In the Swiss village of Mürren, the links with the spy world (“The ski club and the spy”, Travel, Life & Arts, January 13) run deeper than simply providing a Blofeld scene in the James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, as you describe.
Arnold Lunn was indeed one of the Brits who in the 1920s revolutionised competitive skiing. The other espionage link is that his elder son, Peter, after captaining the British ski team in the 1936 Winter Olympics, went on to have a stellar career in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, and in the 1950s masterminded the Berlin spy tunnel, one of the most daring covert operations of the cold war. A joint SIS-CIA operation that took months to construct, it successfully tapped into Red Army communications in East Berlin — only to have its secret betrayed to Moscow by Lunn’s fellow SIS officer, the traitor George Blake. Nonetheless, for a crucial period it delivered invaluable intelligence to Britain and the US.
To the end of his life — he was 97 when he died — Lunn retained close links with Mürren. He skied there every season possible and enjoyed his own private accommodation in the Hotel Eiger.
When I first corresponded with him about my book on the tunnel, Spies Beneath Berlin, he wrote to me on stationery from the hotel. He also penned an early thriller, set in the Alps, entitled Evil in High Places — many years before Ian Fleming’s Bond villain appeared on the scene.
David Stafford
Victoria, BC, Canada
