Klop was the first to depart the Ustinov family home in London, accompanied by his brother Peter: like many young men they were caught up in the patriotic fervour of the moment, rushing to volunteer with little thought of the slaughter that awaited. But Klop and Peter were German; their duty lay with the Kaiser on the continent, not with Lord Kitchener and King George V.
Platon, meanwhile, got his wish and returned to Russia where, despite being seventy-three years old, he was still technically an officer of the Chevalier Guards. His wife Magdalena and daughter Tabitha, then aged fourteenth, joined him soon after, heading for a country that they barely knew and where they would soon find themselves destitute. The two youngest children, Platon junior, aged eleven, and Gregory, seven, were left behind, at boarding school in London. They were in the care of wealthy and influential friends, the shipping magnate Sir Karl Knudsen and his wife, and relatives of the banker Johannes Frutiger. Norwegian-born Sir Karl had taken British nationality and married a Scot, Anne Macarthur. He played a vital role during the war in liaising with Norwegian ship owners whose fleets helped keep Britain supplied.
Peter who had been born in Tölz, in Bavaria in 1895 and had been planning to study medicine, was first to enlist, on 7 August. Klop signed up three days later in the 123rd Grenadiers of the 5th King Karl of Württemberg infantry regiment. He gave his next of kin, rather grandly, as the Gräfin von dem Bussche. She at least had impressive German credentials compared with his relatives, who were scattered through lands which were now enemy territory. He began his career as a gefreite, or lance corporal, but seems to have been marked out for rapid promotion and by March 1915 held the junior officer rank of leutnant. The regiment had marched out from its headquarters at Ulm, anthems playing and flags fluttering in the breeze, advancing into Belgium. They followed the old Roman road down which Attila had led the Hunnish hordes in his assault on the empire of Valentinian III nearly 1,500 years earlier. Attila got to Orleans, west of Paris, before being driven back at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. The Kaiser’s army never got that far. By the winter on 1914 they were trapped in the primeval landscape of the forest of the Argonne east of Reims in northern France where even the place names were redolent of death. It was hard, attritional warfare. There was impenetrable undergrowth, gorse bushes and head high bracken growing between ancient oaks and beeches. The troops made shelters in the foliage and dug foxholes. Now they had to fight their way forward step by step through the forest and the trenches. A contemporary photograph shows Klop, with close-cropped hair and a steely gaze, in his ankle-length greatcoat on a snow-covered hillside. In January 1915 he had taken part in the storming of the Valley of Dieusson in the Bois de Grurie. Recognition that he had been acting above his rank was signified by the promotion to leutnant and the award of an Iron Cross, Second Class. The Dieusson attack cost the French about 3,000 men, roughly three times the German casualties. In the first three months of 1915, fighting mostly in the Argonne the French Third Army lost nearly 30,000 men. The Germans, under General Bruno von Mudra, were gaining the upper hand. By summer they were able to muster concentrated artillery attacks; for the first time shells were delivering poison gas and a new design of hand grenade was available.14 The Grenadiers were temporarily trapped under heavy artillery bombardment from the French and when it relented the Kaiser visited them to present bravery awards. During the autumn Klop continued to attract attention in regimental records for his noteworthy actions. Hans Speidel was a platoon commander and singled out Klop as one of his fellow junior officers who forged an unbreakable comradeship with their men which helped to maintain their morale as they experienced the terror of mechanised warfare for the first time. They finally escaped the ‘accursed forest’ for the even greater hell-holes of the trenches of the Somme towards the end of the year. Behind them, in a grove of mighty oaks, they had buried their dead comrades, with a regimental memorial carved into one of the trees. To have fought in the battle of the Argonne Forest became a badge of honour.15
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle visited the opposing French troops there in 1916, in his capacity as war correspondent of the Daily Chronicle, and wrote:
The great forest consists of sturdy oaks and beeches and firs, with a thick tangle of undergrowth, mountain, valley, and plateau alternating. The soil is soft clay, admirably suited for entrenching, tunnelling, and mine warfare – when it is dry. As an outside observer, I do not see why the war in this area should not go on for a hundred years, without any decisive result. What is happening now is precisely what happened last year. The only difference is that the trenches are deeper, dug-outs better made, tunnels are longer, and the charges of explosives heavier.16
Klop had established an important and lifelong friendship with Speidel, who became a career soldier, later a general and chief of staff in France and on the Russian Front in the Second World War. Speidel was ashamed of Nazi racial policies and took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. In the late 1950s he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of NATO forces in Central Europe.
For them the year 1916 began in Flanders, where their job was to cling on to the hard-won positions that they called Der Bastion and Doppelhöhe 60, known to the Allies as the notorious Hill 60. From there they could look out over the unattainable goals of St Martins Cathedral and the medieval Cloth Hall of Ypres, a town they occupied briefly at the start of the war but never recaptured. All around it both sides suffered terrible losses.
Hill 60 was not much more than an embankment, rising only a little over sixty metres above sea level, created artificially from the spoil of a nearby railway cutting. It had been captured by the Germans in 10 December 1914 and became the first scene of the underground warfare in which British engineers and miners tunnelled under the German lines in April 1915 to plant around 4,500kg of explosives. The blast that followed caused an enormous crater and flung debris 300ft in the air.
The British then suffered heavy casualties trying to defend the position – the Victoria Cross was awarded on four occasions in a single night’s fighting – but in May 1915 the Germans recaptured the barely recognisable landmark with a lethal assault of poison gas.
The 123rd Grenadiers held on grimly to what was left of Hill 60 during the early months of 1916 but were beaten back from the nearby stronghold known as The Bastion at the beginning of March. They had sustained heavy losses in a night-time artillery barrage followed by an infantry advance at 4:30 a.m. on 2 March. British troops reported that many of the Germans they took prisoner had no weapons. The Grenadiers were withdrawn from the frontline after that reverse and given a couple of months leave in the peaceful surroundings of Bruges, Ghent and Ostend. Hill 60 was only recaptured by the Allies in June 1917 after they detonated 450,000kg of explosives under enemy lines at the start of the Battle of Messines, reputedly killing 10,000 German soldiers with a blast so loud that it was claimed it had been heard in London and Dublin.
The Grenadiers had by then long moved on to other scenes of slaughter. As the Battle of the Somme raged on throughout 1916 they were rushed in July to the defence of the villages of Guillemont and Combles. Once more they came under relentless bombardment. They were forced to exist in the ancient underground catacombs at Combles and when they were finally obliged to retreat during August they left many dead and dying comrades behind them in the caves.
They dug in once more, in front of High Wood near Guillemont where the German Army had a divisional headquarters. They were under constant attack by the British, led by officers on horseback and preceded by artillery assaults that reduced everything to dust and rubble. Probably the worst was on 17-18 August when the artillery barrage lasted twenty-six hours. The 2nd Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders attacked, accompanied by flamethrowers, but German machine-gun fire coupled with the British bombardment, which did not let up, even when their own troops reached the disputed ground, forced them back.17 In that bleak landscape, a smouldering slag heap where no plant life survived, the Grenadiers were invited to surrender and refused, despite having lost three-quarters of their men, fighting on with only a few machine guns and precious little ammunition. They were finally withdrawn at the end of August, highly praised for their steadfastness, but it was in vain. Guillemont fell to the Allies a fortnight later.18
Klop’s fastidious ways were hardly suited to the mud and filth of the trenches. It must have been a relief when he got a chance to train with the recently formed Luftstreitkräfte, the German army’s air force section. He and his brother Peter had not been fighting side by side. Peter had started with the 1st Württemberg Regiment, joined Klop in the 123rd Grenadiers in May 1915 and then joined the 127th in February 1917 but he was also taking part in flying training. Klop quickly found that the glamorous image of an aviator in uniform opened the way to conquests that were altogether more amenable than confronting the British Tommy in the trenches. As he later confided in his wife Nadia, ‘he was able quite effortlessly to have any and every female he fancied’. He described to her how he and Peter contrived to be billeted in chateaux where the owner invariably had at least one beautiful daughter. Unblushingly, he told her he shared girlfriends with his brother and indulged in three-in-a-bed sessions with two sisters. In the officers’ mess he was developing his skills as an entertainer, playing the piano, impersonating the singers of popular songs in English and French as well as German, making friends in high places who would serve him well in later life.
On the ground, the fighting was concentrated around Messine and Wytschaetebogen where the British began a massive seventeen-day bombardment around the middle of May. Klop was a witness.19
Aviation was still its infancy. Crashes were commonplace. Dogfights were becoming lethal with the development of cockpit-mounted machine guns that could fire through the propellers. Previously enemy airmen fired at each other with pistols or threw missiles at each other. Klop claimed to have once escaped unscathed from a cockpit riddled with bullets, some of which had passed through his cap without causing injury. He liked to maintain that it was the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, who had come to his rescue. By April 1917 Klop had qualified as an observer rather than a pilot. His duties involved spotting targets on the Western Front for the artillery, and occasionally dropping bombs.
It was then that he and Peter were reunited in flying section A250. Their comradeship was to be short-lived. On the morning of Friday, 13 July 1917, Peter Ustinov sat on the end of his brother’s bed and said farewell before taking off on a mercy mission. With white streamers attached to the wings of his plane, he was heading behind enemy lines to drop bags of mail from British prisoners of war to their loved ones back home. British anti-aircraft gunners failed to see the white streamers and Peter Ustinov, with his pilot Georg Fick, met their deaths in no-man’s land at Hollebeke, just south of Ypres. For Klop, who led the search party to recover his body, it was a shattering experience. A month later Klop was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class and in September the Ritterkreuz or Knight’s Cross, effectively a double Iron Cross. He was still flying but the logs that might record what he did to deserve the accolades were destroyed in the Second World War. Klop may not have cared much about medals after the loss of his brother. He named his only son in his memory.20
In July 1918 Klop won yet another Ritterkreuz, this time with the additional recognition of the Order of Friedrich, a nineteenth-century award created for nobility serving in the Württemberg regiments. In October, a couple of weeks before the war ended, he was transferred out of the front line to a War Office job back in Württemberg. When he enlisted he had described himself as a Protestant Evangelist. By the time he signed his discharge papers he had no religion.
He soon moved to Berlin in search of civilian employment. He abandoned the notion of becoming a diplomat. Representing a defeated and vilified country abroad may not have been the best showcase for his talents but his chosen alternative was scarcely better. He had influential friends and quickly found himself appointed to the Wolff’s Telegraphische Büro, the national news agency of Germany, as a correspondent destined to report from London, probably the most hostile posting imaginable. Wolff’s had been founded by Bernhard Wolff in 1849, shortly before his former colleague Julius Reuter set up his eponymous agency in London. They had previously worked together in Paris, for the French news agency Havas. The three agencies represented the great powers of international news reporting, often pooling reports or sharing the telegraph cables that made possible rapid worldwide communication. The strategic significance of communications technology had been recognised during the war, with Britain in particular seeking to control the means of transmission in Europe, across the Atlantic and into the Far East. Intercepting enemy diplomatic and military traffic for intelligence and propaganda purposes played an important part in her strategy. Similarly, the Wolff Bureau had been used before and during the war by the German Foreign Office to challenge Britain’s colonial supremacy and to get Germany’s message across.
So Klop’s new profession was not that far removed from diplomacy, in fact it was ideal cover. Klop was about to become a spy.
While he waited for British clearance to travel to London he was sent by the Wolff Bureau to the Netherlands, reporting from there on Dutch and English news. In 1919 the German ambassador in The Hague was Friedrich Rosen, an Orientalist who had grown up in Palestine and been German consul in Jerusalem at the turn of the century. In 1905 he led a German mission to Ethiopia and so would almost certainly have known Baron Platon Ustinov and Moritz Hall’s family. Klop reintroduced himself to Rosen and got to know the counsellor at the embassy, Baron Adolf Georg Otto ‘Ago’ von Maltzan. Rosen would briefly serve as Foreign Minister in the Weimar Republic conducting lively exchanges with his opposite number in the Soviet Union, Georgy Chicherin, with a view to rapprochement.21 But it was Maltzan who was the architect of German revival by clandestinely subverting the peace treaty of Versailles from the moment when victors and vanquished finally put pen to paper in June 1919.
Germany and Russia had been on opposing sides for the first three years of the war but after the Russian Revolution hostilities had officially ceased. The Russians were therefore excluded from the Versailles treaty negotiations. In addition, some German soldiers had joined forces with the White Russian armies, which already had British and French support, seeking to depose the new Communist rulers. As these rebellions petered out, hundreds of thousands of troops from either side were left stranded in the Baltic States or held as prisoners on either side. There were estimated to be 100,000 German prisoners in Russia and 1.2 million Russians in German hands. During 1919 Maltzan became commissioner responsible for repatriating these displaced soldiers. These were ideal circumstances for infiltrating agents and Maltzan, who had been First Secretary at the German embassy in St Petersburg before the war, took full advantage.
He was convinced that Germany’s best prospect for economic and political recovery lay with Russia – Bolsheviks or no Bolsheviks. Russia needed Germany’s technical ability; Germany needed Russia’s raw materials and vast labour force. The punitive reparations imposed by the Western Allies meant there was no future in that direction. He built his own career around that concept. By 1921 he was ministerial director of the Eastern department of the German Foreign Office and by 1922 State Secretary and closest adviser to the Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, who signed the Treaty of Rapallo which ultimately allowed Germany secret military development facilities inside the Soviet Union.
In 1919 and 1920 Germany did not have normal diplomatic representation in Moscow and was anxious to infiltrate any unofficial observer who could report first hand on the chaos that was enveloping the new regime. One of Maltzan’s first sources was a Communist sympathiser, Wolfgang Breithaupt, editor of a small but apparently well-regarded journal known as The Word in Three Languages, published by the Pacific-World-Union in The Hague, in fact in four languages – English, French, Dutch and German. It attracted contributions from a number of English correspondents, among them the novelist D. H. Lawrence who provided a four-part series on democracy. He had been introduced to the magazine by the pacifist novelist Douglas Goldring, who visited the magazine’s offices in 45 Van Imhoff Street and recalled that the paper was run by Germans pretending to be International Socialists. He thought they were secret service agents.22 It has since emerged that between November 1919 and March 1920 the magazine was used as a front to gather information from inside Russia, paid for by Maltzan who received the fruits of their research direct from Wolfgang Breithaupt. In January 1920 Maltzan paid an Italian journalist F. P. Giuntini the relatively modest fee of 8,000 Marks to travel through Russia, ostensibly gathering material for Italian newspaper articles. A month later, a German businessman using the cover name of Knoll was set up with 30,000 Marks to trade in confiscated or export-prohibited medicinal drugs that the authorities in Soviet Russia desperately needed, while making an objective assessment of the latest political events in Soviet Russia. The German consulate at Vyborg, just inside the Finnish border and only eighty miles north-west of St Petersburg, was weighing in with information gleaned from Bolshevik newspapers and informants prepared to make hazardous border crossings at night.23 Two German doctors, Julius Borchardt and Georg Klemperer, had been summoned to Moscow to treat Lenin’s baffling, persistent headaches and reported back to Maltzan. In 1919 a Dutch journalist by the name of Fabius went on a semi-official trip and was arrested on the Russian border but still contrived to return with copies of correspondence between Stalin, Lenin and the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky.24
Maltzan was simultaneously holding secret trade talks in Berlin with Viktor Kopp, Russia’s Red Cross representative in the city, and hatching military strategies with General Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission, to overthrow the Bolsheviks. Maltzan was also aware that, however much Britain might appear to oppose the Communist takeover in Russia, Prime Minister Lloyd George saw a potential solution to his country’s unemployment problems in opening up the Russian market to British exports. Maltzan was determined to get in ahead of him. On the face of it, Britain was trying to bring down the Bolshevik regime, while Germany was trying to establish good relations with them, in spite of their ideological differences. It was not so straightforward.25
Klop was a natural candidate for recruitment. He had strong personal reasons to go to Russia: he had lost touch with his parents and his sister. Early in the war they had corresponded through his mother’s younger sister Katia, who was in Bulgaria and managed to pass letters through Sweden and Switzerland. But after the revolution in 1917 Klop lost touch and determined to go to Russia to find out what had happened to them. It was not a journey to be taken lightly or without friends or support. Friedrich Rosen and Ago von Maltzan could help him prise open the door but thereafter he would have to live on his wits. The consequences if he was betrayed or captured didn’t bear thinking about.
It probably did not cross his mind that he would find a bride of independent mind, great strength of character and aesthetic talent who just at that moment was in need of a knight in shining armour.