The Bedbug (9 page)

So, when Klop presented himself at the Foreign Office they were keen to court his favour and he did not disappoint. When he explained to them how difficult it was to recruit servants in Britain – cooks and cleaning ladies were too patriotic to work for a German – the diplomats were sympathetic and persuaded the Home Office to give a work permit to Freida, baby Peter’s German nanny.

When Klop intimated that British foreign policy would get better coverage but for the exorbitant cost of telephoning his copy to Berlin, they intervened with the General Post Office to get him cut-price calls. In return, Klop called daily at the Foreign Office and, in the words of one official ‘has been assisted to obtain authoritative statements and comments which have been transmitted without distortion’.
⁶²

But Klop was not what he seemed. He was still a German Foreign Office secret agent, in their pay and required to answer first to the ambassador and to the senior diplomats of the
Wilhelmstrasse
before attending to the needs of the Wolff Bureau and German newspapers. That had been decided as early as April 1920, before he set out on his Russian mission. Dr Carl von Schubert, a close ally of Maltzan and future Foreign Office Secretary of State, decreed that the London embassy did not need its own press officer and would be better off using the Wolff Bureau representative as a front man. Klop was considered particularly suitable because of his knowledge of Britain and British politics. It is not clear on
what basis Klop was considered such an expert, other than his brief pre-war sojourn in London. When he eventually arrived in London it was agreed that three-fifths of his £1,200 a year salary would be paid for by the German Foreign Office. The wage was the equivalent of a fairly senior diplomat – at assistant secretary or under-secretary level – and would equate to £100,000 plus in 2013. And, like most journalists, Klop became adept at recovering his incidental expenses. Part of his rent was paid, plus a newspaper and entertainment allowance and telegraph charges for his reports. In 1923 the ambassador was complaining that nearly all his £500-a-year budget for press and propaganda went on Klop. By 1924 the bill was running at £564 for six months. On the other hand Klop’s duties were fairly onerous. He was to cultivate the British press in German interests; and provide daily digests of their reports to the ambassador and Berlin, with particular reference to politics, the economy and culture. He had to monitor magazines, political brochures and books and make comments on them; and report false stories in the London Press and suggest ways to refute them. On top of that he had to supply his agency with reports on all the major British news stories of the day. If he had any time left he was permitted freelance for other papers and he was entitled to four weeks summer holiday. But on no account was he to reveal that he was anything other than an agency reporter or that he had these obligations to the embassy.

Not surprisingly, Klop managed to ingratiate himself to the extent that he could discuss sensitive political issues with the head of the Foreign Office news department, Sir Arthur Willert, and he formed a crucial and lifelong friendship with Willert’s assistant, Clifford Norton. From their attitude it seems probable that they understood perfectly Klop’s dual role.

Norton, a clergyman’s son, educated at Rugby and The Queen’s College, Oxford, was a year older than Klop, and had served with the 5
^th
Battalion, Suffolk Regiment at Gallipoli and in Palestine during the First World War. He knew Klop’s home town of Jaffa:
he had suffered a gunshot wound in the back during fighting there in 1917 and from 1919 to 1921 he had been a political officer, advising the Palestine High Commissioner, based for part of that time in nearby Haifa. In 1927 he married Noel Hughes, universally known by her nickname ‘Peter,’ a painter and later leading arts patron with an independent and adventurous spirit. They became close to Klop and Nadia, socialising and sometimes babysitting for the young Peter Ustinov.

Klop’s pre-eminence as the German embassy’s unofficial eyes and ears in the Foreign Office came under threat at this point from a rival journalist, André Rostin. He had been private secretary to the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert who was president of Germany from 1919 to 1925. Like Klop, Rostin was partly bankrolled by the embassy while officially working for a trade and industry newspaper. Klop’s friend Albrecht Bernstorff, the First Secretary, had recruited him partly because of his Socialist and Communist contacts and he spent a good deal of his time at the Soviet embassy, extracting information from the ambassador Ivan Maisky and his colleagues. He also made rapid headway in British society, befriending the Duke of York’s private secretary Sir Louis Greig, and a number of senior government officials. He was remarkably prolific. In a two-month period in the summer of 1926 he filed secret reports containing information gleaned in discussions with three Soviet officials, with John Gregory, the Foreign Office assistant secretary, and with his junior minister Godfrey Locker-Lampson. Klop feared Rostin was after his job and began to badmouth him to his friends at the British Foreign Office, whispering that Rostin was in fact a Soviet agent and claiming that he was the son of a Russian Jew, Alexander Helphand-Parvus, who had masterminded Lenin’s return from Swiss exile at the time of the Revolution. Klop’s contacts duly reported this to MI5 and it is clear from the copious files on Rostin that its officers were also monitoring Klop’s activities during this period. Rostin, who had money and girlfriend problems, transferred soon after to the
United States and MI5 took some pleasure in warning the FBI about his unsavoury activities.

Rostin resurfaced in London in the late 1930s, working as a salesman for a ladies swimming costume company and as a director of the London branch of Horcher’s, a Berlin restaurant fashionable with the Nazi hierarchy. Klop was surprised to bump into him in Piccadilly Circus and realise that despite his Jewish background he was still working for the Nazi regime. He alerted his colleagues at MI5 who would have interned him when war broke out if he had not fled to Switzerland, where Klop and Rostin would have one last, fateful meeting.
⁶³

With Rostin out of the way, Klop ruled the roost once more and in April 1928 he discussed with Norton the problem of Fichtebund propaganda – a nationalist group in Hamburg whose pamphlets became part of the Nazi propaganda machine. A few days later Hans Dieckhoff, Counsellor at the German embassy, visited Norton who raised the issue again. Dieckhoff handed him a file of correspondence between himself and his superiors in Berlin, showing the efforts he had been making to curb the worst excesses. Norton recorded:

It reveals (what, indeed, we knew) that the relations between the Wolff Bureau and the German Embassy and Foreign Office are very close indeed. It seems that Mr Ustinov reports to the German Embassy and also to his Chief, Herr Mantler, in Berlin, who takes the question up direct with the Wilhelmstrasse [German Foreign Office], which thereupon asks the embassy to report on it, a system of dual control which post-war Germany has not got rid of.
⁶⁴

In December 1930 Klop had a long conversation with Sir Arthur Willert about British and German policy. Three months earlier the Nazis had taken nearly 20 per cent of the vote in Reichstag elections. Lord Cecil had been conducting disarmament talks in Geneva on the British behalf but had predicted a fifteen-month delay. Willert
suggested to Klop that although the German government, led by the Centre Party’s Heinrich Brüning, professed to support disarmament and to be alarmed by the rising support for Hitler, they might welcome the collapse of the talks as an excuse to break the restrictions placed on the German military after the First World War. Klop had agreed to try to put the British view across in his news agency reports but Willert had a different objective in mind. He wrote:

Mr Ustinov is very intimate with the German Embassy and one can take it for granted that, if not actually sent to ask questions such as these, he does not fail to report the answers to the Embassy.
⁶⁵

Klop would in due course find himself on even more intimate terms with his German Embassy colleagues as the Wolff Bureau was absorbed in the German propaganda operation. The pretence of impartiality was abandoned and he became an embassy press officer. In January 1932, Klop presented a fifteen-minute talk about Germany on BBC radio as the first of a series called Through Foreign Eyes. He maintained, and even increased, his liaison with the British Foreign Office but from 1930 onwards the records of those meetings have, with one exception, been carefully expunged from the official archives.

It may be coincidence, but 1930 was also the year in which Clifford Norton won a long-awaited promotion. He became private secretary to Sir Robert Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office. Throughout the 1930s, Vansittart was the most powerful, and often the loneliest, official opponent of appeasement. He did not trust even his own diplomats to reflect accurately Hitler’s true intentions. Nor did he rely on the massively underfunded and often ineffectual espionage efforts of MI6. Vansittart ran his own intelligence service. Norton was his unnoticed lieutenant, Klop one of his many sources.

Klop had also made the acquaintance of the diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart who had been implicated in the 1918 plot to
assassinate Lenin and was the former lover of the Russian aristocrat Moura Budberg. It appears that Lockhart may have met Nadia during his days in St Petersburg at the time of the Revolution, or at least known her family, since he recorded in his diary in March 1929:

Lunched with Ustinov, an ex-German airman, who is married to Benois’s daughter. He is the author of the brilliant expression: There will be no peace until men learn that it is a nobler and harder task to live for their country than to die for it.

A couple of months later he had lunch with Klop and Nadia at their flat in order to meet Hans von Raumer, a former German finance minister who was in Britain to improve his English. Among the other guests were Arthur Willert from the Foreign Office and the German diplomat Count Albrecht Bernstorff.

Bernstorff and Klop made it their business to try to influence British thinking against Hitler and Lockhart records in 1932 that he met them both at the Carlton Grill shortly after Klop had spent some time in Berlin and both men lectured him on being too pro-Hitler in his
Evening Standard
articles. Klop was at that stage still hopeful that Hitler had lost his chance to seize power.
⁶⁶

Lockhart clearly came to admire both men and later wrote:

From 1929 to 1933 German journalism was strongly represented in London by a brilliant team of foreign correspondents. The brightest star was Ustinov, who not only had a remarkable flair, but also a penetrating mind, illuminated with a scintillating wit.
⁶⁷

CHAPTER 6: VANSITTART

R
obert Gilbert Vansittart, born 25 June 1881, occupied third place on Hitler’s blacklist of Britons whose intransigence he blamed for the Second World War, after Winston Churchill and Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Jewish Minister of War who oversaw Britain’s belated drift to rearmament from 1937 to 1940. Even in 1942, in his Wolf’s Lair headquarters on the Eastern front, Hitler’s dinner table conversation turned to the supposed iniquities of these three opponents of appeasement.
⁶⁸

Vansittart’s family origins were in south-eastern Holland, near the German border, but the Vansittarts had been settled in Britain since 1670: merchant adventurers, administrators, admirals and generals, a director of the East India Company, and, in Nicholas Vansittart, Baron Bexley, a Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1812 to 1824. Nevertheless Vansittart’s hawkish features and slightly slanting eyes gave rise to rumours that he was of Asian or black lineage, which his detractors thought significant.

His father was an army captain who inherited substantial estates at Foots Cray in Kent. The income paid for Robert to be educated at Eton, where he excelled at languages and determined on a career in the diplomatic service. As a young man, he made extended visits to France and Germany that profoundly influenced his outlook. In Paris, at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, he was horrified by the violent anti-Semitism routinely practised. In Hamburg, during the Boer War, he suffered bullying and humiliation as a
result of anti-British sentiments. Disappointed to be rejected for military service in the First World War, on account of his protected profession, he mourned bitterly the loss of his younger brother Arnold at Ypres in 1915. From 1916 he was secretary of the Prisoner of War department of the Foreign Office, inevitably concerned daily with allegations of German mistreatment of captives.
⁶⁹

In the 1920s his career had advanced rapidly: political secretary to Lord Curzon as Foreign Secretary; then private secretary to Conservative and Labour Prime Ministers, Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald respectively. In 1930 he returned to the Foreign Office as permanent under-secretary, theoretically at least the most powerful figure in the diplomatic firmament, and from there he waged a personal and often lonely battle against appeasement for most of the next decade.

His first wife, Gladys, had died young and in 1931 he married Sarita, widow of his diplomatic colleague Sir Colville Barclay. The Vansittart family fortune had been dissipated by his father but his new wife was independently extremely wealthy and this enabled the new permanent under-secretary to entertain lavishly at his country mansion, Denham Place in Buckinghamshire, and at 44 Park Street, Mayfair, where the distinguishing feature was a curved first-floor ballroom. The guest list included King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, Churchill, and Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador.