The Bedbug (29 page)

There were plans to bring him to London but in March 1946 he attempted suicide and it was decided that he was not in a fit state to travel. It was July before Gilbert Ryle was able to see him in Salzburg but by then the Americans had provided a full background, running to more than seventy pages and listing all his Abwehr contacts and code names of his agents.

When Gilbert Ryle saw Richard Kauder he quickly came to the conclusion that the earlier suspicion that the Klatt organisation was a Soviet double cross had been well-founded. The key was Ira Lang, Turkul’s intelligence chief. It became clear that he controlled virtually all the incoming traffic for the Klatt organisation and was extremely secretive about his sources. Lang was supposedly the son of a Czech father and a Russian mother and had grown up in Krasnodar in southern Russia, trained for the military at cavalry school but after the revolution had fought on the White Russian side under General Anton Denikin. Thereafter he had studied law in Prague, never qualified but worked for a Hungarian law firm. He had been jailed in Budapest for spreading anti-government propaganda and that was where he met Kauder, who was also briefly in jail because of irregularities in his travel documents. Lang led Kauder to believe that his intelligence sources were White Russians who had infiltrated the Soviet military command.

Ryle found it incredible that this network could have operated from 1941 to 1945, filing daily reports, without the Russians
discovering it. And since he knew that the Russians had been told about Klatt, it was even more incredible that they took no action to close him down. He noted, too, that Turkul and Lang, who had not been under arrest in Salzburg in the immediate post-war period, seemed quite unconcerned that the Russians might try to kidnap them to answer for their duplicity. Yet the Russians had attempted to snatch Kauder from under the noses of the Americans and when that failed they tried to capture his mistress and hold her hostage. That too was thwarted. Ryle concluded that both Turkul and Lang knew they were safe because they had been working for the NKVD, the Russian secret police, forerunner of the KGB. He drew attention to the fact that Turkul had been expelled from France in 1938 after being implicated in the kidnap and disappearance of the White Russian leader in Paris, General Evgeni Miller. British intelligence had also been told, pre-war, by the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, that it was NKVD policy to infiltrate the rebel White Russian movement and control it from within.

Ryle concluded that far from running a network, Lang was being run by the NKVD. There had not been any two-way radio traffic, just a blind feed – a broadcast which Lang could pick up on any radio set and decode before recasting it in a series of ‘headlines’ to Richard Kauder who then recreated it as text to give to the Germans. Ryle suspected that the broadcast was powerful enough to be received by General Turkul in his Rome headquarters, and that Turkul had been selling it on to Mussolini, thereby doubling the income which kept him and his ‘Anti-Communist Union’ afloat.

That would explain why Kauder and Lang had to rescue Turkul from Rome before Mussolini was deposed. They feared that the whole operation would be exposed. Ryle was not convinced that the NKVD was deliberately feeding the Germans disinformation. He thought their sole objective was to control Turkul and through him all anti-Communist organisations. Turkul admitted, under
questioning, that he had set out to undermine rival White Russian groups.

This was how Ryle explained his scenario:

It was no part of the concern of the NKVD to assist Russian generals to win battles or campaigns. Its business was to penetrate and tamper with anti-Communist organisations. Its enemy was not the Axis powers but,
inter alia
, the White Russians. Consequently while the Max system was indeed a double cross, it was not a method of leading the Axis General Staffs astray in tactical or strategic matters; it was a method of consolidating its agent, Turkul’s control over White Russian activities …

It is also quite compatible with the single-minded ruthlessness of the NKVD that it should deliberately have issued Max-reports which were likely to lead to the sinking of a Russian convoy, the bombing of a new airfield or the destruction of a Russian division. When Lang confessed to Klatt that he hated to think of the thousands of Russians whose death he had brought about, the explanation may be not that Lang was beginning to swerve from his White Russian hatred of the Soviet regime but that he deplored the price paid by Russia for the build-up that the NKVD had given to him and Turkul.
²⁵⁰

Ryle’s hypothesis convinced his colleagues back in London and on 28 August a small group gathered in the office of Major Tar Robertson, who had coordinated Britain’s Double Cross operation which so successfully deceived the Nazis with disinformation. Robertson and his colleague Joan Chenhalls were hosts to Commander Win Scott and Sam Bossard of the OSS, the American forerunner of the CIA. They agreed that Turkul and Lang should be arrested and brought to London for questioning. Halfway through the meeting Kim Philby, head of counterintelligence at MI6, rang to say new information was coming in from the French secret service lending credence to the idea that Klatt was a Soviet front.
²⁵¹

Turkul and Lang were to be held in Brixton prison but taken each day for questioning at an MI5 safe house, Flat 19, Rugby Mansions, a red-brick four-storey block in Bishop King’s Road, Kensington, a side street opposite the Olympia exhibition centre. It had previously been used to question Mirko Rot. Miss Chenhalls made the arrangements and explained to the housekeeper that the visitors were not prisoners, they were very important people who were visiting secretly and would be accompanied at all time by people ‘who were looking after them’. Privately, she noted that the sitting room and dining room gave out on to a balcony and the guards would have to be careful that neither of their guests attempted suicide. Her biggest headache, though, was to get them ration cards so that they could be provided with food.
²⁵²

It was agreed that Gilbert Ryle should conduct the interviews with Klop – ‘Mr Johnson’ – as interpreter. They would start in friendly fashion, seeking better knowledge of the Abwehr, and then turn up the heat. The interviews with Turkul took place on Thursday 19 September and the following day.

By the end of the questioning of Turkul and Ira neither man had broken down or confessed to being a Soviet agent but Ryle was confident that they had let slip enough to confirm that the Max/Moritz traffic was ‘an up-to-date form of Trojan Horse’. He added:

There is no room for doubt that the NKVD supplied Ira with military intelligence of as high veracity as could be achieved in order that he might secure from the Abwehr in return for these golden eggs the funds, the immunity from surveillance, the communications and the travel permits necessary for the prosecution of the covert-pro-Soviet operations of Turkul’s organisation.
²⁵³

Turkul had accepted under interrogation that Ira must have been foist upon him in 1940 by the NKVD. Questioned separately, Ira consistently denied the allegation, mocking it and offering
to go on trial as a war criminal if they had enough evidence. The interview with him had started badly. He had a glass eye which was somehow damaged shortly after his arrival in London and the interrogators had to find a specialist who could replace it.
²⁵⁴
Ira’s answers did nothing to illuminate the picture. He and Turkul confirmed that they had sought to undermine other White Russian groups working in Germany’s interests. They attributed this to factional rivalry; Ryle put it down to NKVD instructions. He was firmly of the opinion that the principal object of the NKVD was to penetrate and control anti-Communist White Russian groups.

Klop agreed with the overall analysis but believed that there was two-way traffic, masterminded by Ira. He used the White Russians to supply the Germans with disinformation and to obtain intelligence on German responses which he could feed back to Russia. Turkul had been an insignificant figurehead who chose not to realise the obvious – that he was being used by Ira. In Klop’s wonderfully mixed metaphor: ‘The Trojan Horse had the head of an ostrich which it buried in the sands of the Campagna Romana.’
²⁵⁵

There were other undercurrents that tended to confirm Ryle and Klop in their suspicions. According to Otto Wagner, head of the Abwehr office in Sofia, he had always regarded Klatt as a ‘
Nachrichtenschwindler
’, an intelligence fraud and a Soviet agent. Wagner reported that one wall of Klatt’s office was covered with a map of the USSR west of the Urals, with a small light near each major city. Whenever Wagner or another Abwehr officer visited Klatt, one or more lights flashed repeatedly, whereupon Klatt would exclaim, for example: ‘Ah! A report from Kiev has just come in.’
²⁵⁶
Wagner was unimpressed, and complained that Klatt was a Soviet plant, but he had twice been overruled by the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris.

The SS General Walther Schellenberg, who replaced Canaris as head of the Abwehr, was another admirer of Klatt’s network. In his memoirs he wrote:

The work of this man was really masterly. He was able to report large-scale strategic plans as well as details of troop movements … usually two or three weeks ahead of events, so that our leaders could prepare suitable counter-measures – or, should I say, could have done so if Hitler had paid more attention to the information.
²⁵⁷

Turkul also had connections with Claudius Voss, who had run a White Russian intelligence unit out of Sofia through the 1920s and 1930s. Voss, like Turkul, had been suspected of involvement in the kidnap and disappearance of the White Russian leader General Miller by agents of the NKVD. He had served in a German naval unit during the war. Post-war both Turkul and Voss had worked for the Americans in Vienna, purporting to identify Russian Communist infiltrators. And, as Klop no doubt knew, both had pre-war links to MI6. They had been recruited in the 1920s in Paris by Dick Ellis, whose brother-in-law was a White Russian. Ellis was later suspected of selling information to the Germans and the Russians.
²⁵⁸
Voss claimed to have carried on working for MI6 through the Gibson brothers, Alfred and Harold, who ran agents in Eastern Europe. He added that one of his men, Michael Skoblikov, had been executed in 1941 for spying for the British.
²⁵⁹
Not that working for the British and the Russians were mutually incompatible, as amply demonstrated by the MI6 officer overseeing Klop and Ryle’s investigation – Kim Philby, KGB agent.

In October 1946, the decision to bring Turkul and Lang to London for interrogation was reported to Prime Minister Clement Attlee by the new director of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe.

Ostensibly, General Turkul, who was in control of many groups of genuine White Russians, was exploiting these forces in German interests. In actual fact he was controlling these groups on behalf of the Russian NKVD and betraying them to the Soviet, whenever it seemed profitable to do so. … The case is of special interest, as it shows the total disregard of human life by the Soviet authorities when they feel that a major issue is at stake.
²⁶⁰

Although the evidence that Klatt was a Russian front was mounting, it was still not conclusive and Klop was sent urgently to Switzerland to see Turkul’s one-time secretary, George Leonidovitch Romanov. This Rasputin lookalike had taken refuge in Geneva at the end of the war and entered Holy Orders. He was about to leave for a new life as a priest in Argentina. Klop was greeted in Switzerland by two old friends: the MI6 head of station Nicholas Elliott, who put him up in his apartment, and Paul Blum, Elliott’s opposite number at the American Office of Strategic Studies. Klop and Blum had become friends as part of the Schellenberg interrogation team. He had already questioned Romanov and was keeping an eye on him.

Romanov had travelled all over Europe on Turkul’s behalf, visiting the leading German expert on the Soviet Union, Gustav Hilger, in Berlin and the former Chancellor and wartime ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen. He freely admitted that his purpose was to advance the cause of White Russians through the Nazis and that was how he came to detest Ira. He denounced him to Turkul as a Soviet agent but in the ensuing power struggle it was Romanov who was forced out. He told Klop: ‘Ira’s main occupation was lying. Ira always lied, even when it was not necessary. He distorted everything, even lies.’

Klop, who had not expected to like Romanov, found himself warming to a man who had lived successfully for so long on his wits. By the end of the interview Klop was addressing him as ‘mon père’ and Father George gave Klop a signed photo, acknowledging engagingly that he was bound to need it for secret service records. He also remarked that for a man who claimed he did not speak Russian, Klop’s pronunciation of the names of people and places was remarkably fluent.
²⁶¹

Gilbert Ryle was pleased with Klop’s efforts and there was a growing feeling that what they were looking at was an NKVD operation which would have continuing significance in the Cold War. Michael Serpell wrote an assessment for MI5’s director general Percy Sillitoe, based in part on information provided by Wilhelm Flicke, head of the German equivalent of Bletchley Park. He had analysed the ‘sensational’ success of the
Rote Drei
, an NKVD ‘ring of three’ in Switzerland who consistently provided the Russians with accurate intelligence on German intentions on the Eastern Front. The Germans had gradually realised what was going on and a witch hunt against hundreds of their own people ensued as they tried to find the traitors. Serpell saw a direct parallel with the Klatt organisation. He believed that Klatt fed information to the Germans and used their responses to analyse their intentions and tactics. Serpell thought the fruits of their research were fed back to Moscow through the
Rote Drei
. He compared Klatt to Agent Garbo, Britain’s most successful double agent who completely misled the Germans about the location of the D-Day landings. Garbo had been used in the same way: he fed information to the Germans, under British control, and his British controllers analysed the German responses for clues to their intentions. Britain had the advantage that it could track the German responses to Garbo’s disinformation using the Enigma decrypts.