The Bedbug (25 page)

her appreciation of the role we are assigning to her is at present more romantic than practical and [that is] why her cohabitation with Koschnik has … not yielded greater results so far. I made it clear that to live with the Abwehr is not quite helpful enough and that more concrete results must be achieved.
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He provided her with scraps of Air Ministry paper, apparently salvaged from waste paper baskets, containing disinformation about the effect of the V1 rocket attacks on London, and persuaded her to deploy her charms on another Abwehr officer, Rudolf Baumann, who failed to succumb despite ‘two prolonged kissing bouts … one of which lasted thirty-five minutes’.

Klop was frequently in touch with the head of the Abwehr’s Lisbon office, Fritz Cramer, who in peace time had been secretary of the prestigious Adlon Hotel in Berlin. He was a hearty, strongly built man with a florid, scarred face, living well beyond his means, with a mistress at the Atlantico Hotel and a fondness for beer, horses, gambling and women. Klop’s task was to sow suspicion and dissent between him and his colleagues and their rivals in the German SS, by spreading black propaganda about the war crimes charges they would face when the war was over. Whether by accident or design, this led to Cramer being suspected by his superiors of working for the British and towards the end of the war he did in fact approach the Americans with a view to defecting.

One of Cramer’s best agents caused continuous concern to MI5. Paul Fidrmuc, codename Ostro, kept up a steady flow of intelligence about Britain, and British activity in the Middle East. The code-breakers
at Bletchley Park were able to monitor Ostro’s reports as they were radioed back to Germany, and knew that most of his British information was hopelessly wide of the mark. Sometimes, though, he was too close to the truth for comfort, particularly about secret RAF operations, and his Middle East information was apparently reliable. The problem for British intelligence was not so much that a German spy appeared to be running agents in London, although that was bad enough, but that he was endangering their own carefully constructed and entirely bogus agent Juan Pujol Garcia, codename Garbo. Pujol had invented a fictional network of agents in Britain, which he used to supply the Abwehr with false information. He became the star of their network of double-cross agents; his greatest coup was to mislead the Germans about the date and place of the D-Day landings. He was awarded the British MBE and the German Iron Cross for his services. But what the Double Cross team really did not need was a rival agent, Ostro, who was not under their control, feeding in contradictory intelligence which might lead the Germans to doubt Garbo’s reliability.

MI5 and MI6 debated whether to assassinate him. Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, was against the idea, on the grounds that the highly secret Enigma decrypts must never be compromised by revealing knowledge that could not have been obtained through another source. The Double Cross committee disagreed and even after D-Day continued to press for liquidation. At one point, after Ostro revealed plans to move Canadian troops from Italy to France, they considered approaching the two supreme Allied commanders General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Alexander, to overrule ‘C’.

Instead, a plan was hatched to compromise Fidrmuc in the eyes of his German paymasters by giving the impression that he was a double agent in the pay of the British. Klop must have been involved in this because the first step was to be an approach to Fidrmuc to change sides, made by Klop’s agent Ecclesiastic.
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That idea was dropped and when Fidrmuc was eventually captured Klop
and MI5 officer Joan Chenhalls were given the job of investigating him. They went to great lengths to establish how he had succeeded in running the only undetected spy ring in Britain.

The tall, powerfully built, blond agent was taken aback by Klop’s announcement, at the start of questioning, that he already knew him well from his time in Lisbon. Fidrmuc had apparently been unaware of the existence of his opposite number. But he was quite unabashed about his role in feeding intelligence to the Germans. He was a German, born in the Czechoslovak Sudetenland in 1898, who had business interests in metal trading, dabbled in journalism and prided himself on his physical fitness. It was known that he obtained some of his information from Dutch airline pilots flying the London to Lisbon route. He named his best source in London as his distant relative, a Czech lawyer Rudolf Ratschitsky, who worked in the economic department of the Czech government in exile at Princes Gate. Ratschitsky got information from his friend Air Vice-Marshal Karel Janoušek, head of the Czech air force, but his best, unwitting, contact was Maxmillian Lobkowitz, Czech ambassador in London during the war. Lobkowicz had been a member of the underground movement against the Nazis and would certainly not have provided them with information deliberately. Fidrmuc claimed that Ratschitsky managed to obtain the names of German cities that were about to be bombed by the RAF and left coded messages on the notice boards of Catholic churches around London which were collected by a Spanish Republican with a radio transmitter and relayed back to the Germans. In 1947 June Chenhalls tracked Ratschitsky down in the United States and went to interrogate him. He flatly denied the allegation and was able to demonstrate that many of the details provided by Paul Fidrmuc were incorrect. When confronted with this denial Fidrmuc stuck to his story. Klop came to the conclusion that he probably had recruited Ratschitsky before the war but had then invented his reports to win favour and admiration from his Nazi controllers.
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But there were still nagging doubts that they never managed to
resolve. Agent Garbo’s cover story had been that his reports were radioed from London by a Spanish Republican; it was a bizarre coincidence that Fidrmuc should invent the same story. Fidrmuc’s supposed Middle Eastern agent, whom he named as Ahmed Isauri, a representative of the Yemeni Royal family, was never traced. Fidrmuc, who was married, had indulged in the glamorous life of the secret agent, mixing with the dubious characters who gathered nightly at the El Galgo restaurant and nightclub run by Rosalinda Fox, a British informant with high-placed sources in the Spanish government. Fidrmuc even had an affair with a married MI6 agent, Denise de Lacerda, who had tipped off her employers about his activities. And whatever else he invented there was one espionage coup involving the veteran British ambassador in Portugal, Sir Ronald Campbell, which Klop and Miss Chenhalls were able to confirm. Fidrmuc told Klop how he had been sunning himself on a rock on the beach at Arrabida near Setubal in August 1943 when he noticed two men and a woman having difficulty mooring a small boat. He went to their assistance and was amazed to recognise one of the party as the ambassador, who was with his wife and a friend. They gratefully accepted his help and Sir Ronald asked Fidrmuc to keep an eye on their clothes while the party went for a swim in the sea. While they were gone Fidrmuc went through the ambassador’s pockets and found a notebook with a coded reference to a meeting with representatives of Pietro Badoglio, the newly installed Prime Minister of Italy, who had sent three generals to Portugal to negotiate a surrender. Fidrmuc tipped off the Abwehr who refused to believe the story. But it was confirmed, in part, by Sir Ronald who had told the MI6 station chief Charles de Salis at the time about his surprise encounter with a German. Sir Ronald was no fool and it seems incredible that he would have been so careless, so it may be that Fidrmuc substantially embellished the story for reasons of self-aggrandisement.
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Klop was of the opinion that Fidrmuc stuck to his story because he had taken to writing spy novels and thought his own
career would give his plots credibility. Guy Liddell came to the conclusion that Fidrmuc’s vanity would not allow him to admit that his reports were fabricated. To do so would make life difficult for him as he attempted to rebuild a career in Germany.
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Fidrmuc was not the only troublesome Czech in Lisbon. They had their own intelligence branch there, run by Major Vaclav Pan, but once again German subversion was successful. Walther Schellenberg told Klop after the war that Fritz Cramer’s greatest achievement in Lisbon had been to penetrate British intelligence through the Czechs. His mole was Pan’s deputy Jean Charles Alexandre, a cover name for an Austrian agent of the Abwehr, Wilhelm Gessmann. His treachery, which included betraying a Resistance network in France, was revealed by intercepted Abwehr radio traffic and by tapping the Czechs’ own communications. MI5 discovered that Gessman had handed over to Cramer a British radio intended for use by the Resistance and the Germans had used it to feed false information back to Britain. Klop briefed his Czech intelligence contact Vaclav Slama who set up a confrontation in London between Major Pan and their boss František Moravec. Pan tried very hard to defend his protégé and Klop was convinced that Pan and Gessman had both been involved in some dubious business in Lisbon. Gessman refused to come to London and was sacked but Stewart Menzies was so angered by his behaviour that he sought Foreign Office approval for a plot to lure Gessman into fleeing Portugal on a neutral passenger liner which MI6 and the Royal Navy could intercept in international waters to arrest him. This would have been a breach of international law but fully justified, in Menzies’ view, to deal with ‘an enemy agent of quite extraordinary calibre’. In November 1946, after Klop completed his investigation, Guy Liddell recorded:

Gessmann was a high grade German agent whose penetration on the Allied intelligence service was extremely successful. He joined the Czech I S in Lisbon in 1940 and he was able to betray to the Germans the Czech intelligence network in Paris and Marseilles about November 1941. He was responsible for the death of many members of the French Underground. His treachery was discovered by our service and he left the Czechs but managed to gain the confidence of the Americans who employed him for some time afterwards.
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It would be surprising if the Americans had not been warned about Gessman. One of Klop’s jobs was liaison with FBI Special Agent Dennis A. Flinn, whose cover was as legal attaché at the US Embassy. He was the first FBI man to take up a posting in Europe and unusually, given the rivalry between the two, worked simultaneously for his official boss J. Edgar Hoover and the head of the recently formed OSS, Colonel William Donovan. He reported on the Abwehr’s leading personalities in Portugal and their technical capabilities – in cryptography and the use of secret inks for instance. He also played a role in identifying German agents sent to the US. Flinn went on to be director of the Office of Security at the State Department.
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CHAPTER 12: SCHELLENBERG

W
alther Schellenberg, head of Hitler’s foreign intelligence service, was one of the biggest names in the Nazi hierarchy brought to Britain for interrogation at the end of the war. There had been intense competition between the British, Americans and Russians over who should benefit from his revelations. It fell to Klop to do the first examination. Extraordinarily, MI6 tried to block his participation, on the grounds that he was out of the country on a more important mission. What that was has never been explained. The result was that Schellenberg spent nearly all of May and early June 1945 in Sweden before being flown to Allied headquarters in Frankfurt on 17 June. Rather than allow him to be held at the American Uberersel interrogation centre, Dick White arranged for Schellenberg to be kept at a private house to await Klop’s attentions. Apparently, therefore, Schellenberg had ten days of private contemplation before Klop arrived on June 27 to begin sixteen days of questioning. That rather defies belief, unless there was some compelling reason why Klop should conduct the interrogation in preference to anyone else.

Recently released documents in the United States suggest a sensational explanation. FBI agent Frederick Ayer Jr had persuaded Schellenberg’s captors to let him sit in on the interviews but was so in awe of Klop that he wrote to his director, J. Edgar Hoover:

After conferring with the Special Interrogator sent down from the War Office in London, a Mr Johnson [Klop’s cover name] … I decided that it would be best if this were not so. Johnson is a man who has made a study of Schellenberg for the past five years and has had a penetration Agent in close contact with the man for some time. In fact he knows Schellenberg almost as well as he knows himself.
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The idea that Klop had someone inside Schellenberg’s office in the
Sicherheitsdienst
, able to monitor his every move over a long period, would have been a hugely significant breakthrough. Yet it seems to have passed unremarked in Britain. Unlike the leaky Abwehr outfit run by Canaris, Himmler’s SD and SS were a much more secure and dangerous proposition. The fact that Klop had been investigating him for the past five years means that he had been aware of his importance almost from the time of the Venlo fiasco. Human intelligence from Germany, as opposed to Signals intercepts, was in short supply. Recently released files suggest that MI6 had an agent who was privy to military planning for the Eastern Front offensive in 1942 and that prior to that they had a source in Berlin who could find out how Allied plans were being leaked to the Germans. This unidentified agent was, unsurprisingly, difficult to contact so response times were inevitably slow.
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It is believed that Polish intelligence, working alongside the British, had a source inside Hitler’s headquarters who reported back via Switzerland.
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