by Peter Day
From reports Klop wrote for MI5 it is clear that he was well versed in the minutiae of the Venlo discussions, and the radio traffic between Stevens and his supposed contact in Cologne. Klop had also visited Brussels soon after war was declared for talks with an SD man who was in touch with Group Captain Christie.
Klop’s news story, planted in the Swiss newspaper Basler Nachrichten, was a bizarre choice of signal and it had a damaging side effect. While the Gestapo were duping British intelligence in Venlo, genuine peace feelers were being made by Hans Oster of the Abwehr via the Vatican. He had sent a Munich lawyer, Josef Müller, a Catholic who had access to Pope Pius XXII, and messages were relayed via the British ambassador to the Holy See, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, to the Foreign Secretary. But Schellenberg’s superior officer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich’s security service including the Gestapo, had got wind of the discussions and when he saw the newspaper article his investigations intensified, forcing Oster to back off.
Since Klop was responsible for the newspaper article, and the BBC follow up, he may also have been behind another unexplained element of the fiasco. There are reports that, on the day that Stevens and Best were captured, a pirate German radio station or Freiheitsender broadcasted a call to arms to anti-Nazi Germans to rise up and overthrow Hitler. The BBC ran this as a news story and reported a ‘manifesto’ of this dissident station. Yet the BBC’s own monitoring service maintained that it had not picked up the pirate broadcast. As already mentioned, Dansey’s contact Carl Spiecker claimed to be able to make such broadcasts from a ship in the North Sea. And there was another highly secret outfit, the Joint Broadcasting Committee, which had been set up to make just the type of propaganda that this illicit broadcast represented. Among its early recruits were Guy Burgess and Klop’s close friend Moura Budberg. It later emerged that this team, run either by MI6 or by Vansittart’s personal intelligence agency, claimed to be able to deliver recorded messages for broadcast either inside Germany and its occupied territories or from Switzerland.156
One interested observer of this debacle was the young Nicholas Elliott, just starting out on a career as a diplomat and MI6 officer. He was the son of a headmaster at Eton and his social network included members of the Royal Family, the Cabinet and the Establishment at large. Through a family connection he had been recruited when he came down from Cambridge as an honorary attaché at The Hague by the newly appointed special envoy, Sir Neville Bland. Bland was a close friend of the head of MI6, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, who visited the Legation during the summer of 1939 and got to know Elliott. The aspiring spy also got to know Klop and acted as a go between with Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who sagely advised him not to take a holiday in Russia at the end of August 1939 as war would break out before he could get back. Elliott had met Best a couple of times and thought him ‘an ostentatious ass blown up with self-importance’. Stevens he liked, but concluded that his intense ambition to take the credit for ending the war before it really got started warped his critical faculties and prevented him seeing through the deception. The consequence was ‘as disastrous as it was shameful.’157
Elliott’s superior, ambassador Nevil Bland, took a different view, telling the Foreign Office in London that Best had been viewed with intense distrust by other members of the Passport Control Office and that they had resented the increasing ascendancy of Best over Stevens in the weeks running up to the Venlo incident. Bland went on to report gossip that Best had been in the pay of the Germans all along and was expecting a German war decoration for his betrayal. He complained, too, that Stevens’s deputy was not up to the job. All these allegations were emphatically rejected by Stewart Menzies.158
One of the unexplained elements of the Venlo incident is the role of the Czech Intelligence Service. They and the Poles had borne the brunt of Hitler’s aggression but they had offered more than passive resistance. They had well-developed networks of agents whose information they were willing to share. They had also, inevitably, been the target of penetration attempts by Hitler’s secret services, some of which succeeded. Klop and Dick White were responsible for liaison and by the end of the war Klop was regarded as a walking encyclopaedia on their activities.
František Moravec, who had been appointed head of the Czech Intelligence Service in March 1934, had formed a close working relationship with MI6’s man in Prague, Harold Gibson. Despite the debacle of Munich, in which Chamberlain effectively sold out the Sudetenland to Hitler behind the backs of the Czechs, Moravec still believed Britain was his best ally. He shifted £1 million in secret funds via neutral countries to London. On the eve of Hitler’s occupation of the Czech capital in May 1939, Gibson laid on a private plane to fly Moravec and ten of his most senior staff to London. Moravec transferred his most secret files to the British embassy, who shipped them to London in diplomatic bags that the Germans could not intercept. He liaised closely with the heads of MI5 and MI6 and was able to pass on to them intelligence brought out of Germany by his best agent, codenamed A-54 and later identified as Paul Thümmel, a high-ranking Abwehr officer. Since 1937 he had correctly predicted every step on Hitler’s route into Czechoslovakia.
Moravec was delighted when Thümmel re-established contact with him in London and set up a meeting for 15 June 1939 at the Hotel des Indes in The Hague. He revealed the existence of Plan White, for the invasion of Poland and information about the increased number of Panzer divisions. A-54 made another trip to Holland on 3 August. His rendezvous point on this occasion, with two of Moravec’s senior staff, was a small shop, known as De Favourit van Jansen, in Noordeinde in The Hague. It was run by an exiled Czech couple, Charles and Antoinette Jelinek, who traded in small objects d’art, Czech glass and leather work. Thümmel spent the evening sitting at a table in a backroom typing from memory full details of the invasion plan for Poland.
At the end of November, a matter of weeks after the Venlo fiasco, Thümmel was back in The Hague for three days, giving early warning of the rocket development that would lead to the V1 and V2 weapons. The bric-a-brac shop became Thümmel’s cover address for mail drops. Towards the end of March 1940 he revealed, using invisible ink in an otherwise innocuous letter, the plans for Germany’s attack on the West. On 1 May he correctly predicted that it would take place on the tenth.159
Klop had been in The Hague for most of the final months of 1939, gathering all the intelligence he could from Wolfgang zu Putlitz before he had to flee to Britain and assisting Richard Stevens in the Venlo negotiations. Another of Moravec’s agents was also in evidence. This one was less trustworthy. William Morz had worked for the German police in Hamburg and belonged to the Schwarze Kapelle – the resistance movement against Hitler – before becoming a collaborator with Czech intelligence. Unbeknown to them, he was a double agent working for the Nazis.
In April 1939 Dick White had issued a special clearance for Morz to be allowed into Britain. He had visited Major Josef Bartik, the Czech head of counter intelligence, at his new home at 53 Lexham Gardens, South Kensington and been despatched on a secret mission to Holland. He then tried to lure Bartik to a meeting near Venlo but the Czech officer, who had lost men to Gestapo kidnap squads in the past, was suspicious and insisted that the meeting take place well away from the German border, on the Dutch coast. He decided to hand control of Morz over to the British. Whether Klop was the liaison officer in the case at that stage is not clear but in 1940 he was involved in a frantic manhunt for Morz, who had by then been exposed as a German agent. Special Branch spent some time visiting West End nightclubs and Soho cafes after various sightings of the agent. Dick White thought he had spotted Morz working as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant but, like every other sighting, it proved to be mistaken. He noted:
It is only the great importance of his case that makes me anxious to leave no stone unturned to try to find him. He is in fact one of the cleverest secret agents the Gestapo has, and he is believed to have been responsible for betraying certain members of the British S.S. [Secret Service] in Holla
nd and thus contributing to the kidnapping of Stevens and Best at Venlo in November last year.160
Morz was never found but it was discovered that Franz Fischer, the instigator of the whole sorry Venlo episode, had also worked for the Czech Deuxieme Bureau.161
Back home Klop felt that it was time his artistic son joined the family business in secret intelligence. He arranged an interview which required Peter to meet a stranger, identifiable by his copy of the News Chronicle and an exchange of passwords, outside Sloane Square Underground station. A brief and inconsequential conversation took place, in elementary German and French, before the two parted and Peter later learned that he was considered unsuitable for secret work because he could not easily blend into a crowd. This may well have been true, but his father was hardly inconspicuous either and it represented yet another disappointment for Klop in his son’s progress into adulthood. Instead, Peter got a part in a revue. His father was dismissive: ‘Not even drama … vaudeville.’ For much of his son’s early career Klop maintained an ambivalent attitude, outwardly dismissive, even hostile, yet he would often sneak in unannounced, in the company of friends, to observe his performances and bask in the occasional successes. Peter was called up in 1942, serving briefly as a private in the Royal Sussex Regiment and the Royal Army Ordnance Corps before being transferred to a propaganda film unit under the aegis of the Directorate of Army Psychiatry. In 1940, at the age of nineteen, he had married the actress Isolde Denham. As he later admitted, he was ill-equipped to sustain such a relationship and Klop seems to have had little to offer in the way of parental advice or encouragement. Indeed, he had never felt able to explain the facts of life to his son, despite their lecherous conversations over ice-creams in the park during Peter’s childhood.
Klop worked throughout the war and beyond in close collaboration with Czech intelligence but it was a complex relationship. His contact, Vaclav Slama – Agent Sloane – was a lawyer and head of counter-intelligence. He had sources all over Europe, one of the most important being a mole inside the Swedish embassy in London. The Swedish Minister to London, Bjorn Prytz, had been involved in one of the most controversial peace-feelers of the war. On 17 June 1940, only a fortnight after the evacuation of Dunkirk, he had met his old friend Rab Butler, deputy to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, strolling back from lunch across St James’s Park. Prytz reported this casual encounter with one of the arch apostles of appeasement back to his government, including seriously injudicious remarks by Butler that appeared to have Halifax’s tacit encouragement. He said that no opportunity would be missed of compromise [with Germany] if reasonable conditions could be agreed and no diehards would be allowed to stand in the way. Halifax was reputed to have said that common sense and not bravado would dictate British policy.
The Swedes passed on these comments, with their implied criticism of Churchill, to Hitler. News of it leaked to a British journalist in Stockholm whose report back to London was quickly quashed by the censors but Churchill soon got to hear of it, from his ambassador and, most likely from surveillance by MI5. He issued a strong rebuke about Butler’s ‘odd language’ and impression of defeatism.162 This directly contradicted Churchill’s famous ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech on 4 June and another, made the day after Butler’s meeting with Prytz, in which he warned of the likelihood of imminent invasion and declared that if Britain and the Empire could stand up to Hitler men would forever say: ‘This was their finest hour.’
It is clear from MI5’s file on Prytz, only released in March 2014, that he was considered a continuing risk of indiscretion and unauthorised attempts to broker peace deals in contravention of Churchill’s policy of unconditional surrender. Sloane and Klop were able to report the content of discussions among Swedish diplomats and their contacts throughout 1941-42 on the Russian campaign, morale among German troops and civilians, and the influence of Japan on the war. Telephone taps recorded Prytz’s unofficial conversations with British sympathisers.163
The Czechs had good sources and were crafty operators but they had been the targets of determined penetration efforts by the Germans in the years of harassment and intimidation prior to 1939, while simultaneously providing a haven for persecuted German communists. MI5 had been warning from early in the war that refugees had to be regarded as potentially subversive in the German and Russian cause. There was enormous pressure on the Czech government in exile, prompted both by their British hosts and Stalin once Russia entered the war on the Allied side, to mount a showpiece act of resistance. The opportunity came with the appointment of the sadistic security chief, Reinhard Heydrich, as Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. With the help of the British Special Operations Executive, two Czech agents, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, were parachuted in to assassinate him. On 27 May 1942 they succeeded in fatally wounding him by throwing an anti-tank mine at his car as it slowed to take a hairpin bend. Terrible reprisals followed after the two assassins had been traced to the crypt of the Saint Charles Borromaeus Church where they committed suicide rather than be captured. Many of their supporters were killed and in the villages of Lidice and Ležáky every man was executed as were many of the women, while those left alive were sent to concentration camps. Children were sent to an extermination camp and the villages obliterated. This had a devastating effect on morale and naturally raised questions of why the British and Czechs in London sanctioned it, knowing there must be reprisals. One suggestion is that the intelligence services feared that Admiral Canaris was losing his grip on the Abwehr. They knew that in October 1941 the Gestapo had captured the Czech’s best agent, Paul Thummel, who officially worked for the Abwehr. Under interrogation he admitted he had also worked for the British and been in touch with Best and Stevens prior to their capture at Venlo. There was a distinct possibility that Heydrich was on the verge of seizing control. This would inevitably have led to a purge of Abwehr agents and their sources, depriving the British of one of their most valuable weapons – the double agents whom Klop and others ran so successfully throughout the war feeding the Germans false information which deceived them over Allied strategy including the landings in Sicily and the Normandy beaches.164
CHAPTER 10: VERA
Early on the morning of 30 September 1940, Vera Schalburg waited on the platform of Portgordon railway station on the north-east coast of Scotland. She was cold and frightened and not sure where she was. Beside her, silent and anxious, stood Theodore Drücke.
Stationmaster John Donald cast a suspicious eye over the well-dressed, well-spoken woman and her morose companion. He summoned PC Robert Grieve, who noted that the lady’s silk stockings and shoes were soaking wet. The constable guessed, correctly, that she had recently waded ashore after being dropped by a German flying boat. He was about to arrest the first woman spy sent to infiltrate Britain in the Second World War.165
Vera’s possessions were a handbag full of drugs and make-up, a spare pair of stockings and a pair of kid gloves. The couple had about £300 on them. She and Drücke were taken to Latchmere House at Ham, an interrogation centre on the edge of Richmond Park. There were listening devices in the cells and the radiator system had been blocked off to stop inmates tapping out Morse code messages to each other on the pipes. The interrogations, under the control of Colonel Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens – so-called because of his thick glass monocle – were harsh but elicited little. Drücke and a fellow spy, Walter Werti, who had arrived on the same seaplane and got as far as Edinburgh before he was caught, were executed.
MI5 was concerned that the trio had been on a special mission and they had good reason to think so. Vera admitted under interrogation that she had been married to Hilmar Dierks who had been a member of the German secret service since 1914, running agents in Holland, Belgium, France and the UK. He was known to MI5 because in September 1925 he had offered to change sides and was rebuffed. He had been interviewed at the time by members of MI6 in Amsterdam. He told them he would not spy against Germany but offered his services in Russia, S
candinavia and Turkey. They concluded it was a bluff and that he was trying to infiltrate them. But they had kept watch on him and knew that in 1938 he had been running a spy ring in Holland, under cover of a legitimate business. Dierks had died in 1940 in a car driven by Drücke, the man who was now in custody with Vera. Vera suspected it was not an accident and that the two men had fallen out over her or her mission.
A new tactic was needed to find out how much Vera knew. Dick White decided on a bold experiment. Vera was to have a holiday in the countryside, in different and pleasant surroundings with a ‘sympathetic’ couple who spoke her language. Her freedom required the Home Secretary, Sir Alexander Maxwell, who took a personal interest in Vera’s progress, to revoke her detention order.
At the beginning of February 1942 she was moved, in the interests of secrecy, from Holloway prison to Aylesbury jail, where nobody knew her, before being released and taken by a Mrs Gladstone for a restorative hair-do and an Oxford Street shopping spree. Mrs Gladstone’s main role in MI5 was the use of the Ellen Hunt employment agency in Marylebone as a front for MI5 to place staff in foreign embassies. Two minders were deputed to shadow the women and make sure Vera did not escape. She was handed an emergency ration card, number 520460, in the name of Veronica Edwards, giving her address as Klop’s flat: 904 Chelsea Cloisters.