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.