‘Biffy’ Dunderdale (1899-1991) was a legend in his own lifetime within MI6. Born in Odessa to an Austrian countess and a British trader representing Vickers, his cosmopolitan upbringing endowed him with English, Russian, German, Turkish, French and Polish. His real first name was Wilfred, Biffy being acquired through youthful handiness with his fists.
Biffy played an important role in smuggling the Polish copy of the Enigma cipher machine to London
Education and family connections made him intimate with prominent Levantine trading families such as the Whittalls, Keuns and La Fontaines. Members of each served with him in MI6 and two into modern times. Early in the first world war he was studying naval architecture and engineering in St Petersburg when his father sent him to oversee the assembling of submarines sold in kit form to the Russians. The 16-year-old Biffy manned one of the boats with a dockyard crew, took it out for sea trials, spotted German ships and sank four. On returning to port they became entangled in anti-submarine nets and were stuck on the bottom for 18 hours. Biffy was granted the equivalent of a knighthood by the Tsar.
In 1918, back in Odessa, he was taken on by the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division, which worked closely with MI6, to support Russian counter-revolutionary forces. Commissioned the following year, he was promoted and awarded the MBE for preventing a Bolshevik mutiny on another submarine. Although he may already have been working for MI6, he was formally inducted in 1921 and posted to what was then Constantinople, where one of his early tasks was to arrange the clandestine exfiltration of the Sultan, who feared for his fate in the new republic. This done, he then had the delicate task of evacuating the European ladies of the Sultan’s harem to their various destinations. A pocketful of gold sovereigns helped ensure that the British ladies were safely embarked on the Orient Express.
The year 1926 marked the beginning of the next stage of Biffy’s life – his 14-year career as head of the principal MI6 station in Paris. He was married by this time to a glamorous and wealthy American, and the role suited both him and his wife perfectly. He kept his office separate from the British Embassy – he always hated headquarters – and rapidly established himself among the Parisian political and social elite. He ensured that visitors from London had a good time – especially ‘Pay’ Sykes, the MI6 accountant – but an independent income helped with the endless entertaining: long lunches, late partying in nightclubs, trips on his river boat and excursions in his Rolls-Royce.
Although a gifted recruiter of agents, his principal task was liaison with the French intelligence services, especially the Deuxième Bureau, which was about six times the size of the peacetime MI6. The friendship and trust he established with leading figures would prove fruitful in the war to come, but even by 1928 there were significant results, including the joint debrief of the first major Soviet defector, Stalin’s former secretary.
Better known was Biffy’s subsequent role in smuggling the Polish copy of the German Enigma cipher machine out of Warsaw, via Paris, to London, just before the Germans invaded Poland. This, along with later contributions by Polish cryptanalysts, was of great help in penetrating Enigma (although we already had our own version, called Typex); but Biffy played down his role, describing himself as merely a facilitator. In fact, without the relations and trust he had established with the French and the Poles, it would probably never have happened.
As the second world war approached, he ditched some of his more tedious duties – such as keeping watch on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor – and made contact arrangements for agents who were to remain in Occupied France. Back in London, following France’s surrender, he again managed to work away from MI6’s head office, being tasked with infiltrating agents into France and running those already there. He also ensured that the exiled Polish intelligence services were able to operate independently and very usefully.
Little known then was the fact that several of his French intelligence contacts who were forced to work for the Vichy regime were secretly reporting to MI6 through three networks set up by Biffy. In 1941, he ignored government instructions not to collect intelligence on Russia and spent his post-war career working mainly against the Soviet Union, retiring in 1959.
In the absence of released MI6 files, Tim Spicer has researched widely among private papers, French records and the National Archive to produce a very readable, colourful and surprisingly comprehensive account of a likeable man whose career was central to two of the shaping events of the past century. The author is also engagingly discursive, noting, for example, Rebecca West’s response to discovering that she and her friend Noël Coward were among prominent Britons listed by the Gestapo for elimination: ‘My dear,’ she telegraphed Coward, ‘the people we should have been seen dead with!’
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