Description: British Agent by John Whitwell (Pseudonym of Leslie Nicholson) Introduction by Malcolm Muggeridge This is the June 1966 Second Impression “In 1929 I came over to London on leave from the Army of Occupation in Wiesbaden. Whilst I was there I telephoned a senior official in Military Intelligence to find out if something could be done about finding a retirement job for a corporal in the Occupation H.Q,. who was a first class interpreter. As a result of this chance telephone call, I met a 'plain clothes' intelligence man and, after several meetings, he suggested that I resign my commission and enter a new field.” Front cover and spine Further images of this book are shown below Publisher and place of publication Dimensions in inches (to the nearest quarter-inch) London: William Kimber, 46 Wilton Place, London S.W.1 5½ inches wide x 8¾ inches tall Edition Length June 1966 Second Impression [first published April 1966] 224 pages Condition of covers Internal condition Original paper-covered boards blocked in gilt on the spine. The covers are rubbed but remain reasonably bright, having been protected by the dust-jacket. The spine ends and corners are bumped (particularly the tail of the spine) and there are some indentations along the edges of the boards (the most prominent being on the front top edge). The text is clean throughout on paper which has yellowed with age (more noticeably in the margins). The edge of the text block is dust-stained and foxed. The foxing also occasionally extends slightly into the margins. There is a noticeable fusty smell. Dust-jacket present? Other comments Yes: however, the dust-jacket is scuffed and rubbed and there is chipping and slight creasing around the edges (and particularly at the ends of the spine panel). The inside is lightly foxed. The dust-jacket is not price-clipped, with the original price of 30 shillings still intact. This Second Impression is very clean internally, though with foxed edges, while the dust-jacket is creased around the edges but generally in good order. There is, however, a noticeable fusty smell. Illustrations, maps, etc Contents No illustrations are called for; there are three maps within the text (all shown below). Please see below for details Post & shipping information Payment options The packed weight is approximately 550 grams. Full shipping/postage information is provided in a panel at the end of this listing. Payment options : UK buyers: cheque (in GBP), debit card, credit card (Visa, MasterCard but not Amex), PayPal International buyers: credit card (Visa, MasterCard but not Amex), PayPal Full payment information is provided in a panel at the end of this listing. British Agent Contents Introduction by Malcolm Muggeridge One Introduction in Vienna Two Assignment in Prague Three The Critical £1,000 Four Riga as a Base Five Shadows of Munich Six Communications Seven On the Brink of War Eight War Stations Nine Between Molotov and Ribbentrop Ten Russia Moves In Eleven Journey Home Twelve Neutral Background Thirteen The First News of Barbarossa Fourteen London Interlude Fifteen The Spy Who Came in from the Heat Epilogue Index List of Maps Central Europe as it was in 1934, showing the boundaries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire The Baltic States as they were previous to the 1939-45 War The Author's Journey from Riga to London in 1940 British Agent Excerpt: The Critical £1,000 I had heard nothing very concrete about Pickles for nearly a year and then Constantine telephoned in a great state of excitement and asked me to dinner that night. The professor had got it. Pickles existed once again and in a very much more stable form. The dinner was to celebrate this great occasion and I was to meet the professor for the first time. The professor proved to be an astonishing figure, with a great mane of white hair and a slightly mad look; he was certainly more than a little eccentric, both in manner as well as dress. He tried to speak to me in English, but eventually lapsed into Hungarian which Constantine had to interpret for me. What with the dinner and the good drink and one thing and another, he was clearly very much excited. What eventually emerged from our rather stilted conversation was that Pickles could now be demonstrated, but the professor did not want it moved. He and Constantine wanted the British experts to come out to Prague and test it on the spot. I duly got in touch with London and a three-man team was sent out. I did not myself attend the demonstration but this did not pass off without its comic-opera elements. The whole party drove out to Constantine's immense castle outside Prague and adjourned to a clearing in some nearby woods where they were going to put Pickles through its paces. The results were certainly impressive. On the first trial, with a very reduced charge, the test rig was blown apart with a shattering explosion. As the scientists gathered round the results of their handiwork, they were slightly worried to hear the sounds of horsemen. A few minutes later a squadron of cavalry dashed into the clearing led by an officer resplendent in maroon breeches. The British delegation gazed at them in consternation; they had no idea what they were and thought that perhaps they were in danger of their lives. Constantine rushed up to the officer in charge: "My dear Anton," he cried, "what on earth are you up to?" The latter explained that he had thought the noise was obviously poachers and he had decided that for once he was going to catch them red-handed. He and his squadron were bivouacing on his father's estate which adjoined that of Constantine's. Fortunately, Constantine managed to produce some sort of explanation and the troopers, looking sadly disappointed, finally withdrew. The party then continued with their tests which were all extremely satisfactory. The success of the demonstration and of the happy outcome of the brush with the military, which might easily have been disastrous, called for some celebration. The party which returned to Prague next day was in excellent spirits, but they all looked a little haggard. Constantine told me that there had been one further incident. Having, as he said, a suspicious nature, he had asked the delegation to give an undertaking that none of them had 'lifted' some of the material. Rather shamefacedly, one of them had returned a small package. Looking back on it now, the whole Pickles episode seems almost incredible even to me, but it was not yet complete. In the autumn of 1933, Constantine once again came to see me; he was not his usual cheerful self. I had heard that some of his enterprises had come unstuck. In particular, he had backed a big industrial project in Germany, something that I had been keeping an independent eye on, and this had crashed with the upsurge of support for Hitler and the Nazi Party. He had sold his castle and was obviously pushed for ready money. He asked me if I could arrange for an advance of about a thousand pounds which was to keep Pickles going. In return, he was prepared to grant a definite option on the Pickles formula; he was quite certain that it would not now be long before Pickles came to its perfected saleable form, but he simply could not find the money for the final experiments. I told him that I would give him any help that I could, but that I was not my own master when it came to finance. I promised him that I would put his case as strongly as possible to my Government. I sent an immediate cable and I was promptly called to London for talks. I attended several meetings at the War Office with naval and air force officers present. I also went down to Woolwich accompanied by a young Gunner captain and gave a detailed report to the explosive experts. Afterwards I was given lunch in the Royal Artillery mess where I met some old friends of my Army days. A final inter-Service meeting was then held in the War Office to reach a decision. The Navy and the Air Force were both in favour of granting the money, but the Army representative—the Director of Artillery—was against it; I was quite certain that this was largely because he was unwilling to accept any responsibility in a risky experiment; the others agreed with me, that the stakes justified some small risk. A decision of this sort had to be unanimous and so I was forced to return to Prague and give Constantine a negative reply. Constantine was dumbfounded. It was not a very large sum in view of the potentialities of Pickles; even if it was a gamble it was surely worth so small a stake, particularly as the investigations and negotiations so far had already cost a sum considerably in excess of a thousand pounds. I personally felt wretched about it as I felt that I had let Constantine down. I am personally convinced that we lost a great opportunity. I suppose we shall never know whether, for the sake of a thousand pounds, we missed the chance of acquiring data which might have enabled us to split the atom before the Hitler war broke out. By this time, after over two years in the Service, I had discovered that my job was always going to be seriously limited by the amount of money I was allowed to spend. London thought that they were quite generous financially, but I had to explain to them on more than one occasion that, if we wanted information, we would have to pay for it and we would have to raise our bids in a competitive market. I found that I was being regularly outbid by the Germans, I should think on an average by something approaching 50 per cent in hard cash. On one occasion I offered ten pounds for some information about troop movements which I gathered afterwards fetched fifty pounds without question from the Germans; this sort of thing earned us a reputation for meanness which tended to frighten off the professionals and purely 'commercial' operators. The biggest headache of my years in the Service was the necessity of accounting for every single penny and trying to justify the expenses we had to render monthly. The whole system was ruled over by a retired naval paymaster known to everyone in the Service as 'Pay'. He treated public money as if it were his own and seemed almost to begrudge every penny we spent. He rarely left his London office and there was no doubt that he had the most exaggerated picture of the sort of life we led. Once in a blue moon he would venture across the Channel and would pay visits on members of the Service all over the Continent. We all complained bitterly about him and an outsider might logically have assumed that he was indeed an ill-tempered, tight-fisted old miser. But this was hardly the case; I always lunched with him when I was in London and these occasions were always most enjoyable. If our accounts were rather a trial, the fault was certainly ours, though Pay was a stickler for detail which in some cases we would have preferred to gloss over. His excuse for coming to Prague in the spring of 1932 was that all the accounts were in a mess owing to the devaluation of the pound when Britain went off the Gold Standard. I had found that my sterling funds were certainly fetching twenty-five per cent less, although rents and other prices remained stable. After a long delay we were told that compensation would be paid monthly in arrears. This involved some incredibly complicated calculations which few of us were able to cope with. At this stage Pay decided to do a grand tour and teach us all some elementary arithmetic. His arrival coincided with the coldest February morning of the year and I was relieved that his train was on time so that I could get him to his hotel with the minimum of delay. He asked me to stay and talk with him while he bathed and had breakfast. "Order me a quart of coffee, four fried eggs and lots of bacon," he demanded. At the same time he started undressing preparatory to his bath. He was wearing the thickest set of underclothes I have ever set eyes on and I presumed they must have been a special naval issue for wear in the Arctic regions. He told me, however, rather proudly, that he had bought them specially for the journey from Beale & Inmans of Bond Street . . . British Agent From the dust-jacket: "I know of no book which gives a more unaffected, unadorned, and altogether authentic picture of what working for the Secret Service was like." —Malcolm Muggeridge in his Introduction "This is a piece of publishing history. For the first time ever, a former senior member of the service which officially does not exist tells the true facts of life as a secret agent. For security reasons the author has adopted an assumed name, but he is an old friend of mine and I can vouch for the valuable work he carried out for Britain in his highly skilled and dangerous, and in many ways thankless, missions. The glut of fiction written on this theme has tended to take the work of such men into the realm of the fairy tale. But this book is no fairy tale. I am delighted that at last a factual account is to be published, for I believe that the public are entitled to know something of the realities of this splendid service—after all, they pay for it." —Captain Henry Kerby, M P. Please note: to avoid opening the book out, with the risk of damaging the spine, some of the pages were slightly raised on the inner edge when being scanned, which has resulted in some blurring to the text and a shadow on the inside edge of the final images. Colour reproduction is shown as accurately as possible but please be aware that some colours are difficult to scan and may result in a slight variation from the colour shown below to the actual colour. In line with eBay guidelines on picture sizes, some of the illustrations may be shown enlarged for greater detail and clarity. U.K. buyers: To estimate the “packed weight” each book is first weighed and then an additional amount of 150 grams is added to allow for the packaging material (all books are securely wrapped and posted in a cardboard book-mailer). The weight of the book and packaging is then rounded up to the nearest hundred grams to arrive at the postage figure. I make no charge for packaging materials and do not seek to profit from postage and packaging. Postage can be combined for multiple purchases. Packed weight of this item : approximately 550 grams Postage and payment options to U.K. addresses: Details of the various postage options can be obtained by selecting the “Postage and payments” option at the head of this listing (above). Payment can be made by: debit card, credit card (Visa or MasterCard, but not Amex), cheque (payable to "G Miller", please), or PayPal. Please contact me with name, address and payment details within seven days of the end of the listing; otherwise I reserve the right to cancel the sale and re-list the item. Finally, this should be an enjoyable experience for both the buyer and seller and I hope you will find me very easy to deal with. If you have a question or query about any aspect (postage, payment, delivery options and so on), please do not hesitate to contact me. International buyers: To estimate the “packed weight” each book is first weighed and then an additional amount of 150 grams is added to allow for the packaging material (all books are securely wrapped and posted in a cardboard book-mailer). The weight of the book and packaging is then rounded up to the nearest hundred grams to arrive at the shipping figure. I make no charge for packaging materials and do not seek to profit from shipping and handling. Shipping can usually be combined for multiple purchases (to a maximum of 5 kilograms in any one parcel with the exception of Canada, where the limit is 2 kilograms). Packed weight of this item : approximately 550 grams International Shipping options: Details of the postage options to various countries (via Air Mail) can be obtained by selecting the “Postage and payments” option at the head of this listing (above) and then selecting your country of residence from the drop-down list. For destinations not shown or other requirements, please contact me before buying. Due to the extreme length of time now taken for deliveries, surface mail is no longer a viable option and I am unable to offer it even in the case of heavy items. I am afraid that I cannot make any exceptions to this rule. Payment options for international buyers: Payment can be made by: credit card (Visa or MasterCard, but not Amex) or PayPal. I can also accept a cheque in GBP [British Pounds Sterling] but only if drawn on a major British bank. Regretfully, due to extremely high conversion charges, I CANNOT accept foreign currency : all payments must be made in GBP [British Pounds Sterling]. This can be accomplished easily using a credit card, which I am able to accept as I have a separate, well-established business, or PayPal. Please contact me with your name and address and payment details within seven days of the end of the listing; otherwise I reserve the right to cancel the sale and re-list the item. Finally, this should be an enjoyable experience for both the buyer and seller and I hope you will find me very easy to deal with. If you have a question or query about any aspect (shipping, payment, delivery options and so on), please do not hesitate to contact me. Prospective international buyers should ensure that they are able to provide credit card details or pay by PayPal within 7 days from the end of the listing (or inform me that they will be sending a cheque in GBP drawn on a major British bank). Thank you. (please note that the book shown is for illustrative purposes only and forms no part of this listing) Book dimensions are given in inches, to the nearest quarter-inch, in the format width x height. Please note that, to differentiate them from soft-covers and paperbacks, modern hardbacks are still invariably described as being ‘cloth’ when they are, in fact, predominantly bound in paper-covered boards pressed to resemble cloth. Fine Books for Fine Minds I value your custom (and my feedback rating) but I am also a bibliophile : I want books to arrive in the same condition in which they were dispatched. For this reason, all books are securely wrapped in tissue and a protective covering and are then posted in a cardboard container. If any book is significantly not as described, I will offer a full refund. Unless the size of the book precludes this, hardback books with a dust-jacket are usually provided with a clear film protective cover, while hardback books without a dust-jacket are usually provided with a rigid clear cover. The Royal Mail, in my experience, offers an excellent service, but things can occasionally go wrong. However, I believe it is my responsibility to guarantee delivery. If any book is lost or damaged in transit, I will offer a full refund. Thank you for looking. Please also view my other listings for a range of interesting books and feel free to contact me if you require any additional information Design and content © Geoffrey Miller
Price: 125 GBP
Location: Flamborough, Bridlington
End Time: 2024-11-09T09:38:16.000Z
Shipping Cost: 27.1 GBP
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Item Specifics
Return postage will be paid by: Buyer
Returns Accepted: Returns Accepted
After receiving the item, your buyer should cancel the purchase within: 30 days
Return policy details: If any book is significantly not as described, I will offer a full refund, including return postage. All books are securely wrapped and posted in a cardboard container.
Non-Fiction Subject: History & Military
Year Printed: 1966
Binding: Hardback
Author: John Whitwell (Pseudonym of Leslie Nicholson)
Language: English
Publisher: William Kimber
Place of Publication: London
Special Attributes: Dust Jacket
