Real Life Of A Secret Agent

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32382, 22 August 1970, Page 6

Real Life Of A Secret Agent

Alistair Cooke, a journalist with a life time spent where the newsman gather, has a fund of stories from the byways of his profession, and as his admirers know, they lose nothing in the telling. One which he recounted in

his radio “Letter from America," one of the 8.8.C.’s longest - running weekly features, lifted a corner of the veil which normally conceals the working methods of secret agents. During the Second World War there were two secret agents in Lisbon, one German, the other British, whose passion for poker outweighed their patriotism, and who had regular lunch-time sessions together. One day, the British agent got a code message asking him to verify if the Nazis were setting up secret air bases in Spain or Portugal. Neither he nor his German pal had heard a whisper about such a thing. To verify the rumour or explode it, explained Cooke, would involve the British agent in long trips around the Peninsula, and would entail a lot of bribes and hush money.

This would drastically interrupt the poker sessions. The German agent (a retired army officer who privately took an almost Churchillian view of Hitler) thought up a very satisfactory solution. They spread the map of Spain out over the lunch table and picked at random three barren places more or less inaccessible by road. These, they agreed, were the suspected bases. It was also cunningly agreed they were being built underground, which would make aerial reconnaissance useless.

The Briton then sent a secret message to London, naming the three places. The German sent a message to Berlin, in a code he was pretty certain the British had broken. He said “Hear on good authority British are on to our secret underground air bases in Spain. Suggest abandon.”

Just as anticipated, shortly after the British agent’s cable was decoded in London, so was the German’s. He, well aware of the rivalry between the different branches of German intelligence, guessed that his Berlin headquarters, never having heard of these secret bases, would be afraid to check with their rival departments. His guess was correct Berlin cabled back to Lisbon “Agree abandon.” This message too was cracked in London.

The upshot concluded Cooke “was that both men received confidential congratulations from their governments and were free to settle down to their poker.”