Chapter Five

DURING THE first few days after my arrival in Lisbon I had been like some hopeful debutante at a ball, as I waited for Christopher's `they'll get in touch with you' to be made good. I inspected each new British face I met, wondering `can this be he?' But after nearly three weeks in the place without anyone making even the hint of an approach, I had decided that I was not wanted. The Security bureaucrats I felt sure, had once more imposed their veto on my employment.

I had forgotten about the whole thing, when one of my new Lisbon acquaintances, whom I shall call John Burgoyne, invited me to lunch with him at his flat. John was a cheerful, rabbit-toothed Old Etonian who was in Lisbon on business. I had met him in the bar of my hotel. He was buying wolfram from the Portuguese at outrageously exorbitant prices for the British Government, he told me, to prevent the Germans from getting it. I wanted to write a piece about this blockade by preemption and also about the rival German buyers. And John had promised to give me some information about all this over lunch. It did not seem at all strange to me that another guest at the lunch should be an Irishman who told me that he knew my father and had been interned by the Germans with him in Ruhleben camp during the First World War.

The conversation had been more or less equally divided between the wolfram war, Lisbon as a centre of international intrigue, and Ruhleben. Then, just as he had poured me a glass of magnificent Spanish Carlos XIII brandy to go with the coffee, my business man host shot a startling challenge at me.

" You have been working in England for M.L6," he said. I shook my head and tried to look very innocent." I work for no one but the Daily Express," I said, "unless ofcourse M.L6 has something to do with the B.B.C. broadcasts to Germany," I added, with splendid guilelessness. "I did a few broadcasts in German on the B.B.G. before coming here. Is that what you mean?" Burgoyne laughed, and so did my father's Ruhleben friend. "A very good act, Tom," he said, "but you can cut out the comedy with us. I represent M.L6 here. You were told in London, I believe, that we might be getting in touch with you?" "Yes," I said, feeling rather sheepish, "but I understood the chaps I was working with in London were M-I-5 not M.1.6." "No," said Burgoyne drily, "they were M.I.6."

And on that sombre mathematical note began my brief guest role as a 'sub-source, untried' of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. The trouble was that Burgoyne had not realised how very inexperienced his new helper was. He had thought, as he confessed to me after he had scanned my first all too Daily Expressish reports, that his forces were to be augmented by a fully-trained operator. Now he realised he would have to train me himself, step by step. Which may be the reason why my new job had none of the glamour of James Bond about it. In fact it seemed to me to difler from my normal one in only one respect. This was that, while my reports for the Express were read by about twelve million people before being used to light a fire, those I delivered to John Burgoyne were distributed to several hundred persons, read by no one, and then incinerated as secret waste. Burgoyne however was enthusiastic about the material I was getting from the incoming Jewish refugees. And frankly I was amazed myself, that the Gestapo should have allowed men and women to go abroad who could give so much information about such important electronic firms as Askania and Lorenz to mention but two of them.

I was just beginning to build an interesting new contact with an Italian Travel Agency which regularly sent couriers across Hitler-occupied Europe to Spain and Portugal, when a telegram arrived for me from Leonard Ingrams.

" Suggest you return earliest possible, and resign from Express," it said, "important job awaits you." This time it was no false alarm. The Security Officials had been persuaded at last to waive their obiection to me. Presumaably my brief employment by S.LS. had done the trick. Within ten days of receiving the cable, I had flown back to London, obtained my release from the Express, and was proudly riding around London in a huge black Rolls Royce with the magic letters O.H.M.S. on the wind-screen. And I was rather proud too, of the fact that I had signed up with my new bosses for a salary which was less than a third of what I had been earning as a newspaper reporter.

Not that there was any real need for this financial sacrifice. I could have been much better off during the four years of my absence from Fleet Street that now began, had it not been for my lack of tact and my almost idolatrous respect for official regulations. It prompted me into one of the most absurd gaffes of my life. Full of curiosity about my new work and my new surroundings I had been driven down to the secret `Country Headquarters' in a vast Daimler, which, apart from myself contained a German Jewish woman economist from the Bank of England, a goatee-bearded Harrow schoolmaster who was the expert on Spain, a portrait painter in R.A.F. uniform and a couple of girl typists. Not even, once the car was on its way, would any of them tell me where `C.H.Q.' as they called it was situated. That was a `secret', they said. But at last we drove into the little village of Woburn, turned right, and a few minutes later I found myself at the gates of Woburn Abbey, the centuries-old residence of the Dukes of Bedford. A police sergeant came to the door of the car and inspected our passes.

" I am afraid you'll have to get out Mr. Delmer, sir," said the Sergeant politely. "You'll have to come into the guard house to sign the Official Secrets Act. Everyone has to the first time." So out I got and inspected an imposing document setting out the regulations of the Official Secrets Act. I read it carefully and noted that one of its solemn provisions laid down that I would disclose to no one, but absolutely no one, what I was being paid by the department or anything else about the financial affairs of the Organisation-which of course was financed out of the secret vote. Then I signed a declaration that I had duly taken it all in, and realised the appalling penalties I would incur if I committed a breach of security.

" Aha!" I said to myself, "Now I understand why they would not tell me where we were going, even though they knew I was bound to find out ninety minutes later." I was deeply impressed. And that was the origin of my gaffe. For hardly had I been taken across to Dick Crossman's little office in a long, much partitioned hall, which in time of peace, was the ducal riding school, when a breathless messenger burst in on Dick and me.

" Mr. Delmer, you are wanted on the telephone, sir," he panted." I'll take the call in here," I said." You can't, sir," said the messenger, "It is Lord Beaverbrook who wants you, and the call is on the green line. You'll have to take it in the box." I had no idea what the `Green line' could be, other than a bus service. `Some sort of a special ministerial telephone, I expect,' I said to myself, as I ran through the long corridors with my guide. When, at last, I got to the telephone, there waiting for me was the deep rasping voice that had ruled my destiny for the last fourteen years of my life." Tom," said the Minister of Aircraft Production in Winston Churchill's government, "how are you getting on? How are they treating you?"" I am only just settling in, sir," I replied, "But I hope to do all right."" What are they paying you?" Into my mind flashed the Official Secrets Act and its penalties, also the exceptional discretion of my companions in the car. Without a moment's further thought I replied as stiffly to Lord Beaverbrook as they had done to me.

" I am afraid, sir," I said, "that is something I am not allowed to disclose." From the other end of the `green line' came an exclamation of gurgling anger and disgust." Ugh," said Lord Beaverbrook to this young puppy whom he had trained, and who was now biting the hand that had been about to feed him. "In my position I can know any man's salary. Goodbye to you, Tom!" and he hung up.

I never heard another word from him until the war was over. Lord Beaverbrook however so much resented what he regarded as my `patronising arrogance' that he told the story of my outrageous reply not just once, but as was many years later disclosed to me, at least a score of times.

I never heard another word from him until the war was over. Lord Beaverbrook however so much resented what he regarded as my `patronising arrogance' that he told the story of my outrageous reply not just once, but as was many years later disclosed to me, at least a score of times.

Beaverbrook had been on the point not only of making up my salary to its former total for the duration of the war, he had also been about to make me a present of some shares in the Express. But much as I regretted missing this bonus, what I regretted even more, when I learned of this background to the boss's call, was that I should have seemed ungrateful and impertinent to a man for whom I have always had affection and respect.

As I rode around in the car with the O.H.M.S. on its windscreen in those early days, I always hoped that one of my Fleet Street friends would see me and say-"That fellow Delmer must be doing something terribly important. Look at that enormous car!" Very soon, however, the glamour of the car wore off, and the cold truth was borne in on me that I had no real job and no real work.

I had a small office to myself in a hush-hush building in a cul-de-sac off Berkeley Square. It contained a couple of very hard chairs, an unvarnished deal table, an IN-tray and an OUT-tray, a filing cabinet and a set of official stationery, all impressively marked `W.D. Box 100, London S.W.1.' But, except for the `Daily Digest' with excerpts from the press of the `Enemy, Satellite and Occupied Countries' my trays were empty. And apart from writing and delivering two or three talks every week for the German service of the B.B.C. unlike the other British speakers, I wrote mine in German not in English and attending a planning committee or two at Woburn Abbey, I seemed to have no work, and certainly no importance. In my disgruntlement, I even began to think of returning to Lisbon. I had an invitation to do so from my friends at the Admiralty. Burgoyne, too, had been clamouring for me to come back.

Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, had got to the point of asking for my transfer to his staff when at last I was offered a real job by my Psychological Warfare bosses. Leonard Ingrams did the offering. This truly brilliant man combined a key job in the Ministry of Economic Warfare with another in the Cloak-and-Dagger Organisation S.0.2 later renamed S.O.E. (Special Operations Executive) which was responsible for the organisation of resistance, sabotage, assassination and kindred enterprises. He had yet a third job in S.O. i as my department was called. In truth he was a star operative on the British side of the Secret War of wits and I had the greatest admiration for him

." How would you like to run a new R.U. Tom?" said Leonard. "What's an R.U. ?" I asked." A Research Unit-didn't you know?" "No, I didn't. What do they research?" Leonard looked at me with mock astonishment.

" I had no idea our security was as good as all that," he jeered. "Do you mean to say, you have been with us now for the best part of eight weeks, and you've still not found out what a Research Unit is? A fine reporter you are!"

Somewhat huffily I retorted that I did not now consider myself to be a reporter, ferreting out secrets, but was concerning myself strictly with my own business.

" And if you want me to take charge of any research work, for heaven's sake cut the mystery and tell me what it's all about!"

Leonard laughed. R.U.'s, he explained, had nothing to do with research. `R.U.' was simply the cover name our organisation used for its Freedom Radios, the units broadcasting from England on the special transmitters of the department and pretending that they were doing so from somewhere inside Hitler-occupied Europe.

" We used to have two German R.U.'s" said Leonard, "one was a right-wing station operated by a former Reichstag deputy of' Bruning's Centre party who is living over here now as an emigre. But that folded up when the old boy fell ill, and now we have only the left-wing station. It is operated by a group of German Marxists, and calls itself `Sender der Europaischen Revolution' (Radio of the European Revolution). It appeals to workers to shake off the Fascist yoke, and all that stuff, and preaches a doctrine of European community good will, and Marxism. Your friend Dick Crossman takes a sort of benevolent interest in it. But in point of fact the Germans are left to operate it on their own. Not really a terribly good idea."

Dick Crossman and his wife, I learned, presided over the secret house in which the `European Revolutionaries' lived and worked. Dick sat in on some of the team's conferences, but the team-most of them members of a left-wing group called `Neubeginn'-resented any kind of British editorial interference.

" We now want to start up a new right-wing R.U." Leonard went on, "and I have suggested that you take charge of it with full editorial and political control. The Germans under you would say and do what you tell them to say and do. No more nonsense about freedom and independence. What do you think of that?"

" I think it sounds fine."" Well, think it over. Then shove down on paper a plan for your R.U. One thing, by the way, that you should state is that you will work in close conjunction with 5.0.2 and fit in with their operational plans wherever required. That will enable me to give you a little protection from our woolly-minded Socialist colleagues, should they start shooting at you. And in any case there are ways in which your R.U. can help 5.0.2. You'll learn about that in due course."

Tory Leonard Ingrams was bitterly suspicious of Socialist Dick Crossman who had recently become director of the German section of our department, and he feared-groundlessly, as it turned out-that Dick would try to squash any attempt by me to introduce a fresh approach and fresh ideas.

" Oh, and one other small point," Leonard added in the offhand throwaway manner he always adopted when he thought something particularly important or particularly funny. "You know the Germans have recently launched a British left-wing Freedom Radio. `The Workers' Challenge' they call it. Old ladies in Eastbourne and Torquay are listening to it avidly, because it is using the foulest language ever. They enjoy counting the F's and the B's. Well my Minister* thinks we should reply in kind, and as he is a Socialist, he thinks a right-wing station would be the appropriate one to carry the filth."

" That's okay by me," I laughed. "If he wants ... crusty ... trenchant ... language he shall have it. I shall make a special study of barrack-room German."

" Go to it then, Tom. And let me have your paper as soon as you can. It is a great chance for you to show your ingenuity. There are no limits. No holds are barred."

Chapter's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Aspistdistra Photos - Milton Bryan Photos - Contents

The Soul of Hitler : Series of articles published in July 1939 in the Daily Express "H.M.G.'s secret pornographer" : Article by Sefton Delmer Ian Fleming : Secret Memo Sefton Delmer Attack on Morale of German Forces in Norway : Article by Sefton Delmer on Lord Haw Haw