Krueger's Men by Lawrence Malkin Read Free Book Online Page A

member of a distinguished German-Jewish financial family long settled in England. He graduated from Balliol, Oxford’s most intellectual college and a principal supplier of brainpower to the British elite. Waley adopted his mother’s name during the anti-German hysteria of World War I, just as the British royal family changed its name from Battenberg to Windsor and its nonroyal members anglicized their names to Mountbatten. Waley had served in that war as a frontline officer and was decorated for bravery with the Military Cross. He had never felt the need to conceal his background as he made his career at the Treasury, where his colleagues called him Siggie. When Waley later received the Athens memo, he would seek a reaction from a quite different institution, the Bank of England, a clubby hub of finance that the Treasury regarded as decidedly inferior.
    In those days the Bank of England was an official hybrid, owned by its member banks in the way that stock exchanges are still owned by brokerage firms. The Bank recruited young men of good family who had to be nominated by one of the Bank’s directors. Few went to university, and they were known mainly for being trustworthy and dependable, especially if they could count pound notes without making mistakes. The Bank had the important responsibility of not only printing Britain’s pound notes but also regulating their supply to protect the nation’s currency against inflation. Its legendary caution and discretion, its top-hatted doormen guarding its entrance at the crossroads of London’s financial center, lend credence to its nickname “The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.” Situated along what was once a medieval lane named for the artisans who worked there, the Old Lady symbolizes Britain’s financial district like a huge, sleepy Edwardian elephant. Its original structure was dressed up with dome and pillars by Sir Herbert Baker, close colleague of Sir Edwin Lutyens in designing and building New Delhi, the model par excellence of an imperial outpost. The public buildings of Lutyens and his disciples were to architecture what the romantic nationalism of Sir Edward Elgar’s compositions were to music. The Bank’s dome is topped by a gilded statue of the globe-girdling Ariel, the magical Shakespearean messenger who (in the majestic words of the Bank’s own guide to its museum) “is the symbol of the dynamic spirit of the Bank carrying credit and trust over the world.”
    As Churchill reminded Simon in his letter, this was not the first time the English had thought of counterfeiting enemy currency. In 1794 Prime Minister William Pitt approved counterfeiting huge amounts of French assignats, which were originally printed as promissory notes against property of the nobility seized by the revolutionaries and traded inside the country as money. Napoleon retaliated by counterfeiting British pounds and filtering them through neutral ports. It was but one episode in the long history of official forgery that continues to this day. In 1470, when the Duke of Milan warred on the great commercial empire of Venice, he counterfeited its money to undermine its bankers. Frederick the Great of Prussia counterfeited the currency of his enemies, and the British also flooded the rebellious American colonies with counterfeit notes during the Revolution. During the American Civil War, confidence men made a killing on each side by crossing to the other with counterfeit Union or Confederate bills. Reds and Whites counterfeited each other’s currency during the Russian civil war of 1918–1921. When the Soviet Union was starved for foreign currency a decade later during its first Five-Year Plan, Stalin ordered $10 million worth of bogus U.S. hundred-dollar bills printed, partly to finance his secret service abroad. His financial agent in the United States was caught, convicted, and sentenced in 1934 to fifteen years in jail, although the full story did not come out until a Soviet general