The Bedbug

by Peter Day

  Like Rudolf Roessler, she had contacts in the German theatrical world who were still able to visit the theatre in Zurich, and she met Swiss and German journalists who were able to travel between the two countries. A Jewish banker with a German wife told her in the winter of 1940-41 of the liquidation of incurables and others in Germany and by the end of 1941 had reported to her the intended slaughter of Jews in the Final Solution.

  She later recalled that from Christmas 1944 onwards the Russians had become more and more suspicious that the British and Americans were intending to make peace with the Germans behind their backs. The Germans had done everything possible to nurture Russian suspicion. Messages had poured into Switzerland from Nazis asserting that they were prepared to come over to the British side in order to fight with the western Allies against the Russians. She had been personally approached by representatives of the Croat Ustashe dictator Ante Pavelić and Himmler’s head of Reich security, including the Gestapo, Ernst Kaltenbrunner.294

  After satisfying his interrogators in Moscow, Foote was briefed to undertake a new mission in South America on behalf of the KGB, instead of which he handed himself over to the British in Germany in June 1947 and later published a memoir, Handbook for Spies, which had been ghost-written for him by Courtenay Young of MI5. Foote confirmed that in 1943 he had put a radio request to Moscow Centre on behalf of Radó to be allowed to seek refuge in the British Legation. Radó told Foote that the Legation had not only agreed to give him sanctuary but said they would allow him to continue despatching intelligence to the Russians. MI6 later denied any knowledge of this arrangement. But decoded intercepts of Foote’s radio messages at the time seem to partially confirm it. The German investigator Wilhelm Flicke had cracked some of his codes and his files fell into British hands after the war. A message from Moscow via Foote in October 1943 rebuked Radó for making contact with the British military attaché in Berne, Col. Henry Cartwright, and ordered him to sever all connection. A month later, after further analysis, Moscow decided that Radó was exaggerating the danger of German or Swiss intervention and instead blamed British intelligence for trying to disrupt their network.295

  Foote claimed that the Swiss police investigators knew of links between him, an arms dealer called Gerald Chamberlain who had managed to arrange $100,000 in finance for the Rote Drei, and MI6’s air intelligence officer in Berne, Air Commodore Freddie West. In 1947 the Swiss put other members of the Rote Drei on trial and a police witness, Inspector Charles Knecht, told the court that the Radó network had spied for Britain as well as Russia.296

  More light was shed on the British connection to the Rote Drei by Hans Rudolf Kurz, a lawyer who joined the Swiss defence ministry in 1946 and became its deputy director. In 1972 Professor Kurz published a review of Swiss intelligence operations during the war in which he stated that Otto Pünter, one of Elizabeth Wiskemann’s sources, had begun building up a private intelligence network during the Spanish Civil War and supplied both the French and the British. He remained in contact with British intelligence during the Second World War, supplying microdot copies of German documents that found their way to Britain attached to postcards and letters sent by air mail to Portugal. His greatest success was to obtain details of the German V1 and V2 rocket research at Peenemunde from an Austrian scientist who had fled to Switzerland.297

  Constantine Fitzgibbon, an Irish-American who served in the British Army and then with US military intelligence during the war, has argued that the Rote Drei saved Russia from defeat at the hands of Germany in 1942. He maintains that such was the level of distrust by the Russians of intelligence emanating from Britain that the only way to convince them of its veracity was to supply it surreptitiously via the Lucy network. Fitzgibbon had been initiated into the Enigma secret at Bletchley Park as part of his intelligence training. He implies that if the Lucy network continued to operate after the war it was because it suited Britain and America for it to do so. It was a means of feeding into the Soviet machine intelligence that they would trust and not recognise as emanating from the Western Allies. This raises interesting questions about the role of Klop and Nicholas Elliott. Were they on the outside, looking in, or had they effectively infiltrated it?298

  Klop’s Cold War duties in Switzerland also covered fears of undue Communist influence within the fledgling United Nations Organisation.

  With the help of one of his Czech contacts, George Simunek he kept a particular eye on the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe. Myrdal had been a Social Democrat MP and his country’s trade minister from 1945 to 1947, when he came under fire for his close relations with the Soviet Union. He went on to win a Nobel Prize for economics. Klop also reported on Myrdal’s Russian special assistant, Evgeny Chossudovsky. He came from a Jewish merchant family who had fled the Soviet Union in 1921 when their property was confiscated after the Revolution. He had studied at Edinburgh University and married Rachel Sullivan, an Ulster Protestant, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. Some of his family had died in Auschwitz. His wife was believed by MI5 to have Communist sympathies.299

  Klop also played a part in the defection of the Czech chargé d’affaires in Berne, Dr Ivan Glaser-Skalny, who had been President Benes’s wartime aide-de-camp. He had strong connections with Britain – his brother Erik and step-sister Mila were British subjects. He resigned early in April 1948 following the coup in which the Communist Party seized control of his country, with Soviet backing, thus heightening the tension of the Cold War. Dr Glaser-Skalny publicly announced that he refused to support a government which ‘suppressed man’s most sacred rights’, and added: ‘I could not look decent people in the face if I represented such a Government.’300 Behind the scenes he had discussed with Klop the possibility that most of the staff of the Legation, including the minister Dr Jindrich Andrial and his wife Juliana would also defect. The prospect was particularly difficult for them because they faced leaving their children behind in Czechoslovakia. The response from the Foreign Office was distinctly offhand. They were not interested in Czech refugees and offered no encouragement to East Europeans wanting to escape their Communist regimes. The most they would do was grant temporary access to refugees who had visas for travel to the United States. Skalny was able to take advantage of this offer, married Mary Isabella Weir, daughter of Sir Cecil Weir, economic adviser to the Allied Control Commission in Germany, and then emigrated to America. His parents, Karol and Ludmilla were granted British citizenship.

  It was during this period that Klop met the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Brousson, who was working as a children’s nanny for the Swiss Foreign Minister Max Petitpierre while improving her French. They sat next to each other at a dinner party hosted by the British military attache Norman Fryer and the incorrigible Klop, making light of a forty year age difference, asked her out. She recalls:

  I didn’t have much of a social life and if I got invited to anything I just said yes. I was so anxious for experience outside the little island of my life. I was still very young. He was charming and all sorts of people imagined all sorts of things that weren’t happening [about their relationship]. I was used as a sort of decoy. He took me to meet all sorts of peculiar people and I realised later that they must have been German or Russian spies. I was just an acceptable normal healthy English girl. People didn’t know who I was. It was an excuse.

  I didn’t understand about spies and that sort of thing and I always had a question mark in my mind as to what was going on. A lot of the conversation was in Russian. I just looked vague and benign and enjoyed the good food when I was with him. It was only later when I read things about Klop that I wondered whether I was part of the set up.301

  It was a relationship that endured, and blossomed as she became a close lifetime friend of Nadia too. When she returned from Switzerland Klop found her a job with MI5. She was also a guest at one of his intimate dinners at Chelsea Cloisters where she drank too many cocktails and fell asleep on
his bed. She awoke after midnight to find Klop waiting patiently to serve her dinner. Or so she thought. Later he admitted he had locked her in the flat and gone out for a riotous dinner party with the art historian Francis Watson and friends, returning just in time for her to regain consciousness.302

  CHAPTER 15: MOURA

  As the Nazi threat receded, Klop and his joint masters at MI5 and MI6 became increasingly preoccupied with the menace of Soviet Communism. The investigations in Switzerland had demonstrated that the Russian intelligence service had never allowed the immediate danger from Germany to deflect them from the wider imperative of long-term conflict with Western capitalism.

  There had been an embargo on British agents spying on their Soviet allies during the war so it came as a devastating blow to discover how widely the forerunners of the KGB had infiltrated the highest levels of the British diplomatic, scientific and intelligence communities.

  The shock of betrayal caught MI5, in particular, at a moment of weakness. Sir David Petrie retired as director-general in 1946, well-regarded by political masters and colleagues. His last act had been to fight a rearguard action against those who wanted to subsume his organisation into MI6. The new Labour government, with some justification, nursed deep suspicions of the security services in peacetime. The leaking of the Zinoviev letter, which had helped bring down the first Labour government more than twenty years earlier, still rankled. MI5 brought in an outsider, Sir Percy Sillitoe, chief constable of Glasgow, to replace Petrie. He had no real experience of intelligence work but was thought to be a safe pair of hands who would keep his agents noses out of places they had no need to be poking. For Guy Liddell, the deputy director who had appeared to be a shoo-in for the job, it was a bitter disappointment. For Dick White and Klop Ustinov it was an ominous precedent. They had previous form with Sir Percy.

  On the eve of the outbreak of war one of Klop’s surveillance tip-offs had led to the arrest under the Official Secrets Act of a suspected German agent. It was hardly a significant coup and caused barely a ripple at the time. William Brand, a 27-year-old electrician, was seized by police at a Perth post office in Scotland on Saturday 23 August 1939 and in a closed session of the local magistrates was accused of offering to communicate secrets that might be useful to an enemy. He was remanded in custody but by the following day needed hospital treatment and on the Monday was released ‘to take a holiday’. No more was heard of the case.

  Behind the scenes, Klop had warned several months earlier that the German consul in Glasgow, Werner Gregor, was a suspicious character. Like Klop, Gregor had served in the German Army in the First World War and then entered the diplomatic service. He had been shunted into a dead-end job in Glasgow after making derogatory remarks about Hitler but Klop, for some reason, thought he was up to no good. MI5 began intercepting his mail and discovered a letter, which they traced back to Brand, purporting to pass on naval intelligence. Under questioning Brand confessed that the intelligence was entirely the product of his own imagination. The only noteworthy aspect of the case was the difficulty Dick White had encountered in getting it investigated. The Glasgow Chief Constable, then Captain Percy Sillitoe, was a personal friend of Werner Gregor and took some convincing that he could be mixed up in espionage. Gregor in due course returned to Germany, where he remained in the diplomatic service throughout the war, and in 1948 wrote to his old friend asking for a reference to help him get a job. By that time Sir Percy Sillitoe had been two years in the job of head of MI5 and duly provided Gregor with a letter confirming his anti-Nazi credentials and omitting any reference to the espionage allegation.303

  That demoralising incident was as nothing to the furore when the atom bomb scientists Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs and the diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were exposed. Between them they had given away the secrets of nuclear weapons that granted the West a commanding military advantage over the Soviets and exposed the innermost workings of the intelligence services and the Foreign Office. It was obvious they had not acted alone so suspicions spread like a virus among their friends and colleagues. One figure, who seemed to stand at the heart of it, innocently clutching a large gin and tonic, gossiping and flirting for all she was worth, was Klop’s old friend Moura Budberg. In terms of colourful antecedents, amorous adventures, devious plots and dubious friendships, she was at least his equal.

  Moura was born in the Ukraine around 1893, the daughter of Ignaty Zakrevsky, a Russian diplomat and former Attorney General. Her sister Alexandra was great-grandmother to the British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. At the age of seventeen Moura married Johann Benckendorff, a diplomat at the Russian embassy in Berlin and a relative of the Tsarist ambassador to Great Britain. When her husband was called away to fight in the First World War she returned to St Petersburg and led the life expected of a wealthy aristocrat, ingratiating herself particularly at the British embassy where she befriend the ambassador’s daughter Meriel Buchanan. They would spend long weekends together on the Benckendorff estates at Yendel, in Estonia, where they would be joined by naval officers from British submarines in port at the capital Reval (now Tallinn). Among them was Captain Francis Cromie. When Meriel and her father were obliged to leave St Petersburg after the Revolution a tearful Moura was the last person waving them off from the rail station platform.304 She stayed on, as did Captain Cromie, who had been appointed naval attaché. He was killed on the steps of the embassy as he tried to obstruct members of the Cheka, the Russian security police, who were intent on breaking in to discover what Britain’s secret service agents were up to. Moura knew full well what they were up to. She had begun a passionate affair with the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart who was implicated in a plot to assassinate Lenin. As a result Lockhart and Moura were arrested and it was only her feminine wiles that persuaded the head of the Cheka Felix Dzerzhinsky and his deputy Yakob Peters to release her lover.

  He ungratefully abandoned her, returning to his wife in Britain, although they resumed their friendship in later life. In the meantime her husband had been murdered by revolutionaries on his estate and Moura turned for consolation to the writer Maxim Gorky. She became his lover and his secretary at around the time he was running the House of Arts where Nadia and Klop used to go to dance and it is entirely conceivable that this is where they first met. It was at this time too that the British author H. G. Wells travelled to meet Gorky. Wells later recalled his first sight of Moura in Gorky’s flat in 1920. She wore an old khaki British army waterproof coat, a shabby black dress, and had a black stocking tied in her hair for decoration. He thought her magnificent, gallant and adorable:

  I fell in love with her, made love to her, and one night at my entreaty she flitted noiselessly through the crowded apartments in Gorky’s flat to my embraces. I believed she loved me and I believed every word she said to me.305

  She saw little of Wells for several years thereafter but when they were reunited his affection for her developed into a lifelong passion which she never fully reciprocated, refusing his frequent proposals of marriage.

  Moura had two children being raised by relatives on her late husband’s Estonian estates. She was unable even to visit them, since she lacked the necessary travel documents, so Gorky, who was on good terms with the Communist regime, intervened with Dzerzhinsky of the Cheka, to get her permission. Once there, the ever-resourceful Moura managed to make ends meet by dealing in gold and jewels on behalf of the immensely rich Urvater family, diamond dealers from Antwerp.306 Her longer-term expedient was to marry another Estonian, Baron Nikolai Budberg, in 1922. She helped him pay his gambling debts and he enabled her to obtain a legitimate passport and travel documents which she very soon used to return to her lover, Gorky. By 1926 she and the baron had divorced and he had left to start a new life in South America. She continued to live in exile with Gorky, in Germany and Italy, but when he was persuaded to return to his native land she chose instead to migrate to Britain, setting up home with her two children and her niece Kira Engelhardt in C
adogan Square, Knightsbridge. Her affair with H. G. Wells granted her an entrée into London society and introductions that would enable her to earn a living as a literary translator and film studio adviser.

  Through Wells she met other literary luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. She worked with Alexander Korda on the film adaptation of Wells’s novel Things to Come. Korda had close links to Claude Dansey, the deputy director of MI6 and Greene worked for the intelligence agency during wartime.

  She settled in a flat at 68 Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge, where her almost nightly cocktail parties attracted a range of mainly left-leaning socialites, from the former Russian Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky to the exiled Jewish psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, philosopher Bertrand Russell, politician and writer Harold Nicolson and the poet Robert Graves. She was a regular house guest at the home of the libidinous young MP Duff Cooper and his wife, Diana Cooper, acclaimed in the gossip columns as the most beautiful woman of the century. It was there that Moura met the pre-war Foreign Secretary Antony Eden.307

  It had long been suspected, by writers such as Nina Berberova, who was part of the Gorky household, and by H. G. Wells, that Moura had been recruited by the Cheka as far back as her association with Robert Bruce Lockhart and that the price she paid for his freedom was to be a lifelong informant for the Soviet authorities. Berberova maintained that Moura betrayed Gorky by handing over Gorky’s private archive to Stalin when the writer died.308

  MI5’s publicly available records on Moura date back to 1921 when they spotted her name while monitoring the correspondence of Prince Pierre Volkonsky. He was related to Moura’s first husband and had been a leading diplomat in the Tsarist regime before being jailed by the Bolsheviks. His wife, Princess Sophy, a successful surgeon, pilot and published poet, was a direct descendant of Catherine the Great. She had escaped from Russia in 1917 with the few surviving close members of the Tsar’s family, but returned secretly to enlist Gorky’s help to get the prince released. The Volkonskys spent their impoverished exile in Paris: Princess Sophy became a taxi-driver and her daughter became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.309