Even if I did, what had they to lose? I could have gone round to Scotland Yard with my story, and they would be hardly a pennyworth the wiser. All I could have told them was an address in St. John's Wood (which I afterward checked and found to be one of impeccable, if foreign, respectability) and a confused story of a complicated rendezvous which in all probability they would have put down to the maunderings of an unbalanced individual with spy mania. It is certain that, had I blown the gaff, the rendezvous would have been cancelled and any special branch officer who had undertaken the long and tedious journey to Geneva would not have been rewarded by the sight of a woman laden with an orange.

Confusion of mind or no confusion of mind, I resolved to go on with the whole affair, and returned home to collect my kit and make the necessary arrangements for a visit to Switzerland. I had not much time, as the date of the rendezvous was only a few days ahead. Luckily in those days travel was easy and I soon found myself on the boat crossing the Channel. My last crossing had been on an equally clandestine mission- to fight for what 1 thought was freedom. Then I had my comrades with me. This time I was alone and moving into the dark.

A hardened spy regards a rendezvous with his contact as a matter of routine. If the contact is successful, so much the better. If it fails, then there are varieties of reasons which may have occasioned the failure, only a few of which may affect the personal safety or comfort of the spy himself. The human character is infinitely adaptable, and after a short time I regarded clandestine meetings and undercover assignments as the normal course of duty. It would be idle to pretend, however, that I went to this, my first assignment, with complete sangfroid. My attitude of mind was similar to that of the debutante at her first dance: extreme nervousness with a lively anticipation of pleasure and excitement to come.

Geneva is not an exciting town. The centre for international espionage in two wars, it singularly fails to come up to expectations. Swiss architecture, admirable as it may be, does not supply that Puritanical atmosphere of the dark alley and the shuttered casement which should go with the meeting of agents. It may be for this reason that it is such a favourite for clandestine encounters. A meeting of the Inquisition with Torquemada in the chair would there take on the semblance of normality of a parochial council. It must be remembered also that at that time the dove of League peace was still hovering over the town. Slightly bedraggled after Munich, she was still surrounded with an aura of international amity, as bogus, alas, as my role of tourist. It would be difficult to have found a more cynical rendezvous for a spy meeting. Nor is it really relevant that I was only one of many members of varied and various spy rings who were hurrying there for meetings of varying degrees of secrecy and respectability.

Remaining true to my role as a tourist, I stayed at a small hotel near the station and on the appointed day went to the post office for the rendezvous, armed with the necessary paraphernalia for my contact. Anyone who has ever attempted to pick someone up under the clock at Charing Cross station, with the usual marks of identification dear to the writers of notices in the personals column of the Times, can imagine my feelings. It seemed that all the hausfraus of Geneva had conceived the happy idea of supplying their loved ones with a nice orange for their midday meal and all Geneva wrapping paper appeared green. All the women looked equally respectable and equally indifferent. Holding my leather strap, I felt a self-conscious fool and an ass, at best self-doomed to embarrassment and at worst to a Swiss charge of accosting.

The local clocks announced, rather smugly to my heated imagination, that noon had arrived, and not one of the crowd swirling past the steps had even vouchsafed me a glance. Then I noticed her. Punctuality may be the politeness of princes but it is certainly a perquisite of Soviet spies. Slim, with a good figure and even better legs, her black hair demurely dressed, she stood out from the Swiss crowd. In her early thirties, she might have been the wife of a minor French consular official. Her bag contained a green parcel and she held an orange.

"Excuse me, but where did you buy that belt?"

Contact had been established.

AN INNOCENT ABROAD

Seldom if ever can a spy have gone on a mission with so few technical qualifications and knowledge as I. Speaking only inferior French, a little kitchen Spanish, and elementary German, I was not exactly qualified for work on the Continent. Knowing nothing of wireless or other secret means of communication, I was equally ill equipped to communicate any information that I might acquire; and I laboured under the additional handicap of not knowing for whom I was working. My only qualifications were my native common sense, a capacity to judge a position and sum up a situation correctly and succinctly, and, most important in Russian eyes, a good political background. That I ended my career as a spy speaking fluent French and passable German, an efficient wireless operator capable of building my own set, and with a working knowledge of microphotography and the simpler secret inks, speaks, I think, more highly for my adaptability than for the efficiency of the Russian Intelligence Service. In obtaining these qualifications I received no help and little encouragement from my masters. No one could have been more of an innocent in espionage than I was at first, and the fact that I lasted was more a matter of personal good luck than good judgment by the Russians. It must be remembered, however, that I was a "new boy" recruited ad hoc and for a network still in embryo. Their other networks were longer established and better installed. I should know, as in the end I was running one.

After having established contact, my new acquaintance and I adjourned prosaically for coffee. A pleasant person and an amusing companion, my first espionage contact was not as frightening as I had expected. She told me that she was unfortunately not allowed to reveal her name nor to tell me for whom I would be working- for the moment. I could call her Sonia. She spoke English with a slight foreign accent and was, I should judge, a Russian or a Pole- certainly a Slav. When I was finally established in the network I learnt her name. She was Maria Schultz and had had a long career as a Red agent. She and her husband, Alfred Schultz, had worked for the Red Army in Poland and the Far East. Her husband was, I gathered, still in the Far East and I believe at that time was under arrest by the Chinese for espionage activities. She was now starting up a network in Switzerland for work against Germany, and I was one of the first of her recruits. But all this I learnt later, and the only new knowledge that I had acquired in the cafe was her cover name- which for ease and clarity I shall continue to use throughout the narrative.

Sonia and I continued to meet for several days at various public rendezvous in Geneva, but I learnt little more of any interest. All I was told was that it had been decided that I was to go to Munich. There I was to install myself as a tourist and learn the language, make as many friends as possible, and keep my eyes open. Not very onerous or indeed explicit instructions, but after the Spanish front line it was a relief to know that the task described to me in London as "difficult and dangerous" was to be, at any rate for a start, so easy and pleasant. Sonia gave me two thousand Swiss francs for my expenses in Munich and fixed up a rendezvous in three months' time. This time it was to be in Lausanne but at the same locale, the General Post Office, and a series of hours and days were fixed in case anything went wrong.

It was with a light heart that I returned to England to collect my kit and get my visa. Early in November I arrived in Munich.

Munich at that time was a pleasant place. At least for an innocent abroad with enough pocket money and little to do save prepare political reports on Germany and for the rest of the time enjoy myself. I managed to pick up a fair circle of acquaintances and the only brainwork I attempted was to learn German- which I was taught by a local member of the S. S. who lived in the same pension. Time passed swiftly and pleasantly enough till my next rendezvous with Sonia in February.

The only happening of even remote interest during my first Munich stay was that I lit by accident on Hitler's Stammtisch. Looking one day for a cheap place to lunch, I happened on the Osteria Bavaria and, having settled down to the good l/6d set lunch, I noticed a flurry at the door and Hitler strode in accompanied by his adjutant Bruecker, his photographer and toady Hoffmann, and two A. D. C. s. I discovered that the proprietor of the restaurant had been a fellow comrade during the first war; Hider had lunched there on and off for over fifteen years and even now that he had reached power he ate there whenever he was in Munich. This I confirmed, as I made a habit of lunching there and saw him sometimes as often as three times a week. I mention this triviality as it was to have somewhat surprising consequences later.

My second contact with Sonia went off as smoothly as the first, and this time we had several quite long and moderately enlightening talks. It was during this visit that I learnt for the first time that my masters were the Red Army Intelligence. Sonia told me that she was engaged in setting up a new network for them in Switzerland and that my credentials had been referred back to the Russian D. M. I., who had made the necessary checkups, and that I was now on the strength as a "collaborator" at a salary of U. S. $150 a month and all reasonable expenses.

It is perhaps worth noting in passing that all Russian spy payments and accounts are made and calculated in United States dollars. The Red Army net had the strongest objections to dealing in any other sort of currency and went to endless trouble to secure dollars for payment.

Sonia said that in normal times I would have been sent to a special school in Moscow for at least year 011 recruitment. There I would have been taught all the tricks of the trade such as W/T transmission, micro-photography, secret inks, sabotage instruction, etc. As it was thought that an international crisis was imminent. Moscow had decided to dispense with this in my case and 1 was to return to Germany at once and study all these and kindred subjects on my own account.

Sonia gave me a cover name, Jim, and some idea of the elements of the game, especially in the matter of contacting my superiors or others in case of emergency. If I lost contact with her I was to attempt to get into touch with the M. I. Directorate in Moscow through a Soviet military attaché. I was to go to the Soviet M. A. in any country other than the one in which I was working or of which I was a native. In my case, of course, this ruled out Berlin and London. I was to use any device or artifice that I could think of to get into the presence of the attaché himself and get him alone, even to the extent of threatening any minor official with punishment by the N. K. V. D. I was also expressly forbidden to mention my name or show my passport to any official at the embassy - even the attaché on my first visit. Having reached the presence, I was to hand him a message for transmission to Moscow. In my case this would run approximately as follows: "Jim operating in Jersey and a native of Brazil has lost contact with Sonia who lives in Sicily where she has a musical box and wishes to re-establish communication with the director. " In other words "Foote operating in Germany and a native of Britain has lost contact with Maria Schultz who lives in Switzerland where she has a wireless transmitter and wishes to re-establish contact with the D. M. I. " Only when the attaché had received a reply giving the necessary instructions and receiving permission from the D. M. I. to ask for my identity was I allowed to disclose my name.

If for some reason I was unable to establish contact with a Soviet military attaché and the need was urgent (and funds permitted), I should take a ticket for the Far East via the Trans-Siberian Railway and while in Moscow call at the headquarters of the Red Army, which would put me in touch with the department concerned. Only in a last resort was I to go to Russia on an Intourist ticket. Soviet agents were not allowed to keep passports which contained Intourist visas, as these might indicate to the outside world that the holder was favourably inclined toward the regime. In such cases the passport was taken away and a special department of the Soviet Intelligence removed the offending pages. This was a lengthy process and so this course was discouraged.

I was also told that later on I should be given a "place of conspiracy" which would be a fixed spot in some nearby country- probably Belgium or Holland. Certain fixed days and hours would be given me for contact and I would be told my own passwords and distinctive objects and also of course those of the contact. I was, however, to go there only if I lost contact with my group leader, Sonia, or on orders from the director.

All these arrangements sound slightly academic in the light of subsequent events. Cooped up in Switzerland, surrounded by countries at war with my own and later at war with Soviet Russia, the chances of meeting a Soviet attaché or of obtaining an Intourist visa were slight. As for places of conspiracy, these would have to be confined to Switzerland itself. In point of fact the emergency, luckily, never arose, as from the time that we were surrounded until the day of my arrest we always had at least two wireless sets working to Moscow at any one time.

While still in Lausanne, Sonia asked me to write out a report on political and economic conditions in Germany. She had also shown great interest in Hitler and my little Munich restaurant- which I had mentioned to her in the course of casual conversation. She sent my report back over her secret transmitter to the director and must have sent a separate report on the Hitler episode as I was told that the director was extremely interested in the report on Hitler and instructed me to check up on his movements and habits as well as I could.

Sonia also told me that I might expect to receive a visit from a new collaborator who would contact me in Munich and with whom I should have to operate in future. She added that it was possible that we would be asked to carry out some act of sabotage, the actual occurrence of which the director could check from his study of the press. I (and I gathered that this was a general instruction to all agents) was therefore to plan a possible sabotage operation and keep it, as it were, on ice until such time as the director authorised it. Such a scheme could perform no really useful function except that of checking the reliability of an agent and his planning ingenuity, as it was unlikely that even the most fanatical Red agent would put his head in the noose by some really profitable sabotage scheme when he could much more easily and quietly undertake some small-scale arson which would duly appear in the local press and satisfy Moscow.

I returned to Germany after my short and this time moderately constructive trip. I at least knew now for whom I was working, even if the precise details of what I was supposed to do were still lacking. I was not unnaturally curious as to the identity of the "collaborator" whom I had been promised. I could only hope that he might be somewhat more versed in the technique of espionage than I was. In this respect I was to be sadly disappointed. I do not know whether the reader has suffered from the same nightmare that I used to have as a child. I would dream that I was about to conduct a symphony orchestra and the whole audience was assembled, ready and waiting, and the orchestra poised for the first tap of my baton. At that moment I would suddenly realise that not only did I not know the piece which I was supposed to conduct but also that I was unable to read a note of music. On such occasions in dreams, one merely wakes up in a cold sweat. In real life, working for the Russians, it happened only too often- and there was no awakening.

Before I left Sonia gave me U. S. $900 ($450 for three months' salary and a similar sum for three months' expenses). My instructions were not varied. Indeed variations on such a vague theme were hardly possible. I continued to lunch at the Osteria and observe the Fuehrer at such times as he visited the place, and otherwise maintained my previous contacts and continued to learn German. The place was, of course, still full of tourists basking in the twilight of European peace. English and American, they still continued to flock to Munich to observe the picture scenes of the past and the preparations for the future. The former they found more interesting. Van Gogh had not yet been banished from the Neue Pinakothek and only the memorial to the fallen of the Munich Putsch really marked the New Germany. The shadow of the Chamberlain umbrella still lay heavy over the political scene. Anyone who delved deeper could see how thin this veneer of peace really was. Conversations with my S. S. friends and the evidence of my eyes convinced me that it was only a matter of time before the military machine took control and the country went to war. I felt sure that when this happened England would be involved and consequently anything that I could do then or later against Germany would be of value. The future position of Russia was then, as always, enigmatic. There were rumours going about Munich of a possible German-Russian rapprochement but these did not seem to tally with the oft-repeated tirades of Nazi leaders against the Bolshevik Menace and the Red Terror. In the interval before the storm burst I was prepared to go on with the tasks given me by Sonia. The future could take care of itself- and the future did.

In April I received the expected call from my "collaborator." It was an unexpected call from an old friend. The doorbell of my pension in Elizabeth Strasse rang, and the maid ushered in a colleague whom I had not seen since the days of the Spanish War. I was astounded that he had found me, as I had, on instructions, severed all connections with the brigade and even my own family did not know that I was in Germany. I soon discovered that this was no social call but that he was in fact my new fellow worker in Sonia's network in Germany.

Bill Philips (or, to give him his Soviet cover name, Jack) had been recruited in exactly the same way as I. In fact I had been indirectly responsible for his recruitment, as I had given King Street his name as a likely candidate to succeed me in the job of courier to Spain. He had worked with me in brigade transport in Spain and, quite apart from our jobs being side by side, we had been drawn together as he was not a Party member either. (It is not without significance that, as far as Sonia was concerned, the network that she set up consisted of almost entirely non-Party members- though their anti- Fascist records were impressive. This was, after all, mere common sense on the part of Moscow. A Party member would be ipso facto suspect. It would take quite a lot of foreign police digging to discover my past - open as it was.)

Bill had already set himself up in Frankfurt, having received instructions as vague and unsatisfactory as mine. He had been told specifically only that he was to keep an eye on the I. G. Farben factory and to help me in the "Hitler scheme."

It was news to me that this was in fact a scheme. At our last meeting Sonia had told me to keep a general eye on Hitler's movements, but in the subsequent two months the idea had burgeoned in the eyes of the Kremlin into a full-blown scheme for assassination with Bill and me apparently cast for the principal roles. We were neither of us very willing actors as neither of us really fancied a martyr's crown- especially since on the face of it the scheme appeared suicidal and doomed to failure. We did feel, however, that in fairness to our employers, who, after all, had been paying us for some months with little or no return for their money, it behoved us to look into the matter- and the result was not unpromising.

It was not necessary to reconnoitre the field because I knew the restaurant extremely well. Hitler always lunched in a private room which was separated only by a thin wooden partition from the corridor leading from the restaurant to the lavatories. It was along this partition that the coats of the customers were hung. As far as we could gather there was no special surveillance of the place and no extra precautions were put into force when the Fuehrer honoured it with his presence. What could be easier, we argued, than to put a time bomb in an attaché case along with our coats and, having had an early lunch, abandon the lot in the hope that the bomb would blow Hitler and his entourage, snugly lunching behind the deal boarding, into eternity. Looking back on the scheme now, it appears to me to have been well-nigh foolproof. It also bears a startling resemblance to the July 1944 attempt by Stauffenberg. In his case wooden partitions caused the scheme to fail: the blast escaped and Hitler survived. We were too innocent then to know of the niceties of explosives, but as the other three walls were solid Bavarian stone it seems likely that we might have been successful. But the whole affair never got further than the planning stage. It is easy enough as an officer cadet to plan a Tactical Exercise without Troops. It is equally easy as a cadet spy to plan a Sabotage Exercise without Explosives. In both cases the individual has the power and not the ultimate responsibility. The officer cadet will blithely throw away a company in a dashing assault on an impregnable position, knowing that the worst that can befall him is a low mark. Similarly we planned the operation knowing that the worst that could befall us would be a sour look from Sonia.

Determined, however, to earn our keep, on paper if not in practice, we went even further and planned an alternative scheme which involved assassination in its more traditional character- by revolver rather than T.N.T. It was Hitler's habit to proceed down the restaurant en route to his private room, acknowledging the plaudits of the lunchers who, not unnaturally, rose to their feet on the entrance of the head of the state. One day Bill stationed himself at the table next to the gangway, and as Hitler approached put his hand rapidly and furtively into his pocket- and drew out a cigarette case. I on the other side of the room watched the reactions of Hitler's entourage and the rest of the lunchers among whom one imagined there must have been a fair sprinkling of trigger-happy Gestapo agents. Nothing whatever happened. No reaction was visible- though to my heated imagination no action could have looked more suspicious. Looking back on this, it all seems incredibly jejune- even though Bill's act required a considerable amount of personal courage as, if the guards had been alert, it would have been small comfort to him to have been beaten to the draw- of a cigarette.

With such innocent sports Bill and I whiled away our ' time in Munich together. He had little more to do in Frankfurt than I had in Munich, and preferred to come down and see me so that we could do nothing together.

In May I met Sonia again at Vevey at the end of the three months' period. She urged me to go on with further plans for the Hitler assassination plot. I agreed to look into the matter in greater detail, which I had no intention whatsoever of doing. There was no more planning to be done- all that was necessary was an explosive suitcase or a potential suicide- and Sonia's network could provide neither. I returned to a Germany where such plots were still only in the backs of the minds of German generals.

There was one more sabotage exercise during our German period. This scheme was born of Bill's enthusiasm for his job. He had discovered that there was a Zeppelin in a hangar close to Frankfurt and conceived the brilliant notion of burning it up. I never saw it, and Bill's description was confused, but I have always imagined that it was the Graf Zeppelin, which was frequently paraded round Germany on show. Bill said that it would be perfectly easy to put a time bomb with a slow fuse in a cigarette packet under one of the seats and let it and the hydrogen in the envelope do the rest. The next step was of course the manufacture of an incendiary mixture. Sonia had given me instructions in the compounding of an efficient incendiary mixture from chemicals which could be bought easily and openly. After this lapse of time I am vague as to the formula but remember that sugar, aluminium powder, and charcoal were among the ingredients. A moderately accurate time fuse was not difficult to make with two chemicals separated by a division which would be dissolved by acid action in a specified length of time depending on the thickness of the partition. Bill and I conducted simple but satisfactory experiments in a secluded meadow near Munich. However, I was not at all convinced that it would set fire to the leather cushion of the seat in the Zeppelin under which it would have to be concealed. I was also under the impression; I believe now wrongly, that they used helium rather than hydrogen filling for the envelope with the result that we would have to rely on the combustion of the interior fittings alone with no assistance from the gas in the envelope. Before I could go further with my experiments I was summoned to Vevey to an emergency meeting with Sonia. This was in August and coincided with Bill's routine visit at the end of his three months' period.

Sonia was extremely excited over the scheme- even more so than she had been over the Hitler plot. We discussed the whole thing at length, walking up and down the front at Vevey. Sonia was convinced that it would work. I was equally certain that the whole thing would be a flop from the start and that even if the bomb could be planted unobserved the incendiary mixture would ignite nothing save itself.

Ultimately Sonia invited me back to her home so that we could try out the mixture in peace and quiet. This was the first time that I had been asked to her house. Previously we had always met at agreed rendezvous, and I felt that it was a step forward in my initiation into the network. Sonia lived in a modest little chalet at Caux sur Montreux with her two children and her old German nurse. As pretty a domestic, bourgeois atmosphere as one could find anywhere. The only slightly incongruous note was struck by the two bits of her wireless transmitter, which at that time, with incredible carelessness; she used to leave lying about the house. Not at all the setup one would expect for a Russian agent of long standing.

After dinner we adjourned to the loggia to test out the bomb. We placed the mixture underneath one of Sonia's sofa cushions which she sacrificed for the purpose. As I had thought, the only result was a large quantity of black smoke and an unholy stink. By mutual agreement no further mention was made of the Zeppelin scheme.

But while we had been indulging in amateur pyrotechnics, fireworks on a larger and more European scheme began to go off. About August 23 I was ordered to return to my post in Munich. I boarded the train for Germany in Lausanne but almost before I had settled down and before the train was fairly under way, to my astonishment Sonia entered the carriage and sat down opposite. Luckily the only other occupant left for a few moments and in a hurried whisper Sonia told me that she felt certain that Great Britain would fight and that despite Moscow's orders it would be better for me to delay my return until things became a little clearer one way or the other. We arranged a series of rendezvous on alternate days in Berne, and I left the train and returned to Montreux.

I was not unnaturally somewhat concerned over Bill, who had returned to Germany and was taking a holiday at Titisee on his way back to his post at Frankfurt. Sonia, on the other hand, refused to be perturbed, saying that Moscow would send orders in good time and that for the moment he could do no harm: an attitude not really consistent with her concern over my return to Munich. Sonia was, however, oversanguine as to the solicitude of the Kremlin for their minor operatives in potentially enemy countries. The German-Russian pact hit us like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. Such a volte-face had never been regarded as practical politics by most people and such rumours of German-Russian flirtations as had reached Switzerland were in the main regarded as merely journalist bar gossip. The first and only reaction to the fact that we had to report Moscow was a day later when Sonia received a message to pull all the agents she could out of Germany and break all contact with any remaining resident agents.

This was my first experience of Russian Realpolitik and it came as something of a shock. Its effect on Sonia, who was an old guard Communist and had for the past eight years regarded Fascism as the major world menace, was of course, shattering. As a good Party member she had had Party discipline drilled into her until it was second nature for her to obey the whims of a Party directive- but she had always regarded the main Party line as being firmly and steadfastly directed against Fascism. At one blow all this was changed and she, as a good Party member, had now to regard the Nazis as her friends and the democracies as her potential foes. Such a bouleversement of all her preconceived ideas was really too much for her. Working as an undercover agent, she had naturally been less subjected to Party propaganda at first hand than her more docile colleagues, who obeyed the behest of King Street - or rather of Moscow relayed through King Street. The latter obediently trimmed their sails to the prevailing wind from the steppes. Sonia, too, paid lip service to her orders and obediently disbanded the organisation that she had been at such pains to build up; but I think that from that time onward her heart was not in the work. She continued to obey such orders as she received and carried out operations to the best of her ability, but at the first opportunity she pulled out and returned to England. In a way she was lucky to have received her disillusionment early in the war. She had worked for many years for what she thought was a righteous cause, and she was spared the final discovery that that cause was not an idealistic crusade but merely power politics in its crudest form.

While Sonia was wrestling with her political conscience I was left with the more practical difficulty of recalling Bill from Germany. As anyone who has tried knows, continental telephoning at the best of times is a game which requires patience and an equable temper. Transfrontier telephoning provides an additional hazard. Add to both these an imminent European war and a plethora of nervous switch censors at the main exchanges on both sides of the border, and it ceases to become a game of skill and degenerates into a haphazard game of chance. In this case I was lucky and after the waste of only several valuable hours, an uncounted number of francs, and the last remnants of what had once been a placid temperament, I managed to get through to Bill where he was sun-bathing beside the lake and told him to get out of Germany as fast as he could. He appeared somewhat surprised, as international events had apparently by-passed his rural retreat and certainly gone over his head. He managed to get out to Switzerland with a few hours to spare. We waited to see what the world and Moscow would next bring forth. The former brought us war soon enough. As for the latter, Moscow evidently decided that discretion was the best course and during the first week of a Europe at war we received no kind of instruction. Heaven knows we had done little enough for the past year, but it was somewhat galling to think that the little we had done was apparently to be completely wasted. I need not have bothered. There would be work enough before I found rest in a Swiss prison.

SWISS INTERLUDE

My career as a resident Russian agent in Switzerland divides itself roughly into two parts. The first, while I was still working with Sonia, covers the period of the phony war; the second lasted roughly from the time of Sonia's departure in December 1940 to my arrest by the Swiss in November 1943. The latter period was the more strenuous, and during it I used to look back wistfully on the pleasant pastoral interlude while the war was still static and Switzerland, as an intelligence centre, moderately stagnant.

The first message that Sonia received after the outbreak of war instructed us to remain quietly in Switzerland and ordered Bill and me to learn short-wave transmission.

The autumn and winter of 1939 passed peacefully enough for us all. No further instructions were received and Sonia used her transmitter only for the despatch of periodic economic and political reports which were more in the nature of sops to Moscow.

Bill and I settled down quietly in a small pension in Montreux and used to proceed periodically up the hill for elementary instruction in wireless transmission given us by Sonia. We also did our best to gain some kind of a clue as to wireless construction. A few beginners' textbooks and some hints from Sonia were all the help we got, but by the end of the winter I was a moderately proficient operator and had some idea as to radio construction, and Bill was in a fair way to becoming a useful operator.

As I said, Moscow worried us little during this period, and Sonia maintained contact only about once a month for the purpose of sending over her surveys. Moscow was leaving us severely alone. Our usefulness to them was past for the moment and the Red Army was content to allow the network to remain fallow until the time should come to revive it. Moscow, however, did produce one suggestion, which was that the whole network should move to Rumania. As it happened, I had made contact in Switzerland with a Rumanian diplomat and on Moscow's suggestion I explored the matter of visas and passports further; and in the end I did manage to work out a scheme by which Bill and I and Sonia and her entourage could move to Bucharest in comparative comfort and with our papers in almost legal order. The whole scheme fell through in the end, since it called for a certain amount of money to oil the machinery of the Rumanian passport office. Moscow was beginning to feel the pinch and dollars were not quite so readily forthcoming in Switzerland as they had been in the past. Looking back on it now, I can only breathe a thankful sigh of relief that the scheme did not reach maturity, as Bill's and my positions in Bucharest a year or so later would have been, to say the least, ambiguous; and I cannot believe that Sonia's documentation would have stood up to a Gestapo scrutiny. The wife of a German, who himself was incarcerated in a Chinese jail for Communist activities, would hardly have been persona grata with the German authorities who were shortly to take over Rumania. On the whole it was perhaps better that we all remained quietly in neutral Switzerland, even though Moscow had clipped our espionage wings.

Moscow did, however, make life quite complicated for Sonia for a period, and caused her to take a little more care as to her cover and her activities. Just before the outbreak of war the Red Army had sent her a new recruit in the shape of "Alex." Alex was in fact a German who had fought in the International Brigade and had been sent to Sonia to set up another secret wireless set in Switzerland, which was to work as subordinate to Sonia's and also as a stopgap in case her set broke down or was seized. Had Sonia been allowed to continue to run her network into Germany the second set would have proved useful to carry the overflow of traffic which time would not allow her to carry on her set and in her schedules. It would also have proved invaluable to me later when I was passing the majority of the traffic out of Switzerland, since it would have enabled me to remain for a shorter time on the air with my own set. As it was, I had to transmit almost throughout the night, a procedure which was asking for trouble from the Swiss police and the German monitoring.

Moscow, however, had been rather too ingenious, and Alex (Franz Ahlmann) proved in the end far more of a liability than an asset. He had been sent to us on a Finnish passport allegedly issued in Canada. His documentation as such was perfect, and on paper he could pass anywhere- and indeed he arrived from Moscow via France without question. Unfortunately Alex could speak neither English nor Finnish, with one of which languages he must have had at least a bowing acquaintance had his papers been genuine. This Swiss police were not slow in discovering. That in itself would not have been damaging, but unfortunately they raided his room when he was out and discovered in it a large quantity of wireless parts with which he was in the process of making a new transmitter. That also might have been laughed off as over-enthusiasm by an amateur wireless enthusiast- but unfortunately he had been at Sonia's once when the police called on a routine check up.

Subsequent events showed that the Swiss in this case were singularly obtuse or singularly kind and did not connect the litter of wireless parts in Alex's apartment with the quiet little villa at Caux. One reason was that the police officer in charge of the case had been blown up by an infernal machine which, in the course of his duties, he was attempting to immobilise. The affair caused some stir at the time as it was one of the earliest outward manifestations of the silent espionage war which was to rage in Switzerland for the next six years. We never knew whose bomb it was.

The whole affair shook Sonia severely and she thenceforth kept her transmitter buried in the garden- except for the times when it was actually in use. This increased the security of operations immeasurably (as opposed to the earlier, careless days when the whole thing was strewn about the house) but added equally greatly to the difficulty of working. For anyone who wishes to indulge in espionage, I do not recommend digging in a flower bed for a biscuit tin containing the essential bits of a transmitter with the scheduled time for a transmission fast approaching. It may be romantic and in the best tradition, but it is also exceedingly difficult and rather humiliating. Sonia's tulip bed was not improved, and the set developed the faults that might be expected to result from prolonged interment. We were not altogether pleased with the arrival of Alex and felt that the troubles he brought in his wake, which were not really his fault but resulted from the over enthusiasm of Moscow, greatly outweighed his potential value. Alex was to remain a headache for me throughout my stay in Switzerland. The Swiss were kind to him, and though they may have had a shrewd idea as to his potential activities they merely interned him as a foreigner whose papers were out of order, and he was put on forced labour for the rest of the war. His position was not unpleasant as he had a certain amount of freedom and I was able to help him in a variety of ways. He was a perpetual drain on the rather limited finances of our organisation because Moscow ordered that he was to be kept in comfort. He passed a pleasant if slightly tedious war.

The only task Moscow gave us at this time was to send a courier from Switzerland to contact the wife and family of Thaelmann, the German Communist leader, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis. For this task Sonia sent her aged maid, Lisa Brockel, who managed to get an aller et retour visa without difficulty. After a certain amount of trouble she contacted Thaelmann's wife, who stated that Thaelmann himself was in Hamburg prison and, considering all things, fairly comfortable. The maid was not fully in the picture regarding Sonia's espionage activities, but as she had been with the family for years and was devoted to Alfred Schultz, she obviously had a pretty shrewd idea as to what was going on. It was indeed her devotion to Schultz himself which caused the next crisis in our lives and nearly led to disaster.

Sonia was increasingly dissatisfied with the life and work and wished to return to England. The main obstacle, apart from Moscow's views, was of course her German passport. Therefore, in order to get British nationality, she managed to persuade Bill to agree to marry her if she could get a divorce from Schultz. She managed to obtain a divorce in the Swiss courts early in 1940, and straight away married Bill and was thus entitled to a British passport. This whole scheme was explained to Lisa, who was extremely distressed at this apparent disloyalty to her master. Sonia explained that the marriage was to be in name alone and that she had no intention of being unfaithful to Schultz but was merely adding one more to the numerous mariages blancs which were taking place in Switzerland at the time purely for the purpose of acquiring legal papers.

All would have been well had the scheme gone as planned, but there was another factor which had not been considered. Bill and Sonia fell deeply in love, and it was perfectly obvious that this was anything but a mariage de convenance. This disloyalty to Alfred's memory was more than Lisa could bear and she resolved to end it by desperate means. She thereupon rang up the British Consulate and denounced Sonia and Bill as Soviet spies and told them where the transmitter was hidden. As luck would have it, her English was so bad that no one at the consulate could understand what she was saying, and she was cut off by a bored clerk who merely added her name to the list of lunatics who pestered the consulate daily. It was perfectly obvious that as long as she remained in Switzerland- or Sonia and Bill remained in love - she would be a perpetual danger to us all. After endless argument she consented to return to her home in Germany. She was a faithful old thing and I was fond of and sorry for her. Had sex not reared its ugly head she would have been with us to the end, but it was too dangerous to have a weak link in the chain. It was bad enough to have the head of the network and your fellow operative acting like a honeymoon couple, without the thought that at any moment the faithful retainer might try yet another denunciation- and perhaps with more success.

Meanwhile the blitzkrieg had started and soon, with the fall of France, we in Switzerland were virtually isolated. The debacle in France had another and more immediate effect on the lives of us all, for at last we came into touch with espionage proper. The network into which we were now to be incorporated was the permanent Red Army organisation and had been in existence for years. With headquarters in Switzerland, it operated throughout Western Europe. Its ramifications and sources made Sonia's own independent organisation appear a trifle futile. In fairness to the latter, one must add that it had never really been given a chance, since, just as it was about to go into production, the Russo-German pact came into force and the whole enterprise was stillborn. Not so the permanent organisation (of which Sonia had no knowledge till Moscow told her); throughout the period of the phony war it had been building up its resources and agents and was never in any doubt as to its ultimate target- Germany. I gathered, in the course of my long association with the network, that originally part of its effort had been directed against Great Britain but that the rapidly growing danger of Nazi Germany occasioned a switch of its efforts and priorities some years before the outbreak of war. Certainly all the time that I was associated with it there was never any sign that its ramifications extended into England. This of course does not mean that there was no organisation working against England. Many indications show that there was, even if for political reasons it was lying dormant. If an old and trusted Russian spy like Sonia was in ignorance of a parallel organisation run by the same masters in the same country it was unlikely that we would learn of other ramifications into other countries- unless we had to- and the contingency never arose.

SICILIAN MUSICAL BOX

It is now time to mention how we came into touch with the other "musical box" working in "Sicily" (to use the Russian cover names for the wireless sets working in Switzerland for the Red Army), and after that it will be necessary to give a picture of how the whole network was organised and what it achieved.

The reason the Russians were forced to put two independent organisations in touch with each other- a thing which every well-run espionage organisation dislikes intensely, as it naturally doubles the risk of compromise - was the unexpected success of the Germans in France, which led to a complete breakdown of communications.

The permanent Red Army net had in the past communicated its information by means of microphotographs which were taken by courier to Paris and thence forwarded to Moscow over a transmitter belonging to the subsidiary French network. The fall of Paris cut off this route, and the organisation was left in the air. As a result Sonia received orders to get into touch with "Albert," the head of the Red Army network in Switzerland, and place her transmitter at his disposal. Albert had in fact been told to construct a transmitter and train operators against just such a contingency- but had taken no action and was thus cut off from the "Centre" (as Moscow was known in the local jargon).

Albert was stationed in Geneva and Sonia went off to contact him and fix up communication arrangements. Albert was, in fact, Alexander Rado, a Hungarian cartographer and a Soviet agent of long standing. His position in Switzerland was impeccable; in this case Moscow had done their work well, as he was a partner in a Swiss firm of cartographers of great respectability and long standing. Very short and fat and speaking six languages fluently, he was himself an expert cartographer and used to prepare the war maps which appeared in all the Swiss papers. His wife, "Mary," was also "in the net" and in some ways the more dominant of the two in their partnership. Rado, as will be seen, lost his nerve in the end, but Mary was never affected, and I think that it was her influence that prevented Rado from breaking down earlier.

At first Sonia used to go to Geneva and collect Rado's enciphered traffic at an agreed rendezvous and then take it back for transmission from the chalet at Caux. This was time-wasting, and there was always danger that her frequent journeys might arouse suspicion in the minds of the Swiss police, who had probably not forgotten the Alex incident. Sonia's set was therefore moved to a chalet near Geneva until a better and more permanent home could be found for it.

At about the same time (August 1940) Moscow ordered me to move to Geneva and there train a wireless operator for Rado so that he could be independent of Sonia's set. This was the first time I met Rado. During the whole of my stay in Switzerland I never saw the inside of his house and he never entered my flat. We always met at agreed rendezvous at some "neutral" spot (i.e., a place where we were both comparatively unknown). Switzerland is not a large place, and after a time it became increasingly difficult to discover a new town to go to, which was not extremely inconvenient for one of us. Such are the minor burdens of a spy's life.

Rado had selected his recruit for training as an operator, and shortly after my arrival in Geneva I was put in touch with "Edward." Edward, or, to give him his real name, Edmond Hamel, was a member of the Nicole Party of Geneva. This party, headed by Leon Nicole, was plainly left-wing and contained a large number of "fellow travellers" but was not officially a Communist party. It did, however, provide a fruitful recruiting ground for Rado, and Leon Nicole himself acted as one of Rado's chief recruiting agents. It was through him that Hamel was brought into the fold.

Hamel had an excellent cover for his activities as an operator, for he ran and owned a wireless shop at 26 Rue Carouge in Geneva. He was also a radio mechanic and wireless enthusiast, so he had a flying start for his new career- or rather side line. His wife Olga (cover name "Maude") was also a member of the Nicole Party and was recruited at the same time. They both knew that they were working for the Russians but did not really believe it at first, basing their disbelief on the fact that the operator to whom they were sending was so inefficient that they could not believe he was in Moscow!

The Hamels' flat made an admirable hiding place for Sonia's set, and we moved it from the chalet and installed it above the shop. Sonia and I worked it for the first few months ourselves, she coming over from Caux for the purpose while I trained Hamel so that eventually he could take over.

Sonia had become increasingly restless and had repeatedly asked Moscow for permission to leave Switzerland and return to England. It was not until November, when Moscow could see that the hand-over had worked satisfactorily and that Sonia's group was now firmly in liaison with Rado's and communication with Moscow assured, that she received permission to leave. On December 20 Sonia left for London on her British papers. I do not think that since that time she has had any connection with a Russian spy net. She had been too disillusioned by the Russo-German pact to want to go on working and was only too thankful to sink back into respectable obscurity. Moscow on their side were obviously worried both by the Alex incident and the denunciation by Lisa Brockel and were, I think, equally thankful to let her go. They knew that as a loyal Party member she would not talk. There are no Kremlin objections to retirement from the service if circumstances permit and discretion is maintained. Vengeance is reserved for those who talk or who fall by the wayside- for people like Rado and me. Inefficiency and loquacity are the capital crimes.

Before Sonia left she had received from Moscow a new code and new schedules and call signs which she handed over to me. At the same time she told me that I had been ordered to move back to Lausanne and set up a transmitter there to carry part of Rado's traffic as soon as Hamel had built a new transmitter and was a proficient operator. The building of a set was an easy matter for the efficient radio mechanic, and by the beginning of December his set was ready and tested. As an operator, Hamel still left much to be desired, and I left Bill Philips in his flat to assist him until he could carry on by himself. Bill had only one desire- to return to England and rejoin Sonia- but this I could not allow until the organisation could carry on without him. So he remained with Hamel until March, by which time the latter was trained sufficiently. Bill then pulled out of the organisation, and though he remained in Switzerland until 1942 he had no more official contact with us after March 1941. Moscow allowed him to try to make arrangements to leave at the end of 1941 and even assisted him in obtaining a British passport by getting a leading British politician to intervene on his behalf. The politician concerned acted, I am sure, quite innocently in this as Moscow worked through a number of cut-outs, and the person in question would probably have been horrified at the thought of assisting a Russian spy.

On December 15, 1940, I left Geneva for Lausanne, which was to remain my headquarters until I found a less comfortable abode in a Swiss prison cell.

It was not easy to find an apartment in Switzerland in those days, for with the fall of France and the Low Countries there had been an influx of refugees, many of them with money to burn, and there was an acute housing shortage. It would have been obviously impossible to install myself in a hotel or pension. Things were not made easier by a police decree which forbade foreigners to rent apartments and insisted that they should live in hotels. The motives for this ordinance were partially for security but principally mercenary. The war had killed the tourist trade and the Swiss were reluctant to see their hotels standing empty when they could be filled with rich refugees who would probably spend more money in a hotel than they would in an apartment.

I decided to ignore this order and take a fiat first and argue about it afterwards. After some difficulty I managed to find a suitable one in a big block at 2 Chemin de Longeraie. It was self-contained and sufficiently commodious, so I was independent of the rest of the world. It also had the advantage of being alone at the end of a short corridor so that I could hear the footsteps of anyone approaching, thus allowing a minute's grace before the doorbell rang.

Having installed myself, the next thing was to install the transmitter, which I had brought over from Geneva, wrapped up in my dirty laundry. It was in the highest degree unlikely that anyone would stop and search me or my baggage, but the extra precaution cost little. The fiat was admirably suited, in another way, for my less legal purposes, as it was but one floor from the top, and the roof of the block overtopped all the neighbouring buildings. Ideal as the setup was, it still took me almost three months to establish contact with Moscow.

Most accounts of spies and secret activities skate lightly over the purely physical routine difficulties of the trade. Such accounts are generally concerned with the details of the hero's cunning in outwitting the activities of the police. In real life, once the police are really after you, there is little you can do to avoid them. The average spy hopes to avoid police notice rather than to evade it once it is awakened. His real difficulties are concerned with the practice of his trade. The setting up of his transmitter, the obtaining of his funds, and the arrangement of his rendez-vous. The irritating administrative details occupy a disproportionate portion of his waking life- and cut unwarrantably into his hours of sleep.

I had my flat and I had my transmitter, and the rest should have been easy. Unfortunately, here I came up against Swiss rules and regulations. There was a ban on the erection of any kind of external aerial on a building. Sonia had not encountered this problem, as a wire strung over the roof of her chalet at Caux out in the country would have excited no notice and, if it had, little comment. Not so in the heart of Lausanne. Again I decided to take the legal bull by the horns- or rather in this case ignore his existence altogether. Adopting the air of an idiot and foreign child, I went to a wireless shop nearby and explained that I wished them to erect an aerial for my wireless set in my fine new flat. I explained, unnecessarily, as my French accent was not impeccable by any means, that I was English and, exiled as I was from my own country for the period of the war, I was naturally anxious to keep in the closest touch with events at home and therefore wanted to listen to as many English broadcasts as possible. I explained that as my French was bad the short-wave continental broadcasts were not satisfactory and anyway they were designed for foreign consumption. I wished to listen to the medium-wave broadcasts put out by the B.B.C. for the English themselves, and these I could not get on my set with an indoor aerial. I do not know to this day whether my set with the aerial I eventually got would have enabled me to hear the ordinary B.B.C. home programme - nor, indeed, whether I could not have heard it anyway with an ordinary indoor aerial strung round my room. Luckily the mechanic in the shop was equally ignorant- or supremely indifferent - and after the usual delays which afflict workmen all over the world when labour is in short supply, he consented to come round and try to fix something up.

On his arrival a new and unexpected difficulty presented itself. The honest little man had apparently fallen for my story in a big way and was determined, law or no law, that I was to have the best aerial Switzerland could provide to enable me to listen to the programmes of my choice and of my native country. He had brought with him a large and superior aerial with every known device and side wire designed to cut out all possible interference. This would have been delightful had I really wanted to listen to the home news from London but quite disastrous for transmitting home news to Moscow. All I needed was a straight aerial of the right length with no devices to frustrate les parasites (as the French so delightfully call interference). In fact, in my own small way I desired to increase the number of parasites on the air by my own efforts. Ultimately, after endless explanation and liberal administrations of whiskey (of which luckily I had a large stock), I managed to get him to erect a straight aerial to suit my purpose. I do not think that he suspected anything. He went away quite certain that the English were, as he had always been told, quite mad; but he had enough scotch inside him to allay his suspicions.

I took the precaution, for a week or so, of hiding the parts of my transmitter carefully in the flat: one piece in the mattress of my bed and another behind the bath, just in case I had been denounced and was raided. Nothing so drastic happened, though I did receive a visitor who arrived most opportunely during this period, when my flat had an appearance of absolute innocence and my actions were those of the character I was pretending to be- an Englishman, stranded in Switzerland by the war, with ample leisure and ample funds. Lausanne was full of such, ranging from the genuine, stranded resident or refugee down to the frank embusque who had no intention of returning to England and military service and every intention of passing a comfortable and neutral war. I attempted to steer a graceful course between both extremes, my air of respectability being counteracted by my being obviously of military age.

The bell rang one evening and I opened the door to a polite, solid gentleman in the plainest of plain clothes who in no country in the world could have been anything other than what he was- a policeman in mufti. On such occasions as this the best course is to leave all the running to the other person- especially as I was conscious that only the minutest search of the place would show anything suspicious and that my papers, which I showed him, were in perfect order. He took the proffered seat and cigar and explained, in the politest way, that there was an ordinance that forbade foreigners to rent apartments, and perhaps I would be good enough to explain myself. I decided that a mild bluff and an appeal to Swiss cupidity was the only possible course. I explained that I had not been aware of the order when I took the apartment and had only learnt of it too late. I added that I understood that the main reason was to ensure that the hotels remained full and that there was no diminution of the revenue to the Swiss national exchequer from foreigners. I was perfectly prepared to give up the flat, inconvenient as it would be, and retire to a hotel, but felt that I must point out that it was an expensive flat in an expensive block of flats and that I was spending far more occupying it than I would living quietly en pension in a hotel. I was a man of some means and simple pleasures and I was sorry that the means of gratifying them, namely by living alone in a flat rather than crowded into a hotel, were to be denied me, especially as any change in my present mode of life would decrease the flow of sterling from my pocket into the Swiss coffers.

I hardly hoped that the line would work, but I put it over with all the conviction I could and reinforced it with another dose of my invaluable whiskey. Swiss thrift overcame police prudence. He asked me if I would be prepared to divulge my financial position. With a show of some reluctance at having to produce such private matters I explained that I was in receipt of sixty-five pounds a month from England and in addition had a balance of some fifteen thousand Swiss francs in the bank. I added that I was of course prepared to have this investigated if he so desired, but naturally I would prefer to avoid the possible embarrassment of police enquiries of my bank manager. He was kind enough to accept my word and pressed for no more factual details. This was, on the whole, as well since my total finances at that moment amounted to five hundred dollars which I had in my pocketbook. The network was then in low financial water and the monthly remittance and the substantial balance were figments of my fancy.

Pressing my advantage, I asked if I could have permission to remain in the flat for the next six months. This I got; and it was renewed afterwards every six months without question. I wrote a standard letter stating that I was still in receipt of this entirely notional sixty-five pounds a month, and by return post came the permission. This was one of the few occasions when I had to bluff and trust to luck. It worked, and-1 had overcome the two main hurdles a spy has to surmount. I had a fixed and legal base, and my means of communication were secured. These two obstacles trip up ninety per cent of the spies who end their lives on the scaffold or in the cells. The victims are caught either through their means of communication- by radio monitoring or censorship - or because they have been unable to legalise themselves in the country where they are operating. It is practically impossible to be an efficient spy and be, at the same time, perpetually on the run. It was not too bad for me, as the worst that I had to expect from the Swiss was a period of imprisonment; while, if I failed to get established, I could always go quietly to ground with one of Rado's friends who had little to fear- the penalty for sheltering a spy in a neutral country being comparatively slight. Admittedly I was caught in the end, and caught through my means of communication like most of the rest. But thanks to the thrift of the Swiss and the mellowing effect of scotch whiskey I had almost three years' run for my money.

With myself legalised and the aerial installed I had merely to get the set working and contact Moscow. This was not too easy. I had already spent six weeks in dealing with the police and getting my dilatory mechanic on to the job and now I was anxious to get the set going without delay. But when I resurrected the bits of the transmitter from their hiding places and set the whole thing up, the crystal refused to oscillate. After a great deal of trial and error (after all I was not a trained radio mechanic and Hamel and his professional advice were not available to me in Lausanne) I managed to get the set to work by shortening the lead-in and installing the apparatus in the kitchen. This was not in the least convenient, but it was safer, as it ensured me against casual interruption, for it was unlikely that any unwanted guest who arrived during my transmitting times would penetrate to the kitchen. At least I could do my best to stop him and the arrangement saved my having to think up an easy and quick way of hiding the transmitter, which would have been necessary had I installed it, as I had at first wished, in my living room.

With the set now working, I had only to contact Moscow, and in my innocence I imagined this would be an easy task. Night after night, with my receiver tuned to the wave length given me in my schedule, I called at the arranged times. My tappings went out onto the unreceptive ether. Moscow could not or would not hear. Several times I almost decided to give up for the moment and go to Geneva and ask Rado to put a message over his set-which I knew now to be working in Hamel's flat-asking Moscow to listen carefully and let Rado know if I was getting through or whether the set was still faulty. I banished this temptation, as the one thing we were anxious to do was to keep the two sets as unconnected as possible. I settled down again with renewed patience and continued calling. It was all the more irritating because the whole time I could hear Moscow calling me: "NDA NDA NDA," but they continued merely to call and I could get no indication that they could hear me, merely the perpetual reiteration of the call sign, as maddening to taut nerves as a dripping tap.

Persistence, however, won its ultimate reward. On March 12 for the thousandth time I tapped out the call sign "FRX FRX FRX." Then through the hum and crackle of static and over the background noise of other signals I heard "NDA NDA OK QRK 5." (QRK 5 indicated in the "Q code" that my signals were being heard very strongly.) Contact had been established.

BLUEPRINT FOR ESPIONAGE

There now follows a description of the layout of a Red Army espionage network in theory. It is the blueprint which all networks abroad attempt to follow. I can of course speak only for the Red Army system, as that is the only one I know. I should imagine that the Red Fleet or N.K.V.D. (now M.V.D.) network would be organised on approximately the same lines. It is, in fact, an eminently practicable, simple, and effective system, giving the maximum degree of efficiency with the minimum danger of compromise.

The head of the network is, of course, the resident director. Except in exceptional circumstances, he does not reside in the country against which his network is operating but lives and directs the organisation from a convenient neighbouring country against whose interests he is forbidden to work. It naturally happens on occasions that a resident director obtains information concerning his country of residence. In such cases, in normal times, he would hand the development of the source over to another resident director whose network was directed against the first director's country of residence. For example if the resident director in Switzerland of the network against Germany discovered a source who was capable of producing information from the Swiss General Staff, he would hand the source over to the resident director of the network working against Switzerland, who would probably be resident in France, and leave the latter to work out ways and means of getting the information to Moscow. The reason for this is obvious. The local police or counterespionage authorities are likely to take a much greater interest in the activities of anyone they suspect of working against them than they are in an individual who, while resident in their country, is working against a foreign power. Also the chances of compromise through treachery or double agents are much greater if the resident director is living, as it were, on top of his sources. It is, in fact, an extension of the old maxim about dirtying one's own doorstep.

The resident director is also, usually, not a native of his country of residence. He is usually not a Russian either, and in fact few Soviet nationals are used in Russian espionage networks. The Centre (i.e., Moscow) finds that the difference between the way of life in Russia and other countries is so great that it is difficult for Soviet citizens to adjust themselves. Also a Soviet citizen is a much more likely target for suspicion than a person of another nationality. It used to be said that "even- Japanese is a spy." This applies equally well to Russians, as it is impossible for a Russian to get abroad until he has been checked and double-checked by the N.K.V.D. and is known to be one hundred per cent politically reliable. This is equally well known to all foreign counterespionage authorities, who as normal routine take a considerable interest in the activities of any Russian national in their midst.

The resident director is also usually forbidden to search for and develop sources of information. It is not for him to recruit agents or to conduct operations. His tasks are to control the communications system, cope with finance, sort out, evaluate, and edit the information that comes in to him, encipher it for onward transmission to the Centre, and generally to supervise and conduct the work of the whole organisation; seeing that the right lines are being developed and exploited at the right time, but keeping in the background and restricting knowledge of his identity to the minimum number of people. He is usually unknown to his agents, couriers, and radiotelegraphists, maintaining contact with them only through his liaison agents or "cut-outs," who are the only people aware of his identity.

Under the resident director come the cut-outs, who bear the heat and burden of the day. They may or may not be natives of the country of residence of the director or of the country against which the network is working, depending on circumstances and their own particular ability. They act as "talent spotters" and if necessary recruiters as well. It is usually preferable for the actual approach to a new source to be made by another cut-out, one removed from the principal liaison agent, as this reduces the risk of compromise.

One of the most important sources of information and one of the main recruiting grounds for agents is of course the local Communist Party, referred to in network jargon as "the Neighbour." (Not to be confused with "the Neighbours," in the plural, which means the Comintern or rather the function which continued in Russia after the Comintern had been officially, and of course only in theory, abolished.) In every Communist Party there is one highly placed official whose main task is to gather information gleaned from Party members and fellow travellers and pass it on to the resident director through the main cut-out, who is in close but secret touch with him. It is this official who keeps an eye open for likely and useful recruits and passes their names on to the cut-out. The majority of agents are recruited through this means, and in any case any name forwarded by the network to Moscow for vetting is always referred back to the local Party for their views.

Another useful function of the Neighbour is the organisation of study and discussion groups among young students and intellectuals. From among the members of these groups it is possible to discover likely potential spy material: people who, though not members of the Party, are likely to be amenable to an espionage approach, and people who are either in, or likely one day to be in, posts where they could obtain information of value to Russia. Such promising candidates would be discouraged from openly joining the Party or openly expressing Communist or left-wing views. This ensures that their backgrounds are innocuous should they ever come under suspicion or be checked up by the counterespionage authorities. Such characters are sometimes paid for information which is valueless to the Centre purely in order to keep them on a string in the hope that one day they may advance in their profession and be in a position to supply really vital information. The network is prepared to wait a long time for its information to mature. It is much better, if the time can be afforded, to let your spy work his way gradually up into a position of trust rather than to be forced to make a pass at someone in a high position with the risk of failure or compromise. "Catch'em young" is a motto which applies as well to espionage as to other walks of life.

Once an agent is recruited from the Neighbour, he passes his information direct to the cut-out and severs all connection with the Party intelligence system. His final recruitment will usually take place only after a long period during which time he will not be in touch with the network at all but will be passing his information through the contact in the Party. His material and his background will be checked and double-checked against other information supplied from similar sources and the Party records. Only then will he meet the cut-out and become part of the network. Even then he will be able to compromise only his own particular contact who, if he is arrested, will also be knocked off- but will not compromise the network as a whole.

Apart from agents, which term I have used in this chapter only to cover individuals who actually supply- information- spies in the strictest sense of the word- the Party also is a recruiting ground for radio-telegraphists and minor cut-outs and couriers. These may be of the nationality of the country against whom the network is operating or in which the resident director is living. The sole task of the couriers and minor contacts is to act as channels for the information from the agent himself to the resident director, and vice versa. In most cases (and this is of course desirable as often as it is feasible) they are unaware of the identity of the agent they contact or the cut-out to which they work, merely meeting them at predetermined times and places and never at their homes. The information or instructions that they carry are either memorised or typewritten. In the latter case the message is typewritten through a well-used bit of carbon paper and the carbon copy is carried and the original is destroyed. This method makes it much harder to identify the typewriter upon which the message was written should it fall into unauthorised hands. The carbon copy is of course destroyed as soon as the resident director has incorporated it into his enciphered message.

As stated, liaison between the resident director and the local Communist Party is usually carried on by the chief cut-out, who is naturally a person in whom both parties have complete confidence. However, on certain occasions when important directives are being transmitted from Moscow, a secret meeting is arranged between the resident director and the Party leaders where the matter can be discussed. This is one of the few occasions when a director comes out into the open, and happens very rarely.

In all agents' messages and in all enciphered texts, only cover names are used for the sources, etc., and the messages are couched in a jargon which would make them difficult of interpretation by anyone not "in the net," so even if the gist of the message could be made out the agent's identity is concealed by the use of the cover name. The resident director has to memorise all the cover names used in his network. English Christian names are most commonly used, and both male and female names are employed indiscriminately without regard to sex: thus a male agent may easily have a female cover name. In cases where a source is only casual and not in frequent use, the director may give him a name which can be easily remembered by association- such as "Red" if he has red hair or "Lanky" if he is very tall. This is used only for unimportant characters whom the director might not easily be able to remember, and is a practice which is discouraged by Moscow, as such a cover name is obviously less secure than a purely arbitrary one.

In addition to persons, countries also have cover names as well and these vary from network to network. In the Swiss network against Germany, Great Britain was "Brazil," France "Florence," Germany "Jersey," and so on. The U.S.S.R. was always "Home." Other institutions and objects also had their own names. In my network a wireless transmitter was a "musical box"; a passport a "shoe"; a forger of false passports thus naturally became a "cobbler"; a prison was a "hospital" and thus the police became the "doctor."

Finance is one of the major responsibilities of a resident director. He is responsible for paying the entire network and submits his accounts to the Centre once a year. He also has to send an estimated budget for the next year's expenditure. This yearly grant is seldom paid in a lump sum, but at least twice a year the director sends a courier to a neighbouring country where he meets a courier from the Centre who hands the money over, always in dollars. This the director is forbidden to put in a bank; he keeps the entire sum in dollars, hidden somewhere, and removes what is necessary from time to time to change it into local currency for immediate expenses. He is, however, sometimes allowed to put the money in a safe-deposit box.

Salaries in a Soviet espionage network bear little if any relation to the work performed. Instead they are based on the amount the individual needs to maintain his position and support his dependents. Thus the anomaly frequently occurs of an old and trusted agent who is doing valuable and dangerous work being paid far less than, say, a cut-out who has been newly recruited but who has a certain position in life to maintain if he is not to come under suspicion.

A resident director receives about two hundred and fifty to five hundred dollars a month, depending on his dependents, his social position, and the cost of living in the country concerned. A wireless operator under the same conditions would receive from a hundred to two hundred dollars a month. If, on the other hand, he or she has a regular job as well, all that would be paid would be the actual expenses of the job. Agents are paid by results, but an agent of long standing who has produced consistently good and voluminous information may also receive a fixed retainer. Bonuses are also paid for exceptionally good pieces of work. The rates of pay are based on the amount of money that the member of the network has to expend from his day-to-day living expenses. The Centre does not encourage overpayment, as this might result in the individual's accumulating a large bank balance. This is regarded as undesirable, for not only is it a waste of Soviet government money but it also increases the risk of the person's "going private" (i.e., leaving the organisation).

Full-time members of a spy ring are told that they are fully and regularly embodied members of the Red Army and as such can receive military decorations for meritorious service. What actually happens is that all the agent gets is the promise of such a decoration if and when his work outside Russia is finished. For example Rado was a full colonel in the Red Army and I was a major, and when I was in Moscow I was told that I would be promoted to lieutenant colonel on my next assignment. At various times I was informed that I had been recommended for three Soviet decorations, the only one specified being the Order of the Red Banner. This I got for inventing a simplified system of sending Morse numbers which cut transmitting time by a third. I am still, not unnaturally, awaiting my investiture!

In theory a member of the network can retire on full pay after five years' service abroad- but his pension will be paid only in roubles in Russia. And in practice, if he did try to live in idleness and ease on his pension in Russia, he would soon get into trouble, as the slogan "He who does not work shall not eat" would be enforced-even for spies on full pay. He would find it more convenient- and certainly healthier- to volunteer for a further tour of duty abroad or hastily to find some other employment within Russia.

In addition to the return to Russia at the end of the five-year tour, agents are also sometimes summoned back to Moscow either for discussions or to take a course in some specialised subject. In such cases the individual travels to some other country- usually one with a common frontier with the U.S.S.R.- and there, at .a prearranged rendezvous, he meets an agent from the Centre who hands him a new passport (sometimes a Russian one) containing the necessary visas- and of course in a false name. In return, the recalled spy hands over to the

Centre's agent a sealed envelope containing his original passport and necessary documentation which he receives back on his return from Russia.

Frequently these sudden recalls to Moscow are not dictated by necessity but from a desire by the Centre to ascertain the reactions of the person to such a summons. If he expresses immediate willingness to return, the instructions are, as often as not, cancelled at the last minute. If, however, he hesitates or suggests that his recall might imperil the working or security of the network, Moscow's suspicions are at once aroused. He then becomes suspected by the Centre of "Trotskyist sympathies" or some lesser crime, and in all probability is enticed to some other country whence he can be easily abducted to Soviet Russia or where he can be conveniently liquidated.

If the spy is of little importance and his knowledge of the network is limited, the Centre may not take such drastic action. If they decide that his "going private" will not imperil the organisation or hamper its main working, he may merely be excluded from the network, and those individuals with whom he has been in contact are withdrawn and posted elsewhere.

The only occasion on which a member of the network is given leave to get out of the country is if he is under suspicion by the authorities or his security is imperilled by some other member of the organisation who is under suspicion for double-dealing. In such cases, if the need is really urgent, he can even leave without the permission of the Centre. In these cases he will go to his "place of conspiracy" where he will be recognised by the other contact that is there for just such an eventuality. The contact will not, however, make contact on sight. He will note the person's appearance and report back to the Centre, which will then check up to see that it is the right man and not an impersonator planted by some counterespionage authority. The Centre will also check up through the local party and the other members of the network as to the circumstances of the person's departure, and if they are satisfied, then, and only then, will contact be made at the "place of conspiracy."

A resident director, or any member of a network who holds a cipher known only to himself and the Centre, has another course open to him apart from going to the "place of conspiracy," in the event of his being forced to fly the country without receiving specific instructions from the Centre as to his future. He can go to any Soviet military attaché in any country other than that in which he is resident- the farther away the better- and there, without revealing his identity, he hands in a message in his own cipher for the M.A. to dispatch. This message the M.A. will forward to Moscow, asking no questions but merely arranging a rendezvous some time ahead. Moscow will send in return a photograph of the agent and his "control questions." This is a form of question and answer known only to the Centre and the resident director concerned. The M.A. will go to the rendezvous and if the person tallies with the photograph and can give satisfactory answers to the control questions, then his bona fides is considered to be satisfactorily established and the fugitive resident director will, receive further instructions.

So far I have described the skeleton of the organisation and the functions of its main component parts. Also the way its members are recruited, its relations with the local Communist parties, and the means by which information flows to the resident director have been outlined. No mention has been made of the most vital and probably the most difficult operation of all- the getting of the information to Moscow. Communications are the most important part of any spy ring and are its Achilles heel, as it is by tapping in on these that the counterespionage authorities gain most of their information and obtain most of their successes. Because of its importance I have left this subject to the last. Without communications with the outside world and thus to its headquarters, the most efficient spy ring in the world is powerless – as Rado found to his cost in 1940. Cut the channels of communication and you have rendered the network useless. In all probability its attempts to open up communications on an extemporised basis will betray its workings, and the individuals can be scooped up at leisure. This is, I have no doubt, the axiom of counterespionage authorities throughout the world.

Every resident director has of course his own separate means of communication. Before the war the normal means of transmitting the information which the resident director had received, sifted, and evaluated was by means of microphotographs. The director enciphered his text and then the messages were divided into portions of about five hundred cipher groups each. These portions were then microphotographed and resulted in a negative about the size of a pinhead. The pinhead negative was then stuck on an ordinary postcard, the position on the postcard being naturally agreed beforehand. The postcard, which bore a perfectly innocent and normal message, was then sent by the resident director to an address in a nearby country where it was collected by a courier and delivered, either direct or through yet another cut-out, to the Soviet military attaché, who sent it on either in the diplomatic bag or over embassy wireless channels.

Similarly, if the Centre wished to communicate with a resident director, a postcard carrying microphotographs would be sent in the bag to the military attaché's office in a country adjacent to that in which the resident director concerned lived. This postcard the military attaché sent to an accommodation address in the resident director's country where it was collected by a courier and delivered to the chief cut-out, who in turn delivered it to the resident director. In all cases the occupiers of the accommodation or "cover addresses" concerned were entirely ignorant of the identity of the resident director, the military attaché, or even of the cut-outs who collected the mail. They usually believed that they were merely acting as accommodation addresses for the local Communist Party by whom they had probably been recruited.

Apart from this system of microphotographic communication, the networks also used a courier system. The resident director would send one of his trusted cut-outs to various fixed rendezvous in neighbouring countries where the cut-out would meet a courier from the Centre. This system, if slightly slower, was obviously better for the tranmission of bulky documents or samples of apparatus.

These two systems worked very well in times of peace, when postal communications were easy and rapid and, generally speaking, there was no systematic censorship of mail. In time of war, when communications were disrupted, at best subjected to long delay, and at worst never arrived at all, the system was clearly impracticable, and, saves over short distances, broke down. Even when it worked, all correspondence was liable to severe scrutiny by wartime censorship with the consequent risk of compromise.

As a result there was a radical reorganisation of communications systems, and now the main system in use is short-wave wireless transmission. This system is obviously infinitely quicker than the accommodation address and the numerous cut-outs and, provided normal precautions are observed, is equally safe.

In wartime it was vital that the Centre receive information as quickly as possible. Most of the information transmitted by networks concerned operational matters, and these would have been useless even if they had been subject only to the normal peacetime postal delays. As a result wireless transmission was instituted as the normal means of communication between the resident director and the Centre; and all resident directors are now required to undergo a course in radiotelegraphy and construction in Moscow before taking up the direction of a network abroad. Directors so qualified can send off urgent information as soon as it is encoded, without having to contact the normal wireless operator. If the director is forced to flee the country he can then build a new transmitter and is thus in a position to contact the Centre without the delays which a "place of conspiracy" or the contacting of a military attaché is bound to entail.

Though resident directors are now required to be so technically efficient, this newly acquired art has not taken away from the importance of the networks' wireless operators. Even if the director can transmit, it is obviously highly undesirable that in normal circumstances he should go to the set and do it himself- or worse still have the set in his house and transmit from there himself and thus imperil the whole network. As a result there is need for reliable wireless operators who will probably know the chief cut-out but will not know the identity of the director himself.

The ideal operator, like a resident director, is not a native of the country in which he is working. Through being a foreigner it is easier for him to hide his nocturnal and clandestine activities than if he were a permanent resident with many friends and relations all idly curious as to how he spends his time. In equally ideal circumstances this ideal operator will install himself and his transmitter in a top-floor flat of a large building situated in a built-up area. This makes it harder for direction-finding apparatus to locate him than if he were in an isolated place.

In peacetime the operator would probably have no more than two days a month when he was bound to establish two-way contact with the Centre. In addition there would also be several days each week when the Centre would be listening, at prearranged fixed times, in case he should call. Also on certain fixed days the operator himself would be required to listen in in case the Centre wished to call him.

In my network the Centre used a fixed call sign, though the call signs used by our sets varied according to a prearranged schedule. In order to establish communication a fixed call wave was used. For example, if

I wished to call the Centre I would tap out my call sign in Morse on my fixed call wave, say 43 metres. The Centre would be listening and reply on its fixed call wave, perhaps 39 metres. On hearing the Centre reply, I would then switch to my working wave length, say 49 metres, and then with a different call sign send over my material. The Centre would similarly switch wave lengths and call signs, and move over to their working wave length. This system, though it may sound complicated on paper, was simple to operate in practice and cut to the minimum the possibility of radio monitoring.

All messages, of course, were always in cipher and the cipher was one that could be read only by the Centre and the resident director. In the case of our net things were slightly different since, as well as Rado, the resident director, I also held my own cipher, and as I had my transmitter in my flat I was able to answer any questions from the Centre often in a matter of hours. Modern ingenuity has also reduced the risk of having a transmitter on the premises. In the old days transmitters were bulky pieces of apparatus which could not easily be hidden. Now they are made so that they do not occupy more space than the average portable typewriter and are capable of disguise in various forms. Any good modern receiving set is perfectly suitable for picking up messages from the control station. So much for communications.

The foregoing account is an attempt to describe how the network is designed to work under ideal conditions, if it follows strictly the lines laid down by Moscow. Obviously circumstances must alter cases and the network must be adapted to fit in with local conditions, but the general plan is constant and, as will be seen, corresponds very closely with the network in Switzerland. Any variations were due to the exigencies of war and occasionally to the human factor- such as the frailties of the resident director himself. A comparison of the two diagrams showing the organisation in theory and in practice shows the similarity.

It may be argued that the above description of the ideal Soviet network bears little or no resemblance to the espionage organisation uncovered in Canada. There the whole case centred round the Soviet Legation in Ottawa itself, and the legation was directly concerned with espionage against Canada. This goes entirely contrary to the canons of classical Soviet espionage. There is, I think, an easy explanation for this, one which accounts for this variation from the normal - and also, I believe, for the comparative ease with which the network was uncovered. If the network had been properly run even the defection of Gouzenko should not have exposed the whole network. But in fact the network was an ad hoc affair set up in rather a hurry.

The reasons for this are not far to seek. At the outbreak of war the main Soviet espionage effort was switched to Germany and her satellites, and the networks working against the British Empire and the United States were allowed to lie fallow. With the German attack on Russia it became even more imperative to mobilise all espionage resources for the current struggle. Also it was obviously politically undesirable for there to be any chance of a worsening of relations between the Allies as might result from the uncovering of a Russian espionage ring working against one of Russia's own allies. As a result the Soviet spy rings working against the Allies were closed down or allowed to lie dormant.

When it was apparent to Russia that victory was only a matter of time and that her Western Allies were so involved in the war that a separate peace was out of the question, the Centre began to think of reviving their networks in the democracies, so that they would be in full working order when peace came and Russia would once more be in a position to obtain information of value to her from her quondam allies but real and ultimate adversaries- Great Britain and the United States. In the meantime, however, the old networks had fallen apart and the old resident directors had been moved to other posts. There was no time to establish new resident directors and as a result the rather haphazard organisation as exposed in the Canadian case came into being. I myself have no doubt that even though this network was paying dividends to the Centre in the shape of good and high-grade information, new resident directors were being established and were building up their networks quietly in the background. The world was sufficiently startled at the amount of information that the Canadian network was able to obtain. I myself have no doubt that the permanent network will do as well - if not a great deal better- if it is not doing so already. Only the network in Canada and portions of it in the United States have been exposed. It is a fair assumption that a similar emergency network existed in England also. Meanwhile the new resident directors should be well established, perhaps in Mexico and France, working and building up their networks against the United States and Great Britain. Time alone will show how successful they are.

THE BLUEPRINT IN ACTION

Having outlined the theoretical layout of a Soviet spy ring, it is now time to give the actual details of the Russian espionage network working against Germany. To a certain extent I am outrunning my narrative, as I did not learn some of the facts and details until much later in my career- some of them not till I went to Moscow. But in order to draw a clear picture of the whole organisation I have here assembled all the details that I learned at all stages. It will be noticed, and a glance at the diagram of the network will show, how closely the actual spy ring corresponds with the blueprint. It must be remembered that I am dealing only with the main espionage organisation directed against Germany and based on Switzerland. Before the outbreak of war there had been several other organisations- of which Sonia's had been only one. These had lost touch with Moscow and been gradually and in part incorporated into the main Red Army network- as had Sonia's. I can speak only of these subsidiary networks in so far as they came into contact with mine. I have little doubt that they were inactive during the war as none of them, save Sonia's, had any means of communication after the fall of France. The unexpectedly swift advance of the German armies threw the whole Russian setup into confusion and caused the amalgamation of the minor networks into the main Red Army organisation.

For the sake of clarity and to keep as closely as possible to the outline given in the previous chapter I have divided the characters roughly under the heads under which they fall in the blueprint.

RESIDENT DIRECTOR

Alexander Rado. I have already described him and his ostensible cover occupation. He had, I think, come to Switzerland in 1937 and taken over the post of resident director from a woman known to me as "the woman major," whom I met afterwards in Moscow. He remained at the head of the organisation with me as his deputy until the arrests of the Hamels and Bolli in October 1943 forced him into hiding. After my arrest six weeks later the network was virtually quiescent until my release and journey to Paris a year later.

PRINCIPAL CUT-OUTS

Rachel Duebendorfer. Cover name "Cissie" or "Sisi." I did not meet her until after my release from prison, though Rado had been told by the Centre to put us into contact and we had a mutual place of conspiracy, where we were to meet if anything happened to Rado. She was, I should imagine, of Balkan origin herself though she held a Swiss passport, having gone through the ceremony of a mariage blanc with a Swiss in order to get Swiss papers. Her main function was to act as cut-out for Rado between her own two cut-outs, "Taylor" and "Isaac," mentioned below. She also acted as a contact between Rado and the Swiss Communist Party, as she was in touch with Hofmeier of that Party, who was, presumably, one of the Red Army contact men.

Cissie's role in the organisation was an important one and, as will be seen later, she also- at least in Moscow's view- played an important part in the Canadian spy case, as it was one of her more imprudent actions which, the Centre thought, led to the discovery of the Canadian network. Personally she was not really an attractive character, either physically or mentally. Her private life was slightly complicated as she lived with a former German politician, Boetcher, who had had to flee Germany after the Nazis came to power. He was living illegally in Switzerland and was ultimately arrested by the Swiss police for working for the Russians and the British. I cannot speak for the British side but he certainly was not connected with our network.

"Pakbo." The other main cut-out for Rado's organisation. I never knew Pakbo's real name, though we met frequently just before my arrest and after my release. He had been working for the Russians for many years and acted as one of the chief cut-outs and talent spotters of the organisation. His main specialty was contact with diplomatic circles in Berne, where he lived, and he also ran agents in diplomatic circles outside Switzerland. In the case of Pakbo, Rado did as he should, and put me in touch with him when he went into hiding.

Apart from the specific sources mentioned below, Pakbo was also in touch with several military attachés, including the Chinese, of whom he made use after the wireless link was broken by my arrest. On my departure from Switzerland for Paris Pakbo also asked me to deliver a message to the Soviet military attaché to the effect that one Lieutenant Colonel Thibault, the Vichy French military attaché in Berne, wished to be placed in direct touch with the Russians. Thibault stated that he had details of V-3 and wished to hand the plans over personally to the Soviet military attaché. I passed the message on but do not know what, if any, action was taken on it by the Centre.

The other main cut-out was of course myself, who also acted as one of the wireless operators for the group.

WIRELESS OPERATORS

The organisation had three wireless transmitters working after the German attack on Russia. One was run by me from Lausanne, another by the Hamels in Geneva; and the third, ultimately in Geneva, by one Margarete Bolli (cover name "Rosie").

At this stage I need say no more about myself and my activities as an operator. I have already given details regarding the recruitment and training of the Hamels. Rosie, like the Hamels, had been recruited by that invaluable and industrious talent spotter Nicole. I trained her in transmission in Lausanne in 1942 and she set up her transmitter at first in her parents' house in Basle. This led to certain domestic difficulties and after a time she and the set moved to Geneva.

MINOR CUT-OUTS

The only subsidiary contact of any importance was Taylor. He was not only a cut-out but an agent as well.

He worked back to Rado through Cissie. He provided the network with a certain amount of gossip and information from the International Labour Office where he worked as a translator. By origin a German Jew, his real name was Schneider (of which his cover name was of course only an English translation). In himself he was of little importance to the network, but as the recruiter and contact of "Lucy," our link with the German high command (who was of such importance that I have thought it worth while to devote a chapter to his activities), he was of vital importance. He and only he knew Lucy's real identity, and it was therefore vital for the network to keep him working and happy. It is not everyone who acts as intermediary for an agent who has access to all the secrets of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, and Taylor was at first our only link. At a critical period of the war the Centre offered him a salary for life if he would give up his job with the I.L.O. and devote himself solely to being contact man for Lucy. The only stipulation that Moscow made was that Taylor should provide an address in the United States to which the money could be sent in a lump sum in dollars. This, unfortunately for him, Taylor was unable to supply. Despite this, however, he gave up his job with the I.L.O. and did nothing more save cut-out work between Cissie and Lucy. I think that he is still waiting for his money.

COURIERS

The only couriers of any importance of whom the organisation made use were Rosie, who as well as being an operator acted as courier between Rado and me and also between Rado and Pakbo and Maude, the wife of Hamel, who, herself a trained operator, also was a courier between Rado and me when the latter was too busy I to make personal contact.

The above is the main internal communication network. Rado at the centre with his two main cut-outs, Cissie and Pakbo, with Taylor as a secondary contact to the former. Both Cissie and Rado had personal contact with Nicole, who in turn acted as contact with the left-wing Socialists and also one portion of the Geneva and Tessin Communist parties. Cissie was also the cut-out to Hofmeier of the Party. Communication with Moscow was assured through the three transmitters, and Rosie and Maude acted as couriers between Rado, Pakbo, and me.

Before Rado had access to Sonia's transmitter he was, of course, using the old microphotographic technique for the transmission of his information through a cover address in France, whence it was delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Paris. It was the fall of France which, as I have explained before, forced the Centre to put him and Sonia in contact so that communications could be maintained.

With the organisation for the communication and transmission of information clear, the actual sources of information can be examined. To give a catalogue of all the sources would be extremely tedious and, after this lapse of time, almost impossible for me. There were, if I remember correctly, some sixty sources, i.e., agents with cover names, who supplied information to the network. Many of these I knew only by their cover names and many of them, in their turn, merely provided occasional information. Here I give only the main sources

from which Rado drew the material for his reports. They alone were more than sufficient to keep our three transmitters fully occupied. I was often so rushed that I had only time to read and encipher the messages, and no time at all to digest their content, and as a result was on the air for hours at a time, which of course offends all security canons and would lead to certain discovery in an enemy country. The "Bupo" (Bundespolizei, the wartime Swiss police security organisation) were either kinder or less efficient.

Cissie's main sources were three in number:

1. Isaac, by origin a Lithuanian Jew. He asserted that when Russia occupied the Baltic States he had applied to the Soviet Embassy in Paris for Soviet papers, having registered as a Soviet citizen. He also stated that he had been told to stay in Switzerland and not go to Moscow. He was of use to the organisation not only as a source but also, being a member of the staff of the I.L.O. and therefore possessing quasi-diplomatic privilege, as a useful depository for compromising documents and as a "safe house." The information that he supplied via Cis- sie was mostly material from the League of Nations and the I.L.O. and generally dealt, not unnaturally, with political matters. He was never given a regular retainer but was paid only by results.

2. Another source of Cissie's was "Brant," who supplied a certain amount of material on League of Nations matters. He was, I believe, some sort of connection of Cissie's by marriage. He later left Switzerland for France, of which country he was a national, and, as far as I know, is now out of the whole racket.

3. Cissie's third and most important source was Lucy, through the medium of Taylor. She had, in addition, several minor sources and contacts who were of use to the network but these do not merit mention here and will appear only in the course of the narrative.

Pakbo also had three main sources and as well acted as occasional contact with Nicole and the Swiss Communist Party. Probably his main source was "Rot," an organisation in South Germany, which I suspect was closely tied up with the German Communist Party and had links into and with the Swiss Party. This source produced political, military, and economic information from South Germany. Occasionally the source also yielded information from Berlin.

I never knew much more about the organisation, but I should imagine that it was a small group in close touch with events in South Germany, occasionally receiving information from members of the group who were stationed in Berlin or elsewhere and came down to South Germany for leave. The information was never very "hot" and it probably reached Pakbo through a series of couriers. I also suspect that he did not organise these but that they were organised by the Party in Switzerland.

His other source outside Switzerland was one known to me only by the rather romantic name of "Lili aus Vatikan." This source, as the name suggests, produced diplomatic information from Italy in general and the Vatican City in particular. I never knew how it reached Pakbo but always assumed that it was via the diplomatic bag (the delay in receipt would fit that assumption), and that the source was some diplomat accredited to the Vatican City.

In Switzerland Pakbo had one main source of value. This was "Salter." His identity was never known to me but I suspect that he was a Yugoslav and from the type of information that he produced it might well have been the Yugoslav military attaché. Apart from providing in- I formation, Salter also acted as a rather tenuous link between Rado and the British. Salter was in touch with the British military attaché and it was through Pakbo and Salter that Rado put out his feelers for a possible "safe house" with the British should his position become I untenable in Switzerland. Rado did this when he saw that the "heat was on" and that it was only a matter of time before he was picked up or had to go into hiding. He actually made his approach and received a favourable reaction from the British. Rashly, he also put the suggestion to the Centre - who turned it down at once and ever after suspected Rado of, at the best, leanings towards the democracies and at the worst downright treachery. An interesting example of the different attitude of "allies" allegedly fighting the same war against a common enemy.

My own sources also were three in number. This is mere coincidence and not any mystic belief by the Centre in the virtue of uneven numbers.

My first source was "May." She acted as cut-out between me and Humbert Droz of the Swiss Communist Party. Droz had formerly been Secretary of the Comintern and had, in fact, preceded Dimitrov in that post. He had been previously in touch with another Russian network in Switzerland but had not had contact since 1939. I contacted him in 1941, on instructions from Moscow, who wished him to form his own network and supply such information as he could obtain from just over the frontier. This was not really a difficult or dangerous task as workers streamed to and fro over the German border with comparative ease, and there was an ample supply of Party comrades as potential recruits. Droz agreed to do this, but before he could take any steps he was arrested by the Swiss authorities for secretly reforming the Swiss Communist Party. He was released a few months later but abandoned the Communist Party and joined the Social Democrats, of which party he later became Secretary.

Helena Schmidt was a most useful source and veteran of the network, which had employed her for some twenty years. She was the contact between the network and the "cobbler" (maker of illegal passports).

My third source was never really a source of mine but was rather an unpleasant incubus thrust upon me by the Centre. George and Joanna Wilmer (cover names "Lorenz" and "Laura") were old established members of the Russian Intelligence Service. Of allegedly Swiss nationality, they had been born in Russia and had worked abroad for the Centre since 1926, in France, Japan, and the United States. I was given their real, name by the Centre, who instructed me to contact them and take and transmit their material. Unfortunately Moscow was unable to give me their address. By the intelligent use of the telephone directory (an invaluable source and one so frequently neglected by enquiry agents of all kinds) I managed to locate them in their villa near Lausanne. I was treated by them with the utmost suspicion at first, and it was only after a great deal of difficulty that I managed to get any material from them- and then it was of a very low-grade nature. They were both always trying to discover my real name and address, but I am glad to say without success. There is now no doubt that at some period prior to the war they had been "got at" by the German Intelligence Service and were working as "double agents" for the Germans, i.e., supplying false information to the Russians, which information had been supplied to them by the Germans. I warned Moscow repeatedly, and repeatedly expressed my doubts as to their bona fides, but the Centre would have nothing of it.

These then are the sources from which Rado obtained his information for the Red Army. Drawn from all walks of life and all nationalities, there is no common factor to account for their activities as spies for the Red Army. They were in the main efficient and loyal, and their efforts did in some way assist the Allied cause and lead to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Let them be honoured for that.

I now turn to the most valuable source that the network had- the one man who supplied information from the very heart of Germany, whose contacts extended not only into the Wilhelmstrasse and the Bendlerstrasse but also into all places of authority in the Third Reich - Lucy.

ONE AGAINST HITLER

Who was Lucy? He was the most important actor in this peculiar drama, but he never came into the limelight. His supporting cast can only be dimly seen and hazily described; their names unknown and even their roles are undefined. Lucy, snugly ensconced in neutral Switzerland, held in his hand the threads which led back to the three main commands in Germany and also could, and did, provide information from other German government offices. Where he got his information and how it came were his own secrets. Even his own identity was for a long time shrouded in mystery. I can only give the facts as known to me, and the deductions that I can draw. The rest of the story is Lucy's- and Lucy is not talking.

First of all- what did Lucy produce? The answer to this is simple. Lucy provided Moscow with an up-to-date and day-to-day order of battle of the German forces in the East. This information could come only from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht itself. In no other offices in the whole of Germany was there available the information that Lucy provided daily. Not only did he provide the day-to-day dispositions on the eastern front, but also Lucy could, and did, provide answers to specific questions. It frequently happened that Moscow had lost sight of such-and-such an ersatz division. An enquiry was put through Lucy and in a matter of days the answer would be provided, giving the composition, strength, and location of the unit in question.

As far as Moscow was concerned, this was obviously the most important function Lucy could perform. Russia, fighting with its back to the wall and scraping up its last resources, was obviously vitally interested in trustworthy information regarding the armed forces ranged against her- and this Lucy supplied. Anyone who has fought a battle from the General Staff angle will know what it means to be able to place the flags of the enemy on the map and plan the disposition of one's own troops accordingly, in as complete confidence in the authenticity of the information as if one had been in the headquarters of one's opposite number. Lucy put Moscow in this position, and the effect of the information on the strategy of the Red Army and the ultimate defeat of the Wehr- macht is incalculable.

If Lucy had confined himself to producing information regarding the German Army, that would have been in itself sufficiently remarkable, and as such he could have amply justified himself in Soviet eyes. But his sources went further. Not only did he provide information on the troop dispositions, information which could only have come from the O.K.W. in the Bendlerstrasse, but he also produced equally good information emanating from the headquarters of the Luftwaffe and the Marine Amt, the German Admiralty. These last two sources were subsidiary, as the Centre was naturally primarily interested in troop movements; but Lucy could and did provide information on German aircraft and German naval shipping, and occasionally threw in reports on German economic and scientific production. For example, I remember that in 1941 he supplied information regarding the manufacture of flying bombs and plans for the construction of ten-ton rockets. In effect, as far as the Kremlin was concerned, the possession of Lucy as a source meant that they had the equivalent of well-placed agents in the three service intelligence staffs plus the Imperial General Staff plus the War Cabinet Offices.

However late such information was received from such a source, it was obviously of immense value. What increased the value was the speed with which the information reached us. One would normally think that a source producing information of this quality would take time to obtain it. No such delay occurred in the receipt of Lucy's information. On most occasions it was received within twenty-four hours of its being known at the appropriate headquarters in Berlin. In fact, barely enough time to encipher and decipher the messages concerned. There was no question of any courier or safe hand route. The information must have been received by Lucy over the air, and his sources, whoever they were, must have gone almost hotfoot from the service teleprinters to their wireless transmitters in order to send the information off. This speed was one of the factors that made the Centre distrust this source, and only after bitter experience did they accept it at its face value.

Who was the source and how did he come into the network? As always in espionage, the end is dealt with first.

Lucy was introduced by Taylor, alias Schneider, sometime early in 1941. Taylor was apparently an old friend of Lucy's and introduced him to the Centre on one condition only- that he, Taylor, and only he should know the true identity of the source and that Moscow would not be told. The Centre was extremely suspicious and at first advised Rado to have nothing to do with it. Even after Lucy had disclosed the date of the German attack on Russia some two weeks in advance, and check-backs had shown that the information was correct, the Centre still refused to accept the information and insisted that it must be some kind of plant. Despite the Centre's attitude we continued to "plug" Lucy's information over to Moscow. Rado, in one of his few independent gestures of the war, was paying Lucy without prior sanction from Moscow and insisting that this information was valuable, and indeed vital, to the Russian cause. "Dripping water wears away the hardest stone," and in the end we managed to convince Moscow that this information was, to say the least, extremely valuable to them. Once they were convinced, they went for it in a really big way. Lucy was given seven thousand Swiss francs a month as a retaining fee plus special bonuses, and his information, at least all that which passed over my transmitter, had a suffix of one code group meaning "Urgent decipher at once." In fact in the end Moscow very largely fought the war on Lucy's messages- as indeed any high command would who had access to genuine information emanating in a steady flow from the high command of their enemies.

Moscow accepted Taylor's conditions and Lucy was to them a source of unknown origin - as indeed he was to all of us till some time after the dissolution of the network. As far as I know this was the only time Moscow ever accepted an unvetted source; in this case they were amply justified for their unorthodox action.

So much for how Lucy came into the net. As far as the Centre was concerned we forced the source upon them. To the best of my knowledge no one received any thanks for doing so.

Who was Lucy? The answer to that is simple - Selzinger. Who was Selzinger? The answer to that is not so easy. Before Hitler came to power Selzinger had been connected with the theatre in Germany, probably as a producer, and gained quite a reputation in his profession in Berlin. He was not a German himself, but a Czech. After the establishment of the Third Reich he fled to Switzerland. On arrival there he did his best to make his stay as permanent as possible and to this end used his sources in Germany to ingratiate himself with the Swiss. In a short time the Swiss General Staff realised his value and used him as their main source of information regarding the German Army's disposition against Switzerland. In return for his information, Selzinger was given permission to reside in Switzerland. Until the rape of Czechoslovakia Lucy worked for the Czech General Staff, so the secret of his sources may have lain in Prague.

The Swiss General Staff regarded him so highly that they not only used him as a source of information regarding German intentions towards Switzerland- which of course his incomparable sources could provide- but also used him as an "evaluater." That is, they asked him to evaluate the information they received from other sources on the German armed strength and acted on his decision. He ended up, in fact, as the assessor for the

Swiss Director of Military Intelligence on all military information emanating from Germany.

Selzinger had apparently wanted to contact the network and had been introduced to Taylor by one of the latter's minor sources. He was certainly a source of Taylor's in 1941 and quite consciously provided the Centre with his information- even though the Centre did not believe it. He was of course simultaneously providing the Swiss General Staff with such information as he could obtain regarding German intentions against Switzerland and his dual role must be remembered in assessing his actions. Selzinger was a refugee in a neutral country and as such was obviously out to ingratiate himself with as many authorities as he could find- especially the authorities which gave him a safe lodgement. To this end he remained loyal to his Swiss masters- as loyal as he did to his Russian ones. Luckily for him, their interests never clashed.

I never met Selzinger until after my imprisonment when, through a cut-out, he expressed a desire to see me. He was, throughout my active career as a spy in Switzerland, merely a cover name whose sources were equally veiled in jargon. For example "Werther" was his name for the O.K.W. and "Olga" for the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe. Similarly, the Marine Amt and other government departments had their cover names.

Selzinger lived in Lucerne where he was known as a "publicist," the easy phrase that covers anything from a writer of pamphlets to a best seller.

What was the source of his information? Here I must enter into the field of pure speculation. I do not know; the Centre did not know; Taylor did not know; and the only person who did know was Selzinger himself, and he is not telling. Whoever his sources were, they were obviously high up in the Nazi hierarchy and the information reached Selzinger by wireless. Since the war there have been various books produced by various leaders of the so-called German "resistance" and in them there has been mention of a Communist cell within the German Air Ministry which was broken up sometime in 1942. It is possible that Selzinger's sources included this particular spy ring and that this was the only one that the Germans managed to discover, leaving his Wehrmacht and other sources inviolate. This is not a wholly satisfactory explanation as Selzinger's sources continued uninterruptedly long after this alleged spy ring in the Luftwaffe was eliminated. It would be logical to assume that there might have been a slight hiatus at the time of the Luftwaffe arrests in 1942- but no such hiatus occurred and the information continued to stream in.

A really suspicious-minded person might think that the whole thing was a gigantic double-cross by the Germans, who could have supplied Selzinger with a vast amount of authentic information in the hope that the occasional piece of false information would be accepted as well. There is one scrap of intelligence to support this thesis, and one scrap only. At the time of Timoshenko's Kharkov offensive in 1942 the Russians based this offensive almost entirely on the information that Lucy supplied. In this case the Russians found themselves in a trap and heavy losses ensued. If this had been one of many incidents resulting from Lucy's intelligence, the thesis that the whole thing was a German strategic double- cross would be more tenable. However, this was the only occasion that his information turned out not to be genuine. It is almost inconceivable that the Germans- if they had controlled the source of Lucy's original intelligence - would not have attempted to cash in on it to a greater extent. This did not happen and I think that this excludes the double-cross hypothesis. It is of course possible that Selzinger's intimate contact with the Swiss General Staff may have helped to supplement his information. Selzinger may not have been above peddling to the Russians such information as he obtained in his capacity as an "evaluater" of Swiss intelligence- his own sources in Germany having failed him.

The only clue that Selzinger ever gave as to his sources was when I saw him after my release from prison, when he stated that the purge which resulted from the attempt of July 1944 had considerably reduced the number of his sources. He did manage, however, to produce formidable documentation which he asked me to take with me to Paris for transmission to the Soviet Embassy there, and the purge and the resultant almost complete elimination of any potential resistance movement in Germany had obviously merely embarrassed and temporarily inconvenienced him rather than removed his sources. We can thus rule out any super-patriotic German general as the source.

Really, anyone's guess is as good as mine. If the source was a German double-cross it was a very badly conceived one. If it was the Bendlerstrasse they managed to continue very active even after sentence of death by the People's Court. If it was the Swiss they certainly showed more efficiency than they did in the elimination of our network.

Let the matter be left there. It is sufficient for my purpose - as it was for the Centre - that Lucy produced the "goods" and that on all occasions save one these were accurate, speedy, and complete. The war on the eastern front was fought largely on them and the intelligence produced led to victories for the Allies. I can only suggest that further enquiries be directed to Selzinger himself. As will be seen, he was arrested in June 1944 and released some three months afterwards with a certificate from the Swiss General Staff testifying to the services that he had performed and guaranteeing him immunity in the future. He is therefore presumably still a resident of Switzerland. His services in the past cannot be denied - he produced the answers and protected his sources, and one asks no more of a secret agent. His efforts, if any, in the future may be equally interesting. It is to be hoped that his skill at penetrating into the heart of general staffs remains confined to Germany - if his employers remain the same.

PRELUDE TO WAR

I have interrupted the story of my own activities in order to give a picture of a typical Soviet spy network and also to explain our own. Such background "briefing" is essential for the clear understanding of what follows. Without some background knowledge of the workings of a Russian spy organisation and the cardinal principles involved, many of my actions and the precautions that we took would appear meaningless and stupid. Anyone who has read so far will now appreciate the essential and elementary security precautions that were taken and the way that our sources were contacted. Later on it will be seen how criminal disregard for these "simple little rules and few" led the organisation into disaster.

The period of my career as an active spy when I was in direct wireless communication with the Centre in Moscow falls quite naturally into two parts. The first comprises the first few months of the spring of 1941, between the time that I at last established communication with Moscow on March 12 and the invasion of Russia by Germany on June 22. The second period is from the entry of Russia into the war until my arrest on November 20, 1943. The first period was really a continuation of the halcyon days of peace, after the outbreak of war in September 1939 when Philips, Sonia, and I had little to do and did it on the whole very well. The flurry caused by the fall of France had subsided, and Rado's communications were secure, thanks to the activities of Sonia and myself. He had one set working in Geneva operated by the Hamels and I was also in touch with the Centre from Lausanne. Life was pleasant and easy in Switzerland that spring, and I enjoyed it and the leisure to the full- it was the last leisure I was to have for some time.

In those easy, carefree days I had contact with Moscow twice a week only. Twice a week at one o'clock in the morning I would settle down at my transmitter and send off what little I had and receive Moscow's replies. I was not at that time asked to do any espionage work myself nor to go out and attempt to recruit sources. I was the substitute resident director and as such had to remain in the background; the Centre was perfectly content to know that I was there; that communications were secured and that if anything happened they could call upon me if necessary.

On instructions from the Centre I concentrated upon establishing myself so firmly in Lausanne that there would be no possible danger of my presence arousing suspicion. This was not easy, for in the middle of the war there were not a great number of British subjects of military age resident in neutral Switzerland. In normal times the Centre will often put a resident director into his country for two years before they ask him to take over any work: he spends the entire two years in building himself an impressive cover. I had to do this as quickly as possible, and in time of war. My fellow Englishmen varied from retired army officers and civil servants, who had settled down in Switzerland on their pensions and been caught by the war, to the riffraff of the Riviera, who had been swept out of France by the German invasion and had taken refuge in Switzerland where they lived precariously on their wits, the black market, and such remittances as they could get from home. The latter were not an attractive crowd but they turned out in the end to be useful to me- though quite unconscious that they were indirectly assisting the Red Army. I understand that I ended up with the reputation of being a mildly eccentric English millionaire who had managed to salt away a portion of his fortune abroad and who on the whole shunned the company of his fellow men. The reputation of wealth was essential as otherwise I might have had awkward questions from the Swiss police as to the source of my funds; indeed at times my finances were precarious, while at others I had tens of thousands of Swiss francs concealed in my flat. My reputation as a recluse was not ill deserved. If anyone has ever tried to encipher messages for half the night and transmit them for the other half he will understand the reason why for the rest of the day I was inclined to keep to my flat - and my bed.

At this time Rado's transmitter was capable of taking all the traffic that had to be sent, so I was not used as an overflow channel. Indeed, the only espionage assignment that the Centre gave me that spring was the task of preparing an economic report on Switzerland. This I agreed to do, but in fact did nothing about it as I had no qualifications nor indeed any sources at that time to produce such a thing. Moscow used occasionally to enquire solicitously as to its progress and I used to reply equally encouragingly but did nothing but look round in a vague sort of way for someone suitable to "ghost" such a report for me. Luckily, before Moscow became too querulous the German invasion took place and such academic matters were shelved.

Sonia had left, and Bill Philips, too, had left the net, so at that time my only espionage contact was Rado himself. Having finished training Hamel, I avoided him scrupulously to prevent compromise, though later Maude, his wife, was used as a contact in times of emergency or stress.

The main preoccupation of the network at that time was finance. An espionage organisation without finance is almost as useless as one without communications. The fall of France had cut Rado's purse strings and since that time he had been living on such monies as he could obtain from the Swiss Communist Party - who were now pressing for payment. The majority of my communications with Moscow at this time were over this financial question, and in the end it turned out that I had to do all the organisation for the financing of the network. Moscow were prepared to assist, but were quite unwilling or unable to suggest anything themselves save for one foolish suggestion and one abortive attempt.

Soon after establishing contact in March, after a long discussion with Rado I put the whole financial position to Moscow and asked for help and advice. The Centre replied by suggesting, helpfully, that I go to Vichy and collect money from the courier at a prearranged rendezvous; they added that if this was not possible I could no doubt arrange for a trusted go-between to go there in my place. I replied somewhat acidly that as things were in Europe at that time it was a little difficult for a British subject to go into Vichy France from Switzerland and in any case this would hardly be advisable as it would probably "blow" me completely or at least expose me and the network to a grave risk of compromise. As regarded Ending a reliable homme de confiance I had, as the Centre knew, no sources of my own at that time, having been told not to cultivate any, and by the time I had found someone reliable and had had him vetted by the Centre in all likelihood the whole network would, at best, be in the Swiss equivalent of Carey Street and, at the worst, in jail. The Centre tactfully dropped this suggestion and I heard no more about it; but in April or May they produced a further scheme.

I was informed that a courier was coming from Belgium and that he would meet Rado at a rendezvous in Switzerland and would hand over Rado's allocation of cash and also my own. The courier duly arrived- but empty-handed. He told the infuriated Rado that this was merely a trial trip to see what the frontier controls were like between Germany and Switzerland, and, having passed through them, he, the courier, was certain that this route was not practicable as the search was too stringent. To add insult to injury he attempted to borrow money from the almost penniless Rado in order to finance his return trip. After our experience of these two bright financial ideas by the Centre, it was obvious to Rado and me that unless we ourselves could think up some scheme for getting money and put it in words of one syllable to Moscow the whole organisation would crumble quietly into ruins.

I first of all suggested to the Centre that they should pay money into an account in my name in a foreign bank and that this sum could then be transferred in a normal way to me in Switzerland. This was at once turned down as it would be necessary for the courier who paid the money to know my name, and this was strictly against the rules. They did state, however, that they could make cash payments into banks in Great Britain, the United States, China, and Sweden on receipt of instructions from me. They added, however, that on no account was the person receiving the money to know my name and the courier paying the money in would in turn give a false name. On those conditions and those conditions only could they help financially.

On the face of it, this did not look too promising. On the other hand the war had been going on some time and the various black bourses were in full blast. I made some discreet enquiries among my more monied Swiss friends and the shadier of my English acquaintances, and soon evolved a scheme which I thought would work. Through the agency of a Swiss friend I was able to get in touch with some firms which in the course of their normal business remitted money between Switzerland and the U.S.A. The usual procedure for such transactions was for the whole affair to be handled by the National Bank, which would change Swiss francs into dollars and vice versa at the rate of four francs thirty centimes per U.S. dollar. I proposed that, instead of doing their transactions through the normal and indeed only legal way, namely a Swiss bank, they should allow me to do them- at a cheaper rate.

The scheme was put up to Moscow and they agreed and played their part. The procedure was quite simple and almost foolproof. Moscow would pay into a bank in New York a sum of money in dollars for the credit of the Geneva account of an American firm. The firm's branch in Switzerland would be notified by telegram that this sum had been credited to their account and they would at once pay me the agreed rate in Swiss francs - at the black market rate.

This may sound complicated but in fact it was quite simple- and indeed profitable to all concerned. For ease and simplicity let it be assumed that the official rate for Swiss francs to dollars was four to the dollar and that the black market rate was two to the dollar (the real rates were 4.30 and at lowest 2.75 respectively) and that the sum in question was one hundred U.S. dollars. The Centre, through their courier, would pay into the firm's account at the New York bank the sum of one hundred dollars. The New York office of the firm would notify their Geneva branch that this sum had been credited to them in New York and that as a result they had a credit of four hundred Swiss francs or its equivalent available to them. The Geneva representative of the firm paid out to me two hundred francs (the equivalent of one hundred dollars at the black market rate). At the official rate of exchange, four Swiss francs to the dollar, he had thus paid out only fifty dollars and as a result he or his firm had fifty dollars' clear profit on the deal. The only loser was of course the Centre, which had to buy francs at a bad rate of exchange; but it enabled them (and it was the only way) to pay their network in Switzerland- and I suspect that the same system worked elsewhere. Thus everyone was happy. The firm in New York could not care less; their manager in Switzerland was making a handsome profit (the figures given above are of course arbitrary and put in for the sake of simplicity, but the mathematically inclined can work out the percentage of profit between rates of 4.30 and 2.75) and the Centre was able to finance its sorely embarrassed Swiss network.

This system was one which I worked satisfactorily all the time I was with the network, and as a result some hundreds of thousands of dollars were transferred to our use through the intermediary of innocent firms. The only limitation on the sums involved was laid down by Moscow. They stated that they were not prepared to do deals of more than ten thousand dollars at a time. Their reason for this was simple and practical. Any such transaction meant that a courier had to be given the money in question in cash to take to the bank and deposit. The Centre was not prepared to trust couriers with more than ten thousand dollars, as the temptation might prove too great and they might "go private" and settle down at large and at ease in a foreign democracy. Indeed one such case occurred and caused me considerable embarrassment.

My Swiss friend managed to get in touch with an American firm which was prepared to do business on these terms and he negotiated the first deal. The firm in question was an American one which had a flourishing business in Switzerland. I arranged over my transmitter that the Centre should send a courier from time to time to the bank in New York and pay ten thousand dollars into the firm's account for the credit of their Geneva branch. In due course Moscow informed me that the transfer had taken place, and also of course the firm's representative in Geneva was equally informed that this transfer to the credit of his account had taken place. When both sides were satisfied that the money was there, then my Swiss friend received the money in Swiss francs and handed it over to me. I need hardly emphasise that neither the Swiss friend nor the American firm knew that these transactions were being undertaken on behalf of the Red Army Intelligence, and I have no doubt that they would have been horrified if they had known that the Centre was in fact behind these transactions. The whole thing was regarded by these innocent intermediaries as part and parcel of the usual black bourse activities which flourished all over Europe and with a particularly virile luxuriance in Switzerland.

If I may jump ahead of my narrative a trifle and continue with financial matters, this system suited us admirably for a year or so, and a number of innocent American firms were unwitting paymasters for the network. In 1942, however, things became a trifle more difficult. By this time we had been told by the Centre that America was the only place through which we could be financed and that it was not the slightest good thinking in terms of Great Britain, Sweden, or China. (I had never seriously contemplated the proposal to use the last country. It was complicated enough trying to deal with America- the imagination boggles at the proposition of trying from Switzerland to cope adequately with the black market in Chungking.)

In 1942 the American security authorities decided that the financial arrangements for the transfer of currency abroad must be tightened up, as at that time they gave admirable loopholes through which it would be possible to finance an enemy espionage network in the United States. As a result, as a first and simple measure, it was enacted that in future banks were to inform the United States Treasury of all details regarding large cash deposits. This, not unnaturally, rather disrupted our system of financing the network as it prevented the current procedure. The Centre informed me of the new regulations and asked me to devise a new scheme. As usual they were singularly uninspired. I then delved into the dim twilight world of the local black bourse and discovered that there were a large number of individuals who had friends in America who were prepared to take the place of my well-established firms and quite certain that their relatives would not question a sudden windfall of a few thousand dollars to the credit of their relative in Switzerland. As a result I substituted individuals for firms and the whole procedure went on as merrily as before; the only difference being that instead of benefiting firms of repute, the profits of these transactions went into the pockets of the shadier members of the black-currency underworld.

The whole procedure, though simple in essence, was made immensely more complicated as I had to provide explanations to all and sundry for my desire to transfer these large sums and also the reason why I had them. It would be as tedious as it would be difficult for me to remember the variety of lies that I told to cover up these deals. I think that, on the whole, they did good, for they enhanced my reputation as an eccentric millionaire- as only a millionaire would do deals at such a ruinous rate of exchange. The rate I got was based not on the rate for a check on New York but on the rate of a dollar bill- and as any traveller abroad knows who goes to a "free market," there is the world of difference between the two. A short and cursory study today of the exchange boards of the money-changers in, for example, Tangier will show the difference.

I also had to explain how I knew that the transaction had gone through. In fact, I was of course always told by the Centre that they had paid the money into the bank in New York and I could, and did, then so inform the company or individual concerned through my Swiss friend. I naturally could not tell them I had heard over my secret transmitter that the deal was completed. As a result I used to inform them that, before the war broke out, I had envisaged such a possibility and had arranged a plain language code with my agents by whom they would inform me when a deal was through. All cables were scrutinised by the Swiss and British censorships, and after Pearl Harbour by the Americans as well, so that it was out of the question to say that I had heard through normal channels. Quite often I heard from Moscow before the intermediary in Switzerland had been informed. This did not matter usually; I could laugh it off on the cover story of my plain language code. On several occasions, however, Moscow told me that the money had been paid and it proved that this statement was merely a pious hope. The Centre had told their resident director in America to do the necessary but it had not been done. In most cases this was due to pressure of work at the American end intermingled with sheer incompetence. On at least one occasion- as I learnt when I was in Moscow- the money had been embezzled by the courier, who had "gone private" with the ten thousand dollars; to my intense embarrassment as I had assured my Swiss contact - as the Centre had assured me- that the money had been paid over.

The speed of the transactions varied. Moscow told me that they could guarantee to do the whole thing from start to finish in ten days- given the requisite names. Sometimes it took a great deal less, often a great deal longer, and the longer it took the more my grey hairs grew. The financing of a Russian espionage network in wartime in the face of currency and exchange regulations was no joke, and I take a great deal of credit to myself that despite my original, pardonable ignorance of international finance and the black bourse and the lack of ideas from Moscow, I was able to keep the whole organisation solvent until my arrest.

As I have said, at this time I was seeing Rado only about twice a month in the normal course of events. It had been the original intention of the Centre to keep Rado's and my networks entirely separate once his communications were established. The idea had been that we should gradually draw apart during those spring months of 1941 and become two entirely independent organisations, as had been the position with his and Sonia's networks before the fall of France. Despite this desire on the part of the Centre to keep us apart, they had instructed Rado to arrange a place of conspiracy for me and for his principal cut-outs so that if ever anything happened to him I could step into his shoes. In point of fact the invasion of Russia put an end once and for all to any idea of separating our two organisations. The volume of traffic and the complexity of the work made it more and more imperative that we work closely in contact- and we continued to do so until the end.

In the early part of June 1942 I received instructions from the Centre to meet Rado at least twice a week and take the burden of some of the transmission work of his organisation. Rado was not a trained operator and even if he had been he had not a transmitter under his hand. From the time of receipt of information by him to its despatch over the air some twenty-four hours was liable to elapse. I, on the other hand, could encipher and send off my information in the course of one evening, as I had the set on the premises. As a result, for urgent information the Centre began to rely on me as the vehicle- though of course Rado still was the focal point for its collection.

The messages I sent to Moscow early in June had an ominous sound, and it appeared to me that if they were true the era of perpetual peace between Russia and Germany, which had been so loudly announced by Ribbentrop and Molotov less than two years ago, was rapidly coming to an end. Most of the information on this subject came from Lucy and from his source Werther in the German high command. Werther reported wholesale troop movements to the East, and unless the whole thing was an elaborate strategic bluff the information could mean only one thing- that Germany was about to unleash an attack in the East - if the information was true. At that time the Centre was deeply suspicious of Lucy. His information was regarded as too factual and too exact and Moscow suspected that the original source of it was the Abwehr, who were building up a source for use for deception purposes later. The Centre could not understand why the cut-out Taylor could not reveal the identity of his source and were constantly telling Rado to warn Taylor that the source was tainted.

Despite the Werther information and other news coming in from other sources on German troop movements, Rado himself remained firmly optimistic and refused to believe that Germany had any intention of invading Russia. He thought the whole thing was part of the German "war of nerves" to obtain further political and economic advantages from the Soviet Union, and once these were obtained the whole scare would die down.

One morning toward the middle of June my telephone rang and a voice which I recognised as Rado's bade me, in the usual veiled phraseology, come to a rendezvous. When I saw Rado he was obviously worried and upset. He handed me a message which he had received from Taylor through Cissie that morning. It was from Lucy and from his source Werther. Curtly and baldly it stated that a general German attack on Russia would take place at dawn on June 22 and it gave details of the army groupings and the primary objectives. Rado could not make up his mind what to do. If the information was correct it was obviously of paramount importance that it be got off as quickly as possible. He himself inclined to the Centre's belief and thought that the whole thing was an Abwehr plant. I remember that he argued that we had not only sent the Centre intelligence of German troop movements but that Lucy had also reported what the Germans believed were Russian countermoves. These the Centre must have been in a position to evaluate and appreciate and if after so doing they continued to warn us against Lucy, then Moscow must have had cogent reasons for thinking that it was a German double-cross. I argued that it was not for us to speculate on the workings of the Centre's mind. If the information was false and we sent it, it could not do much harm- if Moscow knew it was false they would throw it into the wastepaper basket. If on the other hand it was true, it was obviously vital that the Centre should have it as soon as possible and it would be criminal for us to suppress it; far the best thing was to send it off and let the Centre do the worrying. In the end Rado agreed and handed me the message and I sent it off that night.

I learnt afterwards in Moscow that this was the first piece of Lucy's information that they did take seriously. It fitted in with information that the Russians had got from other sources and they took it into account in making their troop dispositions. For the first but not the last time Lucy had proved his worth.

The information I was sending grew increasingly ominous over the next few days, and I myself became more and more convinced that it was wishful thinking to imagine that the Germans could have put all that machinery in motion merely to frighten. I did not sleep well that Saturday night and on the Sunday morning turned my radio on early. I shall never forget hearing the hoarse voice of the Fuehrer announce the invasion of Russia. "Operation Barbarossa" was on and our real work about to start.

"OPERATION BARBAROSSA"

"Fascist beasts have invaded the Motherland of the working classes. You are called upon to carry out your tasks in Germany to the best of your ability. Direktor."

This was the message I received from the Centre over my radio that Sunday night. It was not a scheduled day for transmission or reception but, having spent the day listening to the strident and triumphal bellowings of the German radio, I tuned in that night to my receiving wave and at one in the morning received this message. My first from a Russia at war.

Apart from the message given above, I was also told that Moscow would be listening to me all round the clock. The whole machinery was geared to wartime production. For the next few days admonitions and instructions poured in on me from Moscow. They arranged, for the first time, a system of priorities. Messages marked "VYRDO" were exceedingly urgent and were to be decoded by the recipient at once- taking priority over all other work. "RDO" as a prefix stood for urgent and "MSG" denoted routine messages which could be transmitted and decoded at leisure. Owing to my being a one- man show, with the consequent saving of time, most of the VYRDO messages fell to my lot, and of these Lucy's material formed the major part. Gone now were the days when the Centre regarded Lucy as an agent provocateur. They were clamouring incessantly for more and more information- and Lucy produced it. Nearly every day new material from Werther on the grouping of the German forces which were smashing their way towards Moscow came in and was sent off by me. Olga gave the organisation and strength of the Luftwaffe squadrons which were blasting the way clear for the Wehrmacht. Frequently I was so rushed that I barely had time to read the messages before encoding them and as a result did not myself digest the information they contained. If I had had the time, or if I had broken the strict rule against keeping old material, I could no doubt myself have built up the complete German order of battle in my flat in Lausanne. Time did not permit, and anyway it would have been merely of academic interest to us. The interest was far from academic to Moscow, who were virtually fighting their war on the material.

Apart from my work as an operator I was also instructed to get into contact with the Swiss Communist Party in the shape of one of its leaders, Julius Humbert Droz (cover name Droll). The Centre gave me the name of a woman, "May," who was to act as an introductory cut-out. She was an old hand in the game and had been working long before the war in, I think, another network. Her husband was an eminent and extremely respectable Zurich citizen who had no idea as to his wife's secret activities and would have been horrified had he known. I went to her extremely respectable house and introduced myself with the passwords which had been supplied by the Centre. Accepted as a Soviet agent, May arranged a secret meeting between me and Droz.

Droz was then the leader of what might be called the "right wing" of the Swiss Communist Party, with Carl Hofmeier as leader of the "left wing." Droz himself had formerly been Secretary of the Comintern and an old and trusted worker. He was also a bitter political rival of Hofmeier's. Since the outbreak of war in 1939 Hofmeier had been in contact with Rado and had received all the instructions and finances (mostly instruction; the money moved the other way) which the Centre had sent but had kept them for his own faction and refused to hand anything on to Droz, which action had not unnaturally incensed the latter, who considered that he was being slighted- having regard to his position in the past.

To my meeting with Droz I took a telegram which I had received from the Centre and which was signed by Dimitrov. I think that there is little doubt that it was in fact composed by him. The style was entirely different from that usually employed and in it Dimitrov reminded Droz of various incidents and individuals that only they two could have known-dating back to their days together in the Comintern. Dimitrov asked Droz to cooperate with me in every way and give me all the assistance he could. Armed with this letter of introduction, I went off and met Droz in the house of one of his supporters in Lausanne. He was extremely cordial to me but still angry with Hofmeier and gave me a telegram for Dimitrov complaining of the treatment meted out to him. To this I received a prompt reply, also signed Dimitrov, telling Droz that nothing could be done about it at the time as Hofmeier was rendering valuable service to the Centre. Dimitrov urged Droz to devote all his efforts to the same cause with the aid of his own supporters in the Party and hinted strongly that it was the one who did the best work for the Centre who would be confirmed in the leadership of the Party after the war.

The director authorised me to pay Droz two hundred dollars a month and reasonable expenses and also any further sums necessary for the financing of the network that Droz was to set up. This was not a difficult task for him. Among his followers were many individuals who crossed the frontier daily in the course of their normal work. With these he quickly organised a courier service which kept him in touch with local German Communists, and his followers were also able, by intelligent use of their eyes and ears, to pick up a considerable amount of information. Most of this was of local interest only but the odd scrap of military gossip or fact let slip in "careless talk" was worth sending to the Centre. Droz was also attempting to work his people into factories over the frontier so that there might later be a possibility of some serious sabotage work.

After the initial meeting it was agreed that it would be better for Droz to meet me as infrequently as possible. He was a fairly well-known person and if by chance I was observed in his company it might cause some comment. Contact was thus normally kept through May. My last (one of few) meeting with Droz nearly led to disaster.

He had asked to see me because he had an important project which he wished to discuss concerning the possible infiltration of workers into factories in Constance: not a difficult task with the frontier running through the town, but one which he thought might pay dividends. He also had some information on German troop movements in the south which he thought would be of interest. He was in a hurry and so we met in a small cafe run by a Party member near his home, where we could sit in the office at the back and leave separately and innocently after we had done our business. Droz left first and returned home to walk straight into the arms of the Swiss police, who were waiting for him. Luckily they had not been "tailing" him; if they had, suspicion might well have fallen on me since it was not the kind of cafe a foreigner would normally frequent. Droz was arrested, charged with reorganising the then illegal Swiss Communist Party- and imprisoned. As has been stated, on his release he left the Party, joined the Socialists, and is presumably now out of the net.

Droz's arrest broke up the network which had just been formed and that particular project was never revived again, but by that time the Centre had given me another task and this one contained in it the seed of disaster for the whole organisation and in the end led largely to the network's liquidation and to my own arrest.

Shortly after the invasion of Russia the Centre instructed me to get in touch with two agents of theirs with whom they had lost contact. Their names were given and the only additional information Moscow had was that they were thought to be in French Switzerland and had been for some time. These were Lorenz and Laura, in real life George and Joanna Wilmer. As I have already stated, they had worked for a long time for the Red Army abroad. Lorenz had never been a resident director but always an agent or cut-out. They were both expert in all branches of photography, from straight portraiture to document copying and microphotography, and had a well-equipped studio tucked away in a corner of their villa. When formerly in Japan they had been used only for document copying. Their sole task had been to photograph the contents of the wastepaper basket of a Japanese general high up in the Imperial General Staff. This material was brought to them by one of the general's servants who was a secret member of the Japanese Communist Party. As neither of them knew any Japanese there was naturally a monstrous deal of chaff and very little wheat, for they photographed everything entirely unselectively. They told me that after they had been doing this for two years they heard from the Centre that one document had been so valuable that it made up for all the trouble and expense of the whole operation from its inception.

Before the war they had been working in Germany but after the outbreak of war the Centre had lost contact with them. Early in 1941 they had decided that the time had come to put themselves in touch with the Centre again. To this end they had written to an old contact of theirs, "Louis," who was still active in San Francisco as a Red Army agent (I never knew his real name), and had indicated in plain language code that they wished to get in touch with the Centre. Naturally they could not reveal their real names and address because, if Louis had been under suspicion, that would have "blown" them as well; thus they could only give the vaguest indications of their whereabouts. Hence the equal vagueness of the Centre's instructions. Presumably Louis had got in touch with his resident director, who had sent the message back to the Centre over his transmitter, and it was in turn relayed to me.

I went off to their villa, which was pleasantly situated above Lausanne, and contacted them on the pretext that I had heard that their villa was for sale. Despite the usual jargon and passwords it was with the greatest difficulty that I managed to persuade them that I was genuine and had a message for them from the Centre. They trusted me only when, very unwillingly, they had asked me to tea and I managed to show them that I knew a great deal of their past history, which I could only have learned from the Centre. After this initial coldness we became moderately friendly and I was accepted, albeit a little reluctantly, to their espionage- if not to their social - bosoms.

Lorenz claimed to be in touch with two sources of information in Germany known to the director as "Barras" and "Lambert." I never discovered anything about these two sources. Despite the fact that Lorenz asserted that they were in Germany, most of the information of a military nature that the sources produced was about troop movements and dispositions in France and the political information often had rather a French slant to it. Lorenz hinted that he had sources within the French Deuxieme Bureau who had been tried and tested by him over a number of years, and I always assumed that much of his information came from these sources. The Deuxieme Bureau connection should be borne in mind as it has a bearing on later events.

Despite the fact that they had been out of touch with the Centre for some years, the couple appeared to be plentifully supplied with money. Their villa was done up regardless of expense- and equally regardless of taste. Laura was, on the least provocation, swathed in mink and Lorenz was the best-dressed spy I have ever seen. They claimed to be Swiss but I am pretty certain they were Russian; they had certainly left two children in Russia last time they had been there. He was a Georgian type and faintly reminiscent of the earlier pictures of Stalin. He spoke Russian, German, and French with equal fluency, and a little English. He must have learned his French in the Midi, for it had a strong metallic tang.

Very soon I was visiting Lorenz and Laura twice weekly to gather information from their two sources- which the director appeared to value highly. Also on instructions I used Lorenz as a cut-out for various sources which were suggested from time to time by the Centre. Sometimes these sources were unknown to any of us. Instructions were merely sent that Lorenz or Laura were to go to a certain rendezvous and collect documents which would be handed over after an exchange of passwords. These were duly handed on to me and transmitted over the air to the Centre.

On one occasion Moscow suggested that it would be profitable to contact Marius Mouttet, a former French Socialist minister then a refugee in Montreux. The Centre had heard from London that Mouttet would be able to supply us with valuable political information. (This was one of the few concrete indications I ever had that the network was operating in England as well. As an abstract speculation I have no doubt that it was- if only in a skeleton form- but concrete indications were few as far as I was concerned.)

Lorenz duly went off and contacted Mouttet, saying he had heard that he might help with information. Mouttet was perfectly willing to play and offered his fullest cooperation, as he thought Lorenz was a British agent. In his turn he proposed a plan to organise the escape of Herriot from France by means of a flying boat landing on the Lake of Geneva. Lorenz was all for going ahead and taking information from Mouttet in the name of British intelligence. This did not seem at all a good or feasible plan as it might have involved us in every sort and kind of international espionage complication. If, for example, the British, who might well have received the news that Mouttet would "play" through their own sources, contacted him and asked for his help, Lorenz's position would have been, to say the least, a little embarrassing. Similarly we could hardly have helped him over the flying-boat scheme. Besides, I was having trouble enough financing the network as it was organised then, and any additional financial commitments had to be gone into with a thoroughness that a chartered accountant or thrifty housewife might envy. If that were not enough, there was already such a mass of information coming in that we had to edit it down and send only the barest essentials and the cream of the material, otherwise we would have been on the air or enciphering the whole twenty- four hours. Thus in my capacity as espionage housewife and blue-pencilling subeditor I asked the director's permission to drop the project - which was agreed to. Anyway I think that Mouttet was far too wily an old fish to be "caught in the net" and that, to continue the piscatorial metaphor, he would have soon seen how fishy the whole thing was.

But that is enough of Lorenz and Laura for the time being. From the time of our first contact in the late summer of 1941 until the summer of 1943 Lorenz continued to act in most respects like a normal Soviet agent. Not a very satisfactory one, as his reports were verbose in the extreme and when boiled down to essentials often contained remarkably little information, and the twenty new recruits that he put up to further his schemes were all turned down flat by Moscow. The Centre argued, quite rightly, that money was tight enough and to take twenty new and untried sources on the pay roll was not only impossible but also flatly against the canon of Soviet espionage law.

For nearly two years, from the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1943, my life fell almost into a routine - if anything can be routine in a career where the unexpected is always coming up, and is usually dreaded. As regards the daily espionage round, late rising was an understandable rule when one was often up at all hours getting the material over to Moscow. Having breakfasted leisurely at about ten, the rest of the morning was one's own. Unless, as so often, it was one of the days to meet Rado or one of his couriers, or Lorenz at his villa, or one of the cut-outs. I tried, however, to make all these appointments in the afternoon so that I might have some time to myself and at the same time try to keep up my pose of the leisured émigré Englishman. The afternoon rendezvous were invariably tedious, as they meant a long journey to somewhere so that the contact could be on unsullied ground. Having returned, I usually had a long evening's ciphering before me. According to the rules all ciphering should have been done after dark and behind locked doors. But needs must when the Centre drove and in the more hectic times I was enciphering in all my spare moments.

My transmission time was usually about one in the morning. If conditions were good and the message short I was through in about a couple of hours. If, as frequently happened, I had long messages to send and atmospherics were bad I had to fight my way through and send when and as conditions allowed. Often on such occasions I was still at the transmitter at six and once or twice I "signed off" at nine in the morning. The nights that conditions were bad always seemed to be nights when Moscow had particularly long messages to pass back to me, which also lengthened proceedings greatly. To be on the air for that length of time broke all the normal precautions against radio monitoring. But it was a chance which had to be taken if the intelligence was to be passed over, a risk which the Centre took despite frequent admonitions by Rado and me. As regards the service intelligence, mostly Lucy's material, we were told that we must take every risk to get it over and damn the consequences. Rather cold comfort to us as we were the people who would take the consequences rather than the Centre.

In addition to the normal hazards of atmospherics the Luftwaffe added to our difficulties in getting through to Moscow. Whenever there was a German bomber raid on the Russian capital the station went off the air until the raid was over. I remember that in September and October 1941, when the Germans were hammering at the gates, we could get contact only on rare occasions and for only a short time. This got worse and worse, and on October 19 Moscow went off the air in the middle of a message. Night after night Rado and I called, and night after night there was no reply. Rado was in despair and talked of going over to the British. I was desperate as the radio silence had occurred in the middle of one of my financial deals with America and I was being pressed by my intermediaries for news and/or money- preferably the latter. Weeks passed, a month passed, and the whole delicate structure of a spy ring working at high pressure was in very real danger of disintegration. Fruitlessly we still tried every night to get contact and all we got were the derisive howls of atmospherics. Suddenly one night at the scheduled time - and six weeks after the break - the Centre piped up. As if nothing had happened, they finished the message that they had cut off halfway through, a month and a half before. Not one word of explanation or apology (not that that was expected, but a kind word would have been appreciated). When I was in Moscow I learned that this interruption had been caused by the move of the whole of the Centre's communications to Kuibishev. This move had been done at twelve hours' notice to the senior staff and none to the junior, so that the unhappy operator had been practically wrenched from his set and put in a lorry for the long trek eastward.

With such occasional alarums and excursions the months passed swiftly. As most people know, a regular and ordered life makes the time pass extremely fast and if the excitement of war is added, the whole of time seems to flow and merge in a kaleidoscopic medley. Most people I know have the greatest difficulty in sorting out exactly what they were doing at any particular moment of the war. For this reason I trust that I will be forgiven for an occasional haziness of date or blurring of recollection. Twice-weekly meetings with Rado and Lorenz, my financial deals, and the incessant grind of enciphering and transmitting occupied my life. So things went on till the crisis in the summer of 1943 which in a few months broke up the organisation and landed me in jail.

"SHOEMAKER'S" HOLIDAY

This chapter concerns a facet of my espionage career which does not really fit in neatly anywhere chronologically, so it must appear as an independent story on its own. The chapter heading refers to that most essential adjunct of any well-conducted spy ring- the forger. In the jargon of the Centre, a forger of passports was known as a "shoemaker" or "cobbler" and we had a very able and efficient one working for us in Switzerland.

The disadvantage of most forged passports is the very fact that they are forged. That may sound obvious but it is a very real difficulty. However good the forger may be and however complete the technical aids at his disposal, there is always the risk that some small change or some foolish mistake may land the carrier of the document in trouble. Despite the boasted efficiency of the German Secret Service and their undoubted technical ability, their forgeries during the war were often beneath contempt and were veritable death warrants to the unhappy holders. Our network avoided this difficulty completely by arranging to have our Swiss passports made by the Swiss themselves.

In the latter part of 1941 the Centre put me in touch with one Helena Schmidt (cover name "Anna") in Basle. She was an old hand, as she had been in the net for some twenty years. Before the war she had been in touch with another Soviet network which had been in existence in the country; but ever since the outbreak of war she had been out of touch with the Centre and had received no orders. I do not know exactly which network she had been working for, but suspect that it was one which had been run by the resident director who preceded Rado. Anna was a motherly old soul who looked like a superior charwoman, and I have little doubt that in the past she had acted as one. Her looks belied her; and, respectable old body as she appeared, she was deep in the network and had one most useful contact in the country. She was the cut-out between the network and a corrupt official in the Swiss Passport Office in Basle.

"Max" (I never knew his real name and in fact never met him) had also been working for the network for many years, supplying the Centre with passports for its agents. The procedure was as simple as it was easy. It would work in any country where passport office staffs are venal, and I have little doubt that it was worked by the Centre in other countries in a similar way. The Centre would supply to Max the physical details of the person for whom the passport was required. Max would then consult the files of various Basle citizens and choose a suitable identity for the new passport holder. I do not know whether he chose identities of living or dead persons, or on what principle he selected the candidate for the dubious honour of acting as Doppelgaenger for a Soviet spy, but it was obviously somebody who was never likely to apply for a passport himself.

This identity was then sent back to Moscow. The details naturally included date and place of birth, parentage, profession, etc., in fact all the details that are normally required for a passport in any country. The Centre then prepared a fake Swiss birth certificate. This presented little difficulty, as the invaluable Max had supplied them with the requisite forms and rubber stamps and also specimen signatures of the various registrars who had signed birth certificates over suitable years.

A completed passport application form (also of course supplied by Max) with the signature of the person requiring it in the name that Max had chosen together with his real photograph and the forged birth certificate attached were then returned to Max. He, in the normal way and in the normal course of his duties, prepared the passport and passed it for signature to the chief of police (Swiss passports are issued by the cantonal authorities). Max always took care to present the passport only when there was a large batch of them for signature and would slip the fake one in the middle of the bunch. This made it less likely that the police chief would remember who had presented the passport for signature in the improbable event of its ever being discovered to be a fake.

These false passports could of course be prolonged at any Swiss Consulate abroad. If the consular authorities were for any reason suspicious and queried it back to Basle, then the particulars, tallying in every detail, were on the passport records there. There was a gentleman's agreement between the Centre and Max that no holder of such a false passport should ever live in Switzerland on the strength of it. For his labours Max received a hundred and fifty francs a month retainer and a further hundred francs for every passport issued. Anna for her services as a cut-out received four hundred and fifty francs a month. Max was used only to supply passports. At one period the Centre instructed me to use him to obtain information, but the material that he passed to me through Anna was of no value and I did not press him on the matter, as he obviously preferred, like all good "cobblers," to stick to his last.

For the two years that I was in contact with Max the Centre never asked us to provide them with a new passport. However, one passport provided by him was due to expire in Italy. Unfortunately this one could not be renewed in the normal way as it was being used by a different agent from the one to whom it had been originally issued. As a result the signature on the renewal form would not correspond with that in the police records in Basle. The passport was brought to Switzerland through Rado's network in some way and I had it passed by Anna to Max with a request that he prolong its validity. This he did and it was returned to its owner, also via Rado.

The passport was in the name of Schneider (no connection with the Taylor of Rado's network) and I learnt later that he had been arrested and shot in Italy for espionage.

In addition to Max, Anna had another contact in the shape of her brother Hans. At the time that I re-recruited Anna into the network Hans was living in Freiburg (Germany) and like his sister was inactive. Towards the end of 1942 the director ordered me to instruct Anna to tell her brother that he would be contacted by a certain female Soviet agent, "Inge," whom the director was sending to Germany via Sweden. Also another agent would be visiting him and would hand over a short-wave transmitter, which was in turn to be handed over by Hans to Inge. This caused some difficulty to Anna as she had no secret means of communication with Hans and so had to write through the open post, giving the information in guarded language, and hope that it would escape the notice of the German censor.

Shortly afterwards I had occasion to go to see Anna again. When I got there her little flat was empty and no one knew where she had gone. I managed to contact the lawyer who had dealt with some of her affairs in the past and he told me that she had received a telegram from her brother asking her to come to Freiburg, as his wife was dangerously ill. In fact this telegram was a fake and had been sent by the Gestapo in order to lure her into Germany. After a time, as she did not turn up again, the Swiss authorities presumed that she was dead and appointed a trustee to look after her little property in Switzerland.

What had actually happened was that the radio transmitter had been found in Hans's house and he had been arrested and executed. He was known to have been in communication with Anna and I assume that the German censors passed to the Gestapo then, if not before, the cover letter from Anna to Hans. As a result the fake telegram was sent and Anna arrived in Freiburg to walk straight into the arms of the Gestapo. I learnt later in Moscow that they had questioned her without getting any result. Anna was too old a hand to talk - even under such pressure as the Gestapo could apply. In the end they threw her into a concentration camp, where she languished for the rest of the war, only to be released by the Russians when they overran it. On her release she returned to Switzerland and, for all I know, is back at her old trade. I do know that on her release the Centre paid her nothing in compensation for the years of hell that she had endured in the camp and turned her loose without a penny - not even back pay for the period of imprisonment. Sic me servavit Apollo.

Handbook for Spies