Intelligence

Passwords and secret night meetings

Times Online

Extracts from MacGibbon’s confession

IN BRITAIN:

“Through my friendship with X [the name is missing] whom I met when we were both at 8 Corps HQ . . . a meeting was arranged at X’s sister’s flat in Edgware Road. He confirmed the British were not passing on their vitally important enemy intelligence, something that can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

“I have forgotten how my first rendezvous was arranged but I met a young Russian woman, Natasha, at a pre-ordained spot near Westbourne Terrace.
“We exchanged passwords and walked along together introducing each other and I passed on my first note on the German units facing the Soviet armies. The first cache was arranged. This was usually under a bush in a front garden of the terrace houses, my typed notes including a matchbox. The caches were changed each time. In each cache I left an empty box which was marked with a cross by Natasha before I left the new box with my notes.
“This became a regular routine once or twice a month, with occasional meetings, always taking care we were not being watched. We became friends although I never met her in daylight.
“And so it went on from 1943 to 1944 when I was transferred to Washington on the British side of the Combined Chiefs of staff in June 1944.”

IN AMERICA:

“I was one of two GSO2s under our brigadier, a friendly regular soldier. My work was similar to what I had been doing in London with the new duty of writing a weekly brief for our general. Our old friends [not identified in the confession] had gone to the USA a year or so before war broke out and were well established with another part of Washington society, liberal-minded journalists and writers.
“Saturday nights were very happy. Once again I was leading a wartime life that seemed unreal, so far removed from danger.
“I can’t remember how my meeting with my new contact was arranged but very soon I was having regular meetings, this time with a sophisticated man, and arranging drops as I had done in London.
“All this had become so much of a routine that after he and I began having occasional drinks in a bar I began to feel I was taking unnecessary risks and we stopped.
“I was never conscious of being in danger although occasionally I wondered what my fate would be if discovered.”

October 30, 2004 at 11:34 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home