Before Sonia left she had received from Moscow a new code and new schedules and call signs which she handed over to me. At the same time she told me that I had been ordered to move back to Lausanne and set up a transmitter there to carry part of Rado's traffic as soon as Hamel had built a new transmitter and was a proficient operator. The building of a set was an easy matter for the efficient radio mechanic, and by the beginning of December his set was ready and tested. As an operator, Hamel still left much to be desired, and I left Bill Philips in his flat to assist him until he could carry on by himself. Bill had only one desire- to return to England and rejoin Sonia- but this I could not allow until the organisation could carry on without him. So he remained with Hamel until March, by which time the latter was trained sufficiently. Bill then pulled out of the organisation, and though he remained in Switzerland until 1942 he had no more official contact with us after March 1941. Moscow allowed him to try to make arrangements to leave at the end of 1941 and even assisted him in obtaining a British passport by getting a leading British politician to intervene on his behalf. The politician concerned acted, I am sure, quite innocently in this as Moscow worked through a number of cut-outs, and the person in question would probably have been horrified at the thought of assisting a Russian spy.
On December 15, 1940, I left Geneva for Lausanne, which was to remain my headquarters until I found a less comfortable abode in a Swiss prison cell.
It was not easy to find an apartment in Switzerland in those days, for with the fall of France and the Low Countries there had been an influx of refugees, many of them with money to burn, and there was an acute housing shortage. It would have been obviously impossible to install myself in a hotel or pension. Things were not made easier by a police decree which forbade foreigners to rent apartments and insisted that they should live in hotels. The motives for this ordinance were partially for security but principally mercenary. The war had killed the tourist trade and the Swiss were reluctant to see their hotels standing empty when they could be filled with rich refugees who would probably spend more money in a hotel than they would in an apartment.
I decided to ignore this order and take a fiat first and argue about it afterwards. After some difficulty I managed to find a suitable one in a big block at 2 Chemin de Longeraie. It was self-contained and sufficiently commodious, so I was independent of the rest of the world. It also had the advantage of being alone at the end of a short corridor so that I could hear the footsteps of anyone approaching, thus allowing a minute's grace before the doorbell rang.
Having installed myself, the next thing was to install the transmitter, which I had brought over from Geneva, wrapped up in my dirty laundry. It was in the highest degree unlikely that anyone would stop and search me or my baggage, but the extra precaution cost little. The fiat was admirably suited, in another way, for my less legal purposes, as it was but one floor from the top, and the roof of the block overtopped all the neighbouring buildings. Ideal as the setup was, it still took me almost three months to establish contact with Moscow.
Most accounts of spies and secret activities skate lightly over the purely physical routine difficulties of the trade. Such accounts are generally concerned with the details of the hero's cunning in outwitting the activities of the police. In real life, once the police are really after you, there is little you can do to avoid them. The average spy hopes to avoid police notice rather than to evade it once it is awakened. His real difficulties are concerned with the practice of his trade. The setting up of his transmitter, the obtaining of his funds, and the arrangement of his rendez-vous. The irritating administrative details occupy a disproportionate portion of his waking life- and cut unwarrantably into his hours of sleep.
I had my flat and I had my transmitter, and the rest should have been easy. Unfortunately, here I came up against Swiss rules and regulations. There was a ban on the erection of any kind of external aerial on a building. Sonia had not encountered this problem, as a wire strung over the roof of her chalet at Caux out in the country would have excited no notice and, if it had, little comment. Not so in the heart of Lausanne. Again I decided to take the legal bull by the horns- or rather in this case ignore his existence altogether. Adopting the air of an idiot and foreign child, I went to a wireless shop nearby and explained that I wished them to erect an aerial for my wireless set in my fine new flat. I explained, unnecessarily, as my French accent was not impeccable by any means, that I was English and, exiled as I was from my own country for the period of the war, I was naturally anxious to keep in the closest touch with events at home and therefore wanted to listen to as many English broadcasts as possible. I explained that as my French was bad the short-wave continental broadcasts were not satisfactory and anyway they were designed for foreign consumption. I wished to listen to the medium-wave broadcasts put out by the B.B.C. for the English themselves, and these I could not get on my set with an indoor aerial. I do not know to this day whether my set with the aerial I eventually got would have enabled me to hear the ordinary B.B.C. home programme - nor, indeed, whether I could not have heard it anyway with an ordinary indoor aerial strung round my room. Luckily the mechanic in the shop was equally ignorant- or supremely indifferent - and after the usual delays which afflict workmen all over the world when labour is in short supply, he consented to come round and try to fix something up.
On his arrival a new and unexpected difficulty presented itself. The honest little man had apparently fallen for my story in a big way and was determined, law or no law, that I was to have the best aerial Switzerland could provide to enable me to listen to the programmes of my choice and of my native country. He had brought with him a large and superior aerial with every known device and side wire designed to cut out all possible interference. This would have been delightful had I really wanted to listen to the home news from London but quite disastrous for transmitting home news to Moscow. All I needed was a straight aerial of the right length with no devices to frustrate les parasites (as the French so delightfully call interference). In fact, in my own small way I desired to increase the number of parasites on the air by my own efforts. Ultimately, after endless explanation and liberal administrations of whiskey (of which luckily I had a large stock), I managed to get him to erect a straight aerial to suit my purpose. I do not think that he suspected anything. He went away quite certain that the English were, as he had always been told, quite mad; but he had enough scotch inside him to allay his suspicions.
I took the precaution, for a week or so, of hiding the parts of my transmitter carefully in the flat: one piece in the mattress of my bed and another behind the bath, just in case I had been denounced and was raided. Nothing so drastic happened, though I did receive a visitor who arrived most opportunely during this period, when my flat had an appearance of absolute innocence and my actions were those of the character I was pretending to be- an Englishman, stranded in Switzerland by the war, with ample leisure and ample funds. Lausanne was full of such, ranging from the genuine, stranded resident or refugee down to the frank embusque who had no intention of returning to England and military service and every intention of passing a comfortable and neutral war. I attempted to steer a graceful course between both extremes, my air of respectability being counteracted by my being obviously of military age.
The bell rang one evening and I opened the door to a polite, solid gentleman in the plainest of plain clothes who in no country in the world could have been anything other than what he was- a policeman in mufti. On such occasions as this the best course is to leave all the running to the other person- especially as I was conscious that only the minutest search of the place would show anything suspicious and that my papers, which I showed him, were in perfect order. He took the proffered seat and cigar and explained, in the politest way, that there was an ordinance that forbade foreigners to rent apartments, and perhaps I would be good enough to explain myself. I decided that a mild bluff and an appeal to Swiss cupidity was the only possible course. I explained that I had not been aware of the order when I took the apartment and had only learnt of it too late. I added that I understood that the main reason was to ensure that the hotels remained full and that there was no diminution of the revenue to the Swiss national exchequer from foreigners. I was perfectly prepared to give up the flat, inconvenient as it would be, and retire to a hotel, but felt that I must point out that it was an expensive flat in an expensive block of flats and that I was spending far more occupying it than I would living quietly en pension in a hotel. I was a man of some means and simple pleasures and I was sorry that the means of gratifying them, namely by living alone in a flat rather than crowded into a hotel, were to be denied me, especially as any change in my present mode of life would decrease the flow of sterling from my pocket into the Swiss coffers.