Helen Fry
The Spy Sites of London, Part 2
Dr Helen Fry | The Spy Sites of London, Part 2 | 03.26.24
Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.
- So we are with part two of Spy Sites of London today. So for those of you who didn’t make it to part one, you can catch up eventually on Lockdown. But you won’t have missed anything ‘cause I’ve been picking out some really fun sites that have a spy history in London. And of course, it’s a huge topic. I could have chosen so many buildings, and so many we walk past that we don’t know about. It was okay before. That’s it. Lovely. Thank you. So many we don’t know about, but this today is going to be fun. Quite often I do a serious lecture on spies and espionage, but today, like part one, is intended to be fun. And thank you to all of you who emailed me afterwards with suggestions of spy sites or ones that you’d related to because you’d walked past them in your childhood. So thank you. That was really great, and I’ve incorporated a couple of them in today’s talk. And especially St. Ermin’s Hotel, we’ll see in a moment. And I will mention, although I haven’t put it in, the old War Office in Whitehall, beautiful grand building that is now a high-class hotel.
Really worth a visit. Lots of historic rooms there, and so many of the documents I work on are headed: War Office, London, and that’s this iconic building with a history, so maybe it deserves its own talk one day. So we see on the screen as we saw last week, just as a sort of starter, on the left hand side, the iconic building of MI6. I absolutely love this architecture, would love to go inside one day, but I guess none of us will have that privilege, because, of course, MI6, Secret Intelligence Service, is one of our most top-secret intelligence organisations there on the bank of the Thames. And opposite is Thames House, the MI5 headquarters, that you can see there on the right hand side of the screen. MI6, Secret Intelligence Service, just to remind you, is in charge of kind of intelligence or security with assets and offices abroad, and MI5 is in charge of home security, and, of course, the boundaries sometimes get blurred in our contemporary age. Next slide, please. But London has had this long association with spies, as I’ve listed there, sort of spies, double agents.
We’ll come to some of those shortly. Traitors, most certainly, and we think of the Cambridge Spies. Heroes, villains, those kind of shadowy games on the streets of the capital, where, at times, things were at high spy fever pitch, particularly in the run up to the First World War. I mentioned before when we really had this fear that, at that point, German spies were rife across London and even across the UK, spying for Germany. It was proven to be exaggerated in the end, but it did lead to the formal establishment of our intelligence services in 1909. Next slide, please. And so what about a number of those buildings? I love this place. I don’t know how many of you have been here. This is the St. Ermin’s hotel. It’s not far from St. James’s Underground station. It’s a lovely area all in around the back now. It’s been, I don’t know about redeveloped, but smartened. Just over the back is the former headquarters of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service Broadway buildings. But around that whole area around the back there was some really kind of smart funky cafes and little restaurants. Really, really worth visiting. And that’s happened, it looks to me, since lockdown.
So that’s really, really, it’s a wonderful little sort of enclave there. And this hotel is almost like a sort of oasis with its own driveway, as you can see. It’s a grand building. I mean, it’s really impressive. When you go inside, you know, it is like you’re not prepared. Well, I wasn’t prepared when I first went inside for what I was going to see. I mean, this is a gorgeous interior, almost like a wedding cake, that kind of beautiful white interior, and very unusual carvings and features, and little areas. You can see on the first floor there, sort of little areas with balconies where there used to be tables and chairs, and spies would kind of meet and some of the Cambridge Spies allegedly would meet there, would meet their handler secretly. Today the hotel does have a special exhibition, a permanent exhibition, on the ground floor towards the back, really worth seeing, on the Special Operations Executive. So on the whole secret war, secret warfare with some unique museum pieces, a couple of sort of room-size things with a screen that you can just look and enjoy those artefacts, that whole kind of gadgets of the espionage worlds that are really worth seeing.
But also very atmospheric. If you sit there and have afternoon tea and just soak up the atmosphere, and it kind of feels a bit like it’s got a spy history. Next slide, please. But I’m going to go back a little bit earlier to the end of the First World War. And I’ve picked out some stories today that you might not have heard of. And, as I said at the beginning, I could have picked any number of buildings. Lord Northcliffe, so a little bit about him. Propaganda, which we associate with the Second World War, and, of course, in contemporary times, there’s a lot going on across social media and across the worldwide web in propaganda. We think at the moment of the Israeli-Hamas War and who, question mark, is winning the propaganda war. So propaganda in wartime is not new, but people don’t really think of it in the First World War, but we absolutely were still fooling our enemies. We had the posters. American poster there on the left, actually. Americans came into the war in 1917. “Help Uncle Sam stamp out the Kaiser! Buy U.S. Government Bonds.” So it was believed that investing in America would make America strong, strong to defeat the Kaiser.
Of course, the Kaiser doesn’t survive the First World War. And then there’s in the middle there kind of snapshot of the kind of propaganda things that the British were up to during the First World War. But Lord Northcliffe was actually made chief of the section, the whole of the propaganda in the First World War, directed against primarily Germany. Next slide, please. But he’s an interesting case because he was based in this house, Crewe House, and this is located in 28 Charles Street. Last time I checked, it was the Saudi Arabian Embassy. I need to double check that that hasn’t changed. But Northcliffe was actually in charge of this new propaganda section in the First World War that worked secretly out of Crewe House. Next slide, please. But he is interesting, because he had a number of interesting personnel working for him, and it was only when some files were released into the National Archives in 2013 that there was a strange secret, as I put there, strange secret was revealed about Crewe House.
So we were beginning to have an understanding of Northcliffe and his propaganda working out of Crewe House, but we then discovered, historians discovered, that Alan Alexander Milne, famously A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, and love it, lived not so far away at 13 Mallord Street and worked in intelligence and propaganda for Northcliffe. And he actually served in both world wars. So fascinating character. You know, we love what he’s created. Did you know that in both world wars, he worked in intelligence, and in particular, in propaganda? He was, of course, the assistant editor of “Punch.” And “Punch” made the decision, the editors made the decision to speak out in support of war, and that whole debate in the First World War between those who were conscientious objectors, which were very brave in those days. As we know, they could face imprisonments or worse. And so “Punch” decided to support the war, interestingly. Next slide, please. But what about Lord Northcliffe?
He’s a very mysterious figure, because at the end of the war, I don’t know if you know this, but he actually started to complain of stomach pains. He had difficulty sleeping. He’s suffering from insomnia, and then suddenly he gets this acute episode of paranoia, and he was quote unquote incarcerated for his own safety. Sounds terrible doesn’t it? In a specially-built wooden shed on the rooftop of 2 Carlton Gardens. Next slide, please. And this newspaper magnate believed he could trace his health problems, nothing changes, does it? Back to a shadowy encounter with a group of Germans on the Dutch border, and it was then that he’d eaten some ice cream, which he believed they had somehow managed to lace with poison. So we think the Polonium-210, the Novichok of the recent years is so iconic of the post-Cold War poisonings, and we’ll come on some early poisoning shortly. But no, this kind of goes way back. And he actually died in 1922. He never really recovered. But for his own safety and safety of others, he was incarcerated in this sort of little wooden shed. Next slide, please.
So the official cause of death, interesting, streptococcus infection. My understanding is it’s a bacterial infection in the bloodstream. It can affect the brain. Of course a strand of streptococcus can cause things like meningitis. It’s not known actually. Perhaps he actually suffered from a form of meningitis from which he recovered. But we don’t have any evidence to support that either way. But this for him actually manifests itself in kidney and heart malfunction. And sometimes it’s described as quote, “general paralysis of the insane.” So of its time. Next slide, please. But just over, fascinating, 30 years later 2 Carlton Gardens had another secret. It hosted a top-secret meeting between senior MI6 and CIA officials. This was where they discussed a number of Cold War operations, and one of them was called Operation Gold. There was a parallel called Operation Silver. Operation Gold was the digging of this tunnel to tap into Russian communications right under East Berlin. And they did the same, Operation Silver, in Vienna. So this is after the Second World War into the early Cold War.
And of course in the 1950s Operation Gold was compromised by George Blake. Next slide, please. So the aim of this whole operation, and there are a few photographs released now like this one here, it was so top secret obviously for so long. But it would be to, as I put there, first to intercept vital communications and penetrate the heart of Soviet intelligence. This was the infamous Berlin Tunnel. And they would have a group of operators listening in, tapping into primarily the telephone wires in the buildings above. Next slide, please. So 2 Carlton Gardens, just there off The Mall. Beautiful building. It was a government building that was frequently used by British intelligence and other military intelligence and officials. Next slide, please. And that whole Cold War period, we don’t know actually if, beyond the Berlin Operation Gold and Operation Silver, whether 2 Carlton Gardens was actually used for any other secret purpose. It may be that it was just sort of temporarily used as such. But if we think about those poisonings of Northcliffe. Of course, London has seen its fair share of poisonings.
If we look at that Cold War period, one of Khrushchev’s puppets, if you like, was the ruler of Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov. And he actually emerged as the ruler in Bulgaria during the Cold War. Next slide, please. And particularly into the 70s. And he obviously has quite a lot of concern about this chap. I’ve done a whole lecture actually on Markov. This is Georgi Markov he’s a journalist, playwright, novelist. He’s one of the top novelists in Bulgaria in his day. Born in 1929 and son himself of an army officer. And he suffered various periods of imprisonment for his political beliefs. A lot of you probably know quite a bit about him, you’ve probably read a lot about him. He actually survives TB and meningitis. He was working as a chemical engineer, but from the 1960s he starts to change direction in his career and he becomes a novelist. He has to leave for his own safety as a critique of the Bulgarian government, but also of course the Soviets that are really controlling the country behind.
So he’s a critic of both the Soviet and the Bulgarian government. So he actually arrives in England in 1971 and he joins, next slide, please, the BBC’s Bulgarian service. So he starts to broadcast all kinds of material and it’s vocally critical of the Bulgarian government. And Zhivkov is absolutely furious and he wants to silence Markov. And this is the famous umbrella poisoning. And it took a few years to catch up with him. But January, 1978, Markov received death threats, messages that he was to stop broadcasting for the BBC or he would actually be killed. And in May, 1978, a friend visited him to warn him that the Bulgarian Politburo, the sort of intelligence, the kind of heavies, had already hatched a plan to kill him with a rare poison. But of course his so-called friend doesn’t divulge any information about the plan. And it’s not certain whether that friend knew more than there was a plan to kill Markov with this rare poison. And Markov believed it would be administered orally, which, of course, is what happened in the case of the Polonium 210 with Litvinenko, and almost certainly with the Novichok door handle, possibly touching mouth, through the skin. So he actually thought traditionally that poisons would be administered orally.
But this was on a totally new level. Next slide, please. Because even he could not have anticipated what had happened. And so it’s actually, the timing is important. This is Waterloo Bridge. He passes a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge and it’s actually two days before the anniversary of Bulgaria and the Communist Bulgaria and Zhivkov’s birthday. So very firmly under control of the Soviets and a communist country. And he kind of doesn’t really feel anyone brushing past him, but he experiences this sudden pain in his right thigh. This, like, sort of prick. And, you know, you kind of have a double take. And then he then turns, 'cause he does survive for a few days to kind of try and piece together what happens. Saw a man man bending down, picking up an umbrella, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” in a foreign accent and hurries on. Next slide, please. And we know what transpires is that that was the way that the poison was administered. Markov was shot with this minuscule pellet of rare deadly poison.
And what Scotland Yard had to, Special Branch, New Scotland Yard as it is today, had to work out what was the poison? And the pathologist at the time said in his report, the clever thing about ricin, and ricin was what was used, and it can be found naturally in plants, actually, is what it mimics symptoms and appears in hospital investigations as a natural disease. So it’s pretty deadly in that sense because you’re testing for all kinds of other things, and it’s actually masking what’s really actually killed him. So the inquest concluded that he was unlawfully killed with a deadly rare poison, ricin. Next slide, please. And we’ve got a picture of that umbrella. Yeah, so how this whole thing was, I mean, who would’ve ever believed that in this umbrella was this whole kind of mechanism that could release that poison pellet in a tiny, tiny prick in the leg of Markov. No one was ever caught for the murder, and even today, no one has ever been caught for his murder.
But he himself knew in those four remaining days while he fought for his life that he’d been killed by the Bulgarian secret police or the KGB. So yeah, perhaps we’ll never really know, but the bridges of London have their own sort of spy history. Next slide, please. But it is not just above ground that we have some interesting spy sites or secret sites of London. What about the tunnels? And I’m not talking really just about the Underground itself, but we know that Churchill had his whole underground command centre and the Churchill War Rooms. Those are now open to the public, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Unknown to most of us, most visitors to London, Churchill and his senior intelligence figures used a whole labyrinth of tunnels under both Whitehall and Downing Street. Next slide, please. Yeah, here we go. This is an image of one of those secret tunnels with cables and all kinds of things, but a path enough to be able to sort of walk through so that all kinds of connections to buildings, particularly for the Second World War, and to protect Churchill.
Churchill wanted to stay in London as far as he could. And we looked last week at one of the other sites, the Dollis Hill bunker in North London. He hated that. He hated that bunker and only used it once, as I said last week, in 1940. But he felt much more comfortable and happier, actually, in London underground. Next slide, please. So this tunnel system was used to access important buildings so that he and military intelligence officers or anyone, commanders that needed to meet with him, could actually meet without putting their head above the parapet and going actually into the streets of London. And this was at a time of the heavy Blitz of London, of course, that came first. And then we have the threats from the V-1 flying bombs and then of course the V-2 rockets. So this gave a level of security and took the risk out of the management of government and, in particular, of Churchill’s work, but it also had a railway postal system. Next slide, please. I’m not sure if any of you have been to visit this, but it is now open. I haven’t actually been yet, but it is open as an underground museum. And if I’m not mistaken, I think you get to ride on one of these little trains.
But this whole postal network through these tunnels would deliver all kinds of post and documents, top-secret documents, I understand, as well, to all kinds of places, all underground, would stop off, drop them off. This whole network of communication that’s not what we traditionally think of with cables and the likes of the whole communications and signals intelligence. But this is actual physical post being moved around. And that did not come out until fairly recently. It’s within the last decade or so. And now, as I said, this has actually been renovated and you can visit. Next slide, please. But fascinating. I find it fascinating. But Churchill also use this whole maze under the streets of London to reach one of his most famous and favourite locations, The Duck and Goose, his favourite city pub. I’ve never been actually in The Duck and Goose. So I think that might be one of my trips when I’m in that area. Next slide, please.
But love it. Absolutely love this. But there was of course a sub-sub-link, a sub basement that linked to the pub and was part of the secret passage that went to the embankment to none other than 2 Whitehall Court. And we know that the view from the embankment side there, that was the location of MI6’s early headquarters, the Secret Intelligence Service. We looked at that last week. And it’s also, there was a period when MI5 used an entire upper floor. This beautiful building that was a hotel, but also had a number of apartments, had one or two floors that were used for secret purposes. But it had this link to this whole network underground that Churchill could use as well. Next slide, please. And then there are the Kingsway tunnels. My understanding is, I’ve not been in these, I’m not sure if they’ve ever been open to the public on one of those public days. There are obviously, of course, lots of health and safety issues now with these disused underground tunnels. But the Kingsway tunnels. Next slide, please. You can see I’ve got the photograph of the door. Yeah, the disused door.
I mean, you could just walk past it and not realise that this is one of the entrances to these whole tunnels that we used for important work. And they were bombproof, very, very importantly, in the Second World War. Next slide, please. Yeah, so the first knowledge really, and I love this, at first, we didn’t know anything about these bombproof tunnels, is when they come up for sale in 2008. So do contact me if you’re one of those that have actually bought these tunnels. I don’t know what you would do with these tunnels, but situated, they’re 100 foot down under the streets of London. They’re not far from Furnival Street. That was originally built in, this whole complex, 1942 to protect civilians from bombing. And I understand that it is almost certainly linked to the underground tunnels, but I might not be completely ofay on that. But the Kingsway tunnels, again, I’m pretty sure they have been open once or twice for visits. But extraordinary network, originally to protect civilians in that era of London, had a secret use. Next slide, please. And two years after the sale in 2008, MI6 and a number of other agencies quietly established, allegedly, a secret facility here. There’s all sorts of notices about no recording, no photographs.
And it was primarily, we understand from what has been released publicly about the site, to protect sensitive equipment and store documentation. But of course, you know, at the end of the Second World War, this mile-long tunnel was allegedly completely emptied and stripped bare. And so after 2008 there were rumours about, you know, well, was it really empty after the Second World War? Next slide, please. The answer is no, of course. And fascinating that there were some 400 tonnes of highly-sensitive documents belonging to what we now call the National Archives. They were stored in those Kingsway tunnels. Gosh, if I’d only known. We could have got a team of us in there. But 400 tonnes! And, of course, some of these, we don’t know exactly, I’ve not seen a catalogue of which documents were held down there. But this is a view of all those racks of documents that were, because it’s a stable temperature down there. Now a lot of them are stored at the National Archives, but also at an offsite I think in one of the salt mines.
But it was initially the Public Record Office, now known as the National Archives, stored 400 tonnes of some of the most highly sensitive documents, some of which will have been released and probably I may even have worked on in doing my World War II spies and secret history. So when this site was taken over. And it’s a bit hazy in the timeline of when this was used at various points by various people because of its secrecy. So the General Post Office, then known as the GPO also ran Britain’s telecommunications and this was before the establishment of BT, of British Telecom, and papers became the property technically of the GPO. Next slide, please. By 1953, we can ascertain, as far as I’ve been able to tell looking back on what is known about the Kingsway tunnel, number one, it ran the UK’s entire machinery to connect overseas telephone calls. Extraordinary. And that these were controlled by a self-contained telephone exchange system inside the complex. So it didn’t need anybody to control it from outside. Totally self-contained under the streets of London. Next slide, please.
Ah! And among the calls that were routed in and out via Kingsway was allegedly the so-called hotline which connected the Kremlin to communications teams in the White House in the 1960s. So this becomes a really important site at the heart of the Cold War. We think about the Bay of Pigs in 1962, that attempted invasion of Cuba. We think of the tensions of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so all of that, when we see the films now, the iconic films that have been produced, particularly around the Cuban Missile Crisis and, you know, they talk about hotline to the Kremlin or hotline to the White House. Well, it was run from under, all those calls went through the underground streets, in these tunnels under the streets of London. I mean those are the kind of details I find utterly fascinating about these buildings. Next slide, please. Yeah, there’s a rare image that’s been released of this whole underground network. Not sure I would’ve enjoyed working down there with no daylight for, you know, at least 12-hour shifts. Next slide, please.
So when this site was sold in 2008, and, again, a couple more rare images have been released, it was then owned by the British Telecom Group. So part of the GPO’s communications were sold or became under the auspices of the company we now know, BT, which was a national company, but now, of course, has been privatised. Next slide, please. And a BT spokeswoman said at the time, “We’re looking for a purchaser with the imagination and stature to return the tunnels to productive use. The site, quite rightly, has a fantastic history. And now that we have no requirement for it for telecommunications use, it is right that we should offer it to the market. Here’s hoping it has a fantastic future as well.” Next slide, please. And according to one article in “Telegraph” newspaper in January, 2009, BT hoped that they would get 5 million pound for these tunnels. And they had all kinds of interests, including, because of the stable temperature down there, including from art galleries, museums, even hotel companies, people that would want to store data down there, their records, their archives. Next slide, please.
But we don’t know today whether there are any archives being stored there. If we go sort of the other side of London to Kensington. And I have spoken a bit about this before, this building. Well, it was one of a series of houses in Kensington Palace Gardens, that gated street. You can still walk down and it’s sort of, sometimes it’s quite empty but you always feel you’re being watched or someone’s following you. It’s got a kind of spy feel. And that’s probably just my imagination. But this is 7 and 8A Kensington Palace Gardens. So number 6, 7, 8, and 8A were used, those four beautiful mansion buildings were used as the London Cage. Next slide, please. This was a secret interrogation centre during the Second World War. And this is a photograph taken in November, 1938 of the gates to Kensington Palace Gardens. And they look pretty much like this today. Obviously without the snow, but those gates, they haven’t changed. In the middle there just to the left, you’ve now got a small guard room and it’s guarded by a number of people. I do remember asking the directions to somebody one day and smelled rather a lot of liquor on the guard’s breath, actually.
So yeah, a very interesting sight, I think, even today. And, of course, at one point, with the Israeli Embassy right down there. And just on the left-hand side of the photograph, you can see that notice, it says no cyclists. You can just read that. Behind that in the shadow is the sort of building, that’s Number 8 and 8A Kensington Palace Gardens, you have Number 7. It’s just out of sight. Number 7 today is the Russian Embassy, of course. The Russian Embassy today has a history of being a secret World War II interrogation centre during that war. And its work that I’ve written about in my book, the London Cage. It’s getting renewed attention, actually, after a few years. And why it’s so important is because there’s a lot of controversy. Next slide, please. I never found any evidence of torture or anything like that, a bit of psychological stuff, but it was run by this man at the top of the screen, Colonel Alexander Scotland. And prisoners of war, like these coming off one of the commando raids, they’ve captured German prisoners. If their will to resist, as it says in the files, couldn’t be broken down by the soft technique, they could face more long-term, harsh interrogation up to eight hours.
As I say, no evidence of physical brutality. But we did gain intelligence from prisoners. It opened in September, October, 1940 and ran to the end of the war. Next slide, please. And at the end of the war, and perhaps I’ll do a lecture on this, it’s really, really important. At the end of the war, it becomes a war crimes investigation centre until 1948. And some of the worst Nazi war criminals, including the commander on the right here, Fritz Knochlein, passed through there. And the teams of interrogators actually interrogated hundreds of SS in those three years or so after the war. They interrogated camp commandants from concentration camps, really, really significant. They passed stuff to Nuremberg. They’re primarily investigating those war crimes that Nuremberg teams themselves didn’t have time for. Next slide, please. So this is the front of the building of Number 7, which is now today the Russian Embassy. So they use a series of buildings alongside each other. At one point you have 100 SS in these rooms, dotted all through these buildings. And very, very challenging work. And some of them were brought to justice.
But there’s quite a lot of controversy at the moment. You’ve probably seen in the media that, around the Channel Islands and Alderney in particular, the war crimes there and a lot of research being done behind the scenes. And Lord Pickles’ actually heading a commission to find out, establish the truth of what happened on Alderney. But the London Cage, as it was known, was actually responsible for investigating war crimes on the Channel Islands. But of course the war crimes were not against British subjects. They were against Russian forced labourers, some Jews, around 250 French Jews, but primarily thousands of Russians and other European nationalities. So a fascinating site. These buildings in London still have history to reveal. And as I said, our historians, and I think I’ll go back in the archives myself and have a look, because I didn’t get chance to look at the Channel Islands. It’s just such a mass of material that these four houses in Millionaires Row, as it was dubbed back then. In the 1940s, everyone knew this was Millionaires Row.
Today, Billionaires Row. Had a really significant role in bringing to justice some of the Nazi war criminals that could not be brought to Justice via Nuremberg. Really important legacy. But how many people know, you know, when you walk past those buildings that it has this whole backstory and still with so much history to discover. Next slide, please. And if we’re talking about interrogation, there’s a secret MI5 interrogation centre. And this is located at Ham near Richmond. It’s Latchmere house. Today it’s been turned into luxury apartments. But this house was, during the Second World War, one of, actually it’s the only MI5 interrogation centre I’ve learned about in the Second World War with a very specific purpose. And it was also known as Camp 020, and it had two main functions. It actually held some of the British Union of Fascists. So when they were interned under Regulation 18B, after Hitler had swept through most of Western Europe, May, June, 1940. So some of Oswald Mosley’s followers were interned here for a while. But primarily it’s remembered because this was where captured German spies throughout the war would find themselves.
This is where, next slide, please, we turned them to become double agents to work for us. And this is an intelligence officer and the commander of Camp 020, otherwise known as Latchmere House, Robin “Tin Eye” because of his monocle he was called Tin Eye, Stephens. Next slide, please. And he was pretty tough kind of persona to those prisoners. And, of course, if those captured German spies didn’t agree to work as double agents, they were actually executed. But a number of them did actually work for us as double agents. Famously you’ve got Eddie Chapman there, of course he’s not originally German, but he is one of those that was turned to work in this whole Double-Cross System during the war. You have Fido, Biscuit, Treasure, she was Natalie Sergueiew, Zig Zag, Eddie Chapman there, Dragonfly, Snow. A number of books have been written, particularly about Arthur Owens, Snow. You can read about them. And Garbo, we’ll come to Garbo shortly. But there were also, as I’ve discovered in my new book, “Women in Intelligence,” a whole raft of women who were also double agents, not only Natalie who was codenamed Treasure. Next slide, please.
So the Double-Cross System run by this man, Major John Cecil Masterman. And the aim was to control the German espionage system. So to actually penetrate the Abwehr, the German military secret service, to catch any spies that landed in Britain. And, of course, a lot of those were picked up via messages that were decoded from Bletchley Park, and if they’re being infiltrated into Britain. And also importantly, and it’s often forgotten, that they were to obtain information on enemy codes. So not just to catch those spies, to turn them to work for us with the Germans still believing they were really working for them. Of course, they weren’t. To catch those that had infiltrated, but also we were really keen to, a high priority was to capture their codes. And some of the codes that they carried with them. I’ve actually seen in the National Archives, one of these double agents came with his little round circular codes that you could actually decode. Some of his stuff, his little torch. That was Agent Tate. Next slide, please.
Fascinating. So it’s not just archives that survive in our National Archives, not just files, but sometimes artefacts as well. And there was the deception ahead of D-Day. Sorry, 35 Crespigny Road in Hendon. This was the home of Agent Garbo, or at least the safe house he was working from. And he famously deceived the enemy, deceived Germany, that Britain’s D-Day operations were going to be around Calais, rather than the Normandy coast. And it was also where he was sending out messages ahead of Operation Mincemeat the year before that floated a dead body off the coast of Spain. And you know, we think of these wonderful operations but when we trace it back to this ordinary suburban house where he operated from, fascinating! So how many of these houses, you sort of walk past the buildings that have a really interesting connection to espionage and intelligence? Next slide, please. So here he is, Garbo that lived in Hendon. His wartime home. His original name, Juan Pujol. And he, of course, always wanted to work for the British as an agent. No one would have him. They wouldn’t have him. So he set up. He worked initially for the Germans and set up this whole fictitious network of agents. And he was getting very close to British intelligence operations.
So they had to pull him in, and they pulled him in and said, okay. So they took him on. And this is a very brief resume. And he became one of the leading members of MI5’s double agents. So MI5 and MI6 both ran operatives, some of them out of the UK, some of them were based in Lisbon, some of the women were based out of Lisbon, actually, the female double agents. They are feeding misleading information to the Germans who really believe that the intelligence they’re receiving, it’s not only stuff ahead of D-Day, but the intelligence they’re receiving is accurate. And we had a number of ways of fooling them into believing that this was actually accurate. Next slide, please. So just as a summary, at 3:00 AM on the morning of D-Day, 6th June, 1944. And, of course, we’re coming up to the 80th anniversary of D-Day this year. Agent Garbo sent a crucial message from that address in Hendon, firstly telling his controllers the time and place of the Normandy landings. Extraordinary. But it was just too late for the commanders, the German commanders, to act.
And also I’ve read elsewhere in intelligence reports that, and the German generals talking about it to hidden microphones at other secret sites like Trent Park in North London, that they were not, Hitler was absolutely adamant he was not to be disturbed by commanders before 10:00 AM. Absolutely crazy. And so when the whole invasion force was coming, you know, those commanders, those generals in Normandy were too afraid to send the messages to Berlin for fear of disturbing Hitler. So anyway, what we knew that would give real intelligence from our Agent Garbo, so he would be believed but we gave it too late for them to actually act on. Not that the Germans realised it was too late. But this information preserved his reputation, continued to fool the Germans, but it also meant that the Germans believed all the other double agents as well. It’s just so clever. Next slide, please.
But Northwest London has another really interesting history. And you’re thinking, this isn’t in Northwest London? No, this is Wormwood Scrubs, but we’re going to jump shortly to Northwest London because Wormwood Scrubs, in the prison, in some of those cells, saw the beginnings of the radio security service, MI8, Military Intelligence 8. And we’ve heard of MI5, MI6, some of you will have heard of MI9 because I’ve written about MI9, the whole escape and evasion and all the networks, the gadgets, secret lines across Europe. But MI8 was under the auspices, Bletchley Park fell under the auspices of the Radio Security Service. But also there are a number of voluntary interceptors of radio hams working through the country, intercepting material that would go eventually to Bletchley Park. There were the Y-stations. Some of you may have, particularly female relatives in your family who worked in the Y-stations, often in uniform, obviously highly top-secret work. Next slide, please. But the headquarters moved very soon from Wormwood Scrubs with these voluntary interceptors, around 1,500 of them.
Although some estimates now place it at 1,700. The fact is, all the files haven’t been released and all the names haven’t been released. But of those, there were just six women working as voluntary interceptors. They were amateur radio hams, all of the members of the Radio Security Services of Great Britain. And they, obviously the link with the intercept stations all over the country, the Y-stations. But they moved their headquarters. Next slide, please. To Arkley. I love this. This house apparently is no longer there. I haven’t looked for it. So the headquarters of MI8, so the equivalent of the headquarters of MI5 or MI6, actually, in the Second World war for MI8 was at this house called Arkley View. And it’s a little region of Arkley in the Borough of Barnet, not far from Mill Hill, for those of you who are in London and know London area. And who would’ve known that all their messages. Next slide, please. Including this. Oh, I’ve put in an extra photograph there. Yeah, this is some of the equipment. I believe this was taken inside Arkley View. There aren’t many photographs of equipment that survive, in actual fact. Next slide, please.
Yeah, this is one of the messages that’s coming up that I scanned from my research for one of only six female voluntary interceptors. You can read more about her in my book, “Women in Intelligence.” It was a very male world, of course, that whole world of tech and radio hams. But she was expert, and her call sign was G3GH. She worked out of a little cottage in North Devon in Knole, a little village in North Devon. And this is an example of one of her sort of calls, if you like, but this is not a wartime message. So the wartime intercepts look very similar to the ones that we see in Bletchley Park files. So what they were intercepting, they were listening to surface shipping, they’re listening to telecommunications for U-boats, listening for anything in quite a range. In fact, some of them managed to listen into communications, depending on what frequency, as far as America from the UK. I mean, that’s quite extraordinary in terms of, when we think that the signals in communications were nothing like as developed as they are today. And they provided intelligence, which actually, as I say, fed into Bletchley Park.
And Catherine Myler, Catherine Mill Myler, Mysterious Mrs. Myler as I always knew her as, was the only woman to receive the British Empire Medal for her work. And she would send her envelopes with the intelligence, they were double marked, through the post office to box 25. Now it’s not certain, I never interviewed her. She died way, way, way back, when I was just quite young. So I never met her. She and the other voluntary interceptors would put their message inside an envelope and inside another envelope, double envelope, just box 25, and that’s it. Box 25. Might even have had to add London. But box 25. Nobody knew that this was Arkley View in the Borough of Barnet. So extraordinary. They made a really important contribution in what they picked up that fed into Bletchley Park that was not able to be picked up or decoded directly. Sorry, they had to send the messages to Bletchley Park for decoding. So they were an integral part of that whole codes and cypher sort of system and success. Next slide, please.
My last building, also in North London, fascinated by this sort of Art Deco Isokon building, as it’s known. Many of you who are in Northwest London will probably have walked past this building, will know of it. I absolutely love it. It’s a whole series of flats. I’ve never been inside, although I think occasionally you can. I think occasionally there are opportunities. But of course, they are private residences primarily. But there was a sort of bar restaurant in the basement, all kinds of interesting social mix in the 1930s. It’s the sort of Bauhaus movement, excuse me, of architecture. Next slide, please. There’s a blue plaque on there today. It’s become very, very famous, known as the Isokon building, as I said. So it’s the first, as I’ve put there, modernist building in Britain to use reinforced concrete in domestic architecture. Fascinating. Opened formally in July, 1934 at an interesting period. July, 1934. 1934, you know what I’m going to say. There’s a link to spies and espionage. Of course there is.
In 1934, April ‘34, that’s when Kim Philby returns from Vienna with his new wife, Litzi Friedmann. And I’ll loop back on that in a moment. So this has 32 flats and it’s had some of the most famous residents. I mean, really fascinating. There’s a book out on this now called “Lawn Road Flats.” It’s in Lawn Road in Hampstead, this Isokon building. The book is just called “Lawn Road Flats.” Apologies, I don’t remember the author, but it’s a wonderful book. I really recommend it. Next slide, please. So what about these famous… Yeah, so those Bauhaus exiles. It was a meeting point, living there, of continental refugees, Jewish refugees, but also of Communists, some of whom were Jewish, some who weren’t. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. I dunno if many of you know him. Marcel Breuer. Really, really fascinating. I mean, this is just tip of the iceberg. And Childe, the poet, who went on to become an intelligence officer at Bletchley Park. But I’m also fascinated that Dame Agatha Christie was there, excuse me, was there in the wartime. And I kind of often wonder, you know, why she was there. Do you think she was keeping an eye on some of those Communists during the Second World War? I mean, who knows? I’m not saying she was a spy. But yeah, fascinating. She wrote some of her most famous works there. Utterly, utterly fascinating. Next slide, please.
And of course, it does have, my last slide for today, it does have, of course, a link to those elusive, they are elusive, aren’t they? Cambridge Spies. We think we know a lot about them. There’s an awful lot been written. Volumes and shelves written about those Cambridge Spies. But there are links to them in Hampstead to the Isokon building. And one of the people that lived there was Arnold Deutsch, otherwise known as Otto. He was the one who recruited Kim Philby. Kim Philby, as I said, came back in April, 1934. And it was this woman, Edith Tudor-Hart, friend of Philby’s first wife, who kind of, with his first wife, really kind of pushed him towards Communism. No, no, well, he was already a C communist, but pushed him towards Soviet intelligence by introducing him or asking him to meet a man on a bench in Regent’s Park. And this was Otto. So these are the two women ultimately behind Kim Philby’s recruitment as a Soviet penetration agent. And we all know the devastation that the Cambridge Spies went on to wreak. But Edith Tudor-Hart herself…
Oh, I’ll just go back and say one final thing about Arnold Deutsch. I’ve said that his KV files have never been released. The KV files, KV is the preface that’s used for MI5 files. So we get terribly excited if you do a search and it comes up KV, so they’re MI5 files. WO would be War Office. FO is Foreign Office. KV, as I said, is MI5. MI6 doesn’t release its files. So we don’t have those. So there is just one file actually that’s been released on Arnold Deutsche. Viennese, so he’s Austrian to start, by origin. He lives here for a short time. And MI5 were following him, but we don’t know the full story of what exactly they did because just one file was released just two or three years ago. And Edith Tudor-Hart, close friend of Philby’s first wife, Communist, spy, I think almost certainly, and her MI5 files have now been released. And Charlotte Philby, granddaughter of Kim Philby, has actually written “Edith and Kim,” a sort of fictional account of this friendship between Edith Tudor-Hart and her grandfather, Kim Philby. And she does confront that sort of difficult family history, which obviously she’s inherited.
She’s not responsible for her forefathers, but very interesting, worth reading. And she actually draws on those declassified files. But both Deutsche and Edith Tudor-Hart both spent a short time, or a number of months or years, in the Isokon building. So I hope you’ve enjoyed today. It’s a bit more fun. Next time you walk past a building, maybe you will think, does it have a secret history? Well, not even a secret history necessarily. There are so many of the buildings, and not only in London, that we walk past that have just an interesting history. And that, for me, I think brings history alive. I think it’s important to have a sense of place, to visit these places. Whether it’s a stately home you enjoy and you enjoy what’s happened there. Or whether it’s wartime sites, whether it’s sites of an old theatre, whatever it is, whether it’s Roman sites, Tudor period, whatever it is, I think that that fuels our passion for history. And I think there’s nothing quite like visiting the place where something happened. And so maybe now then, as a result of part one and part two of Secret Spy Sites of London, you might actually want to visit those that you can visit or walk past them. And maybe you’ll see something new and enjoy your trip.
So yeah, enjoy. And I look forward to seeing you again.