by Max Hastings
The next development in this saga derived from a fluke. In April 1943 two Luftwaffe aircraft forced-landed in neutral Switzerland. They proved to contain large quantities of German documents, which were impounded by the Swiss. The local MI6 station gained access to photograph them, and when the haul was examined in London, on 30 April an SOE officer reported gloomily to colleagues, ‘the following, I am afraid, concerns us’. The file to which he referred was a translation of a Luftwaffe report on the interrogation of a British spy, Ronald Seth, at Dulag Luft, Oberursel, on 6 February. Baker Street’s man, it appeared, fell into German hands within days of landing in Estonia. He had since told his captors everything about his SOE experiences – with a protective gloss. He claimed that he had been forced to accept his espionage mission by a Jew at the Air Ministry who had threatened him with a revolver.
SOE commented after studying the Abwehr interrogation: ‘This report is factually correct so far as the individual, his training with us and his delivery in Estonia are concerned. It is difficult to credit, however, the statement that SETH makes in regard to a pistol held to his head by a WING-COMMANDER in the AIR MINISTRY … There is some possibility of his being alive … It may be, however, that in the process of time we shall hear more as to the further treatment meted out to him. Until then, it is impossible to say whether he has remained a prisoner in enemy hands, or has been executed.’ Another SOE officer took a harsher view: ‘I am sorry to have to do so, but I feel that I can put no other construction on this unfortunate operation than that SETH got cold feet on his arrival. I never met him, so far as I know, but all the reports I have heard of him pointed to his being somewhat nervy and likely to break down under any strain of loneliness or opposition.’
On 5 May 1943 SOE’s Signals Office was instructed to abandon its listening watch for wireless transmissions from ‘Blunderhead’. A month later, a memorandum reported that Seth’s handler, Major Hazell, ‘has seen Mrs Blunderhead who says she would be very glad to have some approved story to tell her friends – for example, that her husband is missing. [Hazell] has not told her anything about our information as to Blunderhead, and says that his wife will be reconciled to waiting until the end of the war for news … In all the circumstances I would suggest that the Personnel department of the Air Ministry should … send the wife a letter saying that Blunderhead is missing from operations.’ Josephine Seth was delicately informed that although her husband was not dead, his circumstances were extremely precarious. The strain on the poor woman must have been appalling.
Thereafter, for more than a year not another word was heard of Seth. It was reasonable to assume that, like almost all captured Allied agents, he was being held in a concentration camp or – more likely – was dead. A few weeks after D-Day, on 29 July 1944 SOE minuted: ‘Information has now been received that Flight-Lieutenant Ronald Seth must now be reclassified “Killed on active service 24.10.42” … Mrs Seth has already been informed unofficially of her husband’s death.’ Less than a month later, however, the liberation of Paris produced a new and sensational twist in the Seth story, which thereafter engaged the serious attention of MI5, MI6 and MI9. A man who called himself Émile Rivière approached an RAF officer in the French capital and handed him an envelope addressed to the War Office in London. This was duly forwarded to its destination. On examination it proved to contain a densely-pencilled seventy-six-page narrative headed ‘Paris, August 7th, 1944’, and addressed to ‘the GOC S[pecial] T[raining] S[ervices] HQ, Room 98 Horse Guards. From BLUNDERHEAD. In The Field.’
A covering letter began, ‘Dear Sir, I hope you will forgive my asking this very great favour, but if my operation has so far been successful in your opinion, please could you possibly apply for my promotion to the rank of: ACTING GROUP-CAPTAIN (unpaid), with seniority retrospective twelve months from the date of this letter? I ask for this favour, Sir, because should anything happen to me in the months that are to come, my wife and children would at least have a suitable pension on which to live. This has worried me considerably throughout the whole of my operation, although Major Hazel assured me that he thought that in the event of my death the Organisation [SOE] would provide £1000 for my children. But £1000 will not provide the education for my son and daughter that I could give them were I there to provide for them. And education is going to count more than ever in post-war England, I am sure.’
If this was a somewhat humdrum opening gambit, the rest of Seth’s report to SOE was page-turning stuff: a lurid, highly coloured narrative in which it is no easier today to distinguish truth from invention that it was for Britain’s secret services to do so in 1944. The only incontrovertible fact was that, in the course of almost two years in occupied Europe, in the hands of a ruthless enemy, SOE’s man had known experiences fantastic even by the standards of world war. He claimed that he had made his original parachute landing on top of a group of Germans, from whom he managed to flee, at the cost of abandoning his arms and equipment, then suffered adventures which included being fired upon by Estonian militiamen: ‘one shot whizzed through the undergrowth in which I was hiding, narrowly missing my head’. He described how he had blown up several German aircraft and an artillery position, but had been obliged to spend days living in the wilderness without food, sustained only by opium tablets and a flask he had brought from England: ‘I could find no chickens. For shooting deer, even if I could stalk them successfully I had only my Colt .32 and thirty rounds. The outlook was bleak, as my whiskey was getting low. Having sampled the temper of the natives, I decided to adhere to my plan to make no contacts until I had seen [his old friend] Saarne.’
Seth met the farmer at last on 5 November, and during a tense, bleak conversation was told that his mission was hopeless: ‘Those older people remaining after the Russian occupation of 1939–40 were lethargic, the young Estonians were whole-heartedly with the Germans, who had very cleverly exploited the disgusting Russian excesses during the Red occupation.’ Seth said he thereupon decided to go to Tallin, and was walking through the nearby village when he was arrested by militia, who handed him over to the Germans. He was promptly incarcerated in Cell 13 of Tallin Central prison, and interrogated by a Major Vogl. Asked if he would make wireless transmissions to England, this agent weakened by hunger and privation tearfully agreed to do so. He was questioned for eight days, and invented the tale of a Jew at the Air Ministry named Goldmann who had forced him to accept the SOE assignment. He lengthily described to his London readership experiences of first being tortured, then informed that on 21 December that he would be publicly hanged. He said that on the appointed day he was indeed led out onto a gallows, and placed before the trap: ‘I refused a handkerchief for my eyes with as heroic a shake of my head that I could manage.’ After a long and circumstantial account of this ordeal, he claimed he was told that his execution would be postponed until after the Christmas holiday. He told the Germans that he would be happy to work for them against the Russians. This persuaded them in January 1943 to put him on a train from Riga to Berlin, thence to Frankfurt am Main.
Seth spun his jailers a series of fantastic yarns, describing himself as a group-captain with a knighthood and close connections with the royal family. He told SOE he had informed the Germans that in 1941 he was initiated into a secret society called the Windsor League, seeking the restoration of King Edward VIII, and had attended meetings at which Sir Stafford Cripps and several other MPs had been present. He urged the Gestapo – who held him for a time – that his experience as a BBC announcer could be immensely helpful to them. He was eventually told that he was being transferred to the custody of the Abwehr, who proposed to train him to carry out an espionage mission in Britain.
In November 1943 he was taken by his Abwehr handler Major Emile Kliemann to Paris, where he was lodged with a French family of well-known German collaborators named Delidaise, and granted liberty to move freely around the city carrying an Ausweis – official pass – in the name of Sven Passikiwi, a Finn. Here his narrative for SOE
assumed Baron Munchhausen proportions: he claimed to have shot dead two German soldiers in the Metro. He confessed that he had formed an easy relationship with Richard Delidaise and his family, and especially with Liliane, his host’s sister-in law. He told SOE: ‘I was known by everybody as “M. Ronnie” … It was inevitable, I am afraid, Sir, that Mlle. Liliane would become my mistress. The present report is no place to enter into pathological or psychological details, but I feel I must justify this somewhat unagentlike behaviour on my part, by saying that for me “practical love” is a PHYSICAL NECESSITY; but also, at this time, I was mentally desperately in need of some mundane contact to make my world seem real … I ask you if you will, Sir, to imagine yourself in my place. I was playing a role, not like the ordinary actor, for two or three hours a day, but for twenty-four.’
For six months he underwent Abwehr training as an agent, including instruction in wireless technique and coding, about which he provided SOE with copious detail, including charts and numerical expositions. He appears sometimes to have worn a Luftwaffe uniform on the streets of Paris. Shortly after D-Day, he was told that within a fortnight he would be dispatched to England. On 20 June, however, he was abruptly informed that his new employers had lost confidence in him; Berlin now refused to approve his mission. He was removed from his comfortable quarters and from his lover and lodged in the Cherche-Midi prison, where he endured sufferings that he described extensively, including finding lice ‘as big as a fingernail’ and developing scabies. His Abwehr handler ‘Kilburg’ – Major Kliemann – visited him to report that a debate was taking place about whether to send him back to Berlin. After six weeks in a cell, he was suddenly informed that it had been decided to use him as a stool-pigeon in British PoW camps.
He was thereupon released from the Cherche-Midi, restored to semi-liberty, and – in those days when it was obvious that the Allies would soon be in Paris – occupied himself in composing his voluminous report, which he entrusted to Richard Delidaise – who also used the name Émile Rivière. The Frenchman must have believed, not wrongly, that by assisting Seth to make contact with the British he could save his own unattractive neck, together with those of his relations. Seth included in all his subsequent messages to London passionate pleas to protect Delidaise – and, of course, his beloved Liliane. He assured SOE that although they might think he was now working for the Germans, in reality he was still a loyal British agent. In the valediction of his report addressed to the War Office, he wrote histrionically: ‘I do not yet know whether I shall go to camps in Germany or France, or indeed if I shall yet come out alive. But if you do not receive reports of my death when the armistice is signed, please will you look for me in P.O.W. camps, and if I am not there, in German civil prisons and concentration camps … I beg to remain, Sir, your obedient servant BLUNDERHEAD August 7th 1944.’
When this astonishing document reached London it prompted a new surge of memoranda and commentaries, thickening files on Seth in Broadway, Baker Street and at MI5 that already ran to hundreds of pages. A dozen overworked senior intelligence officers, from Stewart Menzies and Felix Cowgill at MI6 to Lt. Col. ‘Tar’ Robertson of MI5 and Lt. Col. James Langley of MI9, found themselves attending meetings to discuss the past doings and future prospects of ‘Blunderhead’. SOE, reasonably enough, sought to make the best possible case for its man, but was obliged to admit that his narrative was impossible to swallow: ‘Seth is extremely prolific on paper, of a highly-strung temperament, very vainglorious, but possesses initiative, imagination and quickness of mind … It would appear that, in the spirit, SETH is very much under the domination of the Germans … he would have had many opportunities to escape in PARIS which he did not embrace. If the Germans decide that they have no further use for SETH, it is likely he may be executed. He has, however, shown himself very astute by putting the Germans off with promises and he may succeed in continuing to do so … It would appear to be the case that he is genuine in his assertions that he intends to double-cross the Germans, and if he were sent back to ENGLAND, would certainly not carry out any mission for them.’
On 25 September Commander John Senter of SOE wrote to ‘Tar’ Robertson, emphasising Baker Street’s ‘responsibility in this matter, first of all to Seth who undertook a mission calling for great personal courage … I understand that you are in full agreement that he should not be treated on his return to this country as a felon, but as a British officer who must be invited to explain what happened.’ RAF administrators joined the Seth paperchase, expressing concern that some months earlier they had paid a gratuity to his wife on the assumption of her husband’s death, and were even now paying her a pension. It had now become plain that she was not entitled to either. Should she be made to pay back the money?
On 5 October an initial report from counter-intelligence in Paris expressed bewilderment that Seth’s document addressed to SOE had been handed over to an RAF officer by Richard Delidaise – under his alias as Rivière – a known creature of the Abwehr. The CI team had interviewed the family, and emerged with scant enthusiasm for any of them. They described ‘Liliane’, Seth’s acknowledged mistress – full name Lucie Beucherie of 3, Rue Lincoln, Paris 8 – as ‘a woman of loose morals, one lover succeeding another’, some of them German. She was up to her neck in the black market, and Seth was merely one among a multitude of her men. He had spent some of his time in Paris under an assumed German identity as ‘Lt. Haid’, but she told her interrogator that ‘Blunderhead’ had confessed to her that he was only pretending to work for the Germans in the hope of facilitating his escape. The author of the Paris counter-intelligence report concluded with a list of ‘questions to which I should like the answers’, which started with that of ‘When and where did SETH find time to write his 76-page report?’
On 10 October there was another flurry of excitement in London following receipt of a new emotional outburst, scribbled by Seth in Belgium and given to a local man who passed it on to an American officer when the liberators arrived a week later. This letter, dated 2 September, explained that he had left Paris with the retreating Germans on 17 August, having agreed to work for the SD in PoW camps. ‘Having found out what they wanted me to do, I decided that this work would be so important from the British side and although I have had many chances to escape in the last two weeks I am carrying through. I have got so much important political information that it is absolutely essential I should be released immediately war is over. I shall be in the Oflag at Limburg under the name of CAPTAIN JOHN DE WITT.’ An MI5 officer wrote to John Senter of SOE, saying that the latest message from Seth ‘only deepens the mystery of his case, and I must say I find it difficult to understand his argument that, having as he says so much important political information for this country, he should consider it even more important not to escape but to stay behind and work for the Sicherheitspolitzei in P/W camps’.
The British PoW ‘Captain John de Witt’ made his debut in a letter from the officers’ camp at Limburg, dated 15 September 1944. He wrote to a supposed sister – in fact his wife Josephine – saying among much else: ‘There is one thing worrying me. Will you get in touch with Hazel? He knows I have been nursing the Ely constituency, and I am afraid that after this is all over, there may be some delay in getting released, and I may miss the General Election. Ask Hazel to pull every string he can – see Anthony [presumably Eden, the foreign secretary] if necessary – and get me out of here immediately peace is signed. I must get home at once, otherwise all my work will have been wasted.’ In case this letter failed to get through, Seth persuaded a fellow-officer writing home to include some remarks which reached SOE and MI5: ‘by the way Ronnie is here, as blunderheaded as usual. It’s good to have him.’ The copy in SOE’s file is marked ‘original with MI9’.
Other British prisoners in the camp sent coded messages to London, demanding to know what they should make of ‘Captain de Witt’, who seemed to spend much of his time talking to Germans outside the compound on the pretext of arranging musical e
ntertainments, and who occasionally confided that he was really SOE agent Ronald Seth. The senior officer at Limburg later testified that the newcomer had ‘started behaving in a most peculiar manner. He drew attention to himself in no uncertain fashion by telling all and sundry incredible and diverging stories.’ Another bulletin reached MI9 in an officer’s letter dated 10 October from Oflag 79. It said: ‘DE WITT claims joined RAF bomber 1940 promoted Group-Captain and made KCB. Seconded SOE dropped Esthonia 24 October 1942.’ MI5 discussed the ‘de Witt’ letters with SOE. Obviously the ‘Hazel’ to whom the writer referred was his own former handler, now a lieutenant-colonel working in France, where he was dispatching agents into Germany. But the MI5 officer commented wearily: ‘I must say I cannot find any satisfactory hypothesis to explain why SETH should be given a false name and then permitted to write to his wife under the false name as if he was her brother.’