The Solitary Spy

A Political Prisoner in Cold War Berlin

Douglas Boyd

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780750993913, 9780750969789
• eBook ISBN: 9780750982900
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Of the 2.3 million National Servicemen conscripted during the Cold War, 4, 200 attended the secret Joint Services School for Linguists, tasked with supplying much-needed Russian speakers to the three services. After training, they were sent to the front lines in Germany and elsewhere to snoop on Soviet aircraft in real time.

Posted to RAF Gatow in Berlin, ideally placed for signals interception, author Douglas Boyd came to know Hitler's devastated former capital. Pulling no punches, he describes SIGINT work, his subsequent arrest by armed Soviet soldiers, and how he was locked up without trial in solitary confinement in a Stasi prison.

The Solitary Spy is a unique first-hand account of the terrifying experience of incarceration and interrogation in an East German political prison, from which Boyd eventually escaped, one step ahead of the KGB.

PART 1

2.3 MILLION MEN

1

THE REASON WHY

Lenin’s foundation of the Communist International, or Comintern, in March 1919 launched a clandestine struggle to destroy the Western democracies from within by industrial sabotage, infiltration of their trade unions, and subsidising armed rebellion, especially in colonial countries.¹ However, the Soviet Union ended the Second World War against the Axis powers with huge, well-equipped armies and air forces that had advanced into Europe and occupied territory many hundreds of miles to the west of the former Soviet borders, giving supremo Josef Stalin the military power to continue the expansion of the Russian Empire by less subtle means. The political pressure on the British Prime Minister and the US President to ‘bring the boys home’ had no counterpart in the USSR, ruled by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, whose vague title masked Stalin’s total power over 170 million Russians, other Slavs, Balts, Caucasians and Asian races in the Soviet Union.

At the Potsdam Summit Conference in July 1945 – only two months after the final German surrender – the new US President Harry Truman and the new British Prime Minister Clement Attlee realised that Stalin intended to ‘adjust’ the southern frontier of the USSR, shared with Russia’s traditional enemy Turkey, as though it had been an enemy belligerent in the Second World War, during which it was neutral. Iran being known to have substantial reserves of oil, Stalin also intended to keep significant Soviet forces in that country, through which massive amounts of Western materiel had been delivered to the Soviets during the war.

The agreed date for withdrawal of Western and Soviet forces from Iran was 2 March 1946, on which day British forces in central and southern Iran began to withdraw, but Soviet troops stayed put in the north of the country, not leaving until May 1946 – and then only because Iran was the first country to use the UN Security Council to resolve the deadlock. This was a shot across Stalin’s bows, proving the observation a century earlier by British Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Lord Palmerston:

It has always been the policy and practice of the Russian Government to expand its frontiers as rapidly as the apathy or timidity of neighbouring states would permit, but usually to halt and frequently to recoil when confronted by determined opposition; then to await the next favourable opportunity to spring upon its intended victim.²

Keeping a wary eye on the US Sixth Fleet deployed in the eastern Mediterranean, Stalin did just that, reluctantly complying with the UN resolution.

On 5 March 1946 Britain’s wartime premier Winston Churchill, who had failed to be re-elected in the 1945 General Election, made a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in which he contrasted the realities of life in the Soviet Union with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of civil freedoms epitomised in Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the principle of habeas corpus, trial by jury, English common law and the American Declaration of Independence. He went on to say:

A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lit by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist International organisation intend to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies. I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin. There is deep sympathy and goodwill in Britain – and, I doubt not, here also – towards the peoples of all the Russias and a resolve to persevere through many differences and rebuffs in establishing lasting friendships. We understand the Russians need to be secure on her [sic] western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression. We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome – or should welcome – constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic.

It is my duty however – for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you – to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.³ Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.⁴

Churchill’s oratory was such that the nineteenth-century metaphor ‘Iron Curtain’ was thought by many to be his own creation on the spur of the moment, so graphically did it describe the fate of the Central and Eastern European countries occupied by Soviet troops. Russia’s Central Asian and Caucasian possessions had historically enjoyed few links with the West, but the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland had been part of Europe geographically, politically and culturally – as had been Eastern Germany and Austria, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia. Now, they were like a fast vanishing mirage: geographically still of the Continent but politically distant as their puppet governments imposed by Moscow punished brutally all dissent and any unofficial contact with the West brought severe sanctions.

During a US Congressional debate on 16 April 1947 the American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch labelled the stand-off between the Soviet bloc and the Western democracies for the first time as ‘the Cold War’. Political commentator Walter Lippmann picked up the apt expression and used it as the title of a book. By September, it was in use worldwide because it exactly described the increasingly dangerous tension between the two power blocs, in which the temperature was kept below flashpoint for half a century thanks to nuclear weapons, ensuring that this new kind of war was waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts by the major ‘belligerents’ and would turn hot only on the periphery of their spheres of influence in the form of proxy wars, notably in Korea, Malaya, Vietnam and Africa – and in the Cyprus emergency 1955–59 and the Suez invasion of 1956.

The complete Sovietisation of Central and Eastern Europe began in Russian-occupied Germany and Austria, plus Poland, with Czechoslovakia losing its democratic freedoms in February 1948 and Hungary after the elections of May 1949. The essential technique used was the same everywhere. As recounted by Wolfgang Leonard, one of Walther Ulbricht’s team of puppet leaders in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, they were told by him not to appoint Communists as head of any public authority except the police. The population was deliberately misled about the Soviet takeover by the selection of respected bourgeois figureheads from other parties, who could be controlled behind the scenes by their deputies, all of whom were Communists. Thus, there was an appearance of democracy in local and national governments, but control lay firmly with the Moscow-dominated Communist Party in each country.

The West’s response to this was the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), founded on 4 April 1949 and numbering among its member states Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. Greece, Turkey, West Germany and Spain joined later.

As preparation for NATO, Britain’s Socialist Government led by Clement Attlee brought in the National Service Act of 1948, which introduced for the first time in Britain universal peacetime conscription for all physically fit men aged 18 or over. Being protected from invasion by sea in all directions, the United Kingdom had traditionally relied upon the Royal Navy to police the seaways, and kept a far smaller standing army than most European countries, which had extensive land frontiers to defend. The passing of the Act put 2.3 million young British men in uniform, at first for eighteen months, then from 1950 to 1960 for two years of their lives, followed by three years on the Reserve, liable to recall should the Cold War suddenly heat up. The last conscripts were finally demobilised only in 1963. Of these young men, almost 2 million served in khaki, with 433,000 in RAF blue-grey and a mere handful in the Royal Navy’s bell-bottoms and Jack Tar caps. For the majority of conscripts, especially during endless months of fatigue duties in the army, the enemy was boredom, summed up in the maxim, ‘If it doesn’t move, paint it white. If it does move, salute it.’

Tens of thousands of conscripts did, however, see active service abroad, many of them with the British Army of the Rhine occupying the British zone of occupied Germany. By 1951 British and Commonwealth forces were also engaged in the Korean War (1950–53) alongside predominantly US and South Korean forces and contingents from many other countries, in a war whose grim monochrome images in magazines like Picture Post were far from the genial, jokey world of the TV series MASH. Certainly for 13-year-old boys like the author, aware that they too would be in uniform in just five years’ time, they were scary.

Because the USSR was a member of the United Nations Organisation, US pilots flying Lockheed F-84 and Republic F-80 jets who got into close-quarters dogfights with MiG-15 jets painted in North Korean or Chinese colours, were warned not to speak about the white Caucasian pilots flying them,⁵ who were Second World War Soviet fighter aces sent by Stalin with the 3,000-plus men of his 64th Fighter Corps. Although wearing Chinese uniforms and ordered to use only their basic Korean on the radio, the Russian pilots occasionally resorted to swearing in their own tongue when in a tight corner – which was a bit of a give-away when the transmissions were intercepted. And intercepted they were, as when one pilot announced in March 1953 to a comrade, ‘Stalin umer’ – ‘Stalin has died’.

During that war the Royal Navy kept at least one aircraft carrier on station, as did the Royal Australian Navy. Other Commonwealth countries also sent warships. A National Serviceman named Bill Tidy – later to become a famous cartoonist – found himself detailed off to control the loading and unloading of merchant shipping at one important Korean port. Placed in charge of 2,000 Japanese dockers, he rose to the occasion but, wearing only a corporal’s stripes, was surprised at first by the excessive traditional Japanese respect shown by his work force to their two-stripe ‘general’.⁶

Less fortunate young Britons found themselves fighting in the hostile winter climate of the Korean mountains against human waves of North Korean and Red Chinese soldiers, most famously at the vehicular ford across the Injin River, a traditional invasion route targeting the South Korean capital, Seoul. On 22 April 1951, 650 men of the Gloucestershire Regiment found themselves attacked from all sides by a complete division of 10,000 Red Chinese soldiers. Equipped with no radios, the Chinese commanders transmitted orders by bugle call, causing a British bugler to be ordered to sound various British Army calls in the hope of confusing the enemy.

They certainly confused his own side. Just forty of the ‘Glorious Glosters’ escaped back to their own lines, leaving over 600 men dead, wounded or force-marched as prisoners of war (POWs) to death camps and brainwashing sessions on starvation rations in the north.

A contributory factor in the disaster was said to be a British commander back at headquarters telling his American opposite number, ‘Things are getting a bit sticky at the ford’. The typical tight-lipped British understatement was misinterpreted as meaning that massive US artillery support was unnecessary when it might have given the besieged men a chance to break out.

Soviet expansion into Central and Eastern Europe post-1945.

In 1953 Soviet infantry and tanks were used on the streets of Germany’s divided capital to suppress the 17 June uprising against Moscow’s puppet government of the so-called German Democratic Republic (GDR). Western forces watched across the Potsdamer Platz, but did not intervene. Although direct conflict between the two superpowers was generally avoided, French forces in the colonies of Indochina fought their own war against the Communist Viet Minh from 1946 to 1954, when Washington’s refusal to actively support the government in Paris saw that war fizzle out after the massive French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. Having allowed the French colonial and Foreign Legion forces to bleed to death in Indochina, Washington then sent more than half a million American troops to Vietnam after France signed a peace treaty with Ho Chi Minh, thus prolonging the agony of the Vietnamese people by nearly two decades of increasingly industrial-scale destruction and killing, in which millions died, but open conflict between the superpowers was again avoided.

The United Kingdom’s parallel ‘hot war’ was in Malaya (1948–60), where the British-trained Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army of guerrilla fighters had been disbanded in December 1945. Despite various incentives to hand in their weapons, some 4,000 mainly Chinese fighters controlled by the Malayan Communist Party went underground – actually under the trees of the jungle – fighting an anti-colonial war to drive out the returning British authorities. The conflict was never officially dubbed a war because London insurance companies would not have compensated the British owners of tin mines and rubber plantations that were sabotaged and destroyed. So it was quietly agreed that this was to be called ‘the Emergency’. It became more than an emergency when the defoliant Agent Orange was sprayed from the air as a weapon of war onto jungle sheltering the insurgents and onto civilians’ crop fields – provoking genetic damage which is still blighting a third generation of sufferers – and in the process providing President Kennedy with a precedent for using Agent Orange in Vietnam with even worse effects.

Commonwealth troops from as far away as Fiji and Rhodesia were drafted into Malaya where, despite an amnesty offered to the guerrillas in the jungle in September 1955, the war that dared not say its name continued.

On the other side of the globe in Hungary, virtually an entire nation rose up against Soviet oppression and the Soviet-controlled secret police in October and November of 1956 in a rebellion that cost 2,500 Hungarian lives and countless injured. Nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians grabbed the moment when the frontier was unguarded to flee into Western Europe and claim political asylum.⁷ It was at this point in the sometimes hot Cold War that the author and his coevals entered the lists, although not as combatants.

In a turf battle between the British external intelligence organisation known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the domestic counter-intelligence service designated MI5, the latter won the job of carrying out counter-intelligence in Malaya. (Knowledge of this curious arrangement would later enable the author to identify an MI5 watcher at JSSL Crail.)

After the Malayan Emergency ended officially on 31 July 1960, Britain’s National Servicemen who were unfortunate enough to become involved in this dirty war were reborn as the unlikely heroes of the light-hearted 1969 film The Virgin Soldiers.

National Servicemen also risked being killed and had to kill others in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising (1952–60) and in the Franco-British-Israeli Suez Invasion (October–December 1956). Although Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden famously told the House of Commons that the invasion was not a war but just ‘a state of armed hostilities’, young Britons died, were wounded or suffered post-traumatic stress there. A 19-year-old Liverpudlian friend of the author, while on night sentry duty in a British camp near Suez, saw an intruder crawl under the perimeter wire, challenged him, received no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1 – 2.3 Million Men
• Part 2 – School for Spies
• Part 3 – Berlin Days
• Part 4 – One Man’s Story – Solitary in Potsdam
• Further Reading in English
• Places to Visit
• Notes and Sources
• Picture Section