The Bedbug (13 page)

MI5 accumulated thirteen folders of information about him, including occasional contributions from Klop, usually based on commentary provided by Eugen Sabline. Baykolov fed anti-Communist stories to the right-wing
Morning Post
newspaper and became a trusted confidante of the Duchess of Atholl who was one of the first to highlight the repression and exploitation of the people of the Soviet Union. Through her, he was introduced to Winston Churchill and Sir Robert Vansittart. An indication of the ambivalent attitude of the intelligence services is evident in correspondence in 1934 between Valentine Vivian, the head of the anti-Comintern Section V of MI6, and Jane Sissmore, MI5’s Comintern expert. Vivian made the point that all Baykolov’s information, in common with other White Russian sources, had to be treated with suspicion, no matter how accurate it appeared, because of the likelihood of penetration by the Russian secret police. It was known that in the early 1930s in Germany he had been in regular contact with them. Nevertheless, MI5 had been in the habit of briefing Clifford Norton, Sir Robert Vansittart’s private secretary, on the contents of Baykolov’s correspondence and even supplying copies of it. Vivian proposed a conference with Norton to decide how to handle the material in future.
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Baykolov had contacts with the main exile groups in Paris, the White Russian Armed Services Union led by Prince Anton Turkul, the NTS or National Labour Group and the Mladorossy or Young
Russians. All these groups had constantly shifting loyalties, were used for intelligence gathering by MI6 and were known to have been heavily infiltrated by Soviet intelligence. Klop continued to keep an eye on Baykolov throughout the war and in December 1941, after the Soviets had been brought into the war on the Allied side, he reported that Baykolov was one of the chief antagonists of Anglo-Russian cooperation. Later still, Baykolov was reported to be a supporter of the Russian Liberation Movement which formed a pro-Nazi fighting force under General Andrei Vlasov in Germany to oppose the Soviet forces. Turkul and Baykolov would feature again in Klop’s Cold War investigations.
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The Russian influx of the 1920s was overtaken by larger numbers of Germans fleeing the Hitler regime in the 1930s. Klop was among the earliest and, despite the impediments to earning a living, was made a good deal more welcome than many of his compatriots. Long gone was the nineteenth-century open-door policy which prompted the Conservative Lord Malmesbury to proclaim in 1852:

I can well conceive the pleasure and happiness of a refugee, hunted from his native land, on approaching the shores of England, and the joy with which he first catches sight of them; but they are not greater than the pleasure and happiness every Englishman feels in knowing that his country affords the refugees a home and safety.
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In the last twenty years of that century approximately one hundred thousand Jewish refugees arrived, mostly fleeing persecution in Russia, and the foreign population more than doubled. Many were poverty-stricken and their presence was emphasised by their congregation in areas like the East End of London. The Aliens Act of 1905 gave immigration officers the right to refuse entry to ‘undesirables’.

The First World War, and the years immediately before it, fostered anti-German and anti-immigrant feeling, sometimes to the point of hysteria, and led to the internment of 40,000
Germans, four-fifths of the total resident in Britain. Additional legislation in 1914, 1919 and 1920 required immigrants to be able to demonstrate that they had the means to support themselves and to obtain a Ministry of Labour permit before they were allowed to take up employment.

The idea that immigrants were a threat to the livelihoods of the native population were all the more prevalent during the Depression years of the early 1930s and initially the British government tried to limit admission to those who would bring economic advantages: manufacturers and industrialists, who were directed to the high unemployment areas in the northeast and north-west, and eminent scientists whose skills were of identifiable value. Nevertheless, in 1933, when Hitler came to power, between three and four hundred refugees a month arrived in Britain. By the time war broke out, in September 1939, 55,000 refugees had been admitted. Despite the concerns about unemployment there was a counterbalance in the Foreign Office’s desire to maintain Britain’s reputation abroad as a haven for the downtrodden. Other countries, including the colonies, progressively closed their doors.

There was another fear, in which MI5 became embroiled. The influx, about 90 per cent of which was Jewish, was used as an excuse for Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists to carry their violent anti-Semitic propaganda campaign into the East End of London and other districts with a large Jewish population. Nazi propaganda attempted to whip up this virulent hatred. The Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, told the Cabinet in March 1938 that MI5 believed it was deliberate German policy to export anti-Semitism by inundating Britain and other countries with poverty-stricken Jewish refugees to create the social problems that accompanied such an exodus.
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Among the exiles were a relatively small number of political activists, representative mostly of the banned German Communist Party, the KPD, the Social Democrats and a smattering of senior conservative politicians who
had held office and attempted to thwart Hitler’s ambitions. Among the latter group were Heinrich Brüning, Hermann Rauschning, Carl Spiecker and Gottfried Treviranus.

Brüning had been leader of the Centre Party and Reichs Chancellor from 1930 to 1932. He fled to Britain in 1934, later moving to the United States. Rauschning was a former Nazi leader who turned against Hitler and went into exile, arriving in Britain in 1939. Spiecker was another member of the Centre Party under Brüning and a special commissioner for combating National Socialism. He had originally gone into exile in Paris but became a contact of MI6’s assistant chief Claude Dansey and, as will be seen, was the instigator of one of their worst wartime blunders. Treviranus, a member of the Conservative People’s Party, had been a minister in Brüning’s administration.

As they maintained their opposition to the Nazi regime in speeches and publications, German government policy was to deprive them of their citizenship, rendering them stateless and dependent on their new host countries, then to try to bully those countries into silencing the dissidents in the interests of good diplomatic relations. In Britain this policy was largely ineffectual, on account of the attitudes of those charged with implementing it. The German embassy counsellor Count Albrecht Bernstorff, who was frequently to be found with Klop decrying the Nazi regime, reported disingenuously to Berlin in 1933 that no anti-German activity by the émigrés had been brought to the Embassy’s notice and they appeared to be acting with restraint.

Two years later Wolfgang zu Putlitz, Klop’s close friend at the embassy, made a half-hearted protest to the Foreign Office about refugees – especially the playwright Ernst Toller – making speeches against the German government. The Gestapo and the Nazi party soon recognised that their diplomats were reluctant informers and began to post their own people abroad.
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It was in this context that Putlitz warned Klop and MI5 in 1936 against the activities of Otto Bene, the Nazi leader in London
whom the new ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, hoped to appoint as Consul-General.

Klop was also one of a number of people keeping an eye on Gottfried Treviranus. They had something in common: both had been part of Sir Robert Vansittart’s private intelligence network while still German citizens. Treviranus had been introduced to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden by Vansittart. The German politician had a much narrower escape than Klop. He was in his back garden when SS men arrived to arrest him and fled by jumping over a wall to his waiting car after his young daughter cried out a warning. The SS men opened fire and only narrowly missed – he later claimed he had kept his hat with bullet holes in it. His escape was engineered by another of Vansittart’s men, the former Labour MP Major Archibald Church who provided him with a false British passport and escorted him through Holland back to Britain.

In 1936 Klop reported to MI5 that he did not think Treviranus posed a threat to British security or was engaging in ‘unpleasant activities’. He revealed that, apart from working for Vansittart, Treviranus was also briefing Winston Churchill on the situation in Germany.

Treviranus set himself up as an arms dealer and was allowed to open a gun-manufacturing plant in Lancashire. Among his clients was David Hall who was buying arms on behalf of the Ethiopian government of Haile Selassie, whose country had been invaded by Mussolini’s Fascist Italian regime. David Hall was Klop’s uncle, his mother’s brother who had maintained the family’s Ethiopian heritage by becoming an adviser to the Emperor. After war broke out Sir Louis Grieg, who had been an equerry to King George VI and was working for the Air Ministry, helped find Treviranus a job with an aeronautical engineering firm who employed him as their representative in Canada – thereby neatly removing him from contentious political manoeuvring in Britain.
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Apart from a favoured few, like Klop, German journalists were regarded with suspicion by the Foreign Office and MI5. Klop used
his journalistic background to keep tabs on them, including Karl Abshagen, correspondent of the Prussian newspaper
Schlesische Zeitung
. Doubtless he did not find it too much of an imposition to accompany his colleague to his favourite watering hole, the Paradise Club in Regent Street, where they could enjoy late night drinking, a cabaret with jugglers, stand-up comedians, ‘exotic’ dancers and music provided by the resident pianist Arthur Rosebery and his band. Abshagen was held in much the same esteem in the 1930s by senior figures at the Foreign Office, including Clifford Norton, as Klop had been during the 1920s. His reports were considered objective and well-informed – too well-informed sometimes and there was at least one investigation into a suspected Cabinet leak. It was assumed that he had an unofficial intelligence role and, after a foreign correspondents’ visit to the battleship HMS
Nelson
, the director of naval intelligence somehow got the idea that Abshagen’s wife had a miniature camera concealed in her umbrella. A Foreign Office note about Abshagen noted that he was in a mood of exasperation and despair at Britain’s failure to heed his warning that a strong and forthright condemnation of Hitler’s diplomatic bully-boy tactics was what was required. Hitler was scoring points at home and intelligent opposition to him in Germany was becoming stultified. At the highest level of the Foreign Office there was general agreement. Sir Robert Vansittart commented that he was talking admirable sense and even the pro-appeasement Alec Cadogan, the rising star at the Foreign Office who would eventually supplant Vansittart, described him as ‘a fairly acute observer’. They were aware of reports from Klop identifying Abshagen as one of at least half a dozen German journalists using their official role as camouflage for intelligence gathering. Klop knew, probably from his own experience, that they wrote special reports, with a circulation of only about 200 to the most senior officials in the German government.
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These documents went first to General Hans Oster, deputy to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, German
military intelligence. Abshagen’s reports were often in complete contradiction to the wilder flights of fancy of the German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Third Reich’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels warned his editor:

Abshagen must continue to report quite frankly, whether or not his reports agree with those of the embassy in London. But tell him to take care that his phrasing gives no offence, for they will be read by our Führer in the original.
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Klop had already reported to MI5 on what could happen when the Führer took exception to a news man’s interpretation of events. Count Carl Heinrich Pückler of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung had commented favourably on the strength of Britain’s anti-aircraft defences and had received such a fearsome dressing down from Hitler that he was a broken man and later lost his job. Under such circumstances his colleagues were most reluctant to file any news stories that might incur their leader’s wrath.
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CHAPTER 8: SECRET AGENT

K
lop’s introduction to MI5 put him in the position of answering to two masters. Vansittart at the Foreign Office still wanted to know what was going on in Germany; Liddell was concerned with counter-espionage on the home front. But there were no hard and fast demarcation lines. When Liddell recruited Dick White to MI5 in 1936 his first act was to send his future deputy on a tour of Germany to improve his language skills and familiarise himself with the Nazi regime.

On his return he became Klop’s case officer and, as he later told his biographer:

Here without question we had picked a natural winner who would not let us down … the best and most ingenious operator I had the honour to work with.

Klop and White also shared a certain disdain for some of the old-fashioned MI6 officers whom they encountered and who appeared to be ‘ivory from the neck up’.
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