Two days later, at three in the morning, Elliott and Hearson broke into Hamburg port by climbing over the wall. ‘We discreetly poked our noses all over the place for about an hour,’ taking photographs, before ‘returning to safety and a stiff drink’. Elliott had no diplomatic cover and no training, and Hearson had no authority to recruit him for the mission. Had they been caught, they might have been shot as spies; at the very least, the news that the son of the Eton headmaster had been caught snooping around a German naval dockyard in the middle of the night would have set off a diplomatic firestorm. It was, Elliott happily admitted, ‘a singularly foolhardy exploit’. But it had been most enjoyable, and highly successful. They drove on to Berlin in high spirits.
The twentieth of April 1939 was Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, a national holiday in Nazi Germany, and the occasion for the largest military parade in the history of the Third Reich. Organised by propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, the festivities marked a high point of the Hitler cult, a lavish display of synchronised sycophancy. A torchlight parade and cavalcade of fifty white limousines, led by the Führer, was followed by a fantastic five-hour exhibition of military muscle, involving 50,000 German troops, hundreds of tanks and 162 warplanes. The ambassadors of Britain, France and the United States did not attend, having been withdrawn after Hitler’s march on Czechoslovakia, but some twenty-three other countries sent representatives to wish Hitler a happy birthday. ‘The Führer is feted like no other mortal has ever been,’ gushed Goebbels in his diary.
Elliott watched the celebrations, with a mixture of awe and horror, from a sixth-floor apartment in the Charlottenburger Chaussee belonging to General Nöel Mason-MacFarlane, the British military attaché in Berlin. ‘Mason-Mac’ was a whiskery old warhorse, a decorated veteran of the trenches and Mesopotamia. He could not hide his disgust. From the balcony of the apartment there was a clear view of Hitler on his saluting podium. Under his breath, the general remarked to Elliott that the Führer was well within rifle range: ‘I am tempted to take advantage of this,’ he muttered, adding that he could ‘pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking’. Elliott ‘strongly urged him to take a pot shot’. Mason-MacFarlane thought better of the idea, though he later made a formal request to be allowed to assassinate Hitler from his balcony. Sadly for the world, the offer was turned down.
Elliott returned to The Hague with two new-minted convictions: that Hitler must be stopped at all costs, and that the best way of contributing to that end would be to become a spy. ‘My mind was easily made up.’ A day at Ascot, a glass of fizz with Sir Robert Vansittart and a meeting with an important person in Whitehall did the rest. Elliott returned to The Hague still officially an honorary attaché, but in reality, with Sir Nevile Bland’s blessing, a new recruit to MI6. Outwardly, his diplomatic life continued as before; secretly, he began his novitiate in the strange religion of British intelligence.
Sir Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Office mandarin who smoothed Elliott’s way into MI6, ran what was, in effect, a private intelligence agency, outside the official orbit of government but with close links to both MI6 and MI5, the Security Service. Vansittart was a fierce opponent of appeasement, convinced that Germany would start another war ‘just as soon as it feels strong enough’. His network of spies gathered copious intelligence on Nazi intentions, with which he tried (and failed) to persuade Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of the looming confrontation. One of his earliest and most colourful informants was Jona von Ustinov, a German journalist and fierce secret opponent of Nazism. Ustinov was universally known as ‘Klop’ – Russian slang for bedbug – a nickname that derived from his rotund appearance, of which he was, oddly, intensely proud. Ustinov’s father was a Russian-born army officer; his mother was half-Ethiopian and half-Jewish; his son, born in 1921, was Peter Ustinov, the great comic actor and writer. Klop Ustinov had served in the German army during the First World War, winning an Iron Cross, before taking up a post with the German Press Agency in London. He lost his job in 1935 when the German authorities, suspicious of his exotically mixed heritage, demanded proof of his Aryanism. That same year he was recruited as a British agent, codenamed ‘U35’. Ustinov was fat and monocled, with a deceptively bumbling demeanour. He was ‘the best and most ingenious operator I had the honour to work with’, later declared his case officer, Dick White, who would go on to head both MI5 and MI6.
Elliott’s first job for MI6 was to help Ustinov run one of the most important and least known pre-war spies. Wolfgang Gans Edler zu Putlitz was the press attaché at the German embassy in London, a luxury-loving aristocrat and a flamboyant homosexual. Ustinov recruited Putlitz and began to extract what was described as ‘priceless intelligence, possibly the most important human-source intelligence Britain received in the prewar period’, on German foreign policy and military plans. Putlitz and Ustinov shared Vansittart’s conviction that the policy of appeasement had to be reversed: ‘I was really helping to damage the Nazi cause,’ Putlitz believed. When Putlitz was posted to the German embassy at The Hague in 1938, Klop Ustinov had discreetly followed him, posing as the European correspondent of an Indian newspaper. With Ustinov as go-between, Putlitz continued to supply reams of intelligence, though he was frustrated by Britain’s apparent unwillingness to confront Hitler. ‘The English are hopeless,’ he complained. ‘It is no use trying to help them to withstand the Nazi methods which they so obviously fail to understand.’ He began to feel he was ‘sacrificing himself for no purpose’.
In The Hague, Klop Ustinov and Nicholas Elliott established an instant rapport, and would remain friends for life. ‘Klop was a man of wide talents,’ wrote Elliott, ‘bon viveur, wit, raconteur, mimic, linguist – endowed with a vast range of knowledge, both serious and ribald’. Ustinov put Elliott to work, boosting the spirits of the increasingly gloomy and anxious Wolfgang Putlitz.
Putlitz was a ‘complicated man’, Elliott wrote, torn between his patriotism and his moral instincts. ‘His motivation was solely idealistic and he went through acute mental torture at the knowledge that the information he gave away could cost German lives.’ One evening in August, Elliott took Putlitz to dinner at the Royale Hotel. Over dessert, he remarked that he was thinking of taking a holiday in Germany: ‘Is Hitler going to start the war before we get back at the end of the first week of September?’ he asked, half in jest. Putlitz did not smile: ‘On present plans the attack on Poland starts on 26 August but it may be postponed for a week, so if I were you, I’d cancel the trip.’ Elliott swiftly reported this ‘startling statement’ to Klop, who passed it on to London. Elliott called off his holiday. On 1 September, just as Putlitz had predicted, German tanks rolled into Poland from the north, south and west. Two days later, Britain was at war with Germany.
Not long afterwards, the German ambassador to The Hague showed Wolfgang Putlitz a list of German agents in the Netherlands; the list was identical to one which Putlitz had recently handed over to Klop Ustinov and Nicholas Elliott. Clearly, there must be a German spy within the MI6 station, but no one for a moment suspected Folkert van Koutrik, an affable Dutchman working as assistant to the station chief, Major Richard Stevens. Van Koutrik had ‘always displayed perfectly genuine faithfulness’, according to his colleagues. Secretly he was working for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and ‘by the autumn of 1939, the Germans had a pretty clear picture of the whole SIS operation in Holland’. Van Koutrik had obtained the list of German spies Putlitz had passed to MI6, and passed it back to German intelligence.
Putlitz knew ‘it could only be a matter of time before he was discovered and dealt with’. He immediately requested asylum in Britain, but insisted he would not leave without his valet, Willy Schneider, who was also his lover. Putlitz was whisked to London on 15 September, and lodged in a safe house.
The loss of such a valuable agent was bad enough, but worse was to follow.
On 9 November, the head of station, Major Stevens, Elliott’s new boss, set off for Venlo, a town on the Dutch border
with Germany, in the expectation that he would shortly bring the war to a speedy and glorious conclusion. He was accompanied by a colleague, Sigismund Payne Best, a veteran military intelligence officer. Elliott liked Stevens, considering him a ‘brilliant linguist and excellent raconteur’. Best, on the other hand, he regarded as ‘an ostentatious ass, blown up with self-importance’.
Some months earlier, Stevens and Best had secretly made contact with a group of disaffected German officers plotting to oust Hitler in a military coup. At a meeting arranged by Dr Franz Fischer, a German political refugee, the leader of the group, one Hauptmann Schämmel, explained that elements within the German High Command, appalled by the losses suffered during the invasion of Poland, intended to ‘overthrow the present regime and establish a military dictatorship’. The Prime Minister was informed of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, and Stevens was encouraged to pursue negotiations with the coup plotters. ‘I have a hunch that the war will be over by the spring,’ wrote Chamberlain. Stevens and Best, accompanied by a Dutch intelligence officer, headed to Venlo in high spirits convinced they were about to link up with ‘the big man himself’, the German general who would lead the coup. In fact, ‘Schämmel’ was Walter Schellenberg of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party intelligence agency, an intelligent and ruthless master spy who would eventually take over German intelligence, and Dr Fischer was in Gestapo pay. The meeting was a trap, personally ordered by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
Shortly before 11 a.m., they arrived at the rendezvous point, Café Backus, on the Dutch side of the frontier, a few yards from the border post. ‘No one was in sight except a German customs officer,’ wrote Stevens, ‘and a little girl who was playing ball with a big dog in the middle of the road.’ Schellenberg, standing on the café veranda, beckoned them over by waving his hat. That was the signal. As they climbed out of their car, the British officers were immediately surrounded by SS commandos in plain clothes, firing machine guns in the air. The Dutch officer drew his revolver and was shot down.
‘The next moment,’ recalled Best, ‘there were two fellows in front of each of us, one holding a pistol to our heads and the other putting handcuffs on. Then the Germans shouted at us “March!”, and prodding us in the back with their pistols and calling “Hup! Hup! Hup!”, they rushed us along toward the German frontier.’ The commandos bundled the captives into waiting cars, dragging the dying Dutch officer with them.
‘At one stroke,’ wrote Elliott, ‘all British intelligence operations in Holland were compromised.’ Worse still, Stevens had been carrying in his pocket, idiotically, a list of intelligence sources in Western Europe. MI6 scrambled to extract its network of agents before the Germans pounced.
The Venlo incident was an unmitigated catastrophe. Since the Dutch were clearly involved, and had lost an officer, Hitler could claim that Holland had violated its own neutrality, providing an excuse for the invasion of Holland that would follow just a few months later. The episode left the British with an ingrained suspicion of German army officers claiming to be anti-Nazi, even when, in the final stages of the war, such approaches were genuine. Stevens and Best were imprisoned for the rest of the war. By December, through information derived from the British captives and the double agent van Koutrik, the Germans were ‘able to construct detailed and largely accurate charts of [MI6’s] agent networks’, as well as the structure of MI6 itself. It was the first and most successful German Double Cross operation of the war. Oddly, it was also one of the last.
Looking back on the Venlo incident, Elliott blamed the ‘intense ambition’ of Stevens, who had scented the ‘possibility of winning the war off his own bat, and this completely clouded his operational judgment’. Instead of maintaining the fiction of a resistance cell inside German High Command, Schellenberg sent a crowing message: ‘In the long run conversations with conceited and stupid people become boring. We are cutting off communications. Your friends the German opposition send you hearty greetings.’ It was signed ‘The German Secret Police’.
In his first six months as a spy, Elliott had learned a salutary lesson in the forgery and fraud that is the currency of espionage. His boss was now in a German prison, having fallen for an elaborate deception; a valuable spy had fled to London, betrayed by a double agent; the entire intelligence network in Holland had been fatally compromised. Even the innocuous Captain John King, the cipher clerk who had taught Elliott coding, was now in prison, serving a ten-year sentence for spying, after a Soviet defector revealed that he had been ‘selling everything to Moscow’ for cash.
So far from being repelled by the duplicity around him, Elliott felt ever more drawn to the game of skulduggery and double cross. The Venlo debacle had been ‘as disastrous as it was shameful’, Elliott concluded, but he also found it fascinating, an object lesson in how highly intelligent people could be duped if persuaded to believe what they most wanted to believe. He was learning quickly. He even made up a ditty in celebration:
Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive.
But when you’ve practised quite a bit
You really get quite good at it.
At three on the morning of 9 May 1940, Elliott was awoken by the arrival of an emergency telegram from London. He extracted the code books from the ambassador’s safe, sat down at the embassy dining table, and began to decode the message: ‘Information has been received that the Germans intend to attack along the entire Western Front . . .’ The next day, Germany invaded France and Holland. ‘It soon became apparent,’ wrote Elliott, ‘that the Dutch, bravely though they fought, would not last out for long.’
The British prepared to flee. Elliott and his MI6 colleagues made a swift bonfire of compromising files in the embassy courtyard. Another officer seized most of Amsterdam’s industrial diamond stocks and smuggled them to Britain. The Dutch Queen sailed to safety on a Royal Navy destroyer, along with her Cabinet, her secret service, and her gold. Elliott’s principal task, he found, was to evacuate the terrified dancers of the Vic-Wells touring ballet company, which he did by loading them onto a dredger commandeered at Ijmuiden. On 13 May, a British destroyer, HMS Mohawk, anchored off the Hook of Holland, waiting to carry the last British stragglers to safety. As he raced in a convoy towards the coast, Elliott watched as flames from burning Rotterdam lit up the horizon. He was one of the last to climb aboard. The following day, the Dutch surrendered. As the young MI6 officer alighted in Britain, he was greeted by the words: ‘We’re in the final now.’
*
Elliott had expected to find a nation in crisis but he was struck by the ‘normality and calmness’ of London. From that moment, he wrote, it ‘never occurred to me for one moment that we might lose the war’. Within days he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, and then, to his astonishment, he found himself behind bars.
Wormwood Scrubs, the Victorian prison in West London, had been adopted as the wartime headquarters of the security service, MI5, and was now expanding rapidly to cope with the threat of German espionage. The fall of France and the Netherlands was attributed, in part, to Nazi fifth columnists, enemy spies working from within to aid the German advance. The threat of a German invasion set off an intense hunt for spies in Britain, and MI5 was swamped by reports of suspicious activity. ‘England was gripped by spy fever,’ wrote Elliott, who was seconded to MI5 to ‘give evidence of what I had seen at first hand of Fifth Column activity in Holland’. The fifth column threat never materialised, for the simple reason that it did not exist – Hitler had not intended to go to war with Britain, and little effort had been made to prepare the ground for a German invasion.
The Abwehr soon set about making up the deficit. Over the next few months, so-called ‘invasion spies’ poured into Britain, by boat, parachute, and submarine; ill-trained and underequipped, they were swiftly duly rounded up. Some were imprisoned, and a handful executed, but a number were recruited as double agents, to feed false information back to their German handlers. Th
is was the embryo of the great Double Cross system, the network of double agents whose importance would steadily expand as the war progressed. Under interrogation, many of these spies provided information of vital interest to the Secret Intelligence Service. Elliott was appointed liaison officer between the sister services, and based in Wormwood Scrubs. It was a bizarre place to work: malodorous and dingy. Most of the inmates had been evacuated but a handful remained, including an Old Etonian contemporary of Elliott’s, Victor Hervey, the future 6th Marquess of Bristol, a notorious playboy who had been jailed in 1939 for robbing a Mayfair jeweller’s. Elliott worked from a soundproofed jail cell, with no handle on the inside; if his last visitor of the day accidentally turned the outside handle on leaving, he was locked in until morning.
Elliott loved his new life, in prison by day and at liberty at night, in a city under siege and threatened with invasion. He moved into a flat in Cambridge Square, Bayswater, belonging to the grandmother of another friend from Eton, Richard Brooman-White, who was also in MI6. Basil Fisher was now a fighter pilot with 111 Squadron, flying Hurricanes out of Croydon. Whenever Fisher was on leave, the three friends would gather, usually at White’s. The Blitz hammered down, and Elliott was elated by the ‘feeling of camaraderie’ as he sat with his friends in the smoky, mahogany-panelled luxury of London’s oldest and most exclusive gentleman’s club. ‘My only moment of real danger was when drinking a pink gin in the bar of the club. A bomb fell on the building next door, upsetting my gin and knocking me flat. I got another pink gin with the compliments of the barman.’ Elliott was enjoying his war. Then, three months after returning to London, he discovered what war is about.
A Spy Among Friends Page 2
