Having spirited no fewer than four defectors out of Istanbul, Elliott followed them to Britain. He travelled by train to Lebanon, and then on by air via Cairo, Algiers and Casablanca, before finally arriving at Newquay, Cornwall, after an ‘exceedingly tedious and uncomfortable’ journey lasting more than a week.
Kim Philby, ever helpful, had offered the use of his mother’s Kensington flat as a place to house the Vermehrens on their arrival in London. The defection was so secret that not even MI5 knew they were in the country. Elliott went straight to Dora Philby’s flat in Drayton Gardens, South Kensington, where he was greeted by a beaming Philby, and reunited with the Vermehrens. Over the next fortnight, Philby and Elliott put the couple through a friendly, detailed and rigorous debriefing. Vermehren had worked for the Abwehr for only a few months, yet the information he had to impart was supremely valuable: the structure of German intelligence, its operations in the Middle East, the identities of its officers and agents; Elisabeth Vermehren furnished chapter and verse on the Catholic underground resistance in Germany. The Vermehrens’ piety made them quite irritating. Whereas most spies are compelled by a variety of motives, including adventure, idealism and avarice, and can thus be manipulated, the Vermehrens served only God, which made them unpredictable and occasionally uncooperative. ‘They are so God-awful conscientious you never know what they’re going to do next,’ Elliott complained to Philby in exasperation, after sitting through another of Vermehren’s religious homilies. Vermehren was codenamed ‘Precious’, because that is what he was, in more ways than one.
During a break in the debriefing process, Elliott at last had an opportunity to meet his parents-in-law, which might have been a confusing experience for someone less familiar with the eccentricities of the British upper class. Sir Edgar Holberton turned out to be convivial, pompous and distinctly odd. Years in the tropics had left him with a peculiar verbal habit: every so often, and quite without warning, he would say something entirely inappropriate. Elliott met Sir Edgar for lunch at his club. The older man launched into an exceptionally boring disquisition on the Chilean economy, and then suddenly observed, without breaking stride: ‘I don’t mind telling you, my boy, that I too kept a Burmese girl in Rangoon. Didn’t cost me a penny more than £20 a month.’ Conversation with Sir Edgar, Elliott reflected, was an ‘obstacle race with frequent jumps’.
Some of the material extracted from the Vermehrens was deemed of sufficient value to be passed on to Britain’s allies. Moscow was informed that Vermehren had revealed that certain Turkish officials were passing information to the Abwehr. The Soviets protested loudly over this violation of Turkish neutrality, and Turkey immediately ceased all ‘German-Turkish intelligence exchanges regarding the USSR’. But many of the defectors’ revelations, notably those relating to the anti-communist resistance organisation in Germany, were considered far too sensitive to be shared with the Soviet Union. More than a year later, Moscow was still complaining that it had not seen a full account of Vermehren’s debriefing.
The news of Vermehren’s defection was carefully leaked. The Associated Press reported: ‘The twenty-four-year-old attaché and his wife declared that they had deserted the Germans because they were disgusted with Nazi brutality. He is said to possess detailed information of the greatest value.’ MI5 was annoyed to discover that the defection was being exclusively handled by MI6. ‘If an enemy alien is to be brought here solely for the purposes of his being pumped for information he should, I think, be under our control,’ wrote Guy Liddell. This was pure professional jealousy. In securing Vermehren’s defection, MI6 trumpeted that Elliott had struck an ‘outstanding blow’ against the enemy: the information he brought was useful enough in terms of intelligence, but the symbolic impact of his defection on Germany was quite shattering.
Hitler is said to have ‘exploded’ when told of Vermehren’s defection. For some time, he had suspected (rightly) that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and many of his fellow Abwehr officers were less than fully loyal to the Nazi project, and secretly conspiring with the enemy. Here was proof. Hitler also believed (wrongly) that Vermehren had taken the Abwehr’s secret code books with him. Anyone who had aided, or even merely known the Vermehrens, was now under suspicion. Vermehren’s father, mother, sisters and brother were all rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps. Hitler summoned Canaris for a ferocious dressing down, and told him the Abwehr was falling apart. With more bravery than tact, Canaris replied that this was ‘hardly surprising given that Germany was losing the war’. Two weeks later Hitler abolished the Abwehr, and created a new, over-arching intelligence service under Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst. Canaris was shuffled into a meaningless job, placed under effective house arrest and finally, following the failure of the July Plot in 1944, executed. The Abwehr might have been corrupt, inefficient and partly disloyal, but it was, at least, a functioning worldwide intelligence service. The defections set off a chain reaction that destroyed it utterly, just three months before D-Day. In the words of the historian Michael Howard, German intelligence was ‘thrown into a state of confusion just at the moment when its efficient functioning was vital to the survival of the Third Reich’.
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Nicholas Elliott was now the darling of MI6. An internal assessment concluded that he had handled the case with ‘consummate skill and sympathy, but with just the necessary touch of firmness’. Some of the glory rubbed off on Philby, who had helped orchestrate the defections from afar, and then debriefed the Vermehrens in his mother’s flat. The operation, it seemed, had ended in complete triumph. Elliott would ‘dine out’ on this success for a very long time, but the wining and dining began immediately, in celebration of Elliott’s ‘dazzling coup’.
It was through Philby that Elliott met the gaunt but convivial young American, James Jesus Angleton. The three intelligence officers became firm friends, and spent a good deal of time in each other’s company, from which Elliott emerged ‘formidably impressed both by Jim’s intellect and his personality, as well as by his enjoyment and capacity for food and drink’. Angleton had taken to wearing a Homburg, like Philby, and he peered out from underneath it through heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Beneath the rather sinister mystique was a very likeable man,’ Elliott recorded, ‘with a formidable personality and breadth of vision.’ Angleton and Elliott had much in common: fierce ambition, daunting fathers and, of course, a shared admiration for Kim Philby.
Before heading back to Istanbul, Elliott was summoned to MI6 headquarters by the head of security, a former soldier newly appointed to oversee vetting and secrecy procedures within the diplomatic service and MI6. This was an issue that had never been raised before with Elliott, who was almost pathologically discreet. ‘At that time, secrets were secrets,’ he wrote. But he now wondered if he had let his guard down in some way, or spilled some information to the wrong person. He need not have worried. The ensuing conversation, which he wrote down afterwards, said a great deal about the organisation of which Elliott was now a most valued part: