Churchill's Mole Hunt

By John Tilston

Winston Churchill, reappointed as First Lord of the Admiralty in September 1939, suspected there was a mole operating at the heart of the Admiralty during the first months of World War II. Did he leak critical information about naval defenses at the Royal Navy’s British base at Scapa Flow that lead to the sinking of the Royal Oak and the loss of 836 men in an audacious raid by a German U-Boat?

And how was this German spy linked with US Embassy spy Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff, an fanatical anti-Bolshevik Russian émigré who made dresses for the Duchess of Windsor and sold the best caviar in London in her family’s South Kensington Tea Room, who conspired to smuggle secret correspondence between President Roosevelt and Churchill to the Nazis?

Scotland Yard chief inspector Nicholas Ridgeway’s dogged investigation of a murder in a Whitehall back street leads him to the aristocratic Nazi sympathizers in the Right Club and to play a key role in the surprising sting that exposes the mole in the Admiralty.

We’ll never know all the facts about treachery in London in those early months of the War because the Navy burnt tons of sensitive papers in 1945. John Tilston’s historical novel postulates what might have been, weaving known fact and historical characters in a rich tale that captures the mood of that bleak winter of 1940, the coldest in living memory. Along the way we meet Churchill, US Ambassador Joe Kennedy, Ian Fleming, MI5's notorious Maxwell Knight, and sultry MI5 agent Joan Miller.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Tilston
• Release date: Dec 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781847285942

John Tilston

John Tilston has over 25 years’ experience writing for leading financial publications reporting on economies and stock markets from close quarters. He has worked as Melbourne Bureau Chief for the Australian Financial Review; Economics Editor for Business Day; and London-based Economics News Editor for Dow Jones Newswires. He has contributed to New York's Business Week; the London-based Investors' Chronicle; the Financial Mail in Johannesburg; The Sunday Times; and Finance Week. He is the author of four books, most recently: NIMBY! Aligning regional economic development practice to the realities of the 21st Century. Others are Meanjin to Brisvegas: Brisbane’s journey from colonial backwater to new world city; How to explain why you’re vegetarian to you dinner guests (published in Japan, 2004); and a work of historical fiction, Churchill’s Mole Hunt (novel) (2006)

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Churchill's Mole Hunt

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By John Tilston

Copyright © 2006 by John Tilston

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The Author asserts his moral rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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This is a work of historical fiction. Many of the characters and events are a matter of historical record. The author accepts no liability for their human foibles but asserts that he has made his best endeavors to accurately represent them and the period as a true reflection of what he understands to have been the case.

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ISBN: 978-1-84728-594-2

For Arthur,

who lost his innocence in 1940

so that mine and my children's might be preserved

MOST SECRET

8th November 1940

MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRIME MINISTER

Subject: Outcome of Kent/Wolkoff Trial: US assistance

I thought you would wish to know that Mr Justice Tucker earlier today at the Old Bailey handed down sentences in the Kent/Wolkoff trial held in camera on charges under the Official Secrets Act, given your interest in the case. Wolkoff was sent down for ten years; Kent, for seven years, the lesser sentence because Wolkoff was found to have been the driving force in passing the secrets to our enemies.

The bench dismissed Kent's barrister's submission that his client was exempt from the Act by virtue of his privileged position as a diplomat, which was seen to be untenable since his immunity had been revoked by his own Government's Ambassador.

The Second Secretary at the US Embassy - Mr Franklin Gower - gave strong evidence of Kent's stealing of the sensitive documents. I suggest it would be prudent to thank Ambassador Kennedy for his invaluable assistance in this matter. It is, as far as we can determine, the first instance anywhere in the world in which the United States Government has waived diplomatic immunity for a member of its diplomatic corps.

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Desmond Morton

August 1939

There has been a good deal of criticism of the [Royal Navy] intelligence provided from London ... It must be admitted that, during the early months of the war, the procurement by the enemy of intelligence regarding our warship dispositions and movements was superior to our own.

Official History of the Second World War: The War at Sea Volume One. Her Majesty's Stationary Office 1954

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The Admiralty, Whitehall, Monday night of the 15th

He pushed back his chair, arched his back and stretched his arms towards the ceiling. He had been so engrossed in his work that only now did he realize there was no one else in the room. He looked at his watch. No wonder, he thought, it's almost ten o’clock. He’d better go home; he wanted to go home. Alice had been decent enough not to kick up a fuss about this recent spate of late nights, but he missed her. He missed the warm hug as soon as he was in the front door and had his coat off, and the cozy dinners with her and young David. He missed her womanliness after a day of regimented Navy work. Still, the late nights were proving fruitful. He felt he was making real progress and would have a final report ready in a couple of days.

He gathered the papers - scribbled notes, formal reports and maps - scattered on his desk, put them into a manila folder marked Most Secret, which he lobbed into his in-tray. He stood up, walked over to the hat stand and put on his Royal Navy Lieutenant’s cap. He felt the familiar pride when he pulled it on. He was an officer in a navy that could trace its battle honors back to Francis Drake and the unrivaled Horatio Nelson. But then he sighed. Sometimes he felt that with all this deskwork, he might as well be a clerk rather than a sailor. Except that it was intelligence work that might turn out to be of the utmost important.

He closed the door behind him and headed down the now quiet corridor in the basement of the Admiralty building towards the stairs. He nodded goodnight to the ageing Marine sergeant on the main desk as he left the building and walked briskly down Whitehall towards Parliament Square and Westminster Tube Station.

He saw there was only one other man, in a pinstriped suit and bowler hat, in the carriage as he entered the train carriage. He sat down several seats away, feeling a little conspicuous in his naval uniform. He still hadn’t got used to his shore posting and an office job. He felt something of a fraud to have a desk job in Whitehall and to be still wearing a uniform. Uniforms were for active postings: for campaigns at sea.

Still, he reminded himself again, the research was going well, and he was beginning to feel it might just make a small contribution to getting the Royal Navy into shape for the war with Germany that was sure to come soon. Everyone knew the Government had let the armed services go to seed. For fear of appearing unduly belligerent, the weaselly politicians had treated the Navy and Army as if they were a necessary embarrassment but must be kept quiet and out of sight. Only in the past year had they come to realize how foolish, how shortsighted this had been, and even now they were reluctant to admit it. Only that eccentric old bird Winston Churchill had over and over again called for action. Pity he wasn't still First Lord of the Admiralty.

Though he was disappointed at being posted to Navy HQ at the Admiralty, Lieutenant Arthur Winterton had come to see it as a necessary step to eventually getting command of his own ship. The time spent at headquarters helped him get known amongst those ultimately determining his fate. He had expected two or three years of routine and tedious clerking, but the compensation was going home each evening to Alice and David.

Then two weeks ago he had stumbled on something that had snapped him out of the torpor.

His station was in Room 40, the heart of the Admiralty’s Intelligence Ops. The Directorate of Naval Intelligence. His job was to maintain an unbroken record of the positions of the German Kriegsmarine, using information from radio intercepts, well-placed human intelligence (they never called them spies) and aerial reconnaissance by the Royal Air Force.

As if in a cartoon, a light bulb had suddenly lit up a month ago: he recognized a pattern; it seemed at the time that it was by intuition. He saw now that’s how patterns were recognized. Not as the result of a clear strategy but out of the subconscious mind prepared by prolonged exposure to piles of bits and pieces of information. You don’t recognize a line of trees as having been planted by analysing plantations. It is by the difference that we have unconsciously absorbed from observing nature and the suddenly regular spacing of a plantation. So it had been with his discovery. He suddenly recognized that the many German ship positions he had been plotting were part of a pattern.

At first, he’d hit a brick wall at the Admiralty trying to get his discovery recognised and acted upon. Lieutenant Commander MacLeod, his boss, wasn’t receptive. Fussy, bureaucratic, scared of his own shadow. Winterton had to talk long and often to get permission to dig deeper. He suspected MacLeod had finally given the go ahead because he’d been worried about Winterton's suspicions leaking along the corridors and to the upper floors. That would leave MacLeod exposed. This fear had finally overcome his natural apprehension that the research might rock the boat. Poor man, on the horns of a bureaucratic dilemma, Winterton sneered at the thought.

The train stopped at Fulham Broadway and he got off. He climbed the stairs out of the station and turned right into Fulham Road towards home.

He wondered about Captain Dixon, MacLeod’s boss. He was a cold fish: impossible to read. He’d probably been driving MacLeod to get him to produce a report with greater detail; less assertion, more fact. He was doubtless looking for something in black and white, hard concrete evidence, which he could pass on to Admiral Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence. A conclusive report that would be the catalyst to make some changes to the system. That’s why MacLeod had had him rechecking his information, tying in all the ship sightings, not just those that suited his argument and working all hours of the night. No loose ends, Lieutenant, he'd said pompously.

Well, Winterton wasn't sure that it was possible to be so precise, nor that they had the time to waste.

He pushed his key in the front door lock, hoping Alice had waited up for him.

He hung his cap on the hat stand in the hallway and started taking off his jacket as he walked into the front room.

Hello, Darling, she said. Another tough day?

It’ll all be over soon, my love, he smiled. Gosh, you are a sight for sore eyes.

Pimlico, early morning of Thursday 17th

The telephone woke him.

Detective Chief Inspector Ridgeway?

Yes. He fumbled for the switch to the light on the bedside table and checked his watch. It was half past midnight.

I’m Sergeant Jessop, sir, duty officer on the Yard desk. Sorry to call so late, but we’ve got a dead body in suspicious circumstances in Whitehall. Can you come down, sir?

Yes, alright Sergeant, I’ll go straight there. Give me the address.

It’s Cannon Row, just off Bridge Street, sir, right behind Yard, in fact. I’ve made sure the scene has been secured by two constables and I’ve sent for Doctor Llewellyn, the pathologist. And I’ve taken the liberty of ordering a car round to your flat, sir. It should be there any moment now.

Alright, sergeant, thank you. Do you have any details? He took a cigarette from the packet on the bedside table.

Not many. All I have is the dead man is wearing a Royal Navy uniform and he appears to have been stabbed.

Nicholas Ridgeway dressed quickly, his mind clear. He’d been in bed for only a short while and not yet into deep sleep. London wasn’t his hometown, but he knew Cannon Row well. It was part of a back street dogleg with Derby Gate that commuting civil servants used as a short cut between Whitehall and the Bridge Road entrance to the Westminster Tube Station. The rear door of the Red Lion public house was close to the knee of the dogleg. That’s why he knew it. It wasn’t far from the back gate of the Yard and he’d stepped in there for an after work drink often enough. On summer evenings, its patrons - mostly civil servants, lower ranking politicians and a few servicemen in uniform - spilled onto the street, while they enjoyed a pint of beer on the way to the Tube Station or to brief a politician in the Houses of Parliament opposite the Station.

If there has been a murder in Whitehall, the centre of political power in the British Empire, it could be very sensitive, he thought.

Whitehall, early morning of the same day

The black Austen police car stopped on Bridge Road. Ridgeway got out and looked down Cannon Row. A solitary street lamp halfway along the left side dimly lit the empty street bounded on both sides by two-story buildings; it was little more than an alleyway despite being perhaps 70 yards long. He could see a pile of rubbish propped up against the wall on the left near the lamp post. From the top of the street he could see the two constables standing close together and both smoking, cupping their cigarettes in their hands in the clandestine way sentries do when on duty. Behind them, on the pavement, against the wall on the right, there was a dark shape that, only because he’d been forewarned, he could see was a body.

He identified himself to the constables and asked them how they had found the body. The older of the two – Constable Evans – said he had been on his regular nightly patrol. He had just tested the side door of the Red Lion to make sure the pub was not staying open beyond closing time. It didn’t happen often, but perhaps once every month or so, the publican had trouble chucking out a few stragglers. This time it was locked. He then turned into Cannon Row and had seen the man lying there, just beyond the corner. At first he had supposed he was a drunk, it being 25 minutes to midnight, only half an hour after closing time. But, on closer investigation, he’d seen the man was dead.

Ridgeway scanned the scene as best he could in the dim light. What’s been moved since you first saw the body, Constable?

Evans said he had moved the body. It had been lying face down, with the weight slightly favoring the right side, the head towards the Houses of Parliament. He had turned the body over onto its back, tried to find a pulse in the neck and then the wrist. He had then noticed a patch of blood on the pavement under where the chest had been. He had run down to the Police Call box on Whitehall to report in to the Yard and then returned, as Sergeant Jessop had instructed him to secure the scene. He had seen no one in the street before or after finding the body. Constable Jones had joined him 10 minutes later. He had not seen anyone either.

Duty pathologist Dr James Llewellyn arrived. It was, he said, sharing his thoughts with no one in particular, a very unusual spot for a call out. He had never been summoned to a dead body in Whitehall before. After a brief examination he said death was almost certainly caused by a stab to the heart by a long, sharp instrument. There were no other signs of struggle or violence.

I'd say he has been dead for about two hours. First signs of rigor mortis in the facial and neck muscles are setting in. And, in addition, lividity is at an early stage. He looked at the blank faces of the three policemen, that's the blood settling under gravity to you heathens.

Ridgeway checked the dead body. He noted the dark blue navy uniform and the single medium and thin gold lace hoops on the sleeve that marked the jacket’s wearer as a Lieutenant. The cap was off the head but still close to it.

Has the cap been moved, Constable?

No, sir.

He found a pocketbook in the dead man’s left inside breast pocket that identified him as Arthur Winterton of 112 Fulham Road. It contained a photograph of a pretty but severe looking woman of about 30 and a small boy, both staring out rather sternly at the camera.  There was also a ten-shilling note and coins totaling two shillings and nine pence.

He could not see anything else that might be useful, but it was still too dark for close examination. He let the ambulance men who had just arrived to take the body away. He told the two constables he would try and see the next of kin and told them to secure the site until he could get back when it was light.

Fulham, early morning of the same day

112 Fulham Road was in the centre of a group of three-story terrace houses. The houses were solid middle class: stucco walls, bay windows, steps up to the large front doors with polished brass knockers, but without the porticos of the grander houses of neighboring Chelsea or South Kensington.

Mrs Alice Winterton was more attractive in the flesh than she appeared in the photo. About 30, in the full flush of womanhood, she was less stern even in the current fraught circumstances. She was sitting on the couch opposite Ridgeway in an elegant light turquoise silk dressing gown. He had shown her the pocketbook as some sort of inadequate demonstration of authenticity of the harsh news he had just brought with him. She was shocked and upset but her practiced manners held her together, just. Her eyes were very moist, tears spilling onto her cheeks, but she held back any sobbing. That would be for the privacy of her bedroom, Ridgeway guessed.

He told her the early hours of an investigation were the most productive and she volunteered to answer any questions straight away. Yes, he was in the Royal Navy. He was working in the Admiralty in Whitehall in the Naval Intelligence Unit. Yes, lately he had been working late into the night. A new head of the Unit had been appointed some months ago and he’d been driving everyone hard. No, she could not think of anyone who might hold a strong grudge against her husband.

Arthur, she said, was very warm and generous, but he was also tough and very tenacious. When he got hold of a problem, he didn’t rest until it was solved. It was at once an endearing and infuriating trait. She paused and with deep breath regathered her strength.

Ridgeway waited silently, deciding against a show of shallow support.

He was a physical man; he liked the outdoor life, she continued. He’d been attracted to the Navy because he couldn’t bear the thought of sitting behind a desk, so it was ironic that he’d been doing just that at the Admiralty.

They had married nine years ago after Arthur had come down from Cambridge. He still played some sport, cricket in summer and a bit of rugby, but at 33 he was starting to feel he couldn’t keep up with the younger players.

She was sobbing now. It was time to stop the questions for now. He'd have to come back in a day or two.  She declined his offer of help in contacting relatives and he left her alone in the empty house.

Cannon Row, Whitehall, morning of the same day

There were more uniformed policemen at the crime scene now. Constables had been posted at the entrances to Cannon Row and Derby Gate to divert the trickle of curious commuters.

Ridgeway checked the ground around where Winterton had been found. It had not rained but even so there was very little of note. There was a small pool of dried blood, reinforcing Llewellyn’s estimation about how he’d been killed. A clean stab by a sharp instrument leaves a small entry wound and causes mostly internal bleeding. It also suggested that Winterton had died quickly and had not put up a fight. It was unusual to die so quickly, but it did happen when the heart itself was pierced. There’d been no scuffmarks on his shoes and his trousers and jacket were clean. As a rugby player he could have been expected to resist an attack but it didn’t look like he’d had the chance. The closeness of the cap to the head also indicated he’d gone down quickly – like a sack of potatoes with little sideways momentum. Died instantly, Ridgeway reckoned.

It pointed to the murderer being someone who knew what he was doing. And the cash in the pocket book meant the killer was unlikely to be a thief. In any event, such a sophisticated killer wouldn’t work for 12 shillings and nine pence.

At the corner of Cannon Row and Derby Gate, just on from the rear door to the Red Lion, he looked at the sprinkling of cigar and cigarette butts spread over an area of maybe three square yards, probably from drinkers stubbing out their smokes as they spilled out of the pub. He rummaged through them; they were all self-rolled or common makes; the Senior Service brand predominant, appropriately enough, he thought. Then he noticed a half smoked gold-tipped black Russian oval shaped cigarette, fashionable in chic society circles in London, but not usually associated with the middle ranking civil servants and serviceman patrons of the Red Lion. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

Scotland Yard, Victoria Embankment, midmorning the same day

Ridgeway eased his 6 foot 2 inch frame into a chair opposite his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent David Telford, who was sitting behind his large uncluttered desk. They got on well together. The much older Telford felt a responsibility for the 32-year-old Nicholas Ridgeway that verged on the paternal since he’d arrived on secondment from the British South Africa Police a little over twelve months previously. Telford, in his late fifties, saw in Ridgeway the qualities he’d liked to see in his own son. He was straight talking in his colonial way, sometimes to the point of naiveté, whereas his son Jeremy was often too clever by half; too embroiled in the pseudo-sophisticated world of the London arts scene.