Fighting to Lose

by John Bryden

  Blunt, Burgess, and Maclean had been obvious communists during their student days at Cambridge, Burgess and Maclean noisily so. Philby had been less obvious, but was open about having communist sympathies when serving as a volunteer in the workers’ rebellion in Vienna in the mid-1930s. He later covered the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent for the Times. The names of all four would have been in the Registry’s card index, and there would have been PFs — personal files — on all of them.21 The fire destroyed the card index that would have led to these dossiers.22

  For those inclined to conspiracy theories, there are other intriguing facts surrounding this incident:

  In September 1940, most in government saw Stalin as an ally of Hitler and believed that the Soviets were likely soon to come into the war on the side of the Nazis.23

  Liddell was then MI5’s (and therefore Britain’s) counter-espionage chief. How, then, did he come to be chatting amiably over supper at his club with two fairly notorious pre-war Cambridge communists, whose dossiers it would have been his duty to read?

  A PF (personal file) in the Registry could not safely be made to disappear so long as there was a name-card in the index that pointed to it.

  Most of the cards were destroyed.

  The Registry supposedly occupied the glass-roofed former prison laundry which could not be locked.24

  Victor Rothschild, a Cambridge scientist personally recruited by Liddell four months earlier, had been assigned the task of having the card-index microfilmed just before the fire, so in a way it was saved.

  The copying, however, was poorly done. Reconstruction of the card index was not completed until June 1941 (when Hitler invaded Russia and Stalin became an ally).25

  Once the fire had occurred, it would have been impossible to determine whether specific files and their index cards had been removed before the microfilming.

  The card index, however, did exist when Blunt joined MI5 in June. Even allowing for the administrative confusion then gripping the Security Service, it was surely wildly irresponsible for its counter-espionage chief and former Scotland Yard expert on communist subversion not to have personally run Blunt’s name through the Registry. How could he possibly not have done so before socializing with him at his club?26

  It seems he left the vetting to Rothschild, who had introduced him to Blunt in the first place. In a 1943 secret memoir to his Soviet controllers, Blunt recalled being surprised his communist past was not a problem when he entered MI5:

  One thing is, however, mysterious. When I eventually joined MI5 my name was put through the registry in the ordinary way by Rothschild. He told me that the only records were an intercepted postcard from Maurice Dobbs to Left Review suggesting they should print an article of mine, and mention of my name on a list of those visiting Russia in 1935.27

  One would have thought the visit to the Soviet Union alone would have been enough to disqualify Blunt from the British secret services in 1940, but, if Blunt is to be believed, Liddell left it to Rothschild to read his file.

  Liddell apparently did not read anything on Burgess, either. Blunt’s Cambridge chum had managed to join MI6 (Section D) in January 1939, having flirted with the secret intelligence service on behalf of Moscow for two years. There should have been a lot on him, for he had been very open about his communist activities at university and had also been with Blunt on the boat trip to Russia in 1935. All the same, MI6 had accepted him, and that, Liddell could argue, should be good enough for him.

  On the other hand, MI5 ran the Central Registry for both services. Liddell could temporarily launder a file if it went through his office. It would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to retrieve a file for Major Vivian at MI6, then simply take out and put back items as the file came and went. Indeed, it is entirely possible that Liddell referred Burgess to Vivian in the first place.

  And so it was that Blunt and Burgess — both devotees of Stalin — were dining with Liddell at the Reform Club during that evening of the “oil bomb.” Blunt had just joined MI5; Burgess had been attached to MI6 for over a year. One imagines the two lifting their glasses, red with port, which both of them liked, in a silent toast to their mutual friends, Kim Philby and Tomás Harris, both of whom had recently entered MI6 on Burgess’s recommendation. In just a few hours flames would put out of reach the pre-war pasts of all of them.28

  For Philby’s future, this obliteration was crucial. The Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky had come over from the United States at the beginning of the year to submit to questioning by MI5. In describing Soviet espionage, he mentioned that Russian intelligence had had “a young Englishman working for it in Spain under cover of a journalist.”29 As there would have been only a limited number of English journalists covering the Spanish Civil War, and MI5/MI6 would have routinely had files on every one of them, Liddell could not have failed to have called up Philby’s. The fire guaranteed that no one else would ever do so.

  The same might hold for “Tommy” Harris, Blunt’s Spanish art dealer friend. Krivitsky mentioned a Soviet agent, “‘a well-known painter and perhaps a sculptor’ who had purchased planes for the Spanish Republicans.” Harris did paint and did deal in looted Spanish art. This could be an allusion to him.30

  Five months later, Blunt became Liddell’s personal aide. This position he developed over the ensuing months into access to the secret files Liddell was dealing with, to what remained of the Registry, to the Abwehr wireless traffic intercepted by the Radio Security Service, to diplomatic decrypts, and to MI5’s entire double-cross program. Short of Liddell himself being in direct contact with the Soviets, penetration of MI5 was to be as complete as any Soviet spymaster could have wished.

  In January 1941, Blunt passed MI5’s final report on the debriefing of Krivitsky to his Soviet controller. Within the month, Krivitsky was discovered dead in a pool of blood in his Washington hotel room, shot through the temple, a .38 calibre pistol in his hand. He had previously told his wife that if ever he was found dead, it would not be suicide.

  There were three suicide notes.

  9

  September–November 1940

  Major Ritter had heard from Caroli but not yet from Schmidt when he tried the identity-card trick again. At 7:30 a.m. on September 30, a man and woman turned up at the train station of Port Gordon, a tiny coastal town in Scotland. They seemed to be lost, having to ask where they were, and then for advice on what tickets to buy to get to Edinburgh. They were well-dressed, but for the city rather than the country, and the station master noticed that their shoes were wet, and that the man’s pants were damp to the knees. The woman had an unfamiliar accent and the man could barely speak English. As they waited on the platform, the station master rang up the local constable.

  The constable’s name was Grieve, and it is safe to assume that he had lived in the area all his life. The woman claimed she was Danish; the man Belgian. They were refugees who had been in Britain for some time, they said. Constable Grieve asked to see their national identity cards. He would not have had the experience or the eye to spot a reasonably good forgery, but he immediately noticed that the numeral 1 on the man’s card was written with a very un-British-like flourish, and that there was no immigration stamp. He asked the pair — probably in that wonderful folksy manner that British constables of the period were famous for — to accompany him to the station. When the man was searched he was found to have nineteen bullets in his pocket and a flashlight marked MADE IN BOHEMIA. His suitcase was forced open and there was the revolver that matched the bullets, and a wireless transmitter.1

  Meanwhile, a search of the shore near the town turned up an empty rubber dinghy. When inquiries were made down the railway line, a porter at the left-luggage office at Edinburgh station reported that a man had left a wet suitcase in one of the lockers that morning and was to come back for it that evening. Plainclothes constables staked out the area, and when a man appeared and opened the locker, they pounced. He, too, had a revolver in his pocket and at
first reached for it, then reconsidered. His suitcase contained another transmitter, maps, and a code disk. His identity card had the number 1 written in the same obviously not-British style. He was arrested.

  When the trio were turned over to MI5, it was immediately noted that the serial numbers and names on their identity and ration cards were unmistakably derived from the information supplied earlier by SNOW.2 The mistakes on the cards were put down to German stupidity.

  Had MI5 had a false document section of its own, or had its officers read the First World War memoirs of the American Herbert Yardley or the German spy chief Colonel Nicolai, they would not have supposed it possible that the Abwehr could fail to produce decent forgeries. In fact, every Ast, including Hamburg, had technical specialists, and in Berlin there was a full laboratory for producing all manner of faked papers.3 MI5 had no similar facilities and, given the intellectual vacuum in science and technology that had existed in the organization for the previous two decades, was not even on the horizon when it came to the theory and practice of faking documents. MI5 saw in the clumsy mistakes what it would have expected of itself.

  With the benefit of hindsight, and with the knowledge that Major Ritter was aware at least since June that Owens was under British control,4 it is possible with some certainty to deduce what was going on. The woman was known as Vera Eriksen, a.k.a. Schalburg, a.k.a. Wedel, and much mystery has long surrounded her. In fact, she was none of the above. After intensive questioning at Latchmere House by Colonel Stephens personally, she admitted that her real name was Vera Starizky, she had been born in Russia, she was Jewish, and she had been a spy since age seventeen. She was twenty-eight, slim and raven-haired, with a finely sculpted face. She spoke Russian, English, French, German, and Danish, and undoubtedly, should she have so chosen, could have achieved summa cum laude in bedroom espionage.

  Vera’s career had included five years in Paris, where she preyed on the diplomatic community, before finally fleeing her Soviet controller and going over to the Germans. Before the war, she was briefly in England, where she met the Duchess of Chateau-Thierry, and her current assignment was to resume her pre-war contacts, develop relationships with airmen, and report by wireless. At first she had refused, but (so she said) when her husband, a German officer, was killed in a car crash, she accepted the mission in a fit of despondency. She always, she said, intended to turn herself over to the British when she got to London.

  It was a superb cover story, and she stuck to it despite a withering grilling by Colonel Stephens. Robertson and Liddell declared themselves convinced, and she would have become yet another wireless double agent, but Stephens would not give up. He seems to have sensed a lie, although his persistence could also have been driven by the novelty of “breaking” a woman. He did not succeed, and Vera was turned over to Klop Ustinov, one of MI5’s ablest interrogators. In the end, she was interned for the duration of the war.5

  It was a near-miss for the British. Vera was the classic penetration agent, and a woman of her brains, beauty, and experience had the potential to wreck havoc if she got loose in British intelligence, or anywhere in the War Office. The two men she had come with apparently were sacrificial Nazis, necessary only because a woman landing by seaplane at night could not be expected to paddle a rubber dinghy to shore on her own. The two, one Dutch and the other Swiss — Karl Drüke and Werner Walti — were more useful to the Germans if they were caught than free, and the mistakes on their identity cards ensured that they would be.

  Vera’s interrogation ordeal has survived in Britain’s National Archives and it is appropriate to note that she made every effort to portray Drüke and Walti as innocent employees of the operation, whose only job was to land her safely. She was prepared to be shot herself to save their lives, but despite her efforts, she was saved while they were not. They were hanged the following August.

  Ast Brussels also sent spies to England that same month. They, too, were instantly caught. On September 3, under cover of darkness, two rowboats containing three Dutchmen and a Franco-German were towed across the Channel and released about a mile from shore. All four were keen Nazis and they had been told that they were to hide out with their transmitters for a few days and then report on British troop movements when the German army stormed ashore.

  None of these would-be spies had identity papers, only one spoke decent English, all had revolvers, their clothing was German, as was their food — right down to the sausages. And they carried no water. In search of it that morning, one of them was picked up by a coastal patrol; another aroused suspicion because he sought a drink of cider at a local pub before opening time. The other two were netted in the subsequent dragnets.6

  When the four — Pons, Kieboom, Meier, and Waldberg — were under lock and key at Latchmere House, MI5 invited MI14 to look them over. MI14 was the War Office agency responsible for trying to determine German intentions from the collation of intelligence from all sources. It was headed by the entirely capable Colonel Kenneth Strong, and he talked to the prisoners personally. MI5’s Guy Liddell recorded his reaction in his diary: “Strong has a great regard for German efficiency and cannot bring himself to believe that they could have been so stupid, as having sent these men over here without having schooled them properly and worked out plans by which they could be really effective.”7

  They were deliberate sacrifices. There can be no other explanation. They were non-German Nazi zealots and, therefore, to the Abwehr, expendable. Meier had been involved with an organization advocating the merger of Holland with Germany, Waldberg had been a spy in Belgium and France, and Pons and Kieboom belonged to the Dutch Nazi party. The leadership at Ast Brussels, loyal to Canaris and opposed to Hitler, was not going to shed tears if such fodder was caught and condemned to the hangman, as three out of the four were.

  The other expeditions that autumn involved a Swede and two Belgians landing by boat on September 23, and three Cubans, a Dane, a Dutchman, and two Frenchmen on November 12. All were badly outfitted and promptly arrested.8

  Andreas Folmer, the Luxembourger who had so successfully infiltrated the Belgian Deuxième Bureau, was recruited for one of these trips. It began for him when the Germans brought him back to Brussels after Belgium’s surrender to denounce and help arrest his former Belgian secret service colleagues. When this was completed, he was introduced to a Major Klug who told him his next assignment was to land by sea in England with two companions to set up a secret pre-invasion radio transmitter. The three — he, a Belgian, and another Luxembourger — would pose as refugees and leave by boat from Brest.

  After preparations that Folmer found alarmingly careless, the mission began, only immediately to run aground when the boat got stuck in mud in the harbour. When they tried again a week later, a German officer in full uniform arrived to oversee their departure, making it obvious to everyone within sight what was going on. Folmer became very, very nervous; it would be the kiss of death if any of the watching Frenchmen was in contact with Britain. Happily for him, the boat’s engine broke down and the trip was aborted once more. Folmer then sent a polite note to Major Klug saying that the mission was hopelessly compromised and he wanted no further part in it. To his surprise, he was suddenly arrested and spent the next nine weeks in a Brussels jail.9

  The intention of these antics can only be guessed at. Their effect, in any case, was to contribute to MI5’s impression that its Abwehr opponent was hopelessly incompetent. This lulled it into complacency.

  Folmer was doubly lucky. Not only did he miss out on a voyage that would have put him on the bottom step of the scaffold, but his former boss, Oscar Reile of the Abwehr’s Abt IIIf counter-espionage section, obtained his release and brought him to Paris. There for the next four years he worked undercover against the French Resistance with deadly effect.

  As for Major Klug, he went on to carry out a similar caper with eight enthusiastic foreign-born Nazis who were to sabotage Swiss airfields while pretending to be on a holiday walking tour. Dressed identic
ally in plus-fours and wearing the same brown shoes, and with capes made from Luftwaffe field grey, they stood out in the Alps like a parody of the von Trapp family from The Sound of Music. On being stopped, they had no identity papers, were each carrying a brand-new Swiss one hundred–franc note, and had in their satchels their hiking refreshments, a revolver, and explosives. All were imprisoned.10

  Major Klug — whose name is the German word for “clever” — appears to have been engaged in some gratuitous mischief against the Nazis.

  With the exception of the groups from Ast Brussels, all the spies captured by the British between September 1940 and the following March were linked directly or indirectly to Major Ritter, and had identity papers that were obviously flawed and traceable to the names and numbers provided by BISCUIT and by SNOW.11 The errors varied, but were always glaring. A 1942 British intelligence report described them as follows:

  (I) National Registration Identity Cards are usually forged, and the following typical errors are noticeable:

  (a) Address is written in continental instead of English style.

  (b) Cards are dated prior to 1.5.40, which is the date by which completion was officially ordered.

  (c) The use of initials rather than full Christian names.

  (d) Christian names are placed before surnames.