The deceptive life of a super spook

FOLEY The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews by Michael Smith (Hodder, GBP 20) MICHAEL Smith, a former member of the British Army Intelligence Corps and now a senior reporter with The Daily Telegraph, has written in Foley a useful biography of one of Britain's "secret army" of long-serving MI6 intelligence officers, Frank Foley, incorporating new details of his life and work with what was previously known about him from published sources on Britain's Secret Services.

From just after the end of the First World War to a week before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Foley was MI6's Head of Station in Berlin whose prime job during the 1920s was to keep tabs on Russian communist intelligence activities. Foley, like colleagues of his elsewhere, operated under the cover of Passport Control Officer (PCO) attached to the British Embassy, although working in different premises at Tiergarten-strasse 17 (later, the Nazi "euthanasia" programme came to be directed from Tiergartenstrasse 4).

As of 30 January 1933, Foley found himself increasingly busy administering Britain's peacetime refugee policy "at the front line", as it were, as a consequence of the Nazi Third Reich's antidemocratic and anti-Jewish policies which resulted in thousands upon thousands of Germans applying for British visas to start life anew elsewhere. This, however, is where some degree of dissatisfaction with the book arises, especially since Smith's concentration on that aspect of Foley's work inevitably meant reducing the space allotted to other matters. Smith has written almost nothing about Foley's intelligence work in Berlin throughout the 1920s, providing instead a potted and unnecessary "history" of the rise of Hitler and Nazism to 1933. Given Foley's undoubted expertise as a spy and the original purpose of his mission in Berlin, it is astonishing, to say the least, that nothing appears in this book about British secret intelligence achievements concerning the highly secret military co-operation between the Weimar Republic and Soviet Russia. FAR greater space is devoted to Foley's work as PCO in Berlin after the Nazi Machtber-nahme on 30 January 1933, and the admittedly humane and sympathetic manner in which he dealt as positively as he could with the thousands of Jews who besieged the passport offices at Tiergarten-strasse 17 trying to escape from Nazi persecution. While Smith utilises some Foreign Office records from the Public Record Office to illustrate that work - but irritatingly, as elsewhere throughout the book, minus the essential reference point of dates, but padded around yet again with thumbnail details of the history of the Third Reich - most of his account is based on glowing post-war testimonials from Jews about Foley having "saved" them. Now, Lord Greville Janner, the Chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, has instituted a campaign to have Foley declared a Righteous Among the Nations, a title given by Yad Vashem in Israel to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, and hitherto denied to Foley. Indeed, the author himself appeals to his readers to support this campaign. In the name of historical objectivity, but without taking anything away from the essential humanity of Foley, this is going much too far. As PCO in Berlin, Foley was only carrying out normal peacetime British refugee policy, albeit in a positive manner insofar as Jewish victims of Nazi persecution were concerned - just as he sometimes refused visas to Jews. At no time did Foley put his life at risk and he did not "save" or "rescue" Jews from the Holocaust, contrary to what the author implies. Until after 22 June 1941 there was no such thing as a Nazi "Holocaust", certainly of the Jews, anywhere in Europe. That is, of course, if one sticks to "normal" definitions of the anti-Jewish genocide implied by that term, and is not seduced by the highly elasticised definitions pushing it back to 30 January 1933 now being foisted upon the general public by certain quarters. The book becomes a different (and better) creature altogether when Smith concentrates on Foley's significant intelligence work during the Second World War and afterwards in occupied Germany. That included his totally frustrating experience of debriefing the clearly disturbed Rudolf Hess after his flight to England and his vital contribution in establishing secure wireless links between intelligence sources in the United Kingdom, above all Bletchley Park, and agents in the field. Foley also played a leading role in one of the greatest intelligence operations of all time, the Double-Cross System whereby German agents were "turned" to work as double agents for British Intelligence. Clearly, this part of the book was more to the author's own liking. Dr John P Fox lectures in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College, London.

Copyright 1999
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