The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [52]
Chapter 15
THE SPYMASTER
CUTHBERT EUAN CECIL RABAGLIATI, head of MI6 Denmark and Holland, was small and slightly built, but instantly recognisable as a character of fearsome intensity. He had grey-red hair, thinning and slicked back, a sharp moustache and a noticeable dent in his head. The depression, large and circular, like a volcanic crater, was visible thanks to his receding hairline. Below it, a silver plate had been inserted to prevent the skull from caving in completely. The plate’s owner, as usual, was impeccably dressed in the uniform of a British officer. When he appeared from behind his huge desk inside 54 Broadway, his shiny black shoes gleamed brightly, as if to compensate for the fact that they were almost too tiny to encase adult feet.
Rabagliati spoke in the clipped accent of an English aristocrat, even though his family roots were Scots-Italian. When he met people he didn’t know, he preferred to call himself Colonel Ramsden, a name plain enough to be soon forgotten. Although ‘Ramsden’ had joined the SIS from the Ministry of Information, the forty-nine-year-old’s past was far more colourful than that of most civil servants. He had shown tremendous personal courage in the First World War as a fighter pilot in what was then the Royal Flying Corps, becoming the first British ace to shoot down a German plane in the new form of warfare known as ‘aerial combat.’ He did so by manoeuvring alongside the enemy aircraft and shooting the pilot with a pistol. On another occasion, when he himself was shot down, he survived in no-man’s-land for days before crawling to safety.
Rabagliati often flew behind enemy lines and once noticed a substantial build-up of German troops opposite a weak point in the British line. He landed in a field on the British side of the trenches and informed the relevant officers immediately. To his astonishment and fury, they hardly seemed to care, as if they had seen too much carnage already to worry about the fresh threat. The infantrymen were more interested in his plane, still a battlefield rarity in those brutal days of bayonets and trenches. Rabagliati had to use all his tenacity to make sure the war-weary officers reacted swiftly enough to his intelligence to avert a crisis.
It was that kind of initiative and bravery which earned him the Military Cross, the Air Force Cross and six mentions in dispatches. And his courage also won the lasting respect of the enemy, a fact he used to his advantage when the Great War was over. During the 1920s and 1930s, he managed to build up important contacts among the best pilots in Germany. When he went into the insurance business, one of his main clients was Jauch and Hubener in Hamburg.
Hooked on the adrenalin of speed and danger, Rabagliati found his peacetime fix in motor-racing, and drove in the Double Twelve Hours race at Brooklands. There, on 10 May 1930, disaster struck on the notorious banked corner as he pushed his car and body to the limits of their endurance. He clipped another vehicle at 160 kilometers per hour and his co-driver, who had doubled as his mechanic, was killed. Rabagliati himself, having suffered devastating head injuries, was almost left for dead. Then someone noticed he was still breathing, pulled him out of the wreckage and got him into an ambulance. In hospital surgeons patched him up and inserted the plate in his skull, though without much optimism. He spent two weeks in a coma before stunning the nurses by opening his eyes. With his first words after returning to the land of the living he ordered a bottle of champagne.
Though Rabagliati’s career in the Ministry of Information was never going to provide a similar buzz to motor-racing, the SIS offered some respite from day-to-day routine as they began to consult him on German matters. Powerful figures at MI6 soon decided they could use a man of Rabagliati