Moscow did, however, make life quite complicated for Sonia for a period, and caused her to take a little more care as to her cover and her activities. Just before the outbreak of war the Red Army had sent her a new recruit in the shape of "Alex." Alex was in fact a German who had fought in the International Brigade and had been sent to Sonia to set up another secret wireless set in Switzerland, which was to work as subordinate to Sonia's and also as a stopgap in case her set broke down or was seized. Had Sonia been allowed to continue to run her network into Germany the second set would have proved useful to carry the overflow of traffic which time would not allow her to carry on her set and in her schedules. It would also have proved invaluable to me later when I was passing the majority of the traffic out of Switzerland, since it would have enabled me to remain for a shorter time on the air with my own set. As it was, I had to transmit almost throughout the night, a procedure which was asking for trouble from the Swiss police and the German monitoring.
Moscow, however, had been rather too ingenious, and Alex (Franz Ahlmann) proved in the end far more of a liability than an asset. He had been sent to us on a Finnish passport allegedly issued in Canada. His documentation as such was perfect, and on paper he could pass anywhere- and indeed he arrived from Moscow via France without question. Unfortunately Alex could speak neither English nor Finnish, with one of which languages he must have had at least a bowing acquaintance had his papers been genuine. This Swiss police were not slow in discovering. That in itself would not have been damaging, but unfortunately they raided his room when he was out and discovered in it a large quantity of wireless parts with which he was in the process of making a new transmitter. That also might have been laughed off as over-enthusiasm by an amateur wireless enthusiast- but unfortunately he had been at Sonia's once when the police called on a routine check up.
Subsequent events showed that the Swiss in this case were singularly obtuse or singularly kind and did not connect the litter of wireless parts in Alex's apartment with the quiet little villa at Caux. One reason was that the police officer in charge of the case had been blown up by an infernal machine which, in the course of his duties, he was attempting to immobilise. The affair caused some stir at the time as it was one of the earliest outward manifestations of the silent espionage war which was to rage in Switzerland for the next six years. We never knew whose bomb it was.
The whole affair shook Sonia severely and she thenceforth kept her transmitter buried in the garden- except for the times when it was actually in use. This increased the security of operations immeasurably (as opposed to the earlier, careless days when the whole thing was strewn about the house) but added equally greatly to the difficulty of working. For anyone who wishes to indulge in espionage, I do not recommend digging in a flower bed for a biscuit tin containing the essential bits of a transmitter with the scheduled time for a transmission fast approaching. It may be romantic and in the best tradition, but it is also exceedingly difficult and rather humiliating. Sonia's tulip bed was not improved, and the set developed the faults that might be expected to result from prolonged interment. We were not altogether pleased with the arrival of Alex and felt that the troubles he brought in his wake, which were not really his fault but resulted from the over enthusiasm of Moscow, greatly outweighed his potential value. Alex was to remain a headache for me throughout my stay in Switzerland. The Swiss were kind to him, and though they may have had a shrewd idea as to his potential activities they merely interned him as a foreigner whose papers were out of order, and he was put on forced labour for the rest of the war. His position was not unpleasant as he had a certain amount of freedom and I was able to help him in a variety of ways. He was a perpetual drain on the rather limited finances of our organisation because Moscow ordered that he was to be kept in comfort. He passed a pleasant if slightly tedious war.
The only task Moscow gave us at this time was to send a courier from Switzerland to contact the wife and family of Thaelmann, the German Communist leader, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis. For this task Sonia sent her aged maid, Lisa Brockel, who managed to get an aller et retour visa without difficulty. After a certain amount of trouble she contacted Thaelmann's wife, who stated that Thaelmann himself was in Hamburg prison and, considering all things, fairly comfortable. The maid was not fully in the picture regarding Sonia's espionage activities, but as she had been with the family for years and was devoted to Alfred Schultz, she obviously had a pretty shrewd idea as to what was going on. It was indeed her devotion to Schultz himself which caused the next crisis in our lives and nearly led to disaster.
Sonia was increasingly dissatisfied with the life and work and wished to return to England. The main obstacle, apart from Moscow's views, was of course her German passport. Therefore, in order to get British nationality, she managed to persuade Bill to agree to marry her if she could get a divorce from Schultz. She managed to obtain a divorce in the Swiss courts early in 1940, and straight away married Bill and was thus entitled to a British passport. This whole scheme was explained to Lisa, who was extremely distressed at this apparent disloyalty to her master. Sonia explained that the marriage was to be in name alone and that she had no intention of being unfaithful to Schultz but was merely adding one more to the numerous mariages blancs which were taking place in Switzerland at the time purely for the purpose of acquiring legal papers.
All would have been well had the scheme gone as planned, but there was another factor which had not been considered. Bill and Sonia fell deeply in love, and it was perfectly obvious that this was anything but a mariage de convenance. This disloyalty to Alfred's memory was more than Lisa could bear and she resolved to end it by desperate means. She thereupon rang up the British Consulate and denounced Sonia and Bill as Soviet spies and told them where the transmitter was hidden. As luck would have it, her English was so bad that no one at the consulate could understand what she was saying, and she was cut off by a bored clerk who merely added her name to the list of lunatics who pestered the consulate daily. It was perfectly obvious that as long as she remained in Switzerland- or Sonia and Bill remained in love - she would be a perpetual danger to us all. After endless argument she consented to return to her home in Germany. She was a faithful old thing and I was fond of and sorry for her. Had sex not reared its ugly head she would have been with us to the end, but it was too dangerous to have a weak link in the chain. It was bad enough to have the head of the network and your fellow operative acting like a honeymoon couple, without the thought that at any moment the faithful retainer might try yet another denunciation- and perhaps with more success.