The Bedbug (14 page)

White had been assigned to fill the void of MI5’s ignorance about German intelligence activities in Britain and was coached by Klop and Putlitz, who also introduced him to Vansittart’s private intelligence system. Thereafter White often served as a staging post at which high-ranking anti-Nazi visitors from Germany could stop off to deliver their warning messages for Vansittart.

Although Klop was by now an employee, albeit a part-time one working at arm’s length, he was rarely referred to by name but by his soubriquet U35. The U might almost stand for ubiquitous – it appears in the MI5 wartime records and those of the Foreign Office in a way that no other agent does. But it is a curious choice. Taken at face value it could be short for Ustinov 1935, the year he was recruited. That seems too transparent to be true, and he had in any case been unofficially recruited some time earlier. It is also out of keeping with normal practice. MI5 rarely gave its officers a cover name consisting of initial and numbers. They were more likely to use a pseudonym. MI6 did use initials and numbers in the 1920s but had largely abandoned the practice by the 1930s, preferring a five-digit code in which the first two digits signified the country of operation.

There is, however, a curious anecdote about U35 which, if connected, would indicate an unsuspected sense of humour among the heads of the intelligence services. It concerns Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who became head of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, on his forty-seventh birthday, 1 January 1934.

He was small, shrewd and secretive, fluent in English, French and Russian, educated, well-travelled and an officer of the old school. He despised Hitler and it is now generally accepted that, while he performed his duties effectively enough to remain in office until 1943, he was throughout working in what he believed were Germany’s best interests, not the Führer’s. At times that meant lending active assistance to the Western Allies. He stood back from the conspiracies to depose Hitler, while doing nothing to discourage his deputy Hans Oster from playing a leading role, and both men were executed after the assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944. The Nazis condemned him as a traitor.

During the First World War he was an intelligence officer in neutral Spain where his reports enabled U-boats to wreak havoc on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean. Such was his notoriety that a young British intelligence officer, Captain Stewart Menzies, was
sent to kill or capture him. More than twenty years later Menzies would become head of MI6, once more in direct opposition to Canaris. But it was the German who won that first encounter. Knowing that the British were on his trail, and despite two French submarines patrolling the coast, he took refuge in a small boat among the Spanish fishing fleet in Salitrona Bay near Cartagena, southern Spain. Germany’s most successful U-boat commander Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière slipped in unnoticed to rescue him. His vessel was U-35.
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On 7 March 1936 Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland. Vansittart’s assistant Ralph Wigram was given the task of escorting the French Foreign Minister Pierre Flandin to London where he tried without success to persuade the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, to take a robust stance against the aggression. A sympathetic Wigram arranged meetings with every influential person he could find, including Churchill, but as it became clear Britain was neither inclined nor prepared for a confrontation, the despondent official told his wife:

War is now inevitable, and it will be the most terrible war there has ever been. All my work these many years has been no use … I have failed to make people here realise what is at stake.
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Before the year was out he died of cancer. On 31 December 1936, Vansittart wrote a memorandum entitled ‘The World Situation and British Rearmament’, in which he observed: ‘Time is vital and we have started late. Time is the material commodity the Foreign Office has to buy. Our aim must be to stabilise the situation till 1939.’
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This was the strategy which in part influenced Chamberlain’s ultimately fruitless endeavour to find solutions to Germany’s grievances. Even officials who no longer believed that such a policy could appease Hitler found it difficult, given Britain’s lamentable strategic position, to recommend alternative courses.

Around this time Klop also had the opportunity to enter a rather different, risqué artistic clique. It came about through his intimate relationship with the photographer Thea Struve which had threatened to drive a wedge between him and Nadia. When Nadia and Klop lived at 72 Lexham Gardens, Kensington in the early 1930s, Thea had been a near neighbour at No. 64, a house occupied by a coterie of respectable individuals among then Etheldred Browning, founder of a housing association for single women, the religious writer Arthur Howell Smith and Nadia’s fellow artist Vere Lucy Temple. Thea was, like Klop, a German exile. She had taken pictures at Marie Rambert’s Notting Hill theatre where Nadia designed the sets.

Nadia recognised that Thea was attractive in a rather special way. Her elongated figure reminded Nadia of a Modigliani or El Greco painting. She was broad-minded and unpredictable which made her intriguing to Klop and infuriating to Nadia, who admitted to powerful feelings of jealousy as she was obliged to witness their exchanges of sexual banter. As ever, she later tried to make light of it, recalling a wild Bohemian party in Bloomsbury when the lights went out. Klop had taken the opportunity to surreptitiously fondle his latest amour in the darkness, only to discover when the lighting was restored that he had missed his target and was greeted by the loving glance of a bearded Hampstead poet.
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It was in this Hampstead world, populated by a number of German cultural exiles, that Thea’s ambitions lay. She began photographing the sculptor Jacob Epstein and the surrealist painter Sir Roland Penrose at work in their studios. Penrose, friend and biographer of Pablo Picasso, and a Communist sympathiser, lived at 21 Downshire Hill and was a notorious party-giver. Many of the guests would have been of interest to Klop as would his neighbours in the Isokon building, better known now as the Lawn Road flats where some of the KGB’s best agents made their homes.

Thea moved in with Penrose and is believed to have been the model for one of his nudes, but it was to be a short-lived affair. He
was already involved with the American photographer Lee Miller, who would become famous later as a
Vogue
war photographer and come under Klop’s scrutiny because of her Communist activities. She was married to an Egyptian diplomat and when she returned briefly to him Penrose wrote to her that Thea was now occupying his bed but added:

I almost feel ashamed to make love with her. She is very sweet and is perhaps the only person who could console me of this bitterness. She puts up with my gloom with great patience though I talk of you whenever I can and tell her of the lump that I can’t remove move at the bottom of my heart.
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Thea left Penrose in December 1938 to start a new career at the Buchholz Gallery in New York, an occupation which would be of interest to Klop during his wartime duties in Lisbon.

In April 1937 Klop and Wolfgang zu Putlitz were involved in the expulsion of the German spy Otto Ludwig who was caught during a Customs search at Harwich carrying blueprints for a new type of armour-piercing bullet. As head of the consular department at the German embassy, Putlitz was responsible for looking after Ludwig’s interests while he was in custody. Simultaneously he briefed Klop on every legal move and contact that Ludwig made.

Klop was able to report that Ludwig’s first instinct was to ask Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop to intervene. Instead, Putlitz sent his assistant to interview Ludwig, who was anxious to warn his contacts in Britain to lie low. One of these was the German journalist Franz Wrede, who had been asked to establish contacts with Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, and evaluate the group’s attitude to Hitler. Wrede’s colleague, Werner von Crome, was supposed to find out what were the prospects of Edward VIII being able to return to the throne. Edward had abdicated the previous year, over his determination to marry the divorcee Wallis Simpson, and was considered to be sympathetic
to the Nazi regime. Later that year he paid a controversial visit to Germany and met Hitler. Karl Friedrich Basedow had posed as a British tourist and managed to get on board a British warship in Majorca to question the crew. He tried a similar stunt at the naval dockyard in Gibraltar.

Klop, playing the sympathetic fellow journalist, was able to chat to Ludwig’s colleagues about their plight and to feed back to MI5 the consternation that his arrest had caused in the German embassy and in Berlin. Klop went through Ludwig’s papers and diaries and concluded that he was an agent of the Gestapo who intended to set up a secret political intelligence unit to operate in peace and wartime. His notebooks revealed that among the tasks Ludwig had been set was to find out what Klop had been up to since he left the German embassy. Unfortunately, the spy charge would not stick because it turned out that the blueprint was the property of a foreign inventor who had already offered it to the British government and been rejected. Sir Robert Vansittart reported Klop’s findings to the Prime Minister who authorised the Home Office to expel Ludwig along with seven German journalists. Ludwig was convinced he had been betrayed – how else did Customs know to search him? – and was also incensed that Putlitz had treated him in such heavy-handed fashion. Putlitz was summoned back to Berlin to explain himself, particularly his very public remarks that Ludwig had behaved like ‘a complete fool’. Luckily for him, his outspokenness diverted attention from the possibility that he was the mole who had given away Ludwig’s mission in the first place.
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Wolfgang Gans Edler Herr zu Putlitz was a member of a Junker family – Prussian landed gentry – born in 1899 at Laaske in the Brandenburg province. His ancestors had been rulers in the Middle Ages until they were supplanted by the Hohenzollerns who eventually ruled the German empire until 1918. The Gans in the middle of his name means goose – the family estate was famous for them. After service in a Prussian cavalry regiment on the Eastern
Front and Finland in the First World War, he had forsaken the family estates at Putlitz, midway between Berlin and Hamburg, for a university education and a career in the diplomatic service. Even in those days he had a reputation for left-wing sympathies and had supported the Communist-inspired revolution of 1918-19 which led to the replacement of the imperial government with the Weimar republic. He was nicknamed
das rote puttchen
– the little red chicken – in a derisive reference to the traditional family association with geese. He had a letter of introduction to Klop and got to know him and Albrecht Bernstorff in London in the 1920s, while broadening his education with a spell at Oxford University. At Oxford he was befriended by Claud Cockburn and their paths later crossed in Washington, Berlin and back in London where Cockburn’s scurrilous newsletter
The Week
acquired an influence way beyond its meagre circulation and despite its editor’s unwavering commitment to Communism.
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In the late 1920s, when Cockburn worked for
The Times
in Berlin, Putlitz had been his best source in the German Foreign Office and they met again a couple of years later when both were posted to Washington. Cockburn recalled him as a big man, with gleaming grey eyes and a face like a hooded eagle. He occasionally thought wistfully that he might have been Germany’s ruler had his ancestors anticipated, as the Hohenzollerns had, how useful gunpowder could be in wartime. He was prone to moods of profound Prussian doom and occasionally envisaged himself leading his country away from the abyss towards which Hitler was leading them. In anticipation, he practised carrying large amounts of gold around in a body belt and concealed elsewhere about his person. It did not take Cockburn long to realise that Putlitz had no interest in women and preferred the company of young men whom he met in bars or in servants quarters. He scandalised the American diplomatic circuit by having an affair with the French ambassador’s valet.
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Putlitz was well connected. He was already friends with Franz von Papen, son of the former German Chancellor, and when
he returned to work in London in 1934 he was greeted by the ambassador, Konstantin von Neurath, an old family friend who became Hitler’s Foreign Minister until 1938. He was in touch with ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, who at that time was the Führer’s confidante.
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Claud Cockburn did him no favours though by reporting in
The Week
an incident in which Putlitz had posed as an American journalist for an interview with Joseph Goebbels. It had backfired, convincing no one and making Hitler’s Propaganda Minister look rather foolish.
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Klop initiated him into the mysteries of Fleet Street and introduced him to Sir Robert Vansittart. When Putlitz came under pressure to join the Nazi Party, Klop persuaded him to comply so that he could fight the regime from the inside. He was promised a safe haven in Britain if he was caught. He was remarkably productive; it was Putlitz who urged MI5 not to accept the appointment of Otto Bene as consul general because of his thuggish Nazi attitudes. He briefed them on social connections between the German ambassador Leopold von Hoesch and King Edward VIII’s mistress Wallis Simpson. When Hoesch died, to be replaced by Joachim von Ribbentrop, Putlitz explained that he had ordered the German press to avoid mentioning the King’s affair because he thought he would retain the throne and be sympathetic to Germany. The abdication came as a shock to the inexperienced diplomat – nicknamed Herr Brickendrop by the British press – and took some explaining to Hitler. At that time some German military leaders were trying to persuade Hitler to attack Russia, rather than Western Europe, confident that Britain would not come to the Soviets’ aid. As Ribbentrop’s attitude changed to one of hatred for the British, Putlitz kept Vansittart fully briefed. He tipped off immigration authorities about intensifying attempts by German agents to infiltrate Britain; throughout the first half of 1938 he warned of the increasing bellicosity of Hitler; and he predicted the invasion of Czechoslovakia. His message, repeatedly passed on by Vansittart, was that Britain was letting all its trump cards fall from its hand.
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