Author on crusade and book-promotion

Press, 15 April 1986, Page 23

Author on crusade and book-promotion

Ron Jeffery, of Auckland, clearly has a higher goal in mind as he travels New Zealand promoting his autobiography, “Red Runs the Vistula.”

It is a story of wartime intrigue in the spying war against the Nazis, but it ends in betrayal at the hands of Communists, and to Mr Jeffery, the battle is not over, but is in danger of being lost. His present tour of the South Island is as much a crusade against communism as a bookpromotion exercise.

His wartime experiences are surely unique. Born and raised in London, he enlisted in the British Army only to be captured in France in 1940. After one abortive escape, he successfully got free and made contact with the resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland.

There began the most bizarre phase of his life. With British approval, Mr Jeffery joined the Resistance. Fluent in French, German and Polish, he spent the rest of the war travelling occupied Europe as a spy. However, Mr Jeffery’s recurrent theme when talking about his book in Christchurch was not his success against the Ger-

mans but rather the duplicity of the Russians. He said that his biggest coup was the recruitment of Boris von Regenau, a spymaster colonel attached to Hitler’s headquarters. With von Regenau’s help, a plot was hatched which Mr Jeffery believed could have ended the war in early 1944.

However, when he was smuggled into Britain to seek approval for the plot, it was quashed by Kim Philby, then the chief of MI6 and later to be exposed as a Russian agent.

“The Russians had no intention of finishing the war early, because they were screaming across Eastern Europe swallowing territory,” said Mr Jeffery.

There were other incidents, covered in the book. The Katyn massacre of 5000 captured Polish officers, which Russia blamed on the Nazis but which Mr Jeffery said was clearly done by the Russians; and the battle for Warsaw, where, he said, the advancing Russians left the resistance to fight the Germans unaided, then moved in to pick up the pieces.

Mr Jeffery said that

Poland, “the most loyal ally” of World War 11, had "lost the war completely.” It was now “fully viciously” occupied by the Soviet Union. However, it was the wider ramifications of the Philby incident which had most shaped Mr Jeffery's post-war life. He belived that Soviet moles in Britain prevented full recognition of his war service, a disappointment which prompted him to emigrate to New Zealand with his Polish wife. He believed that Soviet moles continued to function throughout the West, and that belief was his main motive in writing the book. "Red Runs the Vistula” is primarily a stoiy of his wartime experiences, but it also argues the case for Western vigilance against what Mr Jeffery believed was a continuing Soviet threat.

"The Pacific is a major target, and the Soviets’ aim is blood. They are trying to stir up racial strife,” he said.

The warning is contained in the preface to the book: the Vistula, Poland’s biggest river, could soon be joined by the major rivers of the West in “running red.”