The Bedbug (38 page)

But John had always hankered after a role in rebuilding a new Germany and British officials tried, and failed, to ease him into a number of fairly insignificant positions. Then, to the enormous resentment of many of his fellow Germans, he suddenly landed a position that could be expected to be vital to his country’s democratic future and rehabilitation in the civilised world. To many of them he was a traitor. It was not so much that he had participated in the 20 July plot to kill Hitler; it was the fact that he fled, and then worked actively for the enemy against German interests, that condemned him in their eyes. How had he survived when so many of the conspirators, including his own brother, had stayed behind and faced certain death? Although the British government has always denied it, the almost universal perception is that it was Britain that engineered his appointment as head of the BfV, purely in its own interests. Nine names had been put forward by the Germans, four of which were submitted to the Allied authorities that were still overseeing the government of West Germany. All
were rejected, including Reinhard Gehlen whom the Americans preferred and who eventually became head of the equivalent of MI6. He had been in charge of military intelligence for Hitler on the Eastern Front. Then Otto John’s name was submitted and the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, feeling he had been boxed into a corner, reluctantly authorised the appointment though he never fully accepted it.
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There is no doubt that the intelligence services were in close touch with the new head of the BfV. Before taking up his appointment, Otto John came to London for a meeting with Dick White and the director of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe. The meeting had been set up by John Wheeler-Bennett, wartime assistant director of political intelligence, and General Kenneth Strong, who had been US General Eisenhower’s chief intelligence officer during the war and subsequently became director of the British Joint Intelligence Bureau. Ostensibly this was a social call, at which Otto John was assured he would get any help he needed. He was then passed on to General Sir Sidney Kirkman, who was responsible for intelligence gathering in the British control zone of Germany, under cover of conducting an inquiry into military expenditure. Thereafter John reported regularly to Kirkman and his successors.
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Gehlen told his American controller that Otto John had confirmed, after too much to drink, that he was a member of Britain’s special services. Gehlen went on to claim that his opposite number was carrying out espionage operations on behalf of the British in East Germany, the Middle East and the Soviet Union, where he boasted of a contact in the immediate vicinity of Joseph Stalin.
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Klop used his German contacts to keep an eye on the way the new German government was developing and the appointment of former Nazis to positions of power and influence. In early 1951 his old friend, the former military attaché Leo Geyr von Scheppenberg, wrote to tell him that Fritz Hesse had become a member of the Senate for the Academy for Political Science and chief of the Institute of Public Opinion. Geyr added a Latin tag:
Dificile est satiram non scribere
(It is difficult not to write satire). Klop reminded Guy Liddell:

Fritz Hesse was an arch-Nazi and Ribbentrop’s right hand man for press affairs in this country. After the outbreak of war it was he who … demanded at a conference in the German Foreign Office … the immediate bombing of the harbour of London predicting that the population of the East End of London would march in their thousands to Buckingham Palace demanding a peace with Germany. After the defeat of Germany Hesse was flown over to London and brought to my flat for interrogation.
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Klop and Geyr kept in touch. When the general became the first German to address the British Military Commentators Circle, in November 1954, on ‘The Role of Germany in the defence of Western Europe’, he invited Klop and his son as special guests. Geyr set up a similar discussion group in Germany but a year later he complained to the president of the British Circle, Basil Liddell Hart:

It was yours and your friends’ idea to form a corresponding circle in my country too. It is in being now, although it is fighting hard against more or less open and underground Nazi and Nationalist restoration.
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He explained that ‘Nationalists’ had been trying to cut him off from his international contacts. The concern that former Nazis were repopulating the new government of West Germany also weighed heavily on Otto John’s mind. It was fomented by Klop’s old friend Wolfgang zu Putlitz. Like Otto John, he had nursed hopes of playing a part in a new beginning for Germany. He could not return to his old estates in Laaske, because they had been expropriated by the Red Army despite his brother Gebhard converting to Communism, but he had at least been allowed to remain in his old home. With Dick White’s help Putlitz had obtained a job in the Presidential
Chancellery in Kiel but, like Otto John, he found himself branded a traitor among his own people.

He wrote bitterly to Sir Robert Vansittart in 1946:

I somehow resent being ‘denazified’ by people who probably did not do half as much against the Nazis as I did. But it is like that: For the British I am a German and therefore not trustworthy as a matter of principle. For the Germans I am – if not a traitor – at least a Junker with a title and therefore suspicious.
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Putlitz went on to complain that British attitudes to the Occupation were choking off all attempts by Germans to build a new life and warned that if this continued Germany would collapse and France would follow, presumably into Communist hands. In a series of articles for The People he revealed his wartime spying and bemoaned the lack of opportunity that the peace had brought. This sense of rejection led him to take a step he had resisted throughout the war and assume British nationality. He tried teaching and commercial travelling without much success. His circle of homosexual friends, among them Guy Burgess and the Labour MP Tom Driberg, were politically left-leaning. Suspicions about Putlitz’s own political loyalty began to be voiced by the Dutch secret service who questioned him about links with the pre-war Soviet spymaster Walter Krivitsky. Not long after, despite the death of his brother Gebhard in prison, Putlitz decided to settle in Communist East Germany and become an active advocate of their cause, contributing propaganda pamphlets attacking the ‘rebirth of [West] German imperialism’.
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Not content with that, he sought out his old friend Otto John in West Berlin and began to berate him with the iniquities of the Adenauer regime and the perils of re-nazification. Putlitz encouraged John to believe that the only way to stop this was by exposing it from the sanctuary of East Germany. These contacts began in 1951, very soon after Otto John’s appointment, and
continued through to 1954. In March 1953 they met in a restaurant and, according to Otto John, Putlitz voiced all the arguments about a divided Germany, reunification, rearmament and peace negotiations that appeared daily in the eastern zone newspapers. John’s account, written some time later in self-justification, describes Putlitz as a ‘politically awkward’ customer. John maintains that he drew Putlitz’s attention to the fact that he was still technically a British citizen despite his adherence to his new political masters’ doctrine.
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Otto John apparently neglected to inform his superiors of these potentially treasonable discussions, although he kept his British handlers aware of them. He also briefed his old boss, Sefton Delmer, when he came to visit in 1954 intent on writing a series for the
Daily Express
entitled: ‘How Dead is Hitler?’ Otto John may also have been the source of an earlier Delmer article criticising his rival Reinhard Gehlen for being in the Americans’ pocket. Delmer set up a meeting with Putlitz and then wrote a piece attacking him, while pursuing strongly the line that West Germany was in danger of falling again under the Nazi spell.

By 1954 British enthusiasm for Otto John was on the wane and a number of Germans were questioning his suitability. The week of the tenth anniversary of the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler was the turning point. John attended a commemoration in Berlin and was clearly in an emotional state, possibly a little the worse for drink, as he reflected on the death of his brother and so many of his fellow conspirators. According to Sefton Delmer, John was due to meet two British intelligence officers for dinner that evening at the Maison de France restaurant and was dropped outside.
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But, instead of going in, he walked to the nearby home and surgery of a physician who had treated his brother for war injuries, Wolfgang Wohlgemuth. He also had a practice in East Berlin and had been used by John as a conduit to Communist contacts. Two weeks earlier Wohlgemuth had spent the night at John’s home, sitting up late and drinking together with Michael Winch, a former British agent who had worked in Portugal in 1943 and in Moscow in 1944.

On the evening of 20 July, he drove John to East Berlin, passing through checkpoints apparently without difficulty in the days before the Berlin Wall. Supposedly John was going to visit his brother’s grave; in reality he ended up in a KGB safe house meeting Russian and East German intelligence officers. More drink was taken and John decided to stay. Whether he was drugged and abducted, went voluntarily and was forced to stay, or always intended to defect remains unclear to this day despite his later testimony and the accounts of witnesses from both sides. MI5 seems to have been in little doubt that Putlitz was behind the defection.

Initially the West German government tried to pass off this bombshell as an abduction but as John made radio broadcasts and held press conferences, at which he chatted amicably with Delmer and other journalists, without displaying signs of extreme duress, that version soon crumbled. In the broadcasts John attacked the re-nazification of West Germany and revealed delicate secret negotiations designed to admit the recently created state to a European Defence Community, thus paving the way for them to rearm.

Previous links between John and other Communist sympathisers began to be uncovered. A newspaper drew attention to the fact that among John’s former colleagues in Sefton Delmer’s black propaganda unit were Baron Wolfgang zu Putlitz, Eberhard Koebel, Dr Honigmann and Karl von Schnitzler. Surely it was no coincidence that all were now in the Soviet-controlled part of Germany.
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Otto John’s deputy Albert Radke, who had previously worked for the Gehlen organisation, said it was apparent that he had no real experience of counter-intelligence and had a bad habit of conducting meetings behind his deputy’s back. That included his conversations with Putlitz, although he had put a note on file saying that he rejected Putlitz’s blandishments.
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John was taken to Moscow and then to a Black Sea resort and questioned about his links to British intelligence and his 1944 escape to Britain. Then, just as unexpectedly as he had disappeared, he reappeared again in
West Berlin in December 1955, having slipped the attentions of his KGB minders while visiting a university campus.

This was no spur of the moment dash for freedom – it had been set up in advance in collaboration with British Intelligence – nor had John’s disappearance come as a total surprise. In October 2013, as a result of a Freedom of Information request, the Foreign Office released a thick file of previously secret memoranda which shed new light on Otto John’s defection. It maintains the convenient fiction that Britain was not responsible for John’s appointment, attributing the nomination to the German politician Jacob Kaiser. Like Otto John, he had been a member of the 20 July plot and linked to the Cologne-based Nazi Resistance group. He was also a founder member of the CDU and therefore came from the same power base as the Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Yet the two men had significant political differences – Kaiser was a left-leaning trade unionist who had initially formed an East German branch of the CDU until forced out by the Soviet authorities. In Adenaeur’s West German government he was appointed minister for reunification.

It is clear that John was in regular contact with his handler from British Intelligence, Keith Randell of the British Services Security Organisation. He was also involved in running joint counter-espionage operations, as later alleged by Gehlen. But it was not until November 1952 that he revealed to Randell that Putlitz had contacted him eighteen months earlier. He had turned up unannounced and accosted John outside the headquarters of the BfV. John had invited him home to dinner where they had talked about old friends in Britain with whom Putlitz remained in contact.

John had then moved house but four months later Putlitz had turned up on his doorstep having done some detective work to track him down in Cologne. On 16 March 1953, the two men had lunch and twenty-four hours later John briefed Randell on what had happened but did not inform his own government. Putlitz had made a great play of his dislike for the Americans, vilified
the British to a lesser extent, and stated that he would ‘rather be a member of the proletariat under the Russians than a misused gentleman under the Western Allies’. He accused John of allowing himself to become the head of a new Gestapo. Then he came to his very important message: a senior Russian officer wanted to meet John, in West Berlin or Austria if necessary, and professed that this would be in Germany’s best interests. John apparently declined the invitation and the conversation turned once more to old friends in Britain and what they were doing. Although Klop is not mentioned personally in Randell’s report, Dick White, Vansittart and Malcolm Christie are. White and General Sir Kenneth Strong, who was also mentioned, were at that stage in the running to replace Sir Percy Sillitoe as director-general of MI5.