The Bedbug (39 page)

One of Randell’s colleagues pointed out to John that Putlitz had already fulfilled the classic early stages of a KGB sting operation against John – a target reconnaissance to establish where he lived, his family circumstances, opinions and reaction to what amounted to an offer to defect. He recommended putting Putlitz under surveillance and strongly advised John not to keep a rendezvous with Putlitz the following day. If he did meet Putlitz, he should make clear he ‘had no interest whatsoever in his strange proposals and strange friends’. Randell recorded that John claimed not to have adequate resources for a surveillance operation, clearly did not like the advice he had been given and probably would not take it.

On 18 March, Randell saw John again to question him about his friendship with Wolfgang Wohlgemuth and revealed that Randell’s boss, Edward ‘Crash’ Abbotts, was also in touch with Wohlgemuth. John confirmed that Wohlgemuth was a Communist. Randell was apparently concerned about John’s associations and state of mind and he raised the subject again at a meeting on 15 July 1954, five days before John’s disappearance. Randell made the point that Putlitz and Wohlgemuth were likely to find an opportunity to meet John during his visit to Berlin for the 20 July memorial and that dubious characters were bound to target him as
head of the BfV. Once again John deflected the conversation and Randell was so suspicious that he recommended placing a tap on John’s telephone at the
pension
where he would be staying: Haus Schaetzle in Seebergsteig (now known as Toni-Lessler Strasse) in the Grunewald area of Berlin.

It is apparent from the file that British Intelligence was already intercepting Wohlgemuth’s communications. Internal memos on him and Putlitz have been withheld. They also had access to transcripts of a tap on John’s home phone, although that may only have been imposed after his disappearance.

The Foreign Office in London had additional reasons to worry about John’s intentions. He had written expressing his concerns to the Labour MP and future Cabinet minister Richard Crossman, who had been head of the Psychological Warfare Department during the war when John was broadcasting propaganda for Sefton Delmer. Crossman in turn discussed them with Sir Frank Roberts, a senior diplomatic adviser to the Foreign Secretary, before writing back to John. The contents of those letters are still secret but Crossman remained a supporter of John’s after his defection and return, blaming Britain for his troubles. He wrote:

We had used John as our tool during and after the war and therefore ought to accept a residual obligation to him. At the end of the war although John wanted to stay in this country he had been persuaded by the Foreign Office to undertake an important security post in West Berlin which led to his subsequent troubles.
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Crossman’s letter to John was intercepted by the American postal censors in the Allied control area of Germany which caused considerable embarrassment at the Foreign Office. They were obliged to explain the circumstances in the hope of persuading the Americans that the left-wing in Britain was not ‘up to something’ in connection with John’s disappearance.

A damage limitation exercise followed. The consensus was that whatever John revealed under Soviet interrogation would not have serious consequences for Allied interests, other than revealing a secret memorandum of understanding which would allow Germany to rearm as part of a European Defence Force. But there was a tacit acknowledgement that John’s fears of the re-nazification of Germany had some substance and recognition that his appointment had been a mistake, leaving the BfV as a lame and ineffectual organisation.

Foreign Office official Peter Male, who had spent the last four years dealing with security issues at the Control Commission offices in Wahnerheide, near Cologne minuted:

The present BfV is useless and despondent. The danger is that the protagonists of a tough security service in Germany may win. Some of those German nationalists, including ex-Nazis, who are keen on such a centralised and powerful security service are now in influential positions.
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John’s political superior, the Interior Minister Gerhard Schröder, had been a member of the Nazi Party and was also a harsh critic of John’s management of the BfV. His comments were believed to have been bitterly resented by John.

By mid-November 1956, British diplomats in London and Bonn were aware of the possibility that John would attempt to return to the West. These were backed up by a message from John to ‘Crash’ Abbotts delivered by a Danish journalist, Henrik Bonde-Henriksen, and a simultaneous approach by John’s wife. It appears that Abbotts initially encouraged them to expect British assistance but this was very firmly stamped on by the ambassador, Sir Frederick Hoyer Millar, his colleagues in London and by MI6. Abbotts was told that if John turned up on his doorstep he was to be handed over immediately to the German authorities. As Peter Hope, counsellor at the embassy, explained:

Although John’s re-defection might perhaps be claimed to be a minor triumph in the Cold War, we think here that the question of Anglo-German relations is much more important. We had a bad Press in the past over Otto John and his British connexion; we think it would be a great mistake if we were now to be involved in his re-defection. Moreover, I very much doubt whether the Federal government would relish John’s return. … All in all, therefore, we think we are probably better off with John being where he is and with all this in mind have made it clear to Berlin that Crash Abbotts should have as little to do with the John case as is possible.
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When John duly reappeared on 12 December he was arrested by the German authorities and tried for ‘treasonable falsification and conspiracy’, found guilty and sentenced to four years in jail, of which he served two. He had reverted to the defence that he had been drugged and kidnapped, subsequently going along with his captors’ demands to avoid more intensive interrogation. He maintained that stance for the rest of his life although it was undermined by the KGB defector Vladimir Apollonowitsch in 1969. He claimed to have been the man John had gone to meet in 1954 and that he had been surprised by John’s decision to defect.
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Theories abound as to what really lay behind John’s disappearance. After he died in March 1977 an obituary in The Times rehearsed various explanations, among them a suggestion that Kim Philby lay behind it. It would have suited KGB interests for John to get the job in the first place, and to defect in 1954 in order to denounce the secret European Defence Community. They speculated that John’s return was calculated to create confusion in the mind of the new head of MI6, Dick White, who had begun to re-examine Philby’s loyalties, an investigation which eventually culminated in his exposure as a KGB agent in 1963.

CHAPTER 18: PEACE

S
ir Dick White’s transfer from MI5 to head of MI6 preceded Klop’s retirement by only a year. White was brought in to restore confidence after the fiasco of Buster Crabb’s botched operation in Portsmouth Harbour, for which Nicholas Elliott bore some of the blame. Klop was approaching sixty-five and there is no reason to suppose that White did not still hold him in high esteem. But it must have been a miserable time to be a member of a service so driven by betrayal and botched operations, where technology was increasingly the king and human enterprise, particularly of the type Klop had been used to, was bound to be suspect. What had once made him such a useful agent, his background knowledge of Germany and Russia, and close relationships to Germans and Russians, inevitably now attracted deep suspicion. Although Kim Philby had yet to confess his treachery, he remained under suspicion. Everyone who had been close to him, as Klop had been, had to be considered tainted and it was part of White’s new role to clean up the mess.

Klop had been more or less estranged from Nadia, and at odds with his son Peter, for some time. Nadia seems to have taken the initiative to rescue the situation. Having left Barrow Elm for good in 1953, and with Klop’s flat in Chelsea Cloisters being too small for both of them, she took on responsibility for finding somewhere larger for them to live. In the meantime she stayed with Peter at his Chelsea house. His marriage to Isolde had ended in 1950 but his
career kept him constantly busy. He had enjoyed a huge stage success with his comedy,
The Love of Four Colonels
, and now attempted to replicate it with
No Sign of the Dove
, combining bedroom farce with a satirical rewriting of the story of Noah’s Ark, condemning all the ills he perceived in modern Britain. Nadia designed the sets and went on the provincial tour which preceded its launch at the Savoy Theatre in the West End at the end of November 1953. Klop, feeling lonely and neglected, seemed to think that his wife and son were ‘conspiring’ to exclude him. The play was a massive flop, panned by the critics, booed by the audience on its opening night, and taken off within a week. It cannot have improved family relations that Klop sided with the critics. Peter should stick to what he was good at – making people laugh – he advised. Freed from her stage commitments, by the end of December Nadia had found a two-room ground-floor flat in Egerton Gardens, just off the Brompton Road in South Kensington. It was the first time for twelve years that they had lived together and there were clearly difficulties. Klop was suffering bouts of lassitude and depression. He was crotchety, objecting to her harmless pastimes, such as card games, and interfering in her painting. She began to take odd jobs, decorating houses and church interiors which took her away from the flat and helped to make ends meet.

Klop had remained friends with Rita Winsor, his MI6 colleague in Lisbon, and it led to an unusual commission for Nadia. Part of Rita’s duties had been to make the complicated travel arrangements necessary for spiriting defectors like Otto John out of the country and ensuring safe passage for visiting intelligence officers like Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham and Malcolm Muggeridge. She decided to put her skills to use in peacetime by opening an upmarket travel agency specialising in out-of-the way places, among them trips to the moon scheduled to start in 2040. Nadia designed the poster showing travellers setting off.
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In 1954 Peter married the French-Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier. They had three children, Igor, Pavla and Andrea. When
Igor was born in London in April 1956, Peter was unable to be present because it coincided with the first night of his play
Romanoff and Juliet
. Klop, showing a rare streak of sentimentality, went to the hospital and tearfully promised always to be around to care for Igor.

Visitors and pretty girls still sparked Klop’s imagination but by now there was an air of desperation about it, including a passing interest in pornography. He was flattered when the former Soviet ballerina Galina Ulanova, by then in her forties, came to visit and played up to him. He spent occasional evenings with a Spanish air hostess at a local sherry bar and on one occasion managed to pick up a young French au pair who had rung his number by mistake and ended up being invited round to tea. But these fitful excursions down Memory Lane were interspersed with days when he fell asleep in his armchair while polishing his antique bronzes or suffered a panic attack after accidentally locking himself in the lavatory.

He was revived and immensely honoured when the German General Hans Speidel, who had been his commanding officer in the First World War, sought him out and spent a couple of days as his guest.
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Speidel had recently been appointed commander in chief of NATO forces in central Europe, and was doing the grand tour, meeting heads of state and senior military figures such as Lord Mountbatten and Field Marshal Earl Alexander but still found time for his former fellow lieutenant.
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Peter Wright, assistant director of MI5, visited Klop at home shortly after his retirement from MI6 in 1957, hoping to get some useful advice about a small operation he was planning against the Russian embassy. He expected to meet a hero of the secret world living in honourable retirement:

In fact, Ustinov and his wife were sitting in a dingy flat surrounded by piles of ancient leather-bound books. He was making ends meet by selling off his fast-diminishing library.

As they spent the afternoon drinking vodka, Klop became bitter about the way he felt he had been abandoned, without a pension. He told Wright:

When you work for them you never think about the future, about old age. You do it for love. And when it comes time to die, they abandon you … The gentlemen run the business and the gentlemen have short memories…
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Klop served for a brief period as a director of his son Peter’s management company, along with Peter’s cousin Julius Caesar Edwardes, who was also of Russian descent, and his literary agent Alroy Treeby. He acted as secretary, keeping notes of board meetings, but it was clear that business acumen was not among his talents. His chief virtue was fending off the many telephone inquiries that found their way to him at the Egerton Gardens flat because he was in the phone book and his son was ex-directory. Even that, in his son’s bitter view, only served to remind Klop that Peter was not the failure he had always predicted he would be.
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