The Bedbug (16 page)

would probably think his policy of appeasement had been torpedoed by the wicked anti-German Foreign Office … he would probably take steps to clip the wings of the FO as much as possible and at the same time carry on with his clandestine negotiations. He would either have to have a General Election or carry on with some dummy in the FO. He might well take over the entire Secret Intelligence Service and put it under his personal control.
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Britain would look weak and divided. Hitler might be tempted to stage an immediate military showdown before Britain had a chance to rearm and prepare to fight. On the other hand, Cadogan did not want to be accused later of suppressing vital intelligence. He described the appeasement faction as ‘Tiger-riders’ who were playing an appallingly dangerous game. He decided he must tell Halifax, who in turn confronted Chamberlain. The Prime Minister professed he was ‘aghast’ at the revelation and promised to put a stop to it, although the idea that Steward might have acted without Chamberlain’s authority seems preposterous. In reality, all that happened was that Steward was warned about ‘indiscreet talk’.

Dick White had befriended Hesse when he spent several months of 1936 in Germany, but Hesse was a loyal servant of Ribbentrop and continued to work for him throughout the Second World War. In 1946 he was flown to Britain to be interrogated by his predecessor, Klop, who revealed that MI5 had kept a record of his conversation with Steward. Hesse told him that he had been in secret contact with Steward from 1937 onwards and with Chamberlain’s special adviser Horace Wilson after Munich. He explained:

My relations with the Foreign Office were quite normal and they helped me in any way I asked them. The secret talks I had here were at the instigation of No. 10 and I was their instrument … My defence is that I was used from the other side. I was a journalist, half and half in disfavour with the Germans. Then there comes the secretary to the Prime Minister and asks me to help.
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The incident did not dissuade Chamberlain from pursuing his appeasement policy. Neither did the warning, three weeks later,
from Sir Hugh Sinclair, director of MI6, that Hitler was bent on world domination and that:

Among his characteristics are fanaticism, mysticism, ruthlessness, cunning, vanity, moods of exaltation and depression, fits of bitter and self-righteous resentment; and what can only be termed a streak of madness; but with it all there is a great tenacity of purpose, which has often been combined with extraordinary clarity of vision.
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From that point onwards warnings came thick and fast about Hitler’s aggressive intentions, not only in the east towards Czechoslovakia and Poland but in the West where war with Britain and France was also countenanced. Between December 1938 and April 1939 there were twenty secret reports, among them the dire threat that Hitler’s first aggressive act would be to bomb London, possibly as early as March 1939. Not all the reports were accurate and some may well have been planted by Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr, either to provoke Britain into a robust response or to test Chamberlain’s resolve. MI6 predicted that Hitler would find a quarrel to justify an invasion of Holland, initially wrong but ultimately true, and accurately forecast the annexation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia.
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And while the Prime Minister clung to the hope of peace he was not blind to the fact that Britain was unprepared for conflict if it came. Production of aircraft, particularly fighters, was stepped up, and a Military Training Act requiring all men aged twenty and twenty-one to spend six months under arms was passed in April 1939. An agreement was entered into with the French to defend Holland if Hitler attacked and talks began in Moscow to persuade Stalin to side with the Western Allies, effectively encircling Germany. Stalin, fearing that the Allies hoped to turn Hitler eastwards for an attack on Russia, chose instead to sign a peace treaty with the German dictator.

From the perspective of the German Army officers still trying to avert a war with Britain and France, none of these measures
was likely to convince Hitler to back off. As late as July 1939 they despatched Lt Col. Gerhardt Count von Schwerin, the head of the British section of the German war ministry intelligence department, to warn of Hitler’s determination to attack Poland. Schwerin was a guest of the director of naval intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, at a dinner party given by retired Admiral Sir Aubrey Smith at his home in Gloucester Place, Marylebone. Also present were James Stuart MP, parliamentary whip, representing the Prime Minister, and General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall, a former MI6 man who was now director general of air and coastal defence. He recalled that ‘a good deal of good champagne was consumed’.

Schwerin recommended that Churchill should replace Chamberlain as PM, a battle squadron should sail to the Baltic to make a show near Danzig and RAF bombers should be stationed in France. His hosts severely deflated these ambitions. James Stuart explained that replacing the PM would bring down the government; Godfrey said the Admiralty would never allow its capital ships to be at risk in the Baltic where they could be mined or torpedoed; and Marshall-Cornwall pointed out that French airfields had already been prepared to meet RAF bombers if needed. Schwerin’s proposals were duly passed to the Prime Minister who balked at anything so provocative.
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One Foreign Office official dismissed Schwerin’s arguments as ‘gross treasonable disloyalty’, while another pointed out that the German Army seemed to expect Britain to save them from the Nazi regime.
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CHAPTER 9: WAR

W
ith war looking ever more likely, Klop made frequent visits to Holland to hear how Wolfgang zu Putlitz gauged the situation. He had used his journalistic credentials to obtain a freelance position as European correspondent of an Indian newspaper and established an office in The Hague for the purpose. Although Klop was still technically working for MI5, his duties in Holland brought him under the aegis of MI6.

Putlitz told Klop that Holland was now the frontline for Abwehr intelligence operations against Britain. MI5 submitted a report to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who in turn relayed the information to the Prime Minister. It included a character assessment of Hitler, based on information from Putlitz and others who were in touch with his closest entourage, saying that he was now pursuing in high politics tactics which he had previously confined to smaller matters:

He caused his opponents to be confused with a feint here and a serious blow there, and simultaneous offers of peace, and when having given them no rest, he had got them where he wanted them, he made an energetic attack, falling on them like lightning.

The report added a comment from Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, to the effect that the only person who made an impression on Hitler was one who could firmly say ‘no’ or answer
threats with counter threats. Any sign of weakness only egged him on and it was a mystery that other countries did not see this. MI5 concluded that

it must be anticipated that Hitler would make increasingly drastic demands. This was extremely probable if, as seemed beyond doubt, he was convinced that Great Britain was decadent and lacked the will and power to defence the British Empire.
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No action was taken on the security service’s request for additional manpower to match the German effort. The lack of preparedness would cost them dear when war was finally declared on 3 September 1939. Klop was again at the heart of events, in what came to be regarded as MI6’s worst humiliation of the war.

Klop’s intelligence from Putlitz in the last days of peace was confusing and, with hindsight, wishful thinking. In the first week of August 1939 Klop reported that the German military were on standby but not yet on full alert. On 30 August he declared that ‘the Germans have got the jitters’ and Putlitz was under the impression that: ‘We have got Hitler on the run and that nothing should be done to provide him with a golden bridge to make his getaway.’

He reiterated this message the following day and Guy Liddell noted that he seemed very confident that disintegration had set in and even suggested that it was doubtful whether the German Army would march if the order were given. Liddell found it difficult to judge whether his two agents’ views were based on hard evidence or gossip in diplomatic circles. He feared it may be another bluff but did not rule out the possibility of serious internal dissension between the German Army and its political masters. The information was passed to Vansittart, who said it confirmed what he was hearing from other sources and that he still hoped there might be no war; or that if there were it would not last very long.
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Klop was not the only agent feeding back intelligence that elements within the German Army were anxious to avoid a conflict.
This coincided exactly with what Chamberlain continued to hope and strive for, and appears to have persuaded those involved, Klop included, to ignore a dire warning sign.

Putlitz was doing his very best to pass on every item of useful information. He compiled a list for Klop of Dutch businessmen who were collaborating with the Germans to transport vital imports of oil, coal and raw materials from their ports before a British naval blockade could come into effect. He was horrified when, three days later, he was summoned into his ambassador’s office and confronted with the list, which had apparently come into the hands of the Gestapo direct from the office of MI6’s main officer in The Hague, Captain Richard Stevens. He was asked to conduct an investigation into how such a leak had occurred. Putlitz knew immediately that the game was up. It could only be a matter of time before the ambassador realised he was the mole. He had to get out … fast.

Putlitz had a live-in lover – his manservant Willi Schneider, a former waiter who had fallen foul of the Gestapo and spent some time in a concentration camp. If Putlitz was going to escape, Willi had to come too. He had often acted as a go-between with Klop and it now fell to Willi to arrange the getaway. Within twenty-four hours he and Klop had lined up the Dutch air ace Dirk Parmentier, who could circumvent wartime emergency flight restrictions. They carried only one small suitcase each. German propaganda later claimed that Putlitz had filled his with stolen Nazi gold. He denied it.
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On 15 September, at Shoreham airport near Brighton, they were met by Dick White who took them to his brother’s flat, close to the British Museum in Bloomsbury, central London, where they were to live. Within days Putlitz found himself under arrest by the British police. He had gone, quite innocently, to a local cinema where he was recognised by a Belgian diplomat who happened to be in the audience and denounced him as a probable Nazi spy. This kind of hysteria was, understandably, rampant on both sides in the
phoney war period and may partially account for the way warning signs were disregarded.

Reaction in Germany was equally bizarre. The news of Putlitz’s defection was deliberately concealed from Adolf Hitler. There were various vested interests at work. The German ambassador at The Hague, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, no Nazi sympathiser, had to account for the missing money that Putlitz had taken with him, and his failure to spot a mole at the heart of his embassy. The Gestapo could equally be found to be at fault for the security blunder. Joseph Goebbels seized the opportunity to put round a story that Putlitz and Willi Schneider had been murdered and thrown into a canal by ‘Jewish robbers’ who made off with the money. But there were plenty of people who knew this to be a fiction and word penetrated through to Putlitz’s old school friend Count Michael Soltikow, who was working for Admiral Canaris in the Abwehr. He was told that the missing pair were ‘living in clover’ in London. Canaris, calculating that this was an opportunity for one-upmanship over the Gestapo, despatched Soltikow to the Netherlands to investigate.

He quickly established that on the day they were supposed to have been murdered the pair had sold a private car and a motorcycle and that payment had been transferred to London. Putlitz had signed a receipt for the money. Dutch police had investigated the disappearance and were mightily put out by the slurs broadcast by Goebbels. They had obtained from Scotland Yard a photograph of Putlitz in a London street, which was date stamped and showed in the background young women in military uniform, demonstrating that it could only have been taken after war was declared. They also had a copy of a letter, signed and dated, that Putlitz had written to various former diplomatic colleagues in London explaining his reasons for defection and revealing correspondence between Hitler and Ribbentrop exposing Hitler’s double-dealing over the naval treaty he signed with Britain in 1935. The police were able to tell Soltikow that
the spy and his lover were disguised in women’s clothing when they fled the country.

It was weeks after the disappearance that Soltikow found himself summoned one evening, with Canaris, to face the Führer at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin to explain his findings. On the way Canaris warned him not to mention the document revealing the double-dealing over the naval treaty. It might be interpreted as painting Hitler as ‘War Criminal Number One’.