By, Monica Porter
2 min read
ByMonica Porter, Monica Porter
By Michael Smith
Biteback Publishing, £10.99
Towards the end of the First World War, an intrepid, multilingual young army captain called Frank Foley - son of a West Country railway worker - was recruited by the British Intelligence Corps to run networks of secret agents in Europe.
It was a role for which he had exceptional aptitude. After the war, when Bolshevik spies were fomenting revolutionary fervour and attempting to infiltrate Britain, he was sent as MI6 station head to Berlin, then a hotbed of communists and anarchists, with a brief to keep them out.
His official title was Passport Control Officer, ideal cover for a spy ringmaster. He built up an effective network of agents.
But, following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, he began to focus his attention on the persecuted Jews. Whereas before he had endeavoured to keep dangerous subversives out of Britain, now he worked tirelessly to have desperate Jewish refugees allowed in.
He helped run MI5 and MI6's web of double agents
As ever more Jews lost their livelihoods, were robbed of their assets and thrown into concentration camps, Foley dispensed with cumbersome bureaucratic rules in order to sidestep the many impediments to Jewish emigration from both Nazi and British authorities. With uncooperative officials, he said, "I just pounded on the desks until I got what I wanted."
In addition to the thousands of life-saving visas he authorised to Britain and other British territories, he covertly helped Zionist organisations smuggle Jews into the British Mandate of Palestine, thus risking his job. He risked his life, too, by hiding in his home Jews fleeing the Gestapo, and helping them acquire forged documents. As Passport Control Officer, Foley had no diplomatic immunity, he could be arrested anytime as a spy and shot.
He and his wife Kay finally left Berlin in the summer of 1939. During the war, he helped run the web of double agents set up by MI5 and MI6, the fiendishly cunning Double Cross System which so often duped the Germans.
Returning to Berlin soon after the war, he was involved in hunting down and destroying the underground groups intent on re-establishing a Nazi state. It took two years.
So, as this biography of Foley admirably shows, this is what a daring and heroic British secret agent looks like. Not like James Bond, but rather a short (5 foot 2 inches) middle-aged gent in tweed jacket and owlish glasses.
Hubert Pollack, the Jewish aid worker and MI6 agent who was Foley's prime liaison with various Jewish organisations in 1930s Berlin, remarked: "The number of Jews saved from Germany would have been tens of thousands less if an officious bureaucrat had sat in Foley's place. There is no word of Jewish gratitude towards this man which could be exaggerated."
Foley died aged 73 in 1958. He was named Righteous Among the Nations in 1999.
Monica Porter is a writer and journalist