The Bedbug (17 page)

Hitler demanded to know every detail. How long had the treachery gone on and what were Putlitz’s motives? Soltikow showed him the photographs and traced Putlitz’s history back to his days at Oxford University. He told Hitler that Putlitz had been the victim of British blackmail over his homosexual relationship with Willi. He had been given the choice of betraying his country’s secrets or being arrested and deported back to Germany where he would certainly find himself in a concentration camp, brutally treated and probably hounded to death. When he worked in the London embassy he had access to the safe where secret documents were kept and would copy them with a miniature camera.

Hitler seems to have been impressed and wanted to promote Soltikow to be a lieutenant in the SS. Canaris persuaded him that his agent could be put to better use in the Abwehr.
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Wolfgang zu Putlitz, meanwhile, found himself rather surplus to requirements. He no longer enjoyed access to German diplomatic secrets and his potential value to the British war effort was either as an analyst or a propagandist. Vansittart’s principal agent, Group Captain Malcolm Christie, recommended him for a role on an Anglo-German committee pursuing long-term propaganda aims, not just to refute ‘Nazi lies’ but to prepare the way for eventual peace. Putlitz, according to Christie, was eminently suitable because of his friendships with exiled anti-Nazi German politicians and for his flexible mind and constructive, creative mentality. Vansittart reported this to the Foreign Office, having first consulted MI5, and proposed taking Putlitz and Christie to talk it over with the
Ministry of Information.
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It came to nothing and Putlitz was reduced to working as a production assistant to the film director Alexander Korda at Denham Studios.

After the Nazi invasion of France, anti-German feeling became so intense that he and Willi Schneider decided to move to the United States. They were initially refused a visa and spent an unhappy time under effective house arrest at a Canadian army camp on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. When he was finally granted a US visa he teamed up with a number of dissident Germans, among them his old friend Dr Carl Spiecker, who, as will shortly become clear, had not endeared himself to the British. The group wrote copious briefing notes for the Americans on German resistance to Hitler, nominating their exiled friends as a replacement government if the Führer could be deposed. Putlitz, in particular, does seem to have been instrumental in briefing Allan Dulles, who would play a key role as head of US intelligence in Switzerland. Not all of their intelligence was of the highest calibre, as the following excerpt from Putlitz demonstrates:

Dr Wolfgang Klaiber is in his early forties, a rather good looking blond fellow, trying to be immaculately well-dressed without always succeeding (he likes spats and similar gadgets) to look really smart. By natural inclination he cannot be much of a Nazi.
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Their hosts soon tired of this flummery and Putlitz eventually returned to Britain, without Willi Schneider, in 1944, to a new role as a propagandist, and a controversial future in peacetime Germany.

It must have been obvious from the circumstances in which Putlitz’s role as a British agent was jeopardised that there was a serious leak in the British intelligence services’ Dutch network. The culprit was not identified until after the war when a German intelligence officer under interrogation, Traugott Protze, named the mole as a Dutchman, Folkert Arie van Koutrik, whom the
British had believed was working for them. He had fled to London shortly after the outbreak of war and continued to work for MI6.
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It might be expected that the reaction to the exposure of Putlitz would be caution. Yet the first thing MI5 did was to send an officer using the cover name Susan Barton to join Klop in The Hague, where she had worked previously. Mrs Barton, real name Gisela Ashley, was German by birth and had a brother who was a U-Boat captain. She had married a British man and although they had divorced by the time war began she retained British citizenship and loyalty. She later became one of the leading members of the hugely successful Double-Cross operation, running agents supplying the Germans with bogus intelligence.
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It was hoped that she might entice the German naval attaché, Käpitan Kurt Besthorn, into believing that she could provide him with intelligence from the British military censorship department, where she purported to work, and then use him to obtain naval intelligence from Germany. She shared a flat with Besthorn’s secretary Lili, who was an old friend from Germany. This, Guy Liddell thought, would partially compensate for the loss of Putlitz.
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But the greatest risks were taken by Richard Stevens and Sigismund Payne Best of MI6. In theory, the two should not even have been working together. For the previous twenty years, MI6’s rather sparse and underfunded network of agents had been based on the British embassy passport control officers whose official role was to scrutinise applications for visas. It was a convenient cover, in peacetime, for defensive intelligence to keep a check on foreign agents intent on coming to spy on Britain but less effective in gathering intelligence about foreign governments. And, inevitably, the cover story was fairly transparent. The head of MI6, Admiral Sir Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair, commonly known as ‘C’, had given his deputy Claude Dansey the job of setting up a parallel, undercover team, known as the Z organisation. Dansey was something of a maverick but he had a background in business and set about recruiting fellow businessmen.

Major Richard Stevens was the passport control officer in The Hague. He had only been appointed in 1939, having previously served as an army intelligence officer in India. He was multilingual (languages included German) but inexperienced. He was also, according to one contemporary, ‘a man of almost overbearing confidence’.
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As part of his induction he was introduced to Klop and briefed on the relationship with Putlitz. It is clear that MI5 feared that Stevens’s cover had been blown almost as soon as he was appointed and that even in London he would be under German surveillance. John Curry, the MI5 official who took him to Klop’s London flat, recalled that as they drove off a man jumped into a taxi on the rank immediately behind them and followed. Curry instructed their driver to make a series of quick turns in the side streets and lost their pursuer.
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By contrast, Sigismund Payne Best was an intelligence veteran. He had worked for the first director of MI6, Mansfield Cumming, during the First World War, directing military espionage from Holland. He had married the daughter of a Dutch general and lived in Holland for twenty years, setting up an import-export consultancy for British businessmen wanting to trade with Holland and Germany. He spoke both languages fluently and had extensive contacts, among them the German-born Prince Henry of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, consort of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Best and his Dutch business partner, Major Pieter van der Willik, were recruited by Claude Dansey for the Z network. Best was not exactly inconspicuous, every inch the English gent with a private income, affecting both a monocle and spats, but he kept himself apart from the British embassy. With the outbreak of war, a reluctant Best was persuaded to subordinate himself to Stevens on the grounds that they would need to coordinate their efforts and use the embassy’s secure means of communication, either through wireless or diplomatic bags which were immune from inspection by Customs or other authorities.

The chain of command at the top of MI6 was altered, too. Dansey was to operate from Paris or Switzerland so Best would be reporting direct to ‘C’ – except Admiral Sinclair was seriously ill with cancer, and died on 4 November 1939, so his deputy, Stewart Menzies, handled the day-to-day business and was effectively in charge.

The Prime Minister was clinging to the hope that war might still be averted by a change in the Nazi regime. Two days before war was declared he told the House of Commons:

We have no quarrel with the German people, except that they allow themselves to be governed by a Nazi Government. As long as that Government exists and pursues the methods it has so persistently followed during the last two years, there will be no peace in Europe.
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He reiterated that position in the Commons on 12 October, saying that the German government was the sole obstacle to peace, which he was sure the German people desired, and playing on what he believed was serious dissent within the German High Command. He had good grounds for believing it to exist.

In 1951, Sigismund Payne Best published a book giving his account of what happened next but it was heavily circumscribed by the Official Secrets Act. He wrote a much more explicit private version in 1947 to an old friend, Lt Col. Reginald Drake, who had joined MI5 in 1912 and was helping Best to claim a proper pension and compensation for what became known as The Venlo Incident.
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Best says that he was contacted from London on 30 August 1939 by Dansey’s right-hand man, Lt Cdr Kenneth Cohen, and instructed to make urgent contact with one of Dansey’s agents, Franz Fischer. Best maintains that he knew of Fischer and did not trust him. Nevertheless, knowing that it risked blowing his cover, he invited him to his office and Fischer explained that he was working with a former press secretary from the German Chancellor’s office, Dr Carl Spiecker, who was in contact with
the anti-Nazi faction of the army and had organised anti-Nazi radio broadcasts from a pirate radio ship in the North Sea. Dansey vouched for Spiecker’s reliability but Best reported to London that he did not believe Fischer’s story.

A senior official came over from London to impress on Best and Stevens the importance and urgency of the contact and they pressed ahead, meeting yet another intermediary, Johannes Traviglio, a Luftwaffe major from the Abwehr, in the Wilhelmina Hotel at Venlo on the Dutch-German border. Best was led to believe that at least three generals were involved in the anti-Nazi faction: Werner von Fritsch who had been driven out of his position as commander in chief by Heinrich Himmler on trumped up charges of homosexuality; Gerd von Rundstedt, who had supported Fritsch against Himmler; and Gustav von Wietersheim, the Panzer Division commander who had had a face-to-face clash with Hitler over his plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Fischer indicated that one of the three was prepared to meet Best and Stevens personally.

It seems doubtful whether there was ever any truth in Fischer and Traviglio’s claim to speak on behalf of those involved. Both men were double agents working for the German SD – the
Sicherheitsdienst
or SS security service. Certainly there were factions within the army that contemplated the removal of Hitler, and there were fears among the generals, shared by Himmler and others in the Nazi leadership, that a war in the West simply left Germany open to invasion by Russia in the east, despite Hitler’s non-aggression pact with Stalin. The Venlo operation seems therefore to have been an attempt either to find out to what extent Britain was conspiring with dissident factions in Germany, or to see if there was still a last chance of a peace settlement even though war had been declared.

The latter view is supported by events elsewhere. Prince Max von Hohenlohe had the ear of many in the Nazi regime and plentiful contacts with the Allies. He had sent a note to Goering and Hitler, arguing that only Bolshevism would benefit from war between
Britain and Germany. Although Hitler dismissed his ‘defeatist scribblings’, Goering and the Gestapo showed some interest. Accordingly, he took his proposals to the Royal Hotel in Lausanne in Switzerland in October 1939 and put them to Sir Robert Vansittart’s agent, Group Captain Malcolm Christie.
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Christie, using a highly placed source in the German Air Ministry, had been able to warn Vansittart on 15 September of German military plans to invade Holland and sweep down through Belgium into France.

Separately, Theodor Kordt, who had been German
chargé d’affaires
in London prior to the declaration of war, was visited in Berne in October 1939 by Dr Philip Conwell-Evans, acting as Vansittart’s intermediary. He reiterated Chamberlain’s assertion that their quarrel was with the regime, not the German people, and that a just peace might still be negotiated. This was supposed to be the incentive the army dissidents would require to carry out their coup. And in Rome Dr Joseph Müller, a Munich lawyer sent by the deputy head of the Abwehr, Major-General Hans Oster, was making similar overtures via the Pope to the British ambassador to the Vatican. Oster had already leaked to the Allies Hitler’s projected date for an invasion of Holland and Belgium, on 12 November, adding urgency to the quest for a solution.
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What occurred at Venlo has to be viewed in this context. It was an intelligence operation but it was sanctioned by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet in pursuit of a compromise peace.

In any event, Fischer kept the talks going and demanded that, as evidence of British sincerity, a coded message should be broadcast by the BBC which the conspirators in Germany could recognise as a sign of encouragement. Klop was called upon to make the arrangements, planting a story in a Swiss newspaper which could then be taken up by the BBC. On 11 October Guy Liddell noted in his diary that Klop had just got back from Holland: