II. Mercury Man
This is part of Agent of Influence, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Andrew Lycett’s careful piecing together of previous mentions of Mercury’s secret role, including Fleming’s own admission of his part in it, brought the network’s true nature into focus for the first time. In 1998, the veteran Sunday Times journalist Phillip Knightley was able to write in that newspaper that Mercury had been ‘one of the largest rings of intelligence officers, agents and “assets” masquerading as reporters in the history of journalism or espionage’.
But even then, the dam didn’t break. There have now been several full-length examinations of Fleming’s role in intelligence during the Second World War, but his work for M.I.6 during the Cold War remains little-known. It’s established that Fleming ran this group—but what exactly did they get up to? A sizeable book could be written answering this, taking in this network’s intelligence and propaganda roles, its impact on Fleming’s fiction and more, but my focus here will be on just one of the Mercury Men, Antony Terry.
Described by one writer who had dealings with him as ‘a cocktail of duplicitous charm and amorality’, Terry was a complex and enigmatic figure, with many significant parts of his life remaining hidden from view even after his death in 1992. His obituaries unsurprisingly made no mention of his decades-long work for M.I.6, but they also had several other notable omissions: for instance, the Times noted only two of his four marriages.
With Ian Fleming’s guidance and support, Terry would become a near-legendary figure in Fleet Street, and the Sunday Times’ longest-serving foreign correspondent. His obituary in that paper attributed his ‘prodigious memory and relentless attention to detail’ to his name becoming ‘a byword among his peers’, while The Independent described him as a journalistic ‘giant’, ‘a one-man listening post, a fastidious checker of facts, a burrower into dark corners and a traveller who never complained of fatigue’.
Among the stories he investigated were the Thalidomide scandal and the missing treasure known as the Amber Room, but his main beats were espionage and crime, and his journalistic archive is a roll-call of spies, smugglers, arms dealers and, above all, war criminals.
But while a few reporters of the old-school might occasionally still mention Terry’s name reverently, most of his scoops have long faded from memory and his legacy today is felt more through others’ work, notably in the fiction he inspired. His reporting and expertise sparked the interest of several thriller-writers, who drew on his experiences as an intelligence operative and his deep knowledge of Germany, Austria and Central Europe.
Born in London in 1913, Antony Frédéric Aimé Imbert-Terry was a descendant of a French aristocratic family that had settled in Britain. He grew up in Berlin, where his father, who had lost his title and been disowned by the family after eloping with a suffragette, was a minor functionary at the British Embassy. Terry was schooled by tutors and his mother at home, and grew up completely fluent in German, even mastering many of its dialects.
Few Brits at that time lived in Germany and were able to speak the language like a native, and Terry evidently realized early on that he could exploit this, writing articles for the Sunday Dispatch from the age of 14. In 1935, Terry married Eileen Griffiths, but the marriage collapsed within a year after she fell pregnant and he insisted that she have an abortion. It seems that Terry was virulently opposed to the idea of having children of his own. Griffiths remarried, becoming Julia Greenwood (Julia being her given first name) and forged a career as a broadcaster and, under the pseudonym ‘Francis Askham’, a writer: George Orwell favourably reviewed her 1946 novel A Foolish Wind.
Terry’s career, meanwhile, led him in a different direction. After several years working in film publicity—possibly involving some espionage activity—in 1940 he joined M.I.19, a branch of British military intelligence, as part of its Prisoner of War Interrogation Section. He was posted to 6-7 Kensington Palace Gardens, ‘the London Cage’, where many captured Germans were imprisoned and interrogated under the leadership of Colonel Alexander Scotland. Terry was given the legend of ‘Anton Schroder’, a German newspaper correspondent working as an aerial cameraman whose plane had been shot down by the British over Aylesbury in 1940. No further details survive of this operation, but presumably the false identity enabled him to pose as a prisoner to loosen the lips of the others. He also appears to have become a very effective and valued interrogator.
Bespectacled, with thinning hair and cold eyes that gave him the look of a sinister hypnotist in a B-movie, Terry probably didn’t match most people’s idea of a daring commando and decorated war hero. But he became both. In March 1942, he volunteered to be a part of the intelligence contingent of Operation CHARIOT, the daring British raid on the dry dock at St Nazaire in Nazi-occupied France often referred to as ‘The Greatest Raid of All’. Terry was attached to No. 2 Commando with the idea that if any enemy combatants were captured he would be on hand to interrogate them on the spot to obtain ‘hot’ intelligence.
However, it didn’t turn out that way. Instead, the group he was in found itself surrounded by the Germans. Terry decided to carry out a reconnaissance mission of the town and ventured out into the streets alone. According to his Military Cross citation after the war, he did so ‘at great personal risk, armed only with a revolver and showing total disregard for his own safety’. He managed to return with ‘the most valuable information concerning the actions and whereabouts of the enemy’, but it wasn’t enough. The Times described the incident in his obituary:
‘Major Terry and his men drew German fire as they crossed an iron bridge, bullets ricocheting against its girders, and were captured. His team was actually being lined up against a wall by German soldiers to be shot when saved by the distraction of another British team’s limpet-mines going off under the battleship Tirpitz a short distance away.’
Along with several others, Terry was imprisoned in Spangenberg Castle until the end of the war; while there, he kept his fellow prisoners informed by running a daily news bulletin, collating everything that could be gleaned from the German press and broadcasts listened to on a radio set built from components that had been smuggled piece by piece in aid parcels into the camp and, when that was detected in a search by the Germans, a new model built from stolen valves and hidden inside a gramophone.
After his release from Spangenberg in 1945, Terry returned to the London Cage, now renamed the War Crimes Investigation Unit, to interrogate high-ranking Nazis as the deputy to Colonel Scotland. Years later, he recalled in a documentary that he was known as ‘the shit with the glasses’ by those whose testimonies he unravelled.
In April 1946, he returned to Germany, visiting Dachau. The notorious concentration camp was now a detention centre run by the Americans, and one of its prisoners was General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst. The Nazis’ supreme commander in Norway, in October 1942 von Falkenhorst had ordered the execution of seven British commandos who had been captured during MUSKETOON, the operation to destroy the hydro-electric plant in Glomfjord. The laws of war envisaged imprisonment in such circumstances, not being shot through the back of the head, but these men were the first victims of the Nazis’ ‘Commando Order’.
Terry’s interview in Dachau helped secure von Falkenhorst a guilty verdict in an Allied military tribunal. He was sentenced to death, but this was then commuted to life imprisonment, and he ended up being released in 1953 due to ill health. This would likely have infuriated Terry. He never wrote or spoke publicly of it but one of the seven commandos, Joe Houghton, had also been at St Nazaire. Terry would have known this from his research into the case, and so would also likely have been conscious of the fact that while in the earlier operation Houghton had escaped and he had been captured, at that point in the war the Nazis had still played by the established rules of war and had only held him as a prisoner. Their fates could easily have been reversed.
Terry was recruited by M.I.6 shortly after his return from Dachau. It’s not hard to see why they were interested. He was ideally qualified for work behind the Iron Curtain: he had operated under cover (as ‘Anton Schroder’); had shown great physical courage at St Nazaire; had been a highly effective interrogator both during and after the war; was as ardently anti-Soviet as he was anti-Nazi; and was completely fluent in German.
While the latter point had been an asset for the London Cage, it was even more so for M.I.6. The post-war division of Austria and Germany meant that cities such as Vienna and Berlin, where East and West were separated by still-porous borders, had become key targets for the agency. It was eager to gather intelligence on Soviet bloc activities and intentions without taking the far greater dangers involved in recruiting or infiltrating agents deeper inside the U.S.S.R.
This was soon to be Terry’s new role, but first he needed cover. Considering his background, both from his teenage years and his time preparing a news bulletin inside a German P.O.W. camp, journalism would have been an obvious option. In 1947, someone from the London Station asked Ian Fleming if Mercury could take on Antony Terry.
Terry’s heroic war record would probably have appealed to Fleming, especially as it involved a commando raid. In March 1942, Fleming had drafted a memo proposing the creation of a ‘Naval Intelligence Commando Unit’, a small force that would go ahead of advancing Allied units to snatch codes, documents and even valuable personnel. He’d signed it ‘F’ with a flourish. This eventually came into existence as 30 Assault Unit, two leaders of which were veterans of the St Nazaire raid: Robert ‘Red’ Ryder and Dunstan Curtis.
Terry also fitted many of Fleming’s other requirements for the job. In an essay for The Kemsley Manual Of Journalism, he had given the criteria for his ideal correspondent, which included their being ‘either a bachelor or a solidly married man who is happy to have his children brought up abroad’, as well as the sort who would ‘enjoy having a drink with the meanest spy or the most wastrelly spiv’, could speak at least one foreign language fluently with another to fall back on, and was ‘able to keep a secret’.
Much of this description could, of course, also apply to an intelligence operative acting under cover as a foreign correspondent. Fleming agreed to take Terry on, and M.I.6 then instructed Terry to marry ‘one of his girlfriends at the time’, a 32-year-old divorcee named Rachel Nixon. M.I.6 did not employ bachelors: a ‘solidly married man’ made for more plausible cover and was thought to dissuade the Soviets from attempting honey-traps. Rachel later recalled that she was vetted by M.I.6, after which the couple married at a civil ceremony in Kensington in June 1947. She was informed of his intelligence role, Fleming ‘arranged the cover’, and they moved to Vienna.
There, Terry reported to two masters: George Kennedy Young, head of M.I.6’s station in the city, and Ian Fleming in London. The cover role was no mere formality: he was expected to excel at both jobs. Fleming wanted to enliven The Sunday Times’ foreign coverage and had high expectations of his new correspondent. Young, meanwhile, was running a network of agents and informers in the city, several of whom Terry took on. In October 1948, after M.I.6 agent Kavan Elliott had been interrogated and released by the Hungarian secret police in Budapest, he was sheltered by Terry in his flat in Vienna, where M.I.6 debriefers concluded ‘he had had a tough time, but he had held up well’.
Terry and Young’s relationship was not always a smooth one, perhaps in part because Terry wasn’t confined by the agency’s traditional hierarchy. He doesn’t appear ever to have been a fully salaried member of M.I.6 but rather a highly trusted and capable freelancer with a degree of autonomy from local stations.
According to a barely fictionalized version of this part of his life, he ‘enjoyed the right of direct communication with the Intelligence Directorate in London’. If so, this would presumably have been with someone at the London Station, perhaps Vanden Heuvel or his successor, Nicholas Elliott.
10 January 1948: Antony Terry listens intently to Major Emma Woolf at the Officer's Club in the Kinsky Palace, Vienna (Gerti Deutsch/Picture Post/Getty Images)
It seems Terry was in his element, but his marriage was already in trouble: within a month of arriving in Vienna, Rachel discovered he was being unfaithful to her. She stayed with him nevertheless and started to explore her new home, with mixed results. Vienna in 1947 was divided into four zones of occupation and was rife with espionage and danger. While her husband pursued stories, intelligence and women, Rachel found work at the Allied Control Council, which governed the four zones. Having never left England before, she was shocked by life in the city, and her ‘ignorant adulation’ of the Russians for their heroic part in defeating Nazism soon vanished, as she later described:
‘It was nothing to see a Russian soldier raise the stock of his machine pistol (they were always armed) against someone in his way in the street, and even to strike out with it.
To a Londoner that was as horrifying as the constant accounts of “men in military uniform” raping, looting and killing, for such things could not happen to me and were at first discounted out of the prevailing Allied hatred of everything German. But a man trying to escape from a police jeep being dragged along the street by one foot until a crowd gathered and he got away, his head covered with blood … a shape lying on the pavement covered by a blanket from which blood seeped … such sights in a major city are shocks one does not forget. They were made sharper by the strict discipline of the three other occupying armies. My hero-worship was replaced by a fear that sometimes reached horror, much deeper than the fear caused by bombing during the War. The cure was permanent.’
Also reporting from Vienna at this time was a Daily Express correspondent, Peter Smollett, who was not all he seemed. Viewed by his enemies as ‘an uncouth bull of a man with a decidedly shady air’, he had been born Hans Peter Smolka in Vienna. A Jewish Communist, with the rise of the Nazis he had helped dissidents escape through the city’s network of sewers before fleeing himself to London, where he became a naturalized British subject and briefly ran a press agency with Kim Philby.
Thanks to files smuggled out of Russia by Vladimir Mitrokhin, we now know that Philby and his Austrian wife Litzi recruited Smolka into Soviet intelligence in 1939. He became one of their most effective agents, codenamed ABO.
During the Second World War, Smolka ran the Russian Department within the Ministry of Information, spearheading Britain’s efforts to paint its major ally in a good light to the public. This was a significant propaganda coup for the Russians, as Smolka managed to paint a rosy picture of Communism while suppressing reports on Stalinist persecution. He was awarded an O.B.E. for his efforts.
After the war, Smolka returned to Vienna as a correspondent, carrying out much the same job for Soviet intelligence as Terry was for M.I.6. Smolka was a familiar face in the British press pack, but Rachel Terry soon began to distrust him:
‘In November (1947) Picture Post wanted an article on a foreign correspondent's life in an Occupied city, and Peter Smolka proposed this to my husband as something in his gift. Smolka had the permits necessary to go to such places as Klosterneuburg, impossible to get from the Russians except on an official level. He also invited us and the photographer, the wife of the editor of Picture Post, to dine at the British Officers’ Club in Palais Kinsky with a woman Russian colonel, whose picture duly appeared with us all in the magazine. This was something so unheard-of that even I could see something odd in it. It could only have occurred with official Soviet approval, and to get permission for foreign publicity of that kind proved intimate and high-level contacts.’
Rachel Terry wrote this in 1984, and even then was being a little coy: the ‘woman Russian colonel’ was in fact Emma Wolff, a senior Soviet intelligence officer.
It seems likely that Antony Terry would have come to similar conclusions about Smolka as his perceptive wife and reported back to M.I.6 that he must have connections with Soviet intelligence. And yet the British did not act against Smolka. Two years later, he was even invited to help out with a film that provided a covert role for British intelligence, and was asked to show the screenwriter around the city.
This was Graham Greene, and the film became The Third Man. Smolka gave Greene many of the ideas for the film, including the workings of the city’s black market in penicillin and its sewer system. According to Smolka’s godson, Peter Foges, the character of Harry Lime was partly based on Philby and partly on Smolka himself.
In 1949, Fleming had a new assignment for Terry: Germany. He was initially based in Dusseldorf before settling in Bonn, but he also had stints in Hamburg and Berlin. On posting him to the country, Fleming wrote to Terry to stress he had free rein to travel and pursue stories as he saw fit:
‘I shall never mind being beaten on spot news, if I feel that you are devoting your time to becoming really acquainted with all aspects of your fascinating and dangerous territory and its psychosis ridden inhabitants.’
Such a flexible remit, of course, was perfect cover for espionage work. Fleming also furnished Terry with at least one source with intelligence links. In October 1949, he sent him the details of a Herr von Mouillard in Hamburg, who he said he had been recommended as being ‘particularly well-informed, especially regarding Russian manoeuvres in Germany’ and from whom he felt sure Terry would be able to extract ‘useful material’. He added that von Mouillard was ‘well-known to a mutual friend of yours and mine’—a not-so-subtle reference to M.I.6.