The Bedbug

by Peter Day

  One of Klop’s old army friends from the First World War, Hans Speidel, had also been in Paris, arriving in 1940 with the invading army and becoming chief of staff to the military governor. Speidel would later claim that as an army officer he tried to mitigate the worst excesses of the Gestapo and that he helped maintain a cultural détente. In 1942 he was transferred to the Eastern Front but he left behind a group known as the George V circle, named after the luxury hotel where they met. A central figure was company commander Ernst Jünger, who was a renowned writer and philosopher in Germany and maintained social contacts with artists like Picasso and Jean Cocteau. Speidel had first met him during the First World War when Jünger was an officer in the 73rd Grenadiers who relieved the 123rd at Guillemont. It is likely, therefore, that Klop had also known him then. Jünger was a war hero who had been wounded three times in the earlier conflict. He was an anti-Nazi who referred openly and contemptuously to Hitler by the nickname Kniebolo – roughly translatable as kneel to the devil – and believed that he thrived on cult-worship. Even in 1941, at the zenith of Hitler’s power, Jünger was working on an ethical peace manifesto that assumed German defeat and a Europe which had to be the homeland of the different mother countries. There were others in the George V circle who were of a like mind, among them Rolf Pauls who became Germany’s first post-war ambassador to Israel.202 A number of journalists were members of the group and it seems likely that Mariaux was among them. Although they were anti-Nazi, they were politically conservative or right wing, credentials which would have appealed to the Western Allied governments as they contemplated the future of Europe, after unconditional surrender by Germany, and the increasingly obvious aspirations of the Soviet Union to extend Communist control. They were a more attractive proposition than the likes of Otto John, whose co-conspirators were thought to have social democrat and left-wing sympathies.

  Speidel returned to the Western Front in April 1944 when he was appointed chief of staff to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of Army Group B whose main task was to defend northern France against the expected Allied invasion. This was just at the time that Klop was having fruitful contact with Mariaux. Speidel, among others, was instrumental in persuading Rommel to lend his name to the conspiracy to depose Hitler, but not to assassinate him. All of them knew in advance of the 20 July bomb plot.

  Rommel was apparently deeply impressed by Jünger’s redrafted philosophy, first shown to Speidel three years earlier, which encompassed in its structural design a United States of Europe infused with a spirit of Christian humanism.203 This vision was not too dissimilar from the various anti-Soviet pan-European movements which attracted MI6 support in the immediate post-war period.

  Among Mariaux’s pre-war contacts had been Konrad Adenauer, the mayor of Cologne until 1933 when he was forced out of office by Hitler, and the wealthy industrialist Paul Silverberg. Silverberg had been chairman of the Cologne Chamber of Commerce, a powerful figure in the coal industry and politically active in economic and union affairs. Mariaux, who edited his speeches and letters, described him as having the ‘sharpest critical intelligence’ among the business leaders of the period.204 Despite having converted from Judaism to Christianity, Silverberg soon fell foul of the Nazis and fled to exile in Switzerland, renouncing his German citizenship. But he retained his loyalty to his old home town and to his friend Adenauer.

  In 1945 the former mayor was reinstated and Mariaux returned to become his press spokesman. Adenauer had been imprisoned twice by the Hitler regime, narrowly escaped deportation to Eastern Europe and lost his home. Now he set about building a new political institution, the Christian Democratic Union, which sought to unite German Protestants and Catholics in an anti-Communist political party. His early efforts were made possible by Silverberg, who sent him gifts of food and medicine for his sick wife that were unavailable in post-war Germany. The Adenauer family spent holidays with Silverberg in Switzerland.205 The CDU was an almost instant success and has been the dominant force in German politics ever since. Mariaux continued to work for Adenauer when he became Germany’s first post-war Chancellor in 1949.

  Clearly Mariaux could have had a valuable role to play, both in filtering British propaganda into his newspaper reports, supplying intelligence from occupied Paris or in putting Klop in touch with leaders of the German resistance. Although his resistance contacts did not have such a high profile within the 20 July conspiracy as Otto John’s, they did continue to exert a long-term influence on Germany’s future. And they fitted the profile that MI6 had already determined by 1944 was to be the foundation of its long-term strategy against Communism and the Soviet Union.

  The Germans seem to have had no inkling of Mariaux’s role. Under interrogation after the war, Walther Schellenberg, who replaced Canaris as head of the reformed Abwehr, described Mariaux as ‘a priggish journalist who had only joined up as a collaborator in order not to have to join the Army’.206

  When he returned to London in mid-July 1944, Klop went for an unofficial debriefing session with Liddell at Dick White’s flat. He was less than complimentary about his new MI6 colleagues, painting a ‘positively lamentable’ picture. The head of station, Cecil Gledhill, was initially hostile, regarding Klop as a rival, and then bad-mouthing other members of the embassy staff, including the ambassador Henry Hopkinson. Klop in turn told Liddell that his male colleagues in Lisbon were very nice people but complete amateurs and pretty indiscreet. The best elements were the women. Liddell noted in his diaries:

  U35 is horrified by the way Gledhill and Charles de Salis go about their business. They do not appear to exercise any reasonable precautions and are obviously being led up the garden path in a number of cases. Attempts were made to put U35 himself in touch with all sorts of undesirable people who would have ruined all the work he was doing with Mariaux. He tactfully declined.

  The office itself is overlooked and no attempt is made to screen it. People can be seen from the other side of the street photographing letters and every sort of thing. The only part of the work that he seemed to think was any good was the facilities for examining air mail.207

  Klop also voiced concern that the chief of Portuguese police was often taken into their confidence even though they knew he was receiving huge bribes from German intelligence and inevitably compromising any secrets they might tell him.

  He was conscious that he risked betrayal from the dubious company he was obliged to keep and had been warned to beware of assassins sent to wipe him out. He would always stand nervously at the back of a lift, against the wall, hoping to avoid being stabbed from behind with a hypodermic needle, fretted that his food was poisoned, or that a honey-trap with a homicidal femme fatal might be set for him.208

  But his duties in Lisbon also had a more agreeable aspect. Klop’s was running an attractive 22-year-old Czech agent codenamed Ecclesiastic. She was the mistress of an Abwehr officer in Lisbon, Franz Koschnik, an expert on air force technical information. MI6 set Ecclesiastic up with a job in an office staffed by RAF personnel and provided her with ‘chicken feed’, low-level intelligence she could use to tempt her lover into indiscretions of his own which were of use to MI6. Klop managed to have twenty-six meetings with her in the space of five months and even obtained a photograph, taken by Koschnik, of Ecclesiastic copying the supposedly secret documents for him. Guy Liddell, apparently amused by Klop’s antics, suggested the photograph of Ecclesiastic would make a good frontispiece for his memoirs when he wrote himself up as a master spy. Klop found she enjoyed the game of mobilising her ample female resources against normal male instincts. Though he was very susceptible to such charms himself, he did find it necessary to reproach her that

  her appreciation of the role we are assigning to her is at present more romantic than practical and [that is] why her cohabitation with Koschnik has … not yielded greater results so far. I made it clear that to live with the Abwehr is not quite helpful enough and that more concrete results must be achieved.209

  He provi
ded her with scraps of Air Ministry paper, apparently salvaged from waste paper baskets, containing disinformation about the effect of the V1 rocket attacks on London, and persuaded her to deploy her charms on another Abwehr officer, Rudolf Baumann, who failed to succumb despite ‘two prolonged kissing bouts … one of which lasted thirty-five minutes’.

  Klop was frequently in touch with the head of the Abwehr’s Lisbon office, Fritz Cramer, who in peace time had been secretary of the prestigious Adlon Hotel in Berlin. He was a hearty, strongly built man with a florid, scarred face, living well beyond his means, with a mistress at the Atlantico Hotel and a fondness for beer, horses, gambling and women. Klop’s task was to sow suspicion and dissent between him and his colleagues and their rivals in the German SS, by spreading black propaganda about the war crimes charges they would face when the war was over. Whether by accident or design, this led to Cramer being suspected by his superiors of working for the British and towards the end of the war he did in fact approach the Americans with a view to defecting.

  One of Cramer’s best agents caused continuous concern to MI5. Paul Fidrmuc, codename Ostro, kept up a steady flow of intelligence about Britain, and British activity in the Middle East. The code-breakers at Bletchley Park were able to monitor Ostro’s reports as they were radioed back to Germany, and knew that most of his British information was hopelessly wide of the mark. Sometimes, though, he was too close to the truth for comfort, particularly about secret RAF operations, and his Middle East information was apparently reliable. The problem for British intelligence was not so much that a German spy appeared to be running agents in London, although that was bad enough, but that he was endangering their own carefully constructed and entirely bogus agent Juan Pujol Garcia, codename Garbo. Pujol had invented a fictional network of agents in Britain, which he used to supply the Abwehr with false information. He became the star of their network of double-cross agents; his greatest coup was to mislead the Germans about the date and place of the D-Day landings. He was awarded the British MBE and the German Iron Cross for his services. But what the Double Cross team really did not need was a rival agent, Ostro, who was not under their control, feeding in contradictory intelligence which might lead the Germans to doubt Garbo’s reliability.

  MI5 and MI6 debated whether to assassinate him. Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, was against the idea, on the grounds that the highly secret Enigma decrypts must never be compromised by revealing knowledge that could not have been obtained through another source. The Double Cross committee disagreed and even after D-Day continued to press for liquidation. At one point, after Ostro revealed plans to move Canadian troops from Italy to France, they considered approaching the two supreme Allied commanders General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Alexander, to overrule ‘C’.

  Instead, a plan was hatched to compromise Fidrmuc in the eyes of his German paymasters by giving the impression that he was a double agent in the pay of the British. Klop must have been involved in this because the first step was to be an approach to Fidrmuc to change sides, made by Klop’s agent Ecclesiastic.210 That idea was dropped and when Fidrmuc was eventually captured Klop and MI5 officer Joan Chenhalls were given the job of investigating him. They went to great lengths to establish how he had succeeded in running the only undetected spy ring in Britain.

  The tall, powerfully built, blond agent was taken aback by Klop’s announcement, at the start of questioning, that he already knew him well from his time in Lisbon. Fidrmuc had apparently been unaware of the existence of his opposite number. But he was quite unabashed about his role in feeding intelligence to the Germans. He was a German, born in the Czechoslovak Sudetenland in 1898, who had business interests in metal trading, dabbled in journalism and prided himself on his physical fitness. It was known that he obtained some of his information from Dutch airline pilots flying the London to Lisbon route. He named his best source in London as his distant relative, a Czech lawyer Rudolf Ratschitsky, who worked in the economic department of the Czech government in exile at Princes Gate. Ratschitsky got information from his friend Air Vice-Marshal Karel Janoušek, head of the Czech air force, but his best, unwitting, contact was Maxmillian Lobkowitz, Czech ambassador in London during the war. Lobkowicz had been a member of the underground movement against the Nazis and would certainly not have provided them with information deliberately. Fidrmuc claimed that Ratschitsky managed to obtain the names of German cities that were about to be bombed by the RAF and left coded messages on the notice boards of Catholic churches around London which were collected by a Spanish Republican with a radio transmitter and relayed back to the Germans. In 1947 June Chenhalls tracked Ratschitsky down in the United States and went to interrogate him. He flatly denied the allegation and was able to demonstrate that many of the details provided by Paul Fidrmuc were incorrect. When confronted with this denial Fidrmuc stuck to his story. Klop came to the conclusion that he probably had recruited Ratschitsky before the war but had then invented his reports to win favour and admiration from his Nazi controllers.211

  But there were still nagging doubts that they never managed to resolve. Agent Garbo’s cover story had been that his reports were radioed from London by a Spanish Republican; it was a bizarre coincidence that Fidrmuc should invent the same story. Fidrmuc’s supposed Middle Eastern agent, whom he named as Ahmed Isauri, a representative of the Yemeni Royal family, was never traced. Fidrmuc, who was married, had indulged in the glamorous life of the secret agent, mixing with the dubious characters who gathered nightly at the El Galgo restaurant and nightclub run by Rosalinda Fox, a British informant with high-placed sources in the Spanish government. Fidrmuc even had an affair with a married MI6 agent, Denise de Lacerda, who had tipped off her employers about his activities. And whatever else he invented there was one espionage coup involving the veteran British ambassador in Portugal, Sir Ronald Campbell, which Klop and Miss Chenhalls were able to confirm. Fidrmuc told Klop how he had been sunning himself on a rock on the beach at Arrabida near Setubal in August 1943 when he noticed two men and a woman having difficulty mooring a small boat. He went to their assistance and was amazed to recognise one of the party as the ambassador, who was with his wife and a friend. They gratefully accepted his help and Sir Ronald asked Fidrmuc to keep an eye on their clothes while the party went for a swim in the sea. While they were gone Fidrmuc went through the ambassador’s pockets and found a notebook with a coded reference to a meeting with representatives of Pietro Badoglio, the newly installed Prime Minister of Italy, who had sent three generals to Portugal to negotiate a surrender. Fidrmuc tipped off the Abwehr who refused to believe the story. But it was confirmed, in part, by Sir Ronald who had told the MI6 station chief Charles de Salis at the time about his surprise encounter with a German. Sir Ronald was no fool and it seems incredible that he would have been so careless, so it may be that Fidrmuc substantially embellished the story for reasons of self-aggrandisement.212

  Klop was of the opinion that Fidrmuc stuck to his story because he had taken to writing spy novels and thought his own career would give his plots credibility. Guy Liddell came to the conclusion that Fidrmuc’s vanity would not allow him to admit that his reports were fabricated. To do so would make life difficult for him as he attempted to rebuild a career in Germany.213

  Fidrmuc was not the only troublesome Czech in Lisbon. They had their own intelligence branch there, run by Major Vaclav Pan, but once again German subversion was successful. Walther Schellenberg told Klop after the war that Fritz Cramer’s greatest achievement in Lisbon had been to penetrate British intelligence through the Czechs. His mole was Pan’s deputy Jean Charles Alexandre, a cover name for an Austrian agent of the Abwehr, Wilhelm Gessmann. His treachery, which included betraying a Resistance network in France, was revealed by intercepted Abwehr radio traffic and by tapping the Czechs’ own communications. MI5 discovered that Gessman had handed over to Cramer a British radio intended for use by the Resistance and the Germans had used it to feed false information back to Britain. Klop bri
efed his Czech intelligence contact Vaclav Slama who set up a confrontation in London between Major Pan and their boss František Moravec. Pan tried very hard to defend his protégé and Klop was convinced that Pan and Gessman had both been involved in some dubious business in Lisbon. Gessman refused to come to London and was sacked but Stewart Menzies was so angered by his behaviour that he sought Foreign Office approval for a plot to lure Gessman into fleeing Portugal on a neutral passenger liner which MI6 and the Royal Navy could intercept in international waters to arrest him. This would have been a breach of international law but fully justified, in Menzies’ view, to deal with ‘an enemy agent of quite extraordinary calibre’. In November 1946, after Klop completed his investigation, Guy Liddell recorded: