The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [336]
In August SIS arranged for her to get a secretarial job at an office staffed by British RAF personnel (in civilian clothes) which had been set up to provide technical assistance to the Portuguese government under the Azores Agreement of October 1943. Although there were in fact no ‘technical air secrets’ in the office, it was assumed that the Germans could ‘easily be led to believe that such material’ was to be found there. One of Ecclesiastic’s case-officers was the flirtatious ‘Klop’ Ustinov (father of the actor Peter Ustinov), an MI5 man posted to SIS’s Section V in Lisbon. His speculative eye for a pretty woman and keen appreciation of female charm is evident in the report of his first meeting with her. He dryly observed that while Ecclesiastic considered the cultivation of her lover as ‘part of her official duties’, these duties were ‘not too onerous’. Koschnik, he deduced, was ‘very fond of the girl, and it needs a woman much less womanly than Ecclesiastic to resent such homage to both her physical charm and no doubt also to her mental quality’. Ecclesiastic, he added, was ‘very intelligent indeed’ and she clearly enjoyed ‘the game of mobilizing her ample female resources against normal male instincts’. This, he asserted, explained why her ‘appreciation of the rôle we are assigning to her is at present more romantic than practical and why her cohabitation with Koschnick [sic] has – from our point of view – not yielded greater results so far. I made it clear to her that to live with the Abwehr is not quite helpful enough and that more concrete results must be achieved before her activities for us can be termed a success.’13
Although Ustinov had initially concluded that Ecclesiastic would serve better as a ‘transmitting’ than a ‘receiving station’, she in fact proved to be a real success in both directions right through to the end of the war. Up to the early spring of 1945 (when Koschnik’s appetite for information fell off markedly), Ecclesiastic provided him with a stream of material prepared by Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley of MI5, including details about a new aeroplane and other developments (some on crumpled-up pieces of paper apparently fished from waste-paper baskets); convincingly scribbled notes of overheard phone conversations; and letters containing aero-technical gossip (on authentic Air Ministry notepaper) to Air Commodore Fullard (head of the RAF mission), one of which Koschnik had Ecclesiastic herself photograph before she returned it to the office. 14 Perhaps for insurance, to show Ecclesiastic that he had evidence which could be used against her, he himself photographed her doing this, giving her a copy. She, however, passed it on to SIS and this rare image of a spy at work survives in the archives. In January 1945 a letter to Fullard from the genuine Air Commodore J. M. ‘Jack’ Easton at the Air Ministry was planted as part of the Ministry of Home Security’s ‘V.2 deception plan’. In it Easton complained (among other things) about far-fetched enemy claims of damage to central London. ‘The best of the bunch is the total destruction of Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square which the enemy propaganda put out some time ago. I can assure you’, he wrote, ‘that the Cafe Royal is still in business, and I will treat you to lunch there when you are next home.’ But even deception had its limits, as the covering note to SIS in Lisbon made clear: ‘Easton would like to add that the invitation to lunch does not repeat not hold good and is merely inserted to add verisimilitude to the letter.’
From September 1944 to the end of February 1945 Ustinov met Ecclesiastic twenty-six times, passing her ‘foodstuff’ and receiving a steady supply of information about Koschnik and his Abwehr colleagues. At the beginning of December, Lisbon reported that she was ‘now very valuable from the penetration point of view’. London agreed ‘heartily