The Bedbug

by Peter Day

  From the perspective of the German Army officers still trying to avert a war with Britain and France, none of these measures was likely to convince Hitler to back off. As late as July 1939 they despatched Lt Col. Gerhardt Count von Schwerin, the head of the British section of the German war ministry intelligence department, to warn of Hitler’s determination to attack Poland. Schwerin was a guest of the director of naval intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, at a dinner party given by retired Admiral Sir Aubrey Smith at his home in Gloucester Place, Marylebone. Also present were James Stuart MP, parliamentary whip, representing the Prime Minister, and General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall, a former MI6 man who was now director general of air and coastal defence. He recalled that ‘a good deal of good champagne was consumed’.

  Schwerin recommended that Churchill should replace Chamberlain as PM, a battle squadron should sail to the Baltic to make a show near Danzig and RAF bombers should be stationed in France. His hosts severely deflated these ambitions. James Stuart explained that replacing the PM would bring down the government; Godfrey said the Admiralty would never allow its capital ships to be at risk in the Baltic where they could be mined or torpedoed; and Marshall-Cornwall pointed out that French airfields had already been prepared to meet RAF bombers if needed. Schwerin’s proposals were duly passed to the Prime Minister who balked at anything so provocative.133 One Foreign Office official dismissed Schwerin’s arguments as ‘gross treasonable disloyalty’, while another pointed out that the German Army seemed to expect Britain to save them from the Nazi regime.134

  CHAPTER 9: WAR

  With war looking ever more likely, Klop made frequent visits to Holland to hear how Wolfgang zu Putlitz gauged the situation. He had used his journalistic credentials to obtain a freelance position as European correspondent of an Indian newspaper and established an office in The Hague for the purpose. Although Klop was still technically working for MI5, his duties in Holland brought him under the aegis of MI6.

  Putlitz told Klop that Holland was now the frontline for Abwehr intelligence operations against Britain. MI5 submitted a report to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who in turn relayed the information to the Prime Minister. It included a character assessment of Hitler, based on information from Putlitz and others who were in touch with his closest entourage, saying that he was now pursuing in high politics tactics which he had previously confined to smaller matters:

  He caused his opponents to be confused with a feint here and a serious blow there, and simultaneous offers of peace, and when having given them no rest, he had got them where he wanted them, he made an energetic attack, falling on them like lightning.

  The report added a comment from Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, to the effect that the only person who made an impression on Hitler was one who could firmly say ‘no’ or answer threats with counter threats. Any sign of weakness only egged him on and it was a mystery that other countries did not see this. MI5 concluded that

  it must be anticipated that Hitler would make increasingly drastic demands. This was extremely probable if, as seemed beyond doubt, he was convinced that Great Britain was decadent and lacked the will and power to defence the British Empire.135

  No action was taken on the security service’s request for additional manpower to match the German effort. The lack of preparedness would cost them dear when war was finally declared on 3 September 1939. Klop was again at the heart of events, in what came to be regarded as MI6’s worst humiliation of the war.

  Klop’s intelligence from Putlitz in the last days of peace was confusing and, with hindsight, wishful thinking. In the first week of August 1939 Klop reported that the German military were on standby but not yet on full alert. On 30 August he declared that ‘the Germans have got the jitters’ and Putlitz was under the impression that: ‘We have got Hitler on the run and that nothing should be done to provide him with a golden bridge to make his getaway.’

  He reiterated this message the following day and Guy Liddell noted that he seemed very confident that disintegration had set in and even suggested that it was doubtful whether the German Army would march if the order were given. Liddell found it difficult to judge whether his two agents’ views were based on hard evidence or gossip in diplomatic circles. He feared it may be another bluff but did not rule out the possibility of serious internal dissension between the German Army and its political masters. The information was passed to Vansittart, who said it confirmed what he was hearing from other sources and that he still hoped there might be no war; or that if there were it would not last very long.136

  Klop was not the only agent feeding back intelligence that elements within the German Army were anxious to avoid a conflict. This coincided exactly with what Chamberlain continued to hope and strive for, and appears to have persuaded those involved, Klop included, to ignore a dire warning sign.

  Putlitz was doing his very best to pass on every item of useful information. He compiled a list for Klop of Dutch businessmen who were collaborating with the Germans to transport vital imports of oil, coal and raw materials from their ports before a British naval blockade could come into effect. He was horrified when, three days later, he was summoned into his ambassador’s office and confronted with the list, which had apparently come into the hands of the Gestapo direct from the office of MI6’s main officer in The Hague, Captain Richard Stevens. He was asked to conduct an investigation into how such a leak had occurred. Putlitz knew immediately that the game was up. It could only be a matter of time before the ambassador realised he was the mole. He had to get out … fast.

  Putlitz had a live-in lover – his manservant Willi Schneider, a former waiter who had fallen foul of the Gestapo and spent some time in a concentration camp. If Putlitz was going to escape, Willi had to come too. He had often acted as a go-between with Klop and it now fell to Willi to arrange the getaway. Within twenty-four hours he and Klop had lined up the Dutch air ace Dirk Parmentier, who could circumvent wartime emergency flight restrictions. They carried only one small suitcase each. German propaganda later claimed that Putlitz had filled his with stolen Nazi gold. He denied it.137

  On 15 September, at Shoreham airport near Brighton, they were met by Dick White who took them to his brother’s flat, close to the British Museum in Bloomsbury, central London, where they were to live. Within days Putlitz found himself under arrest by the British police. He had gone, quite innocently, to a local cinema where he was recognised by a Belgian diplomat who happened to be in the audience and denounced him as a probable Nazi spy. This kind of hysteria was, understandably, rampant on both sides in the phoney war period and may partially account for the way warning signs were disregarded.

  Reaction in Germany was equally bizarre. The news of Putlitz’s defection was deliberately concealed from Adolf Hitler. There were various vested interests at work. The German ambassador at The Hague, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, no Nazi sympathiser, had to account for the missing money that Putlitz had taken with him, and his failure to spot a mole at the heart of his embassy. The Gestapo could equally be found to be at fault for the security blunder. Joseph Goebbels seized the opportunity to put round a story that Putlitz and Willi Schneider had been murdered and thrown into a canal by ‘Jewish robbers’ who made off with the money. But there were plenty of people who knew this to be a fiction and word penetrated through to Putlitz’s old school friend Count Michael Soltikow, who was working for Admiral Canaris in the Abwehr. He was told that the missing pair were ‘living in clover’ in London. Canaris, calculating that this was an opportunity for one-upmanship over the Gestapo, despatched Soltikow to the Netherlands to investigate.

  He quickly established that on the day they were supposed to have been murdered the pair had sold a private car and a motorcycle and that payment had been transferred to London. Putlitz had signed a receipt for the money. Dutch police had investigated the disappearance and were mightily put out by the slurs broadcast by Goebbels. They had obtained from Scotland Yard a photogra
ph of Putlitz in a London street, which was date stamped and showed in the background young women in military uniform, demonstrating that it could only have been taken after war was declared. They also had a copy of a letter, signed and dated, that Putlitz had written to various former diplomatic colleagues in London explaining his reasons for defection and revealing correspondence between Hitler and Ribbentrop exposing Hitler’s double-dealing over the naval treaty he signed with Britain in 1935. The police were able to tell Soltikow that the spy and his lover were disguised in women’s clothing when they fled the country.

  It was weeks after the disappearance that Soltikow found himself summoned one evening, with Canaris, to face the Führer at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin to explain his findings. On the way Canaris warned him not to mention the document revealing the double-dealing over the naval treaty. It might be interpreted as painting Hitler as ‘War Criminal Number One’.

  Hitler demanded to know every detail. How long had the treachery gone on and what were Putlitz’s motives? Soltikow showed him the photographs and traced Putlitz’s history back to his days at Oxford University. He told Hitler that Putlitz had been the victim of British blackmail over his homosexual relationship with Willi. He had been given the choice of betraying his country’s secrets or being arrested and deported back to Germany where he would certainly find himself in a concentration camp, brutally treated and probably hounded to death. When he worked in the London embassy he had access to the safe where secret documents were kept and would copy them with a miniature camera.

  Hitler seems to have been impressed and wanted to promote Soltikow to be a lieutenant in the SS. Canaris persuaded him that his agent could be put to better use in the Abwehr.138

  Wolfgang zu Putlitz, meanwhile, found himself rather surplus to requirements. He no longer enjoyed access to German diplomatic secrets and his potential value to the British war effort was either as an analyst or a propagandist. Vansittart’s principal agent, Group Captain Malcolm Christie, recommended him for a role on an Anglo-German committee pursuing long-term propaganda aims, not just to refute ‘Nazi lies’ but to prepare the way for eventual peace. Putlitz, according to Christie, was eminently suitable because of his friendships with exiled anti-Nazi German politicians and for his flexible mind and constructive, creative mentality. Vansittart reported this to the Foreign Office, having first consulted MI5, and proposed taking Putlitz and Christie to talk it over with the Ministry of Information.139 It came to nothing and Putlitz was reduced to working as a production assistant to the film director Alexander Korda at Denham Studios.

  After the Nazi invasion of France, anti-German feeling became so intense that he and Willi Schneider decided to move to the United States. They were initially refused a visa and spent an unhappy time under effective house arrest at a Canadian army camp on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. When he was finally granted a US visa he teamed up with a number of dissident Germans, among them his old friend Dr Carl Spiecker, who, as will shortly become clear, had not endeared himself to the British. The group wrote copious briefing notes for the Americans on German resistance to Hitler, nominating their exiled friends as a replacement government if the Führer could be deposed. Putlitz, in particular, does seem to have been instrumental in briefing Allan Dulles, who would play a key role as head of US intelligence in Switzerland. Not all of their intelligence was of the highest calibre, as the following excerpt from Putlitz demonstrates:

  Dr Wolfgang Klaiber is in his early forties, a rather good looking blond fellow, trying to be immaculately well-dressed without always succeeding (he likes spats and similar gadgets) to look really smart. By natural inclination he cannot be much of a Nazi.140

  Their hosts soon tired of this flummery and Putlitz eventually returned to Britain, without Willi Schneider, in 1944, to a new role as a propagandist, and a controversial future in peacetime Germany.

  It must have been obvious from the circumstances in which Putlitz’s role as a British agent was jeopardised that there was a serious leak in the British intelligence services’ Dutch network. The culprit was not identified until after the war when a German intelligence officer under interrogation, Traugott Protze, named the mole as a Dutchman, Folkert Arie van Koutrik, whom the British had believed was working for them. He had fled to London shortly after the outbreak of war and continued to work for MI6.141

  It might be expected that the reaction to the exposure of Putlitz would be caution. Yet the first thing MI5 did was to send an officer using the cover name Susan Barton to join Klop in The Hague, where she had worked previously. Mrs Barton, real name Gisela Ashley, was German by birth and had a brother who was a U-Boat captain. She had married a British man and although they had divorced by the time war began she retained British citizenship and loyalty. She later became one of the leading members of the hugely successful Double-Cross operation, running agents supplying the Germans with bogus intelligence.142 It was hoped that she might entice the German naval attaché, Käpitan Kurt Besthorn, into believing that she could provide him with intelligence from the British military censorship department, where she purported to work, and then use him to obtain naval intelligence from Germany. She shared a flat with Besthorn’s secretary Lili, who was an old friend from Germany. This, Guy Liddell thought, would partially compensate for the loss of Putlitz.143

  But the greatest risks were taken by Richard Stevens and Sigismund Payne Best of MI6. In theory, the two should not even have been working together. For the previous twenty years, MI6’s rather sparse and underfunded network of agents had been based on the British embassy passport control officers whose official role was to scrutinise applications for visas. It was a convenient cover, in peacetime, for defensive intelligence to keep a check on foreign agents intent on coming to spy on Britain but less effective in gathering intelligence about foreign governments. And, inevitably, the cover story was fairly transparent. The head of MI6, Admiral Sir Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair, commonly known as ‘C’, had given his deputy Claude Dansey the job of setting up a parallel, undercover team, known as the Z organisation. Dansey was something of a maverick but he had a background in business and set about recruiting fellow businessmen.

  Major Richard Stevens was the passport control officer in The Hague. He had only been appointed in 1939, having previously served as an army intelligence officer in India. He was multilingual (languages included German) but inexperienced. He was also, according to one contemporary, ‘a man of almost overbearing confidence’.144 As part of his induction he was introduced to Klop and briefed on the relationship with Putlitz. It is clear that MI5 feared that Stevens’s cover had been blown almost as soon as he was appointed and that even in London he would be under German surveillance. John Curry, the MI5 official who took him to Klop’s London flat, recalled that as they drove off a man jumped into a taxi on the rank immediately behind them and followed. Curry instructed their driver to make a series of quick turns in the side streets and lost their pursuer.145

  By contrast, Sigismund Payne Best was an intelligence veteran. He had worked for the first director of MI6, Mansfield Cumming, during the First World War, directing military espionage from Holland. He had married the daughter of a Dutch general and lived in Holland for twenty years, setting up an import-export consultancy for British businessmen wanting to trade with Holland and Germany. He spoke both languages fluently and had extensive contacts, among them the German-born Prince Henry of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, consort of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Best and his Dutch business partner, Major Pieter van der Willik, were recruited by Claude Dansey for the Z network. Best was not exactly inconspicuous, every inch the English gent with a private income, affecting both a monocle and spats, but he kept himself apart from the British embassy. With the outbreak of war, a reluctant Best was persuaded to subordinate himself to Stevens on the grounds that they would need to coordinate their efforts and use the embassy’s secure means of communication, either through wireless or diplomatic bags which were immune from i
nspection by Customs or other authorities.

  The chain of command at the top of MI6 was altered, too. Dansey was to operate from Paris or Switzerland so Best would be reporting direct to ‘C’ – except Admiral Sinclair was seriously ill with cancer, and died on 4 November 1939, so his deputy, Stewart Menzies, handled the day-to-day business and was effectively in charge.

  The Prime Minister was clinging to the hope that war might still be averted by a change in the Nazi regime. Two days before war was declared he told the House of Commons:

  We have no quarrel with the German people, except that they allow themselves to be governed by a Nazi Government. As long as that Government exists and pursues the methods it has so persistently followed during the last two years, there will be no peace in Europe.146