Churchill's Spy Files

by Nigel West

  According to his story, prisoners in concentration camps were murdered. These bodies were dressed in Polish uniform, riddled with bullets and then placed in German frontier villages to provide evidence that the Poles had raided German territory.

  On their entry into Paris, the Americans discovered a former Tsarist Intelligence Officer called Elie Golenko who had since shortly before the war been engaged in intercepting Russian radio telephony. Before the collapse of France he did this work for the French, but, on the fall of France, he continued and handed the results to the Germans. In spite of this admission he made a not unfavourable impression on his American interrogators, who brought him to London for examination on technical matters and lodged him at Claridge’s. Golenko’s activities as interceptor of Russian traffic were known to us from Most Secret Sources and, after his arrival in this country, further evidence of the same kind was discovered which showed that he had also reported on Gaullist activities to the Germans. Golenko maintained that the Germans had wanted to take him with them when they evacuated Paris, but that he had eluded them. Most Secret Sources showed, however, that the Germans deliberately left him behind to perform a mission for them after the entry of the Allies. They prepared to leave a large sum of money for him and throughout September tried to make contact with him by wireless without success. In view of his failure to tell us essential parts of the truth, Golenko has, with the consent of the Americans, been arrested and transferred to our special interrogation centre.

  The Germans have continued their efforts to revive the activities of controlled spies in this country who have for some time been inactive and have re-opened contact with GELATINE, whom they have neglected for eight months.

  She has been told amongst other things to report on discord between British and Americans and on certain British factories. The Germans claim to have hidden two wireless sets in Belgium for the use of two spies controlled by us. As soon as their exact position is known it is hoped to operate them to continue the policy of deception.

  The German Sabotage Service is now taking to assassination on a larger scale. Three German agents have been arrested who admit that their mission was to murder German spies who were left behind in France and were believed to have gone over to the Allies. Another agent has been given the job of assassinating a French Deputy.

  The German Sabotage Organisation has been detected in Greece using a new disguise for its material. At the end of October twenty cardboard boxes were found among captured enemy ammunition labelled ‘Swedish Red Cross’, the contents being described as American dehydrated food and vegetables. In fact, each box contained about 100 lbs of high explosive. There is no evidence to show that the Swedish Red Cross in any way connived at this deceit.

  12 December 1944

  * * *

  The brevity of MI5’s reference to Cornelis Verloop did little justice to a professional spy who had certainly worked for the German intelligence services in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. According to his version, after his arrest in Holland on 2 October 1944, he had been a private detective and a member of the French Foreign Legion, but had abandoned the Allied cause after he had been detained by the Germans in Loos.

  Originally from The Hague, Verloop was transferred to Camp 020 in November 1944 and under interrogation told an astonishing story that began in April 1942 when he was recruited by the Abwehr IIIF as a low-level penetration agent based in Lille, posing as a resistant and denouncing members of Allied escape organisations in northern France. Among his victims was a Black Watch officer named Colson, a Polish colonel and a suspected member of the French Deuxieme Bureau. Colson later turned out to be Sergeant Harold Cole, a British deserter who would later be turned by the Abwehr and employed as an agent provocateur. He was shot dead in Paris in 1944 while attempting to evade arrest.1

  In February 1944 Verloop was transferred to Brussels, where his assignment was to follow a collaborator, Christiaan Lindemanns, who headed a resistance network in Holland, and expose anyone who came into contact with him.

  In May 1944 Verloop married a Dutch woman in Amsterdam and bought a cafe, but still remained active on behalf of the Abwehr until, in October 1944, he was arrested as he tried to cross the Allied lines near Breda. After being questioned at Turnhout, on 11 November 1944 he was sent to Camp 020, where he made a detailed confession which served to incriminate Lindemanns, the celebrated resistance leader and supposed Dutch patriot known as KING KONG because of his enormous size.

  Verloop was flown back from Croydon to Brussels for prosecution at the end of the following month but was later released from prison. Meanwhile Lindemanns, who was arrested on 28 October, was imprisoned at St Gilles prison in Brussels for five days and then transferred to Camp 020. Over a period of two weeks Lindemanns, a former wrestler, confessed to having been recruited by the Abwehr as an informer in May 1944 and admitted having betrayed members of the resistance and a British officer to his German controllers. According to one estimate, he bore direct responsibility for the arrest of 247 of his compatriots. He was returned to Holland in December 1944, but in July 1946 Lindemanns committed suicide with an overdose in Scheveningen prison’s hospital wing after he had been tried for treason and condemned to death.

  After his death there was considerable speculation that Lindemanns, who supposedly had gained advance knowledge of the Allied assault on Arnhem, might have betrayed the plan to his enemy contacts, and this was the version peddled by a former Dutch intelligence officer, Oreste Pinto, in his 1952 autobiography Spycatcher.

  In reality Lindemann’s Abwehr recruiter was Herman Giskes, who would also be interrogated at Camp 020 where he confirmed that Lindemanns had not mentioned any Allied plans relating to the Arnhem landings code-named MARKET GARDEN.

  Another Camp 020 inmate was Alfred Naujocks, an engineering graduate of Kiel University, the city where he had been born in 1911, who was arrested in France by the US Army in October 1944. Under interrogation Naujocks stated that he had joined the SS as a driver in 1941, and recalled having been sent with an SD colleague, Werner Goettsch, to Prague on a mission to assassinate the German politician Otto Strasser. He had failed on that occasion but in 1939 he had been entrusted with the task of fabricating the scene on the Polish frontier at Gleiwitz that would become Germany’s stage-managed bogus pretext for invasion. Two months later he was on the Dutch border to participate in the abduction of two hapless SIS officers, Major Richard Stevens and Sigismund Payne Best, who thought they were attending a rendezvous with a senior Luftwaffe officer who was scheming against the Nazis. Best and Stevens survived the war in a concentration camp.2

  Promoted by Heydrich, Naujocks conducted various counter-espionage and counter-black market investigations in Copenhagen and Brussels, but after some disagreement with his sponsor was posted to the 1st SS Panzer Division in Russia, where he was wounded. He re-joined the SD and was arrested by the US Army in France in October 1944.

  After his interrogation Naujocks was returned to Germany in September 1945 to be prosecuted by the Nuremberg tribunal, and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. He later escaped from detention, settled in Hamburg, where he granted an interview to the journalist Gunter Peis, and died in April 1966. Peis published his biography, The Man who Started the War, in 1960.3

  * * *

  One of the really fascinating cases mentioned by Petrie in this report is that of Colonel Elie Golenko, a 65-year-old former Russian officer, chief of counter-espionage in the 6th Imperial Army and playwright, who fell into American hands soon after the liberation of Paris. His personal history is quite extraordinary, and can be pieced together from his MI5 personal file, which records that he was found by an SCI unit and this gave him the code name LOTUS. When news of his appearance reached London in November, there was excitement at the Radio Intelligence Section, and Stuart Hampshire drafted a brief report for MI5’s John Stephenson on what was known of his activities when they had been picked up by intercept operators and circulated as ISK and PAIR d
ecrypts:

  This man is almost certainly identical with an agent who has been known from PAIR since 1942. In February of that year RSS heard a W/T link working between Stuttgart and Paris whom they eventually numbered 3/84 though it was originally identified by the reference 0/140. This link was read by GC&CS and messages sent over it were published in PAIR until 15 September 942. These messages showed that there was an agent in PARIS signing as G or GXE (e.g., 3/8413.6.1942 and 22.7.1942, ISOS 34603 and 3431&) who was forwarding to his controlling officers in Stuttgart the texts (translated into French) of alleged conversations between various official bodies in the USSR. It was subsequently agreed that since the conversations appeared to be genuine, the agent in question must therefore have been intercepting Russian R/T links. (eg, 3/84, 3 September 1942, ISOS. 37851). At the same time it seemed almost certain that the intercepted messages were sent ‘en clair’ and that the agent’s expertise lay in his knowledge of Russian rather than in his cryptographic skill. Very few messages were heard passing to this agent from his controllers, but there were enough to show that he was administered by Ast I Stuttgart (eg, the references to Schultze, in 3/84, 17-2M-2 and 26 February1942, ISOS 22374 and 23139), so by September 1942 it was the accepted doctrine that there was an agent at work in Paris intercepting Russian R/T traffic and translating it into French before forwarding the result with his comments to Ast Stuttgart on 3/84.

  At this point the publication of the messages passed on 3/84 as PAIR was suspended, though RSS continued to hear the service, and GC&CS continued to be able to read it; some time later GC&CS ceased to be able to read it and the messages were filed at RSS. This seems to have been the position from June 1943 but the exact date will be available at GC&CS. In February 1944, as a result of the merging of agent traffics in France in RSS’s group 17, the reference number of this link was changed from 3/84 to 17/128. This was the situation until the end of September 1944 when, after a month of fruitless calling by Stuttgart without any reply being made from the agent in Paris, RSS suspended their watch. It is clear from these facts that for the period September 1942 to June 1943 there are solved messages which may throw further light on the case; doubtless these will be readily available to you.

  It had always been assumed that the distribution of these messages within the Abwehr followed more generous lines. The publication of the messages passed by Stuttgart to Berlin on 2/49 during August and September 1944 gave force to this belief. Thus on 8 August 1944 Stuttgart forwarded to Berlin a message which it described as having been sent by an agent R.4927 by W/T from Paris on the previous day. This message was then quoted in French and followed strictly the pattern of G’s messages of 1942 which had appeared on 3/84. It was marked to Mil. Amt B for passing to the teleprint station HXWX (known to be Warsaw) for information (see ISK.112488).

  The inference was that G and R.4927 were one and the same. Further messages showed that R.4927 was highly valued by Stuttgart, that he was in receipt of assignments from Mil. Amt C-R (Operational intelligence East, Russian department), and that he was employed, presumably as a cover, on the staff of the German Army news-sheet Soldat in Westen. (See 2/49, 11.8.1944, 18.9,1944, 28.9.1944. and 30 September 1944 ISK.112167, 117560, 118650 and 118061).

  There seems, then, to be sufficient information to establish whether Golenko is in fact the same as the PAIR character G or GXE @ R. 4927. But apart from the historical interest of the identification, we are anxious to know whether Golenko can throw light on any similar activities in Eastern Europe by other White Russians and in particular whether General Turkul was or is concerned.

  Initial interviews with Golenko revealed his unusual background. After the revolution he moved to France and became editor of Radio Nice et Mediterranee. He also wrote L’Institut Catholique et le Cardinal Bauirillart and founded L’Ami de Livre. As an amateur radio technician he had monitored Russian conversations on Russian radio-telephone links to keep himself well informed on events in the Soviet Union, and when war had broken out in 1939 the French government employed him in the same capacity at an intercept site at Rennes. After the armistice he moved back to Paris and installed his apparatus in the rue Reaumur under the sponsorship of three German officers. Evidently his product was considered sufficiently highly valued to merit a direct teleprinter link to Hitler’s headquarters, and when the Soviets introduced a scrambler, Golenko assisted German engineers in the construction of a device to descramble the traffic. However, as the Allies approached Paris in July 1944 the Germans departed and Golenko went into hiding, adopting the name Gobelin, until he could make contact with the American Signal Corps and offer his services.

  An OSS officer, Captain Ben Welles, escorted Golenko to London in November 1944, flying from Paris to Bovingdon, and accommodated him in room 607 at Claridge’s until he underwent interrogation by MI5, resulting in this summary:

  1. Golenko is a former Procureur Militaire in the Russian Imperial Army who was counterespionage chief of the 6th Army in Helsingfors until the Russian Revolution. He was then asked by the White Russian general, Denikin, to raise a volunteer army, in which Golenko served as Procureur Militaire. At the end of Denikin’s campaign he was for a short time commander of the fortress of Sebastopol and finally embarked before the Russian advance on a Greek vessel. On his arrival in Athens he spent some six months creating a Greek secret police against Communism, and then went on to Constantinople, where there was a large White Russian colony.

  2. He stayed here until early 1922, working as teacher and secretary to a White Russian refugee committee. Then, on the invitation of Cardinal Gaspari, he went to the Vatican to advise a Catholic Mission about to leave for Russia to investigate the famine there. After some four months in the Vatican he went on to Rome and covered the Genoa Conference, attended by leading Allied statesmen, as a journalist, specialising in Bolshevik questions. He was arrested by the Italian police because of his facial resemblance to a White Russian terrorist who was believed to be contemplating an attempt on the Bolshevik delegation. There was at first some question of handing him over to the Bolsheviks, but he managed to obtain his release and returned to Constantinople, where he stayed until the end of 1922.

  3. As counter espionage chief in Helsingfors he had suppressed anti-French and anti-Poincare press propaganda and drawn up new legislation regulating the press. For these services rendered Poincare invited him to Paris and arranged for him to enter the Idris bar – it was then possible for foreign lawyers to practise there. This seemed not very lucrative, so that instead Golenko worked as an expert consultant on company law, and later as journalist and playwright. From about 1927 to about 1930 he edited the periodical Radio Nice et Mediterranae. In 1931 he became president of the association L’Ami du l’Avre, a Catholic literary society with some anti-Bolshevist tendencies. From 1936 onwards he was a prominent official of the Dispensaires Parisiens de Nuit, a chain of poor peoples’ dispensaries launched under the patronage of Mme. Albert Lebrun, wife of the last president of the Third Republic. Through this lady he made the acquaintance of leading politicians, among them Georges Bonnet, French Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of war.

  4. From 1926 onwards Golenko had studied the technical side of radio. From about 1935 when Russia set up a radio telephone network, he had, for his own edification, listened in to conversations over this network.

  5. He affirms that whilst he was engaged on this pursuit before the war he received no propositions from the French or any foreign government to act as their agent by monitoring Russian radio telephone conversations. He thinks most governments were unaware of the possibilities of such monitoring, and says that he himself had discovered it only by accident.

  6. About five days after the outbreak of war, however, he was asked by Georges Bonnet, French Foreign Secretary, to monitor these conversations on behalf of the French Government. Thereafter his work was passed direct to the French Foreign Office. He had one assistant, whose name he cannot remember.

  7. Bonnet had become int
erested in Golenko’s monitoring system after the failure of his negotiations, together with the British, for the conclusion of a pact with Russia. From this failure Bonnet had retained a violent distrust of the Russian Government.

  8. In September 1939 Golenko’s department was sent to Rennes and worked here until the Germans arrived in June 1940. On the very day of their arrival two German staff officers came to Golenko’s flat, where all his apparatus was installed. He was ordered to stay in the flat and guarded there by two Gestapo men. He was told that he must continue his work on behalf of the Germans, but for the time being must wait for the arrival of a German officer from Paris, who would give him orders. This official did not, however, arrive.

  9. Some two weeks later Golenko was therefore taken by his Gestapo guards to the Hotel Majestic, Paris, where, in an office on the second or third floor, he saw a Major Betticher (phonetic), aged about 45. This man was not a radio specialist, but apparently a counter espionage official. He later transferred to Room No. 15, Hotel Lutetia, Paris.

  10. Betticher let Golenko know that the Germans had a very exact and detailed file on Golenko’s activities containing full reports on his arrest of a German espionage network in Helsingfors in 1916. Betticher then told Golenko that he must consider himself under German orders and must start work as soon as he received instructions from Berlin. Meanwhile he was to return to Rennes.

  11. Golenko says that this proposal was made courteously, but that he could not do otherwise than accept; in view of his anti-German work in the last war the Germans would otherwise have had no compunction in deporting him to Germany.