Authors: Ben Macintyre
Tags: #General, #Psychology, #Europe, #History, #Great Britain, #20th Century, #Political Freedom & Security, #Intelligence, #Political Freedom & Security - Intelligence, #Political Science, #Espionage, #Modern, #World War, #1939-1945, #Military, #Italy, #Naval, #World War II, #Secret service, #Sicily (Italy), #Deception, #Military - World War II, #War, #History - Military, #Military - Naval, #Military - 20th century, #World War; 1939-1945, #Deception - Spain - Atlantic Coast - History - 20th century, #Naval History - World War II, #Ewen, #Military - Intelligence, #World War; 1939-1945 - Secret service - Great Britain, #Sicily (Italy) - History; Military - 20th century, #1939-1945 - Secret service - Great Britain, #Atlantic Coast (Spain), #1939-1945 - Spain - Atlantic Coast, #1939-1945 - Campaigns - Italy - Sicily, #Intelligence Operations, #Deception - Great Britain - History - 20th century, #Atlantic Coast (Spain) - History, #Montagu, #Atlantic Coast (Spain) - History; Military - 20th century, #Sicily (Italy) - History, #World War; 1939-1945 - Campaigns - Italy - Sicily, #Operation Mincemeat, #Montagu; Ewen, #World War; 1939-1945 - Spain - Atlantic Coast
In Ivor Montagu’s MI5 files, any explicit reference to Ewen has been weeded out, but as the older brother’s intelligence career developed and his responsibilities grew, so surveillance of the younger brother intensified. MI5 questioned Ivor’s neighbors, infiltrated the meetings he addressed, and analyzed his writings and speeches, yet it could find no hard evidence against him. That would take another two decades.
Between 1940 and 1948, American cryptanalysts intercepted copies of thousands of telegrams passing between Moscow and its diplomatic missions abroad, written in a code that was theoretically unbreakable. Over the next forty years, Allied code breakers struggled to unpick the Soviet code in an operation initially known as “the Russian problem” and later code-named “Venona,” a project so secret that the CIA remained unaware of its existence until 1952. Large swaths of the correspondence were, and are still, unreadable, but finally some 2,900 messages were translated, a tiny fraction of the whole but an astonishing glimpse into Soviet espionage.
These decrypted intercepts included 178 sent to and from the London office of the GRU, the military branch of Soviet intelligence, between March 1940 and April 1942.
The messages were partial and fragmentary, and many were missing, but they revealed something quite remarkable: for at least two years, the Soviet Union had run an undetected British spy ring code-named “X Group” (known as “Gruppa iks”) under the leadership of an individual code-named “Intelligentsia.”
Soviet spies, like their British and German counterparts, seemed to take perverse delight in selecting code names containing the most unsubtle hints. The Venona code for France was “Gastronomica;” the Germans were “Sausage Dealers” (“Kolbasniki”). The code name chosen for the spy in control of X Group was no exception. Agent Intelligentsia was the intellectually inclined Ivor Montagu.
On July 25, 1940, Simon Davidovitch Kremer, secretary to the Soviet military attaché in London and a GRU spy handler, sent a message under the code name “Barch” to “Director” in Moscow: “I have met representatives
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of the X GROUP. This is IVOR MONTAGU (brother of Lord Montagu), the well-known local communist, journalist and lecturer. He has [unintelligible] contacts through his influential relatives. He reported that he had been detailed to organise work with me, but that he had not yet obtained a single contact. I came to an agreement with him about the work and pointed out the importance of speed.”
The report went on to relay Ivor’s analysis of Hitler’s “Last Appeal to Reason,” his “peace offer” to Britain. Ivor, correctly, thought a peace deal unlikely: “Intelligentsia considers there is
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an anti–Sausage Dealer mood in the army.” The reference to Ivor’s “influential relatives”
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suggests that the GRU knew of Ewen Montagu’s senior status within British intelligence.
Ewen and Ivor Montagu were now, in effect, spying for opposite sides in the war. Since 1939, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had been bound together in a formal nonaggression agreement, and until Hitler ruptured the pact in June 1941, information passed to Soviet intelligence could find its way into the hands of the Gestapo.
Initially, Ivor Montagu’s Soviet spymasters were unimpressed. “Intelligentsia has not yet found
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the people in the military finance department. He has promised to deliver documentary material from Professor Haldane who is working on an admiralty assignment concerned with submarines and their operation. We need a man of a different calibre and one who is bolder than Intelligentsia.”
Professor J. B. S. Haldane was one of the most celebrated scientists in Britain. A pioneering and broad-ranging thinker, he developed a mathematical theory of population genetics, predicted that hydrogen-producing windmills would replace fossil fuel, explained nuclear fission, and suffered a perforated eardrum while testing a homemade decompression chamber: “Although one is somewhat deaf,”
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he wrote, “one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.” Haldane was a dedicated atheist and communist: “I think that Marxism
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is true,” he declared in 1938.
Ivor Montagu and Jack Haldane had become friends at Cambridge, and soon after the outbreak of war, Ivor recruited the scientist into X Group. In 1940, Haldane was working at the navy’s secret underwater research establishment at Gosport, and in July he submitted a secret paper to the Admiralty entitled “Report on Effects of High Pressure, Carbon Dioxide and Cold, a study of long-term submersion in submarines.” Two months later, Kremer reported: “Intelligentsia has handed over
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a copy of Professor Haldane’s report to the Admiralty on his experiments relating to the length of time a man can stay underwater.”
Under Kremer’s nagging guidance, Ivor Montagu’s X Group slowly expanded, and the quality of intelligence improved. By the autumn of 1940, Ivor had recruited “three military sources,”
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and an agent code-named “Baron,” probably a senior officer in the secret service of the Czechoslovakian government in exile, who furnished copious information on German forces in Czechoslovakia. MI5 later speculated that another of Ivor’s recruits, code-named “Bob,” was the future trade union leader Jack Jones. In October 1940, Ivor “reported that a girl
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working in a government establishment noticed in one document that the British had broken some Soviet code or other.” Kremer told Ivor “that this was a matter
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of exceptional importance and he should put to the [X] Group the business of developing this report.”
By the end of 1940, X Group had become so productive that the handling of Ivor was taken over by the top GRU officer in London, Colonel Ivan Sklyarov, the Soviet military and air attaché, code-named “Brion.” The surviving X Group messages reveal a steady stream of military intelligence passing to Moscow, including troop movements, air-raid damage, technical information obtained from “an officer of the air ministry,”
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tank production and weapons, and reports on British preparations for a possible German invasion. “The coastal defence is
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based on a network of blockhouses that are weak in design with no allowance made for the manoeuvrability of strong artillery and tank equipment of the Sausage Dealers.” Such information was of great interest to Moscow, but it would have been of even greater importance to the Germans, then actively planning Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain.
Ivor’s most valuable information was passed to Moscow on October 16, 1940, following an air raid on an aircraft factory near Bristol: “30 Sausage Dealer bombers
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and 30 fighters used a radio beam to fly from Northern France.”
The aim of the Luftwaffe bombers had been steadily improving in recent months, prompting suspicion that the Germans had developed some sort of sophisticated guiding apparatus using radio beams. This was the “Knickebein” system: the German bombers followed a radio beam broadcast from France until the beam was intersected by another over the target, at which point the bombs were released. Churchill had formed a secret committee to try to discover how the system worked and how it might be countered. The problem was code-named “Headache;” the countermeasures, inevitably, were code-named “Aspirin.” In time, the RAF developed a technique for “bending” the radio beams to redirect the Luftwaffe’s bombs away from the intended targets: Headache was cured. But in October 1940, Headache was a highly classified secret, known only to a handful of intelligence chiefs, senior RAF officers, and government scientists. The X Group was now gathering intelligence from the very highest levels.
Ivor Montagu was an idealist, but his actions were treasonable. He was not merely passing important military secrets to a foreign power, but to one that was bound in a friendly pact with the enemy. Ivor was a committed antifascist and would have been appalled at the accusation that he was aiding Nazism, but his commitment to the cause of communism was absolute and naive. If caught, he would certainly have been arrested and prosecuted under the Treason Act.
Some of Ivor’s information may have come, inadvertently, from his older brother. Ewen Montagu was aware of his brother’s politics (“he still seems to be going on with
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his meetings,” he told his wife) but entirely in the dark about his espionage activities. He had no idea how closely his sibling was being monitored by his own colleagues in MI5. Ivor, on the other hand, was aware that his brother worked in Naval Intelligence at a senior level and was undoubtedly interested in the contents of his locked briefcase. Did Ivor’s slavish adherence to the party, as noted by Trotsky, outweigh his brotherly affection?
We will probably never know whether Ivor spied on his brother, because at the end of 1942, the Venona intercepts come to an abrupt halt. The traffic between the London
rezidentura
and Moscow continued unabated but was henceforth unreadable. The last translated report from Brion reads: “Intelligentsia has reported
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that his friend, a serviceman in a Liverpool regiment has handed over [unintelligible] German exercise, with dive bombers taking part [unintelligible] between Liverpool and Manchester everything—industry …” This was the last decipherable word from Agent Intelligentsia.
By 1943, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were locked in mortal conflict, and there was now little danger that information from the X Group would be passed on to Berlin. But Ivor remained immersed in the spying game. Germany had spies operating within Soviet intelligence. Ewen had spent months now planning the most elaborate deception of the war. The person most likely to blow Operation Mincemeat, if he should ever discover it, was his own brother.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Butterfly Collector
C
HOLMONDELEY AND
M
ONTAGU
were convinced that they had created a fully credible character in William Martin. “We felt that we knew
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him just as one knows one’s best friend,” wrote Montagu. “We had come to feel that we had known Bill Martin from his earliest childhood, [knowing] his every thought and his probable reaction to any event that might occur in his life.”
It is hardly surprising that Montagu and Cholmondeley felt they knew Bill Martin as well as they knew themselves, for in a way the personality they had created was their combined alter ego, the person they would have liked to be. One contemporary described Cholmondeley as “an incurable romantic
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of the old cloak and dagger school.” In Bill Martin he found an imaginary figure who could wear the cloak and wield the dagger on his behalf. Where Cholmondeley was earthbound by his eyesight and deskbound by his job, Bill Martin was a young warrior on the front line, heading to war with a girl waiting for him at home. Montagu once wrote that he “joined up to go to sea,
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to use my seamanship experience, and to fight.” Bill Martin was the active naval officer that he was not. But Montagu took the identification with Bill Martin a stage further.
“Ewen lived the part,”
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according to Jean Leslie. “He was Willie Martin and I was Pam. He had the sort of mind that worked that way.” Ewen (as Bill) began to pay court to Jean (as Pam) in earnest. He took her to clubs, to films, and out to dinner. He gave her presents, jewelry, and a Royal Marines shirt collar, as a memento of “Bill.”
“He wrote me endless letters,
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from Bill,”
she remembered. Jean kept some of these letters from her imaginary fiancé. They are an extraordinary testament to one of the oddest love affairs imaginable, to the way that fiction was eliding into fact in an entirely unexpected way. Jean Leslie was not, it seems, averse to Montagu’s advances or, perhaps more accurately, to those of Bill Martin. She had a copy of the bathing photograph enlarged and wrote on it: “Till death us do part,
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Your loving Pam,” and gave it to Montagu.
Montagu wrote back:
Pam dearest,
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I just loved the photograph—so much so that I couldn’t bear the idea of anything happening to it and I have left it in the care of my best friend—I know you’ll like him a lot—he has done everything for me and made me what I am today.
This sounds as if I have a foreboding—I have, and from your inscription on the photo I think you have the same fear.
In case I don’t come back you may not like to wear the ring I gave you so I hope you will like this brooch. You can still wear that even if, as I hope you will, you meet someone worthier than me—I know he will understand if he is the sort of man you’ll like.
Ever yours,
Bill
P.S. Try the RNVR next time.