The Bedbug (32 page)

In his post-war investigation Klop concluded that Sedlacek had been a member of the
Rote Drei
and this appeared to be confirmed when Swiss police rearrested Roessler in 1953 and charged him with espionage. He admitted that he had resurrected the spy ring in 1948 at Sedlacek’s request.

It is also clear that MI6 was kept fully informed by Roger Masson, head of Swiss military intelligence, about his investigation of the
Rote Drei
and eventual arrest of some of its members. When Alexander Foote was arrested Masson had checked with Menzies that his prisoner was not working for the British and warned Menzies that there was a general crackdown on illicit radio transmissions. As a result Menzies placed a severe restriction on use of the MI6 transmitter in Berne.
²⁸⁸

Menzies had two other sources of direct information from the Abwehr, one of them provided by its leader Admiral Wilhem Canaris, personally. When the Germans invaded Poland Canaris arranged for a close friend, Halina Szymańska, wife of the former Polish military attaché to Berlin, to move to Berne with the idea that she should establish contact there with the British Secret Service and convey messages from Canaris. She travelled to meet him in France and Italy, using false papers supplied by MI6, and passed on a warning from Canaris that Hitler was about to invade the Soviet Union. She maintained contact with the deputy head of MI6 in Berne, Andrew King, who later helped her to resettle with her family in England, and acted as a go-between for the Abwehr’s agent in Zurich, Vice-Consul Hans Bernd Gisevius. He is also acknowledged to have been one of the most likely sources of information supplying Rudolf Roessler and the
Rote Drei
.
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Foote was not held by the Swiss for long and on release broke his bail conditions and fled to Paris. After the Allies had liberated France, both Foote and Radó approached the Russian military mission in Paris and agreed to return to Moscow to be debriefed about their wartime network and its eventual collapse. They were given false identities as Russian prisoners of war and in January 1945 were put on a plane taking a circuitous route to Moscow via the Middle East. En route, it seems to have dawned on Radó that he might not receive a hero’s welcome and that the penalty for the
Rote Drei
’s disintegration would be execution. During a stop-over in Cairo he walked into the
British embassy and asked for asylum. He showed officials his bogus Russian passport in the name of Ignati Koulicher and explained that he was a Hungarian national. Interviewed by officers of SIME, British Security Intelligence Middle East, he gave a modest, understated explanation of his role as a Soviet agent in Switzerland but claimed to be in fear of his life. By now the Russians were making official inquiries as to his whereabouts and, to complicate matters further, Radó tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists and throat with a razor blade. The Foreign Office in London advised the embassy that they had no standing in the matter and recommended that he be handed over to the Egyptian authorities. This was done on 5 February and it was only two weeks later that MI6 suddenly woke up to who he was and declared him to be a person of ‘considerable interest’.
²⁹⁰
Yet he remained in Egyptian custody for the next five months with no apparent attempt by the British to persuade the usually compliant Egyptians to hand him over. It is tempting to see the hand of Kim Philby, head of MI6’s Soviet section, behind this inactivity. When Radó eventually left in July he needed a British visa for a transit stop in Palestine. He was under Russian guard and manifestly reluctant to make the journey.
²⁹¹

This became more embarrassing for the British when Helene Radó, who was still in Paris, started asking for news of her husband and it transpired that her sisters in Britain had influential friends, among them the Labour Education Minister Ellen Wilkinson and party chairman Professor Harold Laski. MI5 was keen to bring Helene to London for interview, if she were prepared to reveal more about the
Rote Drei
, and complained bitterly that a heavy-handed interview by Section IX of MI6 in Paris – Philby’s department – had convinced her to remain silent.

By that time Alexander Foote had been interrogated in Moscow by Maria Poliakova. She was by then about forty-years-old, and described by Foote as good looking, tall, with blue-black hair, high cheekbones and ‘quite good porcelain artificial teeth’.
She spoke fluent English and German. Poliakova accused Radó of embezzling 50,000 dollars, feeding the Russian Intelligence Service false information and selling information to the British through one of his journalistic sources, Otto Pünter. The service was even more suspicious of Radó’s disappearance in Cairo, speculating that he was being held by the British to prevent him exposing Foote as a double agent.
²⁹²
When he eventually arrived in Moscow, having been put on a plane by Egyptian security police, he remained the object of suspicion and spent the next nine years in prison, only being released after Stalin’s death. In his memoirs he confirmed the suspicion that Pünter had been supplying Britain with information during the war and named his contact as Elizabeth Wiskemann, who had been acting as assistant press secretary at the Legation in Berne as cover for intelligence gathering.
²⁹³
Miss Wiskemann was of German descent but her outspoken criticism of the Nazis in newspaper articles during the mid-1930s had caused Klop, with whom she was friendly, to warn her that she was causing consternation in the German embassy in London. She had been arrested by the Gestapo and expelled from Germany in 1936.

In Switzerland she was in contact with members of the German resistance, particularly Adam von Trott du Solz, an aristocratic German lawyer who was executed for his prominent part in the 20 July plot against Hitler, and Klop’s close friend Albrecht Bernstorff, whom she met clandestinely several times. She said of him:

Albrecht was intelligent and upright and he continued to be well-informed. He suffered from the drawback that people regarded him as what they termed a lightweight; he seemed wildly indiscreet and indeed, once the Nazi Reign of Terror had begun, absurdly foolhardy … I think that he had to some extent calculated the risks and felt it to be important that so Nordic and aristocratic a man as Albrecht Bernstorff should defy the Nazis as openly as possible; in other words I think he was careless on principle.

Like Rudolf Roessler, she had contacts in the German theatrical world who were still able to visit the theatre in Zurich, and she met Swiss and German journalists who were able to travel between the two countries. A Jewish banker with a German wife told her in the winter of 1940-41 of the liquidation of incurables and others in Germany and by the end of 1941 had reported to her the intended slaughter of Jews in the Final Solution.

She later recalled that from Christmas 1944 onwards the Russians had become more and more suspicious that the British and Americans were intending to make peace with the Germans behind their backs. The Germans had done everything possible to nurture Russian suspicion. Messages had poured into Switzerland from Nazis asserting that they were prepared to come over to the British side in order to fight with the western Allies against the Russians. She had been personally approached by representatives of the Croat Ustashe dictator Ante Pavelić and Himmler’s head of Reich security, including the Gestapo, Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
²⁹⁴

After satisfying his interrogators in Moscow, Foote was briefed to undertake a new mission in South America on behalf of the KGB, instead of which he handed himself over to the British in Germany in June 1947 and later published a memoir,
Handbook for Spies
, which had been ghost-written for him by Courtenay Young of MI5. Foote confirmed that in 1943 he had put a radio request to Moscow Centre on behalf of Radó to be allowed to seek refuge in the British Legation. Radó told Foote that the Legation had not only agreed to give him sanctuary but said they would allow him to continue despatching intelligence to the Russians. MI6 later denied any knowledge of this arrangement. But decoded intercepts of Foote’s radio messages at the time seem to partially confirm it. The German investigator Wilhelm Flicke had cracked some of his codes and his files fell into British hands after the war. A message from Moscow via Foote in October 1943 rebuked Radó for making contact with the British military attaché in Berne, Col. Henry Cartwright, and ordered him to sever all connection.
A month later, after further analysis, Moscow decided that Radó was exaggerating the danger of German or Swiss intervention and instead blamed British intelligence for trying to disrupt their network.
²⁹⁵

Foote claimed that the Swiss police investigators knew of links between him, an arms dealer called Gerald Chamberlain who had managed to arrange $100,000 in finance for the
Rote Drei
, and MI6’s air intelligence officer in Berne, Air Commodore Freddie West. In 1947 the Swiss put other members of the
Rote Drei
on trial and a police witness, Inspector Charles Knecht, told the court that the Radó network had spied for Britain as well as Russia.
²⁹⁶

More light was shed on the British connection to the
Rote Drei
by Hans Rudolf Kurz, a lawyer who joined the Swiss defence ministry in 1946 and became its deputy director. In 1972 Professor Kurz published a review of Swiss intelligence operations during the war in which he stated that Otto Pünter, one of Elizabeth Wiskemann’s sources, had begun building up a private intelligence network during the Spanish Civil War and supplied both the French and the British. He remained in contact with British intelligence during the Second World War, supplying microdot copies of German documents that found their way to Britain attached to postcards and letters sent by air mail to Portugal. His greatest success was to obtain details of the German V1 and V2 rocket research at Peenemunde from an Austrian scientist who had fled to Switzerland.
²⁹⁷

Constantine Fitzgibbon, an Irish-American who served in the British Army and then with US military intelligence during the war, has argued that the
Rote Drei
saved Russia from defeat at the hands of Germany in 1942. He maintains that such was the level of distrust by the Russians of intelligence emanating from Britain that the only way to convince them of its veracity was to supply it surreptitiously via the Lucy network. Fitzgibbon had been initiated into the Enigma secret at Bletchley Park as part of his intelligence training. He implies that if the Lucy network continued to operate
after the war it was because it suited Britain and America for it to do so. It was a means of feeding into the Soviet machine intelligence that they would trust and not recognise as emanating from the Western Allies. This raises interesting questions about the role of Klop and Nicholas Elliott. Were they on the outside, looking in, or had they effectively infiltrated it?
²⁹⁸

Klop’s Cold War duties in Switzerland also covered fears of undue Communist influence within the fledgling United Nations Organisation.

With the help of one of his Czech contacts, George Simunek he kept a particular eye on the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe. Myrdal had been a Social Democrat MP and his country’s trade minister from 1945 to 1947, when he came under fire for his close relations with the Soviet Union. He went on to win a Nobel Prize for economics. Klop also reported on Myrdal’s Russian special assistant, Evgeny Chossudovsky. He came from a Jewish merchant family who had fled the Soviet Union in 1921 when their property was confiscated after the Revolution. He had studied at Edinburgh University and married Rachel Sullivan, an Ulster Protestant, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. Some of his family had died in Auschwitz. His wife was believed by MI5 to have Communist sympathies.
²⁹⁹

Klop also played a part in the defection of the Czech chargé d’affaires in Berne, Dr Ivan Glaser-Skalny, who had been President Benes’s wartime aide-de-camp. He had strong connections with Britain – his brother Erik and step-sister Mila were British subjects. He resigned early in April 1948 following the coup in which the Communist Party seized control of his country, with Soviet backing, thus heightening the tension of the Cold War. Dr Glaser-Skalny publicly announced that he refused to support a government which ‘suppressed man’s most sacred rights’, and added: ‘I could not look decent people in the face if I represented such a Government.’
³⁰⁰
Behind the scenes he had discussed with
Klop the possibility that most of the staff of the Legation, including the minister Dr Jindrich Andrial and his wife Juliana would also defect. The prospect was particularly difficult for them because they faced leaving their children behind in Czechoslovakia. The response from the Foreign Office was distinctly offhand. They were not interested in Czech refugees and offered no encouragement to East Europeans wanting to escape their Communist regimes. The most they would do was grant temporary access to refugees who had visas for travel to the United States. Skalny was able to take advantage of this offer, married Mary Isabella Weir, daughter of Sir Cecil Weir, economic adviser to the Allied Control Commission in Germany, and then emigrated to America. His parents, Karol and Ludmilla were granted British citizenship.