Money talks

Karen Neville

Author and journalist Michael Smith introduces us to the real Goldfinger who found a way to make espionage pay

Goldfinger is one of the most famous James Bond villains – a fictional spy villain. But despite the obvious fantasy of 007, there were echoes of the real spy world in every one of Fleming’s Bond books. One of the most valuable agents MI6 ran in Berlin in the immediate post-war period was a powerful criminal boss called Mandel Goldfinger. Berlin lay in ruins with even formerly wealthy Germans forced to sell their most precious possessions to survive. Goldfinger was making a good living buying up their jewellery and selling it on.

It was the way he made his money that brought him to the attention of MI6 which was trying to build up its agent networks in the Soviet Union but was hampered by a lack of roubles. The Russians had blocked the sale of roubles abroad with the official exchange rate in Moscow $400 per 1,000 roubles. An MI6 agent in Berlin told his handler Tony Divall about a remarkably successful black-market operation run by a man called Goldfinger, which was smuggling Swiss gold watches, sold by impoverished Germans, into the Soviet Union where they were highly prized by Communist Party officials, particularly the women’s watches, which were known by the Russians as “Damskis”.

Goldfinger’s operation used the railwaymen who were ferrying German industrial machinery back to the Soviet Union as “war reparations”. Trains would leave Berlin and travel around the Soviet-occupied east Germany picking up wagons loaded with equipment, and then make their way across Poland to the Soviet border to be unloaded.

Divall, a fluent German speaker who could pass as a native German, suggested to his bosses in MI6 that they take over the smuggling ring and exploit it to obtain the roubles they needed to pay agents inside the Soviet Union. They gave him the go-ahead for Operation Junk and using the pseudonym Herr Stephan, he met Goldfinger who agreed a deal whereby MI6 would pay $280 for every 1,000 roubles.

The deal ensured that both Goldfinger and the railwaymen made a substantial profit, keeping them on board, it also saved MI6 money and ensured the KGB had no idea how many roubles it was buying up, and therefore how many agents the British secret service was running inside the Soviet Union. Operation Junk ran from 1946 to 1955, giving MI6 all the money it needed to pay its agents inside the Soviet Union and helping to keep them safe.