Elliott spent the three-week passage to Lagos playing bridge with an SOE officer ‘who was being sent out to Angola to blow things up’, taking his turn to man the ancient Japanese gun mounted on the stern, and tucking into a ‘well-stocked bar’. Although never a drinker in Philby’s league, Elliott was a keen tippler – despite his diabetes, which he treated merely by avoiding sugar. Most of his colleagues were entirely unaware that he was diabetic; with typical recklessness Elliott was not about to let his health stand in the way of a good time. When the ship put in at Freetown, he was greeted on the quayside by Graham Greene, who was now the somewhat disgruntled MI6 representative in Sierra Leone – a good place to gather material for fiction, but an intelligence backwater. Greene took one look at Elliott and proclaimed him ‘the tattiest army officer I had ever seen’. Over a drink, Greene explained that his principal concern was ‘the shortage of contraceptives in Sierra Leone’, a problem Elliott ‘managed to alleviate through the generosity of some of our passengers’. Elliott assumed these were for Greene’s personal use: in fact, the future novelist had set up a ‘roving brothel’ to entice secrets out of ‘two lonely Germans suspected of spying on British shipping’, and his brothel workers were demanding protection from venereal disease.
In Lagos, Elliott transferred to a Dakota transport plane, and five days later he reached Cairo, after hopscotching across Africa via Kano, Fort Lamy, El Fasher and Khartoum. On reporting to Intelligence Headquarters, Elliott was informed that his first job was to take a lorry-load of confidential files to Jerusalem for safekeeping, before travelling on to Beirut. He would then catch the fabled Taurus Express to Turkey.
The elderly train puffed slowly up the Taurus Mountains and then ambled gently across the Anatolian plateau to Ankara, and on to Istanbul, never exceeding thirty miles an hour and stopping frequently for no discernible reason. The food in the restaurant car was excellent, and Elliott found the journey a ‘delight’, made still more pleasant still by the company of his new secretary, a young Englishwoman named Elizabeth Holberton.
Elliott was rather struck by Miss Holberton. She had spent the early part of the war in the Motorised Transport Corps, driving Jeeps in the desert, before becoming a secretary at General Headquarters (GHQ) in Cairo. She was quick-witted, resourceful, beautiful in a demure sort of way, a devoted Catholic and quite posh. Her father was a former managing director of the Bombay Burmah Trading Company and her mother descended from a long line of Irish judges. They got on famously. When the train ran out of supplies of water, the conductor brought Elizabeth a bottle of Turkish Cointreau in which to brush her teeth. She declared the experience refreshing. Elliott liked that.
Ankara was the diplomatic capital of Turkey, but the major powers kept embassies in Istanbul, on the cusp between Europe and Asia; this was where the serious spying was done. Britain’s ambassador to Turkey was Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen, a diplomat of the old school who spent much of his time on the ambassadorial yacht and was, perhaps inevitably, an Old Etonian friend of Elliott’s father. Hugessen adopted an attitude of ‘pained tolerance’ towards the activities of British intelligence in Turkey. Formally a junior diplomat, Elliott joined a swiftly expanding, multi-layered British intelligence force under the overall command of Lieutenant Colonel Harold Gibson, a veteran MI6 professional of ‘great ability and energy’. ‘Gibbie’ oversaw a vast system of intelligence-gathering and agent-running, extending from Turkey into Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia and Hungary. As the representative of Section V, Elliott’s task was to undermine enemy intelligence operations, principally those of the Abwehr. Gibson gave Elliott a fairly free rein to explore and attack espionage targets in Turkey, and there were plenty to choose from.
Istanbul was ‘one of the great espionage entrepôts of the war’, in the words of MI6’s official historian. The city was just forty miles from Nazi-occupied Bulgaria; it was Germany’s gateway to the Middle East, and an access point for the Allies into occupied Europe. The Turks feared the Germans, distrusted the Soviets, and felt little love for either the British or the Americans. But the authorities were prepared to tolerate espionage by foreign powers, so long as this did not impinge on Turkish sovereignty, and the spies did not get caught. By 1942, some seventeen different intelligence organisations had converged on Istanbul, to mix and mingle, bribe, seduce and betray, and with them came a vast and motley host of agents and double agents, smugglers, blackmailers, arms dealers, drug-runners, refugees, deserters, black-marketeers, pimps, forgers, hookers and spivs. Rumours and secrets, some of them true, whirled around the bars and back alleys. Everyone spied on everyone else; the Turkish secret police, the Emniyet, spied on all. Some Turkish officials were prepared to cooperate on intelligence sharing, if the price was right, but every so often, if the spying became too brazen or insufficiently remunerative, the Emniyet would stage an arrest. The spy battle was intense, and oddly intimate. The head of the Abwehr was on nodding terms with his opposite numbers in MI6 and Soviet intelligence. ‘Everyone was well informed as to the identity of everyone else,’ wrote Elliott. When one or other of the intelligence chiefs entered the ballroom of the Park Hotel, the band would strike up the song ‘Boo, Boo, Baby, I’m a Spy’:
I’m involved in a dangerous game,
Every other day I change my name,
The face is different but the body’s the same,
Boo, boo, baby, I’m a spy!
You have heard of Mata Hari,
We did business cash and carry,
Poppa caught us and we had to marry,
Boo, boo, baby, I’m a spy!
Now, as a lad, I’m not so bad,
In fact, I’m a darn good lover,
But look my sweet, let’s be discreet,
And do this under cover.
I’m so cocky I could swagger,
The things I know would make you stagger,
I’m ten percent cloak and ninety percent dagger,
Boo, boo, baby, I’m a spy!
But the dagger beneath the cloak was razor sharp. Just two months before Elliott’s arrival, a Macedonian student had attempted to assassinate the German ambassador Franz von Papen, but the bomb exploded prematurely, blowing up the assassin and only injuring the German diplomat. Moscow blamed the Gestapo; the Germans blamed the Allies; von Papen suspected the British. The plot was almost certainly the work of the Soviet NKVD. A year earlier, a German suitcase bomb planted in the lobby at the Pera Palace Hotel had killed a member of the British consular staff, and badly injured the vice consul, Chantry Page. Espionage in Istanbul, as the MI6 station chief Harold Gibson observed, was ‘not a kid glove affair’.
Elliott was immediately seduced by Istanbul’s sleazy glamour. He moved into an office in the embassy ‘crammed from top to bottom with intelligence operatives engaged in various aspects of skulduggery’, and a garden surprisingly full of copulating tortoises, and plunged into the espionage fray. On his first evening he was swept up by Major Bernard O’Leary, an enormous multilingual former cavalry officer, ‘extremely erudite, but irredeemably idle’, who was responsible for liaison with Turkish intelligence. O’Leary announced they were going to Taksim’s, the spy centre of Istanbul, a cross between a restaurant, a nightclub, a cabaret and a casino. ‘Its clientele,’ wrote Elliott, ‘combined the representatives – mainly engaged in espionage – of all the Axis and Allied powers.’ Taksim’s was run by a charming White Russian who accepted bribes from everyone, without favouritism, and endeavoured to place rival spies at adjacent tables to facilitate eavesdropping. The waitresses were said to be former Czarist duchesses. Nothing at Taksim’s was quite as it seemed. One night Elliott was admiring the club’s resident belly-dancer, a stunning woman with ‘white-coloured skin and jet black hair’, when she fell off the stage, twisted an ankle and swore loudly in a thick Yorkshire accent: she was from Bradford. When not at Taksim’s, Elliott might be found at Ellie’s Bar, a favourite watering-hole of British military personnel that served ‘a ferocious dry Martini with the kick of a horse’. Ellie was buxom, blonde and thought to be Romanian. She ‘spoke excellent English, and purported to fear and hate the Germans’. In fact, Elliott discovered, she was in German pay, employed by the Abwehr to get British officers as drunk as possible in the hope that they would eventually divulge valuable information.