by Peter Day
Then she was taken to meet her holiday hosts, Klop and Nadia Ustinov, at their Gloucestershire retreat, Barrow Elm House.166 The isolated Victorian farmhouse, north of Fairford, had been loaned to them by Sir Thomas Bazley, a wealthy eccentric who worked for MI5 during the war, occasionally acting as the director-general’s personal assistant. Sir Thomas shouldered the bulk of the work of investigating the Czech Refugee Trust and its Communist influences, a task that required regular liaison with Klop, Dick White and their Czech Intelligence contact Agent Sloane. In March 1941 Klop and Nadia spent a weekend as guests of Sir Thomas at his principal residence, Hatherop Castle, which was later taken over by the Special Operations Executive as a training school for the Danish Resistance. A few weeks earlier a bomb had badly damaged their flat in Redcliffe Gardens. Klop and Nadia had found temporary refuge with the Chenhalls sisters, Hope and Joan, in Belsize Park, and Nadia painted Hope’s portrait out of gratitude, but they needed something more permanent. Nadia savoured the isolation of the rather stark but substantial farmhouse with its overgrown courtyard and ramshackle outbuildings. The rooms were spacious and light. There was no gas or electricity, heating was from coal and oil fires and an old-fashioned boiler. But she made it habitable and welcomed Dick White as one of the first house guests. He became a regular weekend visitor, sometimes accompanied by his secretary Joan Russell-King.
Klop also came for weekends, always bringing several visitors, mostly girls, and laden with all kinds of provisions and bottles of gin and whisky. He would cook while the visitors piqued their appetites in the country air. He stayed in London during the week, moving into a small ninth-floor flat in Chelsea Cloisters, Sloane Avenue. It had only one room, crammed with his collection of bronzes and objets d’art, with a fold-away bed, kitchen alcove and bathroom. Yet he was ever the effervescent host and this was a period when his marriage to Nadia was under considerable strain. They were effectively leading separate lives. He threw parties in his tiny London flat that was so crowded there was hardly room to move or else invited girlfriends round for intimate dinners. She recorded:
I think he was thrilled to have a place of his own and to feel a bachelor again, just as I was enjoying my independence and complete freedom at Barrow Elm. I believed that it was good for us to be separated for a while. Neither of us was really made for matrimony. We could not become ‘one’ – our personalities could not merge. The separation however, strangely enough, fortified our bond and at a distance we had a much greater sense of belonging together than when we were actually together.167
It turned out that Vera had rather more in common with Nadia than she did with Klop. Vera Schalburg was born on 10 December 1912 in Siberia where her Danish father was a farmer. The family was ruined by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, fleeing Russia in poverty. They gravitated to Paris during the 1920s. Vera claimed to have danced with the great ballerina Pavlova, star of the Ballet Russes; appeared at the Folies-Bergère; and with the Russian Opera in the Champs Elysées. This was the great era of Ballet Russes, which had grown out of the World of Art movement led by Nadia’s uncle and artistic mentor Alexandre Benois. Under the direction of Sergei Diaghilev, it featured the dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, George Balanchine, Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina and Alicia Markova. They performed to music by Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky in costumes designed by Coco Chanel and sets designed by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Leon Bakst and Alexandre Benois himself.
It was a world of high art and low dealings as exiled Russians intrigued for and against the new Communist regime in their homeland. The penniless and naive eighteen-year-old Vera was seduced by a man who was to shape her destiny. Vera believed his name was Count Ignatieff but was unable to identify him fully to her captors. She said that he was a friend of Prince Serge Wolkonsky who had been director of Imperial Theatres under the Tsar and patron of the likes of Diaghilev and Benois. Ignatieff introduced her to cocaine and persuaded her to spy for the Bolsheviks. She acted as his courier, running drugs and secret documents. Vera’s interrogation records show that MI5 was intrigued by Ignatieff’s identity and tried to get the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky to help. For unexplained reasons, MI6 was reluctant to pass on their inquiries and Krivitsky, who was supposed to be under guard in the United States, was assassinated two months later.
Vera had tired of Ignatieff’s attentions and fled to Antwerp, pursued by one of his hired assassins who stabbed her in the chest but failed to kill her. Terrified for her life, she turned to her pro-Nazi brother, Christian, for help. He introduced her to a member of German Intelligence and not long after Vera married him. Christian von Schalburg went on to join the German SS and was killed in June 1942 when commanding the Danish Freikorps in battle in Russia.
Vera’s new husband, Oberleutnant Hilmar Dierks, fifty-two, was part of a team run by spymaster Major Nikolaus Ritter. Under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, Ritter was tasked with setting up spy networks in the US and Great Britain. Believing any agents he sent would be quickly followed by invading German forces, Ritter blitzed the country with poorly trained spies. As far as is known, they were all caught and either executed or turned into double agents, feeding duff information back to Germany. Vera had been groomed by Ritter before the war, and sent early in 1939 to stay in London with the right-wing Countess de Chateau Thierry, whom he was bankrolling to extract military gossip from her rather limited social circle. The countess was to have been Vera’s first port of call in 1940. Then she was under instructions to take a room in the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane and wait to be contacted.168
It emerged that Vera had an uncle, Ernst, who had been in business in Britain for many years and was serving with the RAF. He was questioned and confirmed Vera’s family history but could tell the authorities little about her more recent past.
After her fortnight’s holiday Vera, having satisfied Klop that she had told him all she knew, had to return to custody. She wrote him a polite little note:
Dear Klop!
I have been very happy staying with you both and I hope the time will come when we shall meet again under more normal circumstances.
Vera
The note was sent to a graphologist who concluded that Vera was a cold, calculating person, selfish, hard, lost and lonely. A month later, Klop returned to see Vera in prison once more and reported in rather florid terms on their encounter:
I stressed that Vera had now ‘made her peace with us’ and noticed unfeigned happiness descending over Vera’s anxious features. I also emphasised that she now had a chance to live up to the trust put in her by showing that she wants to collaborate loyally with the people who have shown her consideration. This really moved Vera and she was quite sincere (I believe) when she said: ‘Life is not worth living for me if it starts again with distrust. The Russians did not trust me, the Germans distrusted me the whole time and if you now start with distrusting me, then it would be much better for me to make an end of it.’169
Vera’s new found loyalty led to her being sent as an informant to the Isle of Man where Germans suspected of pro-Nazi sympathies were interned. Klop advised her ‘to act as though she was the only agent we had on the island’.
In December 1943 she wrote from there in Russian, which Nadia translated. It was a rather plaintive Christmas greeting which began:
I have been always waiting for a letter from you but you seem to have forgotten me and that hurts because I have grown very fond of you and [Nadia] … Write me a few words, how is everything; are you still polishing your bronzes and can you still faire la cuisine as well as before?
I think I had been a good girl as I had promised you to be. I am now very lonely. The females here are awful, they gossip and they knit and sometimes, presumably out of boredom, they fight. It is fun and it is sin all in one (a Russian expression).170
Klop and Nadia both replied, although their letters had to pass through MI5 censorship controls, and the correspondence was first shown to the director-general, S
ir David Petrie, who had asked to be kept informed of Vera’s progress.
Much of the information about Vera’s activity later in the war is still classified as secret and has been withheld from her files. Her case was dealt with by Joan Chenhalls, a friend of Klop and Nadia.
After the war, in October 1945, Vera was apparently deported to a British Army of the Rhine camp while remaining on MI5’s ‘A list’ of surveillance subjects. When her Uncle Ernst asked after her in 1948 he was told she had disappeared. Miss Chenhalls claimed to have no record even of which camp she had been sent to.171 Was Vera abandoned to her fate by a callous British intelligence, or did she begin another espionage career behind the Iron Curtain? It is hard to believe that a woman whose trade had been espionage all her adult life was allowed to slip away into the shadows. Certainly Major Nikolaus Ritter, the Abwehr officer responsible for sending her to England in the first place, did not believe it. In memoirs published in 1975 in Germany he claimed that she had been turned to work for Britain and married a British officer.172
The success of Vera’s holiday in the countryside prompted MI5 to repeat the exercise with another, more troublesome woman agent. Mathilde Lucie Carre, alias Victoire, La Chatte, had been second in command of the Interallie organisation with around 100 agents. It was run by a Polish major, Roman Czerniaski, codenamed Walenty, from a Paris café. Victoire had become one of his lovers, taught him to speak French, and helped organise the network. Trouble began when Walenty imported his long-term mistress, codename Violette, and a jealous feud began. MI5 never entirely got to the bottom of who betrayed whom but in a very short time the whole organisation had been rolled up by the Nazis. Victoire admitted that under interrogation by the Germans she had implicated a number of her former Resistance colleagues, to save her own neck, and then become the lover of one of her captors. He organised her escape on the understanding that she was to be his double agent. She managed to link up with a new Resistance group, run by agent Lucas, who brought her to London in February 1942. There she confessed her misdeeds and offered to turn the tables once more and work for the Allies. Lucas, who had become her latest lover, was keen to maintain the liaison.
MI5 was not about to trust her out of their sight – Lucas returned to France alone. But she did have her uses. She could broadcast radio messages to one of the Walenty sets in German hands, feeding them disinformation about the Lucas group’s plans. Susan Barton was given the job of minding her, first at a flat in Rugby Mansions, Kensington and then at Stratford Court, Oxford Street where there were more distractions for Victoire’s restless ambitions. It quickly became apparent where those ambitions lay. Through a Harley Street doctor who was treating her, Victoire got an introduction to Lord Selborne, the Minister for Economic Warfare and political head of the Special Operations Executive, the sabotage organisation for which Victoire worked. On 2 May 1942 Mrs Barton reported:
It seems that Victoire’s party last night with Lord Selborne at Claridge’s was a great success. She was so excited that she woke me up when she got in about 11.30 to tell me about it. I gather that apart from exceedingly intelligent conversation Victoire put forward some ideas on propaganda which impressed Lord Selborne very much and he said nobody had ever thought of them before. In order to have a long talk about everything Lord S suggested that he take her out to dinner alone next Tuesday. This is a definite appointment unless he has urgent business of state. He also told her that a man who wanted to get on always needed the advice of a clever woman and that there were several women around Churchill. He further said that he was going to talk to Churchill about her and that he wanted a woman painter to paint her portrait. As far as I can gather Victoria seems to be dreaming of becoming Lord S’s mistress. According to her he has all the attributes she admires in a man except that he cannot dance, but that for the moment has become a minor matter. Lord S may be merely playing up to her but even if only half of what she has told me is true it seems that he is behaving exceedingly foolishly and is not doing himself any good, nor for that matter us as she will get more and more above herself.173
Mrs Barton was no prude but she took a very dim view of Victoire, concluding:
She has a thin veneer of charm, kindness and consideration but underneath it all she is an utterly egotistical woman who cares for nothing and nobody but herself and her own pleasures. She is clever, but not half as clever as she thinks she is. She can be very amusing but goes in a lot for dirty stories and her sense of humour is almost infantile. Added to all this there is, of course, her interest in men. She feels she is irresistible to men anyhow and to sleep with a man seems to be a necessity for her. Once she gets hold of a man it is up to her to drop him or be unfaithful to him. God help the man, or for that matter the Service he is in, if he dares to drop her … She is a very dangerous woman.174
Christopher Harmer, the MI5 officer responsible for Victoire, added tersely:
From the point of view of running the case I don’t much mind whether she goes on seeing Selborne or not, but whether we owe a duty to him to prevent him making a fool of himself is a matter I must leave for someone else to decide.
MI5’s lawyer, Gonne St Clair Pilcher, reviewing the case, commented:
In addition to being unscrupulous and fickle, she has extremely expensive tastes. Her goodwill can only be retained by the satisfaction of her appetite for luxury and lovers, the former of which is constant and the latter constantly changing!175
More man trouble swiftly followed. Her doctor friend now introduced her to Richard Llewellyn Lloyd, a wealthy army officer and author of the bestseller How Green Was My Valley. Within days she had installed herself in his Mayfair apartment. At first MI5 suspected that Captain Lloyd was simply providing a love-nest for Victoire and Lord Selborne but it transpired that he had fallen for her himself and after a brief affair had offered her the use of the flat while he was away on military duty. At this point Victoire was persuaded that what she needed was a weekend in the country with Klop. He took against her in a big way:
To put it bluntly: I did not believe and do not believe a single word Victoire says. I tried in further contacts with Victoire to find confirmation for my doubts – a hopeless task with a person so tricky and so alive to the dangers of contradiction … If anything, her confidence in her immunity from being unmasked grew in proportion to the comfort which surrounded her.176
Seeking confirmation of his opinion, he interviewed two other agents from the Walenty organisation who had managed to escape the Gestapo. Both condemned her. Klop believed that her whole story was a carefully thought-out and well-rehearsed German fabrication. She told him that she found Walenty dirty and repulsive as a lover and reckless and indiscreet as an agent. This, Klop thought, was part of a smokescreen to obscure her own role in the cascade of arrests that obliterated the organisation. She made anti-Semitic remarks about Violette, whom she considered ugly, and accused her of implicating Victoire to the Gestapo when she was captured. Klop suspected the reverse, and put it down to jealousy. It took Victoire only two days after her arrest to become the mistress of a Gestapo officer named Bleicher. This would not wash with Klop:
I cannot believe that the confidence of the German Intelligence Service can be won by giving yourself to one member of this service … With all due respect, too, to Victoire’s seductive powers, I firmly believe that every German officer in Paris had the opportunity to ‘write on better paper’ (as they so delicately say in German) and was not dependent for his amorous exploits on the rather faisandé [corrupt] charm of Victoire. This is all nonsense. In my opinion German confidence in Victoire started earlier than one day after her arrest. It was based on a more solid foundation than a bed. The Germans needed Victoire. They needed her for rounding up the rest of the Walenty organisation; they needed her for maintaining wireless transmitter traffic with England, and they needed her as a bait for future fry, small and big … Nothing will ever make me believe that the Germans, however stupidly they may sometimes behave, would take s
uch risks without good reason.177
He concluded that it would not have been enough for Victoire to betray her friends to save her own neck after her arrest. For German Intelligence to have 100 per cent confidence in her, and to release her on a mission to England, she must have been a German agent in the first place, infiltrated into the Walenty organisation to destroy it from within. He paid tribute to her intelligence, courage and sangfroid, all qualities of a perfect double agent, but regarded her motivation as purely venal, unmitigated by patriotism, idealism or decency.
Surprisingly, given this opinion, he introduced her not only to Nadia, the chatelaine at Barrow Elm, but to his son Peter and their friend ‘Dan’ with whom Victoire began a flirtatious correspondence. Dan was almost certainly Daan Cevat, the Dutch art dealer and Rembrandt expert who had teamed up with Klop pre-war buying up paintings at country house sales for export. By 1942 he was working with the Dutch government in exile in London. The correspondence, monitored by Klop without Victoire’s knowledge, was presumably intended to extract some unwitting confirmation of Klop’s opinion of her but petered out inconsequentially.178
Nevertheless, Dick White and his colleagues at MI5 were in full agreement with Klop’s scathing assessment and Victoire very soon found herself interned on the Isle of Man for the duration of the war. In 1945 she was handed back to the French who sentenced her to death for collaboration with the Nazis, although the penalty was later commuted and she was released after serving a prison term.
On Tuesday 10 November 1942, at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon in the Mansion House, a jubilant Prime Minister told his audience:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth Hitler’s Nazis will meet equally well-armed and perhaps better armed troops. Henceforth they will have to face in many theatres of war that superiority in the air which they have so often used without mercy against others, of which they boasted all round the world, and which they intended to use as an instrument for convincing all other peoples that all resistance to them was hopeless…179