Schemmel gave a clear and concise exposition of the internal situation of Germany and told Best that, on behalf of the general, he could guarantee an end to the war, provided the British were willing to give Germany an honorable peace. Stevens and Best gave Schemmel a non-committal answer, pending instructions from London.
Best had given the Germans a clandestine wireless set to facilitate communication. The Germans radioed their messages to the communications center of British Intelligence in London, where they were received by two wireless operators who identified themselves as Inman and Walsh. From London, the messages were relayed to Best.
Best and Stevens were instructed by London to “pursue the matter with energy” and to deal with the Germans sympathetically, but cautiously, to save His Majesty’s Government embarrassment in the event of failure. Another inconclusive meeting was held at Venlo on November 7 (there was still no general) and still another was arranged for November 9. This one was to be decisive.
The morning of that day was dull and cold; rain hung in the autumn air. The weather dampened Best’s enthusiasm and he was also disturbed by the fact that for the last few days he had been trailed by an unpleasant looking stout man, though he did not connect this shadow with the plot.
At 10 o’clock he went to Stevens’ house and found that his colleague was also uneasy. The major went to a drawer, took out two Browning automatics, loaded them, gave one to Best and slipped the other in his pocket. While they waited for Klop to arrive, the Germans came in on the radio, on a direct beam instead of via London. Best expected another cancellation, but this turned out to be a routine request for a change in the hours of transmission. Best concluded everything was going well.
Klop arrived and, driven by Best’s driver, a Dutchman named Jan Lemmens, the party proceeded to Venlo at a leisurely pace. As they drove, their conversation drifted to the possibility of invasion and Stevens did a most unusual thing, especially on this sort of mission. He took a pencil and a piece of paper and jotted down a list of the contacts he would have to get out of Holland in the event of invasion. Whether or not the list was still on him at the climax of this adventure only Stevens knew. Best thinks Stevens succeeded in destroying it.
It was shortly after four when the party arrived at the rendezvous, the red-brick Café Backus, just two hundred yards from the frontier. Nobody was in sight, but Best noticed that, for the first time in his experience, the frontier barrier on the German side had been lifted.
Best spotted Major Schemmel on the second-floor veranda of the Backus and saw him giving a signal with a sweeping move of his right arm.
He thought the major was beckoning him to drive up to the café but, just as he was bringing his car to a stop, he heard an outburst of shouting and shooting. A large, green, open car drove up to the café, and stopped as it hit the bumper of his own automobile. It was packed with men, two of whom sat on the hood firing submachine guns.
Stevens leaned over and said: “I am afraid our number is up, Best!” Next moment both Britons were subdued and handcuffs snapped on their wrists. With little courtesy, they were marched into Germany, as the frontier barrier slowly came down behind them.
The driver, Lemmens, brought up the rear, but there was no sign of Klop. In the commotion, the young officer tried to escape, but just as he was vanishing under a bush, a German spotted him. A machine gun opened up and the youthful “Cloppens” was mortally wounded.
What Best and Stevens should have suspected long before, since the Germans had managed their end of the plot with remarkable clumsiness, was now made abundantly evident: their fabulous plot was a German trap. The idea had originated in Heydrich’s fertile brain. Its execution was assigned to a rising young star in the Sicherheits Dienst, Werner Schellenberg, only twenty-eight years old, a cold and calculating intellectual with a consummate talent for secret service work.
Schellenberg was “Major Schemmel.” “I admit,” Best later wrote, “that he had completely taken Stevens and me in when we met him in Holland, but this was not really surprising since he was exceptionally well-informed and had been well-briefed for the occasion. Besides, the man was a natural conspirator, who, as events showed, kept faith with no one.”
Heydrich had scored a fantastic scoop although he failed to reach the German Opposition. Stevens and Best were merely at the fringes of the greater plot, knew none of its real leaders and few of its details, so they could reveal nothing about it during their prolonged interrogation by Schellenberg. But they were at the very heart of conventional espionage efforts aimed at Germany, the spiritus rectors of the British spy network operating inside the Reich.
The incident exposed the inadequacy of the British secret service, which was due to the incompetence of key personnel. The naïveté with which Stevens and Best fell into Schellenberg’s trap indicated that they were by no means the ideal choices for such delicate jobs. They were tired adventurers, over-ripe for retirement.
The blow Schellenberg had dealt had a frightful impact on Whitehall’s approach to the secret war in that it dissuaded the disillusioned and embittered British Secret Service from ever again dealing with even the most deserving Germans who came bearing such gifts. But at the same time, it also had a salutary effect. It led to the long overdue, complete reorganization of the British intelligence setup.
The whole incident shook British complacency to its roots, but the ultimate shock came from a venomous little touch administered by Schellenberg. Even as Stevens and Best were being safely salted away in the Gestapo cellars in Prinz Albrecht Strasse, Schellenberg used the wireless set-up they had created to send one last message to London. It read:
“Communication for any length of time with conceited and silly people is dull. You will understand, therefore, that we are giving it up. You are hereby heartily greeted by your affectionate German opposition.
The Gestapo.”
In London the message was duly set down by the British operator who acknowledged it with a polite “Thank you” and, as usual, added his name—Walsh.
6
The Great Carillon
Early in 1937, Hitler had given Canaris the green light to establish an espionage network in Great Britain, and the delighted admiral set to work at once. Operating responsibility fell to Colonel Karl Busch, a veteran intelligence officer who headed the Abwehr’s Anglo-American branch.
Busch set up not one, but two, separate rings in Britain. The first was made up of relatively petty agents. It included hundreds of German maedchen who were planted as domestic servants in the homes of important Britons. Like other spies, these girls were trained at the Abwehr school in Hamburg where they learned such diverse things as how to prepare English roast beef and how to operate a wireless transmitter.
Busch regarded this ring as useful, but expendable. It would gather handy information, but its major purpose was to act as a gigantic decoy. Busch expected that it would so absorb the attention of the woefully-undermanned British counter-espionage agencies that the second, and far deeper, ring would go undetected.
Most of the members of Ring No. 2 were dormant. They were to establish themselves in key positions in Britain but to do no peacetime work unless they came across something of the utmost importance. Only when war itself came were they to unpack their ingenious transmitters and go into action.
By 1939, both rings were functioning according to plan. And both were known to British counter-spies, thanks to a little hairdresser of Dundee, Scotland. Mrs. Jessie Jordan, a middle-aged, middle-class widow, led a humdrum middle-of-the-road life on Kinlock Street in Dundee. She was a Scotswoman, and average in every respect: homely, industrious and insufferably dull. Her beauty parlor was quite a favorite with the ladies of the neighborhood.
Mrs. Jordan was also a favorite of the mailman because she was always most generous with tips. She had reason for being so open-handed. People like Mrs. Jordan usually receive very little mail, but hers was exceptionally heavy, a fact that the mailman reported to his super
iors. His report wound up on the desk of a big, bluff, broad-shouldered, stern-looking man, Colonel Hinchley Cooke, in Room 505 of the War Office. It was the room which housed MI.5, the counter-espionage service.
Mrs. Jordan was put under discreet surveillance, and soon Cooke learned some interesting facts about her. He found out that she was the widow of a German who had died fighting for the Kaiser in the First World War. Then it transpired that several times in 1937 she had gone surreptitiously to Germany. Although she said all of her relatives lived on the British Isles, she was receiving letters from the United States, France, Holland and even South Africa; and she was forever posting letters to all sorts of faraway places.
Mrs. Jordan’s mail was quietly opened, and what Colonel Cooke read in those letters convinced him that the trim widow was the central maildrop of a broad German espionage net. She was arrested, tried and given a four-year sentence.
As is usual in such cases, suspect cards were prepared of people supposed to be in the ring; their identity was revealed by the surveillance of Mrs. Jordan, though they were not arrested. These persons were then shadowed and led the counter-espionage agents to still other suspects. In due course, the Jordan case yielded scores of suspects and Colonel Cooke was breathing a bit easier.
Fortunately for Cooke, Busch’s formidable rings were showing their hands in still other ways. In Portslade, in Sussex Downs, lived a retired officer of the British army, Ervine Batley, who had an unusual hobby. An enthusiast of Sussex Downs, he became an expert of the region and spent years preparing a series of unique contour maps which became famous.
One day in 1938, a young man knocked at his door, and introducing himself candidly as a German tourist on a hiking tour, asked Captain Batley for some of his famous maps. The captain tipped off the constable at Portslade and MI.5 was called. Nothing was done to interfere with the young tourist’s hike, but he was shadowed from then on. He led Colonel Cooke’s men to a cluster of German agents.
At about the same time, a British subject named Joseph Kelly was caught red-handed spying for the Germans. He was a bricklayer and helped in the construction of several new defense installations. He had access to blueprints and sold some of them to the Nazis. Before he was arrested, he also led MI.5 to several of his associates. Among them was Walther Reinhardt, a German intelligence director serving as consul in Liverpool. Reinhardt was expelled in due course, but before he left he also helped to enlarge the file of cards in the office of Colonel Cooke.
Far more important than these and similar haphazard leads was a source MI.5 developed laboriously as an inside job. From the fallen spies, Colonel Cooke found out that German agents were trained in the Abwehr school in Hamburg. MI.5 decided to smuggle a plant into the school. The man they picked for the job was a young British linguist.
He managed to get a job in the Abwehr school, teaching colloquial English to German spies about to go to England. From then on, of course, MI.5 was able to accord every new German agent arriving in England the reception due such special tourists. They were not arrested, but all were placed under surveillance. A known spy-at-large can be watched and can be fed misleading information, whereas, if he is arrested, he is likely to be replaced and it may take some time before his replacement can be identified. In this particular case, a wholesale detention of the youthful linguist’s pupils would have made the Abwehr suspicious of the tutor himself.
This daring young man had several means of alerting MI.5 to incoming Germans. His favorite method of warning developed out of his native sense of humor. Agents going on a resident mission had to take a course from him in English habits and customs. He told them that those staid Britons were suckers for respectability, and, being a nation of shopkeepers, measured respectability in terms of pounds, shillings and pence.
He suggested, therefore, that when they arrived in Britain, they take their money to the nearest post office and open a postal savings account. But, he cautioned, it was not enough to do just that. One’s respectability had to be demonstrated, and the people who were the most important to convince were the police. Therefore, he suggested that they lose their passbooks and report the loss to the police, who would thus learn they were men of means. At least a few of his pupils followed his advice. For this reason, anyone who was unfortunate enough to lose his savings book and to report it entered the select suspect list of MI.5.
From such diverse sources, MI.5 compiled a roster of German spies. On the eve of the war, MI.5 and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch had a fairly good idea of the makeup of the two rings. All told it was estimated there were a minimum of three thousand German espionage sharks in Britain, of whom some four hundred journeymen belonged to Colonel Busch’s Ring No. 1 and thirty-five key agents to his Ring No. 2. The rest were minor agents, spies-at-large, free-lancers, informants, pro-Nazi busybodies or dupes.
If MI.5 and the Special Branch were doing such a superb job, it was partly because the old system was well oiled, and partly because those who now administered it were exceptionally competent men. MI.5 was headed by one of Britain’s outstanding espionage specialists, the formidable Staffordshire squire Sir Vernon George Waldegrave Kell, one of the authentic mystery men of the world. Though he spent some forty-odd years (some of them very odd, indeed) in his country’s service, he remained totally unknown to his fellow countrymen.
At New Scotland Yard, Sir Norman Kendal and Commissioner Ronald Howe, stern-faced, fish-eyed, thin-lipped bosses of the Criminal Investigation Department, were General Kell’s opposite numbers. Out in the field, the real nemesis of foreign spies was Cooke, along with Assistant Commissioner Albert Canning, who headed Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, the organization that comes closest to the British idea of a secret political police. Addicted to striped suits and polka dot ties, and to an oversized Homburg pulled down over his brow, Canning could have been mistaken for a barrister.
When Hitler attacked Poland, both MI.5 and the Special Branch were alerted to stand by. On September 3, shortly before the expiration of the British ultimatum, the code word was flashed to the War Office and Scotland Yard. The great spy hunt was on. The job was superhuman. The suspect lists had grown to almost seventy-five thousand entries. Not all of these were spies, by any means, but the spies were in that crowd.
During the night from September 3 to 4, inspectors and special agents of Scotland Yard, with some two thousand detectives and uniformed policemen, made thousands of calls. Before the night was out, four hundred and thirty-five persons received polite invitations to accompany the officers to various centers prepared for their reception. In subsequent days, weeks and months, the cases of seventy-three thousand two hundred and thirty-five secondary suspects were scrutinized and five hundred and sixty-nine additional foreign agents were spotted.
With regard to some six thousand individuals, MI.5 and the C.I.D. were not quite sure, but these were not the times to give such people the benefit of the doubt. Habeas corpus was suspended for the duration. These suspected enemy agents had their movements strictly curtailed.
And the number of spies Canaris had sent to Britain was not much greater than the number of German spies Kell and Canning managed to catch. Colonel Busch’s two phenomenal spy rings were unceremoniously smashed, just when they were needed most. It was Canaris’ first major defeat.
Back in Germany, there was a man who looked exactly like a Hollywood actor playing the role of a German intelligence officer, Captain Herbert Wichmann. He was big and bluff, with a Prussian cropped head and dueling scars, heavy-set but agile, heavy-handed but alert, not exceptionally brilliant but industrious and efficient; the very prototype of the competent, hard-working, self-effacing German staff officer. He was chief of the British desk at the Abwehr. Within a few moments after the outbreak of war, Wichmann was sitting in a guarded communication room of the Hamburg wireless center, breathing down the neck of the radiomen who flashed prearranged signals to agents in Britain and France. The code word, repeated again and again at intervals, alerted h
is men to go into action at once, and to operate henceforth to the best of their abilities and according to their instructions, for better or for worse.
Captain Wichmann could not imagine, and had no reason to suspect, that virtually his whole British network was sitting, not at their wireless sets, but behind the bars of Wormwood Scrubs, the famous prison that MI.5 had taken over for the duration. So he was not surprised when answers began to come from their transmitters operated by radiomen of the British Secret Service. In long hours of meticulous practice, these Englishmen had learned to imitate the highly individualistic touch of each German on the Morse key. This characteristic touch is the basic identification mark of agents who operate transmitters. So perfect was the mimicry of the British substitutes that the Abwehr’s radio operators never found out the ruse.
The continued operation of a fallen spy’s radio is one of the favorite tricks of espionage, a ruse that is both old and common and yet hardly ever fails to be effective. The Germans coined the word Funkspiel for it; literally this means, “radio game.” That translation, however, does not express the picturesque quality of the German term. The word implies a mysterious carillon that rings out in the ether, sounding a Lorelei tune to mislead or entrap men who listen to it.
The great carillon resounded at the hands of British bell-ringers. The English continued this game for fifteen months, during which time Canaris felt safe and smug. He even boasted to Count Ciano of Italy of his formidable network in England and mentioned with particular pride a certain agent who was making up to twenty-five transmissions a day. As far as the Germans knew, only one of their key agents had been lost and even that, they thought, was due to an unfortunate accident.
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