A Spy Among Friends Read Free

knew me and had been at Eton with my father.’
    Before leaving, Elliott underwent a course in code-training at the Foreign Office. His instructor was one Captain John King, a veteran cipher clerk who was also, as it happened, a Soviet spy. King had been passing Foreign Office telegrams to Moscow since 1934. Elliott’s first tutor in secrecy was a double agent.
    Elliott arrived at The Hague, in his Hillman Minx in the middle of November 1938, and reported to the legation. After dinner, Sir Nevile offered him a warning: ‘in the diplomatic service it is a sackable offence to sleep with the wife of a colleague’ – and some advice: ‘I suggest you should do as I do and not light your cigar until you have started your third glass of port.’ Elliott’s duties were hardly onerous: a little light bag-carrying for the minister, some coding and decoding in the wireless room, and attending formal dinners.
    Elliott had been in the Netherlands only four months when he got his first taste of clandestine work and an ‘opportunity to see the German war machine at first hand’. One evening, over dinner, he fell into conversation with a young naval officer named Glyn Hearson, the assistant naval attaché at the embassy in Berlin. Commander Hearson confided that he was on a special mission to spy on the port of Hamburg, where the Germans were believed to be developing midget submarines. After a few more glasses, Hearson asked Elliott if he would care to join him. Elliott thought this a splendid idea. Sir Nevile gave his approval.
    Two days later, at three in the morning, Elliott and Hearson broke into Hamburg port by climbing over the wall. ‘We discreetly poked our noses all over the place for about an hour,’ taking photographs, before ‘returning to safety and a stiff drink’. Elliott had no diplomatic cover and no training, and Hearson had no authority to recruit him for the mission. Had they been caught, they might have been shot as spies; at the very least, the news that the son of the Eton headmaster had been caught snooping around a German naval dockyard in the middle of the night would have set off a diplomatic firestorm. It was, Elliott happily admitted, ‘a singularly foolhardy exploit’. But it had been most enjoyable, and highly successful. They drove on to Berlin in high spirits.
    The twentieth of April 1939 was Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, a national holiday in Nazi Germany, and the occasion for the largest military parade in the history of the Third Reich. Organised by propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, the festivities marked a high point of the Hitler cult, a lavish display of synchronised sycophancy. A torchlight parade and cavalcade of fifty white limousines, led by the Führer, was followed by a fantastic five-hour exhibition of military muscle, involving 50,000 German troops, hundreds of tanks and 162 warplanes. The ambassadors of Britain, France and the United States did not attend, having been withdrawn after Hitler’s march on Czechoslovakia, but some twenty-three other countries sent representatives to wish Hitler a happy birthday. ‘The Führer is feted like no other mortal has ever been,’ gushed Goebbels in his diary.
    Elliott watched the celebrations, with a mixture of awe and horror, from a sixth-floor apartment in the Charlottenburger Chaussee belonging to General Nöel Mason-MacFarlane, the British military attaché in Berlin. ‘Mason-Mac’ was a whiskery old warhorse, a decorated veteran of the trenches and Mesopotamia. He could not hide his disgust. From the balcony of the apartment there was a clear view of Hitler on his saluting podium. Under his breath, the general remarked to Elliott that the Führer was well within rifle range: ‘I am tempted to take advantage of this,’ he muttered, adding that he could ‘pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking’. Elliott ‘strongly urged him to take a pot shot’. Mason-MacFarlane thought better of the idea, though he later made a