The Bedbug (31 page)

She was of the opinion that Nadia had been enormously involved in Peter’s life and career, shaping his destiny, and that Klop may well have been jealous.
²⁷³
A remark of Nadia’s, referring to Klop’s return to London from Switzerland, in 1946, to find Peter’s name in lights in West End theatre land, illustrates the point:

Klop said that he had never before felt so painfully self-conscious as when seeing his name staring at him in huge letters from all sides, but of course he was thrilled and happy for Peter. There was no doubt, Peter was becoming well known and our roles were interchanging. A few years earlier he had been my son (the son of Nadia Benois) – now I was gradually becoming his mother (the mother of Peter Ustinov).
²⁷⁴

Nadia visited Klop in Bern during that year and found little comfort there. One of the few pieces of personal memorabilia she left behind is an anguished fragment from a pocket notebook from that visit. She wrote:

Splitting of hairs is just as dangerous as splitting the atom. What matters what the method is for killing as long as killing is regarded as a possible and sometimes a necessary action. Man is an animal first of all. The only thing which distinguishes him from other animals is his free will i.e. his ability to control instincts. If man would realise that he is nothing else than a beast he might find ways for improvement. Unfortunately man imagines that he is something quite special and therefore behaves like the lowest beast.
²⁷⁵

Klop, on the other hand, was among friends; he was also assured of a welcome at the British embassy where his mentor Clifford Norton was head of mission from 1942 to 1946.

The investigation on which Klop and Nicholas Elliott now embarked into the
Rote Drei
was the most complex of Klop’s entire career. Its subject matter is so full of intrigue that it continues to fascinate spy writers even now. It exercised the best minds of MI5 and MI6, the CIA and the FBI and the German Intelligence Service, who provided many of the early clues to its organisation. At its heart were two men codenamed Lucy and Dora and two women called Sissy and Sonja. None of them was Russian. Nor was their chief radio operator: Alexander Foote was British. Among the many unresolved questions is the extent to which MI6 knew the innermost workings of the
Rote Drei
at the time and how far they collaborated.

The
Rote Drei
or Red Three was so-called because the Germans knew the group had three radio transmitters, which they did their
utmost to shut down. Wilhelm F. Flicke, the senior German cryptanalyst who worked on the case during the war, estimated that the three transmitters sent 5,500 messages to Moscow, averaging five a day, over a three-year period.
²⁷⁶
The Germans never succeeded in cracking completely the
Rote Drei
codes or identifying all their sources, some of whom seemed to have almost instant access to the Nazis’ military plans.

But they did know that this Swiss-based operation had grown out of the much wider network they described as the
Rote Kapelle
or Red Orchestra. Its tentacles spread across Europe and it had existed long before the outbreak of war. By 1945 the Abwehr and the SS had a good knowledge of its workings and had uncovered at least seven separate networks. Under interrogation by Klop and others, these German officers revealed the techniques and personnel of the Soviet network. The realisation dawned that this was an orchestra playing more than one tune. It spied on its supposed Allies every bit as much as its enemies and its soloists often responded to more than one conductor. Agents whom the Germans supposed to be theirs were not, just as agents whose loyalty to Britain went unquestioned turned out to be devoting their virtuosity to a Russian master.

The focal point of the
Rote Drei
was Sándor Radó, who used Dora as his code name. He was a Hungarian cartographer who had joined his country’s Communist party and Red Army when it briefly held power under Béla Kun in 1919. In the 1920s he had run an anti-Fascist newsletter in Berlin and settled in Geneva in 1935, under Russian directions, using a map publishing business, Geopress, as cover. His work was overseen by Russia’s most notorious woman agent, Red Sonja, real name Ursula Kuczynski, a Jewish refugee from Germany. Radó recalled her at their first meeting as ‘a tall, slender, almost fragile looking woman in a closely fitting woollen dress. I put her age at about thirty-five. Her movements were smooth and a trifle languid.’ She had learned her trade with the Russian agent Richard Sorge in China and moved
from Switzerland to Britain with her English husband Leon Beurton. There she lived quietly in the Oxfordshire countryside while running the atom bomb spies Klaus Fuchs, who had been recruited by her brother Jurgen, and Melita Norwood. Her three sisters were also part of the network.

By the time Kuczynski left Switzerland, Radó’s network was in full flow, mainly supplied by Rachel Dübendorfer, codename Sissy, another German-Jewish Communist, who had married and settled in Switzerland. She initially kept her best source, codenamed Lucy, secret even from Radó but he was later indentified as Rudolf Roessler, also German, who ran a publishing house in Lucerne. He had links to Büro Ha, a semi-official Swiss intelligence service named after its director, Major Hans Hausamann.
²⁷⁷
For the neutral Swiss to supply a foreign intelligence network with information about an enemy was a dangerous game. It remains unclear to what extent Roessler used his contacts in Germany to brief the Swiss or vice versa.

The wartime MI6 officer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge later claimed that Roessler was a friend of Foote and that some of Roessler’s information had come not from Germany but from British intelligence. The theory was that Churchill was not prepared to initiate Stalin in the mysteries of the Enigma system that was enabling code-breakers at Bletchley Park to read the Germans’ most secret radio messages. Apart from an unwillingness to share his prize asset, Churchill was concerned that the knowledge would leak back to the Germans who would immediately change all their codes. But in order to keep his conscience clear, Churchill is supposed to have authorised the leaking of Enigma intelligence, un-sourced, via the Lucy network. The trouble was, even if that were true, Stalin didn’t always believe it. Radó had radioed in a warning about the imminent German invasion of Russia in June 1941 but it went unheeded. It was only after he had been consistently proved correct in his predictions of German intentions on the Eastern Front that he gained acceptance. Muggeridge claimed to
have had this theory confirmed by Alexander Foote after the war and commented:

I found it highly appropriate that Stalin could only be persuaded to believe in the reliability of Allied Intelligence if it reached him from an undercover network on a dubious channel.
²⁷⁸

Klop and Elliott’s investigations were incorporated in a three-volume special report compiled by MI5 and MI6 and the CIA in 1949.
²⁷⁹
It summarised everything that was known about the Rote Kapelle and the Rote Drei, and included pen portraits and photographs of hundreds of agents. A chart drawn by Klop showed the links between them, including the route by which funds were transferred via Canada and New York through the Helbros Watch Company run by a Russian-born American, William Helbein. He specialised in selling Swiss watches to American troops.

The report was only declassified in Britain in 2008. It acknowledged that the Russians had agents operating in London pre-war, controlled from Paris by the
Rote Kapelle
’s two leaders Henry Robinson and Leopold Trepper. And despite the assistance of the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, MI5 still could not identify who they were.

The report identified Maria Poliakova, codename Vera, as the founder of the Radó network. She had been recalled to Moscow and, while most of her family died in Stalin’s purges, she had prospered and risen in the Russian Intelligence Service hierarchy so that Radó and Rachel Dübendorfer answered directly to her. When Sonja succeeded Poliakova in Switzerland she recruited Alexander Foote through the Communist Party of Great Britain headquarters in King Street, Hammersmith, and he in turn recruited Leon Beurton. They had fought together in the International Brigade against General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The intermediary at King Street was fellow International Brigade member Fred Copeman who abandoned Communism
before the outbreak of war and was awarded an OBE for his work organising London’s air raid defences. He passed his two colleagues on to Sonja’s sister in London, Brigitte Lewis.

The whole operation had been jeopardised when Sonja divorced her first husband, Rudolf Hamburger, and married Leon Beurton, supposedly for purely ideological reasons. Sonja, despite her Communist credentials, continued to employ the old Kuczynski family maid from Germany, Olga Muth. She was so outraged when she discovered that Sonja’s relationship with Leon was founded on passion as well as politics that she tried to turn them in to the British consulate as spies. Unfortunately the local official could not understand her limited English and ignored her. Leon was not popular with Maria Poliakova either, on account of his use of the secret radio network to try to keep in touch with his wife when she returned to England and he had to stay in Switzerland.

The report concluded that Sonja’s mission had been principally concerned with sabotage operations, which were suspended on the signing of the Soviet-Nazi pact, and that Foote and Beurton had been chosen deliberately as English activists who could be disowned if caught. Even more extraordinarily, the authors thought that Sonja had ceased to be an active agent when she returned to Britain. Nothing could have been further from the truth but the investigators seem to have relied on a report by Roger Hollis of MI5 on the basis of surveillance and postal intercepts. Hollis was at the time the senior officer responsible for monitoring Communism and left wing subversion. He later became director and had to face down suspicions that he too may have been a Soviet agent. In 1944 he wrote:

Mrs Beurton appears to devote her time to her children and domestic affairs. She has not come to notice in any political connection, nor is there anything to show she has maintained contact with her first husband.

Months later, as a result of the Venona Project – American intercepts of Russian communications – the British atom scientist Klaus Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy and it emerged that Mrs Beurton, the housewife from Oxfordshire, had been his Soviet controller.

The report was remarkably circumspect about any British or American connections with the
Rote Drei
. It acknowledged that Sándor Radó had visited Britain in 1937 and may have been sent on an unspecified mission by his Soviet controllers. Yet MI5 had had a file on him and his wife, Helene Jansen, since 1929. Helene had come to notice working for the German Communist Party in Berlin and Sándor was known to be an associate on one of Germany’s Communist leaders Willi Münzenberg. Helene’s two sisters, Emma and Maria, both Communist supporters, had moved to Britain and were under surveillance. Emma was married to the Communist trade unionist Ernest Woolley. MI6 also knew in 1940 that Sándor was running Geopress from Geneva.
²⁸⁰

MI5 had warned the Home Office as early as April 1940 that German exiles, mostly Jewish refugees fleeing persecution, had to be regarded as potentially subversive and that there was often an overlap between German and Russian intelligence operations. Particularly suspect were supporters and sympathisers of the banned KPD, the German Communist Party.
²⁸¹
Klop’s Czech intelligence source, agent Sloane, wrote him a lengthy report on Ernst Meyer, a musician specialising in early English music who fled to London and was a founder member of the
Freie Deutsche Kulturbund
, a cultural haven for musicians, artists and writers but strongly suspected of being a Communist front.
²⁸²
Another leading light was Heinz Kamnitzer who worked with the Czech refugee Peter Smollett in the wartime Ministry of Information. Kamnitzer was also connected to the Association of Scientific Workers, whose chairman was the Communist Jurgen Kuczynski, the man who recruited the atom bomb spy Klaus Fuchs to the Soviet cause.
²⁸³
Thirdly there was the artist and photographer John Heartfield, who had anglicised his name from Helmut Herzfeld and had been
identified by the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky as an agent of OGPU, the secret police whose duties included targeting Russian dissidents abroad. Surveillance of his mail revealed that in 1948 he was in contact with Helene Radó, wife of the leader of the
Rote Drei
, and her British sisters.
²⁸⁴

The report had little to say about what ensued when the Swiss authorities closed down the network. In late 1943 they had arrested Foote and the other radio operators. Radó had gone into hiding. Rachel Dübendorfer and Roessler were still functioning but had no means of communicating with Moscow Centre.

It has since emerged that when the network was infiltrated by the Germans Radó made contact with MI6 and wanted to seek refuge in the British embassy but was refused permission by Moscow.
²⁸⁵
Instead he went into hiding and later fled to Paris. Dübendorfer also approached MI6 in Switzerland and delivered some of Roessler’s intelligence reports to them, on condition that they did not reveal this to the Russians. They were passed on to London and described as ‘Captain X’s flimsies’. This was also the codename for reports supplied by Karel Sedlacek, an agent of the Czech Intelligence Service, who was reporting to his boss František Moravec in London. Sedlacek had been given cover and a passport as a British businessman with the name Charles Simpson.
²⁸⁶
According to Moravec, his man had been in touch with Roessler throughout the war and had been feeding back to London the same material that Dübendorfer and Radó sent to Moscow. Moravec in turn handed it over to Stewart Menzies at MI6. Roessler’s motivation was financial rather than political.
²⁸⁷
According to Alexander Foote, Roessler was paid 7,000 Swiss francs a month by the
Rote Drei
for himself and his sources.