by Peter Day
The traffic was split into two main groups: Max and Moritz. Max appeared to have agents everywhere from Leningrad, 1,300 miles to the north, down to Batumi on the eastern edge of the Black Sea, on through Azerbaijan to the Iranian capital, Tehran, and then on to Baghdad in Iraq, 1,300 miles to the south. Initially MI5 and MI6 were more concerned with Moritz, whose sphere of operations extended from Syria and Palestine down through Egypt into Libya.246 It appeared that the Germans had a mole inside General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army as he sought to turn the tide against the Panzer divisions of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the Western Desert.
Gradually the analysts came to the conclusion that the Moritz material was low-grade intelligence, often inaccurate and capable of being compiled by any well-informed observer.
The Max traffic, however, gave the appearance of being genuine, detailed and immensely valuable to the German high command. It provided information about shipping convoys and troop movements, planned offensives and situation reports from the siege of Stalingrad. With some trepidation, the Joint Signals Intelligence Committee, with representatives from MI5, MI6 and GC&CS (the Government Code and Cipher School) decided to alert the Russians to what looked like a horrendous security failure on their part. Their representative in Moscow, Cecil Barclay – Sir Robert Vansittart’s stepson – was authorised to give a guarded account of the intercepts. This carried the risk that the Klatt operation would quickly realise the Russians had been tipped off. The code-breakers were not about to share the secret of Enigma, the German encryption method that they had broken, with their Communist allies. They were not to know that Russia’s own double agents, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, were assiduously filing every detail back to Moscow anyway.
Additionally, a suspicion was forming in the minds of some in MI5 and MI6 that what they were seeing might be a huge deception operation by the Russians, deliberately feeding false intelligence, laced into genuine information, back to Germany. Britain was already doing the same thing. Cecil Barclay got a surprising response: bitter complaints that the British had been holding out on their allies. More surprising still, nothing happened. The Klatt operation carried on as before; apparently the Russians had done nothing to plug the leaks.
When President Yeltsin ordered the partial release of Russian Intelligence Service archives in the early 1990s it emerged that the NKVD and the counter-intelligence service Smersh had investigated Klatt but had not produced a final report until 1947. They concluded that the Klatt reports contained only 8 per cent genuine intelligence, that the agent names were fictional and that no radio network existed. They did not explain where the genuine intelligence had come from.247
Nevertheless, at the time the British concluded that the Klatt operation was genuine. This belief was fuelled by interrogation of captured German agents, in particular Mirko Rot, a Yugoslav Jew whose parents were among those massacred by the Hungarians in Novi Sad in 1942. He and his wife had narrowly escaped the same fate and he had trained as a German agent with the deliberate intention of getting sent undercover to an Allied country where he could defect. His opportunity came when he was posted to Lisbon and made contact with the First Secretary in the British Embassy, Peter Garran. He was able to identify some of the Klatt agents, among them Willi Goetz who was based in Turkey, and Elie Haggar, the 23-year-old son of an Egyptian policeman. Haggar had been recruited while studying chemistry at university in occupied France and was tracked by MI5 as he made his way home via Sofia, where he was briefed by the Klatt team. He was intercepted by the British in Palestine and interned. But the Moritz traffic continued. MI5 suspected that it might be the work of the correspondent of Tass, the Russian news agency, attached to the British forces.
More significantly, Mirko Rot gave MI5 Klatt’s real name: Richard Kauder. He had met Kauder’s mother, visited his flat at 15 Skobelev Boulevard, and knew about his mistresses in Sofia and Budapest. Klatt managed to operate independently of the local Abwehr office, which treated him with suspicion. Instead he made himself the most valuable supplier of intelligence to the Abwehr in Vienna. Rot was aware that the Klatt signals were highly valued. The Stalingrad reports had been of enormous help to the air force and led to the Russians suffering great losses. Rot also revealed that one channel of communication was a White Russian – someone who would be willing to see Germany triumph in his homeland to rid it of the scourge of communism.248
He identified this source as General Anton Turkul and was later able to describe how, in July 1943, Kauder had personally flown to Rome, accompanied by Turkul’s head of intelligence Ira Lang, to persuade Turkul to flee to Budapest before the Allies invaded Italy. Klop was briefed at an early stage on the Rot revelations so that he could run them past agent Harlequin – the German Major Richard Wurmann – whom he had interrogated at his country home in Gloucester and who was now conveniently located in a neighbouring flat in Chelsea Cloisters. Wurmann could not help but Klop kept in close touch with developments and sought the help of his old friend Eugen Sabline for background on General Turkul.
Turkul, born in 1892 in Odessa in the Ukraine, was the son of an engineer and had enlisted as a private in the Imperial Russian Army at the outbreak of the First World War, rising to the rank of captain. Promotion came even more rapidly with the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Turkul joined the White Russian resistance army in Poland and so distinguished himself that he was appointed general of an infantry division. When it became clear that the rebels were doomed to fail, Turkul, like 160,000 of his countrymen, fled to Turkey. As they then dispersed around Europe during the 1920s, he had eked out a living as a clerk in a sugar factory in Serbia, spent some time in Sofia and then become part of the exile community in Paris. He struggled to make ends meet, running a petrol station and a restaurant and taking in lodgers. He remained active in the many anti-Communist movements, wrote a book about his military experiences and, as he later confessed, was paid money by the Japanese – who were in constant conflict with the Soviets in the east – to infiltrate anti-Communist agitators back into Russia.249
All of this made some sense. Here was a right-wing White Russian intelligence organisation with extensive contacts still inside the Soviet Union. Their concern was not to rid Europe of Adolf Hitler; it was to rid Russia of Joseph Stalin, almost at any price. The opportunity to test this theory came with end of the war and the arrest of Kauber, Turkul and Ira Lang.
On 24 May 1945, Kauder was arrested by the Americans in their control zone in Vienna and the remains of his network were rolled up by the simple expedient of sending out a coded message to them in Kauder’s name summoning them to a meeting. As they arrived they were arrested. British intelligence regarded him as a priority target but for more than a year they were prevented by the Americans from seeing him.
Kauder was questioned at length at the American interrogation centre in Salzburg. The master spy was only 5ft 6in. tall and weighed nearly 13 stone (82 kilos); he was stout, slow-moving, with a round, friendly face and smooth grey hair. He was Jewish by birth but had converted with his parents to Roman Catholicism under the pressure of rampant anti-Semitism in turn-of-the-century Vienna. His motivations for working for the Nazis were thought to be money and fear. He was paid large sums of money to meet the expenses of his supposed agent network but he still faced discrimination because of his background. At one point the Abwehr were forced to stop using him because of an order from Hitler that they should not employ non-Aryans. Kauder’s mother was living in Vienna at the outbreak of war and he was anxious that she should be protected from persecution. His father, who had been a medical officer in the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army, was dead.
There were plans to bring him to London but in March 1946 he attempted suicide and it was decided that he was not in a fit state to travel. It was July before Gilbert Ryle was able to see him in Salzburg but by then the Americans had provided a full background, running to more than seventy pages and listing all his Abwehr contacts and code names of his agents.
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bsp; When Gilbert Ryle saw Richard Kauder he quickly came to the conclusion that the earlier suspicion that the Klatt organisation was a Soviet double cross had been well-founded. The key was Ira Lang, Turkul’s intelligence chief. It became clear that he controlled virtually all the incoming traffic for the Klatt organisation and was extremely secretive about his sources. Lang was supposedly the son of a Czech father and a Russian mother and had grown up in Krasnodar in southern Russia, trained for the military at cavalry school but after the revolution had fought on the White Russian side under General Anton Denikin. Thereafter he had studied law in Prague, never qualified but worked for a Hungarian law firm. He had been jailed in Budapest for spreading anti-government propaganda and that was where he met Kauder, who was also briefly in jail because of irregularities in his travel documents. Lang led Kauder to believe that his intelligence sources were White Russians who had infiltrated the Soviet military command.
Ryle found it incredible that this network could have operated from 1941 to 1945, filing daily reports, without the Russians discovering it. And since he knew that the Russians had been told about Klatt, it was even more incredible that they took no action to close him down. He noted, too, that Turkul and Lang, who had not been under arrest in Salzburg in the immediate post-war period, seemed quite unconcerned that the Russians might try to kidnap them to answer for their duplicity. Yet the Russians had attempted to snatch Kauder from under the noses of the Americans and when that failed they tried to capture his mistress and hold her hostage. That too was thwarted. Ryle concluded that both Turkul and Lang knew they were safe because they had been working for the NKVD, the Russian secret police, forerunner of the KGB. He drew attention to the fact that Turkul had been expelled from France in 1938 after being implicated in the kidnap and disappearance of the White Russian leader in Paris, General Evgeni Miller. British intelligence had also been told, pre-war, by the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, that it was NKVD policy to infiltrate the rebel White Russian movement and control it from within.
Ryle concluded that far from running a network, Lang was being run by the NKVD. There had not been any two-way radio traffic, just a blind feed – a broadcast which Lang could pick up on any radio set and decode before recasting it in a series of ‘headlines’ to Richard Kauder who then recreated it as text to give to the Germans. Ryle suspected that the broadcast was powerful enough to be received by General Turkul in his Rome headquarters, and that Turkul had been selling it on to Mussolini, thereby doubling the income which kept him and his ‘Anti-Communist Union’ afloat.
That would explain why Kauder and Lang had to rescue Turkul from Rome before Mussolini was deposed. They feared that the whole operation would be exposed. Ryle was not convinced that the NKVD was deliberately feeding the Germans disinformation. He thought their sole objective was to control Turkul and through him all anti-Communist organisations. Turkul admitted, under questioning, that he had set out to undermine rival White Russian groups.
This was how Ryle explained his scenario:
It was no part of the concern of the NKVD to assist Russian generals to win battles or campaigns. Its business was to penetrate and tamper with anti-Communist organisations. Its enemy was not the Axis powers but, inter alia, the White Russians. Consequently while the Max system was indeed a double cross, it was not a method of leading the Axis General Staffs astray in tactical or strategic matters; it was a method of consolidating its agent, Turkul’s control over White Russian activities …
It is also quite compatible with the single-minded ruthlessness of the NKVD that it should deliberately have issued Max-reports which were likely to lead to the sinking of a Russian convoy, the bombing of a new airfield or the destruction of a Russian division. When Lang confessed to Klatt that he hated to think of the thousands of Russians whose death he had brought about, the explanation may be not that Lang was beginning to swerve from his White Russian hatred of the Soviet regime but that he deplored the price paid by Russia for the build-up that the NKVD had given to him and Turkul.250
Ryle’s hypothesis convinced his colleagues back in London and on 28 August a small group gathered in the office of Major Tar Robertson, who had coordinated Britain’s Double Cross operation which so successfully deceived the Nazis with disinformation. Robertson and his colleague Joan Chenhalls were hosts to Commander Win Scott and Sam Bossard of the OSS, the American forerunner of the CIA. They agreed that Turkul and Lang should be arrested and brought to London for questioning. Halfway through the meeting Kim Philby, head of counterintelligence at MI6, rang to say new information was coming in from the French secret service lending credence to the idea that Klatt was a Soviet front.251
Turkul and Lang were to be held in Brixton prison but taken each day for questioning at an MI5 safe house, Flat 19, Rugby Mansions, a red-brick four-storey block in Bishop King’s Road, Kensington, a side street opposite the Olympia exhibition centre. It had previously been used to question Mirko Rot. Miss Chenhalls made the arrangements and explained to the housekeeper that the visitors were not prisoners, they were very important people who were visiting secretly and would be accompanied at all time by people ‘who were looking after them’. Privately, she noted that the sitting room and dining room gave out on to a balcony and the guards would have to be careful that neither of their guests attempted suicide. Her biggest headache, though, was to get them ration cards so that they could be provided with food.252
It was agreed that Gilbert Ryle should conduct the interviews with Klop – ‘Mr Johnson’ – as interpreter. They would start in friendly fashion, seeking better knowledge of the Abwehr, and then turn up the heat. The interviews with Turkul took place on Thursday 19 September and the following day.
By the end of the questioning of Turkul and Ira neither man had broken down or confessed to being a Soviet agent but Ryle was confident that they had let slip enough to confirm that the Max/Moritz traffic was ‘an up-to-date form of Trojan Horse’. He added:
There is no room for doubt that the NKVD supplied Ira with military intelligence of as high veracity as could be achieved in order that he might secure from the Abwehr in return for these golden eggs the funds, the immunity from surveillance, the communications and the travel permits necessary for the prosecution of the covert-pro-Soviet operations of Turkul’s organisation.253
Turkul had accepted under interrogation that Ira must have been foist upon him in 1940 by the NKVD. Questioned separately, Ira consistently denied the allegation, mocking it and offering to go on trial as a war criminal if they had enough evidence. The interview with him had started badly. He had a glass eye which was somehow damaged shortly after his arrival in London and the interrogators had to find a specialist who could replace it.254 Ira’s answers did nothing to illuminate the picture. He and Turkul confirmed that they had sought to undermine other White Russian groups working in Germany’s interests. They attributed this to factional rivalry; Ryle put it down to NKVD instructions. He was firmly of the opinion that the principal object of the NKVD was to penetrate and control anti-Communist White Russian groups.
Klop agreed with the overall analysis but believed that there was two-way traffic, masterminded by Ira. He used the White Russians to supply the Germans with disinformation and to obtain intelligence on German responses which he could feed back to Russia. Turkul had been an insignificant figurehead who chose not to realise the obvious – that he was being used by Ira. In Klop’s wonderfully mixed metaphor: ‘The Trojan Horse had the head of an ostrich which it buried in the sands of the Campagna Romana.’255
There were other undercurrents that tended to confirm Ryle and Klop in their suspicions. According to Otto Wagner, head of the Abwehr office in Sofia, he had always regarded Klatt as a ‘Nachrichtenschwindler’, an intelligence fraud and a Soviet agent. Wagner reported that one wall of Klatt’s office was covered with a map of the USSR west of the Urals, with a small light near each major city. Whenever Wagner or another Abwehr officer visited Klatt, one or more lights flashed
repeatedly, whereupon Klatt would exclaim, for example: ‘Ah! A report from Kiev has just come in.’256 Wagner was unimpressed, and complained that Klatt was a Soviet plant, but he had twice been overruled by the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris.
The SS General Walther Schellenberg, who replaced Canaris as head of the Abwehr, was another admirer of Klatt’s network. In his memoirs he wrote:
The work of this man was really masterly. He was able to report large-scale strategic plans as well as details of troop movements … usually two or three weeks ahead of events, so that our leaders could prepare suitable counter-measures – or, should I say, could have done so if Hitler had paid more attention to the information.257
Turkul also had connections with Claudius Voss, who had run a White Russian intelligence unit out of Sofia through the 1920s and 1930s. Voss, like Turkul, had been suspected of involvement in the kidnap and disappearance of the White Russian leader General Miller by agents of the NKVD. He had served in a German naval unit during the war. Post-war both Turkul and Voss had worked for the Americans in Vienna, purporting to identify Russian Communist infiltrators. And, as Klop no doubt knew, both had pre-war links to MI6. They had been recruited in the 1920s in Paris by Dick Ellis, whose brother-in-law was a White Russian. Ellis was later suspected of selling information to the Germans and the Russians.258 Voss claimed to have carried on working for MI6 through the Gibson brothers, Alfred and Harold, who ran agents in Eastern Europe. He added that one of his men, Michael Skoblikov, had been executed in 1941 for spying for the British.259 Not that working for the British and the Russians were mutually incompatible, as amply demonstrated by the MI6 officer overseeing Klop and Ryle’s investigation – Kim Philby, KGB agent.