The Bedbug (15 page)

Putlitz cannot have been an easy agent to run. He was actively homosexual and found his way into an Establishment network that brought him into dangerous company, in particular Guy Burgess, whom he claimed to have first met at Cambridge in 1932.

Jackie Hewitt, who was successively the lover of Burgess then Anthony Blunt, two of the Cambridge spy ring, has described how he first met them. He was a nineteen-year-old working class boy from the north-east, who had run away to London and was appearing in the chorus line of the revue
No, No Nanette
at the London Hippodrome. He was picked up by a Hungarian in the Bunch of Grapes pub in Westminster and found himself at a party in a flat inside the War Office, the home of the resident clerk, Tom Wylie. The guests were about twenty gay men, all with upper-class accents, behaving as if they were appearing in a scene from a Noël Coward play. Burgess and Blunt were among them and it was Burgess who took the young man home to his flat in Chester Square, Belgravia that night.
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This was the milieu in which Putlitz mixed and he was a frequent visitor to the Chester Square apartment. Hewitt was persuaded by Burgess to sleep with Putlitz, describing it as ‘comfort for the troops’, and was under the impression that he was acting as a kind of Mata Hari, seducing the German diplomat for the benefit of Theodor Maly, Burgess and Blunt’s Russian intelligence handler.
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This was not necessarily so. As MI5 would discover many years later, Putlitz was probably working for the Russians even before he signed up for Vansittart’s private intelligence network.

Nevertheless, Peter Wright, the assistant director of MI5 who investigated the Cambridge spy ring in the 1960s and 1970s, regarded the information Klop extracted from Putlitz as priceless – ‘possibly the most important human-source intelligence Britain received in the pre-war period’.
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General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg left his position as military attaché in mid-October 1937 to take over command of the 3
^rd
Panzer Division in Berlin. During his four-year tenure in
London he trod a difficult line between loyalty to his country and anxiety to avert the war that he knew was coming. His relations with some of the British military establishment were good, among them the director of military operations and intelligence Major General Sir John Dill, Colonel Bernard Paget, head of the Western European section at the War Office, and Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the anti-appeaser and military strategist. Geyr had formed a firm friendship with Klop, whom he regarded as an exceptional journalist and ‘a clever and most amusing person who had many good friends among the English’.
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The general’s father had been Master of Horse to King Karl of Württemberg whose wife Olga granted Klop’s father German citizenship.

One evening in 1938, shortly before Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to try to reach a deal with Hitler over his demands to re-draw the Czech border, Peter Ustinov returned to the Redcliffe Gardens flat from drama school to find Klop in a state of mysterious agitation. There were glasses on the table, a bottle of champagne on ice, an open box of cigars. Guests were clearly expected imminently. Peter was ordered to make himself scarce and given ninepence for a cheap seat at the local cinema. He met the guests on the way out:

We lived on the fourth floor. As I went down the stairs there was a group of old men climbing the stairs laboriously. They were like a lot of elephants looking for somewhere to die. I stood flush against the wall as they passed.

The meeting had been arranged by Geyr von Schweppenberg who brought with him other members of the German high command who had flown to London incognito. He had apparently phoned from a callbox to arrange the meeting and told Klop:

We simply must get the British to stand firm at Munich. It is the last chance we have to stop Hitler.
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It was to no avail. The British suspected a trap to goad them into a war they were still in no position to fight.

That, at least, was the explanation Klop gave to his son Peter some years later and the substance is confirmed by unpublished MI5 files.
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The exact date of the secret rendezvous is not clear but it appears to have been in the second half of August. It was not the only indication that the British government had during August that some senior figures in the German Army would contemplate overthrowing Hitler to prevent the forthcoming conflict. Apart from Klop’s rendezvous with the generals in his flat, there were at least two other secret military visits to Britain.

Geyr von Schweppenburg handed over a ‘strictly secret’ four-page directive circulated by Ribbentrop saying that the problem of Czechoslovakia must be solved by early autumn, by war if necessary. Hitler was confident Britain and France would not intervene. Detailed instructions for mobilisation were given and a date for action was stated as before 20 September.

However, Hitler’s army chief of staff, General Franz Halder, and his commander in chief, General Walther von Brauchitsch, believed that the projected invasion of Czechoslovakia would provoke a response from Britain, France and Russia that would lead to a world war that Germany could not win. They began drawing up plans for the army to arrest the Führer if he tried to declare war on France and Britain. In August 1938, Ewald von Kleist visited London as an emissary of the dissident army faction to urge Britain to stand firm against Hitler. He saw Vansittart and told him Hitler was determined on war and that although the generals were opposed to it they could not prevent it without outside help. He wanted a guarantee that France and Britain would intervene if Hitler ordered an attack on Czechoslovakia: that would be sufficient for the generals to act. Vansittart informed the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. Chamberlain’s vacillating reaction was to say: ‘I don’t feel sure that we ought not to do something.’ Kleist then saw Churchill, who was more positive, saying that he felt certain
France and Britain would respond to an armed attack by Germany on her neighbour but that once committed there would be terrible warfare that might take years to resolve. Within a fortnight the generals tried again. Colonel Hans Böhm-Tettelbach, acting on behalf of Halder and General Hans Oster, deputy head of the Abwehr, visited his old friend Julian Piggott who had been British Commissioner in Cologne after the First World War.
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Piggott was an occasional lunch guest of the director of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell, who sent a major from the intelligence service, probably Dick White, to hear what Böhm-Tettelbach had to say and passed it on to Vansittart.
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But the Prime Minister still doubted the resolve of the German officers to stage what would effectively be a military coup. Chamberlain also had to be careful not to be trapped into conspiring to overthrow the legitimate government of a country with which Britain still officially had good diplomatic relations. And, if the putsch failed, he would face leading a woefully unprepared country into war against an enemy whose military might and ambition was becoming ever more apparent.

The result was the opposite of what the German generals had hoped. On 15 September 1938, Neville Chamberlain boarded an aeroplane for the first time in his life and flew to Munich to try to reach some kind of compromise with Hitler over his demands for Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland. On that very day, Geyr von Schweppenburg contacted Klop again and warned him that Hitler intended to bring about the dissolution of the Czech state by all or any means and that by 25 September mobilisation would have reached a stage whereby Hitler only needed to give the word and the invasion would start.
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In Munich, on 29 September, Britain, France and Germany agreed, without consulting the Czechs, that the Sudetenland should be ceded to Germany.

That postponed Hitler’s invasion plan, since he got what he initially demanded without the need for it. The consequence, as explained later by those dissident generals who survived the war, was to deprive them of their excuse for overthrowing him. There
would be other occasions, before war was finally provoked a year later, when a putsch would have been justified but the moment had passed and the impetus was dissipated.

On 7 November 1938, MI5’s senior staff handed to the director Sir Vernon Kell a dossier running to around forty pages setting out the array of warnings they had received from four highly placed German moles about Hitler’s intentions. The bulk of it was Klop’s work, particularly from his contacts with Putlitz and Geyr von Schweppenburg. Kell took it to Vansittart and to his replacement as permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alec Cadogan. He in turn showed it to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, upon whom it is said to have made a considerable impression and he showed it to the Prime Minister. In diplomatic language it made clear that MI5 did not understand the government’s emollient attitude to Hitler when so much of the evidence pointed to his aggressive attentions. Nothing that had happened in Czechoslovakia should have come as a surprise, they said. It was beyond doubt that there were forces in the German government, represented by Ribbentrop and Goebbels, that had not hesitated to risk war with Britain over Czechoslovakia. Hitler may have taken notice of the more cautious advice of his chiefs of staff on this occasion but, the report went on,

these aggressive elements are, and will continue to be, a very dangerous factor in the general situation. There is however reason to suppose that since the crisis Hitler, convinced of the weakness of England, is likely to adopt a different attitude in future.

They highlighted reports coming out of Germany that the government intended to put up to half a million people in concentration camps and authorise mass executions of political prisoners at Dachau.

Without naming him, the authors described Putlitz, making clear that he was working in what he believed was the best interests of his
own country and accepted no payment for his information, which they described as scrupulously accurate. They made special mention of the dismay and exasperation Putlitz felt at the hopeless failure of the British government to recognise Hitler’s Machiavellian tendencies. He had told Klop that ‘the English think they are wise and strong. They are mistaken. They are stupid and weak.’

The report revealed that Geyr von Schweppenburg had also warned the government during the Munich crisis that if war had been declared the Luftwaffe’s first act would have been to concentrate all its resources on a bombing raid on London. The authors concluded:

It need hardly be emphasised that in giving us this information Herr von S has been risking his life. On the 28 December so strong was his desire to do everything possible to bring about the defeat of the Nazi regime – in the event of war – that he was attempting, in spite of the immense difficulties in the way of rapid and safe communication, to send through information which he hoped would have given the British Air Force a few hours more warning than they would have otherwise received.
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Putlitz left London in May 1938 to take up the position of First Secretary in the German embassy at The Hague. MI5 still had excellent sources within the German embassy, presumably still using Klop as an intermediary. They were better informed about what was going on inside the German embassy at 9 Carlton House Terrace than they were about 10 Downing Street, with the result that they found themselves spying on their own Prime Minister.

On 23 November 1938 they trailed the embassy press officer Fritz Hesse, knowing that he had arranged a clandestine meeting, supposedly with someone from No 10. They observed a two-hour discussion with a man the watchers did not immediately recognise but who was soon identified as George Steward, the Prime Minister’s press secretary.

Within days MI5 was able to lay a copy of Hesse’s account of the meeting on the desk of Alec Cadogan. They even updated it with a revised version which had been sent to Ribbentrop after amendments by the ambassador Herbert von Dirksen. It showed that Steward had proposed an extraordinary agreement to limit the horrors of war, including a ban on poison gas and limitations on bombing civilians or a nation’s cultural treasures. Steward said it would paint Hitler in a more sympathetic light with the British public. Hesse reported:

This surprising suggestion is another sign of how great the wish for an understanding with us is here in England and is also evidence for the point of view that Great Britain is ready, during the next year, to accept practically everything from us and to fulfil our every wish.

The meeting took place only weeks after Chamberlain had returned from meeting Hitler in Munich, waving aloft the piece of paper representing ‘peace for our time’. But the deal, which followed Hitler’s occupation of part of Czechoslovakia, was already falling apart. Early in November, the Kristallnacht, during which Nazis ransacked synagogues and Jewish homes across Germany, had outraged British opinion.

Cadogan, generally perceived as far more appeasement-minded than Vansittart, agonised over what he should do. His private thoughts, only released in the National Archives in 2011, were that if he revealed to his own Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, that Chamberlain had gone behind his back to do secret deals with Hitler, Halifax might resign. If Halifax confronted Chamberlain, the PM