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.