On the strength of his fluency in German and French, which he had studied at school and night classes, he was promoted to officer and transferred to the British Army Intelligence Corps in 1916.
Early on he recognised the severe economic restrictions on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles as providing fertile ground for the rise of Nazism.
"[3] Believing that Austria would become a crucial listening post for rapidly growing political problems in Central Europe, he asked to be transferred to Vienna.
His increasingly alarmist warnings about the dangers of the rise of fascism failed to endear him to his establishment editors and he parted ways with The Times.
In Vienna he became known among colleagues as 'The Lone Wolf' for keeping a certain distance from the group of Anglo-Saxon correspondents who often gathered in the city's cafés and bars, including Marcel Fodor, John Gunther and Dorothy Thompson.
Gedye developed leftist politics and helped the young Kim Philby rescue fighters of the Republican Defense Corps.
Disillusioned, he returned to Europe where he followed up on an earlier offer from the British embassy in Prague to join SOE, the fledgling wartime intelligence service.
He covered the rise and fall of the Polish free trade union Solidarity and was the newspaper's bureau chief in Germany when the Berlin Wall was breached and for the subsequent years of reunification.