TAIL OF A TALE

CHAPTER ONE

Overture

THE morning of November 11, 1918 was a typically foggy London November morning. Hammersmith Broadway, where I had gone with other boys from my school, St.Paul's was shrouded in a gloom of smog. The lights of the shop windows glimmered in a blurred uncertain orange. Then punctually at eleven o'clock the historic moment we had been waiting for arrived. 'Boom! Boom! Boom!’ the maroons went off, in Hammersmith and all over London, - the maroons whose explosions until this moment had meant: "Enemy aircraft approaching. Take cover.”
This morning the maroons were the signal of victory. They told us that the armistice had been signed, that the war was over, and that the allies had defeated the Kaiser. For me who had spent the first two years and a half of the war as a lone British schoolboy at the Friedrichswerdersche Gymnasium in Berlin and had sat through many celebrations of the Kaiser's victories "by my German school friends” it was as if the sun had come out and the cold November fog had suddenly turned into a bright and beautiful spring day. I was fourteen years old at the time, and I was ecstatically sure that from now on all would be well with Britain, with the Empire that had defeated the German challenge, and therefore with the world as a whole. The Pax Britannica was safe once more.
How false that assessment was I began to find out when ten years later I went to Berlin as the correspondent of the Daily Express, I discovered there how the Germans were secretly rearming In league with the Russians, and how the allied statesman were wish-fully closing their eyes to the fact.
I had taken up my appointment in Berlin five years before the coming of Hitler. The next eleven years* I spent reporting from Germany, France, Spain, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, and other countries the sinister series of manoeuvres with which the Germans were preparing for the second war.
* See 'Trail Sinister’,

If anyone should have "been taught by experience that victory in war was not enough. That the peace can be lost more fatally even than war, it was I. Yet on May 8, 1945 there I was as over-optimistic about the future as I had been on November 11, 1918.
With the help of one solitary remaining member of my psychological warfare team, - the rest had all gone on a well deserved leave, - I had just written and published a final 'extra' of our newspaper for the Wehrmacht, 'Nachrichten fur die Truppe'. It was dated Saturday May 5, 1945, and was dropped by our squadron of American Flying Fortresses on German garrisons making a nuisance of themselves by continuing to hold out in isolated strong points, like Brest.

"S C H L U S S ! " was the one word banner headline in fat inch high type above the report which told in detail of the Wehrmacht's unconditional surrender in all theatres of the European war. "Schluss" means 'finis’, 'end', 'curtains' -- and 'Shut up !' .

And on May 8, 1945 I really believed it was “Schluss”. With Germany, the aggressive trouble-maker, overrun and pulverised I thought that a rosy prospect of peace and stability lay ahead of us at last, The Japanese? They would not take long to finish off. The Russians? Well yes, they could become a bit of a problem, as they had already been proving by their refusal to carry out their pledges in countries like Poland. But with the United States in closest harmony with us — as I then believed despite Roosevelt's reported trust in the, democratic Russians and distrust of the perfidious British imperialists — the Russians would soon learn the wisdom of cooperating with the Western powers.
So I gladly accepted Ian Fleming's invitation that I should drive up to London and join him in a round of parties to celebrate V.E.-day. In the secret* house in which I had lived with my team during the war I had led a life of almost monastic seclusion.
I had forgone all social contacts not immediately relevant to my work. That made it all the more fun to join in the V.E.-day gaieties of Ian and his friends, some of whom I was to meet again later in the pages of his James Bond thrillers. In all the drinking and laughter of Ian's party and the cheering, dancing and singing of the crowds in the streets outside, it never occurred to me for even the flicker of an eyelid that this was to be the overture to a period during which it would be my job to report and record the fulfilment of one of Hitler's direct predictions, that of the destruction of the British Empire. To be sure not by Hitler's hands but by our own and those of our U.S.allies.
I would have laughed at anyone who told me in that hour of triumph that our governments, Socialist and Conservative, would be competing over the next twenty years as to which of them could do most to liquidate the Empire and betray the trust of the colonial peoples that looked to us for sound administration untrammeled by nepotism, tribalism or corruption. Or that on the one and only occasion when a British statesman stood up to defend. a lifeline of the Empire. The United States government with a dumbfounding blindness to its own long term interests and disregard for the international rule of law would join the Soviet Union in supporting the aggression of the Egyptian Hitler, Gamal Abdel Nasser. ( Not that this deterred the Americans from reproaching us with a lack of loyalty and vigour in supporting them in the areas east of Suez – our line of communication with which they so rashly helped to sever – when they themselves in their turn became embroiled in Vietnam and the Middle East with the same forces they had supported against us in their post-war anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist fervour).
During the war I had been full of admiration for the
amazing accuracy with which our Intelligence staffs predicted the next moves of the enemy. I doubt however whether even their gifts of analysis and deduction would have enabled them to forecast in I945 that a British government would outlaw our own kinsfolk in Rhodesia because they had dared to stand up for law and order in the territory they had opened up and developed to high prosperity
to the benefit of black men and white men alike. Who would have predicted then. That we would seek to destroy them economically because they would not follow us in submission to the reactionary anarchy of African racialist 'Africa-for-the-Africans' agitators? Men of the type that had ruined the Congo, Ghana, and other prosperous territories surrendered to them at the bidding of the anti-colonialist United Nations Organisation.
Nor would I have believed it, if someone had told me on that night that within six years we would be helping the Germans to rearm and to restore to power in the new Federal Republic men of Hitler's general staff who had helped him to plan and wage his war as well as civil servants, judges, diplomats, and police officers who had been instrumental in carrying out the Third Reich’s policies of crime and violence. Or that by December 1966, the West-German parliament would have gone so far in losing its sense of shame for the past, as to appoint to the chancellorship a man who had been a member of Hitler's party from 1933 to 1945 and had played a leading part in the war time propaganda service of Foreign Minister Ribbentrop,
That our policy on Germany was liable to abrupt changes was to be brought home to me within a few months of Ian's V.E.-day party. In the last weeks of the war I had been appointed Controller of the German-Austrian Division of the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. In this capacity I had drawn up a plan for the reform of German newspapers and other mass communications media with a view to laying the foundations for a democratic non-authoritarian Germany. The plan had been approved not only by my own department but by the chiefs of the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Information, and the Control Commission.
Briefly it was to eliminate from the German scene the stodgy unreadable newspapers and unlistenable newscasts which had made things easy for Hitler by leaving the German public uninterested in current affairs and ignorant of them—In their place we aimed to establish well written, attractively presented, and well informed newspapers and radio broadcasts. They were to be independent, - free of the obsequious servility to authority which had characterised newspapers and radio under both the Weimar Republic and Hitler's Third Reich.
Above all I wanted to inject into them that respect for the laws of evidence and for the rights of the individual citizen which we enjoy in Britain where the law of libel prevents campaigns of character assassination such as had been rife in Germany and respect for the court prevents editors police and editors alike from describing a man as guilty of an offence before he has been tried. I believed that if we could do this it would be as great a contribution to the growth of genuine democracy in Germany, as disarmament and demilitarisation or the imposition of a parliamentary constitution.
My program provided for the establishment of a news agency, which would provide radio and newspapers with a wide ranging and accurate news service, and of a model newspaper whose content and lay-out we would transmit by teletype to other newspapers in the British zone for them to follow or not as they pleased. I flew to Germany myself to implement the plan with a team of British and German newsmen, drawn for the most part from my war time team. I had got as far as establishing the news service, parent of the Deutsche Presse Agentur of today, when I learned that our new Socialist masters in Whitehall were not prepared to go through with the rest of my plan.
So I resigned, and with me resigned the top men of my Foreign Office department. I went back to Fleet Street, the others to their peace time careers which they like me had been prepared to neglect in the hopes of contributing to the creation of a new and genuinely democratic Germany.

CHAPTER TWO

The Beaver

The first thing I did on giving up my job with the Foreign Office was to go to bed for three weeks — in a Nursing Home and on a strict diet. The second was to sign on again with The Daily Express as a reporter, the third to dip under Stalin's Iron Curtain. I wanted to see what life was like now in the capitals of my old parish in Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe. As a result of Roosevelt's refusal to accept the advice of Churchill on the need to push into Central Europe ahead of the Russians and of Roosevelt's own blythe trust in Stalin —
" I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask from him nothing in return," Roosevelt had said to Ambassador Bullit before the Teheran Conference, "noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace." * -- these countries had now exchanged the rule of the Nazis for the rule of the Communists. I had a shrewd suspicion of what might be going on. My experiences on the Red side during the Spanish Civil War** were not forgotten. But I was anxious to see for myself and report.
Before I left London however I had to make my number with the boss, I had not spoken to him since early in 1941 when I had given grave offence by obeying the Official Secrets Act and refusing to disclose to the then Minister of Aircraft Production what salary my secret department was paying me. Now Arthur Christiansen, the editor of The Express, had arranged to take me along to the old man's Park

* Quoted by William C. Bullitt in 'How We Won the War and Lost the Peace', Life Magazine, August 30.1948
** See my 'Trail Sinister'.
Lane flat in Brooks House in order that I might kiss hands on my reappointment as Chief European Reporter.

"Glad to have you back with us, Tom", said Lord Beaverbrook with the welcoming smile of a humorous old alligator. "You've been doing a little broadcasting, I hear." He made it sound as though I had been playing marbles. I dare say he saw a questioning look in my eyes. So he repeated the statement, this time without the smile. "You've been doing a little broadcasting !" he said with a cold hard stare. "Yes, sir," I said, and with that he knew, and I knew, that I was back where I belonged.
The others invited to meet his lordship that evening were all members of the top brass of the organisation: E.J.Robertson, the General Manager, his deputy Leslie Plummer, (soon to become a Socialist M.P. and Sir Leslie P.), Christiansen, and an unfortunate colleague called Herbert Gunn who was the editor of the Evening Standard at the time. Gunn apparently had fallen from grace, and the old man was making it plain to all of us. Plainest of all to the unhappy Herbert.
The most successful executives in the Beaverbrook stable were men who managed to anticipate Lord B's moods and wishes and conform to them while at the same time giving every appearance of doing so spontaneously from deep convictions of their own. Some of Lord Beaverbrook’s editors and leader writers possessed this gift to an almost supernatural degree. Not so poor Herbert Gunn.
He did his best to read his employer's thoughts. But he was not very good at it on this particular evening. Beaverbrook was playing cat and mouse with him, leading him on to make a suggestion, then after first seeming to approve he would indicate by a turn of phrase that he did not really approve of it after all. Hastily Gunn retracted and proposed the opposite only to be prompted by Beaverbrook into contradicting himself again. No bullfighter could have been more subtle and elegant with his cape play — or more cruel. I glanced around me stealthily to see how the others were taking it. They just sat there in silence watching Gunn's torment with placidly inscrutable expressions.
To me the most astonishing thing was that this should be happening to Herbert Gunn, an able craftsman and a likeable fellow who had been with the Beaverbrook group since 1931 and had worked his way up to editorship of the Standard through all the subordinate stages. From being a sub-editor of the Standard he had become its news editor. Then he had been appointed editor of the Daily Express Manchester edition. Next he was brought back to London as assistant editor of the Daily Express. Promotion to editor of the Standard followed on that. Yet now after this long and distinguished career of loyal service he was being publicly humiliated before his peers.
What had he done? What had he left undone? I never found out. The next morning I left for Vienna, where I meant to establish, my base for forays into Eastern and South-eastern Europe, determined for the future to avoid, if I possibly could, the kind of close contact with the master that might put me in a similar position to Gunn’s Alas, as things were to turn out, although I fled to the ends of the earth, in the end I too came up against his lordship and incurred his disfavour. My demise after twenty-nine years with the Express was to be even more abrupt than Herbert Gunn's.*

* The story told against him the Beaver liked best was about Sefton (Tom) Delmer. One day Tom turned up at the black glass palace in Fleet Street to find his typewriter missing. He mentioned to his secretary who was sitting hard by Terry Lancaster and asked where it was. She said it had been taken away, and that she was no longer his secretary. In fact he was no longer on the staff. Upset at this communiqué from a slip of a girl, Tom stormed into the office of Pickering (Managing Editor then if I remember rightly) and asked for explanation. Pickering mumbled something, then handed over a cheque, the ‘golden handshake’. Nonplussed for a moment, Tom soon recovered his usual poise. ‘Just like that, Pickering, after thirty years ?’ ‘Just like that said Pickering. ‘Well you can tell the Beaver that if I’d known the job was temporary, I’d never have taken it.’

London Review of Books -- Roy MacGregor-Hastie

CHAPTER THREE

Under The Iron Curtain

Up to the moment it crossed the frontier into Austria the Vorarlberg had been almost empty. Then it began to fill up with passengers. By the time we approached the border of the Soviet Zone people were standing not only in the corridors but even in the compartments. Everyone in mine was talking about the Russians and the terrible things they had been doing, their looting, their drunken orgies, and their sexual assaults on women. "Even old women of seventy", insisted a heavy man with a knapsack which smelled as though it was filled with butter and bacon and perhaps some precious coffee. I could smell it because he was standing on my toes and the knapsack was right under my nose.
" Don't let them make you get off the train" the man with the knapsack advised us all. "Once you do that there's no knowing what will happen to you. One friend of mine who was taken off this train has never been seen again." I had seen Russian occupation troops during my visits to Berlin in my Control Commission days, immediately after the British troops had taken over from them in the West sector of the Four Power city. I had seen the excrement and filth they had left behind in what the Wehrmacht used to call the Seeckt barracks at Spandau. And I had heard enough and seen enough in Berlin not to discount too much of what my Austrian fellow travellers were telling me about them.
The arrival of the Red Army train patrol at the zonal frontier however came as a complete anticlimax, almost a disappointment. Instead of storming the carriages in a wild Tartar horde and ordering us all out on to the platform at pistol point to be robbed and raped as the man with the knapsack" had promised the Russians squeezed their way through the crowded corridors and compartments with considerable good nature and even - so it seemed to me - courtesy. They examined our travel documents, made a spot check of the luggage. The only passenger in my immediate vicinity ordered to get off the train was the man with the knapsack. But he rejoined us safely enough twenty minutes later minus his impedimenta. He complained bitterly that he had been robbed. But as Black Marketeering was an offence punishable under allied occupation laws in all zones of occupied Germany and Austria I could not see that he really had much to grumble about. He had not been taken into custody, as he could have been.
Vienna too seemed to suggest that, despite all the stories about the Russians, there was still some prospect of reasonable collaboration between them and the Western allies. I liked the look of the Military Police jeeps with British, American, French, and Russians in uniform sitting stiffly beside each other, as they patrolled the city, ready to pounce on any members of the allied forces who had got out of hand.
But that was before I had begun my tour of the countries behind the Iron Curtain which was to demonstrate to me the gulf between the Communist- Stalinist approach to the problems of the post-Hitler world and ours.
Looking back I think I learned my most important lesson on my second afternoon in Jugoslavia in January 1946. 1 spent it in the ‘Culture Hall’ of Belgrade's Seventh District. I had driven out to the Culture Hall through the snow covered streets of Belgrade because I had heard a ‘People's Court’ would be in session there. The court was to try a brewery - the Weichert Brewery was its name - on charges of having collaborated with the German occupiers and of profiteering while doing so. I wanted to watch the trial because in my experience one of the best ways to take a country's temperature was to see how things were run in the law courts. It was a good hunch. The trial of the Weichert Brewery was an eye opener.
From the gallery where I stood squashed up against the balustrade by a crowd under whose weight I feared it must collapse if the balustrade did not give way first, the scene looked like one of Louis David's pictures of a Commune tribunal trying Aristos in Paris during the French Revolution.
At the far end of the hall hung a huge red banner flanked by outsize portraits of Marshal Stalin and Marshal Tito. With the banner as a backcloth behind them the presiding judge and his three colleages sat at what looked like four kitchen tables. The hall was appallingly cold. It was unheated because of the coal famine and this January was exceptionally cold even for Belgrade. So the judge and his assistants were wrapped up in mufflers, great-coats, tea-cosy fur hats, and snow boots. Jostling the judges, peering over their shoulders at the books and papers on the tables, pushing against them from in front, from behind, and from the sides was ‘the people’ — men, women, and teenagers. Some even sat in the tall windows, dangling their legs into the hall. They were brewery workers mostly, I was told. But in their quilted jackets, sheepskin hats and head shawls they looked more like peasants.
As I came in (and the crowd in the gallery obligingly made room for me and my interpreter) an accountant was just finishing his report on the brewery's finances. Apparently he was not only an expert witness but a kind of prosecuting attorney as well.
" I submit," he said "that a fine of thirty million dinars" (£150,000 at the then rate of exchange) "could on these figures be approved by the court."
First there was a roar of acclaim from the people'. But at this point a man just to the left of me in the gallery intervened. A dark-skinned gipsy type southerner he was with sharp angular features, his eyes covered by glinting, heavily rimmed spectacles. I noticed he was wearing one of those leather coats which in the Central Europe of the forties were almost a regulation uniform for members of the secret police or party functionaries, whether Nazi or Communist.
" Not enough!" he bellowed with a voice that sounded to me as if it must have been trained in one...................................