The Bedbug (23 page)

Lisbon is as extraordinary a meeting place of all the homeless, the unfortunates, the arrivistes, the scoundrels as can be found in the world today. Most of the refugees from Hitler’s New Order arrive finally in Lisbon en route for the new world. … The temptations to shady activities by some of the refugees, who have lost everything, including their families and their countries, must be overwhelming. There are always agents of the Germans or their stool pigeons [in the secret police] to act as
agents provocateurs
. The traffic in passports and visas, in reply paid cables, the white slave trade, the smuggling of diamonds, gold, platinum – all these flourish.

More perhaps than any other place in Europe, Caldas da Rainha [the main refugee camp] is a place where the fundamental human urges of love, hate, hope and the will to live have been exploited by a clever and ruthless enemy.
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Among those who arrived in Lisbon in late 1943 was one of Hitler’s favoured art dealers, Karl Buchholz. He had been permitted by the Führer to buy up and resell confiscated ‘degenerate’ art. In 1937 Hitler and Goering had displayed 16,000 examples of modern art that they had removed from Germany’s museums and galleries. After ridiculing and condemning it they burned more than 1,000 items, provoking a stampede of art lovers around the world prepared to pay good money to rescue the remainder. Buchholz was one of four people authorised to dispose of it. Another was Hildebrand Gurlitt, whose son Cornelius was discovered still to be hoarding 1,500 of the treasures in his Munich flat in the year 2013 when police raided
it. Bucholz had a ready outlet for his share of the works in America because he owned a gallery in New York. As it became known that he was an authorised outlet many Jewish owners, desperate to dispose of their art collections at any price, also turned to him. Once the US entered the war the dealers had to find a neutral point of sale. Some chose Switzerland; Buchholz opened an antiquarian book shop and dealership in the Portuguese capital.

It would be surprising if Klop did not know of this, given his own interests in art dealing. Certainly British intelligence was aware of Buchholz’s activities and investigated them in some detail. Klop’s close friend Clifford Norton was coordinating reports in Switzerland and at the end of the war these investigations formed the basis of the records of looted art which continue to be sought to this day for return to their rightful owners. Klop, of course, had a potential source within the smuggling operation in the shape of his former mistress, Thea Struve, who had moved to New York in 1938 to work for Curt Valentin, manager and later owner of the Buchholz Gallery there. Valentin handled many prestigious exports from Berlin, including works by Picasso, and his close relationship to the New York Museum of Modern Art later came under scrutiny.

Klop was met on arrival in Lisbon by Desmond Bristow, a Cambridge graduate in his mid-twenties who was born and brought up in the Sotiel Coronada area of southern Spain where his father was a mining engineer. He had been recruited to the Iberian section of MI6 by Kim Philby in September 1941 and had spent the previous two years in Gibraltar and Algiers. He was there to watch Klop’s back as he made contact with an old friend from Germany who was part of an anti-Nazi group plotting to get rid of Hitler. Bristow never met this agent and gives no clue to his identity in his memoirs but the timing coincides very closely with Otto John’s visit to Lisbon, at which he revealed the existence of the plot to assassinate Hitler. Bristow’s value was as an unfamiliar face, not immediately recognisable to the Abwehr agents in Lisbon or
to the ever vigilant and frequently pro-German Portuguese secret police, the
Policia International de Defensa do Estado
.

Bristow made a big show of being a wide-eyed tourist new to the pleasures of Portugal, sightseeing, taking a river cruise and visiting the casino at Estoril before meeting Klop for dinner at the Hotel Avenida Palace in Restauradores Square. It was one of Lisbon’s finest and most glamorous, and at the heart of political intrigue in the city. Klop was not stinting on the expense, immediately ordering lobster and vinho verde as they made their introductions.

Tradecraft – the skill of conducting undercover operations – seems to have been rudimentary. Even in such a cosmopolitan city the diminutive Klop must surely have been conspicuous, dressed in a long Russian astrakhan coat and wide-brimmed black hat, smoking gold-tipped Sobranie black Russian cigarettes, as he and Bristow strolled by the River Tagus. They were stopped by two secret police officers and required to prove their identities – which revealed the fact that Bristow’s room at the Europa hotel had been booked by the British embassy. They borrowed a black Citroen saloon, identical to those used by the police, from Count Charles de Salis and moved into an apartment in Estoril where they began to play cat-and-mouse with the secret police officers who constantly shadowed them. While Klop hung around in Estoril – gambling heavily, Bristow suspected – Bristow attempted to lead the unwanted shadows a dance around Lisbon, testing their ability to keep him in sight.

It was several days before Klop could make his rendezvous. Klop and Bristow spent the morning sitting on the coast, gazing out over the Atlantic Ocean, while two teams of watchers gazed at them. Bristow was first to make a move, sauntering along to the Tamaris restaurant in Estoril, casually carrying out an inspection of the toilets out the back and establishing that there was a small door leading to a garden gate which opened almost directly on to a side entrance of the railway station. After an early lunch, Klop rose at 1:10 p.m. and went, ostensibly, to relieve himself. Five minutes
later he had followed his pre-planned escape route and was sitting aboard the 1:15 p.m. train to Lisbon as it pulled out from platform three. Four detectives sat under a tree in the square at the front of the restaurant quite oblivious to their quarry’s departure.

Klop did not return until the early hours, and next day offered only the noncommittal opinion that the meeting had gone well. Two more rendezvous followed before Klop returned briefly to London to report back. Bristow stayed on for another month, working on providing stories from North Africa that could be fed to the Germans through British double agents, and then returned to Algiers. He regarded his time with Klop as two of the most thrilling weeks of his MI6 career, remarkable considering he later became MI6 head of station in Madrid and Lisbon, retiring in 1954 to work for the De Beers diamond company investigating the illicit gems trade. He had been instrumental, with Kim Philby, in recruiting the most successful of the double agents, Juan Pujol Garcia, agent Garbo, who went on to deceive the Germans about the location of the D-Day landings and employed a safebreaker to steal Spanish ciphers from their consulate in Algiers.

Bristow maintains that he never knew the identity of the agent whom Klop was meeting but clearly he regarded it as of the highest importance and later wrote:

It was our hope and the hope of MI5 that this rendezvous might bring the war to an earlier end than could possibly happen without inside help from this German anti-Nazi group.
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In his recently published memoirs Philby’s deputy, Major Tim Milne, confirms that he and his colleague Noel Sharp, who were monitoring and evaluating the peace feelers, had become increasingly interested and optimistic about the plotters and willing to encourage them. Their concern was that they must have been infiltrated by the Gestapo.
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Milne’s and Bristow’s views are at odds with the stated aims of
the British government and the brief that Klop had supposedly been given before his departure from London. It is likely that Klop was not fully informed of higher government policy but it is also the case that MI6 tried hard to deter Bristow and Milne from publishing their rather too frank memoirs. By implication Klop’s contact must have been of great significance and the most likely explanation is that it was Otto John, who is known to have been in Lisbon at around that time. He had held a rendezvous with the MI6 officer Rita Winsor. According to John’s own account, there was a hurried conversation, sitting in her car, parked in a side street, in which he passed on more specific details of the impending assassination plot but again got no encouragement. However that does not preclude a separate meeting with Klop. Kim Philby later told an interviewer:

John was a difficult man. We tried to use him as a double agent but he was always changing sides. The trouble with the German peace terms was that they were too demanding to take seriously. They were suggesting terms that might have been appropriate if Germany had still been winning the war instead of losing it. We rightly turned them down, so the good Germans had to go it alone, and unfortunately for them, they failed.
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They failed through one of those minute quirks of fate by which even the best laid plans go awry, despite a host of conspirators who had in place not only the means to assassinate the despised Führer but to declare a new government in Germany. On the morning of 20 July 1944 Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, colonel and chief of staff to the head of the German Home Army, arrived at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s military headquarters east of Rastenburg, to report on the training of fresh troops to reinforce the rapidly disintegrating Eastern Front. He walked with a limp and was badly disfigured. His staff car had hit a landmine in Tunisia fifteen months previously and he lost his left eye, his right hand and two
fingers of the left, plus he had injuries to his ear and knee. But he had insisted on returning to military service. His briefcase was packed with English explosives obtained through the Abwehr and as he entered the conference room he broke a capsule of chemicals that would activate the device in ten minutes. He stood about 6ft away from Hitler and placed the briefcase underneath the heavy trestle table, around which more than twenty senior officers were gathered. The conference room, about 30ft by 15, had 18in. thick concrete walls that would contain the blast but all ten windows were open on a sweltering day. At 12:37 p.m., with five minutes to go, he left the room, on the excuse of taking a phone call. He did not return. But his fellow officer Colonel Heinz Brandt, finding the briefcase in his way, moved it to the far side of a heavy wooden trestle. That saved Hitler’s life. By 12:42 p.m., when the bomb went off, Stauffenberg was a couple of hundred yards away. He heard the roar of the explosion, saw bodies hurtling out of the window and debris everywhere. Convinced his mission had succeeded he headed for Berlin to join his co-conspirators. By the time he got there just over three hours later word had reached Berlin that the attempt had failed. By that evening Stauffenberg and three of his fellow conspirators had been executed and the round-up of suspects commenced. There were as many as 7,000 arrests.
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Hans John was tortured to death. His older brother, Otto John, fled to Spain. There he took refuge with Juan Terraza, one of the principal diplomatic secretaries in the Spanish Foreign Office and a close friend of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Germany. With the help of MI6 officers in Madrid he was smuggled to Lisbon in August and spent a couple of months hiding out at a safe house, the Boa Vista, which was also used by Spanish Communists. In October Portuguese police raided this house and arrested him along with the housekeeper and seven of the Spanish Communists. After several days he was released on the orders of the Portuguese General Staff and handed over to the British. Count Charles de Salis arranged for him to be transported secretly to Gibraltar and
on 3 November he was flown to the UK under guard.
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The long delay arouses suspicion that Philby deliberately blocked his return to prevent him revealing the extent of opposition to Hitler and the potential for a negotiated ceasefire. Otto John, in his own account, insists that he was anxious to get to Britain to reveal all he knew and to resuscitate the remains of German resistance by broadcasting the true story of the assassination attempt. He was first taken to London Reception Centre for screening alien arrivals at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Wandsworth and questioned by a Captain F. Basett, who was deeply suspicious and dismissive. He thought John’s muddled replies showed a lack of candour and made plain that the opposition in Germany was unwilling to recognise the inevitability of unconditional surrender. He suspected that John was working for the SS, or being used by them as an unwitting agent. He also knew, from Enigma decrypts, that John had sent radio reports from Madrid to the Abwehr. John consistently denied any link to the Abwehr and Basett was unable to challenge him on that point without compromising the Enigma source. He surmised that John, and some of the other conspirators, may have been unwittingly controlled by the Gestapo as front men for a peace initiative and concluded:

Quite clearly John’s case will have to be gone into very thoroughly and in the meantime he cannot be considered a suitable prospective candidate for use by either SIS or PWE [Secret Intelligence Service or Political Warfare Executive].

Basett was working for department B1d of MI5, reporting to Lt Col. H. J. Baxter who in turn forwarded Basett’s report to Major Tim Milne, Kim Philby’s deputy in the Iberia section of MI6, on 14 November 1944. Somehow it did not find its way to the appropriate person until mid-January 1945. It seems never to have been released in Britain but a copy does exist in United States archives.
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The existence of Captain Basett, however, remains a
mystery. He does not appear in wartime military service records and is presumably an alias. Despite Basett’s doubts, John obtained his release from the interrogation centre thanks to Sefton Delmer, a Daily Express journalist whose role for the Political Warfare Executive, involved creating demoralising black propaganda to broadcast to the enemy. Otto John became one of the announcers on Soldatensender Calais, a bogus station aimed at German troops. Working alongside him was Klop’s old friend and informant Wolfgang zu Putlitz. Otto John was not allowed to use his real name, because it was not German enough, and instead was called Oskar Jurgens. And he was not allowed to broadcast, as he had intended, messages that might give hope and encouragement to the anti-Nazi resistance. Unconditional surrender remained the sole objective.