The Unlikely Spy(31)
His best friend, a brilliant philosophy student named Brendan Evans, arrived at the perfect solution. Brendan had heard the army was starting up something called the Intelligence Corps. The only qualifications were fluent German and French, extensive travel throughout Europe, the ability to ride and repair a motorbike, and perfect eyesight. Brendan had contacted the War Office and made appointments for them the next morning.
Vicary was despondent; he did not meet the qualifications. He had fluent if uninspired German, passable French, and he had traveled broadly across Europe, including inside Germany. But he had no idea how to ride a motorbike--indeed, the contraption scared the daylights out of him--and his eyesight was atrocious.
Brendan Evans was everything Vicary was not: tall, fair, strikingly handsome, possessed of a boyish lust for adventure and more women than he knew what to do with. They had one trait in common, flawless memories.
Vicary conceived his plan.
That evening, in the cool twilight of August, Brendan taught him to ride a motorcycle on a deserted patch of road in the Fens. Vicary nearly killed them both several times, but by the end of the night he was roaring along the pathways, experiencing a thrill and a recklessness he had never before felt. The following morning, during the train ride from Cambridge to London, Brendan drilled him relentlessly on the anatomy of motorbikes.
When they arrived in London, Brendan went into the War Office while Vicary waited outside in the warm sunshine. He emerged an hour later, grinning broadly. "I'm in," Brendan said. "Now, it's your turn. Listen carefully." He then proceeded to read back the entire eye chart used for the vision test, even the hopelessly tiny characters at the bottom.
Vicary removed his spectacles, handed them to Brendan, and walked like a blind man into the dark, forbidding building. He passed with flying colors--he made only one mistake, transposing a B for a D, but that was Brendan's fault, not his. Vicary was immediately commissioned as a second lieutenant in the motorcyclist section of the Intelligence Corps, given a warrant for his uniform and kit, and ordered to cut his hair, which had grown long and curly over the summer. The following day he was ordered to Euston Station to collect his motorbike, a shiny new Rudge model packed in a wooden crate. A week later Brendan and Vicary boarded a troop-ship along with their motorbikes and sailed for France.
It was all so simple then. Agents slipped behind enemy lines, counted troops, watched the railways. They even used carrier pigeons to deliver secret messages. Now it was more complex, a duel of wits over the wireless that required immense concentration and attention to detail.
Double Cross. . . .
Karl Becker was a perfect example. He was sent by Canaris to England during the heady days of 1940, when invasion seemed certain. Becker, posing as a Swiss businessman, set himself up in suitable style in Kensington and began collecting every questionable secret he could lay his hands on. It was Becker's use of counterfeit sterling that set Vicary onto him, and within a matter of weeks he had been spun into MI5's web. Vicary, with the help of the watchers, went everywhere Becker went: to the parties where he traded in gossip and drank himself stiff on black-market champagne; to his meetings with live agents; to his dead drops; to his bedroom, where he brought his women, his men, his children, and only God knew what else. After a month Vicary brought down the hammer. He arrested Becker--pulled him from the arms of a young girl he had kept locked away and drunk on champagne--and rolled up an entire network of German agents.
Next came the tricky part. Instead of hanging Becker, Vicary turned him--convinced him to go to work for MI5 as a double agent. The following night Becker, from his prison cell, turned on his radio and tapped out a coded recognition signal to the operator in Hamburg. The operator asked him to stay on the air for instructions from his Abwehr control officer in Berlin, who ordered Becker to determine the exact location and size of an RAF fighter base in Kent. Becker confirmed the message and signed off.
But it was Vicary who went to the airfield the next day. He could have called the RAF, obtained the coordinates for the base, and sent them to the Abwehr, but it wouldn't be so easy for a spy. To make the message appear authentic, Vicary went about reconnoitering the air base just the way a spy would do it. He took the train from London and, because of delays, didn't arrive in the area until dusk. A military policeman harassed him on a hillside outside the base and asked him for his identification. Vicary could see the air base on the flats below, the same perspective from which a spy might see it. He saw a cluster of Nissen huts and a few aircraft along the grassy runway. During his return to London, Vicary composed a brief report on what he had seen. He noted that the light had been poor because the trains were late and said he had been prevented from getting too close by an MP. That night Vicary forced Becker to send the report with his own hand, for each spy had his own distinctive keying style, known as a fist, that German radio operators could recognize. Hamburg congratulated him and signed off.
Vicary then contacted the RAF and explained the situation. The real Spitfires were removed to another field, the personnel evacuated, and several badly damaged fighters were fueled and placed along the runway. That night the Luftwaffe came. The dummy planes exploded into fireballs; certainly the crews of the Heinkel bombers thought they had scored a direct hit. The next day the Abwehr asked Becker to return to Kent to assess the damage. Again, it was Vicary who went, gathered a report on what he could see, and forced Becker to send it.
The Abwehr was ecstatic. Becker was a star, a super-spy, and all it had cost the RAF was a day patching up the runway and carting off the charred skeletons of the Spitfires.