The Bedbug (4 page)

On the ground, the fighting was concentrated around Messine and Wytschaetebogen where the British began a massive seventeen-day bombardment around the middle of May. Klop was a witness.
¹⁹

Aviation was still its infancy. Crashes were commonplace. Dogfights were becoming lethal with the development of cockpit-mounted machine guns that could fire through the propellers. Previously enemy airmen fired at each other with pistols or threw missiles at each other. Klop claimed to have once escaped unscathed from a cockpit riddled with bullets, some of which had passed through his cap without causing injury. He liked to maintain that it was the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, who had come to his rescue. By April 1917 Klop had qualified as an observer rather than a pilot. His duties involved spotting targets on the Western Front for the artillery, and occasionally dropping bombs.

It was then that he and Peter were reunited in flying section A250. Their comradeship was to be short-lived. On the morning of Friday, 13 July 1917, Peter Ustinov sat on the end of his brother’s bed and said farewell before taking off on a mercy mission. With white streamers attached to the wings of his plane, he was heading behind enemy lines to drop bags of mail from British prisoners of war to their loved ones back home. British anti-aircraft gunners failed to see the white streamers and Peter Ustinov, with his pilot Georg Fick, met their deaths in no-man’s land at Hollebeke, just south of Ypres. For Klop, who led the search party to recover his body, it was a shattering experience. A month later Klop
was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class and in September the Ritterkreuz or Knight’s Cross, effectively a double Iron Cross. He was still flying but the logs that might record what he did to deserve the accolades were destroyed in the Second World War. Klop may not have cared much about medals after the loss of his brother. He named his only son in his memory.
²⁰

In July 1918 Klop won yet another Ritterkreuz, this time with the additional recognition of the Order of Friedrich, a nineteenth-century award created for nobility serving in the Württemberg regiments. In October, a couple of weeks before the war ended, he was transferred out of the front line to a War Office job back in Württemberg. When he enlisted he had described himself as a Protestant Evangelist. By the time he signed his discharge papers he had no religion.

He soon moved to Berlin in search of civilian employment. He abandoned the notion of becoming a diplomat. Representing a defeated and vilified country abroad may not have been the best showcase for his talents but his chosen alternative was scarcely better. He had influential friends and quickly found himself appointed to the
Wolff’s Telegraphische Büro
, the national news agency of Germany, as a correspondent destined to report from London, probably the most hostile posting imaginable.
Wolff’s
had been founded by Bernhard Wolff in 1849, shortly before his former colleague Julius Reuter set up his eponymous agency in London. They had previously worked together in Paris, for the French news agency Havas. The three agencies represented the great powers of international news reporting, often pooling reports or sharing the telegraph cables that made possible rapid worldwide communication. The strategic significance of communications technology had been recognised during the war, with Britain in particular seeking to control the means of transmission in Europe, across the Atlantic and into the Far East. Intercepting enemy diplomatic and military traffic for intelligence and propaganda purposes played an important part in her strategy. Similarly, the
Wolff Bureau had been used before and during the war by the German Foreign Office to challenge Britain’s colonial supremacy and to get Germany’s message across.

So Klop’s new profession was not that far removed from diplomacy, in fact it was ideal cover. Klop was about to become a spy.

While he waited for British clearance to travel to London he was sent by the Wolff Bureau to the Netherlands, reporting from there on Dutch and English news. In 1919 the German ambassador in The Hague was Friedrich Rosen, an Orientalist who had grown up in Palestine and been German consul in Jerusalem at the turn of the century. In 1905 he led a German mission to Ethiopia and so would almost certainly have known Baron Platon Ustinov and Moritz Hall’s family. Klop reintroduced himself to Rosen and got to know the counsellor at the embassy, Baron Adolf Georg Otto ‘Ago’ von Maltzan. Rosen would briefly serve as Foreign Minister in the Weimar Republic conducting lively exchanges with his opposite number in the Soviet Union, Georgy Chicherin, with a view to
rapprochement
.
²¹
But it was Maltzan who was the architect of German revival by clandestinely subverting the peace treaty of Versailles from the moment when victors and vanquished finally put pen to paper in June 1919.

Germany and Russia had been on opposing sides for the first three years of the war but after the Russian Revolution hostilities had officially ceased. The Russians were therefore excluded from the Versailles treaty negotiations. In addition, some German soldiers had joined forces with the White Russian armies, which already had British and French support, seeking to depose the new Communist rulers. As these rebellions petered out, hundreds of thousands of troops from either side were left stranded in the Baltic States or held as prisoners on either side. There were estimated to be 100,000 German prisoners in Russia and 1.2 million Russians in German hands. During 1919 Maltzan became commissioner responsible for repatriating these displaced soldiers. These were ideal circumstances for infiltrating agents and Maltzan, who had
been First Secretary at the German embassy in St Petersburg before the war, took full advantage.

He was convinced that Germany’s best prospect for economic and political recovery lay with Russia – Bolsheviks or no Bolsheviks. Russia needed Germany’s technical ability; Germany needed Russia’s raw materials and vast labour force. The punitive reparations imposed by the Western Allies meant there was no future in that direction. He built his own career around that concept. By 1921 he was ministerial director of the Eastern department of the German Foreign Office and by 1922 State Secretary and closest adviser to the Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, who signed the Treaty of Rapallo which ultimately allowed Germany secret military development facilities inside the Soviet Union.

In 1919 and 1920 Germany did not have normal diplomatic representation in Moscow and was anxious to infiltrate any unofficial observer who could report first hand on the chaos that was enveloping the new regime. One of Maltzan’s first sources was a Communist sympathiser, Wolfgang Breithaupt, editor of a small but apparently well-regarded journal known as
The Word in Three Languages
, published by the Pacific-World-Union in The Hague, in fact in four languages – English, French, Dutch and German. It attracted contributions from a number of English correspondents, among them the novelist D. H. Lawrence who provided a four-part series on democracy. He had been introduced to the magazine by the pacifist novelist Douglas Goldring, who visited the magazine’s offices in 45 Van Imhoff Street and recalled that the paper was run by Germans pretending to be International Socialists. He thought they were secret service agents.
²²
It has since emerged that between November 1919 and March 1920 the magazine was used as a front to gather information from inside Russia, paid for by Maltzan who received the fruits of their research direct from Wolfgang Breithaupt. In January 1920 Maltzan paid an Italian journalist F. P. Giuntini the relatively modest fee of 8,000 Marks to travel through Russia, ostensibly gathering material for Italian
newspaper articles. A month later, a German businessman using the cover name of Knoll was set up with 30,000 Marks to trade in confiscated or export-prohibited medicinal drugs that the authorities in Soviet Russia desperately needed, while making an objective assessment of the latest political events in Soviet Russia. The German consulate at Vyborg, just inside the Finnish border and only eighty miles north-west of St Petersburg, was weighing in with information gleaned from Bolshevik newspapers and informants prepared to make hazardous border crossings at night.
²³
Two German doctors, Julius Borchardt and Georg Klemperer, had been summoned to Moscow to treat Lenin’s baffling, persistent headaches and reported back to Maltzan. In 1919 a Dutch journalist by the name of Fabius went on a semi-official trip and was arrested on the Russian border but still contrived to return with copies of correspondence between Stalin, Lenin and the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky.
²⁴

Maltzan was simultaneously holding secret trade talks in Berlin with Viktor Kopp, Russia’s Red Cross representative in the city, and hatching military strategies with General Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission, to overthrow the Bolsheviks. Maltzan was also aware that, however much Britain might appear to oppose the Communist takeover in Russia, Prime Minister Lloyd George saw a potential solution to his country’s unemployment problems in opening up the Russian market to British exports. Maltzan was determined to get in ahead of him. On the face of it, Britain was trying to bring down the Bolshevik regime, while Germany was trying to establish good relations with them, in spite of their ideological differences. It was not so straightforward.
²⁵

Klop was a natural candidate for recruitment. He had strong personal reasons to go to Russia: he had lost touch with his parents and his sister. Early in the war they had corresponded through his mother’s younger sister Katia, who was in Bulgaria and managed to pass letters through Sweden and Switzerland. But after the revolution in 1917 Klop lost touch and determined to go to Russia
to find out what had happened to them. It was not a journey to be taken lightly or without friends or support. Friedrich Rosen and Ago von Maltzan could help him prise open the door but thereafter he would have to live on his wits. The consequences if he was betrayed or captured didn’t bear thinking about.

It probably did not cross his mind that he would find a bride of independent mind, great strength of character and aesthetic talent who just at that moment was in need of a knight in shining armour.

CHAPTER 3: NADIA

A
lexandre Benois missed the world premiere of Tchaikovsky’s ballet
The Sleeping Beauty
at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on 15 January 1890. His friend Dima Filosofov dragged him along on the second or third night, having heard that it was not so bad after all. The composer’s earlier ballet,
Swan Lake
, had not been well received. For Benois this was a revelation and he attended every performance from then March. The impact on him and his friends was such that it changed their approach to art, ballet and music for years to come. Without it, he claimed, there would have been no Ballets Russes.
²⁶

Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece had awakened in Alexandre Benois the creative impulse which led to the founding of
Mir iskusstva
(World of Art), the magazine which dominated the aesthetics and art nouveau movements in the great city of St Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century. Benois and Filosopov, the supreme ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and the artist Léon Bakst, were the driving cultural force and the Mariinsky was its focal point. The greatest talents of music and dance were nurtured there. Alexandre’s production of
Le Pavillon d’Armide
was premiered at the Mariinsky in 1907 and performed in Paris by Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova two years later. His career as a costume and set designer spanned nearly sixty years with his last production of
Petrushka
staged at Covent Garden in 1957, three years before his death.

For Benois and his young contemporaries, Tchaikovsky opened a gateway to the west, to Europe and progress, without relinquishing the splendour of the eighteenth century when Peter the Great made St Petersburg his model capital. For a while they called themselves the Society for Self-Education of Nevsky Pickwickians, setting out, in the style of Charles Dickens’s Mr Pickwick, from the main thoroughfare of their capital, the Nevsky Prospekt, in their quest for the delights and curiosities of life. Alexandre adopted the slogan ‘
Petersburg über alles
’ as a rule to live by and Sergei Diaghilev described their new movement as a generation thirsting for beauty.
²⁷

The prosperous Benois family, among whom Alexandre was simply the most talented of many talents, had lived in Russia for several generations but they traced their roots to Germany, Italy and France. They were at the heart of the cultural life of the Tsar’s capital.

Nicholas Benois, son of a farm labourer, was born in 1702 and brought up by his widowed mother, a laundress, in the village of Saint Ouen-en-Brie about fifty kilometres south-east of Paris. She instilled enough of an education for Nicholas to become the village school master, a profession his son also followed. But his grandson had grander social ambitions, more suited to a man christened Julius Louis Caesar Benois. He became pastry cook to the Duc de Montmorency. Together they fled the revolution of 1789 and made their way to St Petersburg where the cook found himself more in demand than the duc and was very soon appointed food taster to Tsar Paul I. This prestigious appointment had its drawbacks, since the emperor rightly suspected his courtiers of plotting assassination and became convinced that he was being fed ground glass in his meals.