In the summer of 1938, Basil Fisher took a job in the City, while Elliott wondered idly what to do with himself. The Old Boys soon solved that. Elliott was playing in a cricket match at Eton that summer when, during the tea interval, he was approached by Sir Nevile Bland, a senior diplomat and a family friend, who tactfully observed that Elliott’s father was concerned by his son’s ‘inability to get down to a solid job of work’. (Sir Claude preferred to speak to his son through emissaries.) Sir Nevile explained that he had recently been appointed Britain’s Minister at The Hague, in the Netherlands. Would Nicholas like to accompany him as honorary attaché? Elliott said he would like that very much, despite having no idea what an honorary attaché might actually do. ‘There was no serious vetting procedure,’ Elliott later wrote. ‘Nevile simply told the Foreign Office that I was all right because he knew me and had been at Eton with my father.’
Before leaving, Elliott underwent a course in code-training at the Foreign Office. His instructor was one Captain John King, a veteran cipher clerk who was also, as it happened, a Soviet spy. King had been passing Foreign Office telegrams to Moscow since 1934. Elliott’s first tutor in secrecy was a double agent.
Elliott arrived at The Hague, in his Hillman Minx in the middle of November 1938, and reported to the legation. After dinner, Sir Nevile offered him a warning: ‘in the diplomatic service it is a sackable offence to sleep with the wife of a colleague’ – and some advice: ‘I suggest you should do as I do and not light your cigar until you have started your third glass of port.’ Elliott’s duties were hardly onerous: a little light bag-carrying for the minister, some coding and decoding in the wireless room, and attending formal dinners.
Elliott had been in the Netherlands only four months when he got his first taste of clandestine work and an ‘opportunity to see the German war machine at first hand’. One evening, over dinner, he fell into conversation with a young naval officer named Glyn Hearson, the assistant naval attaché at the embassy in Berlin. Commander Hearson confided that he was on a special mission to spy on the port of Hamburg, where the Germans were believed to be developing midget submarines. After a few more glasses, Hearson asked Elliott if he would care to join him. Elliott thought this a splendid idea. Sir Nevile gave his approval.
Two days later, at three in the morning, Elliott and Hearson broke into Hamburg port by climbing over the wall. ‘We discreetly poked our noses all over the place for about an hour,’ taking photographs, before ‘returning to safety and a stiff drink’. Elliott had no diplomatic cover and no training, and Hearson had no authority to recruit him for the mission. Had they been caught, they might have been shot as spies; at the very least, the news that the son of the Eton headmaster had been caught snooping around a German naval dockyard in the middle of the night would have set off a diplomatic firestorm. It was, Elliott happily admitted, ‘a singularly foolhardy exploit’. But it had been most enjoyable, and highly successful. They drove on to Berlin in high spirits.
The twentieth of April 1939 was Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, a national holiday in Nazi Germany, and the occasion for the largest military parade in the history of the Third Reich. Organised by propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, the festivities marked a high point of the Hitler cult, a lavish display of synchronised sycophancy. A torchlight parade and cavalcade of fifty white limousines, led by the Führer, was followed by a fantastic five-hour exhibition of military muscle, involving 50,000 German troops, hundreds of tanks and 162 warplanes. The ambassadors of Britain, France and the United States did not attend, having been withdrawn after Hitler’s march on Czechoslovakia, but some twenty-three other countries sent representatives to wish Hitler a happy birthday. ‘The Führer is feted like no other mortal has ever been,’ gushed Goebbels in his diary.
Elliott watched the celebrations, with a mixture of awe and horror, from a sixth-floor apartment in the Charlottenburger Chaussee belonging to General Nöel Mason-MacFarlane, the British military attaché in Berlin. ‘Mason-Mac’ was a whiskery old warhorse, a decorated veteran of the trenches and Mesopotamia. He could not hide his disgust. From the balcony of the apartment there was a clear view of Hitler on his saluting podium. Under his breath, the general remarked to Elliott that the Führer was well within rifle range: ‘I am tempted to take advantage of this,’ he muttered, adding that he could ‘pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking’. Elliott ‘strongly urged him to take a pot shot’. Mason-MacFarlane thought better of the idea, though he later made a formal request to be allowed to assassinate Hitler from his balcony. Sadly for the world, the offer was turned down.
Elliott returned to The Hague with two new-minted convictions: that Hitler must be stopped at all costs, and that the best way of contributing to that end would be to become a spy. ‘My mind was easily made up.’ A day at Ascot, a glass of fizz with Sir Robert Vansittart and a meeting with an important person in Whitehall did the rest. Elliott returned to The Hague still officially an honorary attaché, but in reality, with Sir Nevile Bland’s blessing, a new recruit to MI6. Outwardly, his diplomatic life continued as before; secretly, he began his novitiate in the strange religion of British intelligence.
Sir Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Office mandarin who smoothed Elliott’s way into MI6, ran what was, in effect, a private intelligence agency, outside the official orbit of government but with close links to both MI6 and MI5, the Security Service. Vansittart was a fierce opponent of appeasement, convinced that Germany would start another war ‘just as soon as it feels strong enough’. His network of spies gathered copious intelligence on Nazi intentions, with which he tried (and failed) to persuade Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of the looming confrontation. One of his earliest and most colourful informants was Jona von Ustinov, a German journalist and fierce secret opponent of Nazism. Ustinov was universally known as ‘Klop’ – Russian slang for bedbug – a nickname that derived from his rotund appearance, of which he was, oddly, intensely proud. Ustinov’s father was a Russian-born army officer; his mother was half-Ethiopian and half-Jewish; his son, born in 1921, was Peter Ustinov, the great comic actor and writer. Klop Ustinov had served in the German army during the First World War, winning an Iron Cross, before taking up a post with the German Press Agency in London. He lost his job in 1935 when the German authorities, suspicious of his exotically mixed heritage, demanded proof of his Aryanism. That same year he was recruited as a British agent, codenamed ‘U35’. Ustinov was fat and monocled, with a deceptively bumbling demeanour. He was ‘the best and most ingenious operator I had the honour to work with’, later declared his case officer, Dick White, who would go on to head both MI5 and MI6.
Elliott’s first job for MI6 was to help Ustinov run one of the most important and least known pre-war spies. Wolfgang Gans Edler zu Putlitz was the press attaché at the German embassy in London, a luxury-loving aristocrat and a flamboyant homosexual. Ustinov recruited Putlitz and began to extract what was described as ‘priceless intelligence, possibly the most important human-source intelligence Britain received in the prewar period’, on German foreign policy and military plans. Putlitz and Ustinov shared Vansittart’s conviction that the policy of appeasement had to be reversed: ‘I was really helping to damage the Nazi cause,’ Putlitz believed. When Putlitz was posted to the German embassy at The Hague in 1938, Klop Ustinov had discreetly followed him, posing as the European correspondent of an Indian newspaper. With Ustinov as go-between, Putlitz continued to supply reams of intelligence, though he was frustrated by Britain’s apparent unwillingness to confront Hitler. ‘The English are hopeless,’ he complained. ‘It is no use trying to help them to withstand the Nazi methods which they so obviously fail to understand.’ He began to feel he was ‘sacrificing himself for no purpose’.