The Bedbug
Page 10
Two years later Wolfgang zu Putlitz, Klop’s close friend at the embassy, made a half-hearted protest to the Foreign Office about refugees – especially the playwright Ernst Toller – making speeches against the German government. The Gestapo and the Nazi party soon recognised that their diplomats were reluctant informers and began to post their own people abroad.102
It was in this context that Putlitz warned Klop and MI5 in 1936 against the activities of Otto Bene, the Nazi leader in London whom the new ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, hoped to appoint as Consul-General.
Klop was also one of a number of people keeping an eye on Gottfried Treviranus. They had something in common: both had been part of Sir Robert Vansittart’s private intelligence network while still German citizens. Treviranus had been introduced to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden by Vansittart. The German politician had a much narrower escape than Klop. He was in his back garden when SS men arrived to arrest him and fled by jumping over a wall to his waiting car after his young daughter cried out a warning. The SS men opened fire and only narrowly missed – he later claimed he had kept his hat with bullet holes in it. His escape was engineered by another of Vansittart’s men, the former Labour MP Major Archibald Church who provided him with a false British passport and escorted him through Holland back to Britain.
In 1936 Klop reported to MI5 that he did not think Treviranus posed a threat to British security or was engaging in ‘unpleasant activities’. He revealed that, apart from working for Vansittart, Treviranus was also briefing Winston Churchill on the situation in Germany.
Treviranus set himself up as an arms dealer and was allowed to open a gun-manufacturing plant in Lancashire. Among his clients was David Hall who was buying arms on behalf of the Ethiopian government of Haile Selassie, whose country had been invaded by Mussolini’s Fascist Italian regime. David Hall was Klop’s uncle, his mother’s brother who had maintained the family’s Ethiopian heritage by becoming an adviser to the Emperor. After war broke out Sir Louis Grieg, who had been an equerry to King George VI and was working for the Air Ministry, helped find Treviranus a job with an aeronautical engineering firm who employed him as their representative in Canada – thereby neatly removing him from contentious political manoeuvring in Britain.103
Apart from a favoured few, like Klop, German journalists were regarded with suspicion by the Foreign Office and MI5. Klop used his journalistic background to keep tabs on them, including Karl Abshagen, correspondent of the Prussian newspaper Schlesische Zeitung. Doubtless he did not find it too much of an imposition to accompany his colleague to his favourite watering hole, the Paradise Club in Regent Street, where they could enjoy late night drinking, a cabaret with jugglers, stand-up comedians, ‘exotic’ dancers and music provided by the resident pianist Arthur Rosebery and his band. Abshagen was held in much the same esteem in the 1930s by senior figures at the Foreign Office, including Clifford Norton, as Klop had been during the 1920s. His reports were considered objective and well-informed – too well-informed sometimes and there was at least one investigation into a suspected Cabinet leak. It was assumed that he had an unofficial intelligence role and, after a foreign correspondents’ visit to the battleship HMS Nelson, the director of naval intelligence somehow got the idea that Abshagen’s wife had a miniature camera concealed in her umbrella. A Foreign Office note about Abshagen noted that he was in a mood of exasperation and despair at Britain’s failure to heed his warning that a strong and forthright condemnation of Hitler’s diplomatic bully-boy tactics was what was required. Hitler was scoring points at home and intelligent opposition to him in Germany was becoming stultified. At the highest level of the Foreign Office there was general agreement. Sir Robert Vansittart commented that he was talking admirable sense and even the pro-appeasement Alec Cadogan, the rising star at the Foreign Office who would eventually supplant Vansittart, described him as ‘a fairly acute observer’. They were aware of reports from Klop identifying Abshagen as one of at least half a dozen German journalists using their official role as camouflage for intelligence gathering. Klop knew, probably from his own experience, that they wrote special reports, with a circulation of only about 200 to the most senior officials in the German government.104
These documents went first to General Hans Oster, deputy to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Abshagen’s reports were often in complete contradiction to the wilder flights of fancy of the German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Third Reich’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels warned his editor:
Abshagen must continue to report quite frankly, whether or not his reports agree with those of the embassy in London. But tell him to take care that his phrasing gives no offence, for they will be read by our Führer in the original.105
Klop had already reported to MI5 on what could happen when the Führer took exception to a news man’s interpretation of events. Count Carl Heinrich Pückler of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung had commented favourably on the strength of Britain’s anti-aircraft defences and had received such a fearsome dressing down from Hitler that he was a broken man and later lost his job. Under such circumstances his colleagues were most reluctant to file any news stories that might incur their leader’s wrath.106
CHAPTER 8: SECRET AGENT
Klop’s introduction to MI5 put him in the position of answering to two masters. Vansittart at the Foreign Office still wanted to know what was going on in Germany; Liddell was concerned with counter-espionage on the home front. But there were no hard and fast demarcation lines. When Liddell recruited Dick White to MI5 in 1936 his first act was to send his future deputy on a tour of Germany to improve his language skills and familiarise himself with the Nazi regime.
On his return he became Klop’s case officer and, as he later told his biographer:
Here without question we had picked a natural winner who would not let us down … the best and most ingenious operator I had the honour to work with.
Klop and White also shared a certain disdain for some of the old-fashioned MI6 officers whom they encountered and who appeared to be ‘ivory from the neck up’.107
White had been assigned to fill the void of MI5’s ignorance about German intelligence activities in Britain and was coached by Klop and Putlitz, who also introduced him to Vansittart’s private intelligence system. Thereafter White often served as a staging post at which high-ranking anti-Nazi visitors from Germany could stop off to deliver their warning messages for Vansittart.
Although Klop was by now an employee, albeit a part-time one working at arm’s length, he was rarely referred to by name but by his soubriquet U35. The U might almost stand for ubiquitous – it appears in the MI5 wartime records and those of the Foreign Office in a way that no other agent does. But it is a curious choice. Taken at face value it could be short for Ustinov 1935, the year he was recruited. That seems too transparent to be true, and he had in any case been unofficially recruited some time earlier. It is also out of keeping with normal practice. MI5 rarely gave its officers a cover name consisting of initial and numbers. They were more likely to use a pseudonym. MI6 did use initials and numbers in the 1920s but had largely abandoned the practice by the 1930s, preferring a five-digit code in which the first two digits signified the country of operation.
There is, however, a curious anecdote about U35 which, if connected, would indicate an unsuspected sense of humour among the heads of the intelligence services. It concerns Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who became head of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, on his forty-seventh birthday, 1 January 1934.
He was small, shrewd and secretive, fluent in English, French and Russian, educated, well-travelled and an officer of the old school. He despised Hitler and it is now generally accepted that, while he performed his duties effectively enough to remain in office until 1943, he was throughout working in what he believed were Germany’s best interests, not the Führer’s. At times that meant lending active assistance to the Western Allies. He stood back from the
conspiracies to depose Hitler, while doing nothing to discourage his deputy Hans Oster from playing a leading role, and both men were executed after the assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944. The Nazis condemned him as a traitor.
During the First World War he was an intelligence officer in neutral Spain where his reports enabled U-boats to wreak havoc on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean. Such was his notoriety that a young British intelligence officer, Captain Stewart Menzies, was sent to kill or capture him. More than twenty years later Menzies would become head of MI6, once more in direct opposition to Canaris. But it was the German who won that first encounter. Knowing that the British were on his trail, and despite two French submarines patrolling the coast, he took refuge in a small boat among the Spanish fishing fleet in Salitrona Bay near Cartagena, southern Spain. Germany’s most successful U-boat commander Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière slipped in unnoticed to rescue him. His vessel was U-35.108
On 7 March 1936 Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland. Vansittart’s assistant Ralph Wigram was given the task of escorting the French Foreign Minister Pierre Flandin to London where he tried without success to persuade the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, to take a robust stance against the aggression. A sympathetic Wigram arranged meetings with every influential person he could find, including Churchill, but as it became clear Britain was neither inclined nor prepared for a confrontation, the despondent official told his wife:
War is now inevitable, and it will be the most terrible war there has ever been. All my work these many years has been no use … I have failed to make people here realise what is at stake.109
Before the year was out he died of cancer. On 31 December 1936, Vansittart wrote a memorandum entitled ‘The World Situation and British Rearmament’, in which he observed: ‘Time is vital and we have started late. Time is the material commodity the Foreign Office has to buy. Our aim must be to stabilise the situation till 1939.’110
This was the strategy which in part influenced Chamberlain’s ultimately fruitless endeavour to find solutions to Germany’s grievances. Even officials who no longer believed that such a policy could appease Hitler found it difficult, given Britain’s lamentable strategic position, to recommend alternative courses.
Around this time Klop also had the opportunity to enter a rather different, risqué artistic clique. It came about through his intimate relationship with the photographer Thea Struve which had threatened to drive a wedge between him and Nadia. When Nadia and Klop lived at 72 Lexham Gardens, Kensington in the early 1930s, Thea had been a near neighbour at No. 64, a house occupied by a coterie of respectable individuals among then Etheldred Browning, founder of a housing association for single women, the religious writer Arthur Howell Smith and Nadia’s fellow artist Vere Lucy Temple. Thea was, like Klop, a German exile. She had taken pictures at Marie Rambert’s Notting Hill theatre where Nadia designed the sets.
Nadia recognised that Thea was attractive in a rather special way. Her elongated figure reminded Nadia of a Modigliani or El Greco painting. She was broad-minded and unpredictable which made her intriguing to Klop and infuriating to Nadia, who admitted to powerful feelings of jealousy as she was obliged to witness their exchanges of sexual banter. As ever, she later tried to make light of it, recalling a wild Bohemian party in Bloomsbury when the lights went out. Klop had taken the opportunity to surreptitiously fondle his latest amour in the darkness, only to discover when the lighting was restored that he had missed his target and was greeted by the loving glance of a bearded Hampstead poet.111
It was in this Hampstead world, populated by a number of German cultural exiles, that Thea’s ambitions lay. She began photographing the sculptor Jacob Epstein and the surrealist painter Sir Roland Penrose at work in their studios. Penrose, friend and biographer of Pablo Picasso, and a Communist sympathiser, lived at 21 Downshire Hill and was a notorious party-giver. Many of the guests would have been of interest to Klop as would his neighbours in the Isokon building, better known now as the Lawn Road flats where some of the KGB’s best agents made their homes.
Thea moved in with Penrose and is believed to have been the model for one of his nudes, but it was to be a short-lived affair. He was already involved with the American photographer Lee Miller, who would become famous later as a Vogue war photographer and come under Klop’s scrutiny because of her Communist activities. She was married to an Egyptian diplomat and when she returned briefly to him Penrose wrote to her that Thea was now occupying his bed but added:
I almost feel ashamed to make love with her. She is very sweet and is perhaps the only person who could console me of this bitterness. She puts up with my gloom with great patience though I talk of you whenever I can and tell her of the lump that I can’t remove move at the bottom of my heart.112
Thea left Penrose in December 1938 to start a new career at the Buchholz Gallery in New York, an occupation which would be of interest to Klop during his wartime duties in Lisbon.
In April 1937 Klop and Wolfgang zu Putlitz were involved in the expulsion of the German spy Otto Ludwig who was caught during a Customs search at Harwich carrying blueprints for a new type of armour-piercing bullet. As head of the consular department at the German embassy, Putlitz was responsible for looking after Ludwig’s interests while he was in custody. Simultaneously he briefed Klop on every legal move and contact that Ludwig made.
Klop was able to report that Ludwig’s first instinct was to ask Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop to intervene. Instead, Putlitz sent his assistant to interview Ludwig, who was anxious to warn his contacts in Britain to lie low. One of these was the German journalist Franz Wrede, who had been asked to establish contacts with Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, and evaluate the group’s attitude to Hitler. Wrede’s colleague, Werner von Crome, was supposed to find out what were the prospects of Edward VIII being able to return to the throne. Edward had abdicated the previous year, over his determination to marry the divorcee Wallis Simpson, and was considered to be sympathetic to the Nazi regime. Later that year he paid a controversial visit to Germany and met Hitler. Karl Friedrich Basedow had posed as a British tourist and managed to get on board a British warship in Majorca to question the crew. He tried a similar stunt at the naval dockyard in Gibraltar.
Klop, playing the sympathetic fellow journalist, was able to chat to Ludwig’s colleagues about their plight and to feed back to MI5 the consternation that his arrest had caused in the German embassy and in Berlin. Klop went through Ludwig’s papers and diaries and concluded that he was an agent of the Gestapo who intended to set up a secret political intelligence unit to operate in peace and wartime. His notebooks revealed that among the tasks Ludwig had been set was to find out what Klop had been up to since he left the German embassy. Unfortunately, the spy charge would not stick because it turned out that the blueprint was the property of a foreign inventor who had already offered it to the British government and been rejected. Sir Robert Vansittart reported Klop’s findings to the Prime Minister who authorised the Home Office to expel Ludwig along with seven German journalists. Ludwig was convinced he had been betrayed – how else did Customs know to search him? – and was also incensed that Putlitz had treated him in such heavy-handed fashion. Putlitz was summoned back to Berlin to explain himself, particularly his very public remarks that Ludwig had behaved like ‘a complete fool’. Luckily for him, his outspokenness diverted attention from the possibility that he was the mole who had given away Ludwig’s mission in the first place.113
Wolfgang Gans Edler Herr zu Putlitz was a member of a Junker family – Prussian landed gentry – born in 1899 at Laaske in the Brandenburg province. His ancestors had been rulers in the Middle Ages until they were supplanted by the Hohenzollerns who eventually ruled the German empire until 1918. The Gans in the middle of his name means goose – the family estate was famous for them. After service in a Prussian cavalry regiment on the Eastern Front and Finland in the First World War, he had forsaken the family estates at Putlitz,
midway between Berlin and Hamburg, for a university education and a career in the diplomatic service. Even in those days he had a reputation for left-wing sympathies and had supported the Communist-inspired revolution of 1918‑19 which led to the replacement of the imperial government with the Weimar republic. He was nicknamed das rote puttchen – the little red chicken – in a derisive reference to the traditional family association with geese. He had a letter of introduction to Klop and got to know him and Albrecht Bernstorff in London in the 1920s, while broadening his education with a spell at Oxford University. At Oxford he was befriended by Claud Cockburn and their paths later crossed in Washington, Berlin and back in London where Cockburn’s scurrilous newsletter The Week acquired an influence way beyond its meagre circulation and despite its editor’s unwavering commitment to Communism.114
In the late 1920s, when Cockburn worked for The Times in Berlin, Putlitz had been his best source in the German Foreign Office and they met again a couple of years later when both were posted to Washington. Cockburn recalled him as a big man, with gleaming grey eyes and a face like a hooded eagle. He occasionally thought wistfully that he might have been Germany’s ruler had his ancestors anticipated, as the Hohenzollerns had, how useful gunpowder could be in wartime. He was prone to moods of profound Prussian doom and occasionally envisaged himself leading his country away from the abyss towards which Hitler was leading them. In anticipation, he practised carrying large amounts of gold around in a body belt and concealed elsewhere about his person. It did not take Cockburn long to realise that Putlitz had no interest in women and preferred the company of young men whom he met in bars or in servants quarters. He scandalised the American diplomatic circuit by having an affair with the French ambassador’s valet.115