Holiday I spy

Karen Neville

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Michael Smith

Karen Neville

This month, author & journalist Michael Smith tells us about Ryszard Kukliński and his involvement in plans for the invasion of Western Europe 

The two greatest western spies inside the Soviet system during the Cold War Oleg Gordievsky, who died recently, and Oleg Penkovsky were both recruited by MI6, but there was another key agent whose name never gets mentioned.  

Ryszard Kukliński was a senior Polish Army officer working with Soviet colleagues on plans for the invasion of western Europe. These ‘unambiguously offensive’ plans involved the use of tactical nuclear missiles and accepted that the inevitable response by NATO would lay waste to his homeland. When an outbreak of protests in the 1970s in Poland was brutally crushed – with around 40 people shot dead by troops and militia – he decided to act.  

He proposed to his bosses that he and some colleagues take a sailing trip by yacht along the German, Danish, Dutch and Belgian coasts. It would look like a holiday but would actually be collecting intelligence and photographing naval bases and NATO warships. Then he arranged to meet up with CIA officers in Holland and offered to spy for them. They supplied him with tiny Minox cameras and he photographed every document that came across his desk, more than 30,000 in all over the nine years during which he was in play. A car would meet him on a Warsaw back street at night so he could hand over the unprocessed film and his reports. There were numerous fall-back plans to avoid surveillance and even if “casuals” – civilians with no link to the Polish authorities – were spotted, the car would drive round until the CIA handler was absolutely certain no one could spot them.  

Kukliński delivered regular updates of the latest Soviet plans for the invasion of western Europe, and details of every new piece of Soviet military equipment as it was introduced –  including the SS-20 Saber intermediate-range missiles based in Poland and East Germany and targeted at western Europe. He also supplied a complete breakdown of how every Warsaw Pact unit would be deployed in an attack on the West.  

For one of the most dangerous decades of the Cold War, the US – and therefore the UK – had unprecedented detail of Soviet military capabilities and plans, intelligence which led to major changes in the locations, size and operational plans for NATO forces in Germany and western Europe. Had a war been fought, NATO commanders would have known precisely what Warsaw Pact forces would do at every turn, allowing them to preempt or counter any attack. 

Want to chat spies or books with Michael? Get in touch at editor@roundandabout.co.uk 

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UK/US special relationship

Karen Neville

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Michael Smith

Karen Neville

Close intelligence links mean the bond between Britain and America will stand firm according to author and journalist Michael Smith

Donald Trump’s second term as US president has led to some concern over where America stands. Here in Britain, it raises the worrying question of where does the ‘Special Relationship’ stand now?  

Pretty much where it always was is probably the answer. The relationship has survived an awful lot of difficulties over the years and will survive Trump, not least because the real ‘Special Relationship’ is based on far more than the actions of individual politicians. It is based on close security links both in terms of sharing nuclear weapons technology and more importantly intelligence. 

The shared intelligence relationship began at Bletchley Park during the Second World War when the British and American codebreakers shared their expertise to break the top German and Japanese ciphers, producing exceptional intelligence that helped win the war, and continued into the Cold War in the face of the threats from the Soviet Union and Communist China, and subsequently terrorist groups like the PLO and more recently al-Qaeda. As a result, that close intelligence relationship not only continued, despite the occasional political hiccups like Suez in 1956, it became stronger. GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency (NSA) split up the world between them, sharing resources to expand the amount of intelligence they could collect. They work hand-in-glove. Former MI6 Chief John Sawers said of the first Trump presidency that “the relationship between CIA and MI6, between NSA and GCHQ and between the FBI and MI5 remained really, really deep. The operational cooperation was as deep at that time as it had been in the past. There was no change.” 

Attempts by US politicians to use the intelligence relationship to apply pressure on Britain are nothing new, Henry Kissinger ordered the US intelligence agencies to stop sharing intelligence twice in the early 70s and on both occasions the sharing continued, not least because the best intelligence on the Middle-East and the southern Soviet Union was coming from the British signals intelligence base in Cyprus. Indeed, the American valued that so much British Prime Minister Harold Wilson wanted to axe it to save money, President Gerald Ford intervened to block it. It remains just as important today and not just for intelligence on the Middle-East. Fly north from Cyprus and the first part of the old Soviet Union you come to is Ukraine. The real Special Relationship remains as vital to both Britain and America as it ever was. 

l Michael Smith’s latest book The Real Special Relationship: How the British and US Secret Services Work Together is out now in paperback 

Want to chat spies or books with Michael? Get in touch at editor@roundandabout.co.uk 

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They seek him here…

Karen Neville

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Michael Smith

Karen Neville

Accidental spy John Merrett had an uncanny knack for being able to evade capture as author and journalist Michael Smith tells us

John Merrett was an accidental spy. One of a number of British expatriates who had built up businesses in St Petersburg, the capital of Tsarist Russia.  

The owner of a large and successful engineering company, he was a longstanding member of the city’s British expatriate business community. Their lives were changed completely by the 1917 Russian revolution.  

In September 1918, the Bolsheviks stormed the British embassy, in what was now called Petrograd, and arrested a number of British intelligence officers. With the British spy networks under threat, one of the few secret service officers still around handed Merrett 200,000 roubles and asked him to keep the networks running, collecting their reports and handing them to couriers who would smuggle them across the Finnish border. Merrett had absolutely no experience as a spy but he did have a good deal of common sense and ingenuity. He not only kept the networks running, he began using the courier lines to smuggle British citizens out of Russia to safety.  

At one point he was arrested by the paramilitary Red Guards. “Fortunately, I succeeded in escaping on my way to prison,” he said, “and was thereafter only able to avoid rearrest by adopting disguises and sleeping in ever-changing and out-of-the-way quarters.” One of the British businessmen Merrett got out of Russia described him as a “Scarlet Pimpernel” never where the Bolshevik agents who were trying to track him down expected him to be. 

When Paul Dukes was sent from London to take over the networks, he was told Merrett had been arrested. But he reached out to some of the British agents and a few days later, one of them turned up with what Dukes described as “a huge fellow, whose stubble-covered face brimmed over with smiles, beaming good nature and jollity. This giant was dressed in a rough and tagged brown suit and in his hand, he squeezed a dirty hat”. It was Merrett.  

In his report to London, Dukes said Merrett was in constant personal danger. “I found him in hiding, changing his abode every night, in various disguises. I formed the judgement in those days that Mr Merrett was actuated partly, perhaps, by a love of adventure, but mainly by a sense of duty towards the British in Petrograd.” Dukes had Merrett and his wife Lydia swiftly smuggled out of Russia down the same escape lines the businessman had himself created. 

Read more about spies like this in Michael Smith’s book Six: The Real James Bonds, published by Biteback. 

Want to chat spies or books with Michael? Get in touch at editor@roundandabout.co.uk 

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Money talks

Karen Neville

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Michael Smith

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.

Michael Smith’s book The Anatomy of a Spy (History Press) is full of stories like this.

Want to chat spies or books with Michael? Get in touch at editor@roundandabout.co.uk

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Entente Cordiale?

Karen Neville

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Michael Smith

Karen Neville

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The newspapers are currently full of the activities of Russian, Chinese of Iranian spies in Europe but the European countries have never been too averse to spying on each other either as author & journalist Michael Smith explains

One of the most scandalous cases occurred nearly a hundred years ago in December 1925 when John Leather, the Paris representative of the Burndept Wireless Company, two young Frenchwomen were arrested by French police and charged with espionage. The French press revelled in the sensational story of the British spies and their two French “Mata Haris”, who were tasked by Leather and his assistant William Fischer to befriend French officers and obtain details of military aircraft bases for MI6.

One of the two women, a 24-year-old model called Marthe Moreuil, had been seduced by Fischer, while the other, a dancer named Andrée Lefebvre, was run by Leather himself. He, Fischer and their colleague Oliver Phillips all denied espionage, but it emerged in the French press that both Leather and Fischer had links to British intelligence. The Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain insisted in the House of Commons that the British government had absolutely no knowledge of “the activities of the firm in question”, sidestepping the fact that it was not the company, but the employees, who were being accused of espionage.

The deliberately misleading denial did not fool many MPs, not least because it well known within the British establishment, and probably the French counter-espionage service as well, that Leather was a cousin of Desmond Morton, a senior MI6 officer. The service’s “Chief” Hugh Sinclair had made too many enemies within Whitehall to expect any help in covering up the scandal.

Clearly well-briefed, the Labour MP Ernest Thurtle told the House of Commons that Chamberlain’s denial was a ‘diplomatic falsehood’. Ordered by the Speaker to withdraw his remarks or be suspended, Thurtle refused to do so and walked out to cheers from the Labour benches.

Leather was sentenced to three years in jail and handed a 3,000-franc fine, Fischer and Phillips received two-year jail sentences and 2,000-franc fines and the two women lesser sentences of six months and 500-franc fines each. The Foreign Office subsequently made very clear to Sinclair that it had made “a gentlemen’s agreement” with the French that neither country should spy on the other. It is an agreement that is unlikely to have held for any length of time.

Michael Smith’s book Six: The Real James Bonds in published in paperback by Biteback.

Want to chat spies or book with Michael? Get in touch at editor@roundandabout.co.uk

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I spy Christmas

Karen Neville

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Michael Smith

Karen Neville

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Author and journalist Michael Smith introduces us to a Danish naval officer who was content with very ‘conventional’ inducements for passing on secrets

Trying to find a spy appropriate to the season, I thought it might be a good moment to write about the first agent ever run by MI6. Captain Walter Christmas, a former Danish naval officer who travelled in and out of Germany to collect intelligence on what the German navy was doing. MI6, then known as the foreign section of the Secret Service Bureau, was set up in 1909, amid fears of a German invasion. Its first boss was Mansfield Cumming, who was known only by the initial letter of his surname, C, which is still used by heads of MI6 today as an abbreviation for Chief.

Christmas was designated WK, perhaps because it was mistakenly assumed that his name began with a K, or that using the initials WC would lead to his reports being ridiculed in Whitehill. The first time Christmas met Cumming he stressed how keen he was to spy for MI6 having “always looked upon myself as at least half English”. Cumming concluded in his diary that Christmas “seemed straightforward”.

The Dane was in fact very straightforward indeed. He was willing to spy for what were already the standard inducements of sex and cash and went on to provide Cumming with a regular supply of the Danish navy’s ship-watching reports of German vessels passing through the channels joining the North Sea to the Baltic. As well as reports on new German equipment obtained by visits to the naval dockyards in Kiel, Hamburg and Breman. The 48-year-old insisted that the go-between who collected his intelligence should always be a ‘pretty’ young woman who was to meet him in a hotel in Skagen, the town at the northernmost tip of Denmark. The women concerned were prostitutes procured and paid for the purpose. The close links between what are alleged to be the world’s two oldest professions were to be repeated persistently throughout the Service’s early history. Sex and money often represented far better inducements to spy than Patriotic or moral beliefs.

When a few years later, the Germans got too close to Christmas and Cumming had to have him exfiltrated to London, he was lodged in the notorious Shepherd Market area of Mayfair, where there were plenty of pretty young women, all pursuing the same business as the go-betweens who used to collect his intelligence from the Skagen hotel.

But that was not his last job for MI6, Christmas was a close personal friend of King Constantine. So in an early form of the ‘parallel diplomacy’ practised by MI6 in a number of different situations over the years, most notably at the start of the Northern Ireland peace process, Cumming sent him to Athens, in the hope that he might persuade Constantine that Greece should join the war against Germany. Compton Mackenzie, then the MI6 man in Greece, seemingly unaware that Christmas was operating under the direction of his bosses in London, was furious at this intervention on his patch by “this irresponsible old man of the sea” and stymied the operation.

Frank Stagg, a senior MI6 officer, recalled that what Christmas had to say about Mackenzie on his return to Whitehall Court was “unrepeatable”. Stagg decided to take Christmas out as recompense for Mackenzie’s behaviour. “I took that most lovable man to the Hippodrome where Fay Compton was singing a song in which the last line of each verse was ‘I’ll take a little more off’. Christmas was getting more and more excited and clapping roundly. When at the height of his enthusiasm, I asked him if he knew she was Compton Mackenzie’s sister, he looked tragic and said, ‘I’ll take back everything I said about him. If only I had known he had a sister so lovely I should have made friends with him instead’.” 

Christmas was not only the first MI6 agent, he was the first of a long line of officers and agents to venture into spy fiction, a tradition that included Mackenzie himself and many  others, most famously John le Carre. Christmas wrote the first spy novel by an MI6 agent ̶   Svend Spejder (Svend the Scout), in which a young boy hunts down German spies in Denmark ̶   in 1911, relatively early in his MI6 career. 

Michael Smith’s spy novel, Ritter: No Man Dies Twice is published by Safe House books. 

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Could you be James Bond?

Karen Neville

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Michael Smith

Karen Neville

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James Bond fantasies can easily unravel as Michael Smith reveals in his latest account of spies and secret lives

The popular image of a spy as epitomised by James Bond all too often leads people to imagine they can be spies.

FBI Special Agent Richard Miller was supposedly a professional paid to look for spies, but he was 48, seriously overweight and widely expected to be fired for a series of lapses that included leaving the keys in the door of the FBI offices overnight. He did have one potential asset.

Svetlana Ogorodnikova, a slim, pretty, blonde Russian, had emigrated to the US in the early 1970s hoping to become a Hollywood actress. She was all too happy to play a Mata Hari role by helping Miller to recruit the KGB man as his own agent, and turn himself into a hero, a top spy.

The KGB officers in San Francisco were rightly suspicious and rejected the approach. But their bosses in Moscow ordered them to go ahead. When the KGB said yes, Miller and Ogorodnikova celebrated and ended up making love. “It was just something that happened,” Miller said. “She was a very attractive woman. It just sort of came with the territory. I had a James Bond kind of fantasy.”

But the fantasy was spiralling out of control. The KGB sent Ogorodnikova to Moscow to be briefed on what to do and it was agreed that Miller would be paid $50,000 in return for handling over anything the KGB wanted. Ogorodnikova took Miller to the Consulate-General for a meeting with the KGB boss, but the normally teetotal FBI officer was so nervous that he had a few drinks to calm his nerves and became very drunk. He got out of the car in the full view of the FBI surveillance team watching the building, who photographed him with Ogorodnikova and soon identified him.

The FBI set up a surveillance operation against them Operation Whipworm – she was Whip, he was Worm. They bugged Miller’s and Ogorodnikova’s phones and cars, recording an agreement to fly to Vienna to seal the deal. But the trip never went ahead. They were both arrested and jailed.

* Read more stories about spies who never became famous in Michael Smith’s book The Anatomy of a Spy, published by History Press

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Bond: the man, the myth

Round & About

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Michael Smith

In his first column, author and journalist Michael Smith reveals how much truth there is to 007 James Bond and the inspiration for the legendary secret agent

James Bond is undoubtedly the world’s most famous spy. The 14 Bond books, written by Ian Fleming between 1953 and his death in 1964 ‒ and an astonishing 27 films ‒ have created a lasting legend.

MI6 always insists that 007 is nothing like a real secret agent, or more precisely an “intelligence officer”, the official job title for our spies. There are no “Double O” agents here, they say. No-one with a “licence to kill”. But they do admit that Bond “created a powerful brand for MI6”. Sir Alex Younger, a former C, the real-life equivalent of Fleming’s “M”, has admitted that many of the British secret service’s global counterparts “envy the sheer global recognition of our acronym”.

Despite the denials, a remarkable new biography of Fleming himself demonstrates that an awful lot of the stuff that 007 gets up to did happen during the period that inspired the Bond books and Fleming was better placed than most to know how MI6 operated.

Academics have long been a bit sniffy about Fleming’s wartime career in naval intelligence, but as more and more files have emerged from the archives it has become very clear how central he was. As the key lieutenant to Admiral John Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence, Fleming was his main liaison with MI6, in frequent contact with the then “C”, Stewart Menzies, with the codebreakers at Bletchley Park and with the Special Operations Executive, which operated behind enemy lines and was very much “licensed to kill”.

As someone who has written extensively on both MI6 and Bletchley Park, one of the closest links between Fleming’s wartime work and Bond’s adventures comes in From Russia With Love when Bond is tasked to track down a Russian Spektor cipher machine. His frequent trips to Bletchley Park during the war, where Alan Turing was initially struggling to break the German naval Enigma machine, led Fleming to devise a daring plan to seize one from on board a German warship in the Channel. Operation Ruthless was to be led by a ‘tough bachelor, able to swim’, with Fleming writing his own name alongside that role.

The many fascinating examples of storylines in the Bond books based on Fleming’s personal experience working with MI6 are far too numerous to fit into a small article like this. It would take an entire book to do them justice. Fortunately, we now have one. Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare is a fascinating book and a pretty good last-minute Christmas present.

Michael Smith’s latest book The Real Special Relationship: The True Story of How the British and US Secret Services Work Together is out now in paperback.

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