The Bedbug (20 page)

CHAPTER 10: VERA

E
arly on the morning of 30 September 1940, Vera Schalburg waited on the platform of Portgordon railway station on the north-east coast of Scotland. She was cold and frightened and not sure where she was. Beside her, silent and anxious, stood Theodore Drücke.

Stationmaster John Donald cast a suspicious eye over the well-dressed, well-spoken woman and her morose companion. He summoned PC Robert Grieve, who noted that the lady’s silk stockings and shoes were soaking wet. The constable guessed, correctly, that she had recently waded ashore after being dropped by a German flying boat. He was about to arrest the first woman spy sent to infiltrate Britain in the Second World War.
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Vera’s possessions were a handbag full of drugs and make-up, a spare pair of stockings and a pair of kid gloves. The couple had about £300 on them. She and Drücke were taken to Latchmere House at Ham, an interrogation centre on the edge of Richmond Park. There were listening devices in the cells and the radiator system had been blocked off to stop inmates tapping out Morse code messages to each other on the pipes. The interrogations, under the control of Colonel Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens – so-called because of his thick glass monocle – were harsh but elicited little. Drücke and a fellow spy, Walter Werti, who had arrived on the same seaplane and got as far as Edinburgh before he was caught, were executed.

MI5 was concerned that the trio had been on a special mission and they had good reason to think so. Vera admitted under interrogation that she had been married to Hilmar Dierks who had been a member of the German secret service since 1914, running agents in Holland, Belgium, France and the UK. He was known to MI5 because in September 1925 he had offered to change sides and was rebuffed. He had been interviewed at the time by members of MI6 in Amsterdam. He told them he would not spy against Germany but offered his services in Russia, Scandinavia and Turkey. They concluded it was a bluff and that he was trying to infiltrate them. But they had kept watch on him and knew that in 1938 he had been running a spy ring in Holland, under cover of a legitimate business. Dierks had died in 1940 in a car driven by Drücke, the man who was now in custody with Vera. Vera suspected it was not an accident and that the two men had fallen out over her or her mission.

A new tactic was needed to find out how much Vera knew. Dick White decided on a bold experiment. Vera was to have a holiday in the countryside, in different and pleasant surroundings with a ‘sympathetic’ couple who spoke her language. Her freedom required the Home Secretary, Sir Alexander Maxwell, who took a personal interest in Vera’s progress, to revoke her detention order.

At the beginning of February 1942 she was moved, in the interests of secrecy, from Holloway prison to Aylesbury jail, where nobody knew her, before being released and taken by a Mrs Gladstone for a restorative hair-do and an Oxford Street shopping spree. Mrs Gladstone’s main role in MI5 was the use of the Ellen Hunt employment agency in Marylebone as a front for MI5 to place staff in foreign embassies. Two minders were deputed to shadow the women and make sure Vera did not escape. She was handed an emergency ration card, number 520460, in the name of Veronica Edwards, giving her address as Klop’s flat: 904 Chelsea Cloisters.

Then she was taken to meet her holiday hosts, Klop and Nadia Ustinov, at their Gloucestershire retreat, Barrow Elm House.
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The
isolated Victorian farmhouse, north of Fairford, had been loaned to them by Sir Thomas Bazley, a wealthy eccentric who worked for MI5 during the war, occasionally acting as the director-general’s personal assistant. Sir Thomas shouldered the bulk of the work of investigating the Czech Refugee Trust and its Communist influences, a task that required regular liaison with Klop, Dick White and their Czech Intelligence contact Agent Sloane. In March 1941 Klop and Nadia spent a weekend as guests of Sir Thomas at his principal residence, Hatherop Castle, which was later taken over by the Special Operations Executive as a training school for the Danish Resistance. A few weeks earlier a bomb had badly damaged their flat in Redcliffe Gardens. Klop and Nadia had found temporary refuge with the Chenhalls sisters, Hope and Joan, in Belsize Park, and Nadia painted Hope’s portrait out of gratitude, but they needed something more permanent. Nadia savoured the isolation of the rather stark but substantial farmhouse with its overgrown courtyard and ramshackle outbuildings. The rooms were spacious and light. There was no gas or electricity, heating was from coal and oil fires and an old-fashioned boiler. But she made it habitable and welcomed Dick White as one of the first house guests. He became a regular weekend visitor, sometimes accompanied by his secretary Joan Russell-King.

Klop also came for weekends, always bringing several visitors, mostly girls, and laden with all kinds of provisions and bottles of gin and whisky. He would cook while the visitors piqued their appetites in the country air. He stayed in London during the week, moving into a small ninth-floor flat in Chelsea Cloisters, Sloane Avenue. It had only one room, crammed with his collection of bronzes and objets d’art, with a fold-away bed, kitchen alcove and bathroom. Yet he was ever the effervescent host and this was a period when his marriage to Nadia was under considerable strain. They were effectively leading separate lives. He threw parties in his tiny London flat that was so crowded there was hardly room to move or else invited girlfriends round for intimate dinners. She recorded:

I think he was thrilled to have a place of his own and to feel a bachelor again, just as I was enjoying my independence and complete freedom at Barrow Elm. I believed that it was good for us to be separated for a while. Neither of us was really made for matrimony. We could not become ‘one’ – our personalities could not merge. The separation however, strangely enough, fortified our bond and at a distance we had a much greater sense of belonging together than when we were actually together.
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It turned out that Vera had rather more in common with Nadia than she did with Klop. Vera Schalburg was born on 10 December 1912 in Siberia where her Danish father was a farmer. The family was ruined by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, fleeing Russia in poverty. They gravitated to Paris during the 1920s. Vera claimed to have danced with the great ballerina Pavlova, star of the Ballet Russes; appeared at the Folies-Bergère; and with the Russian Opera in the Champs Elysées. This was the great era of Ballet Russes, which had grown out of the World of Art movement led by Nadia’s uncle and artistic mentor Alexandre Benois. Under the direction of Sergei Diaghilev, it featured the dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, George Balanchine, Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina and Alicia Markova. They performed to music by Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky in costumes designed by Coco Chanel and sets designed by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Leon Bakst and Alexandre Benois himself.

It was a world of high art and low dealings as exiled Russians intrigued for and against the new Communist regime in their homeland. The penniless and naive eighteen-year-old Vera was seduced by a man who was to shape her destiny. Vera believed his name was Count Ignatieff but was unable to identify him fully to her captors. She said that he was a friend of Prince Serge Wolkonsky who had been director of Imperial Theatres under the Tsar and patron of the likes of Diaghilev and Benois. Ignatieff introduced her to cocaine and persuaded her to spy for the Bolsheviks. She
acted as his courier, running drugs and secret documents. Vera’s interrogation records show that MI5 was intrigued by Ignatieff’s identity and tried to get the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky to help. For unexplained reasons, MI6 was reluctant to pass on their inquiries and Krivitsky, who was supposed to be under guard in the United States, was assassinated two months later.

Vera had tired of Ignatieff’s attentions and fled to Antwerp, pursued by one of his hired assassins who stabbed her in the chest but failed to kill her. Terrified for her life, she turned to her pro-Nazi brother, Christian, for help. He introduced her to a member of German Intelligence and not long after Vera married him. Christian von Schalburg went on to join the German SS and was killed in June 1942 when commanding the Danish Freikorps in battle in Russia.

Vera’s new husband, Oberleutnant Hilmar Dierks, fifty-two, was part of a team run by spymaster Major Nikolaus Ritter. Under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, Ritter was tasked with setting up spy networks in the US and Great Britain. Believing any agents he sent would be quickly followed by invading German forces, Ritter blitzed the country with poorly trained spies. As far as is known, they were all caught and either executed or turned into double agents, feeding duff information back to Germany. Vera had been groomed by Ritter before the war, and sent early in 1939 to stay in London with the right-wing Countess de Chateau Thierry, whom he was bankrolling to extract military gossip from her rather limited social circle. The countess was to have been Vera’s first port of call in 1940. Then she was under instructions to take a room in the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane and wait to be contacted.
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It emerged that Vera had an uncle, Ernst, who had been in business in Britain for many years and was serving with the RAF. He was questioned and confirmed Vera’s family history but could tell the authorities little about her more recent past.

After her fortnight’s holiday Vera, having satisfied Klop that she had told him all she knew, had to return to custody. She wrote him a polite little note:

Dear Klop!

I have been very happy staying with you both and I hope the time will come when we shall meet again under more normal circumstances.

Vera

The note was sent to a graphologist who concluded that Vera was a cold, calculating person, selfish, hard, lost and lonely. A month later, Klop returned to see Vera in prison once more and reported in rather florid terms on their encounter:

I stressed that Vera had now ‘made her peace with us’ and noticed unfeigned happiness descending over Vera’s anxious features. I also emphasised that she now had a chance to live up to the trust put in her by showing that she wants to collaborate loyally with the people who have shown her consideration. This really moved Vera and she was quite sincere (I believe) when she said: ‘Life is not worth living for me if it starts again with distrust. The Russians did not trust me, the Germans distrusted me the whole time and if you now start with distrusting me, then it would be much better for me to make an end of it.’
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Vera’s new found loyalty led to her being sent as an informant to the Isle of Man where Germans suspected of pro-Nazi sympathies were interned. Klop advised her ‘to act as though she was the only agent we had on the island’.

In December 1943 she wrote from there in Russian, which Nadia translated. It was a rather plaintive Christmas greeting which began:

I have been always waiting for a letter from you but you seem to have forgotten me and that hurts because I have grown very fond of you and [Nadia] … Write me a few words, how is everything; are you still polishing your bronzes and can you still faire la cuisine as well as before?

I think I had been a good girl as I had promised you to be. I am now very lonely. The females here are awful, they gossip and they knit and sometimes, presumably out of boredom, they fight. It is fun and it is sin all in one (a Russian expression).
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Klop and Nadia both replied, although their letters had to pass through MI5 censorship controls, and the correspondence was first shown to the director-general, Sir David Petrie, who had asked to be kept informed of Vera’s progress.

Much of the information about Vera’s activity later in the war is still classified as secret and has been withheld from her files. Her case was dealt with by Joan Chenhalls, a friend of Klop and Nadia.

After the war, in October 1945, Vera was apparently deported to a British Army of the Rhine camp while remaining on MI5’s ‘A list’ of surveillance subjects. When her Uncle Ernst asked after her in 1948 he was told she had disappeared. Miss Chenhalls claimed to have no record even of which camp she had been sent to.
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Was Vera abandoned to her fate by a callous British intelligence, or did she begin another espionage career behind the Iron Curtain? It is hard to believe that a woman whose trade had been espionage all her adult life was allowed to slip away into the shadows. Certainly Major Nikolaus Ritter, the Abwehr officer responsible for sending her to England in the first place, did not believe it. In memoirs published in 1975 in Germany he claimed that she had been turned to work for Britain and married a British officer.
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The success of Vera’s holiday in the countryside prompted MI5 to repeat the exercise with another, more troublesome woman agent. Mathilde Lucie Carre, alias Victoire, La Chatte, had been second in command of the Interallie organisation with around 100 agents. It was run by a Polish major, Roman Czerniaski, codenamed Walenty, from a Paris café. Victoire had become one of his lovers, taught him to speak French, and helped organise the network. Trouble began when Walenty imported his long-term
mistress, codename Violette, and a jealous feud began. MI5 never entirely got to the bottom of who betrayed whom but in a very short time the whole organisation had been rolled up by the Nazis. Victoire admitted that under interrogation by the Germans she had implicated a number of her former Resistance colleagues, to save her own neck, and then become the lover of one of her captors. He organised her escape on the understanding that she was to be his double agent. She managed to link up with a new Resistance group, run by agent Lucas, who brought her to London in February 1942. There she confessed her misdeeds and offered to turn the tables once more and work for the Allies. Lucas, who had become her latest lover, was keen to maintain the liaison.