by Nigel West
A most interesting report came from France connecting a German named Janker with a dancing academy at 4 Boulevard de Clichy and the Abbaye de Thelme restaurant, Place Pigalle, which was frequented by the dancer Amondarain. Between 15 and 20 January 1916 a Spanish dancing master of the Academy had met Janker in Madrid and had been recruited by him to spy in Paris. On leaving the building where the dancing-master had been interviewed by the Germans he met Adolfo Guerrero coming out. The address of the building was Calle Fortuno 5 (or 3). In a statement of November 1916 Guerrero corroborated this meeting but with some change of detail. The French were thanked and asked whether they could induce the Spanish dancing-master to come and give evidence at Guerrero’s trial, and also to find a witness who knew Arregui and had seen him in the company of von Krohn. But the Spanish dancing-master had been sent to Spain on some mission and had not returned.
Guerrero was tried on 13 July 1916 on the charges of having come to England to collect information and of having on or about 18 February communicated with a spy named Frederick Skjellas and he was sentenced to death. This sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment.
Ramona Amondarain was deported on 22 September 1916. She replaced Guerrero promptly and tried to force the Germans to employ her by stating that Guerrero had given her a tube of secret ink. She got hold of a French agent and took him to the German centre after having offered to procure good agents to work in France and England. The French Service was warned against her.
In September Guerrero confessed that he had been sent over by Arregui, whom he had visited once or twice at Calle Fortuny 5, von Krohn was present and the room contained a great number of maps and shipping lists. Guerrero was to have gone to Glasgow and Falmouth. He was to have communicated by letter using well-known phrases as code. He had written twice to Spain using the name Victor Guantas. Subsequently he gave information with regard to the secret ink used by the Germans. He carried in his pocketbook a piece of blotting paper about two inches square, this was impregnated with some salt, and a piece the size of a postage stamp, steeped in a very little water, would give the solution required. This ink had to be developed like a photographic plate. The Germans had substituted letters with messages in secret ink for newspapers marked in pencil, since so many of them were lost. The message was signed with the spy’s number and name. Guerrero had used the ink twice – in Paris to announce the arrival of Zippo, in London to announce his own arrival. The ink business he said was a new development.
Another way of packing the ink was to put the crystals in a metal tube. The British authorities had mistaken such tubes for 606 cologne. Guerrero had had one tube but had managed to dispose of it.
Letters were sent in duplicate, one to Scandinavia and one to Spain and they were checked against each other. Information was paid for separately according to its value, expenses were paid at the rate of £50 to £75 a month. Guerrero was compelled to open an account at Madrid and the Germans paid the money into it. The bank would send a cheque from Madrid and he would cash it at any bank which had an agent in Madrid.
In this second interview, Guerrero stated that he had no knowledge of code, the Censors detected it and it was too risky. Soon after he declared that he had written three or four letters to Madrid containing this code. It is a question whether these letters were written in arbitrary code or in secret ink. Guerrero also stated that the Germans meant to send over in February a number of demi-mondaines who were to get in touch with soldiers. He also knew of two or three Spanish agents who were coming, and some Germans in London frequented the Spanish Club which was pro-German. He had been told to rent a safe-deposit and to keep useful documents there. Three months after leaving Madrid he was to go to San Sebastian.
Guerrero had stated that he was the 154th spy to come to England during the war but he seems to have confused his serial number with the number of those who came.
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Frank L. Theodore Greite (alias Greitl, alias Greibe) claimed American citizenship but the embassy of the United States in London did not admit his claim. He stated that he was born at Brooklyn of a Dutch father and Danish mother. When war broke out he was in Germany. In April 1915 he was in Hamburg and registered with the police as a Prussian subject, nevertheless he obtained in Berlin an emergency passport as an American citizen and returned to the United States.
Early in July he got in touch with the French Oil Mill Machinery Company in Liqua, Ohio, and then came to Europe as their representative. He landed at Bordeaux in August, transacted genuine business on behalf of the company in France, and then came to England using introductions supplied by Mr French, an American and president of Robbe Freres, Paris.
Greite took a flat at 57 Connaught Street and settled there with Suzanne Dupont, a Frenchwoman who was engaged to a French officer then at the Front. Owing to information received from Charles van Ekeren, the bureau was expecting the arrival of one Theodore Greitl, a ship’s captain who would come via Rotterdam en route to the United States of America and would sign his telegrams Frank Greitl. On 8 October 1915 orders were issued to Hull, Folkestone and Tilbury for the arrest of this man on landing. The following day the vice-consul at Le Havre signalled that Frank L. T. Greibe, an American traveller in the oil-cake business, had crossed on 8 October 1915 and was bound for Hull.
Frank Greite applied on 13 October for a permit to go to Holland, at the suggestion of the bureau he was put off for a few days while arrangements were made for his arrest and interrogation at Scotland Yard. He was seen by the assistant commissioner on the 23rd, proved plausible and convincing, and was given a permit with the intimation that if he went to Germany he would not be allowed to return to England.
Greite returned to the United Kingdom on 2 December to open an office at 57 Connaught Street, Hyde Park; he went again to France on 4 January 1916 and returned ten days later via Dieppe and Folkestone, where he was held up but eventually allowed to proceed. An account of his journeys was furnished by the base commandant at Dieppe. The registry then suggested that Frank L. T. Greite was identical with the alleged spy, Theodore Greitl, but this was not admitted by G Branch. Again in February when he made a second application for a permit to go to Holland it was pointed out that he was travelling too much and that to restrict his travels to Holland was of no practical value. G2 considered that the man was harmless, and that his threat if he was long delayed to go to the United States of America and sail thence to Holland would just suit the bureau. Greite went to Holland on 15 March and returned on 25 March. Meanwhile several things had happened to call attention to him:.On 16 March the Censor submitted a curious telegram signed Suzanne Greite recalling him on business; on 22 March the port officer sent in an urgent report about his frequent travels; on 23 March the consul-general in Rotterdam wired to the Foreign Office that Frank Theodore Greitl, who had been reported as a spy last October and was probably a German agent, was returning to England.
On receipt of this message G Branch decided that he was to be well searched each time that he travelled, and detained if he could not produce evidence of doing genuine business. Thereupon the port officer detained Greitl and sent him to Scotland Yard. On interrogation Greite admitted that he had spent five years at school in Berlin, and then served as a ship’s boy and afterwards as a steward. He readily signed an authority for the examination of his banking account. This account did not seem to support his admitted expenditure of £100 per month, and it bore entries of cheques for £98 deposited in December and for £150 deposited in January 1916 without any details as to the source of payment. Greite declared that the sums represented money which he owned in Germany and which had been transmitted through a bank in Holland.
Greite was arrested and a search of his effects showed that he had in his possession the addresses of Christian Mulder and of Dikker, l’Oudeshaus, Amsterdam, apparently a dealer in old clothes. Mulder was a known German agent who had communication with Fernando Buschman and Peter Steunebrink.
As regards Dikker, lett
ers from him to Greite’s address were found to be addressed to the names of the two companies whom Greite represented. In one of these, dated 2 January 1916, J. Dikker instructed Greite in carefully veiled terms to write his secret messages across the open message and not between the lines; in another dated 23 February 1916, Dikker summoned him to Holland on the pretext of arranging for the sale of machinery there. Enquiry showed that Greite was the accredited agent of the two firms in America and that he had been to Liverpool and Hull on genuine business. The case against him depended upon obtaining proof of a criminal connection with Mulder and upon what could be ascertained with regard to Dikker. Richard Tinsley was set to work in Holland. Mulder, twice visited, denied all knowledge of Greite but wrote to Greite to warn him of the visits. Thereupon Suzanne Dupont returned to sender an old letter written by Mulder on 23 December 1915 which referred to the despatch of Netherlands Overseas Trust Circulars. Then Mulder wrote again asking for enquiries about this letter.
Interviewed by Richard Tinsley’s agent, Dikker stated that he knew Greite as a traveller for a well-known American firm. Dikker also wrote to Greite on 12 and 30 April complaining of the non-arrival of letters and hinting that pay would be stopped. The Rotterdamsche Bankvereeniging could give no clue as to the cheque for £58 except that it had been bought over the counter by a stranger. In May Greite himself supplied a clue. He promised one fellow-prisoner named Behan a large sum of money to procure his escape, and begged another fellow-prisoner named Wilhelmi, who seemed likely to be released, to go to Dikker and get him to invent an explanation of the two cheques that came from Germany. Wilhelmi, having completed this errand was to write to Greite using the password ‘Remember Helene’.
Acting on this information, one of Tinsley’s agents interviewed Dikker repeatedly; Dikker thereupon declared and also wrote letters to Greite to the effect that the two cheques represented payments for the sale of machinery on behalf of a third person, whose name however, he declined to give; Helene, he said, was a mutual girlfriend. Tinsley, who was then engaged on research into Brugman’s character and connections, of whom the principal was Alexander Blok, learned from van Spanje that Brugman had met a demi-mondaine named Helene Lemaitre with Blok at some restaurant and had there been asked to do some errand for Blok. Tinsley thereupon identified Greite’s Helen with Helene Lemaitre and pursued the clue. On being questioned Dikker acknowledged that he had introduced Greite to Blok, who was a buyer of foodstuffs for Germany, but denied that Blok was a spy or that he had had business relations with Greite. Van Spanje, however, who was seen talking to Blok, stated that Blok was a buyer for Germany and Dikker, who was Blok’s clerk, had sold two machines for the oil-press man, meaning Greite; Blok had then sent Greite a commission.
The solicitor undertaking Greite’s defence wrote, without consulting MI5, to Dikker in terms which conveyed the explanation given by Greite in examination as to the source of the two cheques. This was that they had been paid by his father-in-law Scheidemantel. The solicitor’s letter escaped notice in the post. In reply, Dikker forwarded in support of Greite’s defence two letters purporting to have been written by Scheidemantel. These documents, which arrived too late for the trial, furnished additional proof against Greite.
Before the evidence with regard to Greite’s connection with Dikker and the sending of the cheques was obtained, Sir Archibald Bodkin had pointed out that previous to two of the interrogations, Greite had not received the necessary caution, therefore his answers could not be used in evidence, and that the case was complicated further because he had done genuine business and the rules of evidence would exclude ‘grounds of suspicion’ only against Greite, except such grounds as fall within Regulation 18a. The case depended therefore upon proving that Mulder was a spy and his address a spy address, and for this purpose his communications with Buschman’s could be proved in evidence.
Accordingly, Sergeant Hubert Ginhoven proved the facts with regard to Mulder’s business which was a retail druggist’s store where all manner of Red Cross appliances were sold. Major Carter gave evidence with regard to Mulder and stated concerning Dikker’s cheques that the Germans had recently altered their method of paying their spies, sending banker’s drafts instead of, as formerly, postal and telegraphic orders. Wilhelmi’s account of Greite’s connection with Dikker and Beham’s story of the plot for Greite’s escape completed the evidence. An attempt to bring over Helene Lemaitre and the informant who had squeezed Dikker to give evidence at the trial failed through the action of the Dutch police who arrested the witnesses as they were embarking.
Greite was tried on 11 and 12 July 1916 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for doing an act preparatory to collecting information calculated to be useful to the enemy and for being in communication with a spy. Greite had confessed to his solicitors that the man who financed the German spy agencies in Holland and Copenhagen was Alexander Blok, a Dutchman of Klosterstrasse, Hamburg. He employed two runners who interviewed all the spies, ‘Wilhelm’ of a Hamburg coffee firm and Schulz, a proprietor of boats at Hamburg. These men put up at the Victoria Hotel, Amsterdam.
The Germans, who believed he had been shot, paid a pension to his reputed widow. Suzanne Dupont, who was invited to leave the United Kingdom under penalty of deportation should she refuse to go. She left on 8 August 1916.
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Early in May 1916 Richard Tinsley reported that Leopold Vieyra, alias Pickard, was coming to England and suggested that the man’s statement should he verified. Some time previously the Censor had submitted a letter from Leo Pickard enclosing three photographs which he had sent to a Mrs Anny Pickard Fletcher asking that they should be endorsed to the effect that they were portraits of himself and returned to Rotterdam, adding that his name was Vieyra as well as Pickard.
Vieyra landed on 6 May with a passport issued at The Hague on 16 April 1916. He was searched and interrogated and sent on to Scotland Yard. Vieyra had first come to England in 1904 and from that date until 1911 had managed the affairs of a company of players known as ‘the Midgets’. Then he went to Brussels and the United States and returned to this country in 1912. In May 1914 he went to Holland to sell films which he had bought here. His object in coming over was to buy more films to sell abroad. Since 1909 Pickard had been on intimate terms with a widow named Mrs Fletcher who managed a boarding-house at Acton owned by him. She passed as his wife, and helped him with the film business when he was absent in Holland. Vieyra was informed that he could not travel backwards and forwards during the war and he chose to remain in England. He procured an identity book as he wished to travel beyond the 5-mile radius.
Tinsley wired from Rotterdam and reported also in writing that Vieyra was said to be a German agent. He had been denounced by Logeher, brother-in-law to Elte, who was engaged in recruiting spies for the Germans. Vieyra had received 2,500 florins before sailing; his expenses for one month were calculated at £2.10s per diem, and payments to him in England were to be effected through Blydenstein’s Bank, Threadneedle Street. Another 2,500 florins were to be deposited in a bank in Holland for Vieyra’s disposal on his return after an interval of two months. Vieyra was said to have a mistress named Josephine Jensen and to be in touch with Heinrich Voltmann, a German. This was followed by a report implicating Vieyra and Elte with a gang of German agents, among them Alexander Blok, Moses van Leeuwen, Andries Bloemenhoofer and Logeher, Elte’s mother-in-law and the informant. The usual checks were put on and Pickard was found to be communicating with Josephine Jensen at Hemonystraat 1 in Amsterdam. Frank at 33 Regulierbreestraat in Amsterdam, and S. Blom at 26 Pretorierstraat, also in Amsterdam, about a film business in terms which showed that the three people were cognisant of the same deal. Several of Vieyra’s letters were treated for secret writing without result. The majority of the letters were sent on. An immense correspondence passed and in June both Vieyra and his employers complained of delay in delivery even exchanging telegrams on the subject. On 26 June S. Blom wrote enclosing copies of letters on 9
and 19 June. From this batch of letters it appeared that Pickard had transferred his account with Blyderstein to the London City and Midland Bank; that S. Blom had sent one remittance to Blyderstein’s and another to the London City and Midland Bank and that if the London dealers were too sharp Vieyra was to try the provinces. These letters were seen on 11 July. Meanwhile it had been ascertained that Frank was probably a genuine dealer in films. It afterwards appeared that Vieyra had bought some second-hand films but was finding unexpected obstacles in shipping them to Holland. On 17 July the bureau asked Tinsley for information regarding S. Blom and heard in reply that at 28 Pretorlerstraat there was no such person but that Sophia, wife of Simon Dikker and sister-in-law to Philip Dikker of the Greite case, might be intended as her maiden name was Blom. Directly after S. Blom wrote warning Vieyra that some mysterious person had called to enquire about the film business. Meanwhile Pickard had applied for a permit to leave the country, thus once more confirming Tinsley’s earlier reports and the War Trade Department suggested to the bureau that he might be worth while searching. The Censor was therefore requested to submit all letters addressed to S. Blom even though they might appear to be about trade only. S. Blom’s warning letter of 26 July was seen by the bureau on 5 August and finally Mr Fletcher received a letter from a soldier in France, complaining of the censorship as a check on his pen and saying he would get a green envelope.
