1

INTO THE SHADOWS – LIFE AND DEATH IN VIENNA

For those seeking to cross it, the Iron Curtain was much more than a political concept or rhetorical device. It was something tangible and often deadly. In the first decade of the Cold War, it was rising mile by mile. Thick wooden posts supported three walls of barbed wire, taller than a man, on the Czechoslovakian border with Austria. A wide clearing lay on one side to make footprints easy to spot, with landmines casually littered around. A touch of one piece of stretched wire might launch a signal flare; at another place it would offer a 6,000-volt shock, the short circuit alerting guards with guns and dogs. Three hundred people were killed trying to cross the Czechoslovak border, some shot by guards, others electrocuted, leaving their bodies caught on the wire hanging at an obtuse angle; one man shot himself after his foot was blown off at the ankle by a mine.1

Jan Mašek had somehow made it across. But he had not found safety. These were the dangerous days of the early Cold War, as he was about to discover. A lance corporal in the Czechoslovak army, he was slight of frame, not too tall, with dark hair. His rough-skinned tan came from the twenty-odd years he had spent growing up in a country village, brought up alone by his mother.² She had fallen ill and he had asked for compassionate leave from the army. His commanding officer had refused, so he simply left to see her. But as he headed back to his unit, he was warned that he faced a court martial. He decided to flee over the border into divided Austria.

There he had found his way into the welcoming arms of British Field Security in Vienna. These were the men, most just out of their teens, who performed the grunt work for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Among their tasks was the interrogation of the illegal frontier crossers who had come over from Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Once any suspicion that they had been sent by the other side to cause trouble was removed, they were sucked dry of every ounce of usable information. Britain was blind about what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain. A claustrophobic fear of imminent war haunted every debriefing. Field Security was under orders to extract every nugget, however trivial, so it could be laid alongside a thousand other nuggets in the hope of revealing something useful and perhaps giving early warning of the Red Army beginning its march. What type of shoulder-boards did the Soviet troops wear in a small village in Hungary? What was a particular factory in Czechoslovakia producing? Even a grandmother might know whether a relative in the army had been moved from one place to another. The purpose was to divine where the enemy was and whether he was on the move.3

Mašek was quietly spoken and sensitive. He was questioned for five days at Field Security’s Vienna office, a grand five-storey building at Sebastianplatz near the city centre. Bob Steers asked the questions, trying to separate fact from fiction in a small, bare room with only two chairs and a table. He ‘fronted’ for the Secret Service by advertising himself as a contact in the Viennese underworld, allowing the MI6 men to remain out of sight. He produced a synopsis of Mašek’s information, which went up to MI6 at its grand hiding place in the Schönbrunn barracks. Two of their people came over. Mašek had some interesting details on how the Czechoslovak army was being integrated with the Soviets. He was a touch simple minded, and extracting more detail was painfully slow. But after two and a half weeks his life had yielded up forty-five pages of double-spaced typed notes.

Just as his reward of a one-way ticket to Australia was being prepared, one of the MI6 men intervened. A radio set had to be taken urgently to near where Mašek had come from in Czechoslovakia. Mašek was the only person around at that moment to do it. This would normally be a job for a professionally trained courier. But the border was being tightened and a network of ‘resistance’ couriers had just been rolled up. More than sixty had been arrested. One betrayed his friends by agreeing to work for the other side. MI6 had a training centre for its couriers in Austria and an office back in London (under the name Kenneth Proud Translation Services, code-named ‘Measure’) to help organise Czech agents. But these operations were penetrated by the Czechoslovak security service, the StB. Over ten years, the StB would record details of more than a thousand individuals linked to British intelligence.4

Adventurous, foolhardy methods were sometimes employed to smuggle couriers across the border as it was tightened. Aqualungs and inflatable rubber suits were used to traverse rivers. Hot-air balloons with canvas folding baskets were another trick – although the discovery of two bodies on a Czech hill bearing the marks of having fallen from a great height bore witness to the dangers. Another method was using the defectors and frontier crossers who had found some way out and who showed some potential. They would be offered a choice: take a message or a radio back and we will get you out of your squalid refugee camp now and give you a ticket to a new life when – or if – you make it out again. Sometimes a radio came with the offer of a gun, one captured from the other side so it could not be traced. One man who appeared tough as nails cried himself to sleep the night before he went back. When he was cornered on the frontier, he shot himself rather than face the secret police.

Mašek did not have potential. ‘He’s too soft,’ Steers protested. He had spent days in a room with him and had promised him he was as good as on the boat. ‘If he came out, he can go in the same way,’ the MI6 man insisted. It took a few hours to persuade Mašek. His orders were clear. Having buried the radio at the agreed spot, he had to – had to – come back immediately. Under no circumstances should he visit his mother as it would be noticed by the informers who worked in the village on behalf of the secret police.

He got across the border and successfully buried the radio. But then he went home to see his mother. Another agent radioed a message to Vienna. The local press were reporting that a British courier had been caught. Jan Mašek’s name was added to the list of those executed for acting as couriers for Western intelligence, joining at least forty others. Many of these were motivated by a commitment to fight Communism. Jan Mašek was just a simple man who wanted to see his mother.⁵

Lives were held in the balance in Vienna after the war. They dangled precariously between life and death and East and West like the city itself. The Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill warned of in 1946 was descending from Stettin in the Baltic in Europe’s north to Trieste in the Adriatic to the south. And yet Vienna lay almost a hundred miles behind a straight line connecting those two places, east even of Prague. Austria was the easternmost area of Western influence and Vienna lay in its far corner, making it a crossroads – a route out from those escaping the Iron Curtain and a route in for those seeking to penetrate it.6 For a decade from the end of the Second World War until Austria gained its independence in 1955 Vienna’s narrow, winding, cobbled streets were a stage on which the drama of the unstable, early Cold War was played out and in which the British Secret Service struggled to adapt to a new enemy and a new war. It was a world of bravery and betrayal, of black and white and every shade in between. East and West were colliding and Vienna lay on the fault line.

The words ‘cleared of enemy’ could still be found stencilled in Russian on the corner of Viennese buildings long after April 1945. They were a reminder of the five days when the Red Army had fought its way from house to house to drive out the Nazis. American and British bombers had done their work from the skies above, burning the roof of St Stephen’s Cathedral and gutting the Opera House in the city’s medieval centre.

The months following the capture of the city were in many ways more traumatic than the brief but intense fighting that preceded it, leaving deep emotional scars of fear and suspicion. ‘People in dark overcoats hurried along with hunched shoulders and blank, shutdown faces,’ recalled a British official who visited in those first few months. ‘Furtiveness, fear and suspicion were everywhere.’⁷ People were constantly on the move, looking for food, trading their treasured possessions on the black market for dried peas and bread.⁸ The phones and electricity were down and at night an air of sinister malevolence hung over the deserted roads.

The Viennese learnt to fear the knock on the door. While the Western powers chose to overlook the previous widespread support for Hitler, the Soviets saw the Austrian people as a defeated enemy and had elected to seize the spoils of victory. ‘Every day every hour it is the same,’ a French occupation official told a visitor that November at a police station. ‘The Russians … have knocked down an old woman in the street and are stealing her clothes. The Russians are pillaging a house … A man walks home with his wife and sees her raped before his eyes … Monsieur, it is fatiguing … The life in Vienna is fatiguing.’9 The claims were often exaggerated. A deep hatred of the Russians, inculcated by Nazi propaganda, had led to fear among the Austrians of being left to the Red Army and its vengeance.¹⁰ In August 1945, the Soviets unveiled a memorial to the Red Army in the central Schwarzenbergplatz. A small crowd carried banners, one reading ‘Saviour of Vienna from the Atom Bomb’. A British Field Security agent reported that the applause was unenthusiastic.¹¹

The memorial joined the statues of forgotten emperors on horseback that stared grandly over the broad Ringstrasse which wrapped around the old city. War had left Vienna a hollowed-out shell of its imperial self. The destruction was not as complete as that inflicted on Berlin and so the still-standing but skeletal façades of baroque buildings gave the city the feel of a film or theatre set for the many visitors who stepped out on to it.

The vision of a rubble-strewn city of shadows, statues and ruins in which the darker paths prospered was immortalised by a former, but not entirely divorced, member of the British Secret Service. In the bitingly cold days of February 1948, if you had happened by the Café Mozart on the square near the Opera building, you would have found a man seated at a table beneath the ornate mirrors and lavish chandeliers working on a screenplay entitled The Third Man as black-tied waiters served thick coffee. There had been snow on the roofs and driving sleet when Graham Greene arrived in the city. A wry Catholic fascinated by sin, Greene was on his way to becoming England’s most famous writer, but one who never quite left the secret world. So powerful would be his evocation of Vienna that those who lived through these years would find it hard to separate their own memories from the world as defined by Greene and the film he helped create.

‘I never knew Vienna between the wars,’ Greene’s British military police narrator explains; ‘and I am too young to remember the old Vienna with its Strauss music and its bogus easy charm; to me it is a simply a city of undignified ruins which turned that February into great glaciers of snow and ice.’ The mood in the city was as bleak as the weather when Greene had arrived. There was talk of Nazis meeting in Gasthaus back-rooms planning sabotage and of Communists preparing putsches. People were simply vanishing into thin air never to be heard of again. Rumours swept the locals that the Allies were preparing to abandon the city to the Russians. ‘Listening to conversations in trams and streets, as well as taking part in discussions in family circles of all classes, the impression is being gained that morale has reached a dangerously low level,’ a British intelligence report read.12

The desire to capture post-war Vienna on celluloid – and especially its moral ambiguities that contrasted so sharply with the black and white of the war – came from the Hungarian-born film producer Alexander Korda, another sometime helper of MI6. His company, London Films, had been a front for the service’s work since the 1930s – scouting for locations provided excellent access to places otherwise hard to reach. Korda had pulled some strings so that Greene could retreat into the cosy warmth of the Hotel Sacher round the corner from the Café Mozart, normally reserved for British officers involved in the occupation. Before the war the cream of Viennese society had gathered in the Sacher’s famous velvet-draped Red Bar. After the war, the bar had become a British officers’ canteen, serving baked beans and dried-up rashers on toast with NAAFI tea as full-length portraits of elegant Viennese women and their children and dogs looked on disapprovingly.¹³ A warren of rooms and cubbyholes on the ground floor proved perfect for whispered conversations. The headwaiters there and across the city did their best to preserve the airs and graces of Old Vienna, dressing in tailcoats and maintaining their haughty air even as their cafés and restaurants had little food and were cold and dirty and covered in grime.

Greene’s tour-guide through the rubble was an unusual character, straight from the pages of one of his books. Peter Smollett, the Times correspondent, knew the city inside out. He had been born there before becoming a British citizen in the 1930s and returned after the war. Greene and Smollett would drink until the early hours of the morning in some of the seedier clubs like the Oriental and Maxim’s whose floor-shows harked back to pre-war Berlin. Greene would also visit some of the lowest prostitutes. ‘I have my ways,’ he explained to one of Korda’s staff who had asked him how he could do so while remaining a Catholic.14

Smollett took Greene into the Soviet sector of the city where the Prater, the famous funfair, used to draw the crowds. ‘The Prater lay smashed and desolate and full of weeds, only the Great Wheel revolving slowly over the foundations of the merry-go-rounds like abandoned millstones,’ Greene wrote in a letter back home.¹⁵ The wheel gave Greene the defining backdrop for the moment in his drama when loyalties collide. His story revolved around Holly Martins, a cheap thriller writer, coming to visit an old friend, Harry Lime, in Vienna, only to find him recently deceased. A mysterious third man had been seen at the time of his passing and Martins seeks him out. He discovers that the third man was Lime himself, who had faked his own death to try and escape the rap for selling fake penicillin which was killing children. As they meet on the Great Wheel, Lime stares down from the creaking carriage through the steel girders to the broken city below. ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving for ever?’ he asks. ‘In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?’

Smollett had probably told Greene about the real-life penicillin rackets. He also knew about spies. He had anglicised his name from Hans Peter Smolka and had worked during the war as head of the Russian section in the British Ministry of Information. This rather suited him since he was himself a Communist and, also, from at least the start of the Second World War, passing information to the Soviet Union.

Graham Greene’s experience of the world of espionage came after he was recruited into MI6 during the war through his sister who worked for the service. True to the service culture of the time, he had been checked out during a series of boozy all-night parties.¹⁶ His first posting was to mosquito-ridden Freetown in Sierra Leone where vultures clattered on his tin roof and he hunted cockroaches at night by torchlight. He was not a success. A typically Greene-like proposal to open a brothel to try and gather information on German soldiers was rejected by London. He hated being asked to pressure a Scandinavian sailor by warning him that if he did not talk he would be interned and his girlfriend would not wait for him. It was, he thought, ‘dirty work’ which should really have been done by the local MI5 man and he soon returned to Britain to be immersed in MI6 files.17

The setting for the climactic scene of his Viennese screenplay was, Greene claimed, provided on the penultimate day of his first visit by a young British intelligence officer.¹⁸ The officer explained that he had seen a reference to ‘underground police’ and, thinking that this meant secret police, he had ordered them disbanded. It was then explained that their name came from working beneath the ground in the sewers. Wearing heavy boots and a mac, Greene was taken down by the men in their white uniforms with trousers tucked into boots to protect them from the rats. The main sewer appeared as wide as the Thames. Around a curving iron staircase lay a shallow scum containing orange peel and old cigarette cartons. When a policeman shone a torch it revealed an army of rats – some looked the size of small dogs – originally raised on farms for their fur. The Russians controlled the sewers and refused to lock the entrances, which were disguised aboveground as kiosks. These allowed their agents to disappear from one part of the city and suddenly emerge ghost-like somewhere else.

The rats of the Viennese sewers were close acquaintances of a mutual friend of both Greene and Smollett. They had been witnesses to the birth of his betrayal more than a decade earlier. Kim Philby returned to Vienna for a brief visit after the war.¹⁹ The memories of his earlier life in the city were hidden carefully away in one of the many locked compartments of his mind. He was in the process of submerging the last vestiges of that past and of the journey he had begun in the dank, subterranean paths of the sewers.

Philby had arrived in Vienna in 1933 just down from Cambridge. His formative university years had been marked by three great events: a bleak economic depression which brought social misery, the abject failure of a British Labour government which dashed political hopes, and the rising menace of fascism which fuelled fear. His response was to see Communism as the answer. For the sons and daughters of the privileged elite, Communism offered both an intellectual critique of the current malaise and an emotional rebellion against their parents’ complacency. One of Philby’s tutors had provided him with the contacts to get to Austria to help those on the front lines of the struggle. Here his intellectual Communism would be blooded. In Vienna the left was holding out against a national government that had turned towards the right. Philby lodged in a spartan flat in the city’s ninth district. There he was introduced to a small, vivacious and brave activist called Litzi who would shape his future. She was utterly devoted to the Communist cause. When he explained that he had £100 to last him the year, she performed some quick calculations and told him £25 could be given up for the revolution. ‘He was two years younger than me,’ she recalled years later, ‘and was a very good-looking man. He behaved like a gentleman. And he was a Marxist, a rare combination … He stammered, sometimes more, sometimes less. Like many people with a handicap he was very charming. We fell in love immediately.’20 The twenty-one-year-old inexperienced British public-school boy fell for the East European activist and they became lovers in the snow (‘surprisingly warm,’ Philby would later remark). She would be the human factor that made his intellectual idealism visceral and real. He had discovered a sense of purpose which, in turn, set him on a path from which he could not or would not stray for the rest of his life.

A British passport was Philby’s ticket into the clandestine world as he flashed it at the border, couriering Communist messages in and out of Austria. One grey morning in February 1934, the city echoed to the sound of gunfire. Listening to his radio, Philby heard that martial law had been declared in response to an uprising. Through the windows he and Litzi watched lorries packed with soldiers moving swiftly through the empty, elegant streets.²¹ The city was plunged into darkness and artillery pounded the workers’ housing estates where families and a few men with guns held out. Hundreds were killed. The socialists and Communists who were not killed or captured fled. Many went underground into the sewers to find refuge with the rats. Those who were caught were hanged. Philby went to friends begging for clothes which he could take below to replace fugitives’ bloodstained rags as he prepared to smuggle survivors across the border into Czechoslovakia. He married Litzi two weeks after the uprising in Vienna’s town hall.²² He would later say it was just to provide her with a way out. But those who saw the couple at the time were convinced that their love was real.

Two months later Philby returned to London with his bride (who was met with the instant disapproval of her newly acquired mother-in-law). He had glimpsed what he believed was the dark future for Europe if fascism triumphed. It was a danger he believed his countrymen had yet to understand. Others had also noticed how the young man had shown courage in his willingness to fight and risk his life for a faraway country and for ideals in which he believed. So, soon after returning home, one of Litzi’s friends from Vienna who had also come to London took him on a long walk to Regent’s Park. Edith Tudor-Hart was slim and pale with blue eyes and bobbed blonde hair. She had been under occasional surveillance from MI5 and the police since 1930 when she attended a workers’ rally in Trafalgar Square before being deported back to Vienna. They suspected she was already working with the Russian intelligence services. They were right. Like Litzi, a marriage to a British citizen who was a Communist would allow her to come to London after the uprising. An opportunity to change history was lost. MI5 and the police Special Branch were still trying to establish where exactly she lived in June 1934 and so there was no surveillance on her the day she took Philby on a roundabout walk to meet a man on a park bench.23 He was another Austrian, a former university lecturer who now lived near Hampstead and was ostensibly studying psychology. Cosmopolitan and erudite, he was the perfect recruiter for the forerunner of the KGB, having the right personality to appeal to the fresh, intellectual Cambridge man. His strategy was to cultivate young idealists and then send them into the British establishment. This required a patience that MI6 officers later reflected they did not possess.²⁴

Philby’s work in Vienna had caught people’s attention, the man explained. Would he be interested in working secretly for the Communist cause? ‘You are a bourgeois by education, appearance and origin. You could have a bourgeois career in front of you – and we need people who could penetrate into the bourgeois institutions. Penetrate them for us!’²⁵ A message soon went back to Moscow with news of the recruitment of an insecure and shy young man. He had said there were other ‘sons of functionaries’ at Cambridge who shared his views and he would soon be providing a list.²⁶ With his stories of blood and turmoil in Vienna, Philby drew others to his cause. He would only tell Litzi of his recruitment the following year.²⁷

Philby was instructed to hide his Communist past and he publicly began to disavow it, flirting with right-wing pro-German politics. One person who knew the truth was Greene’s tour-guide around Vienna, ‘Hans’ Peter Smollett, another friend of Litzi’s in Austria who had come to London. Philby and Smollett even went into business for a while running a press agency. Philby thought he ‘was a hundred percent Marxist, although inactive, lazy and a little cowardly’. That did not stop Philby using him as an occasional source. One day he said to him, ‘Listen, Hans, if in your present job you come across some information that in your opinion could help me in my work for England – and I winked at him – come over to me and offer me two cigarettes. I’ll take one, you’ll keep the other, that will be a signal you want to tell me something important.’28 But Smollett’s amateurishness irritated the security-conscious Philby, especially once he had made it into the inner sanctum by joining MI6 in 1941. Smollett was like the embarrassing friend from school who followed you to university and knew you were not quite what you pretended to be.

With his easy charm, Philby had skilfully glided up the ranks of the British Secret Service. Betraying those around him, and especially the women who fell for him, came easy. There was the illicit thrill of not just entering the secret world but of subverting the establishment which he held in disdain, of duping the fools around him. Secret knowledge offers the needy a sense of superiority and power over ordinary folk. For the traitor within a service, that extended even to one’s colleagues. As the war ended and his career showed no sign of waning, Philby realised he needed to normalise his personal life. His relationship with Litzi was long over but they were technically still married. Philby took the risky step of telling his superiors, explaining that the marriage had been a gallant attempt to rescue a young woman. His superior sent a request over to MI5 for a trace – she was a Communist, now living with a Soviet agent they said. That revelation barely caused a ripple. End it quickly, they said, and Philby did. The two Communist agents agreed to divorce on the pretext of infidelity so that Philby could marry his new partner, Aileen, who by then was expecting their fourth child.²⁹ The two former lovers never met again and rarely spoke of each other. The few times Litzi mentioned ‘Kim’, it was with a tone of regret and love but tinged with bitterness. To those who knew them well, the reticence hid the pain aroused by a deeply felt relationship which had been sacrificed for the cause.30

Greene was one of the few friends not scarred by Philby’s betrayal. Instead it provided a wellspring for his fiction. Philby had been Greene’s boss during the war in MI6, the two men lunching and drinking and enjoying each other’s company, Philby in his tweed jacket with leather patches. Greene had flirted with Communism in his youth but had eventually sided with Catholicism.³¹ ‘Of course I couldn’t talk to him as a Communist,’ Philby said years later. ‘But I did talk to him as a man with left-wing views and he was Catholic. But at once there was human contact between us.’³² Greene had left MI6 suddenly for a far less exciting job in the Ministry of Information. Why? A few have wondered if he might have suspected what his friend was up to and wanted to avoid becoming caught up in it. If so, The Third Man takes on a different hue with its story of a hapless writer, shocked at the amoral behaviour of an old friend he had once looked up to and now determined to chase down the charismatic but ruthless rogue. The writer even falls for the rogue’s East European girlfriend, who needs a passport to get out.³³ In the screenplay, the writer, torn between conflicting loyalties, finally sides with the authorities over his treacherous friend. Reality, for Greene, was always more complex and beguiling than the fiction.

Spy-fact and spy-fiction intertwined from the earliest days of the British Secret Service when Whitehall’s decision to establish what would become MI5 and MI6 was encouraged by ribald thrillers which warned of German spies fanning out across England, stealing its secrets and preparing for an invasion. Sleep safe, the writers told their readers, for the British Secret Service was busy catching the German spies and returning the favour. Except that the bureaucrats knew it was not, since it did not yet exist, and so in 1909 they founded the Secret Service Bureau to catch up. In Vienna, the early Cold War provided the ferment for a new generation of novelists whose work would again shape reality. Greene was foremost among them. It was not long after his visit that the CIA chief could stand on the city’s streets and watch Orson Welles film his scenes for The Third Man.³⁴ Once it opened, the British Field Security team trooped en masse to the cinema to watch their world brought to life.

Over in the Austrian town of Graz another twenty-year-old member of Field Security was discerning the cadences of loyalty and betrayal. He would draw on his experiences to create a fictional world that would define the public understanding of the British Secret Service. David Cornwell, later to become John le Carré, plied his trade among the desperate detritus of the refugee camps. Thousands had been swept up in the ebb and flow of Nazism and the Red Army and deposited far from home. Moving through the flotsam were the spies of many nations picking over the remains. Inside the camps could be found every type of person fleeing something, heading somewhere, some perhaps knowing something.35 In his most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy, le Carré has the young Magnus Pym of Field Security trawling the camps asking the questions Jan Mašek was asked. ‘Where do you come from? What troops did you see there? What colour shoulder-boards did they wear? What did they drive around in, what weapons did they have? Which route did you take, what guards, obstructions, dogs, wire, minefields did you meet along your way? What shoes were you wearing? How did your mother manage, your grandmother if the mountain pass was so steep? How did you cope with two suitcases and two small children when your wife was so heavily pregnant? Is it not more likely that your employers in the Hungarian secret police drove you to the border and wished you luck as they showed you where to cross? Are you a spy and if so, would you not prefer to spy for us?’³⁶

There was the occasional burst of excitement – for instance, carrying a loaded Browning revolver while accompanying a senior officer to meet a Czech source who was promising a ‘one-time sell’ of intelligence. But then there was the disappointment when the clandestine rendezvous at a pub drew a blank. Later he would wonder if the Czech agent ever really existed and whether his senior officer was not something of a fantasist living out his own dream of the spy-world like so many others. ‘He imagined himself at the Spies’ Big Table, playing the world’s game.’ In the fictional world, Magnus Pym is artfully reeled in by an intellectual friend, his own version of Philby’s man on the park bench, who draws him into choosing friendship over his country and embarking on a long path of betrayal for the Czech Secret Service. ‘What would have bought me, I wonder? What would have turned me?’ le Carré later asked.³⁷

Le Carré soon afterwards entered the inner sanctum of MI5 and MI6. ‘It wasn’t long before I, too, was fantasizing about a real British secret service, somewhere else, that did everything right that we either did wrong or didn’t do at all.’38 One day, he bumped into the in-house lawyer. Sitting on his Formica-topped table was a copy of Graham Greene’s latest book. Our Man in Havana was a savage satire of Greene’s former employers in which an MI6 officer recruits a vacuum-cleaner salesman who in turn passes off designs for his latest model (‘the atomic’) to a gullible and eager service as those of a new weapon of mass destruction being built in the mountains. The sight of the two-way nozzle causes particular consternation in London. ‘Fiendish isn’t it?’ the Chief says, after someone remarks that plans for the weapon of mass destruction bore a passing resemblance to an outsized vacuum cleaner. ‘The ingenuity, the simplicity, the devilish imagination of the thing,’ he adds. Greene, the lawyer remarked to le Carré, had gone too far and might have to be prosecuted for this outrage. ‘It’s a damned good book. That’s the whole trouble,’ he explained.³⁹

Vienna was filled with its own tricksters, fraudsters and charlatans on the make. Intelligence was a commodity for sale like everything else on the black market and often just as fake, with refugees running paper mills churning out fabricated documents to satisfy the demands of the spies. There was the high-living, sixty-year-old ‘Count’ with his bevy of lady friends who claimed to know a Soviet major interested in betraying the latest ciphers in return for $25,000. Washington was so excited that it sent out a team. ‘This guy’s lying like a rug,’ they were told after a polygraph.⁴⁰ The British had similar problems. One agent codenamed ‘Dandelion’ was being run as a double agent against the Soviets until he explained that his Russian case officer wanted him to go to South America and needed money to continue his work there. He was a fraud, one officer warned, only to be overruled. Once safely ensconced in Venezuela, Dandelion vanished. It was clear he had made everything up.⁴¹

One young MI6 officer, who had warned of Dandelion’s flakiness, walked the Viennese stage with all the confidence that came from being the youngest officer then recruited into the British Secret Service. Once a month, the dark-haired Briton, straight out of central casting and with a swagger to match, would turn into an alley and then down some steps into a gothic beer cellar just inside the Russian sector of Vienna. He would take a seat and listen carefully to the music. If the next song that the musician struck up was a popular Austrian song called ‘Mamachi’ then all was clear and his contact – a Russian official – had also arrived. The musician was in the pay of the British Secret Service. If he didn’t play the song, Anthony Cavendish would have a beer and hopefully leave as peacefully as he had arrived.42 It was risky, perhaps a bit amateurish – typical of the Secret Service culture of the times. Vienna had become a place to take risks and play spy games in because, like its larger German cousin Berlin, the Viennese capital was one of the only places that British, American and French soldiers and spies came into direct, daily contact with their erstwhile allies, the Soviets. Austria had been sliced into four zones – Soviet, British, American and French. Vienna itself was entirely surrounded by the Soviet zone. It was isolated.

The city itself was divided into four sectors, one for each power. The exception was the First District, the old medieval Innere Stadt or inner city. In a decision that could only have been agreed in the opening days of hesitant co-operation, it was policed collectively by ‘four men in a jeep’, one military policeman from each of the powers with the lead role rotating every month. In their jeeps, suspicions often turned violent. When one patrol passed a Russian checkpoint, the Russian in the jeep forced the vehicle to stop and got his colleagues to drag out a prisoner the Americans had been after.⁴³ One Sunday in June 1946, British and Russian troops brawled outside the railway station, wielding broken bottles. It began when a group of more than fifty British soldiers charged a Russian jeep. One Russian officer died of his injuries.⁴⁴

Smaller than Berlin and nestled into Eastern Europe, Vienna’s intimacy and its location meant that it acted as a place in which to probe the enemy and see what could be learnt and how far they could be pushed before pushing back, a place to divine both Stalin’s intentions and those of individual Communists to see if someone from the other side might be encouraged to meet and perhaps to talk out of line. Within months of the war ending, MI6 officers in the city could see the advantages of making Vienna a centre for intelligence gathering for all of Central and South-Eastern Europe. ‘I would like to urge the importance of establishing in Vienna a separate long-range SIS bureau, entirely divorced from all existing intelligence organisations, if necessary entirely unknown to any of the latter, and operating directly under London,’ wrote one officer in November 1945.45

By the time Cavendish arrived in Vienna with its Middle European cold and its grey skies, he was working out of the Schönbrunn barracks on the outskirts of town. His task, like that of every MI6 officer, was the recruiting and running of agents. MI6 officers only occasionally spy themselves in terms of collecting secret information. More often than not, they gather intelligence by recruiting agents – people with access to secrets who are willing to risk their lives by passing it on. They might offer their services (a ‘walk-in’ or a defector) and do so willingly – for money or to escape. Or they might be ‘persuaded’ – perhaps they need a passport or they have had their hand in the till or been in someone else’s bed.

Cavendish, aged just twenty-one, was imbued with all the brash self-confidence that came from the combination of youth and membership of the secret world. His father had taken the family to Switzerland but then died in a mountaineering accident when his son was only five. His mother decided to stay and the boy attended a village school in the Alps, becoming fluent in French, German and Swiss-German. Cavendish had been commissioned young into the Intelligence Corps, aged just nineteen, and was posted to Cairo as the war ended. There he had met a plump, owl-faced lieutenant colonel with rumpled khaki shorts, untidy hair and spectacles. Maurice Oldfield, the grammar-school-educated son of Derbyshire hill-farmers, worked for British Security in the Middle East. He was a natural intelligence officer destined eventually to become chief of MI6, and he took Cavendish under his wing.

Cavendish had roared around Cairo on his Twin Triumph motorbike, occasionally posing as a German prisoner of war to infiltrate escape routes. Oldfield went on to join MI6 and Cavendish soon followed. There he worked in R5, Philby’s old section (‘Call me Kim,’ the leading light of the service would say as he popped into the office) and in the department dealing with Austria, Germany and Switzerland – his first assignment was eavesdropping on a Swiss trade delegation in London. Training for new officers was slapdash and had not progressed much from the pre-war days when the new MI6 officer in Vienna – fresh to the whole game and without any instructions from base – had arrived in town and went to see the man he was succeeding for any tips on how to recruit agents. ‘Could you give me some idea of how to begin?’ ‘You’ll just have to work it out for yourself,’ he was told. ‘I think everyone has his own methods and I can’t think of anything I can tell you.’46

Cavendish had his own painful introduction into the costs of Secret Service work just before he arrived in Vienna. As he was driving through the North German countryside looking for an evacuation route in the event of the Red Army rolling west, he picked up two young hitchhikers, a boy and a girl in their late teens or early twenties. They came from a town in East Germany called Prenzlau. The Russians had a military garrison in the town and the service wanted a source there. He bought them dinner at a guesthouse. The girl’s name was Frieda, his was Alfred, and they both disliked the Russians. To them Cavendish was ‘Paul’. He persuaded the girl to undertake some rudimentary training for a few days, while Alfred was given some money to enjoy himself. She was taught how to use a wireless set and a one-time pad that allowed messages to be written in code, then they were both sent home. Three weeks later she filed her first report. Simple. But six months on, Cavendish had received a message that he should come to see Frieda. Over dinner, she said she was scared that her boyfriend had informed on her because he suspected an affair with Cavendish. ‘Of course, you’ll be safe,’ he reassured her. Next time they met, she said she thought she was being watched and wanted to stay in the West. It took a lot of persuasion but she went back. A few weeks later she was caught, put on trial and shot. It was only in his later years that the memory of the young girl would trouble Cavendish as he looked back on his own younger, more ruthless self.⁴⁷

The life of a junior MI6 officer, like Cavendish, in Vienna, was taken up to a large extent with the routine work of maintaining an infrastructure for espionage – looking for locations for dead-letter drops where documents could be stashed by an agent and then picked up by his British case officer or checking out new safe houses to replace old, blown ones (the demand for such apartments must certainly have kept the Viennese property market buoyant, the spies reckoned). There was also the work of recruiting support agents, the musicians in the beer cellars, the hotel porters, the taxi-drivers who could be useful in operations or when it came to meeting the agents from the other side who were passing on secrets.

Attempts to recruit agents who could pass on secrets were painfully difficult and reflect the amateurishness of the service of the time. By the lavish baroque abbey in Melk, Cavendish struck up a conversation with a young Russian artillery captain called Grigori on the terrace of a pub on the banks of the Danube, which led to a drinking competition involving a near-lethal mix of two-litre glasses of beer and vodka. Perhaps they could meet again? A fortnight later they were back at the pub chatting about their background and Cavendish wondered if he had found a source in Soviet Military Headquarters. Two weeks on and Grigori failed to show. The landlord was asked to make some discreet inquiries among a group of Russian officers about Captain Grigori by saying he had left something behind on his last visit. He had been sent back to the Soviet Union, he was told. He was not the only Russian officer whom Cavendish befriended who would soon afterwards disappear. A colonel he encountered at the Opera one evening agreed to meet three days later at a local beer cellar. All went well, and another meeting was agreed in a week’s time at a restaurant in the inner city. A team watched the restaurant in case an attempt were made to kidnap Cavendish but the Colonel never showed. A phone call by a third party to his office revealed that he too had been suddenly recalled to the Soviet Union. Something was not quite right, Cavendish sensed, maybe a bad apple was in the mix somewhere. Field Security felt the same. One time a truck carrying an agent was stopped at a checkpoint. The agent was in disguise, with another twelve men in uniform. Yet a Red Army officer held a photo up and spotted the agent and beckoned him out.48 At one point, MI6 activities virtually ground to a halt amid fears of Soviet penetration, and a senior officer came out from London. Laxness in Field Security was the problem, it was concluded.⁴⁹

Along with recruiting and running agents to look for signs of the impending war, Cavendish’s other task was to prepare for the war itself by building a so-called stay-behind network. This consisted of recruiting sleeper agents and burying weapons and communications systems which would be activated only in the event of Austria being overrun by the Red Army. The men and munitions would then provide the core of a resistance network, modelled on those the Special Operations Executive had supported in the Second World War. Setting this up involved acting like pirates on Treasure Island, by finding a quiet spot in the park or the countryside and then counting paces from a tree or other landmark, burying a box three feet deep and then producing a map with instructions on how to retrieve the radio or ammunition. Cavendish purchased a large American Chevrolet car, changed the plates and took it to a garage where a secret compartment was fitted in the boot into which weapons could also be stuffed to get them past Soviet checkpoints as he headed out to Lower Austria. Across Europe and the Middle East, gold ingots were dropped into lakes, guns hidden in caves and radio sets buried as part of these efforts. Some were dug up later. Some were not.

There were other distractions in Vienna, which would get Cavendish into trouble. ‘My social activities at this time were devoted mainly to two of the young women working for the CIA, and I have to admit that coping with both of them at the same time diverted some of the energy that I should have been putting into intelligence,’ he recalled. When not wooing the American girls, Cavendish would occasionally engage in his own bit of spying by taking a drive out of Vienna through the Russian zone of Austria to get to the British zone. His destination was a little pub by a river where he could go fishing. The route conveniently took him past the Soviet-controlled airport. At just that moment, his car engine would splutter and he would have to stop, lift up the bonnet and rummage around. While doing so, he would aim a long-range camera at the airfield and snap off as many shots as possible of the Soviet aircraft so that some poor soul in London could count whether there were any more or less than there had been the previous weekend and try to work out what that meant.

Scratch beneath the thin veneer of glamour and much of the routine work of MI6 was a form of glorified train-spotting – with a little plane- and boat-spotting thrown in. This was true from the service’s inception in 1909 when its primary task was to gather intelligence on the German naval build-up as it recruited people to stroll around harbours. During the First World War, networks of agents behind enemy lines would watch coaches move down the rail tracks as they did their knitting. Drop one for a troop car, purl one for something else. Send the resultant pullover back for analysis. In postwar Vienna, the methods of intelligence gathering had changed only a little.

Recruiting agents was proving hard, so the next best thing was a defector coming over. Every defector from the Soviets, however lowly, was asked the same initial question. ‘Did they have any knowledge of an impending attack on the West?’ This was because it was the question asked again and again at Whitehall at the weekly meeting of Britain’s intelligence chiefs. They demanded the answers from every Secret Service station in the field: ‘are there signs of Russian preparations for war?’50 This was the number-one requirement and the first question dealt with in the weekly summaries of current intelligence. The reason it was asked so often and so urgently at the start of the Cold War is that there was no hard intelligence to summarise. Britain was blind.

When it came to intelligence from inside the USSR, the US and UK both had absolutely nothing. Not one source. Not one agent. The Whitehall mandarins frequently expressed their frustration at the poverty of information as they struggled to understand how far Stalin was willing to push a crisis. A March 1946 Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) analysis recorded that conclusions on Russian intentions were ‘speculative’ as ‘we have practically no direct intelligence of a detailed factual or substantial nature, on conditions in the different parts of the Soviet Union, and none at all on the intentions, immediate or ultimate, of the Russian leaders’.⁵¹ MI6 had been banned from running agents against an ally during the war and the ban remained in place after the war, much to the frustration of officers who were itching to try.⁵²

The blindness was especially painful because it was in sharp contrast to the all-seeing eye that the service had provided in the Second World War. The reputation of MI6 had been salvaged by the box that the Chief hand-delivered to the Prime Minister. Inside it was intelligence derived from the breaking of the German codes (such as those generated by the Enigma machine) at Bletchley Park. That information allowed Britain to get inside German intentions and operations and turn their agents back against them as part of the famous Double-Cross System. But as the gaze shifted from one enemy to another, it lost all focus. The Soviet Union was a giant black hole out of which no intelligence was to come for well over a decade until the combination of satellites and the first spies provided an initial glimpse. Without that insight, train-spotting and snapping pictures of airfields was the only fall-back.

The threat of the Red Army steamrollering into Western Europe was ever present in those first years of the Cold War, before nuclear-tipped missiles and mutually assured destruction. Fear and insecurity were heightened by ignorance. Because of the reliance on scraps and morsels, intelligence estimates were way off the mark. In 1947, the Joint Intelligence Committee thought the Soviets had an army of 170 divisions which could reach the Atlantic coast in forty days while also seizing the whole of the Middle East. In reality at least half those divisions existed only on paper.53 But no one knew that. The fear that at any moment the Soviets could invade was visceral and real, and the desire to know about it was urgent. If those divisions were to head west some would come through Austria. MI6 was asked to construct an elaborate tripwire to give as much warning as possible of any sign they might be on the move.

The network of train-spotters had been established after the war by MI6’s station chief in Vienna, George Kennedy Young, one of the service’s most aggressive operators. A tall, independent-minded Scot with red hair and a sharp intellect, Young had served with intelligence in Italy in the Second World War and after a brief spell in journalism had been recruited by an old friend from St Andrews University. Vienna was to mark the beginning of his rapid rise up the ranks of the Secret Service and nurture a profound hatred for Communism which would later draw him to the political right.

Young had a taste for bravura operations, even if they involved a little risk. ‘Keeping the Russians annoyed is rather an important part of intelligence work,’ he later said. ‘We are trying to breed insecurity and uncertainty about their own people.’⁵⁴ In Vienna, he learnt that the Germans had carried out photographic reconnaissance of the Soviet Union and that the valuable information had been buried in the Soviet zone of Austria right next to a Red Army checkpoint. He organised for a newsagent run by his team to send its delivery van to the checkpoint and drop off a copy of a girlie magazine to the guard at the post. While the guard thumbed through its pages, the former Luftwaffe officer who had originally buried the photographic plates frantically dug them up and stowed them in a secret compartment in the back of the van before quickly driving off.55 ‘The professional skill of espionage’, Young later wrote, ‘is the exploitation of human weakness.’⁵⁶

As head of station, Young’s main task was to take a strategic overview. He favoured action to confront Soviet aggression. He would complain that the Foreign Office and politicians were far too cautious when his agents reported that the Soviets were using their proxy secret services to bring Czechoslovakia and Hungary under their heel. ‘We were not prepared to take the minimal risks of exploiting internal weaknesses in the Soviet Bloc by active political warfare,’ he later recalled. ‘In autumn of 1947 it was apparent that the next Communist take-over would be in Czechoslovakia, but nothing was done to bolster up the will of those Czechs who might have resisted what was in fact a skilfully conducted bluff.’⁵⁷

Stalin was reasserting his authority at home and abroad, determined to show that he would not be cowed. Nothing was more dangerous, he thought, than the hint of weakness. Stalin’s advantage was a deluge of intelligence about his opponents. This, if it had been adroitly handled, could have allowed him to calibrate even more successfully his mix of pressure and bluff to maximum effect, to know when to push and when to back down. Stalin did not want a war but, as Churchill had said, he wanted the fruits of war, a series of pliant buffer states across Eastern Europe. Crackdowns, purges and coups would deliver Soviet control of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania in the years after the war.

Austria lived in fear of being next. At first, the Soviets had co-operated hesitantly with the other occupiers. But when the Communist Party was trounced in elections in November 1945, the Soviets responded with a slow squeeze, particularly of Vienna, where they controlled all the road and rail access points including to the airports.⁵⁸ By 1948 tension was rising. The city watched fearfully as the Soviets blockaded Berlin. CIA officers began preparing escape plans involving donning lederhosen and walking through the Viennese woods.⁵⁹ British officers drew up top-secret plans to confront a putsch with military force, leading to arguments about whether such plans were realistic.60 Britain’s military had begun to push for Special Operations in the form of propaganda and the spreading of rumours to try and undermine Soviet influence in Austria and fuel anti-Russian sentiment.⁶¹ Young had tried to recruit agents within Austria’s Communist movement and wanted to send Czechoslovak and Hungarian refugees back home to work their way up the ranks of their Communist parties.⁶² By the end of 1948, his agents reported that the Kremlin seemed to be pulling back from its most aggressive revolutionary activity in Europe, partly in the face of a tougher line from the West over the Berlin blockade. Young’s progress in planting agents was slow. Not many people were willing to sacrifice the best years of their lives to infiltrate Communist parties.⁶³

Young had a staff of about twenty officers and secretaries, most of them, he knew, blown to the Russians.⁶⁴ Even though it was given extra resources, the MI6 station in Austria struggled to keep up with the demands placed on it. MI6 stations do not decide their own priorities. These are agreed back in London by the different government departments, based on what intelligence they are seeking. By 1953, there were a total of nineteen different ‘Top Priority’ requirements for intelligence, ranging from Soviet order of battle to intelligence on individuals travelling to the UK. Further down the list were another thirty-nine requirements. The station could ‘barely cope with responsibilities’, officials noted.⁶⁵

If Young sat at the top of the intelligence tree and Cavendish in the middle, at the bottom were the grunts from Field Security who carried out the mundane tasks. During the Soviet military’s spring and autumn manoeuvres, they would wait for a tip-off from a contact who worked on the railways and then stand along the line to count carriages go past in the middle of the night. When two Field Security men went to check out the registration numbers of vehicles in one boxcar, its door was suddenly opened and they were forced to hide behind a hoarding. The Red Army soldiers who emerged proceeded to urinate in the dark against the hoarding, prompting a complicated expenses claim for dry cleaning.

The day-to-day debriefing of the stream of desperate defectors and frontier crossers, men like Jan Mašek, was the domain of Field Security. Up to 160 individuals a month were picked up and every possible scrap of intelligence extracted.66 The identity documents they had brought with them were also valuable as MI6’s forgers could use them as models to create their own sets for people being sent back. When defectors had been sucked dry, they would be put into a ‘ratline’ out of the country. The British smuggled them out of Vienna past the Soviets to the British zone and the Semmering Pass on a local train. Then they would be housed in a pub until Field Security Graz could pick them up and take them to a Displaced Persons camp where they would wait – often for a year or two – to get a visa and a boat ride from Italy to a new life in Britain, North America or Australia. The chance to see the West up close in Austria provided temptations for Soviet soldiers which the US and UK encouraged. In one twelve-month period, the US handled a hundred Soviet soldiers and officers.⁶⁷ US Army intelligence ran one ratline for defecting Red Army soldiers by using a corrupt, fascist Yugoslav priest in the Vatican who was willing to provide visas to South America for deserving Catholics if they were willing to pay $1,500. A motley crew of Croatian war criminals, Nazi collaborators and Red Army soldiers scurried on to freighters bound for Latin America.⁶⁸ The same ratline would later be used to get Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyons’ who had tortured, killed and sent countless people to Auschwitz, off to Bolivia via Austria after he had worked with the Americans. Other Nazis who worked with American intelligence were also protected.⁶⁹

The biggest ratline operating in Austria was also the most problematic for the British. Up to 2,000 Jewish refugees were arriving in Vienna every month from the East in early 1946. Many ended up on board boats from Yugoslavia and Italy and went to fight the British to force them out of Palestine. British intelligence responded by placing spies among the refugees in order to look at these routes and try to close them down.⁷⁰ Late in the evening of 19 March 1948, thirty to forty kilos of dynamite exploded at the Park Hotel, where many British officers, including Cavendish, would stay.⁷¹ It followed an attack on the Hotel Sacher a few months earlier and the discovery of a rucksack bomb buried by tracks near where a British military train passed.⁷² The suspects were the Jews bringing their fight in the Middle East into Middle Europe. MI6 did not have clean hands either. Approved at the highest political level, it ran Operation Embarrass to blow up ships in European ports due to take Jewish refugees to Palestine. MI6 even planted fake documents in Casanova, a Viennese nightclub believed to be under KGB control (the same club was frequented by Graham Greene while he wrote The Third Man and it became Harry Lime’s haunt).73 The documents falsely claimed that the Jewish refugees from the East were providing MI6 with valuable intelligence, in the hope it would persuade the Russians to stem the flow.⁷⁴

Britain’s closest ally was not altogether helpful with this problem. The Jewish head of station for the Israeli secret service Mossad LeAliyah Bet, who was masterminding the ratlines using forged Red Cross documents, sheltered in the American zone where he worked under cover as a newspaper reporter.⁷⁵ Some American officers conducted clandestine training for the Jewish refugees and there was a semi-official policy of turning a blind eye to Jewish activity including even arms shipments.⁷⁶ Jewish groups also began hunting war criminals. One group called the Avengers used British uniforms, documents and vehicles to get inside the POW camps holding SS officers to exact their vengeance.⁷⁷

Scavengers of many different stripes hunted in the bleak human wasteland of the refugee camps. One of the most remarkable was a forceful twenty-three-year-old British woman called Daphne Park.⁷⁸ Where Field Security looked for those coming from the East, Park sought out the remains of Nazism and its secrets. Park had grown up on a farm in Africa, digesting the great Edwardian writers of British imperial spy fiction like Kipling and Buchan, and had decided she wanted to be a spy. War had opened up new paths for women and, with a fierce ambition and a willingness to talk directly to her superiors, she had carved out a role with the Special Operations Executive training French resistance agents. She had been rejected by MI6 when hostilities ended and so she joined the closest thing she could find, a body called Field Intelligence Agency Technical. That dull bureaucratic title masked its job of tracking down war criminals in the refugee camps and finding valuable scientists. Its progenitor was a group called 30AU founded during the war by Ian Fleming, a Naval Intelligence officer with an active imagination who maintained an interest in Park’s FIAT as it came into being.⁷⁹ In the first year or two of occupation British intelligence hunted those who had run the concentration camps, including doctors who had carried out experiments on the living. The woefully under-resourced team would chase down rumours of Nazis holding clandestine meetings in restaurants or of Martin Bormann having been spotted living in the 12th district under an assumed name.80 One professor committed suicide before he could be handed over for trial in Nuremberg.⁸¹

It did not take long before the search for Nazi scientists who could help in the future superseded the desire to deliver justice for the past.⁸² There were few rules as each of the four occupying powers raced to grab the individuals behind Germany’s industrial and scientific advances, many of whom had become members of the SS. Their secrets would be shared openly with commercial companies back home.⁸³ The top targets were experts on biological and chemical warfare, electronics, guided weapons, aerodynamics and underwater warfare.⁸⁴

Daphne Park had two half-colonels and a major who were specialists in rockets working for her along with a sergeant major and twenty drivers, as well as a terrifying woman from the Auxiliary Territorial Service who bullied Park mercilessly but licked her into shape.⁸⁵ Park’s lack of German led to a few problems. She was told of one professor who had worked on guided missiles and was now living in the depths of a forest in a Hansel-and-Gretel-type cottage. When she arrived, he proved very excited to see her and enthusiastically started drawing diagrams and talking about flights. Park picked up the word ‘Blumen’ which she thought meant flowers. So she woke up her dozing sergeant and told him to listen properly and translate. He explained that unfortunately the professor was studying the flight path of the bumble-bee rather than the V2 rocket.⁸⁶

In Germany, where the battle for scientific secrets was fiercest, everyone played dirty. German industrialists were ‘invited’ to Britain and then interned and not allowed out until they had spilled commercial secrets to their British rivals.⁸⁷ The Americans were more than happy to take on for their own rocket programme men who had developed the V2 rockets that had bombed London. In Austria, there were desperate attempts to get rocket scientists and research chemists out of the Russian zone before the Russians got their hands on them. ‘It was quite important to get there fast because if the Russians got there first they simply kidnapped them and took them away and they were never seen again,’ recalled Park.88

Vienna was a lawless city in which the police could not always be trusted and in which the rules of the Cold War espionage game had yet to be codified. As a result, the city was known to spies as ‘the shooting gallery’ – a body found in a park or floating in the Danube was an everyday occurrence. Amid the darkened alleys of Vienna, one fear in particular haunted not just those involved in the secret world but ordinary citizens. And that was kidnap. It had begun immediately after the war when people suspected of being involved in certain German units or helping the Nazis disappeared (one woman who had allegedly been a Gestapo informer was kidnapped from her apartment rolled in a rug). As the Soviets lost control of the Viennese police, the trend intensified for targeted kidnapping.⁸⁹ By 1948 the spate of kidnappings had become a hot political issue with up to three people a day disappearing.⁹⁰ Increasingly the victims were those suspected of being spies for the West. One Austrian public official was forced into a waiting car on his way home in December 1947 and never seen again. An English university student was kidnapped after a spurned lover told the Soviets she was the mastermind of an alleged ring of British intelligence agents.⁹¹ In all, 400 people were kidnapped in three years, most by the Soviets, although the Americans were not averse to kidnapping people in the Soviet zone and taking them west.⁹²

The US and UK were particularly worried about the pattern of kidnapping, which suggested that Moscow was looking for help in building an atomic bomb.⁹³ America’s bomb was its only counter to the perceived conventional strength of the Red Army. Intelligence officers were sent out with the specific remit of finding out what scientists the Soviets were after as a clue to understanding their progress. MI6 had found intelligence that the Soviets were mining uranium near the Czech border with Germany and there were reports of further deposits sought in Bulgaria, leading to urgent intelligence-gathering operations to investigate further. One of the more popular of the multitude of swindles employed by those on the make in Vienna were those of the ‘uranium salesmen’ who swamped Britain and America with ‘samples’ wrapped up in cotton stuffed into pill bottles and the promise of more.94 The failure to predict the Soviet atomic test of 1949 only increased paranoia about what else lay unknown. What London and Washington would only slowly realise was that the Soviets had help from inside the West’s own atomic programme, thanks to Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo, whose Communist pasts had been overlooked or ignored.⁹⁵

Daphne Park watched the Russians’ ruthlessness with horror but also with growing fascination. ‘Many of the scientists were being kidnapped by the Russians. It was this that made me want to learn Russian and serve in the Soviet Union, and see what it was really like there,’ she later recalled. ‘I watched them swallow up Czechs, Poles – people I had known. I wanted to meet and understand the people who lived under such a regime.’⁹⁶ She would get her chance. Daphne Park’s stint in Vienna was short-lived. One day a woman turned up and explained that her friend, who happened to be a Russian major, was being sent home but he was reluctant to return. Would Daphne Park see him? She went to pay a visit to the members of the MI6 station with whom she occasionally worked. They were extremely interested. But they had some trouble finding an escape route fast enough. Daphne used her military contacts to get the Russian out. That got her noticed. George Kennedy Young decided she had what it took. In 1948, in a brief nod to the modern world which would not be repeated for another two decades, she became one of the only women to be allowed to join MI6. She was made the stay-behind officer for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In a small office, under particularly tight security, she acted as the point of contact for the stations, including the work of Anthony Cavendish, who respected her as capable, if a touch ‘unfeminine’. Her year and a half in Vienna was formative for a woman who would eventually rise to become a controller at MI6. Decades later when she was asked where her deep-seated and vociferous hatred of Communism and the Soviet regime – which she always called simply ‘the enemy’ – came from, she would answer, ‘I had seen them on the streets of Vienna and how they behaved and I felt anger.’⁹⁷

As the Red Army had driven west at the end of the war, a vast tide of refugees had been pushed before it. And then as the Iron Curtain began to fall, thousands more came. Across Austria at least a million Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Yugoslavs, Cossacks and White Russians had settled into huge Displaced Persons camps. Thousands had been collaborators with the Nazi regime, including war criminals who had been part of SS units drawn from anti-Communist elements in local populations. Others were deserters from the Red Army. Others simply did not want to live under Communism. Some, like the White Russians, had been fleeing and fighting the Communists since the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets wanted them all back and, to their later shame, initially the Allies agreed, shoving many of them into boxcars for transportation to the Russians.98 Some Cossacks killed themselves and their children rather than return. The Soviet Union also sent out their feared SMERSH (the name meaning ‘death to spies’) counter-intelligence teams to hunt for collaborators and enemies of the state. In one case it even appears that a British officer sold out a group of White Russian generals in Austria to SMERSH in exchange for fourteen kilos of gold.⁹⁹

Vienna’s role as a refuge, albeit an insecure one, for those fleeing Communism made it home to a bewildering series of front organisations representing the differing émigré groups. MI6 and the CIA would work closely with these as they scoured the camps in search of agents and intelligence from the East. One of these groups was based at an MI6 safe house at Weyringergasse, not far from the border with the Russian zone. It had the feel of a busy railway station with a constant bustle of young, idealistic Hungarians heading back and forth over the border. Some acted as couriers, others were gathering information and contacting friends, others organising resistance groups. At the centre of the web was Béla Bajomi, a Hungarian who had fled by clinging to the underside of a railway carriage after the Second World War to begin working with MI6.¹⁰⁰ As with other émigré groups, they ran their own intelligence-gathering networks and had knocked at the door of the CIA and MI6 asking for help and offering assistance, promising that the local population was ready to rise up. The Soviets were obsessed with these émigré groups and expended enormous amounts of effort in targeting them. Occasionally, they succeeded. In autumn 1947, a whole MI6-sponsored network in Hungary was rolled up and a hundred people arrested after an ‘unfortunate mishap’.¹⁰¹

One evening Bajomi received an urgent message from a Hungarian colleague who said he was heading for a safe house. Next morning there was no sign of him. An elderly Austrian taxi-driver said he had seen someone being shoved into a car with Russian number plates. An unknown voice telephoned and asked for Bajomi two days later. The caller said the Russians had been unable to get his friend to their zone and offered information to help organise a rescue. He told Bajomi to meet him one block from the Russian zone. Bajomi took a loaded revolver. He arrived just before 11. In the silence and gloom, he walked past bomb-damaged, baroque flats to a drab grey building. All the windows were dark except two on the top floor. He went through heavy oak double doors into a corridor, lit dimly by a yellowish light, up the staircase to the top floor where the lights were on, drawing his revolver. As he approached the door, he heard Russian voices and began to move backwards to make a run for it. The door crashed open and uniformed Russians ran towards him. Others approached from the other end of the corridor. Two men grabbed him and hit him in the face. A hand was placed over his mouth. A voice said in Hungarian, ‘Now we have got you as well. You are the real prize.’

He was bundled into a car and taken back to Hungary. Later, in a Budapest prison, he recounted the story of his capture to members of the resistance network he had helped organise. Many of them were barely out of their teens — his son was one of them. They had been providing the bread-and-butter, low-grade intelligence that MI6 was so eager to consume. But their letters – written with secret ink and posted to the safe house in Vienna – had been intercepted. They had risked their lives to establish the position of a bus terminal, the registration of a Soviet vehicle or the production figures for milk and butter and they were now in jail. Paul Gorka had been passing on details of heavy industry. He had recruited colleagues, friends, relatives and his own girlfriend. In jail, some said they had been ambushed as they crossed the Iron Curtain. One spoke of a British Field Security officer in a small village restaurant giving him a map and telling him to take a particular route. He found the Hungarian Secret Police waiting for him. One day Gorka saw Béla Bajomi through the small inspection hole of his cell. ‘We and all of us, here and abroad, have been betrayed by members of the British Intelligence Service at a very high level,’ the frail man with blond-white hair and a blue-and-white-striped prisoner’s uniform told him. In April 1951, Bajomi was executed, a prison guard gloating about it to his son. The CIA also found that most of its agents were rounded up within a few hundred feet of the barbed wire in Hungary. The remaining few who made it over provided almost no intelligence.102

The Americans were newcomers in the intelligence game. But their rising influence, compared to a weary, near-bankrupt Britain, was quickly evident in Vienna, whether in small ways like the ready supplies of chocolate and cigarettes provided to agents or the much more significant largesse of the Marshall Plan, which provided billions of dollars to help reconstruct Europe. MI6 officers noted that in the competition for agents the Americans were ‘paying enormous sums as retainers’.¹⁰³ Occupation had brought competition for information, and competition drove the market. One Viennese hotel porter worked simultaneously for money for the American, British, Soviet and French services while also working on the side for free for his own country.¹⁰⁴

The CIA was young but persistent and determined. Even if it was initially naive, it learnt fast. Like the British, it was also desperate. ‘What you have to remember is that in the beginning, we knew nothing,’ Richard Helms, the official responsible for the region and a future head of the CIA, remembered later. ‘Our knowledge of what the other side was up to, their intentions, their capabilities, was nil, or next to it.’ Helms later reckoned that at least half the information on the USSR and Eastern Europe in the CIA’s files was fabricated and that the Berlin and Vienna stations had become ‘factories of fake intelligence’.¹⁰⁵ Until 1952 the CIA did not have a single Russian-speaking case officer in town.¹⁰⁶ ‘The Austrian station has one real mission and a bucket of marginal responsibilities, many of them bilge,’ Helms told one officer on his way to Vienna. ‘Your job is to recruit Russians. Until we’ve done that, we’ve failed. I don’t care how many reports the station sends in on the Czech Communist Party or Hungarian order of battle. Our basic job is to penetrate the Soviet establishment – that’s the only way we’ll get the answers the White House is screaming for.’¹⁰⁷

It was in Vienna that the CIA finally managed their first serious penetration into Russian intelligence anywhere in the world, their first chance to run an agent who was willing to remain in place and provide information rather than just defect. On New Year’s Day 1953, a tense man approached a car carrying the American Vice-Consul in the international sector and asked for directions. He dropped a note before leaving. It read: ‘I am a Soviet officer. I wish to meet with an American officer with the object of offering certain services.’108 It offered a location for a meeting and a fall-back if that failed. CIA surveillance teams staked out the location for a blind date and found a stocky officer from a peasant background called Pyotr Popov who worked for Russian military intelligence, the GRU. His motivations were hardly high-minded – he was lonely and out of place, conscious of his illiterate background. He also liked to drink. A Serbian woman from the refugee camps who had been his agent had become his mistress and needed an abortion (the CIA would eventually pay for three terminations). A CIA psychologist would later describe him as a ‘delayed adolescent’ who had found the opportunity to pursue his impulses amid the relative freedoms of Vienna and its exposure to the West.¹⁰⁹

The CIA sent out George Kisevalter to handle him, a bear of a man whose fondness for a drink would later get him into trouble. He had been born in Russia but his family had never returned after the Revolution. He was despatched to Vienna where, after a nervous first meeting, he quickly built on a natural empathy with Popov. ‘The only thing is treat me like a human being,’ Popov told Kisevalter.¹¹⁰ The two would meet a hundred times in the next six years. Popov had little information on the Soviet leadership or its intentions but did pass on voluminous details of Soviet operations in Vienna including the names of many of the seventy KGB officers stationed there, allowing a huge chart to be drawn up. Photographs were added to the wall (in their absence many sources when asked what someone looked like would normally reply ‘like a Russian’).¹¹¹ CIA headquarters at one point asked the team to have Popov organise a resistance group among fellow Soviets. It was an absurd idea that would have risked exposing his work and underscored the still amateurish approach to running agents adopted by Western intelligence agencies. Popov refused angrily, and for years the phrase ‘a small, tightly knit resistance group’ became code in the CIA office in Vienna for ‘another wildly unrealistic idea from headquarters’.¹¹²

Vienna was so much smaller than Berlin that rival intelligence teams would often come to know each other by sight, literally bumping into each other in the alleys. Sometimes British Field Security teams would stop at traffic lights and see next to them a team of Russian footsloggers (as their surveillance men were known). There would be a nod of the head between the driver of a smart, new Soviet BMW and that of a clapped-out British Austin. It was only a short walk around the Innere Stadt’s Ring Road from the British base at the Sacher to the less cosy and more imposing Imperial Hotel which, along with the Grand Hotel opposite, was the base for the Soviets and the KGB.

Everything was done by the British to get a sense of what was going on beyond the marble and chandeliered reception of the Imperial. At one point, two Austrian cleaners were bribed to bring out all the rubbish, but the Russians soon spotted the danger. A photo-observation point was set up in an office opposite to snap anyone emerging and add them to a bulging file that an intelligence officer would frequently thumb through. One New Year’s Eve, some of the junior British Field Security team thought they would share a bit of the festive joy with their Soviet counterparts. They broke protocol and called the Soviet High Command in the Imperial to wish them a happy new year. Their jollity was met with a short reply in a thick Russian accent: ‘Don’t provoke.’ And the line went dead.

One of those KGB officers, an opposite number to Cavendish at the time he was in Vienna, would play the starring role in one of the most tortuous chapters in the history of the British Secret Service. For those coming from the West, Vienna was drab and dreary, but as Anatoly Golitsyn arrived by train, all he could see were well-dressed, happy-looking people and shops – with no queues outside – filled with goods.113 Golitsyn, possessed of a powerful belief in his own abilities, had been born in August 1926 in a small town in the Ukraine. He had grown up with pigs and chickens roaming around the quiet dusty streets. But when he was four the great famine, heightened by Stalin’s collectivisation of farms, left corpses rotting amid the cherry trees and led his family to Moscow.

Too young to fight in the war, Golitsyn had joined the SMERSH academy in September 1945. Like his British counterparts, he had been inspired by stories of heroes hunting down enemy agents. He had been trained in surveillance, the use of informers and the favourite Soviet ploy of ‘provocation’. This involved having a Soviet officer pretend to be, say, a British officer in order to meet a Soviet suspected of dangerous tendencies and see what the Soviet would say (in Berlin, the Soviets went so far as to build a replica American base at a castle with fake Americans in uniforms who could speak English to try and trap their own people).114 In October 1946, Golitsyn joined the Colony Department of the KGB. This spied on Soviet officials abroad, including ambassadors, to check their loyalty. Vienna was one of the hardest places in which to prevent unauthorised contact with the enemy, so almost everyone was asked to watch everyone else right down to the chauffeurs informing on their passengers. One senior counsellor at the Embassy was suspected of being a British spy and put under extensive surveillance.¹¹⁵

Golitsyn’s first job had been to run agents within the Russian émigré community, planting individuals plucked from the refugee camps within different groups. A prime target was the anti-Soviet, Russian émigré grouping, the NTS, and its local leader Valeri Tremmel. Every month or two his agents would travel by train to different provincial towns in the Soviet zone where Golitsyn would pick them up in a car for debriefing. In the spring of 1954, a senior KGB boss arrived to explain that the KGB was going to step up its work against the NTS by eliminating its leaders. One of Golitsyn’s agents was chosen to administer a drug to Tremmel, brought out from the KGB’s special laboratory. The agent and his wife were bugged in order to make sure that they were reliable. The agent managed to give two drugged sweets to Tremmel and he was bundled into a car and driven to Baden.

The KGB Residency in Vienna was divided into fourteen sections, and in September 1954 Golitsyn was reassigned to target the British. Among the notes in his predecessor’s file he found an old letter from the head of the KGB British Department requesting the kidnapping of Peter Smollett to answer charges that he had been working for MI6. Most likely this was part of a purge against agents of Jewish origins that Stalin had begun but which was abandoned after his death.¹¹⁶ Another report referred to an abortive attempt to recruit a young English woman who worked in British censorship in Vienna. She was having an affair with a Soviet lieutenant under KGB control. One evening they were interrupted in bed by a KGB officer threatening blackmail. She told him to get lost. Golitsyn found few other usable agents apart from one driver for Field Security in Vienna whom he kept going.

In February 1954, the KGB in Vienna was rocked by a defection. Major Pyotr Deriabin walked across the city to the Americans. In a panic, the Soviets put armed patrols in the medieval Innere Stadt to look for him. A CIA officer who carried out a quick initial debrief of Deriabin immediately appreciated his value – including the fact that both of them were running the same Chief Engineer of the Soviet military forces as their agent.117 Deriabin was placed in a coffin-like hot-water tank which some holes for air bored into it. The tank – labelled machinery – was packed on the baggage cart of the Mozart Express train which ran out of the city and through the Soviet zone and into the American zone of Austria. Guards were told to shoot if the Russians tried to force their way on to the train (they were not supposed to board, although neither was the train supposed to be used for intelligence work).¹¹⁸ The head of the KGB’s German – Austrian Department arrived in a fury after the defection. He warned staff that the Americans would ‘launch a massive effort to approach, blackmail, recruit or even kidnap our officers and agents’. Purges, fear and denunciations were sweeping through Soviet intelligence. No one could be trusted. MI6 decided to try and encourage more defections, even of low-level soldiers, to heighten the distrust. ‘What appears to be a scruffy malcontent may well be the executioner of one or more senior Army or MVD [intelligence] officers whose demise, or banishment, will weaken the Soviet machine by undermining its authority,’ suggested a top-secret memo which reached the Chief of MI6.¹¹⁹

The Soviets recruited everyone they could from businessmen to barmaids. Clerical and administration staff working in the Western zones would be approached if they had a relative on the Soviet side. Even if they had no access to secrets they could help identify possible targets who had vulnerabilities in relation to money or sex. A few of these staff reported the approach back to the British or Americans who then tried to turn them back against the Soviets to feed false information.¹²⁰ The KGB also ran a campaign of seduction in Vienna employing young, handsome East Europeans who spoke good English and had fancy apartments and spending money. British personnel were explicitly warned of such dangers.121 In one case a secretary to the US Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations was seduced by a man twenty years her junior. ‘What about all those officers here whose wives haven’t arrived or are still back home who have been shacking up with every woman in town?’ she said when confronted by an officer, pointing out that her boss had had an Austrian girlfriend before his wife had arrived and that she herself had not passed on any secrets. She was still sent home.¹²² US military intelligence also knew how to exploit human weakness. Operation Claptrap targeted Soviet soldiers who had become infected with venereal disease and persuaded them to betray secrets in return for medication and to avoid the punishment of being despatched back to the USSR.¹²³

Although the Soviets blanketed the city with their spies, the British had one prime, unmatched source. But it was not a human agent. If you walked down Aspangstrasse in 1950 near the main railway freight line, you would have found an innocuous-looking boarded-up shop. Walk to the rear and you would find a bell, a steel door and a spyhole. Behind were three British soldiers with sten guns. Past them, stairs went down to the cellar and into the heart of one of MI6’s most secret and successful operations of the early Cold War.

The operation was the brainchild of the man who had taken over from George Kennedy Young as head of the MI6 station in Vienna. Peter Lunn had captained the British Olympic ski team in Bavaria in 1936 and his father Sir Arnold Lunn had established the Lunn Poly travel agents (occasionally put to use by MI6). A slightly built man, he was quiet and spoke in a soft voice with a lisp. Those outward qualities masked an intense, highly effective operator who was as zealous and fervent in his Catholic faith as he was in his anti-Communism. According to a colleague, somewhere in a file is a note in Lunn’s spidery handwriting reading: ‘Communists and Communism are vile. It is the duty of all members of the Service to stamp upon them at every possible opportunity.’¹²⁴ When he took over, Lunn knew that much of his intelligence was low-grade chit-chat from agents and defectors. He was frustrated that MI6 had yet to penetrate the decision-making level of the Soviets in Austria. One day while reading reports from an Austrian official, he noticed that the cables through which the Red Army HQ in Vienna communicated to Eastern Austria ran through the British and French sectors of Vienna.125 Perhaps there was a technical solution to his problem. He brought a mining engineer and telephone expert from the General Post Office to discuss a plan to tunnel towards the cables and then tap them. Lunn approached the Ambassador in Vienna who gave it a quiet nod without sending the idea to the Foreign Office for approval, fearing that they would say no. ‘I couldn’t look at myself if there’d been an invasion and I denied the chance of getting the information,’ Ambassador Harold Caccia told Lunn.¹²⁶

Soldiers from the Royal Engineers dug the tunnel and were then promptly posted to Singapore to prevent any loose talk. There was nearly an early disaster. A team carrying the recording equipment had been due to arrive by train in the British district. The reception party waited forlornly. A phone call came in explaining that the men appeared to have got out at the wrong station and seemed to be in the Russian zone. ‘Don’t move, don’t look at anyone, don’t talk to anyone. In the meantime don’t even breathe and we will be out in half an hour,’ said the duty officer as he raced over. They found the two engineers in British uniform on the platform with cases full of listening equipment.¹²⁷

That equipment was taken down to the Aspangstrasse cellar. In the twilight a visitor would have found half a dozen men sitting in front of a tunnel about five feet beneath the street. Wires led to the type of switchboard you would see in an old telephone exchange with a series of sockets in which you could insert jack plugs. One of those sitting in the dank cellar with headphones clasped to his ears was a teenage private named Rodric Braithwaite.¹²⁸ He had failed his officer exams but made it into the Intelligence Corps by the skin of his teeth. The fact that he had originally been heading for Cambridge to study Russian and French suggested an aptitude for languages which led to his being assigned to work on the tunnel as part of a team of thirteen men – almost all eighteen or nineteen years old. The team worked twenty-four hours a day in shifts. There was little awareness among them of whether it was day or night, and only an underpowered light illuminated the wax cylinders on which their work was recorded. One of the perks was a steady supply of chocolate and cigarettes. The use of the latter coupled with the lack of ventilation in their subterranean lair led some of the inhabitants to nickname it ‘Smokey Joe’s’.

The eavesdroppers, who did not speak the language, had to listen out for what sounded like Russian voices and then begin recording on the cylinders. ‘Most of us didn’t know what was Russian and what was Czech. God knows how many mistakes we made, as nobody told us,’ recalls Braithwaite. They were led by a captain whom Braithwaite thought drank too much. Meanwhile, the Captain thought Braithwaite posed a security risk because he insisted on reading the leftish New Statesman magazine – although Braithwaite also wondered if some of the animosity between the two men might originate in the Captain having once played in an orchestra conducted by Braithwaite’s father. After six months, Braithwaite shifted to interview refugees, occasionally brushing up against the spies. That experience left him with a distrust of the betrayals intrinsic to the secret world, so when he was approached at Cambridge, he declined a career in MI6, preferring the Foreign Office. He would carry with him from Vienna a scepticism of spies that would last all the way through the Cold War to its dying days when he was ambassador to Moscow and then Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

The Vienna Tunnel was a success. The headphoned men could hear all Soviet military calls and long-distance civilian calls going out to Bucharest, Sofia, Prague and Budapest. It provided a wealth of material on Soviet military activity. One crucial conversation it picked up was between two Russian soldiers talking about which troops were going to be demobilised. This meant that a war was not on the cards. The tunnel in the cellar lasted until 1951 when the Soviets moved their lines, but more tunnels were built and would survive through to the end of occupation in 1955; one was underneath a bogus jeweller’s shop, another located in the suburban house of a British official.

The Americans were not informed at first of this British success, but they had begun to work on their own plan. So Lunn’s successor from 1950, Andrew King, brought them into the secret. King had known Vienna from the 1930s when he had travelled around looking for locations as part of Korda’s London Film Productions, cover for his role in MI6. He retained an air of flamboyance which might have suited the film industry well but made him rather conspicuous as a spy. He drove around in a fancy green Jaguar, often accompanied by his Pekingese dog.129 He was both gay and a former Communist. Neither feature had been impediments to Secret Service work in the past, although they would eventually cause trouble for him.

Every morning the product of the tunnel team was picked up in a laundry basket and taken over to the MI6 station at the Schönbrunn barracks. So much material was produced by this operation that the two Russian-speakers based there were soon swamped and a backlog of months’ worth of tapes grew. It was decided to send the tapes to London to be processed. The tapes were flown back three times a week by a special RAF plane and then taken to the new Section Y. The translation was undertaken in the grand setting of an MI6 office at 2 Carlton Gardens off Pall Mall by a curious mix of the children of English merchants who had worked in St Petersburg and émigré Russians, as well as some Polish army officers left over from the war. ‘There was plenty of Slav temperament and moodiness about and it required a great deal of tact and careful handling to keep the peace and the machine running smoothly,’ remembers the MI6 officer who became deputy head of the team from September 1953. That officer was handsome and his rather exotic background, mixing Jewish, Turkish and Dutch, not to mention a recent experience as a hostage in Korea, led to his being seen as a ‘pet’ by the secretaries in the office. He was anything but tame.

Just after six o’clock one evening in October 1953, that officer took a leisurely walk through Soho to Oxford Street. He had a cup of tea and some cake and then caught the Underground at Charing Cross. When the Northern Line train came in he boarded at the last moment. At the next station he jumped off just as the doors were closing. He let two trains pass and got on the third. He alighted at Belsize Park and walked towards the exit clutching a newspaper nervously in his left hand. The streets were quiet. ‘A man came slowly out of the fog walking towards me,’ he wrote many years later, ‘also carrying a newspaper in his left hand. In his grey, soft felt hat and smart grey raincoat he seemed almost part of the fog.’ The man, a Russian, had had few problems evading MI5 surveillance in London. The KGB knew from its sources in MI5 exactly what procedures were used to monitor the Embassy. It even listened to MI5’s radio communications and knew when its watchers had their breakfast.130 Even so, a Russian intelligence officer was trained to spend five hours on foot and public transport to evade surveillance. The MI6 man handed over a folded piece of paper. It contained, he said, the precise details of the telephone tapping and microphone operations in Vienna, as well as other microphone operations undertaken elsewhere. The two men agreed to meet in a month’s time. An hour later, George Blake was home having dinner with his mother. His overwhelming feeling was of relief. He had passed the point of no return. He would later claim that during his time in Korea his own religious faith had been supplanted by a new faith in Communism. ‘I came to the conclusion that I was no longer fighting on the right side,’ he would say. There was another, more human reason that Blake never mentioned. He had been dating a secretary from the office. Her father, a traditional type, made a remark along the lines that he would never have a daughter of his marrying some foreign Jew. Later in Seoul when another officer paid a visit to the station, Blake again encountered the casual anti-Semitism that was endemic in much of the English establishment at the time. He never felt particularly British, perhaps because he was not particularly British, and with his capture in Korea a combination of alienation, idealism and sheer pragmatism had led to his offer to switch sides. And when MI6 and the CIA held a joint meeting to plan a far more ambitious tunnel in Berlin, Blake took the minutes. The British would bring their experience from Vienna, the Americans would bring the money, and, thanks to Blake, the KGB would know all about it.¹³¹

The KGB top brass decided to allow extensive communications from their colleagues in the Russian military to continue in Berlin, for a while at least, without telling them that they were being intercepted. This was because it was considered more important to preserve the secret of Blake’s treachery – even if that meant allowing the CIA and MI6 to collect valuable intelligence – rather than risk his exposure by issuing a warning. When Blake was eventually transferred to a position where the trail would be harder to follow, the KGB decided to ‘discover’ the Berlin tunnel, making out that this had happened by chance. In Vienna too, belated warnings were given by Moscow to colleagues on the ground. In the spring of 1955 a letter from Moscow explained that British intelligence had been intercepting Soviet military telephone communications. Enclosed was a document of ninety to a hundred pages giving details of conversations between Soviet generals and other officers. The KGB Resident, or head of station, was told to show it to the chief of Soviet military counter-intelligence under strict conditions.132 By that time, the tunnel’s work had largely been done. Vienna’s time at the frontline of the intelligence war was about to pass, although it would remain a playground for spies of all sides.

The Viennese had not expected a ten-year occupation in 1945. But the Russians blocked moves towards independence until Stalin’s death in 1953. His successor Nikita Khrushchev accepted the notion of Austrian neutrality, a policy aimed at winning over Third World countries, and this opened the way for a treaty reviving an independent Austria signed in May 1955. The Cold War’s final demarcation lines between East and West in Europe were being drawn.

The signing led to a final, frenetic burst of activity for the spies. Most had operated under cover of the occupation and knew they would have to depart. The CIA managed to pay off an estate agent helping a senior KGB officer find a house and had the property promptly wired for sound.¹³³ The KGB tried to place agents in positions of strategic influence in Austrian public life and buried ‘burst’ radio transmitters which could send compressed messages around the suburbs in plastic containers.¹³⁴ The departing powers all deposited their wares in preparation for the next war, which they still thought would be fought like the last. The KGB trained its men in surveillance, small arms and ju-jitsu before placing them deep under cover to prepare for ‘partisan’ activity.¹³⁵ It left caches of arms in villages across the Soviet zone as well as in a monastery and two ruined castles.¹³⁶ Britain and America buried modern weapons, explosives and money in underground caves as part of Operation Gladio, which co-ordinated activity across all of Western Europe. MI6 sent out officers to prepare caches and recruit agent networks to lead the resistance. ‘It doesn’t take much imagination to work out that the Russian army would have hunted us from pillar to post,’ one of those MI6 men said decades later. ‘It would have been a short but interesting life I suspect.’¹³⁷

In October, a vast crowd gathered to cheer as each of the four flags which had hung over the Allied Control Commission building was lowered. The Soviet flag fell last. After ten years, the occupation was over. A few weeks later, the State Opera House, that symbol of Viennese pride, was reopened. Vienna had survived. The war had moved on. But the loyalties and betrayals nurtured in the crucible of Vienna were also moving on to play out on a larger stage.