The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [164]
Matters improved thereafter, and Vivian had several meetings with Jonny, though one, on Copacabana beach, left him badly sunburned. The ambassador, meanwhile, was typically difficult. Seeds told Vivian that he ‘would do a great deal for Sir Robert Vansittart’, but would not let any of his officials ‘act as an intermediary’. Nor would he ‘take the part that Vansittart thinks I can of warning the Brazilian Government if and when a revolution is to take place. They will think we have got spies in the country and I won’t do it.’ Before he returned to London, Vivian found a local British businessman to provide a link with Jonny, who over the next few months reported regularly on the progress of the conspiracy. By June things appeared to be coming to a head. Sinclair told Vansittart on 12 June that the plot had ‘made alarming progress’. The ‘first act’ of the revolutionary government, he warned, ‘would be to take possession of all the British undertakings in Brazil, and to deport all British subjects connected with them’. He told the Director of Naval Intelligence that it was ‘almost certain that a revolution will break out before the end of the year, which may necessitate naval action being taken in order to protect British interests’. Faced with this intelligence, Vansittart decided to instruct Seeds to warn President Vargas, which he did on 20 June, though, ‘as zero hour of plot is still distant’, Seeds was ‘anxious that Brazilian authorities should not take precipitate action’.
Vargas (who had been ‘grateful and interested’ in response to Seeds’s warning) applied some counter-measures, but the Comintern conspirators remained at large, and a distinct possibility remained that some leftist army units might mutiny, which indeed occurred four months later. Alerted by Jonny on the evening of 25 November that things would happen in Rio within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, SIS’s local businessman contact in turn warned the ambassador. At 10 p.m. on 26 November, the businessman was called to a rendezvous by Jonny and told that Prestes and his military friends were going to strike that night. At 3 a.m. the SIS man told the ambassador, but, more effectively, he also warned the general manager of the Canadian-owned Brazilian Traction, Light and Power Company (colloquially known as the Light), the principal Rio utilities company, who was able to hinder and frustrate the revolutionaries by cutting off the ‘power supply from revolting barracks, who were thus without light and could not operate their radio stations’. After some heavy fighting, the rising collapsed. Further information from Jonny led the Brazilian authorities to the chief Comintern representative and a mass of incriminating documents, which subsequently enabled the destruction of the revolutionaries’ South American apparatus.
During the general round-up of conspirators in January 1936 Jonny himself was arrested, but, with the businessman’s help, was released and escaped to the Argentine. He was eventually recalled to Moscow in December and, despite Vivian’s misgivings, insisted on going. He survived a Comintern inquiry and was sent back to Brazil to assemble a team intended to take over a Communist military network in Japan. After his wireless operator failed to turn up, this appears to have been abandoned and Jonny stayed on, enjoying the (by now very considerable) financial fruits of his espionage endeavours. From 1938 SIS had a representative in the region (based in Montevideo) who employed Jonny ‘as a sort of Nazi agent-provocateur’, a role he was not very good at playing. As Vivian recalled, ‘after the very sensational work that he had done for years it was a small meat’. In November 1939 he was arrested for ‘espionage’ and very roughly handled by the Brazilian police. After the businessman managed to alert London, the Foreign Office protested to the Brazilian ambassador, and Jonny was released. He was brought back to Britain and later settled in Canada, where some years later he told stories of his work as a