The Bedbug (41 page)

It is difficult for me to understand how anybody can become a spy, even for a financial consideration. I wouldn’t know a secret if one came my way.
³⁷⁸

This intemperate outburst is surely unfair if it applied in any sense to Klop. It was only towards the end of Peter’s life that MI5 began to release its files and it may be that he knew more of his father’s flamboyant escapades than the serious achievements that lay behind them. The extent of Klop’s work, sometimes at the heart and sometimes on the periphery of so many of the crucial episodes of the Second World War and the Cold War, mark him out as a very special kind of agent. It is not a role that is ever likely to be replicated, given the far greater dependence on specialists and electronic surveillance.

Peter Ustinov’s son Igor, a successful sculptor, based in Switzerland, and a director of the Ustinov Foundation, feels a certain affinity with his grandfather. Klop collected bronzes and antique bottles; Igor frequently casts in bronze and occasionally used bottles in his work. And he sees Klop in quite a different light:

The way I see him is as a man who lost everything at the end of the First World War. He was in the Luftwaffe, his brother was killed. One of his younger brothers went to Canada and the other to Argentina. This is a man who was left totally alone. He hadn’t died but his life had disappeared. His father had wasted all the family money. He gave more away than he invested. His whole life was blown to pieces. Instead of belonging to a wealthy, noble family he ended up with nothing. He is somebody who found strength in life after that period by belief in things, in values, and, in a way, fighting for them. He had lost all the other things in his life. That is why, when he saw the Second World War coming, he started handing over documents from the German embassy and giving them to Chamberlain.

He even finds in this aspect of Klop’s character an explanation for his infidelities:

He was a womaniser, definitely. I think if Nadia was not an artist it would have blown her to pieces. It was not an easy set up for a family, to have a man who likes to wander around and have adventures. He probably had a feeling that having lost everything he would not get emotionally involved any more. He doesn’t want to live on the level of his feelings. He keeps them at the back of his intimate thoughts. I believe Klop was keeping a distance between himself and Peter and Nadia in order to protect them. He was doing fairly dangerous activities and wanted to avoid making them emotionally dependant on him.

Igor Ustinov sees Peter Ustinov’s Foundation as a contribution to the same peaceful aspirations that originally prompted Klop to betray Nazi secrets to Britain. He believes that his father did come to recognise, very late in his own life, Klop’s virtues and to understand some of his apparent failings as a husband and father:

He was for the first time feeling a great respect for his father, who was a very secret person.
³⁷⁹

Igor Ustinov is right: his grandfather was indeed a very secret person. One great secret, unresolved when this book was first published, was how he managed to have a mole at the heart of Germany’s intelligence organisation.

It now appears that his contact was even more important than previously suspected: he had a hand in pre-war secret diplomacy at the highest level; he probably instigated the flight to Britain of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, in 1941; he made peace overtures in
1944; and his personal assistant was briefly a British place-man in the rebuilding of post-war Germany.

Kurt Jahnke was an
éminence grise
of the German secret service. When the Second World War broke out he was in his mid-fifties, broad-shouldered, 6 ft 1, weighing around 12.5 stone, with light brown hair, a long crooked nose and gold-filled front teeth. He was said to be a charming, cultured gentleman who spoke good English but had been born in Russia.

In the First World War, he ran a sabotage unit in the United States with the task of cutting off munitions supplies to the Allies in Europe. He was suspected of organising an enormous explosion at Black Tom Island on the New Jersey side of New York harbour shortly after midnight on 30 July 1916. It destroyed $20 million worth of ammunition, smashed windows in Brooklyn and Manhattan and burst 100 bolts on the Statue of Liberty.
³⁸⁰

When things got too hot in the States, he moved to Mexico for the duration of the war, returned to Germany in peacetime, ran an intelligence service from China, then formed the Jahnke Büro, answering to Rudolf Hess.

Jahnke already had a number of agents in place in London – among them, German journalists whom Klop would have known through the course of his own work. As early as 1935, one of his agents, Gulla Pfeffer, had introduced Jahnke to her friend Harold Fletcher, an employee of the Government Code and Cipher School. Fletcher had first taken the precaution of getting approval from the then head of MI6, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, who was running him as a double agent.
³⁸¹

In 1937, Jahnke tried to broker a deal between Britain and Germany. According to his secretary Carl Marcus, interviewed many years later, it involved putting limits on naval and army expansion and carving up their respective interests in China. Goering oversaw the talks, which were attended by an unnamed British colonel from MI6. Hitler was a sceptical but interested bystander until Ribbentrop intervened and sabotaged it.

Marcus recalled: ‘We were lucky to get the Englishman out of Berlin and back to London alive.’ Before he left, the colonel told Jahnke and Marcus: ‘This means war.’
³⁸²

In 1938, Jahnke in turn visited London and met a representative of the private intelligence bureau run by Sir Robert Vansittart at the Foreign Office. They used the codename Johnson, the same name adopted by Klop in his secret dealings with Germans.
³⁸³
Although the wording of the report is ambiguous, it seems highly likely that this was the moment when Klop forged a link with the heart of the German secret service.

When the British ambassador Neville Henderson flew to Berlin on 27 August 1939 for last-ditch talks with Ribbentrop and Hitler to avert war, he was accompanied by David Boyle, officially the King’s Messenger, responsible for safely conveying secret diplomatic correspondence. Boyle was of Scottish aristocratic descent and had been
aide de camp
to the future Edward VIII when he visited the United States in 1919 as Prince of Wales. He was also a personal friend and stockbroker for Stewart Menzies, then deputy director of MI6. His mission was to conduct secret talks behind Hitler’s back in the belief that elements in the German Army were prepared to overthrow him.

When Boyle returned on Tuesday 29 August, Sir Alec Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, noted in his diary that he had ‘some interesting – and not unhopeful – news’.

According to the historian Ulrich Schlie, a former head of security at the German Ministry of Defence, Boyle’s contact in Berlin was Kurt Jahnke.
³⁸⁴
Walther Schellenberg also said, under interrogation, that Jahnke had done everything possible to introduce a British intelligence officer to Hess, Himmler and even Hitler during the last days of the Polish crisis.
³⁸⁵

Jahnke is also supposed to have originated the idea of Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain in 1941, lending credence to the idea that Klop and MI6 were forewarned. It seems strange that Jahnke survived if he was behind such a controversial and apparently
traitorous mission by Hess. Yet he was appointed as an adviser by Schellenberg, who admitted that he was taking on a ‘hot potato’, suspected by his superiors of being a British agent.

Jahnke maintained channels of communication through Switzerland, where Klop was a frequent visitor. Messages were passed through one of Schellenberg’s agents, Hans Christian Daufeldt, whom Klop had kept under surveillance pre-war when he was based in London, or through the Chinese ambassador, who was an old contact of Jahnke’s. Schellenberg revealed in his memoirs that he had received a thirty-page document from his own security staff alleging that Jahnke actually spent his time in Switzerland being briefed by the British on deception operations, yet he continued to trust him.

In 1944, Schellenberg sent Jahnke’s assistant, Carl Marcus, to France to give himself up to the Allies as they swept in from the Normandy beaches and to make a last-ditch attempt to agree a peace deal. Marcus revealed so much about the German secret service that he was codenamed Dictionary. Post-war, he was allowed to become Oberbürgermeister of the town of Rheydt.

His MI5 interrogator reported that when he first arrived in Britain, Marcus had asked to speak to the same British agent whom Jahnke had contacted in 1938 using the name Johnson.

GLOSSARY

FAMILY

Ustinov, Iona ‘Klop’: Former German journalist and diplomat, agent of MI5 and MI6.

Ustinov, Gregory: Klop’s younger brother.

Ustinov, Grigori: Klop’s Russian grandfather and notorious libertine

Ustinov, Adrian: Klop’s great great grandfather, founded the family fortune in the Siberian salt trade.

Ustinov, Igor: Klop’s grandson, now a sculptor based in Switzerland.

Ustinov, Magdalena: Klop’s mother, daughter of Moritz Hall and Katarina, Ethiopian aristocrat.

Ustinov, Mikhail: Klop’s great grandfather, owner of vast estates in southern Russia.

Ustinov, Peter: Klop’s younger brother, killed in action when his German plane was shot down by British guns.

Ustinov, Peter: Klop’s son: actor, director and raconteur named after Klop’s brother.

Ustinov, Platon: Klop’s father, Russian aristocrat who lived in exile in Palestine.

Ustinov, Platon: Klop’s younger brother

Ustinov, Suzanne (née Cloutier): Peter’s second wife, mother of Igor, Pavla and Andrea.

Ustinov, Tabitha: Klop’s sister, married to Palestinian businessman Anis Jamal.

Ustinov, Tamara: Klop’s first granddaughter, from Peter’s marriage to Isolde Denham, now an actress.

Hall, David: Klop’s uncle, son of Moritz and Katarina, later Counsellor of State to the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.

Hall, Katarina (aka Wayzaru Walatta Iyassus): Klop’s grandmother, Abyssinian aristocrat and wife of Moritz.

Hall, Moritz: Klop’s grandfather, of Polish extraction, missionary and armament maker to Emperor Theodore of Abyssinia.

Metzler, Peter: Evangelical pastor who converted Klop’s father Platon to Protestantism.

Metzler, Maria: Pastor’s daughter and Platon Ustinov’s first wife.

Benois, Nadia (Nadezhda Leontievna): Klop’s Russian wife, artist and theatre designer, daughter of architect Leontij and niece of Alexandre.

Benois, Alexandre: leading light of the World of Art movement and Ballet Russes.

Benois, Leontij (Louis): Nadia’s father, architect and professor at the Academy of Arts.

Benois Albert: Nadia’s uncle, successful water colourist.

Cavos Alberto: Nadia’s great grandfather, architect and designer of Mariinsky Theatre home of the Imperial Ballet.

Edwardes, Matthew: British businessman married to Nadia’s aunt Camilla. The family went into exile in Britain and Matthew’s grandson Julius became Peter Ustinov’s business adviser.

Horvath, General Dmitri: Married to Nadia’s cousin Camilla. Leader of the White Russian rebellion in Vladivostok against the Communist revolution, with British support.

Krohn, Hugo: London-based wine dealer and husband of Nadia’s relative Olia .

Rowe: Miss: Nadia’s childhood English governess.

Steiner, Olia: Nadia’s sister and companion in later life

Steiner, Ernest: Second husband of Nadia’s sister Olia.

Frieda: German cook and occasional nude model for Nadia at their London flat.

BRITAIN

Akers, Sir Wallace: Director of the Tube Alloys project, Britain’s atomic weapons programme.

Archer, Jane (née Sissmore): Soviet expert at MI5 then MI6.

Attlee, Clement: Labour, deputy prime minister 1942-1945, Prime Minister 1945-1951.

Baldwin, Stanley: Conservative, Prime Minister 1923-1929 & 1935-37.

Barton, Susan: Cover name of MI5 agent Gisela Ashley, working with Klop in Holland in 1939 and on the interrogation of German agents during WWII. Member of team running Double Cross agents.