Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat by Giles Milton

Author:Giles Milton [Milton, Giles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, biography, WWII
ISBN: 9781250119049
Google: dMTVCwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1250119022
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2017-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

12

Czech-Mate

IN THE NINE months that Margaret Jackson had been working for Colin Gubbins, she had come to realize that there was something extraordinary about her job. Unlike everyone else in the country, who were ‘dependent on newspapers or what had been censored’ for their daily news, she was ‘in direct touch with what was happening abroad’.1 She also knew of decisions being taken at the highest level, for it was she who typed up the notes about the work being undertaken at the secret stations and she who kept the records of Gubbins’s meetings with the chiefs of staff. Indeed she was privy to all the undercover operations being planned across Europe. If ever she had been abducted by the Nazis, she could have revealed priceless information.

One of Gubbins’s responsibilities was to liaise with the Czech government-in-exile, which Winston Churchill had recognized as a representative body in the summer of 1941. Baker Street had already agreed to start training the Czech soldiers who had fled to Britain more than a year earlier and had also accepted ‘that an essential pre-condition of any future operations was the establishment of a secure radio link with the Protectorate’.2 A Czech volunteer was trained for this role, but it took many months and ‘several false starts’ before he was finally dropped into the country by air. He was accidentally landed in Austria, instead of Bohemia, but eventually managed to slip across the border. Henceforth, London and Prague were in radio contact.

As early as September 1941, the Czechs had revealed to Gubbins that they were planning a mission of such secrecy that neither MI6, nor any senior British politician, was to be informed. The secret came directly from Colonel Frantisck Moravec, the wily head of Czech intelligence, who was based in London and working alongside his government-in-exile. Moravec and his staff had fled their native Czechoslovakia eighteen months earlier, flying out in the teeth of a blizzard at the very moment Hitler’s storm-troopers were marching across the frontier.

Moravec had been deeply depressed to flee his native land, for he was leaving everything behind. ‘My wife and children were lost to me, abandoned in the stricken country below, somewhere under the swirling flakes, left to the mercies of the invaders.’3 There was just one cause for optimism. He had spent several months directing the activities of a German double agent who was working against the Nazis: the experience had taught him that ‘even a brutal police state like Hitler’s could be penetrated’.4

The penetration he was now planning was little short of spectacular, as he confessed to Gubbins at their September meeting. The Czech president-in-exile, Eduard Beneš (who was nominally running Czechoslovakia from a suburban villa in Gwendolen Avenue, Putney), ‘had sanctioned a terrorist attack on some prominent personality’5 in the Nazi government in Prague. When Gubbins pressed Moravec further, he learned that this prominent personality was none other than the Reichsprotektor, Reinhard Heydrich.

Heydrich was a spectacular target, as Gubbins well knew. Appointed Reich Protector of Bohemia

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