by Andrew Cook
They were left alone by a deferential Governor, and ‘Robinson’ began to make casual conversation.
‘Is the confinement irksome to you?’
‘Naturally.’ I looked him straight in the face. ‘I am a philosopher. Kismet, Captain.’
‘Oh – ho’, he exclaimed. ‘You address me as Captain. Wherefore this knowledge? We have never met.’
‘No’, I replied. ‘But I have associated too long with various types of army officer not to be able to detect a British cavalry officer. Formerly of an Hussar regiment, I take it?’ [Kell was in the South Staffordshire Regiment]
He laughed for some time…
How could Graves stay inside after this? It would be like keeping Sherlock Holmes banged up. They immediately reached a gentlemen’s agreement and Graves changed sides. The following day the Lieutenant-Governor escorted his distinguished prisoner by train to London and handed him over to ‘Captain Robinson’. Graves stayed overnight at the Russell Hotel before keeping a luncheon appointment with Robinson at Morley’s Hotel in Trafalgar Square.
There another gentleman joined us – a Mr Morgan, whom I easily judged and afterwards knew to be of the English Secret Service. Presently Morgan told me that I was to drive with Captain Robinson to Downing Street that afternoon.
‘One of our ministers wishes to see you’, he explained.
There follows a highly unlikely interview with Sir Edward Grey.
It is all preposterous. Graves got out of jail early, as all model prisoners may, and did, as he says, go to America. Whether or not anyone, either German or English, thought of employing him on a ‘mission’ there is doubtful. According to Steinhauer, ‘most of the letters and telegrams he sent from Glasgow contained nothing but requests for money, which is always the way with these swindlers’.21 And an SSB ‘List of persons to be arrested in case of war’ drawn up in July 191422 contains his name, marked ‘in America’.23 But by 1914 he, at least, knew or had been told about Mr Morgan.
In the summer of 1912 Melville was on the trail of a Royal Navy gunner who would later be charged with ‘communicating information prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state… useful to an enemy’. Warrant Officer George Charles Parrott, aged forty-five, was in charge of the rifle range at the Naval Gunnery School at Chatham, where he lived with his wife in a private house at Alexandra Road, and was officially stationed on HMS Pembroke further along the coast at Sheerness. According to his commanding officer, he was ‘an exceptionally smart man’.24 Some time before, he had become friendly with a language teacher called Hentschel from Sheerness. Parrott, ace marksman, boasted also what was then called ‘a keen eye for the ladies’. He began an affair with Mrs Hentschel, an Englishwoman née Riley. Later his defence was that Hentschel had told his wife to seduce him so that he could blackmail Parrott into spying.25 If this was true, Parrott risked jail and dismissal from the service after twenty-seven years rather than have Mrs Parrott discover his infidelity. It seems unlikely. Whatever his motive, he agreed to provide Hentschel with information, and did so from 1910 onwards.26
Eventually the two spies fell out over money. Parrott claimed that he was being cheated. Maybe Mr Parrott’s ardour for Mrs Hentschel was cooling too. Anyway, he began freelancing direct to Germany, and Hentschel, annoyed, communicated anonymously with the British Admiralty.
In July of 1912 Parrott obtained leave to visit Devonport. A Warrant Officer was not allowed to leave the country without permission, which he made no attempt to obtain. He set off from Sheerness Dockyard, accompanied by a lady, on the train to Sittingbourne, where she disembarked. He carried on to Dover. At Dover he was stopped as he tried to board the Ostend boat. At first he claimed to be a civilian. Then, confessing his identity, he explained that he had to meet a lady at Ostend at 8.00 p.m.
The person he was really going to meet was either Steinhauer, or another officer of the German Secret Service; it was all prearranged by an intercepted telegram from ‘Seymour’ (Parrott) to Richard Dinger in Berlin. Steinhauer used that name, and on the matter of the actual trip to Ostend the German Meisterspion may be less than trustworthy as his account of Parrott’s trip to Ostend is pretty much identical to the one Melville gave in court. However, Steinhauer claims to have been in Dover, shadowing Parrott to the continent in case he was really a double agent:
Shortly afterwards the detective let him go aboard the steamer. Parrott did not notice what I had already seen – something that told me his fate was sealed. I had been hanging around – easy enough with a big crowd of people such as travel by the Ostend boat in summer-time – when I noticed, behind a pillar in the waiting room, a quiet, keen-eyed man who followed Parrott with his eyes and missed nothing.
Scarcely had Parrott gone up the ship’s gangway than the detective went to the man behind the pillar and greeted him unob trusively. The pair of them followed Parrott aboard and then, as I caught a good sight of the second man, I nearly fell backwards with fright. In spite of his excellent disguise, of which he was a master, who should I recognise but my former friend, the famous Superintendent Melville of Scotland Yard!
…I should have liked to warn him but it was utterly impossible. I knew too well that any attempt on my part would only make it worse, for the moment Melville caught sight of me any uncertainty they may have harboured about Parrott’s guilt would have vanished instanter.
Steinhauer followed Melville and the detective, and Parrott, onto the boat. Months later at Parrott’s trial, we find a retired, but unusually vigilant, former policeman appearing as a witness.
Mr William Melville, of Clapham, formerly a Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, said that he was at Dover on July 13th, and saw the defendant go on board the boat. The witness also went, reaching Ostend about 8.30. On leaving the boat and passing through the railway station the defendant was joined by a man. There was no mutual recognition or handshaking; the stranger, evidently a foreigner, sidled up to the defendant. The foreigner was about 35 years of age. The witness thought that he was a German. They walked off together and went through various back streets into the fishing quarter of the town, finally coming out on the promenade. As they walked the foreigner looked round several times. They sat down on two chairs in a remote place where no one was about. At 9.25 several persons came along, and the defendant and the foreigner got up and moved about 50 yards to another retired position. They remained chatting until 10.15 when the other man got up and hurriedly walked away. The defendant remained sitting for a few minutes longer, and then he got up and walked away too. The witness followed him through various streets to the Place d’Armes, in the centre of the town, where the defendant entered a cigar shop and bought a box of cigars. There he entered a café, afterwards going towards the Dover boat, which he reached about 11 o’clock. The witness saw him on board but did not travel by the same boat.27
It is the only post-Special Branch court appearance that we know of by Melville, and it could well be that he had seen Steinhauer on that boat and knew that Steinhauer had seen him. If so, his appearance was a signal, almost a challenge to his German opposite number.
Quite soon after the trip to Ostend, Warrant Officer Parrott was sacked on Admiralty orders following an official inquiry. He and his wife moved to Battersea, to Juer Street off Parkgate Road near the Albert Bridge, and he began to send and receive mail through a newsagent’s shop across the river in Chelsea. He made regular trips to Germany.28 In October or November he visited Hamburg. In November, the lodgings in Battersea were raided. Bank books were found; as a Warrant Officer he would have been paid around £20 a month, but there were records of mysterious deposits to his account as well as proof of the trip to Germany, and thirty-five guineas in cash in a writing desk. The formidable Mrs P had a word with the searchers and the guineas stayed put.29
Parrott, in the dock, underestimated the strength of the case against himself. He came up with cock-and-bull stories about who the man at Ostend was (someone apologising for the nonappearance of his
date, a lady picked up at the Palace Theatre) and about questions he had promised to answer concerning the Firth of Forth (for a newspaper article). Earlier he had told the police that he met no one in Ostend, but he had been ‘protecting the identity of a lady’. The more excuses he made, the deeper the hole he dug himself into. The jury took only half an hour to find him guilty. Fortunately for him, the unlikely story of the seductive Mrs Hentschel had seized the imagination of Mr Justice Darling, who said ‘You abused the trust which was placed in you… Of any one in the service of the Crown it is impossible to imagine a graver offence than that…’ and then sentenced him to four years, rather than the possible seven, of penal servitude because ‘I think you were probably entrapped’.30
There was a sequel. Hentschel went to Australia and in Steinhauer’s account ‘for some time money was sent to him to keep him quiet’. Hentschel’s contact in Berlin was Colonel Torner – Steinhauer himself. For several months German Secret Service funds leaked unproductively to Hentschel’s antipodean hideaway; but one day in June 1913, an item appeared in a London paper stating that Colonel Torner, of the German General Staff, had been lost overboard in mid-Atlantic. Hentschel received a cutting in the mail. He wrote a threatening letter from Sydney to Berlin, to the effect that he was not born yesterday. His wife had had diphtheria; the medical bills were huge. He wanted either a stream of remittances, or ‘re-engagement under a different name, but the same salary’. If he didn’t get either, he would go to the English newspapers or the English security services. And then ‘Germany will have a startling row’.
It was not the most diplomatic way to approach an employer. His letter was ignored. In October 1913 Hentschel turned up at Chatham Police Station and surrendered himself as a spy. He wanted to be arrested, he said. They told him to push off. So he went to London and walked into the police station in Old Jewry where somebody took him seriously and he obtained an audience with concerned authority, probably Cumming and/or Kell. In exchange for money he was able, according to Steinhauer, to tell them all about ‘his activities with Parrott from 1910 onwards’. He must have told them everything he knew, because when he appeared in court the prosecution – led, once more, by Archibald Bodkin – declined to pursue the case. Karl Hentschel and his wife, under her maiden name of Riley, remained on the list of persons to be jailed in case of war. At the outbreak of hostilities his address was listed as unknown and she was removed from the ‘jail’ list and marked ‘search’. Hentschel, at least, had left to start a new life elsewhere.
By the end of 1912 Special Branch (which retained the power of arrest that MI5 officers did not have), Cumming, Kell and Melville were established in separate offices within half a mile of each other, strung along the north bank of a bend in the River Thames. Special Branch was of course at Scotland Yard, on the southern end of Whitehall close to the Houses of Parliament. Cumming was based a few hundred yards further north, high in a Victorian Gothic warren of offices called Whitehall Court that overlooked the river, from which he ran SIS – Secret Intelligence Service – agents overseas. Beyond Whitehall Court, past Charing Cross, the Thames swings east and in the 1920s the old Adelphi building, with its vaults and passages, ranged along the riverbank. In September 1912 Kell moved a few hundred yards west of Temple to the third floor of Watergate House, York Buildings, Adelphi. MI5 mail was forwarded from ‘Kelly’s Letter Bureau, 54 Shaftesbury Avenue’ (Kelly was a name he often used.) By the summer of 1913 he was a major with three captains working under him: Drake, Holt-Wilson and Lawrence. Drake was the one Melville would have most to do with. The other two gathered, filed and sorted information, but Drake was involved with action on known agents and counter-agents.
The German Secret Service officers, compared with the British, had a fatal flaw: arrogance. The glass ceiling of class was present in the SSB too, but Melville was respected. When, in 1909, an extra layer of management was introduced and his involvement with agents overseas diminished, MacDonogh took pains to include him in the new MI5 set-up; he knew the value of his broad experience and took his opinions seriously, and so did Kell. Melville was allowed to run his own show31 in Temple Chambers, later with the help of Regan and, from 1913 onwards, another ex-policeman called Fitzgerald.
Steinhauer, on the other hand, bemoaned more than once the stupidity of his superiors in Berlin. The notorious strutting conceit of the Prussian military and naval top brass, personified in Kaiser Bill, seems really to have existed. Why else would German intelligence have refused to listen to the common-sense view of an experienced policeman like Steinhauer? They were completely taken in by Wilhelm Klauer: a puny, unqualified, Portsmouth tooth-puller who lived off the earnings of his wife, a prostitute. He offered to spy for Germany. Steinhauer, having looked into the man’s background and mode of life, advised against having anything to do with him, but Berlin went over his head and started sending him money. When Klauer (in England he was known as Clare) was asked for the results of the latest British torpedo trials, he asked his German hairdresser friend Levi Rosenthal to help. Rosenthal nodded wisely, appeared to go along with the plan, and told a friend of his – a town councillor – that he had been approached.
Not only had Rosenthal a sharp eye for a dangerous situation, but he was unable to read and write; Klauer could not have picked a more unsuitable partner in crime. Acting on instructions, Rosenthal strung him along; Klauer was watched by Melville & Co. and led into a trap. He got five years’ hard labour.
Steinhauer, by his own account, had no idea that Klauer had ever been hired, or arrested, or jailed; so when he went to Portsmouth to check up on him out of curiosity in June 1913, three months after the trial and the publicity, he almost got arrested.32
Klauer was otherwise insignificant, but MI5’s next major case was the most important spy the British had yet brought to justice. In Steinhauer’s view Frederick Adolphus Gould ‘was able for something like eleven years to forward to Germany more information on naval matters than all our other spies put together’. He was a tall, powerfully-built man who had spent twelve years in the German navy, and his real name was Schroeder. But he spoke English like a native, for his mother was English. According to Steinhauer, Gould had worked for the German Secret Service in the 1890s and stopped, and had then been reintroduced to them by an Englishman of dubious motive called Stevens. Stevens worked for France and Russia and around 1902 obtained some British naval information which he induced Gould to offer to Germany. Steinhauer claims that he frightened Stevens into the background by tricking him into thinking that Melville and Special Branch were onto him, waited a while and then turned his own attention to Gould. It was Gould who had been showing Steinhauer around Chatham Dockyard in 1902 on the occasion when Le Queux spotted the German policeman.
Walking boldly into the enemy’s lair, so to speak, was typical of Gould. He was just a little too reckless. But his material was reliable and informative, and in 1908 he persuaded the German Secret Service to set him up as landlord of a pub at Chatham. This was the Queen Charlotte, from which he passed on tidbits of gossip from the naval ratings who were his customers until the end of 1913.
According to Steinhauer, Schroeder worked with Stevens all along, and his decision to leave the Queen Charlotte came when their partnership was dissolved. Stevens’s involvement begs questions, but at any rate Gould’s recklessness now proved his downfall, because the pub’s incoming tenant found incriminating documents in the attic and informed the authorities. The papers included maps and a letter to ‘Dear St’ (Steinhauer) asking for money.
If Schroeder had indeed parted company with Stevens he was continuing in business on his own, because at his new address at Merton Road, mail was still passing to and from the German Secret Service. Through an intercepted telegram it was learned that Mrs Schroeder would soon be delivering material to ‘Schmidt’ (a Steinhauer alias) in Brussels. She was arrested at Charing Cross Station.
In her possession were found an English Admiralty chart of Spithead, a gunn
ery drill book, and certain confidential drawings dealing with the engine rooms of battleships which had clearly been obtained by someone connected with espionage.
Schroeder, entirely ignorant that his wife was in custody, was also arrested shortly afterwards. When the police came to search his house they discovered more fatal documents. Valuable as he had been as a spy, he had been unutterably simple when it came to destroying traces of his guilt. The police found in his possession a paper containing a list of thirty-odd highly important questions relating to the English navy which no man in his sane senses would have kept about him.33
Steinhauer’s account must be treated with caution as it was edited and given a decidedly pro-British, pro-Melville slant by Sidney Felstead seventeen years after these events. Felstead’s account was approved by Basil Thomson, the jingoistic Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner in charge of the CID from 1913. Readers were kept in ignorance of MI5 or the Special Section within it, as Steinhauer refers to Special Branch, and Melville, but never explains exactly who Melville is working for.
Steinhauer’s MI5 file shows that Gould’s capture was the most important so far.
In March 1914 after Gould’s arrest, F Reimann [Steinhauer], a traveller in jute, wrote to William Schutte, son of Steinhauer’s agent Heinrich Schutte, stating that he was coming to England and asking whether it was worth while coming down to Portland. The reply was to be sent to the Wilton Hotel, but on 29th March Reimann wrote to the hotel from Antwerp asking the management to forward letters to Hamburg, and it is doubtful whether he ever came.
His correspondence with agents here during the latter half of March shows that he was aware of danger in coming here. The Times’ report on the Gould trial mentioned the following documents:
Incriminating letters signed ‘St’ dated 1904.
Friendly letters signed ‘St’ dated 1914.
A picture postcard photograph of Gould’s correspondent dated 8th December 1913.
