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Peter Lunn

Peter Lunn, who has died aged 97, captained the British skiing team at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen; later, as a gentleman spy in the early Cold War years, he pioneered the idea of digging tunnels under Soviet-controlled zones to facilitate telephone tapping. Peter Lunn (third left) with members of the 1936 British skiing team in Murren  Photo: HULTON ARCHIVE Peter Lunn at a party in Bonn in 1957

7:23PM GMT 06 Dec 2011

Peter Northcote Lunn was born on November 15 1914 into British skiing aristocracy. His grandfather, Sir Henry Lunn, was a one-time missionary who, having failed to convert the Indians to Methodism, moved to Switzerland, where he embarked on encouraging the British to ski. To this end, he established The Public Schools Alpine Sports Club which, by offering hotel accommodation near the mountains, was the precursor of the ski travel business.

On one occasion Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to stay with Sir Henry in Switzerland, and told him that he had decided to devote his life to psychic research but couldn’t think what to do with Sherlock Holmes. As Peter later told the story: “My grandfather said 'Push him over the Reichenbach Falls’, and Conan Doyle hadn’t heard of them so he showed them to him.”

In time, Henry’s operation became the travel agency Lunn Poly. Peter’s father, meanwhile, Sir Arnold Lunn, is today revered as the father of downhill skiing because, from his base at the Palace Hotel, Mürren, he spent decades campaigning (against stiff opposition) to get downhill and slalom racing recognised as International Ski Federation and Olympic events.

Peter first skied at Mürren a few days before his second birthday and, as he recalled, soon “felt ashamed if I spent a day without falling. It meant I hadn’t been trying hard enough.” He won his first skiing prize soon after his father set the first modern slalom at Mürren in 1922.

“It’s now accepted as so obvious that the thing to do is ski downhill that people find it difficult to think there was ever opposition,” he recalled. “They used to say that downhill was for people too cowardly to jump and too feeble to do cross-country.” When a German named Luther told his father that downhill was “an awful bore”, Peter recalled that Sir Arnold took him up the mountain, watched him standing petrified at the top, then drily observed: “Here stands Luther, he can do no other.”


Peter also remembered the foundation of Mürren’s British ski racing club, the Kandahar, in 1924. (Its motto, “Sicut Sagitta a Sagittate”, roughly translates as “don’t turn unless you have to”.) But he was away at Eton in January 1928 when 18 of the club’s skiers pioneered the Inferno, a 10-mile up-and-downhill marathon which has come to be regarded as one of the most gruelling races in the world.

Arnold Lunn’s campaigning bore fruit with the inclusion for the first time of downhill and slalom racing at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Bavaria, where Peter captained the British team. The Lunns escaped the opprobrium heaped on the British team after the Olympic march past (when an overexcited German commentator mistook their Olympic salute, with the arm raised sideways as opposed to forwards, for the Nazi salute), as they had refused to attend the ceremony — though Peter claimed that the credit was undeserved: “I didn’t go to the march past [because] I don’t like marching about.”

On the ski-slopes, meanwhile, he came a disappointing 15th: “I skied too carefully,” he recalled. “It was the only major international downhill race in which I failed to fall.” He was much prouder of the ninth place he achieved after three falls in the infamous Innsbruck downhill of the same year (when spectators, appalled by the crashes they had seen on a rock-strewn icefield, invaded the course in an attempt to slow the skiers down): “At every corner people were waving and yelling at us to slow down, 'Langsamer! Langsamer!’ — but you couldn’t go any bloody langsamer!”

Following the outbreak of war in 1939, Lunn was commissioned into the Royal Artillery but was soon seconded to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). He spent most of the war years in Malta, where ostensibly he worked for the British Council and endured the bombing that led to the island’s award of the George Cross. In a later article he compared the feelings of a downhill racer before the start with those of somebody caught in a heavy bombardment.

In 1945 he was posted to Italy, where he took a parachute course, an activity which he described as an activity providing “maximum fright with minimal risk”.

After the war Lunn was posted as head of the MI6 station in the divided city of Vienna, with the official title of Second Secretary at the British embassy. Though he was once described by the espionage writer Richard CS Trahair as having a “slight build and blue eyes” and speaking “in a soft voice with a lisp”, every inch the gentleman spy, he also had a razor-sharp mind.

In 1948 Graham Greene, who had also worked for SIS, went to Vienna to research material for the screenplay of The Third Man (1949). He discovered the existence of a force policing a vast network of sewers under the city which, memorably, he incorporated into the closing stages of the film.

Lunn too was interested in the city’s subterranean world. According to David Stafford, in his book Spies Beneath Berlin, Lunn realised that “cables linking the Red Army to Soviet units in Austria ran through the British and French sectors [of Vienna]”. If he could tap these communications, “he would be the first to know if Stalin gave the order to invade Western Europe”.

After winning over his superiors in London, he recruited a team of experts — including a private mining consultant — to build at least three tunnels which would enable him to tap into the underground cables which the Soviets used to communicate. He even bought a villa on the route of the cable that linked the Soviet headquarters in Vienna with the city’s airport and its overall command station for Austria at St Pölten. From the villa, his team could excavate undisturbed.

Operation Conflict, as Lunn’s eavesdropping scheme was known, yielded a wealth of intelligence about Soviet operations in Eastern Europe between 1948 and 1951.

It was not a glamorous undertaking. When an SIS officer arrived in the city, Lunn greeted him: “So now you’re in Vienna you think it’s going to be all wine, women and song. Well, let me tell you, old boy, it’s all beer, bitches and broadcasting.”

After a posting in Berne, in mid-1953 Lunn was named MI6 section chief in Berlin at a time when intelligence gathering was being hampered due to the Soviet shift from radio to landline. When the American defence secretary George Marshall declared “I don’t care what it takes, all I want is 24 hours’ notice of a Soviet attack”, Lunn suggested that they should try the same tunnel trick again.

Winston Churchill, then prime minister, had been informed of the success of the Vienna tunnels. Now, he personally authorised Lunn to undertake something similar in Berlin. The Berlin tunnel, which extended hundreds of yards into the East German side, was built mainly by the CIA and was a much more elaborate affair than the Vienna prototype (in Vienna, Lunn had kept his tunnelling operation secret from the Americans.)

SIS was responsible for the critical final phase of the operation — placing the tap itself. When the first successful tap was made in May 1955, the message sent to Washington was: “The baby is born”. But its usefulness was short-lived. On the night of 21/22 April the next year, the Soviets “discovered” the tunnel (having being tipped off, as it later emerged, by the British traitor George Blake, whom Lunn had considered his best agent-runner). None the less, the intelligence gathered during the time that it was operational was so great that processing the backlog continued until 1958.

Lunn’s KGB counterparts, who had spent years observing him in action, described him as “demanding” of the agents he ran.

He went on to serve as head of station in Bonn, and during the 1960s in Beirut, where he enjoyed skiing at The Cedars, a resort where, as he recalled, discipline in the lift queues improved dramatically after an attendant shot dead the two worst queue jumpers. Even so, it was “not so stimulating as Mürren”, and throughout his years in the service he always brought his family to Mürren for a month at Christmas.

Lunn described himself as a “skiing glutton” and he preferred to ski fast, off-piste and alone. When one interviewer asked a Mürren lift operator where to find him, he was told to “look for crazy tracks in the deep snow”.

After retiring in 1986 Lunn spent every winter in Mürren and continued to ski even after a car crash in 1985 that left him with double vision from a collapsed eye socket and knees so badly broken that doctors predicted he would never walk again. Every year after his retirement he participated in the Inferno race until he broke his hip in another car accident at the age of 90. Even that did not stop him, and he continued to ski regularly until last year.

The author of several technical books about skiing, in 1947 Lunn published a novel, Evil in High Places, about a psychotic mountaineer.

Peter Lunn was appointed OBE in 1951 and CMG in 1957.

He married, in 1939, Antoinette Preston, daughter of the 15th Viscount Gormanston. She died in 1976, and he is survived by his partner, Christa Palmer, and by two sons and two daughters. Another son and daughter predeceased him.

Peter Lunn, born November 15 1914, died November 30 2011