III. Our Man in Germany
This is part of Agent of Influence, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
It was in Germany that Terry began to make a name for himself as a correspondent. For the Sunday Times, he was now increasingly called on to write the ‘big picture’ reports on political developments, treaties, industry and the like, while elsewhere he tended to file more sensational material, sprinkled with ‘tabloiditis’ as he referred to the style years later.
These stories often implicated the Soviets in the clandestine backing of a resurgent Nazi movement—Terry had left the War Crimes Investigation Unit, but he would continue to investigate war criminals by himself for the next half-century.
Several of Terry’s articles from this period concerned Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, who had vanished in Berlin in the final chaos-strewn days before the German surrender. Bormann’s skeleton was eventually discovered in 1972, and as a result we now know from forensic evidence and dental records that he died shortly after he escaped from the bunker, probably as the result of biting down on a cyanide capsule. But in the decades before his body was found, journalists were free to speculate that he might be alive and up to all kinds of activities.
Terry was an avid purveyor of such theories, producing a stream of lurid stories about Bormann. In February 1952, he wrote that Bormann was not only still alive but was now working as an agent for the Soviets. Citing West German intelligence as his source, Terry claimed that since the end of the war Bormann had visited China, India, Turkey, South Africa and elsewhere, disguised as a businessman and leaving ‘a trail of murder and rioting wherever he goes’.
In October the same year, he provided further details in a follow-up article:
‘Martin Borman, under his new name, “Borner,” is in charge of “Operation Borner”—a forcing school designed to turn out a regular supply of thousands of trained Red spies.
Acting under Stalin’s personal orders, Bormann has now “trained” no fewer than 1,200 Russian agents, who are now at work inside Russia, in Poland, in Eastern Germany, and Africa.’
Once again, he cited anonymous intelligence sources to support his claims, although we now know that these must have been nonsense. In today’s parlance, Terry was peddling ‘fake news’. He might have suspected as much himself, but as intelligence agencies are compartmentalized and rarely comment on press reports, he could have been fairly confident that none of his claims would be publicly contradicted.
These articles are also, by today’s standards, almost laughably crude propaganda: the uncritical parroting of unnamed intelligence sources claiming to expose a succession of sensational and sometimes absurd conspiracies without documentary evidence, and with the Soviets repeatedly portrayed as a vehicle for a resurrection of the Nazi Reich.
Faked identities and hidden Nazi pasts were a recurring theme in Terry’s articles. Bormann did not become ‘Borner’, but many escaping Nazis did change their identities. Also in Terry’s sights were the likes of Otto Remer, ‘the new Nazi Fuhrer of Germany’, and Fritz Roessler, alias Franz Richter, a former Nazi leader with Soviet support who had apparently fooled the German and Allied authorities by ‘remarrying’ his own wife under a different name after the war.
It’s not clear if these articles were the result of Terry operating on his own initiative as a kind of private extension of his war crimes investigations work, or whether M.I.6 had steered him towards this topic. It might have been both. As well as his own imprisonment by the Nazis and interrogations of war criminals, Terry may have been motivated by a sense that the British government had not pursued these men as persistently as they should have done after the war, and in some cases had turned a blind eye to them. In a 1988 Sunday Times investigation into Wilhelm Mohnke, a former S.S major-general accused of ordering the murder of 80 unarmed British P.O.W.s in 1940, Terry commented:
‘There’s always been a reluctance on the part of Whitehall to pursue these people. I don’t know what the reasons were, but I discovered later there were political reasons why they didn’t want to pursue Nazis at that time. We certainly did our best to collect the material, but we were hamstrung in London.’
Whatever Terry’s motivation, thanks to files declassified in 2009 we know that his articles on Bormann met a chilly reception from some in British intelligence. After his February 1952 article was syndicated in several countries, the South African police sent the version published there to British military intelligence headquarters in Germany, asking if there were any truth to it. The article was also shared with M.I.6, whose reaction we don’t know, and M.I.5—who were distinctly unimpressed. A letter signed on behalf of Sir Percy Sillitoe, the head of the agency, singled Terry out for stinging criticism:
‘A British Press correspondent in Germany, named Antony TERRY, published last January a series of articles in the English Sunday newspaper “Empire News”, alleging that there was a widespread underground neo-Nazi movement active in Germany. The articles were exaggerated, sensational and distorted. Although links between neo-Nazi individuals or small groups and Communist agencies undoubtedly exist, there is no evidence of any large underground organisation. TERRY’s main source of information was Baron Gero von GALERA, who was born 17th May 1926, and is known to the authorities as a common swindler, who styles himself as a freelance journalist. He was at one time employed by the Amt fuer Verfassungsschutz in Berlin, but was dismissed for openly stating that he was so employed. His reports were described by the Head of that office as “packed with lies” and “fabricated”.’
Five months after this letter, American intelligence officials in Berlin arrested Gero Von Galera on suspicion of spying for the Russians.
It looks as if Terry had been duped by a dodgy source, of which there were plenty in Germany at the time. He might not have cared one way or the other, as claiming that the old bogeyman Nazi was now working as a ruthless secret agent for the new bogeymen Soviets had valuable propaganda value, and nobody could disprove his assertions. Only those really in the know—like the head of M.I.5—would be aware it was untrue, and even then doubts would always remain. Such might be the calculations of a busy reporter, and it would be naive to think Terry was above this considering his reliance on anonymous and unnamed sources in the intelligence world, and his hidden allegiance to M.I.6.
In the 1940s and ’50s, Terry openly admitted in several of his articles that the information in them originated from Allied officials, but they were not his only source in the intelligence world. In 1948, the British government set up the Information Research Department, a partially clandestine branch of the Foreign Office that produced a wealth of anti-Communist material and distributed it to selected journalists. Terry would likely also have been on their distribution list.
He would also have had local sources. Some, like Gero von Galera, might also have tried to feed him distortions or even outright fabrications. Another possible source along these lines is Werner Stephan, a former Gestapo officer given a four-year prison sentence in 1957 for selling thousands of pages of ‘secrets’ over a decade, all of which he had concocted at home using two typewriters. Terry’s report on the sentencing strikes a curiously bitter note as he celebrates the imprisonment of the ‘amateur spy’ and ‘dilettante’ who has now left the trade in intelligence in Berlin to the professionals. One might almost think he had been stung by the man himself.
But sometimes Terry was the one distorting information. For many years one of his most important sources was Tony Divall, an M.I.6 agent with his hands in all kinds of bizarre intrigues who fed Terry intelligence for decades. Divall had been in the Royal Marines in the Second World War and then joined T-Force, hunting down suspected war criminals in Germany. Terry might have first met him there. Recruited into M.I.6 in Germany, Divall had ‘developed a talent for running agents’ and had been placed in charge of an operation codenamed JUNK. This involved ‘an underground railway that ran agents and consignments of Swiss gold watches into the satellite states in exchange for defectors and illegal roubles’. According to an article on the ‘Goldfinger’-style operation by Terry in 1968, the double agent George Blake took over the running of JUNK in 1955 and blew it to his Soviet handlers.
Divall was also at various times an arms dealer in Hamburg and mixed up with mercenaries in Biafra and elsewhere, all the while working for M.I.6, until his relationship with ‘The Firm’ turned sour and he threatened to blow the whistle on their joint activities by way of a Spycatcher-style book. This never materialized.
Terry and Divall were close friends for decades, and what survives of their correspondence reads like a running commentary on the Cold War from two old hands. However, some of the material also shows that Terry distorted information Divall gave him.
In the winter of 1991, the publishing magnate Robert Maxwell was found dead in the sea after disappearing from his yacht. Born Ján Hoch in pre-Second World War Czechoslovakia, Maxwell was a controversial figure, and his death made headlines around the world. From New Zealand, Terry called Divall to see if he could provide any inside information Terry could give the Sunday Times. The transcript of the call has Divall claiming Maxwell had been deeply involved in espionage:
‘Can’t see a man of his type and mentality doing himself in. Somebody must have given him a push. He’s been involved with Mossad as a source, in connection with arms deals and in particular with the Bulgarian connection.’
Divall was convinced that Maxwell had been recruited while he was serving with the British Army in Germany, where he had met him in 1948. Hoch/Maxwell had been in charge of distributing quarters and furnishings in the British sector of Berlin, and Divall’s T-Force unit had discovered a house he was responsible for laden with loot. Divall now told Terry he was convinced that Soviet intelligence had backed Maxwell financially from immediately after the war, and that in return Maxwell had worked for them ever since—while also working for Mossad. Some of his musings on this veered into racial prejudice, alleging that as Maxwell wasn’t ‘a pure Czech’ but came from the Karpathenraus, this meant he had been ‘born into intrigue and duplicity’. His work for Mossad was also put down to his religion:
‘With Jewish people it’s all one firm, it’s like the Russians, they’re supposed to do it.’
A day later, Terry wrote to London:
‘Following our conversation I have had some talks to intelligence sources on the Mossad connection. They keep coming back to the Bulgarian operation…’
He then repeated Divall’s claims about that operation, before moving onto a new topic:
‘The other suggestion I have come across in conversation in these circles is that at least during his dates in the British army in Berlin after WWII (when he was in charge of providing accommodation in requisitioned headquarters for the British occupation forces) Maxwell was under suspicion of having NKVD and later KGB connections…’
This, too, was followed by a repetition of Divall’s claims about Maxwell’s activities. The precision of them makes it clear that his only source for both was Divall, but he had cleverly made his single spy seem like an army of them. The Bulgarian information was presented as having come from intelligence sources: plural. He then presented the allegations about wartime Soviet connection as if told at another time as part of ongoing discussion with ‘these circles’. Divall had told Terry he believed Maxwell had been ‘nothing more nor less than a bloody KGB agent’ all his life. Within a day, Terry had transformed Divall’s stream of theories into the detached and authoritative language of a newspaper report. Even if all Divall had said had been true, which seems doubtful, Terry had presented his one source as a conglomeration of sources, making it sound like he had been consulting a veritable den of spooks.
This is a rare glimpse into journalistic malpractice, as it comes from Terry’s own surviving papers, and it raises the obvious question of when else he had massaged information his sources gave him in this way.
However, it is undeniable that he was also capable of the fastidiousness of research so often mentioned in his obituaries. Ironically, this was often most in evidence when he was doing legwork for others. In 1956, Elizabeth Nicholas, a Sunday Times travel correspondent, asked Terry for his help on a book she was writing about seven female S.O.E. agents. Terry tracked down former concentration camp officials and was the first to find evidence that the unknown fourth agent who had been killed at Natzweiler, previously presumed to have been Noor Inayat Khan, was in fact another woman, Sonia Olschanezky.
~
Another theme Terry investigated in the 1950s was the clandestine construction by the Russians of a series of missile bases in Europe. In September 1949, after American spy planes detected radiation on the edge of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Harry Truman declared that the Soviet Union had tested a nuclear weapon for the first time. American and British intelligence had been caught by surprise: they had considered the Soviets several years away from achieving this. Overnight, the Cold War had become several degrees chillier, and rhetoric on both sides hardened as a result.
In the aftermath of Truman’s statement, newspapers in the West were filled with alarming stories of Soviet capabilities. One of the first, by the United Press agency, claimed that ‘Anglo-American intelligence sources’ had confirmed a report from a German expert who had escaped Russia that the Soviets had ‘virtually ringed Western Europe with secret V-2 rocket-launching bases’ aimed at strategic points ‘from the English Channel to the Adriatic’. Some of these bases were said to be in the vicinities of Cologne, the island of Rügen and the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria.
This story was widely picked up by other agencies and newspapers, and was followed by similar claims from others. Antony Terry published several stories about Soviet missile bases in the next few years, with details about the locations, the personnel involved and the technology behind the weapons building on or in some cases contradicting his previous reports. All made for sensational reading.
In October 1952, Terry reported that Western intelligence had been startled by information from ‘reliable sources in the East German government’ that the Soviets were building a huge underground launching site off the tiny island off Walfisch, just 25 miles from the British Zone of Germany, with a larger base at Poel. The project was said to be under the technical leadership of German ‘wartime flying-bomb expert’ Professor Luettgens, who was under the close supervision of the Stasi in the Soviet Zone.
In February 1953, in an article headlined ‘Britain, Red Target’, Terry returned to the theme, claiming that Stalin was building a ‘secret, atom proof island fortress in the Baltic’. The alleged location was again Rügen, where locals had supposedly been evacuated and where thousands of slave labourers were now working in shifts to complete underground fortifications, U-boat pens and ‘missile-launching sites, some of them trained on London, Manchester and other big cities in Britain’. Three Soviet paratrooper divisions were said to have been flown in, and Russian torpedo bombers ‘piloted by women’ were already stationed there. Terry also reported that Marshal Zhukov had recently visited the island, and that the Soviets were working from a Nazi plan for a bomb-proof U-boat base. This connection to German wartime operations was highlighted with the mention of another location:
‘Using German rocket experts sent from Russia, and guarded day and night, the Soviets are hollowing out thousands of acres of cliffs on the island and at Peenemunde, where Hitler had his much-bombed rocket-research station.’
Three months later, Terry returned to the subject:
‘British intelligence in Germany, working on agents’ reports and cross-checked refugee stories, are now convinced that the Russians have a V-weapon arsenal more gigantic and deadly than anything Hitler ever hoped to control.’
Peenemünde is once again mentioned, and then we are informed that the Russians are ‘believed to have massed giant atomic-war like rockets which could destroy Europe in a night’. A couple of paragraphs later, he repeats the assertion that this emanates from intelligence sources:
‘This is what eye witnesses have told of the Soviet scheme—information which has been carefully cross-checked with secret intelligence sources.
The main flying bomb base which the Russians are building is centred around the Baltic port of Rostock.
Six underground rocket firing stations are located in an area of 20 miles square so cleverly concealed that they cannot be detected either from the ground or by aerial photograph.’
Terry claimed that Russia was using 20,000 German engineers and forced labour to put into effect its ‘fantastic plan’.
In January 1954, Terry branched out a little, with an article alleging that German scientists were building weapons in countries outside Europe, biding their time for when the Fatherland could once again become a great military power. He reported that Henrich Focke had spent a year in a secret factory in the Brazilian jungle ‘building a superhelicopter of his own design for the Brazilian Government’, and that several others were working in South America and even in the U.S. However, behind the Iron Curtain ‘German aircraft designers stand by their wind tunnels watching the results of their latest experiments, which the Kremlin hopes will put Russia ahead of the West in aircraft design’.
Like his stories about Martin Bormann, these articles clearly had a propaganda value for the West, as they were alleging secret war-mongering on the Soviets’ part and painting them as a major threat. Declassified but still partially-redacted C.I.A. files show that the United States gathered intelligence on Soviet activities along the Baltic coast from the late 1940s on. The agency collected material in the public domain, such as articles in the foreign press, as well as rumours and tip-offs. Dozens of such reports were collated, some from on-the-spot informants. Many were contradictory: the Soviets were said to be levelling an unusable German wartime installation and abandoning the area, or they were building a naval harbour in its place, or they were constructing a missile launch site, and so on.
This was military decision-making across a wide area over many years, and easily misinterpreted through Chinese whispers. The Soviets did develop their fortifications and bases around the Baltic during the Cold War, just as Western allies strengthened theirs. However, there’s no evidence of any serious intent to launch unprovoked strikes as Terry suggested in his articles, any more than the West had that intention. These bases were instead part of the stand-off between East and West that the Cold War embodied, codified as the ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ model of deterrence once the nuclear arms race was underway. That’s not to say it was an impossibility that the Soviets might have launched an attack on the West, or that it wasn’t worth keeping an eye on, but the posture on both sides was fundamentally defensive.
But once again, the truth of his reports might have been a moot point for Terry. Like his articles on Martin Bormann, the claims were virtually impossible to disprove—even if the Soviets were to bother denying them, they wouldn’t have been believed. In some ways, then, he was doing much the same work as the C.I.A. analysts: reading material published in the German press and other open sources, seeking out sources of his own, and honing the details over several months.
But there are crucial differences. Intelligence agencies build up a picture through multiple reports, which they then analyse in context—in and among the rumours, distortions, Chinese whispers and fabrication, what is the probable truth of the matter? And even then, they can get things catastrophically wrong. But as well as working for M.I.6, Terry was writing for publication to tight deadlines, often filing several articles a week. The time and resources he had for evaluating his information was nowhere near comparable to the C.I.A.’s, and his motives were also different: his articles were not for figuring out the Soviets’ true intentions behind closed doors but were both his means of making a living and a way of attacking the Soviets publicly.
~
Back in London, Ian Fleming appears to have been reading Terry’s articles about hidden missile bases with close interest. Fleming had by now become an author, with his first novel, Casino Royale, being published in March 1953, and his second, Live and Let Die, already written. With James Bond now in the world, Fleming was on the hunt for new ideas. In an essay written several years later, he gave the following advice to those wishing to follow in his footsteps as a thriller-writer:
‘You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.’
Fleming acted on his own advice, and he had several advantages any aspiring thriller-writer would have given their right arm for: he was editing and commissioning articles for a newspaper group, often on topics he found personally interesting, and many of his friends and colleagues were former or serving intelligence officers. They had plenty of thrilling things to tell him that he could build up with his fertile imagination.
From the start of his career as a novelist, Fleming used the Mercury correspondents as his own private research bureau on the side. For Casino Royale, he sought out background information for the gambling scenes from Mercury’s correspondent in France, Stephen Coulter, who had been in the Royal Navy in the war and also had a history in intelligence. (Coulter would also go on to have a successful career as a thriller-writer.)
Of all the Mercury correspondents, Terry was the one he relied on most. Later, this would involve asking him directly for information, but even parts of his first novel evoke the tenor of Terry’s journalism. The villain, Le Chiffre, works for a Soviet intelligence agency, Smersh, not for ideological reasons but because he wants their financial backing. He is a mittel-European of the type that had been seen in the work of Eric Ambler and others, but he is also of a kind familiar from Terry’s reporting: a criminal backed by the Soviets, a displaced person with a mysterious past in Dachau, a survivor of the rubble and chaos of post-war Europe who has created a new life for himself under an assumed identity.
In September 1953, Fleming wrote to Terry in Berlin:
‘Dear Tony,
Many thanks for the V-2 book, and here is one more request. Has a book or a series of articles been published on the ‘Were-Wolves’ who were organised to harass us at the end of the war? Would you please let me have anything that there may be available? Incidentally, did they ever achieve anything? and what happened to them all?’
The Werewolves were the Nazis’ last-ditch guerrilla resistance movement, and Terry had written about an attempt to revive the phenomenon the previous year, writing of a ‘widespread plot to revive Hitler’s werewolf murder gangs’ in the American Zone that had included a list of political targets to be ‘liquidated’.
Terry might have forgotten this as he didn’t mention it in his reply to Fleming, instead noting that he wasn’t aware of any books about the Werewolves but that he recalled there had been rumours about them when he had been on the march out of Spangenberg at the end of the war. Or perhaps he judged it tactful not to respond to his boss by effectively telling him to look up what he had already written on the topic. The seemingly casual reference to his own extraordinary wartime experiences might also have served as a subtle reminder of just how in the know he was if Fleming were looking for an expert on such matters.
The book he had sent to Fleming looks to have been V-2 by Walter Dornberger, which had recently been published in Germany. Dornberger had headed the Nazis’ rocket programme, and Fleming presumably requested the book as a result of discussing Terry’s articles on the Soviets’ V-2 type bases with him.
The novel he was working on when he wrote this letter, Moonraker, would eventually feature a few technical terms from Dornberger’s book to help make his plot ‘ring true in fiction’. The novel’s focus is a base manned by German scientists housing an advanced rocket developed from the Nazis’ wartime V-2s to use against Britain, just as Terry had claimed was happening in reality. While the base in Moonraker is not in the Baltic but on the English coast, there are several other striking similarities: hollowed-out cliffs, references to Peenemünde, a plan for a devastating first strike against the West. In May 1953, Terry had claimed in one of his articles that two German defectors to the West had provided vivid details of the activities at the bases near Rostock and Gellenstrom and a training camp in Kaliningrad:
‘The V-weapon men wear a characteristic blue-green stripe on their shoulder pieces and caps. All have taken an oath of secrecy not to reveal details of their work or its location.’
This reads unmistakeably like a description of what we now view as the classic ‘Bond villain base’ convention: a secret army of fanatics, all wearing their own uniforms, hard at work on a fantastical plan to blow the West to smithereens with advanced missiles.
This is now a standard trope in the thriller genre, but its first appearance was in the novel Moonraker. In Chapter 12 of the novel, Bond inspects the base being overseen by Sir Hugo Drax, and finds a group of experts with ‘the look of a well-knit team, almost of a brotherhood’, and goes on to note their clothing:
‘With the exception of Drax they all wore the same tight nylon overalls fastened with plastic zips. There was nowhere a hint of metal and none wore spectacles…’
Later, when Drax is revealed as the villain, he regales Bond with his life story. Like Martin Bormann, he is a Nazi war criminal who vanished at the end of the war—but, as in Terry’s reporting, he survived and is now in league with the Soviets. His backstory includes a stint in the Werewolves at the end of the war and culminates in his becoming a rich man visiting Moscow with plans to destroy Britain:
‘“I got to the right people. They listened to my plans. They gave me Walter, the new genius of their guided missile station at Peenemunde, and the good Russians started to build the atomic warhead,” he gestured up to the ceiling, “that is now waiting up there…”’
Drax’s aim is to attack Britain with a missile, echoing Terry’s articles on the Soviets’ bases and intentions against the West in general and Britain in particular.
Fleming’s letters to Terry about Werewolves and V-2s establish that he was an influence on Moonraker, while Terry’s articles on rocket bases in the Baltic suggest either a closer reading of them by Fleming or, perhaps more likely, the subject gradual seeping into his consciousness through exposure to Terry’s repeated reporting on it.