Celebrity Spies of the World Wars

Anonymity has been always an essential aspect of espionage, which makes the association of celebrity names with the clandestine world of cloak and dagger spies all the more strange. As time has pushed into the twenty-first century, famous names have been linked to espionage and military intelligence that have been long associated with literature, entertainment, and even sports: European dancer Mata Hari and television star Julia Child; movie stars Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, Anthony Quayle, Bill Travers, John Ford; writers W. Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, Noel Coward, Malcolm Muggeridge, Helen MacInnes, as well as baseball star Moe Berg, Supreme Court Justices Arthur Goldberg and Byron White, and Teddy Roosevelt's son Kermit Roosevelt. Some agents became so effective or infamous in their undercover intelligence work, like the Great War's Ace of Spies Sidney Reilly and the cold war turncoat Kim Philby, that their names are forever linked to espionage as super agents.

Often it is only after the fact that the names of celebrities are associated with espionage of the world wars of the twentieth century. There are some exceptions, Mata Hari being one. She was a European dance celebrity and then associated, most likely with little reason, with World War I espionage. Her link to espionage resulted in her execution outside of Paris. The Ace of Spies, Sidney Reilly, eventually became known as one of the most effective and least understood spies of the World War I, whose name is still associated with the highest degree of war intelligence intrigue. He mysteriously disappeared in 1925. Swedish film superstar Greta Garbo was world famous before she became a World War II British agent.

The outstanding British writer W. Somerset Maugham became part of British intelligence during the Great War. Maugham used the cover name of Somerville and an occupation cover of a journalist writing for the Daily Telegraph of London when he worked intelligence in Switzerland. His novels Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge, and the stories of Ashenden were based on his experiences as a British intelligence agent in Petrograd, Russia. Maugham has been considered the first author of spy books to be written from the perspective of a former spy. Maugham wrote that Ashenden was "founded on my experiences in the Intelligence Department during" the first world war "but rearranged for the purpose of fiction. For years it was required reading by British agents." Ashenden, writes espionage novelist Alan Furst (editor of The Book of Spies - An Anthology of Literary Espionage), is "a serious contender for the best novel ever written in the genre [espionage]."[1]

Maugham eventually worked within Russia gathering intelligence concerning the Bolsheviks. He sent ciphered messages to London for weeks before returning to London to meet Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He worked with key figures of the anti-Bolshevik movement, the Mensheviks and passed along their desperate pleas for more arms and ammunition to fight the Bolshevik uprising. George refused to help, and before Maugham could return the Bolsheviks had seized power of Russia in the fall of 1917. Maugham had told colleagues that he thought he could have succeeded in helping the Mensheviks overthrow the Bolsheviks if he had started six months earlier. Maugham would later work with World War II espionage ace, William Stephenson.[2]

As time has passed and records have been released from various governments, we are finding more familiar names associated with espionage. In 2005, the American National Archives released thousands of pages of documents that revealed the names and details of some unlikely agents who have now become familiar within celebrity circles.

Greta Garbo starred with Ramon Novarro and Lionel Barrymore in the 1932 version of Mata Hari, a film where Garbo (who became a spy for the Allies in World War II) portrays the Dutch dancer as a cigarette-smoking, manipulator of men. This is a case where one of the most famous film stars in the world, who would eventually become a spy herself, portrayed the most famous female spy in the world.

The late Julia Child, known for her popular French cooking shows on television, worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) after working with the American Red Cross. She worked with OSS chief William Donovan in Washington logging agents names, as well as helping to development shark repellant. Eventually she was stationed in Sri Lanka where she documented classified communications and then China where she received a citation for her service with the OSS.

Moe Berg, a Princeton graduate, had played catcher with the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox before he became an OSS agent. During a trip to Japan in 1935 as a player, Berg filmed Tokyo harbor and military installations along the coast from the team plane. General Jimmy Doolittle may have viewed this film in preparation for his famous Tokyo raid. With his knowledge of numerous languages and his ability to speak German fluently, Berg was chosen to attend a Werner Heisenberg lecture in Zurich. If the atomic scientist Heisenberg said anything in the lecture that led Berg to believe the Germans were close to the atomic bomb, Berg was instructed by the OSS to shoot Heisenberg on the spot. Berg attended the lecture with a pistol and a cyanide pill in case he was to be captured. Though Berg was well versed in scientific studies he was not sure if Heisenberg's lecture hinted at the Nazi's abilities to create an atom bomb. Berg decided not to use the gun.

Ian Fleming and the Spies of Oracabessa Island

In the 1950's and early sixties James Bond creator Ian Fleming shared the Oracabessa island with fellow intelligence operators William Stephenson, the head of the British Security Coordination, and Noel Coward, famed actor and playwright. It was here that Fleming entertained his fellow literati that included Truman Capote, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. It was at Fleming's home Goldeneye where martinis and rum cocktails flowed freely alongside a callaloo soup presented at dinner parties that consisted of onions, greens, crab, and the local Jamaican cannabis. Fleming spun cocktail-fueled tales, both true and exaggerated for his guests, concerning his work with MI6 during the war. When he wasn't regaling his guests with his stories, he was typing up a new Bond adventure in his Goldeneye study.

Fleming's island neighbor, the Canadian William Stephenson entered the war as a self-made millionaire who built airplanes and controlled the largest movie studio outside of Hollywood. He would eventually become the most important and powerful MI6 agent in North America. With his connections to the film industry he was able to employ the Swedish actress Greta Garbo to track vital materials, like heavy water, into Nazi Germany. Garbo, a two-time Academy Award winner, worked in Stephenson's studio and was a personal friend; she was able to pass along information to Stephenson concerning Nazi sympathizers throughout the war.[3] Garbo was only one of many film stars who worked secretly for intelligence services. Cary Grant monitored suspected Nazi sympathizers in Hollywood such as Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper, which won him the King's Medal after the war. Other British film stars that provided information for British intelligence were Anthony Quayle and Bill Travers.[4]

In 1940 Noel Coward begged Churchill to allow him to spy for Britain and become one of the many British "literary spies"[5] of both world wars. Though Churchill took a dim view on such a well-known British celebrity getting involved in spying, he relented and allowed Coward to plant false rumors and misinformation during his travels throughout unoccupied Europe, Asia, and South America. However, Coward refused to use invisible ink in communicating with his controls declaring that even he couldn't read his own writing.[6] Coward was placed in the Nazi intelligence "Black Book," as a person who would be arrested and executed if the German's Operation Sealion had succeeded in invading Britain. Coward had two sets of homes on Oracabessa: Blue Harbor and Firefly where he entertained Churchill, and assorted Hollywood superstars like Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and a pre-Bond Sean Connery.[7] As an island neighbor, Fleming enjoyed Coward's company.

Graham Greene and the Third Man

Along with cold war, espionage novelist John Le Carre, Graham Greene is considered to have brought the spy novel into modern fiction.[8] Ian Fleming, who admired Greene's work, reviewed Our Man in Havana for the BBC. He appreciated Greene because "each sentence he writes interests me, both as an individual and a writer." Critic Umberto Eco contends that Casino Royale's dialogue is reminiscent of a "watered-down" Greene dialogue. Ian asked Greene to write an introduction for Gilt-Edged Bonds. He was so eager to have Greene write the introduction that he offered Goldeneye for a visit. When Greene found out that the stay at Goldeneye was quid pro quo for his introduction, he refused both. Eventually Greene did visit Goldeneye in 1960. [9] Le Carre worked with MI5 and MI6 in the 1950's and 1960's, which provided him most of the background he needed for hisnovels like the Spy Who Came in from The Cold.

Greene, like Fleming, based his characters on "an amalgam of bits of real people [though] real people are too limiting." [10] In Greene's The Human Factor, Bond is referred to in no less than four places.[11] He wanted the novel to be "of espionage free from the conventional violence, which has not, in spite of James Bond, been a feature of the British Secret Service."[12] Greene, in his eight espionage-related novels,[13] adapted the detective story into a unique, sophisticated spy novel.[14]

Greene's family had a long history of intelligence work. His older brother Herbert was an ambitious spy who worked for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the 1930s and then the British and Americans. His younger brother Hugh co-edited with Graham an anthology of spy fiction, The Spy's Bedside Book in 1957. He may have been involved in espionage as well. His sister joined MI6 in 1938 and recruited Graham into the service in 1941 where he was involved into the 1980s.

While in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Africa in 1942 Greene worked at the local police station as a cover.[15] The area was important to Allied intelligence. The Vichy French held nearby French Guinea, and German agents were trying to smuggle industrial diamonds out of central Africa through Freetown. However, Greene's work in Freetown was a disaster when he locked his codebooks in a large safe and couldn't reopen it. Hoping to make amends, he gave MI6 the idea of starting something called a "roaming" brothel, an idea with a certain Fleming flair. He envisioned girls of the brothel debriefing Vichy French officers of important information, not unlike the notorious General Reinhard Heydrich's infamous Nazi brothel, Salon Kitty. MI6 rejected Greene's idea as too expensive.[16] In February of 1943, he was called from Sierra Leone to England to serve in Section V, the counter-intelligence branch of British intelligence. His immediate supervisor was Kim Philby, who may have been the model for the film The Third Man.[17] From Lisbon, Portugal, Greene tracked German agents and turned those names into Philby.

The Alexander Korda produced and Carol Reed directed classic film The Third Man was scripted by Graham Greene. Considered since its 1948 release a cinematic masterpiece, the film's underlying theme has had many interpretations by critics throughout the years. No interpretation is more interesting than the view that the film's central drama concerning the American pulp fiction writer Holly Martins and the mysteriously murdered Harry Lime was based on Graham Greene's relationship with Kim Philby, the first, as Siegfried Beer puts it, "regarded as one the great English writers, the second as the super spy of the twentieth century." [18] Ever since the film, the term "third man" has referred to a person involved in setting up the escape of British spies to the Soviet Union.

Greene remained devoted to Philby as a friend after the later fled to Moscow and admitted his devotion to Communism. Greene wrote an introduction to Philby's memoirs, My Silent War. Greene established a relationship with another double agent of World War II after the war: Dusan "Dusko" Popov, the flamboyant Yugoslavian agent whom was the basis for some of Ian Fleming's James Bond character.

Another British intelligence agent stationed in Lisbon was writer and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge rose to the rank of major in the Army Intelligence Corps and served in Mozambique, Italy, and France as well. Lauded as one of the greatest journalists in the English language, Muggeridge's eclectic tastes in writing included a biography of the British novelist Samuel Butler, working as an editor of the British satirical magazine Punch, and writing a book devoted to the unorthodox lives of men like William Blake, Blaise Pascal, and Soren Kierkegaard whom he christened "God's spies."[19]

Thriller writer Helen MacInnes's (Above Suspicion and Assignment in Brittany) husband Gilbert H. Spied worked with the British Security Coordination under William Stephenson. Spied, a classic professor at Columbia University, ran Latin America operations in New York City for the BSC. Spied was suspected by fellow BSC agents of providing too much information concerning BSC operations for his wife's novels.

The Turncoat Philbys - Like Father Like Son

Harold "Kim" Philby became known as the greatest turncoat in British intelligence history. He defected to the Soviets after a long and illustrious career as an MI6 officer. Philby's disappearance and reappearance in Moscow in 1962 rocked the intelligence world and created a difficult situation for Graham Greene. Philby graduated from Cambridge in 1933 where he became disillusioned with the Western social system, especially British society.

He studied Marxism-Leninism and began spying for the Russians in 1934 when he was recruited in Vienna by the Soviets. He rose to the head of the MI6 Russian desk in 1944. He is responsible for notifying the Soviets about a joint CIA-MI6 operation in Albania in 1949-51, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Albanians. When he fled to Moscow in 1963, he received the Order of the Red Banner, Order of Lenin, Order of People's Friendship. Kim Philby wrote of his traitorous activities that his father, St. John, who introduced Kim to the British intelligence world and was once a major figure in it, would have been "thunderstruck, but by no means disapproving."

St. John Philby, a successful and loyal British agent, never knew that his son had turned to the Russians, nor did he know that he was the target of Kim's first investigation. The Soviets were interested in getting a stronger foothold in the Middle East and therefore wanted information about St. John's relationship with the King of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud. It is hard to believe that the elder Philby would have approved of that part of his son's career.

Beer proposes in his article The Third Man that Greene sensed Philby's double life as early as the mid-forties and so wrote parts of their relation into The Third Man. The film focuses on a complicated relationship between Harry Lime (the Philby-based character according to Beer) and everyone he encounters; Harry "epitomizing Greene's attitude towards evil in modern society."[20]

Like many men and women of espionage, Kim Philby remained mysterious to the end. Biographer Phillip Knightley wrote that after studying the man, reading hundreds of thousands of words on his life, and knowing his children and grandchildren, Knightley was still uncertain if he really knew Philby.[21] At the end of his life, Philby's Moscow apartment was graced with three portraits of men he admired: Lenin, Che Guevara, and his father St. John Philby dressed in Arabian garb.

Philby's defection is believed to be the inspiration for Greene's The Human Factor (1978) and Le Carre's Karla trilogy, The Quest for Karla (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; the Honourable Schoolboy; Smiley's People). Philby and Greene continued their friendship long after the defection, both of them meeting each other in Moscow. Greene wrote a foreword for Philby's 1968 autobiography, The Silent War, in which he defended his traitorous friend who had turned on both their countries. "On Philby's betrayal of his country," Greene wrote, ". . . yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?"[22]

[1] Furst, Alan, ed., The Book of Spies - An Anthology of Literary Espionage, Modern Library, New York, 2003, p. xi.

[2] Of Maugham's opinion of the human race, he wrote, "Their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ." Swainson, Bill, ed. Encarta Book of Quotations, St. Martin's, New York, 2000, p. 622.

[3] Breuer, William B. Deceptions of World War II, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1999, p. 42-43.

[4] Bennett, Richard M. Espionage - an Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets, Virgin Books, London, 2002, p. 85.

[5] British literary spies have included Christopher Marlowe, Daniel Defoe, John Bucan, Compton MacKenzie, W. Somerset Maugham, Malcolm Muggeridge, Dennis Wheatley, Fay Weldon, Charlotte Bingham.

[6] Breuer, William B. Top Secret Tales of World War II, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1999, p. 80.

[7] The Bond films launched Sean Connery into superstardom but Connery, a Scotsman not an Englishman like Bond, wasn't Fleming's pick for the celluloid version of Bond. Fleming preferred to give the role to his friend David Niven. Cary Grant and James Mason were also front runners for the part.

[8] Rosenburg, Bruce and Stewart, Ann. Ian Fleming. Twayne Publishing, 1989, p. 65.

[9] Lycett, Andrew. Ian Fleming, The Man Behind James Bond. Turner, Atlanta, Ga., 1995, p. 391.

[10] Beer, Siegfried. History Today, May 2001, v. 51, p. 45.

[11] Rosenburg, Bruce and Stewart, Ann. Ian Fleming, Twayne Publishing, 1989, p. 83.

[12] Rosenburg, Bruce and Stewart, Ann Ian Fleming. Twayne Publishing, 1989, p.380.

[13] Greene's espionage novels include Orient Express, The Gun For Hire, The Confidential Agent, A Minstry of Fear, The Third Man, Our Man in Havana, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor.

[14] Knudson, Richard. The Whole Spy Catalogue, St. Martins, 1986, New York, New York, p. 47.

[15] Greene's brother Herbert was an ambitious spy who worked for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the 1930s and then the British and Americans. His younger brother Hugh co-edited with Graham an anthology of spy fiction, The Spy's Bedside Book in 1957, and his sister joined MI6 in 1938 and recruited Graham into the service in 1941.

[16] Smith, Julia L. Traveling on the Edge, St. Martin's, New York, 2000, p. 71.

[17] Siegfried. History Today, May 2001, v. 51, p. 45.

[18] Beer, Siegfried. History Today, May 2001, v. 51, p. 45.

[19]Muggeridge's book The Third Testament devoted chapters to great thinkers and writers whom he believed lived lives that produced a "third testament" to God's benevolence.

[20] Beer, Siegfried. History Today, May 2001, v. 51, p. 45.

[21] Philby, Kim. My Silent War - The Autobiography of a Spy, Modern Library, New York, New York, 2002, p. vii.

[22] Philby, Kim. My Silent War - The Autobiography of a Spy, Modern Library, New York, New York, 2002, p. xvii.