by Peter Day
Although John’s re-defection might perhaps be claimed to be a minor triumph in the Cold War, we think here that the question of Anglo-German relations is much more important. We had a bad Press in the past over Otto John and his British connexion; we think it would be a great mistake if we were now to be involved in his re-defection. Moreover, I very much doubt whether the Federal government would relish John’s return. … All in all, therefore, we think we are probably better off with John being where he is and with all this in mind have made it clear to Berlin that Crash Abbotts should have as little to do with the John case as is possible.362
When John duly reappeared on 12 December he was arrested by the German authorities and tried for ‘treasonable falsification and conspiracy’, found guilty and sentenced to four years in jail, of which he served two. He had reverted to the defence that he had been drugged and kidnapped, subsequently going along with his captors’ demands to avoid more intensive interrogation. He maintained that stance for the rest of his life although it was undermined by the KGB defector Vladimir Apollonowitsch in 1969. He claimed to have been the man John had gone to meet in 1954 and that he had been surprised by John’s decision to defect.363 Theories abound as to what really lay behind John’s disappearance. After he died in March 1977 an obituary in The Times rehearsed various explanations, among them a suggestion that Kim Philby lay behind it. It would have suited KGB interests for John to get the job in the first place, and to defect in 1954 in order to denounce the secret European Defence Community. They speculated that John’s return was calculated to create confusion in the mind of the new head of MI6, Dick White, who had begun to re-examine Philby’s loyalties, an investigation which eventually culminated in his exposure as a KGB agent in 1963.
CHAPTER 18: PEACE
Sir Dick White’s transfer from MI5 to head of MI6 preceded Klop’s retirement by only a year. White was brought in to restore confidence after the fiasco of Buster Crabb’s botched operation in Portsmouth Harbour, for which Nicholas Elliott bore some of the blame. Klop was approaching sixty-five and there is no reason to suppose that White did not still hold him in high esteem. But it must have been a miserable time to be a member of a service so driven by betrayal and botched operations, where technology was increasingly the king and human enterprise, particularly of the type Klop had been used to, was bound to be suspect. What had once made him such a useful agent, his background knowledge of Germany and Russia, and close relationships to Germans and Russians, inevitably now attracted deep suspicion. Although Kim Philby had yet to confess his treachery, he remained under suspicion. Everyone who had been close to him, as Klop had been, had to be considered tainted and it was part of White’s new role to clean up the mess.
Klop had been more or less estranged from Nadia, and at odds with his son Peter, for some time. Nadia seems to have taken the initiative to rescue the situation. Having left Barrow Elm for good in 1953, and with Klop’s flat in Chelsea Cloisters being too small for both of them, she took on responsibility for finding somewhere larger for them to live. In the meantime she stayed with Peter at his Chelsea house. His marriage to Isolde had ended in 1950 but his career kept him constantly busy. He had enjoyed a huge stage success with his comedy, The Love of Four Colonels, and now attempted to replicate it with No Sign of the Dove, combining bedroom farce with a satirical rewriting of the story of Noah’s Ark, condemning all the ills he perceived in modern Britain. Nadia designed the sets and went on the provincial tour which preceded its launch at the Savoy Theatre in the West End at the end of November 1953. Klop, feeling lonely and neglected, seemed to think that his wife and son were ‘conspiring’ to exclude him. The play was a massive flop, panned by the critics, booed by the audience on its opening night, and taken off within a week. It cannot have improved family relations that Klop sided with the critics. Peter should stick to what he was good at – making people laugh – he advised. Freed from her stage commitments, by the end of December Nadia had found a two-room ground-floor flat in Egerton Gardens, just off the Brompton Road in South Kensington. It was the first time for twelve years that they had lived together and there were clearly difficulties. Klop was suffering bouts of lassitude and depression. He was crotchety, objecting to her harmless pastimes, such as card games, and interfering in her painting. She began to take odd jobs, decorating houses and church interiors which took her away from the flat and helped to make ends meet.
Klop had remained friends with Rita Winsor, his MI6 colleague in Lisbon, and it led to an unusual commission for Nadia. Part of Rita’s duties had been to make the complicated travel arrangements necessary for spiriting defectors like Otto John out of the country and ensuring safe passage for visiting intelligence officers like Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham and Malcolm Muggeridge. She decided to put her skills to use in peacetime by opening an upmarket travel agency specialising in out-of-the way places, among them trips to the moon scheduled to start in 2040. Nadia designed the poster showing travellers setting off.364
In 1954 Peter married the French-Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier. They had three children, Igor, Pavla and Andrea. When Igor was born in London in April 1956, Peter was unable to be present because it coincided with the first night of his play Romanoff and Juliet. Klop, showing a rare streak of sentimentality, went to the hospital and tearfully promised always to be around to care for Igor.
Visitors and pretty girls still sparked Klop’s imagination but by now there was an air of desperation about it, including a passing interest in pornography. He was flattered when the former Soviet ballerina Galina Ulanova, by then in her forties, came to visit and played up to him. He spent occasional evenings with a Spanish air hostess at a local sherry bar and on one occasion managed to pick up a young French au pair who had rung his number by mistake and ended up being invited round to tea. But these fitful excursions down Memory Lane were interspersed with days when he fell asleep in his armchair while polishing his antique bronzes or suffered a panic attack after accidentally locking himself in the lavatory.
He was revived and immensely honoured when the German General Hans Speidel, who had been his commanding officer in the First World War, sought him out and spent a couple of days as his guest.365 Speidel had recently been appointed commander in chief of NATO forces in central Europe, and was doing the grand tour, meeting heads of state and senior military figures such as Lord Mountbatten and Field Marshal Earl Alexander but still found time for his former fellow lieutenant.366
Peter Wright, assistant director of MI5, visited Klop at home shortly after his retirement from MI6 in 1957, hoping to get some useful advice about a small operation he was planning against the Russian embassy. He expected to meet a hero of the secret world living in honourable retirement:
In fact, Ustinov and his wife were sitting in a dingy flat surrounded by piles of ancient leather-bound books. He was making ends meet by selling off his fast-diminishing library.
As they spent the afternoon drinking vodka, Klop became bitter about the way he felt he had been abandoned, without a pension. He told Wright:
When you work for them you never think about the future, about old age. You do it for love. And when it comes time to die, they abandon you … The gentlemen run the business and the gentlemen have short memories…367
Klop served for a brief period as a director of his son Peter’s management company, along with Peter’s cousin Julius Caesar Edwardes, who was also of Russian descent, and his literary agent Alroy Treeby. He acted as secretary, keeping notes of board meetings, but it was clear that business acumen was not among his talents. His chief virtue was fending off the many telephone inquiries that found their way to him at the Egerton Gardens flat because he was in the phone book and his son was ex-directory. Even that, in his son’s bitter view, only served to remind Klop that Peter was not the failure he had always predicted he would be.368
As Klop tried to adjust to retirement he developed a hankering to live in the country. Once again Sir Thomas Bazley came to his aid. H
e had provided Barrow Elm during the war and later a place for Nadia’s sister Olia and her husband to stay. Now he offered Klop and Nadia a large but dilapidated stone cottage, dating from Tudor times, at 49 Eastleach, a Gloucestershire village midway between Witney and Cirencester, not far from Barrow Elm. It needed renovation and they eventually moved from Egerton Gardens in October 1957. Nadia missed the colourful London scene more than Klop who, to her amazement, quickly settled into country ways once he had displayed his art works, bronzes and sculptures, musical instruments and handblown black glass bottles. He even installed an old gravestone in the fireplace of his dark and overcrowded bedroom.
He befriended the locals, gossiping with them over large whiskies in the local pub, and took up bird-watching. But others saw a morose figure, not at ease in his tweed jackets and felt hat, more comfortable talking to his titled neighbours, Sir Thomas Bazley or Lord and Lady Howard, or Nadia’s friends from the world of art and theatre. He was a bit of a snob, keeping up with the social scene in the pages of Tatler and Queen magazines. Nadia, on the other hand, was quickly accepted: helping out with harvesting and village bazaars, at once peasant and aristocrat, in woollen dresses, cardigans and slippers, puffing on a small cheroot.369
Peter Ustinov, observing these events more remotely as he sailed majestically between Hollywood, London and Paris celebrating success on stage and screen, was possibly more perceptive of their meaning. His father had always been an urban dweller, browsing in the shops for culinary delicacies, nipping through the streets by taxi, and this sudden conversion to the rural idyll smacked of the abandonment of all life’s pleasures because what remained was the poignant echo of past excitement.370
Klop’s mood cannot have been lightened by the publication that year of Wolfgang zu Putlitz’s memoirs. The two men had kept in touch and indeed Putlitz maintained contact with Peter Ustinov even after Klop’s death. While the book contained nothing that reflected adversely on Klop, it was were an unwelcome reminder of how Communist agents had repeatedly duped British Intelligence. The English edition carried a particularly mischievous preface in which Putlitz explained that he hoped publication in London would restore old friendships damaged by his decision to make his home in East Germany. He singled out for special mention Lord and Lady Vansittart, Sir Colville Barclay, Colonel Graham Christie, Mr and Mrs Paul X and Mr Anthony Blunt, whose kindness and understanding he would never forget.371
Putlitz had been a frequent guest in the Vansittarts’ home and they had done their best to make him welcome and comfortable in Britain; Col. Christie was the leading member of Vansittart’s private intelligence service; Paul X was the pseudonym Putlitz had used in the book to refer to Klop. His sensitivity in not naming a serving MI6 officer would have been more impressive had he not identified him clearly in the German edition. But the sentimental reference to Blunt must have been intensely irritating to the authorities, conscious that the book would have been vetted and probably orchestrated by the KGB. Although he had been under suspicion since the defection of Burgess and Maclean, Blunt did not confess until 1964, with a promise of immunity from prosecution, and was not publicly exposed until 1979.
Then there was Colville Barclay, Lord Vansittart’s stepson, who had also fallen under suspicion of spying for the Soviets. He fitted the profile provided by the defector Walter Krivitsky when he was questioned by Guy Liddell and MI5’s Russian expert Jane Archer in 1940. He told them of a mole with access to top secret government papers including the minutes of the Committee on Imperial Defence. This man, whom he was unable to name, was a Scottish aristocrat, artistic, Eton- and Oxford-educated and wealthy enough not to want payment for his betrayal, which he justified on ideological grounds. His activities within the Foreign Office had begun around 1936.
Sir Colville was fourteenth baronet of a family whose noble Scottish roots could be traced back to the fifteenth century. He had indeed been educated at Eton, and Trinity College, Oxford, and he spent his post-war career as a painter and naturalist. He had joined the Foreign Office in 1937, left to serve with a naval unit carrying out covert operations in the run-up to D-Day, and was then recruited by Kim Philby to join his new Section IX anti-Soviet department at MI6. Sir Colville’s younger brother Cecil had been their man in Moscow during the war. Jane Archer, who had interrogated Krivitsky and identified Sir Colville as a suspect, was also working for Section IX and queried his appointment. It was cleared by Philby after a trawl through MI5 files. In 1957, when the Putlitz book came out, Philby was also under suspicion but had not confessed. Sir Colville was only publicly identified as a suspect in 2003 when he told the author that he had never been questioned and had no idea the finger had been pointed at him.372 Nevertheless, the KGB may well have known of it from Philby.
Once Klop and Nadia were ensconced in their rural retreat guests began to come from London, among them one of Klop’s old flames, an air hostess named Conchita who arrived one weekend with caviar from Moscow, vodka from Warsaw and chocolate from Madrid, supplemented by champagne and crumpets. Klop wrote euphorically to another of his girlfriends, Elizabeth Brousson, describing their gourmet weekend that had also included pheasant supplied by Lady Carmen Bazley, their landlord’s wife. Nadia wrote to Elizabeth separately, telling her that Conchita was a very sweet girl and that Elizabeth must not be jealous.
Elizabeth, whom Klop had befriended during time in Switzerland, also visited along with Moura Budberg whose unchanging lifestyle meant that she rose at lunchtime, having spent the morning in bed making phone calls, writing and receiving visitors. The three women got on famously but Elizabeth Brousson recalls that life was not easy for Nadia and Klop:
I used to go and spend weekends with them – they were sort of surrogate parents for me. They were the kindest people in the world. They made their life in the village and got to know all the villagers. I don’t know how they managed to live. Klop used to find things in antique markets and have good luck through his sense of discernment. They never spent any money on themselves and when there was nobody about they lived on pretty much bread and cheese and saved everything for the weekends. Klop did cook beautifully and it was quite rich but it was only when he was entertaining. I think they were pretty short and the Bazleys were very good to them.
He used to tell these amazing stories. He was a terrific raconteur. People were very happy to sit and listen to him. Nadia had heard them endlessly. She really was an example of someone who really just loved him and smiled benignly at his little peccadilloes. He used to parade his girls around and make it very obvious. People didn’t approve but Nadia was not a jealous woman. She knew in the end of it Klop would always come back to her even if he did have little flirtations on the side. They had been through a lot together coming back from Russia and they were totally necessary to each other. She didn’t have to worry because there was no threat to their relationship. He probably needed a bit extra.373
There were still friends locally from their days at Barrow Elm, among them David and Tamara Talbot-Rice and Phyllis Sorel-Taylour who, since Klop and Nadia did not have a car, often acted as chauffeurs for trips to the theatre or Klop’s frequent forays to local antique shops and country house sales. Mrs Sorel-Taylour had been secretary to the eccentric archaeologist Alexander Keiller, who owned Avebury Manor and the ancient stone circle nearby.374
Tamara, a Russian exile like Nadia, and her husband has worked during the war for the Ministry of Information and military intelligence respectively. Two old friends from MI6 maintained their connection. Dick White, by now head of the Service, and Nicholas Elliott would visit with their wives and children.
The country idyll had lasted only a few months when Klop’s previously hedonistic lifestyle caught up with him. As a clap of thunder broke over the cottage he implored Nadia to run to the nearest phone box and summon the doctor. He liked to boast that he had not consulted a physician in more than forty years but at the age of sixty-five he needed one urgently. The diagnosis was not good: a serious he
art condition, high blood pressure and liver problems. The remedy: a low-fat diet, complete rest and medication. To Nadia’s surprise Klop submitted meekly to the regime and the benefits were soon apparent. On 17 July he got out of bed for the first time in weeks to celebrate their thirty-eighth wedding anniversary. With Peter’s help new home comforts were added to the cottage – a fridge, a television and, more vitally, a telephone.
By the following year life had returned to normality, with Nadia trying to enforce a more sedate pace. It was enlivened by a visit from the art historian Peter Ward-Jackson, who had been Klop’s driver during his post-war investigations in Germany. His old friend arrived with a case of champagne and a new bride, Joan Schellenberg (no relation to Walther of the German intelligence services). Klop and Nadia had introduced them.
It was followed by an excursion to Paris to see Peter, recently returned from America after eighteen months away, and to meet for the first time their latest grandchild, Andrea, who was four months old. It was an opportunity for Nadia to visit her uncle Alexandre, now aged eighty-nine and in failing health. He died the following February, shortly after publication of his memoirs, which Moura Budberg had translated into English.
Paris in the summertime revived Klop’s spirits and his interest in cooking and pretty girls. But the euphoria did not last. He was becoming unsteady on his feet, self-conscious about his infirmity and less willing to be seen in public. There were interludes of enjoyment, when friends came to visit, but Klop and Nadia increasingly had only each other for company and though they were drawn closer by the experience it was a period of forlorn sadness. Peter was leading a hectic show business lifestyle. He arranged visits for them to the film studios and put them up in hotels while he was in London, even had them chauffeured from Eastleach to Montreux in 1961, to spend Christmas with him in his suite at a grand hotel. They seem to have found the surroundings uncomfortable. Klop fell several times in the bathroom and needed Nadia constantly within calling distance. An introduction to Suzanne’s parents was not a success. Yet Klop couldn’t resist the old lure of the showman. He dressed up as Santa Claus for the grandchildren. Igor, only five years old, remembers it well. He shyly presented this strange bearded figure with a little handkerchief which he had embroidered at school. About a week later he saw Klop blowing his nose on the handkerchief and that was how he came to realise that Father Christmas did not really exist.375