The Bedbug (7 page)

They then spent a week to ten days in Berlin where Nadia was introduced to Klop’s relatives – Magdalena’s brothers and sisters and his Ethiopian grandmother. Klop had meetings with the directors of the Wolff Bureau and, significantly, spent a good deal of time with Ago von Maltzan at the German Foreign Office.
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He wrote a fifteen-page report, closely typed and dated 31 August 1920, which was circulated among senior figures within the Foreign Office. It contained a good deal of pontificating – Klop recognised early in his espionage career that he would do his credibility no harm by telling his masters what they wanted to hear. And of course he could not resist the hyperbole which became a trademark of his later reports for MI5 and MI6. But he also provided, separately and not for circulation, a list of sources that included senior officials of the Cheka, and former ministers and church officials from the Kerensky regime and the last days of the Tsar. These indicated that he had indeed been extracting intelligence in high places – some startling new information, of varying reliability, and some particularly acute barbs at his British competitors. Here was a man aged twenty-seven, who had gone pretty much straight from university into the trenches, brimming with self-confidence, politically aware, quick on the uptake and capable of insinuating himself among the powerful elite of a strange country regardless of personal risk.

His stay in Petrograd, the renamed St Petersburg, which he regarded as ‘the seismograph of Soviet Russia’ covered the period from 7 May-17 August which, he pointed out, ranged from the beginning of the Polish offensive through to the menacing of
Warsaw by the Red Army. The newly created Polish state was bitterly resented by the Germans because the Danzig corridor had divided eastern Prussia from the rest of Germany. The Poles had invaded Russia in April 1920, hoping for territorial gains in Ukraine and Byelorussia, but by early August had been driven back to the gates of Warsaw by the Red Army. There were fears across Europe that, if Warsaw fell, the Communists would sweep onwards across Germany. A peace treaty was signed in October but it was a time of high tension for all those in positions of military, economic and political power. Klop had, he said, attempted to set passion aside and obtain a deep insight through contact with all parts of the population and supporters of all parties. A general overview was impossible; all he could do was report the highlights. Earlier assessments may have overstated the strength and stability of the Red regime but to underestimate it would be equally harmful.

He had concluded already that Communism would not work and that its leaders realised this. They survived only through a bureaucratic reign of terror. The overwhelming majority of the Russian people disapproved of the regime but were too weak and apathetic to oppose it. While an English delegation had been treated to ‘six star dinners’ in the official Palace of the Workers, he had been with the real workers slurping soup. There was great indignation that foreigners ate so well while the Russian workers starved. Visitors were having sand thrown in their eyes. They were being shown Lenin’s version of Potemkin villages – a throwback to an earlier age when temporary villages were created, populated with specially imported cheery peasants, to convince Catherine the Great that her empire was thriving. One of the English delegates privately admitted to Klop: ‘My only impression is that we don’t get the right impression.’

They were shown hospitals with plenty of food, school children marching in the sun and ruined bankers for whom there was no sympathy. But all these were deceptions. Society and the economy were breaking down. There had been fifty murders in a month in
Petrograd. The head of the Cheka in Petrograd, Gleb Bokii, had personally warned Klop not to put his foreign money in the state bank because it would probably be stolen. A railway maintenance manager explained that for every locomotive they repaired they had to break up two for spare parts, for every new piece of track laid they had to rip up two others to use the rails. Despite steely discipline the Army was decimated by deserters who faced the firing squad if caught. Officers referred to the troops as ‘radishes – red on the outside and white on the inside’. Demobilisation of the Red Army would pose a great threat to the regime. It knew that only work and reconstruction would prevent wholesale collapse.

Klop likened the regime to icebound ships in winter on the Riva Neva that flows through St Petersburg. Often they were rotting from within and liable to sink in the first floods of spring. The Russian regime might slowly go to ground if the ice of war that was their mainstay gave way under the warm sun of peace.

A former high official of the Orthodox Church under the Tsar had told him that there was not one man in the current government capable of administering his portfolio. The real problem was that there was no alternative, not Tsarists, democrats, Bolsheviks, nor especially anarchists, capable of leading the Russian people. The reign of Faust (the scholar who in German folk law makes a pact with the devil) would be the most likely result of a coup.

Feeble-minded British support for the White Russian rebel forces of Admiral Alexander Kolchak in Siberia and General Anton Denikin in southern Russia and the Caucasus had failed. There was now a view that the perfidious Albion had an interest in leaving the Red regime in place and letting the Bolsheviks ‘sit in the saddle until they had ridden the Russian horse to death’. The Red regime recognised that the strength of the revolution was not sufficient and they had persuaded themselves to return to the once much-maligned behind-the-scenes diplomacy.

Klop seems to have been well-informed about the secret trade negotiations that had been taking place at the beginning of August
in London between the Prime Minister Lloyd George, Leonid Krassin, People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade, and Politburo member Lev Kamenev. According to Klop these talks were an illusion for the benefit of the English workers and the Bolsheviks, intended to give the impression that a trade deal would create jobs in Britain and provide food and money to alleviate hunger in Russia. However, he had received news, from well-informed naval circles in Petrograd and Moscow, that England had stipulated that Petrograd should become a free port under the League of Nations. The Russian regime had agreed to this. An informant reported that in a food map for Russia that he saw in Moscow, Petrograd was no longer provided for.

All of which led Klop to the conclusion that:

In the international race for the great prize of Russia, Germany is for the Russian people the hot favourite. The great part of the Russian people fully realise that Germany and Russia need one another to recover and that this would only be prevented by the Allies. Overall they hold the view that: only the Germans know us and only the Germans can help us.
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There would have to be a ‘parallelogram of power’ based on German investment to relieve the sorrows of the people and, consequently, bolstering the Bolshevik regime. For a start, the entire Russian transport system would need to be overhauled. Russia was waiting to see which would be the first country to give them what they needed. Whoever was first through the door would be last to leave. It would require vigilance, to prevent the Russian sickness pervading the German economy and workforce and to immunise the country against the Communist International. A former Russian minister had described the Bolshevik leadership as the orphan child of St Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. They had not given up on their final goal of world revolution and they would pursue it without consideration by all means possible, including illegality.
Adolph Joffe, chairman of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee which overthrew the Russian government in October 1917, had said to Klop:

When are we having the revolution in Germany? It will come within two years. We need you unconditionally. Germany will tip the balance. Without Germany the world revolution is impossible.
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It was against this background that the German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau had been persuaded to hold secret talks in the Moabit jail in Berlin with Karl Radek, the Bolshevik agitator who had been incarcerated because of his role in the 1919 Spartacist rebellion in Germany. They discussed industrial cooperation. General Hans von Seeckt, in overall command of rebuilding the German army by subverting the terms of the Versailles peace treaty, also had talks with Radek and sent emissaries to see him in Moscow in 1920 after he was released from prison. Before the end of the year General von Seeckt had formed the highly secret Special Group R as the means of clandestine cooperation, thus laying the foundation for the rebuilding of the German Luftwaffe and Panzer tank divisions behind the Russian border away from the critical surveillance of the Western Allies.
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Early in September Klop and Nadia moved on to Amsterdam to await their visas to travel to London. It was another bewildering phase of married life for Nadia, as she gradually became aware of Klop’s previous dalliances and capacity for self-centred insensitivity.

On their first evening they dined with Klop’s colleague Felix Banse who was obliged, at Klop’s insistence, to explain how he had broken the news of Klop’s marriage to the girl he had left behind in Amsterdam, a telephonist named Lenie. She had, Banse assured him, taken it very well in the circumstances.

Nadia’s new world centred on a musty, one-room bedsit with a rickety washstand, in a tall house on the Singel canal. There was no bathroom and meals had to be prepared on a frighteningly volatile
spirit lamp. Nadia had no real experience of cooking for herself and the results were often scorched offerings that filled the room with the smell of burning. She was in despair and Klop showed little sympathy. She confessed later:

Altogether poor Klop must have been in many ways disillusioned. We had been thrown together by exceptional and highly romantic circumstances, owing to which we got married, disregarding the fact that neither of us represented the ideal of the other, for I was as far removed from a black-stockinged Raphael Kirchner [an illustrator of pin-up postcards] as he was from the David of Michelangelo. But, apart from our physical appearances, we both had something in us which kept us together, forced us to forgive one another for not being ideal and made us even very happy at times.
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Nadia was indeed no pin-up: tall and powerfully built, her physical presence served only to emphasise Klop’s diminutive stature and appearance of a little bedbug. But she was certainly not ugly and her kindly, expressive face and disposition to accept what fate brought her made her an attractive character. Her imperturbable, pragmatic nature was to be sorely tried by her first experience of Great Britain.

CHAPTER 5: LONDON

K
lop and Nadia arrived at Harwich, Essex on the overnight ferry on 22 December 1920. It was, by Nadia’s account, about as bleak and unwelcoming as could be imagined. Passport control found a discrepancy with Nadia’s visa and detained her while Klop, leaving her some money, hurried on to London, thinking he could sort out the problem from there. Nadia was by now heavily pregnant and dressed in the only clothes that would fit – a brown frock, with horizontal embroidery, and her mother’s old sealskin coat. She looked, she thought, like a fanatical female revolutionary. After several hours the police decided she did not represent an immediate threat to the security of the nation and put her on a train to London. She arrived at Liverpool Street station in the dark, to find a thick fog and no one to welcome her. After wandering the streets, being accosted by troublesome strangers, she ended up at the only address she knew – lodgings in Heathcote Street, just off Gray’s Inn Road occupied by Miss Rowe, her English childhood governess. She was not home,, her landlord and landlady were scarcely welcoming, and it was several more hours before Klop eventually tracked her down. They retreated to the Liverpool Street station hotel where they spent a miserable few days, dining completely alone in the hotel’s vast empty restaurant on Christmas Day.

Nadia’s first impression of England was of a benighted country of fog, rain, damp and cold; reeking of coal smoke, mutton fat,
gas and tobacco; and deeply antagonistic to ‘bloody foreigners’ in general and enemy aliens in particular. She and Klop took to conversing in French to disguise their true origins.
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She must have been desperately lonely. All communication with her family in Russia had been cut off by the Marxist regime.
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Nadia’s early misadventure at least had the virtue of establishing that there was a room to let at Miss Rowe’s lodgings. At the beginning of April they moved to a sunnier top-floor flat in Ridgmount Gardens, near Tottenham Court Road, taking Miss Rowe with them as prospective nanny. Nadia went into labour in the early hours of 16 April. While Miss Rowe searched the empty streets for a taxi, Klop was in the small cubby hole where a telephone had been installed, dictating his overnight news copy to Berlin and demanding that Nadia somehow rein in her contractions until he had completed his story. They eventually made it to the nursing home that another exile, Olia Krohn, had booked for them in Belsize Park and later that day their only child, Peter Ustinov, was born.

Nadia’s sister, also named Olia, came to help her through the first six weeks of child rearing before Nadia and Peter were packed off to the Schönblick sanatorium in Württemburg, where Klop’s mother and two of his aunts were staying. Klop followed a few weeks later for Peter’s christening and, with typical insensitivity, nominated one of his former admirers as godmother. He explained to Nadia that since the girl had hoped to marry him it was the least he could do, even though when he had met her in Munich it was her sister he had an affair with.
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