The Secret Agent's Bedside Reader by Michael Smith

Author:Michael Smith [Michael Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849548199
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Extracted from Adventures of a British Master Spy: The Memoirs of Sidney Reilly by Sidney Reilly (first published by Harper & Brothers in 1933 and due to be published by Biteback in 2014)

THE SPY WHO SAVED 10,000 JEWS

HUBERT POLLACK

I first heard the name Frank Foley in 1995. I was working on a book about Britain’s spies and interviewed two former MI6 officers who looked after the Service’s archives. At the end of our conversation, I asked them if there was anything they wanted to tell me, to bring out into the open.

There was. Two of their former officers deserved to be better known than they were – an unusual suggestion from an organisation as secretive as MI6. One was Sidney Cotton, who appears in the next chapter, the other was Frank Foley, the Service’s bureau chief in ’30s Berlin, who was still held up to new recruits as a brilliant agent-runner but whose main claim to fame was that he had saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis.

‘One of the most interesting things about Foley was that normally to be a good case officer you need to be a bit of a shit,’ one of the former MI6 officers said; agent-runners might sometimes have to drop an agent, or put him in a position where he was forced to do something he didn’t want to do, or worse. ‘But Foley managed to be a brilliant case officer and a near saint. Schindler pales into insignificance alongside his work on getting Jews out of Germany. He was a very able man, who never got the recognition he deserved.’

It seemed unlikely that someone might have saved tens of thousands of Jews and no one knew anything about him, but I set out to find out more about Foley and eventually wrote his biography, collecting first-hand testimony by a number of living witnesses which persuaded Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial organisation, to name him as Righteous Among the Nations.

It was well deserved. The cases here would have been relatively routine for Foley. He also went into concentration camps to get Jews out and in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938, when all Jewish men were being taken to concentration camps, he hid four or five in his flat every night, providing them with the documentation they needed to escape, in most cases visas, in some false passports.

This remarkable testimony comes from one of Foley’s own agents. Hubert Pollack not only worked for MI6 but also with Mossad le Aliyah Beth, the Zionist organisation which smuggled Jews into Palestine.

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