The Bedbug (22 page)

True to type, Wurmann lacked the courage to face a prisoner’s future. He saw only mud not stars. He burnt his boats as thoroughly as anyone can. I firmly believe that having taken the plunge and having soothed his conscience with patriotic and humane formulae, he is playing fair with us and will continue to do so, not because fair play is part and parcel of his moral make-up, but because he is much too intelligent and much too disinclined to face discomfort of any description.

Wurmann characterised Admiral Canaris as having an ice-cold brain but a friendly disposition, on first-name terms with his subordinates. His aim was to ‘secure big stuff through big people’ and to that end he cultivated agents like Prince Max von Hohenlohe, an aristocrat with estates in Czechoslovakia, Spain and Mexico. Among Hohenlohe’s contacts were Sir Samuel Hoare, British ambassador in Madrid, and Allan Dulles, Swiss station chief for the American secret service. Wurmann’s previous posting had been in Biarritz, where Hohenlohe had a villa. The prince had confided in him that as early as February 1941 he had put peace feelers out to Sir Samuel Hoare but they came to nothing.

Wurmann had also been in contact with Charles Bedaux, the notoriously right-wing American millionaire. He had befriended
the Duke and Duchess of Windsor after the abdication and engineered their visit to Germany and meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1937. Bedaux had used his Nazi connections to put pressure on the Vichy government in North Africa to sign commercial deals with him and boasted to Wurmann that he held an honorary rank of major in the German army. He knew Admiral Canaris, and Wurmann thought he might be one of the admiral’s special agents. Bedaux had also been captured during Operation Torch and committed suicide in the United States while awaiting a grand jury investigation for alleged treason.

MI5 was reassured by Wurmann’s admission that the Abwehr had poor agent coverage in England but dismayed to learn that their radio intercepts had given them a full picture of the distribution of army divisions and numbers. Similar results came in from Allied radio traffic in Egypt. Guy Liddell had been warning for some time of lax signals security. The Prime Minister was given a special report on Wurmann’s information and noted that it was ‘deeply interesting’.

Eventually Wurmann’s usefulness came to an abrupt halt as a series of Abwehr failures made it apparent that Admiral Canaris was increasingly out of favour and liable to be dismissed. Wurmann realised that his dream of playing a prominent role in making peace and salvaging Germany’s pride would never be realised and refused all further cooperation. Klop took him out for a final dinner before leaving it to Major Caroe to hand him over to an escort party to send him to America as a prisoner of war. As a PoW, Wurmann was entitled to wear his German officer’s uniform. Fearing that this might cause some consternation around Chelsea Cloisters, Caroe took him to a nearby office to change and then to Waterloo station, only to find the escort was waiting for them at Paddington. They dashed across London and made it to their train with minutes to spare. Major Caroe was careful to take possession of the Home Office letter offering Wurmann British citizenship.
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A top secret report issued by the British to the United States on the intelligence value of Klop’s interrogations concluded:

Only after the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942, and the capture there of responsible Abwehr officers, was it possible to balance our theoretical knowledge against the evidence of knowledgeable men with practical experience. From that moment our penetration of the Abwehr became increasingly deep so that by the time of its dissolution and the fall of its head in the Spring of 1944 there was no important activity which it directed unknown to us.
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CHAPTER 11: LISBON

T
owards the end of 1943 Klop became a KGB agent carrying out an important mission of special interest to Josef Stalin. Klop was oblivious to this, of course. He was acting under orders from Kim Philby, the Russian intelligence service’s main man inside MI6. Philby’s duties for Britain left him in charge of counter espionage against the Nazis in the Iberian Peninsula. Among other things, that meant assessing the frequent peace feelers put out by secret contacts with German politicians and agents. Lisbon and Madrid, along with Berne and Stockholm, were the favoured neutral locations for this traffic and during 1943 it began to reach a crescendo.

The presence of Sir Samuel Hoare as ambassador in Madrid had made the British embassy a magnet for German dissidents and secret service mischief makers. Hoare was a former Foreign Secretary who had been strongly pro-appeasement. He had been sent to Spain as a sympathetic ear to the Fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who needed oil and provisions to fend off starvation in a country ravaged by three years of civil war. The supplies could only reach him by running the gauntlet of a British naval blockade. Hoare, supported by a vast array of agents from MI5 and MI6, played a canny hand, bribing and cajoling Franco’s government with cash and goods to keep them from entering the war on the Nazi side. The Germans were playing the same game to less effect. Hoare was seen as a potential intermediary by those Germans
who thought a peace deal was still possible, or even that Churchill, once he took over as Prime Minister in May 1940, might still be undermined and supplanted by a leader more sympathetic to the German cause. Albrecht Haushofer, representing the Führer’s deputy Rudolf Hess, turned up in Madrid, as did Prince Max von Hohenlohe, Walther Schellenberg’s agent, who previously had dealings with Sir Robert Vansittart’s secret agent Group Captain Malcolm Christie. Hoare, against instructions, saw Hohenlohe in March 1941, and was told firmly from London that the discussions should be broken off. Churchill had made it abundantly clear in the aftermath of Dunkirk that his government would not participate in peace negotiations and that such approaches should not even be dignified with an answer. Silence should prevail.

This was reinforced by the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt at a conference with Churchill and de Gaulle in Casablanca in January 1943. Roosevelt proclaimed that the war would be fought relentlessly by the Allies to the point of unconditional surrender by Germany and Japan. There was debate later about whether this had the effect of prolonging the war by giving the Germans no option but to fight to the bitter end. The intention was to demoralise them and, equally, to reassure Stalin that the Allies were committed to the fight and would not leave the Soviet Union to bear the brunt of the losses nor make a separate peace and turn against the Communist regime.

Silence did not prevail. Stalin was not convinced. MI6 had an interest in hearing what the Germans had to say. It was a means of gaining intelligence, of finding out who might be joining the ranks of the disaffected, of feeding back disinformation and of sizing up likely defectors.

Philby’s task, for Soviet intelligence, was to keep Stalin informed of any indications that the Allies were wavering from the stance of unconditional surrender. During 1943 the head of the Abwehr, General Canaris himself, had made several trips to Spain and Portugal and sent a message inviting his opposite number, Stewart
Menzies at MI6, to meet him face to face. Menzies wanted to go but the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, absolutely forbade it. Almost simultaneously, a German agent with Abwehr connections, Otto John, leaked to MI6 in Lisbon a report that revealed the existence of the weapons research establishment at Peenemunde, on the German Baltic coast, where the V1 and V2 rockets were being developed. In August 1943 the RAF were able to mount a major bombing raid on the facility.
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Otto John was one of the key figures in the German resistance to Hitler. He was a frequent visitor to Madrid and Lisbon in his capacity as a lawyer for the Lufthansa airline and from May 1942 onwards was in touch with MI6. He was a friend of Prince Louis-Ferdinand Hohenzollern, grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II and a rallying point for monarchist elements among the anti-Nazi factions. Acting on the directions of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who would eventually lead the ill-fated assassination attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, Otto John made contact with the American chargé d’affaires in Madrid, William L. Beulac, and his military attaché Colonel William Hohenthal. He also had a meeting with an MI6 officer from Lisbon, whom Otto John referred to as ‘Tony’. Some accounts identify him by the name Graham Maingott, others say it was Guy Burgess. It might equally have been Kim Philby’s deputy Major Tim Milne, who occasionally used the name Tony. Whoever it was, Otto John gave him information, nearly a year in advance, that there was a plan to assassinate Hitler. He asked for support. It was not forthcoming.

There were doubts about Otto John’s Resistance credentials and fears that he might be an agent provocateur for the Gestapo, but Allen Dulles, senior representative of the OSS (American secret service) in Switzerland, was convinced of his
bona fides
and angered by his colleagues’ apparent lack of enthusiasm. In January 1944 he sent a coded message to Washington saying he had heard about Otto John’s mission from a Resistance contact who told him that it had not been well-received in Portugal. Dulles asked his boss,
Whitney H. Shepardson, to find out discreetly what had happened at this ‘exceedingly secret’ meeting because the Resistance, whom he codenamed the Breakers, needed encouragement and support. He added:

I would appreciate hearing of any indication with which you could supply me regarding what you would be interested in achieving via the Breakers, and could be pursued effectively at this time. I do not understand what our policy is and what offers, if any, we could give to any resistance movement.
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The message was passed on up the chain of command to the US State Department but only in order to tell the Russians of the approach and assure them there was no intention to broker a separate peace.

Two of MI6’s most formidable analysts, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and philosopher Stuart Hampshire, had drawn up a report on the dissident faction within the German army. Philby refused to circulate it, describing it as mere speculation, and likewise suppressed Otto John’s supplications for encouragement. Trevor-Roper later wrote that they were baffled by Philby’s intransigence and, looking back, wondered, whether the reason was that it was not in Russia’s interest for the Western Allies to support Hitler’s conservative enemies within while the Red Army was still too far away to intervene.
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Philby decided he needed a man on the spot to keep him up to date with what he described as ‘dickering with the Germans’. Klop was that man. His mission, initially for three months, was agreed by the intelligence services towards the end of November 1943. He was to ‘make contact with his former German connections in the Embassies and ultimately worm his way into Abwehr circles’.
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It was around this time that Baron Axel von dem Bussche, a relative of Klop’s godmother, offered to give up his own life to assassinate Hitler. Due to model a new army greatcoat before the
Führer, he intended to hide two grenades beneath the coat and, when he got close enough, pull the pins, annihilating them both. The fashion show was cancelled, because of an Allied air raid, and another opportunity passed.
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MI6 had been under pressure on financial grounds to reduce its presence in Lisbon, where it employed more than fifty people. Philby had to refer Klop’s mission to Peter Loxley, MI6’s liaison officer at the Foreign Office, and in December 1943 he cleared it with the Foreign Secretary. Anthony Eden made clear that Klop was to refrain from discussing peace proposals and engage only in intelligence work, which was exactly what Philby’s Soviet paymasters wanted. Klop was to report direct to MI6’s head of counter intelligence in Lisbon, Count Charles de Salis, who in turn was to inform the British Minister on the spot, Henry Hopkinson.
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Years later Philby, basking in the reflected glow of a visit to Moscow by Peter Ustinov to meet President Gorbachev, claimed he got to know Klop well after sending him to Lisbon to meet Germans ‘who were thinking mainly of saving their own skins’.
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While Eden was making up his mind to approve Klop’s mission, new evidence of German peace feelers emerged. Walther Schellenberg, MI6’s nemesis at Venlo, sent the French fashion designer Coco Chanel and her English friend Vera Lombardi to Spain in an abortive attempt to make direct peace overtures to Winston Churchill via Sir Samuel Hoare. Chanel had been conducting an affair with a German officer but had made at least one earlier visit to Madrid to pass on intelligence to MI6. This time she was unsuccessful although it is clear that Churchill was informed of her mission because he later intervened to help Vera Lombardi, who had been left stranded and penniless in Madrid.

Klop departed for Lisbon in mid-February 1944. An American intelligence report from that time described Portugal as a happy hunting ground for racketeers, double agents and double-crossers. The dictator Antonio Salazar was well-disposed towards Britain
but many of his middle ranking officials were pro-German Fascist sympathisers and his secret police were German-trained. The poverty-stricken peasant classes were socialist or communist inclined and both groups were open to corruption and bribery. It wasn’t even safe to go for a haircut. One of the Abwehr’s best sources was the Portuguese barber who trimmed the locks of many an American and British diplomat and agent. The report added: