Funeral in Berlin (26 page)

In the late ‘thirties a German scientist, Gerald Schrader, discovered a group of organic phosphorus insecticides from which Parathion
¹
and Melathion were developed. The German Government immediately put a security blank over all this work, seeing the potential value of nerve gas as a weapon. They filmed the effect of them upon concentration-camp prisoners. The films and the research came into Allied hands during the war and the research was continued by UK, USSR and USA and still continues to be important as a military weapon.

There are many stories demonstrating the enormous potency of these poisons, like the crop-sprayer who reached his hand into a tank of it to retrieve a nozzle and was dead within twenty-four hours.

Dr Samuel Gershon and Dr F.H. Shaw (Departments of Pharmacology and Psychiatry, University
of Melbourne, Australia) reported in the
Lancet
on sixteen cases of schizophrenic symptoms, depression, blackouts, impaired memories and inability to concentrate among horticultural workers where this group of insecticides was used.

Organo-phosphorus compounds although they break down quickly have a dangerous tendency to ‘potentiate’ one another. That is to say, two tiny harmless amounts get together and make a lethal combination.

Gehlen came from an old Westphalian family but the family motto—
Laat vaaren niet
—was Flemish. The motto means, ‘Never give up’. Gehlen entered the Reichswehr under General von Seeckt in 1921 and was seconded to military intelligence even before Hitler took power.

The Abwehr department he made his own was Group 111 F, directed against the USSR. By 1941 Major Gehlen was in charge of Abwehr Ost. His districts included the Ukraine and Byelorussia. He received many decorations including the Knight’s Cross. When he compiled a report suggesting that the Germans formed a resistance based upon the Polish Resistance, it was suppressed by Himmler for being ‘defeatist’.

In 1945 he was in a better position to summarize the world’s position than Hitler was. Gehlen went to the Abwehr Archives at Zossen
¹
and
burned every document there—after microfilming it and locking the microfilms into steel canisters.

Gehlen allowed himself to be captured by the Americans and, after a little trouble, gained an interview with Brigadier-General Patterson, the US Army Intelligence chief.

The US Army gave Gehlen the ‘Rudolf Hess Wohngemeinde’
²
—which was a large modern housing estate built for Waffen SS officers in 1938—they put stars and stripes on the roof, US Army sentries on the gates and lots and lots of dollars in the kitty. He was allowed to call upon old comrades of the Sicherheitsdienst and the Abwehr and some of his agents abroad scarcely had a break in their payments and communications.

Nomenclature.

Group 1. Intelligence.

Group 2. Sabotage (a very small group consisting mostly of a structure without operatives).

Group 3. Counter-Intelligence. This group is subdivided according to function and a suffix letter is added to indicate its activities as follows:

• H = Army
  
• M = Navy
  
• L = Air Force
  
• F = .The detection and penetration of enemy intelligence.
  

One still hears Russian security men speak of Chekist operators. Originally these were an anti-sabotage, anti-revolutionary force which became a battle gendarmerie during the civil war and was empowered to hold courts martial and execute Whites, or Reds who were getting a little bleached. It remained as a part of the army although nowadays has become merely a slang word. The actual organization underwent many changes of structure, responsibility and name. It became GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB and in 1946 split into MVD and MGB. The latter was renamed KGB in 1954; it is responsible for the most vital part of security and intelligence at home and overseas. (The MVD now handles police, prisons, immigration, highway police and fire services.) Stok’s branch of KGB is the counter-intelligence unit GUKR.

In 1937 Marshal Tukhachevsky tried to throw off Chekist control and was executed for plotting with Trotsky to betray Russia to Hitler. Thousands
of Red Army officials were executed at the same period and the Red Army was in bad repute. At the twentieth Party Congress in 1956 there was a movement towards proving the innocence of the executed men.

Colonel Stok had had extensive politicalmilitary experience, starting from when he stormed the Winter Palace in Leningrad in 1917. He worked with Antonov Ovseyenko when the latter was military adviser in Barcelona. Some say that he was responsible for Ovseyenko’s removal. As a KGB officer, Stok’s loyalty is to the Communist Party, but as an officer he must sometimes sympathize with the aims of the professional soldiers with whom he works. Stok is not a member of GRU (military intelligence) which is entirely separate.

A very complex arrangement of interlapping units which—like all intelligence units—tend to develop special allegiances.

The Secret Service as such is the top dog. I will not elaborate on that. Next in importance is the DST. (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) of which Grenade is a member. This unit combines the function of what is, in Britain, the Special Branch with MI5.

Thirdly, there is the General Intelligence which holds the files of politicians and trade union leaders. It is comprised of two parts; one part overlaps with the Sûreté Nationale and the other with the Paris Police Prefecture.

The Sûreté Nationale also leads a life of its own and has all sorts of specialized departments—from gambling to the huge phone-tapping department. The Ministry of the Interior controls General Intelligence as well as having its own private intelligence unit rather like WOOC(P) except that while
Dawlish is responsible to the Cabinet via the Prime Minister, the French Minister gets access to his reports
before
the President.

The military have their own intelligence networks which co-operate with the above departments now and again.

The lowest echelon of agent consists of the so-called
barbouzes
or semi-official informers, who often speed up a slow season by fomenting antigovernment plots in order to expose them.

Section 6 provides that the police (or etc) may question someone suspected of having information in regard to a breach of Section 1 of the Act. Failure to answer such questions is punishable as a misdemeanour. It is under this section that results can be obtained from uncooperative persons. The law does not provide that Section 6 can be invoked to solve a breach of the less serious Section 2 of the Act. (The maximum penalty for misdemeanour is two years’ imprisonment.) But until the information is gained by means of Section 6, it is not always clear whether Section 1 or Section 2 is the relevant one (if you see what I mean!).

Another interesting aspect of the application of the OS Acts is the use to which the prosecution puts the charge of ‘conspiring to contravene the OS Acts’, for a conspiracy charge automatically renders the Attorney-General’s permission
unnecessary and gives the Crown a catch-all way to plaster the sum of the charges across all the persons charged (some of whom might not have otherwise been liable for prosecution). This convenience is illustrated by the frequency with which the conspiracy charge arises in prosecutions under the Official Secrets Act.

‘A stone cold, cold war classic’
Guardian

When a number of scientists mysteriously disappear in Berlin, what seems to be a straightforward case rapidly becomes a journey to the heart of a dark and deadly conspiracy. It is a conspiracy that takes Len Deighton’s working-class hero on a journey that will test him to the limits of his ingenuity and resolve, and call on him to prove himself as a spy at the very top of his game.

The Ipcress File
was not only Len Deighton’s first novel, it was his first bestseller and the book that broke the mould of thriller writing.

‘Deighton has written a spy thriller which outbonds Bond’
Daily Express

‘Deighton in top form…the best kind of action entertainment’
Publishers Weekly

‘Deliciously sharp and flawlessly accurate dialogue, breathtakingly clever plotting, confident character drawing…a splendidly strongly told story’

The Times

978 0 586 02619 9

‘Lives brilliantly up to the promise of
The Ipcress File’ Books and Bookmen

The Ipcress File
was a debut sensation. Here in the second Secret File,
Horse Under Water,
skin-diving, drug trafficking and blackmail all feature in a curious story in which the dead hand of a long-defeated Hitler-Germany reaches out to Portugal, London and Marrakech, and to all the neo-Nazis of today’s Europe.

The detail is frightening but unfaultable; the story as up to date as ever it was. The unnamed hero of
The Ipcress File
the same: insolent, fallible, capricious—in other words, human. But he must draw on all his abilities, good and bad, when plunged into a story of murder, betrayal and greed every bit as murky as the waters off the coast of Portugal, where the answers lie buried.

‘James Bond’s most serious rival’
Queen

‘I had a sneaking feeling I was breaking the Official Secrets Act every time I opened this book’

Daily Express

‘This secret service thriller will be read; so will the next and the next…’
Sunday Telegraph

978 0 586 04431 5

The classic thriller of lethal computer-age intrigue and a maniac’s private cold war

General Midwinter loves his country, and hates communism. In a bid to destabilise the Soviet power block he is running his own intelligence agency, whose ‘brain’ is the world’s biggest supercomputer.

With his past coming back to haunt him, the unnamed agent of
The Ipcress File
is sent to Finland to penetrate Midwinter’s spy cell. But then a deadly virus is stolen, and our hero must stop it falling into the hands of both the Russians and the billionaire madman.

‘So far in front of other writers in the field that they are not even in sight’
Sunday Times

‘Such credibility, such accurate line-by-line beaming of a sheer sense of the actual…a glittering, wintry entertainment’
Guardian

‘Worthy of Raymond Chandler…intelligent, inventive, constantly entertaining’
Sunday Telegraph

978 0 586 04428 5

Bomber
is a novel war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die.

Bomber
follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of twenty-four hours in the summer of 1943. It portrays all the participants in a terrifying drama, both in the air and on the ground, in Britain and in Germany.

In its documentary style, it is unique. In its emotional power it is overwhelming.

Len Deighton has been equally acclaimed as a novelist and as an historian. In
Bomber
he has combined both talents to produce a masterpiece.

‘A massively different novel…the effect is—quite literally—devastating’
Sunday Times

‘A massive and superbly mobilised tragedy of the machines which men create to destroy themselves…masterly and by far Mr Deighton’s best’

Douglas Hurd,
The Spectator

‘A magnificent story…the characters lean out of the pages’
Daily Mirror

978 0 586 04544 2

The war is over. And we have lost.

In February 1941 British Command surrendered to the Nazis. Churchill has been executed, the King is in the Tower and the SS are in Whitehall. For nine months Britain has been occupied—a blitzed, depressed and dingy country. However, it’s ‘business as usual’ at Scotland Yard run by the SS when Detective Inspector Archer is assigned to a routine murder case. Life must go on.

But when SS Standartenfuhrer Huth arrives from Berlin with orders from the great Himmler himself to supervise the investigation, the resourceful Archer finds himself caught up in a high level, all action, espionage battle.

This is a spy story quite different from any other. Only Deighton, with his flair for historical research and his narrative genius, could have written it.

‘A brilliant picture of Britain under German rule’

Sunday Telegraph

‘One of Deighton’s best. Apart from his virtues as a storyteller, his passion for researching his backgrounds gives his work a remarkable factual authority. With Bomber and Fighter he established himself as an expert on a period…the authority of these books seem absolute.’

Observer

‘Len Deighton is the Flaubert of the contemporary thriller writers…there can be little doubt that this is much the way things would have turned out if the Germans had won the war.’

Michael Howard,
Times Literary Supplement

978 0 586 05002 6

A private aircraft takes off from a small town in central France, while Adolf Hitler, the would-be conqueror of Europe, prepares for a clandestine meeting near the Belgian border.

For more than forty years the events of this day have been Britain’s most closely guarded secret. Anyone who learns of them must die—with their file stamped: