"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.