The Bedbug (21 page)

MI5 was not about to trust her out of their sight – Lucas returned to France alone. But she did have her uses. She could broadcast radio messages to one of the Walenty sets in German hands, feeding them disinformation about the Lucas group’s plans. Susan Barton was given the job of minding her, first at a flat in Rugby Mansions, Kensington and then at Stratford Court, Oxford Street where there were more distractions for Victoire’s restless ambitions. It quickly became apparent where those ambitions lay. Through a Harley Street doctor who was treating her, Victoire got an introduction to Lord Selborne, the Minister for Economic Warfare and political head of the Special Operations Executive, the sabotage organisation for which Victoire worked. On 2 May 1942 Mrs Barton reported:

It seems that Victoire’s party last night with Lord Selborne at Claridge’s was a great success. She was so excited that she woke me up when she got in about 11.30 to tell me about it. I gather that apart from exceedingly intelligent conversation Victoire put forward some ideas on propaganda which impressed Lord Selborne very much and he said nobody had ever thought of them before. In order to have a long talk about everything Lord S suggested that he take her out to dinner alone next Tuesday. This is a definite appointment unless he has urgent business of state. He also told her that a man who wanted to get on always needed the advice of a clever woman and that there were several women around Churchill. He further said that he was going to talk to Churchill about her and that he wanted a woman painter to paint her portrait. As far as I can gather Victoria seems to be dreaming of becoming Lord S’s mistress. According to her he has all the attributes she admires in a man except that he cannot dance, but that for the moment has become a minor matter. Lord S may be merely playing up to her but even if only half of what she has told me is true it seems that he is behaving exceedingly foolishly and is not doing himself any good, nor for that matter us as she will get more and more above herself.
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Mrs Barton was no prude but she took a very dim view of Victoire, concluding:

She has a thin veneer of charm, kindness and consideration but underneath it all she is an utterly egotistical woman who cares for nothing and nobody but herself and her own pleasures. She is clever, but not half as clever as she thinks she is. She can be very amusing but goes in a lot for dirty stories and her sense of humour is almost infantile. Added to all this there is, of course, her interest in men. She feels she is irresistible to men anyhow and to sleep with a man seems to be a necessity for her. Once she gets hold of a man it is up to her to drop him or be unfaithful to him. God help the man, or for that matter the Service he is in, if he dares to drop her … She is a very dangerous woman.
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Christopher Harmer, the MI5 officer responsible for Victoire, added tersely:

From the point of view of running the case I don’t much mind whether she goes on seeing Selborne or not, but whether we owe a duty to him to prevent him making a fool of himself is a matter I must leave for someone else to decide.

MI5’s lawyer, Gonne St Clair Pilcher, reviewing the case, commented:

In addition to being unscrupulous and fickle, she has extremely expensive tastes. Her goodwill can only be retained by the satisfaction of her appetite for luxury and lovers, the former of which is constant and the latter constantly changing!
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More man trouble swiftly followed. Her doctor friend now introduced her to Richard Llewellyn Lloyd, a wealthy army officer and author of the bestseller How Green Was My Valley. Within days she had installed herself in his Mayfair apartment. At first MI5 suspected that Captain Lloyd was simply providing a love-nest for Victoire and Lord Selborne but it transpired that he had fallen for her himself and after a brief affair had offered her the use of the flat while he was away on military duty. At this point Victoire was persuaded that what she needed was a weekend in the country with Klop. He took against her in a big way:

To put it bluntly: I did not believe and do not believe a single word Victoire says. I tried in further contacts with Victoire to find confirmation for my doubts – a hopeless task with a person so tricky and so alive to the dangers of contradiction … If anything, her confidence in her immunity from being unmasked grew in proportion to the comfort which surrounded her.
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Seeking confirmation of his opinion, he interviewed two other agents from the Walenty organisation who had managed to escape the Gestapo. Both condemned her. Klop believed that her whole story was a carefully thought-out and well-rehearsed German fabrication. She told him that she found Walenty dirty
and repulsive as a lover and reckless and indiscreet as an agent. This, Klop thought, was part of a smokescreen to obscure her own role in the cascade of arrests that obliterated the organisation. She made anti-Semitic remarks about Violette, whom she considered ugly, and accused her of implicating Victoire to the Gestapo when she was captured. Klop suspected the reverse, and put it down to jealousy. It took Victoire only two days after her arrest to become the mistress of a Gestapo officer named Bleicher. This would not wash with Klop:

I cannot believe that the confidence of the German Intelligence Service can be won by giving yourself to one member of this service … With all due respect, too, to Victoire’s seductive powers, I firmly believe that every German officer in Paris had the opportunity to ‘write on better paper’ (as they so delicately say in German) and was not dependent for his amorous exploits on the rather faisandé [corrupt] charm of Victoire. This is all nonsense. In my opinion German confidence in Victoire started earlier than one day after her arrest. It was based on a more solid foundation than a bed. The Germans needed Victoire. They needed her for rounding up the rest of the Walenty organisation; they needed her for maintaining wireless transmitter traffic with England, and they needed her as a bait for future fry, small and big … Nothing will ever make me believe that the Germans, however stupidly they may sometimes behave, would take such risks without good reason.
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He concluded that it would not have been enough for Victoire to betray her friends to save her own neck after her arrest. For German Intelligence to have 100 per cent confidence in her, and to release her on a mission to England, she must have been a German agent in the first place, infiltrated into the Walenty organisation to destroy it from within. He paid tribute to her intelligence, courage and sangfroid, all qualities of a perfect double agent, but regarded her motivation as purely venal, unmitigated by patriotism, idealism or decency.

Surprisingly, given this opinion, he introduced her not only to Nadia, the chatelaine at Barrow Elm, but to his son Peter and their friend ‘Dan’ with whom Victoire began a flirtatious correspondence. Dan was almost certainly Daan Cevat, the Dutch art dealer and Rembrandt expert who had teamed up with Klop pre-war buying up paintings at country house sales for export. By 1942 he was working with the Dutch government in exile in London. The correspondence, monitored by Klop without Victoire’s knowledge, was presumably intended to extract some unwitting confirmation of Klop’s opinion of her but petered out inconsequentially.
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Nevertheless, Dick White and his colleagues at MI5 were in full agreement with Klop’s scathing assessment and Victoire very soon found herself interned on the Isle of Man for the duration of the war. In 1945 she was handed back to the French who sentenced her to death for collaboration with the Nazis, although the penalty was later commuted and she was released after serving a prison term.

On Tuesday 10 November 1942, at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon in the Mansion House, a jubilant Prime Minister told his audience:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth Hitler’s Nazis will meet equally well-armed and perhaps better armed troops. Henceforth they will have to face in many theatres of war that superiority in the air which they have so often used without mercy against others, of which they boasted all round the world, and which they intended to use as an instrument for convincing all other peoples that all resistance to them was hopeless…
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Churchill was celebrating the triumph of General Montgomery over Field Marshal Rommel at El Alamein at the end of October, the Allies’ first victory. He went on to point out that their fortunes continued to prosper in North Africa now that America had
entered the war. Two days before his speech they had launched Operation Torch, the invasion of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia previously controlled by the Vichy French. For Major Richard Wurmann, chairman of the German Armistice Commission liaising with their puppet regime in Algiers, Operation Torch was the beginning of the end. Dressed in French army uniform, he headed for Tunisia hoping to escape the advancing American and British Forces. He successfully bluffed his way through several roadblocks until he was unmasked by French soldiers who had switched to the Allied side. The British quickly discovered that they had an important prize in their hands. His real job was as head of the Abwehr station in Algiers. He had extensive knowledge of Germany’s military intelligence set-up throughout Europe and America. MI5 gave him the cover name Harlequin and even now expunge his real name from their files when they are released to the National Archives. What he told them, coupled with the Enigma decrypts, enabled British Intelligence to penetrate the Abwehr so deeply that no important activity remained unknown to them for long.
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One commentator concluded that it was probably not an exaggeration to maintain that, as a result, Allied intelligence understood the Abwehr better than its own high officials did.
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To get him to talk, Guy Liddell, director of counter-espionage at MI5, made a promise he knew he could not honour: to protect Richard Wurmann by offering him a new identity and British citizenship. In perpetrating this deception he inveigled Sir Alexander Maxwell, permanent secretary at the Home Office, into writing a letter seeming to confirm the deal. Wurmann naturally assumed that such matters could be fixed quite easily. Yet, even in the midst of war, neither Guy Liddell nor Alexander Maxwell had the power to put this into practice. The law said that he could only obtain British citizenship after five years’ residence. And the law brooked no exceptions.

So Maxwell’s letter simply stated that it was intended to grant Wurmann citizenship in five years, starting from the date of his
capture. In addition, it explained that it was not the custom of the British government to deport aliens if by so doing they would be liable to persecution by their own authorities. The letter was addressed not to Wurmann but to the Director of Military Intelligence, who got cold feet and refused to endorse it. Nevertheless, Wurmann was eventually given a copy and taken along to the Midland Bank in Sloane Street, Knightsbridge to put it in a safe deposit box. Sir Edward Reid – in peace time a director of Barings Bank, in wartime a financial fixer for MI5 – helped Wurmann to open an account in his new false identity: Count Heinrich Stenbock, an aristocrat from the Baltic states. He was to receive £400 a month plus his rent, of forty-nine guineas a week, for his flat at 184 Chelsea Cloisters, in the same block as Klop. In Wurmann’s absence, Sir Edward Reid had a quiet word with the bank manager, the delightfully named Mr Skull, and explained to him, as one banker to another, that under no circumstances should Count Stenbock be allowed to remove the letter from the safe deposit box. If he attempted to do so Mr Skull was to notify the appropriate authorities immediately.
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Wurmann was already acquainted with his new neighbour, Klop Ustinov. He had spent a fortnight at Klop’s country retreat at the end of January 1943. He passed the time sketching out charts on A3 size sheets of paper showing the entire structure of the Abwehr, starting with Admiral Canaris at the top and details of each country headquarters and sub offices, with names of the operatives where he knew them.

Wurmann had satisfied his own conscience by making it a condition of his cooperation that he should one day play a part in initiating a peace deal with Germany. He accepted that they would not win the war and implied that his boss, Admiral Canaris, recognised this too and would negotiate. MI5 played along and Klop proposed that interrogations should take the form of casual conversations at his flat rather than formal questioning where Wurmann might feel he was betraying his country.

Klop shared the task with Major Victor Caroe and between them they covered a range of topics. Guy Liddell regarded Wurmann as ‘a useful reference book on all Abwehr matters’. Klop, at the end of a long report, some of which is still classified secret, felt that ‘Wurmann is not the type of person I ever want to see again once the orange has been squeezed dry.’
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His personal assessment of Wurmann was scathing: a member of the Prussian officer class distinguished by physical courage and moral cowardice. He had embraced Nazi-ism as the antidote to the Treaty of Versailles, Bolshevism and Judaism and was now ready to disown it since it had failed to deliver the anticipated results. He went on: