The Bedbug

by Peter Day

  Gessmann was a high grade German agent whose penetration on the Allied intelligence service was extremely successful. He joined the Czech I S in Lisbon in 1940 and he was able to betray to the Germans the Czech intelligence network in Paris and Marseilles about November 1941. He was responsible for the death of many members of the French Underground. His treachery was discovered by our service and he left the Czechs but managed to gain the confidence of the Americans who employed him for some time afterwards.214

  It would be surprising if the Americans had not been warned about Gessman. One of Klop’s jobs was liaison with FBI Special Agent Dennis A. Flinn, whose cover was as legal attaché at the US Embassy. He was the first FBI man to take up a posting in Europe and unusually, given the rivalry between the two, worked simultaneously for his official boss J. Edgar Hoover and the head of the recently formed OSS, Colonel William Donovan. He reported on the Abwehr’s leading personalities in Portugal and their technical capabilities – in cryptography and the use of secret inks for instance. He also played a role in identifying German agents sent to the US. Flinn went on to be director of the Office of Security at the State Department.215

  CHAPTER 12: SCHELLENBERG

  Walther Schellenberg, head of Hitler’s foreign intelligence service, was one of the biggest names in the Nazi hierarchy brought to Britain for interrogation at the end of the war. There had been intense competition between the British, Americans and Russians over who should benefit from his revelations. It fell to Klop to do the first examination. Extraordinarily, MI6 tried to block his participation, on the grounds that he was out of the country on a more important mission. What that was has never been explained. The result was that Schellenberg spent nearly all of May and early June 1945 in Sweden before being flown to Allied headquarters in Frankfurt on 17 June. Rather than allow him to be held at the American Uberersel interrogation centre, Dick White arranged for Schellenberg to be kept at a private house to await Klop’s attentions. Apparently, therefore, Schellenberg had ten days of private contemplation before Klop arrived on June 27 to begin sixteen days of questioning. That rather defies belief, unless there was some compelling reason why Klop should conduct the interrogation in preference to anyone else.

  Recently released documents in the United States suggest a sensational explanation. FBI agent Frederick Ayer Jr had persuaded Schellenberg’s captors to let him sit in on the interviews but was so in awe of Klop that he wrote to his director, J. Edgar Hoover:

  After conferring with the Special Interrogator sent down from the War Office in London, a Mr Johnson [Klop’s cover name] … I decided that it would be best if this were not so. Johnson is a man who has made a study of Schellenberg for the past five years and has had a penetration Agent in close contact with the man for some time. In fact he knows Schellenberg almost as well as he knows himself.216

  The idea that Klop had someone inside Schellenberg’s office in the Sicherheitsdienst, able to monitor his every move over a long period, would have been a hugely significant breakthrough. Yet it seems to have passed unremarked in Britain. Unlike the leaky Abwehr outfit run by Canaris, Himmler’s SD and SS were a much more secure and dangerous proposition. The fact that Klop had been investigating him for the past five years means that he had been aware of his importance almost from the time of the Venlo fiasco. Human intelligence from Germany, as opposed to Signals intercepts, was in short supply. Recently released files suggest that MI6 had an agent who was privy to military planning for the Eastern Front offensive in 1942 and that prior to that they had a source in Berlin who could find out how Allied plans were being leaked to the Germans. This unidentified agent was, unsurprisingly, difficult to contact so response times were inevitably slow.217 It is believed that Polish intelligence, working alongside the British, had a source inside Hitler’s headquarters who reported back via Switzerland.218

  Information that has come to light since the first edition of this book was published suggests that Klop’s mole was of greater significance than any of them. It seems probable that Klop had been in touch since 1938 or earlier with Kurt Jahnke, an éminence grise of German intelligence whose First World War exploits were notorious. As explained in a postscript, this means that Klop would have had a handle not only on every move Schellenberg made but also on the solo peace mission to Germany of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.219 Schellenberg was the seventh child of a piano builder of modest means from Saarbrücken. He had worked his way through law school, joining the SS in 1933 partly because membership qualified him for grants to complete his education. He was an ascetic workaholic, who neither drank nor smoked, and that quickly brought him to the attention of the head of the Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich. By 1939 Schellenberg was head of a Gestapo department of counter-intelligence, at home and abroad, and had formulated his goal of a single united German intelligence service, with him at its head.

  Whether he recognised his interrogator is not known. Answering questions he referred to Klop by his cover name of Mr Johnson. Certainly their paths had run perilously close, if not actually crossed, in the previous six years. Schellenberg had played a leading role in the Venlo disaster; he had been behind the attempts first to flatter, then cajole, then bribe and ultimately kidnap the Duke of Windsor from Spain and he had spent some time undercover in Lisbon. He had risen under Heinrich Himmler’s patronage to be SS-Brigadeführer in charge of all Nazi foreign intelligence, eclipsing the faltering Abwehr military intelligence operations of Admiral Canaris.

  As Hitler prepared Operation Sea Lion, the projected invasion of Britain in 1940, Schellenberg had the job of flooding the country with secret agents and of drawing up the Sonderfahndungliste GB (literally Special Search List for Great Britain, inevitably called The Black Book). It was a hit list of 2,820 prominent people who were to be rounded up and handed over to the Gestapo. These included, obviously enough, Winston Churchill and other members of the War Cabinet, plus leaders of foreign governments in exile, prominent Jews, and writers including Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Noël Coward and E. M. Forster, the psychologist Sigmund Freud – who had died in London in 1939 – and even the black American singer Paul Robeson. Klop and Wolfgang zu Putlitz were both on it, marked down as British agents for special attention by Schellenberg’s counter-espionage department IVE4. Klop’s cover name was given as ‘Middleton-Peddelton’.220

  Reinhard Heydrich had organised six Einsatzkommando for the major cities, terror groups whose role was to destroy all civilian resistance to the conquering German Army. Schellenberg’s later knowledge of the slaughter of thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe by these groups would lead him into the dock at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, where he denied taking part in the planning of the atrocities and was acquitted of that particular charge. But he admitted being present when 120 members of the Czech Resistance were slaughtered by the Gestapo in the Karl Borromaeus church in Prague in May 1942.221

  Schellenberg deluded himself in thinking that Hitler’s security chief and Interior Minister, Heinrich Himmler, might be an acceptable alternative as German leader. In the last days and months of the Third Reich, Schellenberg persuaded Himmler to turn a blind eye as thousands of Jews were rescued from the concentration camps via Switzerland and Sweden. That much at least stood to his credit when Germany finally capitulated. He was by then acting as a peace emissary in Sweden with Count Bernadotte, whose humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Red Cross he had facilitated. He gave himself up to the Swedish authorities and it was through them that he agreed to return to Germany to face his inquisitors.

  As FBI agent Frederick Ayer Jr explained to Hoover, Schellenberg had been greatly surprised that he had not been brutally interrogated and shot. Instead he had a week in the safe house surrounded by books and with meals brought to him on a tray. Klop’s interrogation technique did not come from the Gestapo textbook either. As Agent Ayer described it:

  Johnson’s approach to the man was to introduce himself and tell Schellenberg that he was proud to meet him and had studied
his career as an intelligence operator and officer with great interest, and wished to talk to him as one professional to another. This manouver [sic] was eminently successful and Schellenberg has been furnishing almost too much information.222

  Klop himself reported back to London that the first meeting ‘left nothing to be desired and justified reasonable hope that complete answers will be received to all queries which Schellenberg is competent to answer’.

  Klop’s interrogation style continued to mirror his personality: conversational, inviting his subject to expand on subjects that fascinated him and about which he already knew a little. His opening gambit was to inquire about events in Spain and Portugal, which of course he knew well and might therefore spot very quickly whether Schellenberg was telling the truth. This must have been a relief to Schellenberg. Still only thirty-five, he was exhausted, chronically unwell and had good reason to expect and fear harsher treatment. That would come later. He responded well. In his preliminary report Klop, who was probably assisted by Patrick Milmo and Stuart Hampshire, was able to say:

  Walter Schellenberg is facing his present plight as a prisoner in Allied hands in a spirit of complete realism … The fact that Schellenberg seems to be possessed by a certain amount of good faith in Allied goodwill is due to his conviction that he has, ever since becoming conscious in 1940 that Germany had lost the war, been striving for a settlement with the Western powers and for an improvement of the lot of Allied nationals, soldiers and civilians in German hands.223

  On 7 July it was time for Schellenberg to be taken to Britain. FBI agent Ayer, watching him depart, wrote to Hoover:

  This whole case is regarded by the Allied Counter-Intelligence officers, and in particular by the British, as being the most important single case to come up in the history of Counter-espionage by the Allies. A thorough study is being made of the information obtained and a great deal of further interrogation will be done in London.224

  On the journey to London an unidentified companion recorded in terms entirely redolent of Klop’s imaginative prose:

  [T]he plane which brought Schellenberg to England on a glorious summer day passed over Greater London. Schellenberg, who for the first time in his life flew gegen Engelland, stared spellbound down on the giant living city. His eyes sought anxiously for the wounds inflicted on the centre of the British Empire. He could find no wounds, nor even scars. Giving up the hopeless search, he whispered: ‘I cannot understand – no destruction at all.’225

  Schellenberg was taken to Camp 020 – actually not a camp at all but a rather plain Victorian country house, enclosed by a wooden fence and a double ring of barbed wire, on the edge of Ham Common woodland next to Richmond Royal Park in south west London. Latchmere House had been the home of a wealthy marine engineer, Joshua Field, and then used during the First World War as a military hospital, treating officers for ‘neurasthenia’, a euphemism for shellshock. The thirty rooms that had once been used for patients were converted to cells, which were bugged. Staff lived in Nissen huts in the grounds. This had been the main interrogation centre for German agents under Lt Col. Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens who had a reputation for uncompromising methods. Prisoners were required to stand during interrogation and there was to be ‘no chivalry, no gossip, no cigarettes. Figuratively a spy in war should be at the point of a bayonet.’

  Stephens supposedly forbade physical violence because it produced answers to please rather than the truth. He later faced a court martial for alleged mistreatment of Nazi prisoners in Germany and was cleared, although there was evidence that torture had been carried out by subordinates. But he was not averse to psychological pressure, including threats of execution or being subjected to the horrors of Cell 14, a mythical torture centre whose torments were planted in the minds of prisoners.

  And Stephens certainly did not like Walter Schellenberg, describing him as ‘a priggish little dandy … [who] sulked peevishly until he was brought face to face with the reality of British contempt for him and his evil works’.226

  Schellenberg later claimed at the Nuremberg Trials he had been subjected to bright lights, being hollered at, and cold water baths, adding: ‘I was finished. Eight weeks in a lightless cell. I wanted to kill myself. It was not possible.’227

  Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of this in the MI5 files, other than a slightly conscience-stricken concern that if the circumstances in which a confession had been obtained from him were made public at his trial it might be ruled inadmissible in court.228

  It seems certain that Klop continued to be one of the interrogators because in August Schellenberg wrote, or dictated, a long statement clearing up various points that had been raised with him, including some details of the Coco Chanel operation ‘for Mr Johnson’.

  Some time before that, a preliminary report had been drawn up covering the period 27 June to 12 July. Once again, the conclusions have the hallmarks of Klop’s florid style:

  For Schellenberg the puppet show has ended. The puppet show in which he pulled the strings and in which Grand Muftis, Balkan politicians, White Russian generals, French collaborators and other venal agents took his money and danced to the tune of the young SS General. Instead the tragedy has started. The tragedy which he foresaw and foretold early in the war but could not prevent because he and his betters, Himmler, Hitler and all the rest, lived in a world of their own making, i.e. a fool’s Paradise. Their ignorance about the normal world around them, which had risen to crush the monster, staggers belief.229

  He then recounted how Schellenberg and Himmler had discussed, apparently in all seriousness, in August 1942, a peace proposal under which Germany would give up most of its conquered territory, except parts of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland and Austria, in return for handing over France and the Low Countries to British rule.

  The report itself, though, was extraordinarily wide ranging. Schellenberg described his own role at Venlo; the existence of a private intelligence organisation, run by the I G Farben chemical conglomerate, which Schellenberg had used; the breaking of the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), the Russian intelligence network in Germany and France, including the identity of high-ranking Germans who had collaborated with it; his views about the Max Klatt network which supplied him with intelligence from the Russian front; his honey-trap operations in Spain and Portugal, using girls supplied by a Berlin bar; and Himmler’s Werewolf scheme to maintain an underground Nazi network after defeat and to aid the escape of its most wanted war criminals.

  Schellenberg’s close links with Roger Masson, head of the Swiss intelligence service, would have been of particular interest to Klop. Masson’s tactic had been to balance the very real threat of a German invasion against the value he could be as a conduit of information in both directions. He had regular contact with Schellenberg and eventually, under pressure from him, had rolled up the Rote Drei (Red Three), an incredibly productive, Geneva-based, Russian spy network which had penetrated the highest echelons of the German high command. Masson had known about them – indeed his own intelligence corps was suspected of being an unwitting source – and so had Britain. Klop and his old friend Nicholas Elliott, MI6 station chief in Berne, had already been investigating them and, as will be seen, had good reason to maintain their interest. Schellenberg had also been in contact with Eric Cable, the British consul in Zurich in 1943 and had put him in touch with Himmler about a possible peace deal. Hitler heard about it from Ribbentrop and vetoed it but it appears that Schellenberg kept up the contact.230 As late as November 1944 Allen Dulles, the head of US intelligence in Switzerland, was told by the German consul Alexander von Neurath that he had been approached by Cable who wanted to be put in touch with representatives of the SS about a peace initiative in which the Papal Nuncio to Berne, Monsignor Phillippe Bernardini was also involved. Dulles was sceptical and telegraphed back to his HQ:

  Understand this matter caused some excitement in SS quarters in Berlin. Cable is an expansive person and has not given impression here of being particul
arly discreet. Difficult for me to judge whether this is his own initiative as consider unlikely he would have been used for highly confidential task. … [In view of] possible capital Nazis could make out of this vis-a-vis Russians I have had nothing to do with it.231

  The questioning of Schellenberg seems to have been largely forward-looking. Although it went over much old ground its purpose was to establish German methods, to identify German personalities who might still be active, and to understand the German intelligence perspective on the Soviet Union. The Cold War was already beginning. So, although Schellenberg gave a narrative account of Venlo, he did not clear up once and for all the extent to which a genuine possibility of a coup against Hitler had existed in 1939. The degree of treachery or complicity, if any, of the Duke of Windsor, was never explored and nor were the circumstances of Rudolf Hess’s bizarre one-man peace mission to Britain in 1941, even though Schellenberg had the job of investigating his disappearance at the time and concluded that it had not been sanctioned by Hitler.

  Maybe there was not enough time. The interrogators were under increasing pressure to hand over their star witness to the Nuremberg prosecutors and in the autumn of 1945 they were obliged to comply. Schellenberg’s first appearance at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal was as a witness against his former boss, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was hanged on 16 October 1946. Schellenberg then appeared in the ‘Wilhelmstrasse Case’, one of twenty-one defendants from different German government offices and organisations. Although acquitted of complicity in atrocities against civilians by Heydrich’s special task forces, who murdered hundreds of thousands, he was found guilty of the extermination of Russian prisoners who had been forced to work as saboteurs and spies against their country, and of membership of a criminal organisation – the SS. He was eventually sentenced in 1949 to six years in prison but was already too ill to attend court. He was soon released and spent his last days receiving medical treatment in Switzerland and Italy. Coco Chanel, in voluntary exile in Switzerland to escape the opprobrium of her French countrymen for collaborating with the SS, paid his medical expenses. He died of liver and gall bladder problems in 1952.232