Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [14]
It was MI5 that Professor Percival Godliman joined in the autumn of 1940. He turned up at the War Office in Whitehall on a cold September morning after a night spent putting out fires all over the East End; the blitz was at its height and he was an auxiliary fireman.
Military Intelligence was run by soldiers in peacetime, when—in Godliman’s opinion—espionage made no difference to anything anyhow; but now, he found, it was populated by amateurs, and he was delighted to discover that he knew half the people in MI5. On his first day he met a barrister who was a member of his club, an art historian with whom he had been to college, an archivist from his own university, and his favorite writer of detective stories.
He was shown into Colonel Terry’s office at 10 A.M. Terry had been there for several hours; there were two empty cigarette packets in the wastepaper basket.
Godliman said, “Should I call you ‘Sir’ now?”
“There’s not much bull around here, Percy. ‘Uncle Andrew’ will do fine. Sit down.”
All the same, there was a briskness about Terry that had not been present when they had lunch at the Savoy. Godliman noticed that he did not smile, and his attention kept wandering to a pile of unread messages on the desk.
Terry looked at his watch and said, “I’m going to put you in the picture, briefly—finish the lecture I started over lunch.”
Godliman smiled. “This time I won’t get up on my high horse.”
Terry lit another cigarette.
CANARIS’S SPIES in Britain were useless people (Terry resumed, as if their conversation had been interrupted five minutes rather than three months ago). Dorothy O’Grady was typical—we caught her cutting military telephone wires on the Isle of Wight. She was writing letters to Portugal in the kind of secret ink you buy in joke shops.
A new wave of spies began in September. Their task was to reconnoiter Britain in preparation for the invasion—to map beaches suitable for landings; fields and roads that could be used by troop-carrying gliders; tank traps and road blocks and barbed-wire obstacles.
They seem to have been badly selected, hastily mustered, inadequately trained and poorly equipped. Typical were the four who came over on the night of 2–3 September: Meier, Kieboom, Pons and Waldberg. Kieboom and Pons landed at dawn near Hythe, and were arrested by Private Tollervey of the Somerset Light Infantry, who came upon them in the sand dunes hacking away at a dirty great wurst.
Waldberg actually managed to send a signal to Hamburg:
ARRIVED SAFELY. DOCUMENT DESTROYED. ENGLISH PATROL 200 METERS FROM COAST. BEACH WITH BROWN NETS AND RAILWAY SLEEPERS AT A DISTANCE OF 50 METERS. NO MINES. FEW SOLDIERS. UNFINISHED BLOCKHOUSE. NEW ROAD. WALDBERG.
Clearly he did not know where he was, nor did he even have a code name. The quality of his briefing is indicated by the fact that he knew nothing of English licensing laws—he went into a pub at nine o’clock in the morning and asked for a quart of cider.
(Godliman laughed at this, and Terry said: “Wait—it gets funnier.”)
The landlord told Waldberg to come back at ten. He could spend the hour looking at the village church, he suggested. Amazingly, Waldberg was back at ten sharp, whereupon two policemen on bicycles arrested him.
(“It’s like a script for ‘It’s That Man Again,’” said Godliman.)
Meier was found a few hours later. Eleven more agents were picked up over the next few weeks, most of them within hours of landing on British soil. Almost all of them were destined for the scaffold.
(“Almost all?” said Godliman. Terry said: “Yes. A couple have been handed over to our section B-1(a). I’ll come back to that in a minute.”)
Others landed in Eire. One was Ernst Weber-Drohl, a well-known acrobat who had two illegitimate children