down the street avoiding the joins in the paving, then become sure they’ve left the kettle on. They are difficult to hypnotize and difficult to brain-wash.’
‘No fooling,’ he said. ‘It’s a wonder we had so much trouble in the US then.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Don’t quote me about Alice and Ross.’
‘Not a chance,’ he said. But from a couple of things Alice said next day, I think he must have done.
The ‘Henry File’? It’s still as slim as the day I brought it from the War House. Everyone in the department has theories of course, but whoever tipped off Jay is keeping his head well down. Mind you, as Jean said the other day, when we do identify him, it’s sure to turn out to be some relation of Chico.
Another thing we never did finally work out was how Dalby got my prints on to the HS TV camera, but I think he must have screwed the handles on to something (perhaps a door) at Charlotte Street, then taken them with him to Tokwe, and fixed them to the camera before dumping it.
Jean had been back to the Japanese blockhouse the day after I was arrested, but the cathode tube, slip of information and pistol had all gone. She had then sat down with a map of the area and worked out Dalby’s motor cycle trick by sheer brain-power. When the Brigadier heard Jean’s story he had the three places she’d marked, dragged. With no result. She told me it was a terrible moment; but they hadn’t allowed for the undertow. The motor cycle was finally found quite a long way out.[32] Luckily the wooden gimmick was still attached (Dalby couldn’t risk it floating) and by now the Americans were really convinced. Skip Henderson was recalled to Tokwe (it seems the death of Barney was a bona fide accident) and Ross flew to the Pentagon. From then on the skids were under Dalby, but it wasn’t doing me a lot of good.
That’s about all of the IPCRESS story. There has been a lot of work go through Charlotte Street since; some interesting, but mostly boring. Painter has a whole medical research lab working with him, but so far they have found no way of ‘debrain-washing’ people, and many of the original network are still under the threat of the Treason Act, while some still forward reports under the impression that they are going via Jay to some foreign power. Of course I don’t let Jay handle them, just in case he gets ideas. I see Jay at the monthly conference with Ross, when we prepare the Army Intelligence Memoranda Sheet. He seems happy enough, and he’s certainly efficient. I remember another thing about Jays — they store food for winter. ‘Moving in from opposite ends to the same conclusion,’ Dalby said once, and every time I am with Jay I think about it. But I doubt if this was what Dalby meant.
Anytime I want Jay I know I can find him at the ‘Mirabelle’, and last Saturday morning I bumped into him at Led’s. He wants Jean and me to go to dinner with him. He said he would cook it himself. I’d like to go but I don’t think I will. It’s not wise to make too many close friends in this business.
Epilogue
It’s a dead sure way of getting into trouble putting too much information down on paper, but I suppose having got this far I had better tell you the true end of the IPCRESS fiasco.
The Minister just wanted to know how to evade questions, as all Ministers do. He asked me a few searching questions like, ‘Any good fishin’ in the Lebanon?’ and ‘Have another?’ and ‘D’you know young Chillcott-Oakes?’ After leaving the Minister I drove down to a house near Staines. I knocked on the door in a rather strange series of rhythms, and a woman with a moustache opened it. In the back room there was an old man standing amid three partly packed suitcases. I gave him sixty crumpled five-pound notes, which were genuine, and two mediumquality forged UK passports.
The man said, ‘Thank you,’ and the woman said the same thing, twice more. As I turned to leave, he said, ‘I’ll be at number 19[33] if you ever need me.’
I said thanks and drove to London, and the little old man who had been my jailer at the house in Wood Green took the plane to Prague. This, too, was a spy’s insurance policy.
Appendix
During the dark days of the Mediterranean War when it looked like the Wehrmacht had finished what Darius began, Beirut was a submarine base called Medway II, and was the scene of a topsecret mission. U.307 had been sunk in thirtyeight fathoms of water not far away. In the water-filled U.307 the control room was equipped with a new infra-red sighting device for night viewing above water. It was deep for a diver, but not too deep. It was still wet when we got it aboard the plane, and it dripped over my knees on the way to London, where I met Ross for the first time.
In handling Smith & Wesson revolvers the following rules should be observed. PROVIDING that (i) the cylinder has six chambers, and (ii) it revolves anti-clockwise. (Note that Colt cylinders revolve clockwise.) There are 4 categories:
1.
2.
3.
4.
These rules only provide a general guide and THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS.
Prices at time of writing:
Rangoon: 10/- per lb block.
UK (Dockside): ?30 per lb.
Wholesale: ?50 per lb.
Clubs, etc: ?6 per OZ, or 10/6 per cigarette.
(1lb makes approximately 500 cigarettes.)
The prisoners had all been evacuated and the cells were used as offices, each cell being locked when it was vacated as a security measure. However, after a bomb destroyed a section of the building, it was decided to move to a block of offices in St James’s Street, where they remained until the end of the war.
Near the Holo Archipelago where the waters of the Sulu Sea dilute the Sea of Celebes and the fingers of the Philippine islands grope towards Northern Borneo a B29 of the United States Air Force led a fast-moving shadow through the hot afternoon sun of August, 1949.
Special attachments held photographic plates which soaked up cosmic rays. For months this unit had charted and flown carefully calculated routes across the Pacific. It was a boring detail, and the crews were happy when each long day’s flight was ended and cold showers were waiting to revitalize cramped muscles and an open-air movie helped their minds into neutral. But this day was different, this crew had hardly parked their gum when an urgent call recalled them to the briefing-room.
The photo-lab technicians had got used to developing these plates by now. The image was generally of long wormlike strips of light and often needed a little extra development to get a good contrasty image that made plotting the results much easier. But these plates were absurdly different, they were fogged. Not fogged by daylight
