Even before the wedding, Klop had been increasingly nervous about the authorities. A well-wisher in the Soviet Foreign Office warned them that the Cheka – the Communist secret police – were investigating Klop’s credentials. He had told them, fairly unconvincingly, that he was a greengrocer’s assistant from Amsterdam. He could hardly admit to being a journalist and any suggestion that he was gathering secret intelligence for the German government would have been fatal. He had also begun dealing in black market art, hoping to make a small fortune to start married life in the West.

Nadia, who only seems to have learned that his visit was not solely for the purpose of finding his family after they escaped, was surely being disingenuous years later when she wrote: ‘Maltzan asked Klop to keep his eyes open should he succeed in getting into Russia. He did not mean spying of course, only wanting him to report on the whole atmosphere and conditions inside Russia.’40

In such a time of turmoil and mutual suspicion, espionage was exactly what Ago von Maltzan had in mind and the preparations could have left Klop in no doubt. He had travelled on a boat taking Russian soldiers and prisoners of war home. Friedrich Rosen obtained a passport for him, in the name of Oustinoff rather than the Germanic ‘von Ustinow’. It is not clear what nationality Klop assumed or whether this was an early example of the Nansen passport, introduced by the Norwegian explorer, diplomat and commissioner for refugees Fridjof Nansen for use as travel authority for the many stateless displaced people milling around the continent. Klop passed himself off either as a returning Russian – difficult when his command of the language was less than perfect – or a Dutch trader. He travelled light, a solitary bag with few clothes and gifts of tinned meat and chocolate that might smooth away some of the minor obstructions to his progress. For negotiating the major obstacles he had gold coins sewn into the lining of his coat. The ship dropped them at Hungerborg near Narva, on the Estonian border, where they began a tediously slow train journey. The full extent of the famine that was gripping the Russian countryside quickly became apparent as starving peasants lined the tracks begging the passengers for scraps of food. A rumour rippled through the train to the effect that able-bodied men would not be allowed to disembark until they got to Moscow, where they would immediately be pressed into military service. As the train slowed outside St Petersburg, Klop leapt down to the tracks and completed the journey on foot.

Klop arrived on 7 May and set about ingratiating himself with officials of the Cheka and the Foreign Office in the course of searching for his family. At the Cheka his contact was an official named Rougaev who impressed Klop with his bevy of secretaries. They obeyed his every word and appeared not to object to sitting on his lap or being slapped on the backside. Klop was amused to be offered fish and potato soup by his host, who served it by hand, disguising the smell of fish with a liberal application of Houbigant’s Quelque Fleurs perfume that he kept in his desk; Klop’s memory for fine detail demonstrating a skill valuable to storytellers and spies alike. That he should strike up such fellow-feeling in an official of the Cheka was fortunate. He had discovered on arrival in St Petersburg that his family had been living on the ‘Fifth Line’ of Vasilievsky Island, the once fashionable suburb now overrun by Bolshevik squatters. To his distress, he soon discovered that his father had died of dysentery a year earlier and his mother and sister had moved to Pskov, about four to six hours’ rail journey south-west of St Petersburg near the border with Estonia. He needed a Cheka 24-hour travel permit to visit them and the family reunion was necessarily brief, though long enough for Klop to promise to make the arrangements to get the two women out of the country. Typically, his abiding memory years later was of the pretty, freckled peasant girls, their hair tied back by a kerchief, whom he saw on the train. The kerchief became a small fetish that he liked to try out on later girlfriends.41

Despite the great risks involved, Klop decided to leave Russia briefly and make contact with Maltzan from the Estonian capital of Reval. There is a record in German Foreign Office archives, dated 13 July, simply stating that the Württemberg citizen Ustinoff was returning to Russia and requesting that Gustav Hilger should be informed by radio. It added that he would not be travelling on a German passport. If Klop filed a fuller report at that stage it has not survived in the records. But it is significant that he was already working with Gustav Hilger, Maltzan’s other secret emissary to the Soviet Union. Hilger was born in Moscow in 1886 and brought up there. He studied engineering in Germany but returned to Moscow in 1910 to work for his father-in-law’s crane company, travelling all over Russia. He was interned during the First World War and on his release worked for the main commission for aid to German prisoners of war in Russia, assisting their evacuation with only limited and reluctant help from the Soviet authorities. He was briefly expelled when relations between Russia and Germany were broken off but returned in June 1920, and was witness to the starvation, misery, and desperation of the population.42

On his return to St Petersburg, Klop had found lodgings with Nikolai Nikolaevitch Schreiber. He was an inventor who had lived in the next street when Klop’s parents had an apartment in St Petersburg and had been courting Klop’s sister, Tabitha. He was a suspiciously fortuitous landlord for a man who was gathering intelligence for Germany. Schreiber had been a rear admiral of the old Imperial Russian Navy, a specialist in torpedoes and mines. During the First World War he had been in charge of planning the minefields in the Baltic and Black Sea intended to keep the German fleet at bay. He had worked in close contact with the British Admiralty, including the development of a British invention, the paravane, a mine clearance device.

Klop’s quest for travel permits for his mother and sister took him from the Cheka to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here again he managed to charm his way into their good books. According to his son, Peter, his best contact there was Ivan Maisky, which would be yet another extraordinarily lucky break. Maisky had been in London prior to the First World War, at the same time as Klop. His circle of friends included the radical writers George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Beatrice Webb. From 1932 to 1943 he was Soviet ambassador in London, a man of enormous influence and importance in the Allied relationship against Germany. There is no doubt the two knew each other at that time, but it is less clear how they could have met in 1920. Maisky was then a local government official in Samara, near the Kazakhstan border. It is not impossible, with his literary interests, that he visited Gorky’s House of Arts club in St Petersburg, which was frequented by Klop and Nadia, but less likely that he was in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In any event, Klop’s mother Magdalena and sister Tabitha were in due course able to escape via the Crimea and Istanbul. They spent some time in Germany but eventually settled back in the Middle East.43 Klop’s difficulties with the authorities were compounded by his new relationship with the Benois family, some of whom were not entirely above suspicion. They had potentially damning British connections at a time when Britain had been supporting the monarchist side in the civil war with arms, money and men. British secret agents were up to their necks in plots to assassinate Lenin and bring down the Bolshevik regime.

Nadia’s aunt, Camilla Benois, had married her English tutor Matthew Edwardes, whose younger brother George introduced the glamorous Gaiety Girls chorus line to the London theatre scene. Matthew became a successful businessman in Russia but he died in 1917 and Camilla escaped to England. Her son Julius stayed behind and became involved in the notorious British action to seize control of the enormous oilfields around Baku, then part of southern Russia. As a result he spent three years in a Russian jail. The two families remained close and Camilla’s grandson, Julius Caesar Edwardes, became Peter Ustinov’s business partner.

Nadia’s cousin, also Camilla, had married General Dmitri Horvath, general manager of the Chinese Eastern Railway. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he led White Russian resistance in the East, declaring himself provisional ruler of all Russia from his power base in Vladivostok. He could never muster sufficient support and eventually threw in his lot with the ill-fated rebellion led by Admiral Alexander Kolchak, with British backing. Kolchak was executed by the Bolsheviks; General Horvath survived in exile with Camilla in Peking. Their daughter Doushka married the British First World War flying ace Cecil Lewis, who in 1922 was one of the founders of the BBC, and in later life lived for a while with Nadia and Klop at their home in Gloucestershire.

In St Petersburg, too, there were dangerous associations about which the Benois family needed to be wary. The Mariinsky Opera had a British conductor, Albert Coates, and in the years prior to the revolution one of his protégés was a young Paul Dukes who had run away from home to join the orchestra. By 1918 he was an MI6 officer, using his old contacts for information and safe houses to hide from the authorities.

In August 1918 an attempt to assassinate Lenin unleashed the Cheka’s Red Terror in which thousands of suspects were rounded up and hundreds executed. The British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart, who was implicated in the plot, was arrested, only to be freed through the intervention of the lover he shared with Maxim Gorky, Moura Benckendorff. Whether Moura knew Klop or Nadia at this stage is not clear but she would feature prominently in their later lives in her adopted guise as the London society hostess Moura Budberg.

In such turbulent times Klop was running huge risks with his frequent visits to the department of Foreign Affairs, and he compounded those risks with an ill-judged attempt to bribe an official to let Nadia leave the country. Klop told more than one version of this event. According to Nadia he had offered Comrade Rougaev a wad of foreign currency he had smuggled into the country and was immediately rebuffed. According to his son Peter the bribe was chocolate and bacon and the recipient was Ivan Maisky, who rejected it.44

Once more fortune smiled upon Klop. Gustav Hilger, in his role of representative of the German Red Cross and the Nansen Relief Agency responsible for the welfare of POWs, could offer Klop an escape route. Klop had good reason to be grateful and he did not forget. Twenty-five years later he returned the compliment.

Hilger took the only photo Klop had of himself and Nadia – from the wedding a few days earlier – and used it to create repatriation authorisations as if Klop were a soldier returning from the Siberian prison camps.

Three days later, on 16 August, Klop and Nadia spent the day getting export licences for Klop’s treasure trove of art and that night came the news that they should be at the railway station by 7 a.m. next day. There was a frenzy of packing, and in the dark early hours next morning they crept through the deserted streets, pushing their few possessions and a picnic basket on a handcart. Hilger was waiting for them and guided them swiftly to the top bunks of a civilian carriage where they lay still for hours, not daring to move in case they were challenged. It was gone midnight by the time the hissing steam engine slowly headed south-westward to impending freedom. They travelled all the next day, through searches and security checks, Nadia clinging on to a single brooch and a string of pearls. At Narva, on the Estonian border, they camped overnight before boarding a ferry to spend three days sailing almost the full length of the Baltic Sea to the German port of Stettin – now Szczecin in Poland. Another night in a camp was as much as Klop could bear and he managed to telegraph to Berlin to get money sent to the best hotel in town, where he and Nadia gorged on champagne and lobster before ordering complete new sets of clothes. Nadia was already pregnant, although she may not have been aware of it at the time.

They then spent a week to ten days in Berlin where Nadia was introduced to Klop’s relatives – Magdalena’s brothers and sisters and his Ethiopian grandmother. Klop had meetings with the directors of the Wolff Bureau and, significantly, spent a good deal of time with Ago von Maltzan at the German Foreign Office.45

He wrote a fifteen-page report, closely typed and dated 31 August 1920, which was circulated among senior figures within the Foreign Office. It contained a good deal of pontificating – Klop recognised early in his espionage career that he would do his credibility no harm by telling his masters what they wanted to hear. And of course he could not resist the hyperbole which became a trademark of his later reports for MI5 and MI6. But he also provided, separately and not for circulation, a list of sources that included senior officials of the Cheka, and former ministers and church officials from the Kerensky regime and the last days of the tsar. These indicated that he had indeed been extracting intelligence in high places – some startling new information, of varying reliability, and some particularly acute barbs at his British competitors. Here was a man aged twenty-seven, who had gone pretty much straight from university into the trenches, brimming with self-confidence, politically aware, quick on the uptake and capable of insinuating himself among the powerful elite of a strange country regardless of personal risk.

His stay in Petrograd, the renamed St Petersburg, which he regarded as ‘the seismograph of Soviet Russia’ covered the period from 7 May-17 August which, he pointed out, ranged from the beginning of the Polish offensive through to the menacing of Warsaw by the Red Army. The newly created Polish state was bitterly resented by the Germans because the Danzig corridor had divided eastern Prussia from the rest of Germany. The Poles had invaded Russia in April 1920, hoping for territorial gains in Ukraine and Byelorussia, but by early August had been driven back to the gates of Warsaw by the Red Army. There were fears across Europe that, if Warsaw fell, the Communists would sweep onwards across Germany. A peace treaty was signed in October but it was a time of high tension for all those in positions of military, economic and political power. Klop had, he said, attempted to set passion aside and obtain a deep insight through contact with all parts of the population and supporters of all parties. A general overview was impossible; all he could do was report the highlights. Earlier assessments may have overstated the strength and stability of the Red regime but to underestimate it would be equally harmful.

He had concluded already that Communism would not work and that its leaders realised this. They survived only through a bureaucratic reign of terror. The overwhelming majority of the Russian people disapproved of the regime but were too weak and apathetic to oppose it. While an English delegation had been treated to ‘six star dinners’ in the official Palace of the Workers, he had been with the real workers slurping soup. There was great indignation that foreigners ate so well while the Russian workers starved. Visitors were having sand thrown in their eyes. They were being shown Lenin’s version of Potemkin villages – a throwback to an earlier age when temporary villages were created, populated with specially imported cheery peasants, to convince Catherine the Great that her empire was thriving. One of the English delegates privately admitted to Klop: ‘My only impression is that we don’t get the right impression.’

They were shown hospitals with plenty of food, school children marching in the sun and ruined bankers for whom there was no sympathy. But all these were deceptions. Society and the economy were breaking down. There had been fifty murders in a month in Petrograd. The head of the Cheka in Petrograd, Gleb Bokii, had personally warned Klop not to put his foreign money in the state bank because it would probably be stolen. A railway maintenance manager explained that for every locomotive they repaired they had to break up two for spare parts, for every new piece of track laid they had to rip up two others to use the rails. Despite steely discipline, the army was decimated by deserters who faced the firing squad if caught. Officers referred to the troops as ‘radishes – red on the outside and white on the inside’. Demobilisation of the Red Army would pose a great threat to the regime. It knew that only work and reconstruction would prevent wholesale collapse.

Klop likened the regime to icebound ships in winter on the Neva River that flows through St Petersburg. Often they were rotting from within and liable to sink in the first floods of spring. The Russian regime might slowly go to ground if the ice of war that was their mainstay gave way under the warm sun of peace.

A former high official of the Orthodox Church under the tsar had told him that there was not one man in the current government capable of administering his portfolio. The real problem was that there was no alternative, not tsarists, democrats, Bolsheviks, nor especially anarchists, capable of leading the Russian people. The reign of Faust (the scholar who in German folklore makes a pact with the devil) would be the most likely result of a coup.

Feeble-minded British support for the White Russian rebel forces of Admiral Alexander Kolchak in Siberia and General Anton Denikin in southern Russia and the Caucasus had failed. There was now a view that the perfidious Albion had an interest in leaving the Red regime in place and letting the Bolsheviks ‘sit in the saddle until they had ridden the Russian horse to death’. The Red regime recognised that the strength of the revolution was not sufficient and they had persuaded themselves to return to the once much-maligned behind-the-scenes diplomacy.

Klop seems to have been well informed about the secret trade negotiations that had been taking place at the beginning of August in London between the Prime Minister Lloyd George, Leonid Krassin, People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade, and Politburo member Lev Kamenev. According to Klop these talks were an illusion for the benefit of the English workers and the Bolsheviks, intended to give the impression that a trade deal would create jobs in Britain and provide food and money to alleviate hunger in Russia. However, he had received news, from well-informed naval circles in Petrograd and Moscow, that England had stipulated that Petrograd should become a free port under the League of Nations. The Russian regime had agreed to this. An informant reported that in a food map for Russia that he saw in Moscow, Petrograd was no longer provided for.

All of which led Klop to the conclusion that:

There would have to be a ‘parallelogram of power’ based on German investment to relieve the sorrows of the people and, consequently, bolstering the Bolshevik regime. For a start, the entire Russian transport system would need to be overhauled. Russia was waiting to see which would be the first country to give them what they needed. Whoever was first through the door would be last to leave. It would require vigilance to prevent the Russian sickness pervading the German economy and workforce and to immunise the country against the Communist International. A former Russian minister had described the Bolshevik leadership as the orphan child of St Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. They had not given up on their final goal of world revolution and they would pursue it without consideration by all means possible, including illegality. Adolph Joffe, chairman of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee which overthrew the Russian government in October 1917, had said to Klop:

It was against this background that the German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau had been persuaded to hold secret talks in the Moabit jail in Berlin with Karl Radek, the Bolshevik agitator who had been incarcerated because of his role in the 1919 Spartacist rebellion in Germany. They discussed industrial cooperation. General Hans von Seeckt, in overall command of rebuilding the German Army by subverting the terms of the Versailles peace treaty, also had talks with Radek and sent emissaries to see him in Moscow in 1920 after he was released from prison. Before the end of the year General von Seeckt had formed the highly secret Special Group R as the means of clandestine cooperation, thus laying the foundation for the rebuilding of the German Luftwaffe and Panzer tank divisions behind the Russian border away from the critical surveillance of the Western Allies.48

Early in September Klop and Nadia moved on to Amsterdam to await their visas to travel to London. It was another bewildering phase of married life for Nadia, as she gradually became aware of Klop’s previous dalliances and capacity for self-centred insensitivity.

On their first evening they dined with Klop’s colleague Felix Banse who was obliged, at Klop’s insistence, to explain how he had broken the news of Klop’s marriage to the girl he had left behind in Amsterdam, a telephonist named Lenie. She had, Banse assured him, taken it very well in the circumstances.

Nadia’s new world centred on a musty one-room bedsit with a rickety washstand, in a tall house on the Singel canal. There was no bathroom and meals had to be prepared on a frighteningly volatile spirit lamp. Nadia had no real experience of cooking for herself and the results were often scorched offerings that filled the room with the smell of burning. She was in despair and Klop showed little sympathy. She confessed later:

Nadia was indeed no pin-up: tall and powerfully built, her physical presence served only to emphasise Klop’s diminutive stature and appearance of a little bedbug. But she was certainly not ugly and her kindly, expressive face and disposition to accept what fate brought her made her an attractive character. Her imperturbable, pragmatic nature was to be sorely tried by her first experience of Great Britain.