With war looking ever more likely, Klop made frequent visits to Holland to hear how Wolfgang zu Putlitz gauged the situation. He had used his journalistic credentials to obtain a freelance position as European correspondent of an Indian newspaper and established an office in The Hague for the purpose. Although Klop was still technically working for MI5, his duties in Holland brought him under the aegis of MI6.

Putlitz told Klop that Holland was now the frontline for Abwehr intelligence operations against Britain. MI5 submitted a report to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who in turn relayed the information to the Prime Minister. It included a character assessment of Hitler, based on information from Putlitz and others who were in touch with his closest entourage, saying that he was now pursuing in high politics tactics which he had previously confined to smaller matters:

He caused his opponents to be confused with a feint here and a serious blow there, and simultaneous offers of peace, and when having given them no rest, he had got them where he wanted them, he made an energetic attack, falling on them like lightning.

The report added a comment from Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, to the effect that the only person who made an impression on Hitler was one who could firmly say ‘no’ or answer threats with counter threats. Any sign of weakness only egged him on and it was a mystery that other countries did not see this. MI5 concluded that

No action was taken on the security service’s request for additional manpower to match the German effort. The lack of preparedness would cost them dear when war was finally declared on 3 September 1939. Klop was again at the heart of events, in what came to be regarded as MI6’s worst humiliation of the war.

Klop’s intelligence from Putlitz in the last days of peace was confusing and, with hindsight, wishful thinking. In the first week of August 1939 Klop reported that the German military were on standby but not yet on full alert. On 30 August he declared that ‘the Germans have got the jitters’ and Putlitz was under the impression that: ‘We have got Hitler on the run and that nothing should be done to provide him with a golden bridge to make his getaway.’

He reiterated this message the following day and Guy Liddell noted that he seemed very confident that disintegration had set in and even suggested that it was doubtful whether the German Army would march if the order were given. Liddell found it difficult to judge whether his two agents’ views were based on hard evidence or gossip in diplomatic circles. He feared it may be another bluff but did not rule out the possibility of serious internal dissension between the German Army and its political masters. The information was passed to Vansittart, who said it confirmed what he was hearing from other sources and that he still hoped there might be no war; or that if there were it would not last very long.136

Klop was not the only agent feeding back intelligence that elements within the German Army were anxious to avoid a conflict. This coincided exactly with what Chamberlain continued to hope and strive for, and appears to have persuaded those involved, Klop included, to ignore a dire warning sign.

Putlitz was doing his very best to pass on every item of useful information. He compiled a list for Klop of Dutch businessmen who were collaborating with the Germans to transport vital imports of oil, coal and raw materials from their ports before a British naval blockade could come into effect. He was horrified when, three days later, he was summoned into his ambassador’s office and confronted with the list, which had apparently come into the hands of the Gestapo direct from the office of MI6’s main officer in The Hague, Captain Richard Stevens. He was asked to conduct an investigation into how such a leak had occurred. Putlitz knew immediately that the game was up. It could only be a matter of time before the ambassador realised he was the mole. He had to get out … fast.

Putlitz had a live-in lover – his manservant Willi Schneider, a former waiter who had fallen foul of the Gestapo and spent some time in a concentration camp. If Putlitz was going to escape, Willi had to come too. He had often acted as a go-between with Klop and it now fell to Willi to arrange the getaway. Within twenty-four hours he and Klop had lined up the Dutch air ace Dirk Parmentier, who could circumvent wartime emergency flight restrictions. They carried only one small suitcase each. German propaganda later claimed that Putlitz had filled his with stolen Nazi gold. He denied it.137

On 15 September, at Shoreham airport near Brighton, they were met by Dick White who took them to his brother’s flat, close to the British Museum in Bloomsbury, central London, where they were to live. Within days Putlitz found himself under arrest by the British police. He had gone, quite innocently, to a local cinema where he was recognised by a Belgian diplomat who happened to be in the audience and denounced him as a probable Nazi spy. This kind of hysteria was, understandably, rampant on both sides in the phoney war period and may partially account for the way warning signs were disregarded.

Reaction in Germany was equally bizarre. The news of Putlitz’s defection was deliberately concealed from Adolf Hitler. There were various vested interests at work. The German ambassador at The Hague, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, no Nazi sympathiser, had to account for the missing money that Putlitz had taken with him, and his failure to spot a mole at the heart of his embassy. The Gestapo could equally be found to be at fault for the security blunder. Joseph Goebbels seized the opportunity to put round a story that Putlitz and Willi Schneider had been murdered and thrown into a canal by ‘Jewish robbers’ who made off with the money. But there were plenty of people who knew this to be a fiction and word penetrated through to Putlitz’s old school friend Count Michael Soltikow, who was working for Admiral Canaris in the Abwehr. He was told that the missing pair were ‘living in clover’ in London. Canaris, calculating that this was an opportunity for one-upmanship over the Gestapo, despatched Soltikow to the Netherlands to investigate.

He quickly established that on the day they were supposed to have been murdered the pair had sold a private car and a motorcycle and that payment had been transferred to London. Putlitz had signed a receipt for the money. Dutch police had investigated the disappearance and were mightily put out by the slurs broadcast by Goebbels. They had obtained from Scotland Yard a photograph of Putlitz in a London street, which was date stamped and showed in the background young women in military uniform, demonstrating that it could only have been taken after war was declared. They also had a copy of a letter, signed and dated, that Putlitz had written to various former diplomatic colleagues in London explaining his reasons for defection and revealing correspondence between Hitler and Ribbentrop exposing Hitler’s double-dealing over the naval treaty he signed with Britain in 1935. The police were able to tell Soltikow that the spy and his lover were disguised in women’s clothing when they fled the country.

It was weeks after the disappearance that Soltikow found himself summoned one evening, with Canaris, to face the Führer at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin to explain his findings. On the way Canaris warned him not to mention the document revealing the double-dealing over the naval treaty. It might be interpreted as painting Hitler as ‘War Criminal Number One’.

Hitler demanded to know every detail. How long had the treachery gone on and what were Putlitz’s motives? Soltikow showed him the photographs and traced Putlitz’s history back to his days at Oxford University. He told Hitler that Putlitz had been the victim of British blackmail over his homosexual relationship with Willi. He had been given the choice of betraying his country’s secrets or being arrested and deported back to Germany where he would certainly find himself in a concentration camp, brutally treated and probably hounded to death. When he worked in the London embassy he had access to the safe where secret documents were kept and would copy them with a miniature camera.

Hitler seems to have been impressed and wanted to promote Soltikow to be a lieutenant in the SS. Canaris persuaded him that his agent could be put to better use in the Abwehr.138

Wolfgang zu Putlitz, meanwhile, found himself rather surplus to requirements. He no longer enjoyed access to German diplomatic secrets and his potential value to the British war effort was either as an analyst or a propagandist. Vansittart’s principal agent, Group Captain Malcolm Christie, recommended him for a role on an Anglo-German committee pursuing long-term propaganda aims, not just to refute ‘Nazi lies’ but to prepare the way for eventual peace. Putlitz, according to Christie, was eminently suitable because of his friendships with exiled anti-Nazi German politicians and for his flexible mind and constructive, creative mentality. Vansittart reported this to the Foreign Office, having first consulted MI5, and proposed taking Putlitz and Christie to talk it over with the Ministry of Information.139 It came to nothing and Putlitz was reduced to working as a production assistant to the film director Alexander Korda at Denham Studios.

After the Nazi invasion of France, anti-German feeling became so intense that he and Willi Schneider decided to move to the United States. They were initially refused a visa and spent an unhappy time under effective house arrest at a Canadian army camp on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. When he was finally granted a US visa he teamed up with a number of dissident Germans, among them his old friend Dr Carl Spiecker, who, as will shortly become clear, had not endeared himself to the British. The group wrote copious briefing notes for the Americans on German resistance to Hitler, nominating their exiled friends as a replacement government if the Führer could be deposed. Putlitz, in particular, does seem to have been instrumental in briefing Allan Dulles, who would play a key role as head of US intelligence in Switzerland. Not all of their intelligence was of the highest calibre, as the following excerpt from Putlitz demonstrates:

Dr Wolfgang Klaiber is in his early forties, a rather good looking blond fellow, trying to be immaculately well-dressed without always succeeding (he likes spats and similar gadgets) to look really smart. By natural inclination he cannot be much of a Nazi.140

Their hosts soon tired of this flummery and Putlitz eventually returned to Britain, without Willi Schneider, in 1944, to a new role as a propagandist, and a controversial future in peacetime Germany.

It must have been obvious from the circumstances in which Putlitz’s role as a British agent was jeopardised that there was a serious leak in the British intelligence services’ Dutch network. The culprit was not identified until after the war when a German intelligence officer under interrogation, Traugott Protze, named the mole as a Dutchman, Folkert Arie van Koutrik, whom the British had believed was working for them. He had fled to London shortly after the outbreak of war and continued to work for MI6.141

It might be expected that the reaction to the exposure of Putlitz would be caution. Yet the first thing MI5 did was to send an officer using the cover name Susan Barton to join Klop in The Hague, where she had worked previously. Mrs Barton, real name Gisela Ashley, was German by birth and had a brother who was a U-Boat captain. She had married a British man and although they had divorced by the time war began she retained British citizenship and loyalty. She later became one of the leading members of the hugely successful Double-Cross operation, running agents supplying the Germans with bogus intelligence.142 It was hoped that she might entice the German naval attaché, Käpitan Kurt Besthorn, into believing that she could provide him with intelligence from the British military censorship department, where she purported to work, and then use him to obtain naval intelligence from Germany. She shared a flat with Besthorn’s secretary Lili, who was an old friend from Germany. This, Guy Liddell thought, would partially compensate for the loss of Putlitz.143

But the greatest risks were taken by Richard Stevens and Sigismund Payne Best of MI6. In theory, the two should not even have been working together. For the previous twenty years, MI6’s rather sparse and underfunded network of agents had been based on the British embassy passport control officers whose official role was to scrutinise applications for visas. It was a convenient cover, in peacetime, for defensive intelligence to keep a check on foreign agents intent on coming to spy on Britain but less effective in gathering intelligence about foreign governments. And, inevitably, the cover story was fairly transparent. The head of MI6, Admiral Sir Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair, commonly known as ‘C’, had given his deputy Claude Dansey the job of setting up a parallel, undercover team, known as the Z organisation. Dansey was something of a maverick but he had a background in business and set about recruiting fellow businessmen.

Major Richard Stevens was the passport control officer in The Hague. He had only been appointed in 1939, having previously served as an army intelligence officer in India. He was multilingual (languages included German) but inexperienced. He was also, according to one contemporary, ‘a man of almost overbearing confidence’.144 As part of his induction he was introduced to Klop and briefed on the relationship with Putlitz. It is clear that MI5 feared that Stevens’s cover had been blown almost as soon as he was appointed and that even in London he would be under German surveillance. John Curry, the MI5 official who took him to Klop’s London flat, recalled that as they drove off a man jumped into a taxi on the rank immediately behind them and followed. Curry instructed their driver to make a series of quick turns in the side streets and lost their pursuer.145

By contrast, Sigismund Payne Best was an intelligence veteran. He had worked for the first director of MI6, Mansfield Cumming, during the First World War, directing military espionage from Holland. He had married the daughter of a Dutch general and lived in Holland for twenty years, setting up an import-export consultancy for British businessmen wanting to trade with Holland and Germany. He spoke both languages fluently and had extensive contacts, among them the German-born Prince Henry of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, consort of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Best and his Dutch business partner, Major Pieter van der Willik, were recruited by Claude Dansey for the Z network. Best was not exactly inconspicuous, every inch the English gent with a private income, affecting both a monocle and spats, but he kept himself apart from the British embassy. With the outbreak of war, a reluctant Best was persuaded to subordinate himself to Stevens on the grounds that they would need to coordinate their efforts and use the embassy’s secure means of communication, either through wireless or diplomatic bags which were immune from inspection by Customs or other authorities.

The chain of command at the top of MI6 was altered, too. Dansey was to operate from Paris or Switzerland so Best would be reporting direct to ‘C’ – except Admiral Sinclair was seriously ill with cancer, and died on 4 November 1939, so his deputy, Stewart Menzies, handled the day-to-day business and was effectively in charge.

The Prime Minister was clinging to the hope that war might still be averted by a change in the Nazi regime. Two days before war was declared he told the House of Commons:

He reiterated that position in the Commons on 12 October, saying that the German government was the sole obstacle to peace, which he was sure the German people desired, and playing on what he believed was serious dissent within the German High Command. He had good grounds for believing it to exist.

In 1951, Sigismund Payne Best published a book giving his account of what happened next but it was heavily circumscribed by the Official Secrets Act. He wrote a much more explicit private version in 1947 to an old friend, Lt Col. Reginald Drake, who had joined MI5 in 1912 and was helping Best to claim a proper pension and compensation for what became known as The Venlo Incident.147

Best says that he was contacted from London on 30 August 1939 by Dansey’s right-hand man, Lt Cdr Kenneth Cohen, and instructed to make urgent contact with one of Dansey’s agents, Franz Fischer. Best maintains that he knew of Fischer and did not trust him. Nevertheless, knowing that it risked blowing his cover, he invited him to his office and Fischer explained that he was working with a former press secretary from the German Chancellor’s office, Dr Carl Spiecker, who was in contact with the anti-Nazi faction of the army and had organised anti-Nazi radio broadcasts from a pirate radio ship in the North Sea. Dansey vouched for Spiecker’s reliability but Best reported to London that he did not believe Fischer’s story.

A senior official came over from London to impress on Best and Stevens the importance and urgency of the contact and they pressed ahead, meeting yet another intermediary, Johannes Traviglio, a Luftwaffe major from the Abwehr, in the Wilhelmina Hotel at Venlo on the Dutch-German border. Best was led to believe that at least three generals were involved in the anti-Nazi faction: Werner von Fritsch who had been driven out of his position as commander in chief by Heinrich Himmler on trumped up charges of homosexuality; Gerd von Rundstedt, who had supported Fritsch against Himmler; and Gustav von Wietersheim, the Panzer Division commander who had had a face-to-face clash with Hitler over his plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Fischer indicated that one of the three was prepared to meet Best and Stevens personally.

It seems doubtful whether there was ever any truth in Fischer and Traviglio’s claim to speak on behalf of those involved. Both men were double agents working for the German SD – the Sicherheitsdienst or SS security service. Certainly there were factions within the army that contemplated the removal of Hitler, and there were fears among the generals, shared by Himmler and others in the Nazi leadership, that a war in the West simply left Germany open to invasion by Russia in the east, despite Hitler’s non-aggression pact with Stalin. The Venlo operation seems therefore to have been an attempt either to find out to what extent Britain was conspiring with dissident factions in Germany, or to see if there was still a last chance of a peace settlement even though war had been declared.

The latter view is supported by events elsewhere. Prince Max von Hohenlohe had the ear of many in the Nazi regime and plentiful contacts with the Allies. He had sent a note to Goering and Hitler, arguing that only Bolshevism would benefit from war between Britain and Germany. Although Hitler dismissed his ‘defeatist scribblings’, Goering and the Gestapo showed some interest. Accordingly, he took his proposals to the Royal Hotel in Lausanne in Switzerland in October 1939 and put them to Sir Robert Vansittart’s agent, Group Captain Malcolm Christie.148 Christie, using a highly placed source in the German Air Ministry, had been able to warn Vansittart on 15 September of German military plans to invade Holland and sweep down through Belgium into France.

Separately, Theodor Kordt, who had been German chargé d’affaires in London prior to the declaration of war, was visited in Berne in October 1939 by Dr Philip Conwell-Evans, acting as Vansittart’s intermediary. He reiterated Chamberlain’s assertion that their quarrel was with the regime, not the German people, and that a just peace might still be negotiated. This was supposed to be the incentive the army dissidents would require to carry out their coup. And in Rome Dr Joseph Müller, a Munich lawyer sent by the deputy head of the Abwehr, Major-General Hans Oster, was making similar overtures via the Pope to the British ambassador to the Vatican. Oster had already leaked to the Allies Hitler’s projected date for an invasion of Holland and Belgium, on 12 November, adding urgency to the quest for a solution.149

What occurred at Venlo has to be viewed in this context. It was an intelligence operation but it was sanctioned by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet in pursuit of a compromise peace.

In any event, Fischer kept the talks going and demanded that, as evidence of British sincerity, a coded message should be broadcast by the BBC which the conspirators in Germany could recognise as a sign of encouragement. Klop was called upon to make the arrangements, planting a story in a Swiss newspaper which could then be taken up by the BBC. On 11 October Guy Liddell noted in his diary that Klop had just got back from Holland:

It seems that SIS [MI6] are in touch with certain disaffected elements in the Reichswehr [German armed forces], who are proposing to organise a coup d’état within the next few days. Their programme is to arrest all the principal leaders of the Party on the grounds that they have sold their country, and laid up large balances for themselves abroad. Hitler is to be the only exception and will be allowed to remain as a puppet head. The Army could not attack him on account of their oath of allegiance, but they would see to it that he was rendered entirely innocuous.

Two envoys are said to have come to Holland on this mission and were anxious to see a British Cabinet Minister to get some assurance that if they took over and proposed the restoration of Poland and Czechoslovakia, Germany would be given an honourable settlement. They were told that it was impossible for a British Cabinet Minister to be involved in a matter of this sort but that if a notice which they had prepared found its way into the Basler Nachrichten before Thursday they could go ahead. The message in the paper is that it is reported that there is a movement by certain elements in the German Army to arrest all Party leaders on the grounds that they have betrayed the State etc.

U35 in order to get this message through to the BN approached a contact of his in the Swiss legation. This was necessary in order to get the use of the Press telephone line. The Swiss legation must have had some idea of what is intended but they put U35 in touch with the representative here of the BN, which is generally speaking anti-Nazi in tone. This representative thought the story was a good one and worth publication, and a message was telephoned through last night. When it appears it will be broadcast two or three times as a news item by the BBC and this is supposed to give the signal for a general revolt.150

Liddell was not convinced by the German story, any more than Best was, although the form of the proposed coup described fairly accurately what the real dissidents had in mind. The stumbling block of the officers’ oath of allegiance did prey on their minds. Stevens, however, does seem to have been taken in. He and Klop had obviously been working on it together for some time. Klop had also spent some time in Switzerland on an unspecified mission. On a brief visit to London in the middle of the operation, Klop invited Putlitz round to his flat and Stevens regaled him with stories of how they had celebrated Putlitz’s escape from the Gestapo with champagne and oysters at the Restaurant Royale in The Hague. He then revealed that he was in radio contact with army dissidents in Germany and predicted confidently that Hitler was ‘nearly finished’. The war would be over before it began. Putlitz cautioned him against Gestapo double-dealing but Stevens assured him everything was under control. His confidence was misplaced.151

According to Best, the BBC message appeared to have the desired effect and he was told by Fischer that General von Wietersheim was prepared to meet him to discuss terms. At this point Stevens and Best decided they had better tell the Dutch Secret Service what was afoot and, to help things run smoothly at the border, they were assigned a Dutch escort officer. He was Lieutenant Dirk Klop, an extraordinary coincidence given Klop Ustinov’s involvement. On 20 October, two junior German officers using the names Seydlitz and Grosch crossed the border into Holland and were taken by Fischer to meet Stevens, Best and Lt Klop in a café at Dinxperlo. There were Dutch soldiers in the café and Best decided it would be more discreet to continue the conversation at the home of his cousin in Arnhem. The soldiers in the café had been suspicious and called the police, who raided the house in Arnhem. With some difficulty Lt Klop persuaded them that all was above board.

After some delays a further meeting took place in The Hague on 30 October. By now Fischer had faded from the scene and von Wietersheim did not show up. In his place, with Grosch, came Major Schaemmel and Colonel Martini. These two were, in reality, Walther Schellenberg, head of counter intelligence in the Gestapo, and his friend, Professor Max de Crinis, a psychologist. The bogus Major Schaemmel impressed the British delegates and in lengthy discussions they drew up proposals that would involve German withdrawal from Czechoslovakia and Poland, plebiscites in Sudetenland and Austria and restoration of Jewish rights. Best was sufficiently encouraged to entertain the German party to dinner at his home and allow them to sleep over. Next morning Stevens presented them with a two-way wireless set to make communication possible without hazardous border crossings.

These developments were reported back to Stewart Menzies, acting head of MI6, who in turn briefed the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister. Chamberlain authorised MI6 to pursue the talks ‘with energy’ and notified the War Cabinet on 1 November. They approved his action although Churchill, in particular, was unenthusiastic.

After radio contact Best and Stevens met ‘Major Schaemmel’ again on the 7th and 8th of November at the Café Backus, just on the Dutch side of the German border near Venlo. Von Wietersheim still did not materialise, the excuse being that he could not get away because he was obliged to be on hand to attend meetings with Hitler at short notice. On the morning of 8 November, the Queen of the Netherlands and the King of the Belgians, fearing an imminent invasion, had issued a joint appeal for peace. It was promised that von Wietersheim would show up on 9 November.

On that fateful, overcast day Best, Stevens, Lt Klop and their chauffeur Jan Lemmens intended to set out early. They were delayed by a long coded message coming in over the wireless that they had given to Schaemmel, although when deciphered it contained little of consequence. By the time they set off they were aware that an attempt had been made on Hitler’s life the night before when a bomb went off in the Bürgerbräu Keller in Munich, the traditional gathering place of the Nazi Party. As they travelled the 120 miles to the border in Best’s distinctive two-door American Lincoln Zephyr car, they considered the significance of that event, although they knew only the bare details. On the face of it, it lent credence to the idea that there were forces at work in Germany ready to remove Hitler from power by whatever means necessary.

It was getting dark as they drove through the pine woods to the red brick café with its first-floor veranda and children’s playground with swings and see-saws. It was almost opposite the Dutch border post and only 200 yards from the black-and-white painted barrier that marked the German frontier. Best was driving, despite the presence of the chauffeur, and recalled a feeling of impending danger although outwardly there was nothing to fear. A German customs officer was lounging at the roadside; a little girl was playing ball with a black dog. As the Lincoln cruised slowly into the car park Major Schaemmel appeared on the veranda and raised his hat to signal the all clear.152

But as Best reversed into a passageway to park, his way out was blocked by a German Adler car. A snatch squad of ten SS men led by Major Alfred Naujocks came running towards them, firing their weapons to scare off any Dutch customs officers who might otherwise consider intervening. Naujocks was already a veteran of Nazi intimidation techniques: he had murdered a Czech dissident famous for broadcasting anti-German propaganda and he had faked an attack on a German radio station which was then blamed on the Poles and used as justification for Germany to invade Poland. In due course Hitler would use the Venlo incident to justify the invasion of Holland.153

The gallant Lt Dirk Klop was the only one of the British party to put up a fight. He leapt from the front passenger seat and opened fire, and was gunned down for his trouble. He died later the same day in hospital in Düsseldorf. The other three members of the party were captured and driven at high speed into Germany where Best and Stevens were interrogated and made scapegoats for the Bürgerbräu Keller bomb, of which they knew nothing. The chauffeur Jan Lemmens was later released but the two MI6 officers spent the war in prison and concentration camps.

Walter Schellenberg would claim after the war that he had embarked on this exercise with the intention of discovering whether Britain might be prepared to reach a peace settlement without denying Germany the territorial gains she had already made. He had the authority of his boss Heinrich Himmler and, initially, the acquiescence of Hitler, who had believed that Britain would not go to war over Poland. But Hitler was quickly losing patience as his projected date approached for invasion via Holland and Belgium into France. By 9 November it was only three days away, although he was later persuaded to postpone it repeatedly until May 1940. And he was understandably enraged by the Munich beer hall bomb on 8 November which he escaped only because he left early. It remains the most likely explanation that this outrage had been engineered by his own people as a propaganda weapon against the West just as they had faked provocative incidents to justify military actions in the East. Schellenberg maintained that he was only told on the morning of 9 November that he was to act as the bait for the SS hit squad.

On the face of it, Klop Ustinov’s role in this fiasco was peripheral. But there remain many unanswered questions and there were other figures lurking in the shadows. It is known that Klop was working with Stevens in London in October – hence the meeting with Putlitz – and that he was at some point in Switzerland. And it is apparent from Group Captain Christie’s personal papers that his talks with Prince Max von Hohenlohe were not just taking place in parallel but were inextricably interlinked. Moreover, Prince Max at one point had talks with a second Englishman, who may have been Klop. Christie seems to have been in no doubt that Prince Max was genuine, that he acted on behalf of Göring and that he also briefed Hitler from time to time. Christie adopted a fairly transparent disguise for his communications with Max, and his reports back to Vansittart in London, presenting them in terms of competing groups of shareholders and directors of a Mexican oil company. Sir Nevil Bland, ambassador in The Hague, was being kept in the loop.

So on 12 November 1938, three days after the Venlo incident, Christie told Prince Max that his shareholders were deeply dissatisfied with the way the merger was being handled and added:

These comments make apparent the disillusion and dismay that must have been felt in London at the loss of two valuable agents and the diplomatic loss of face at falling for a Gestapo sting. They also imply that a peace manoeuvre was still considered viable. A series of scribbled jottings on rough notepaper with frequent crossings out and over-writing capture something of the confusion and panic that gripped both sides. It is not always clear whether Christie was making notes of conversations with Vansittart or Prince Max. But it emerges that the Prince had been in Holland at around the time of the Venlo incident and that he was trying to set up a face-to-face meeting with Christie or better still Vansittart. A Royal personage was lurking in the shadows, ready to take on the role of peacemaker if Göring could be persuaded there was a real prospect that he could emerge with a favourable peace. Several names were mentioned in this context – the British Duke of Kent, the King of Sweden, or the King and Queen of Belgium and the Netherlands respectively. The latter pair had made a public appeal to Hitler to talk. On the German side, Prince Louis Ferdinand, grandson of the Kaiser and a sympathiser with the anti-Hitler social democrat factions, was mooted as a potential monarch in a reformed state if Hitler could be deposed.

After the Venlo incident Prince Max, using the codename Smiler, called to make excuses and Christie reported back to London, in his Mexican oil company code:

The Rowdy meeting down South was not at the Chairman’s incentive or that of his supporters. On the contrary, the entourage of the Vice-Chairman was perhaps not entirely blameless in this hooliganism.

The implication appears to be that Göring played a part in the sabotage of discussions controlled by his rival Himmler while simultaneously conducting his own negotiations via Prince Max and Christie.

Post-war even this episode took on an element of conspiratorial farce as SS officer Klaus Huegel revealed that they were so cock-a-hoop over their success at Venlo that they planned to kidnap Vansittart by luring him to a meeting in Switzerland.155

Astonishingly, the Venlo operation did not end with the capture of Best and Stevens. MI6 maintained radio traffic with the wireless set they had given to ‘Major Schaemmel’ because they were not certain that he did not genuinely represent the dissident generals. It seemed possible that Schaemmel had been as surprised as Best and Stevens by the arrival of the SS hit squad. Since MI6 knew that Hitler had planned to invade Holland on 12 November, and that did not happen, they suspected that the Army dissidents had prevented it.

Schellenberg kept the game running by sending a message on the two-way radio on 13 November asking what had happened to the British representatives at Venlo. On 16 November, the acting head of MI6, Stewart Menzies drafted a message to be returned by radio from The Hague to the German dissident faction. In the absence of Richard Stevens, who was by then under interrogation in Germany, it may have been Klop who took responsibility for the radio traffic. The message repeated an earlier British stipulation that for peace talks to progress there would have to be regime change in Germany. Schellenberg replied, asking which British politician would be nominated to conduct the negotiations. This charade continued, with Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax still discussing how to handle the conspirators, until Schellenberg brought it to an end with an abusive message on 22 November.

From reports Klop wrote for MI5 it is clear that he was well versed in the minutiae of the Venlo discussions, and the radio traffic between Stevens and his supposed contact in Cologne. Klop had also visited Brussels soon after war was declared for talks with an SD man who was in touch with Group Captain Christie.

Klop’s news story, planted in the Swiss newspaper Basler Nachrichten, was a bizarre choice of signal and it had a damaging side effect. While the Gestapo were duping British intelligence in Venlo, genuine peace feelers were being made by Hans Oster of the Abwehr via the Vatican. He had sent a Munich lawyer, Josef Müller, a Catholic who had access to Pope Pius XXII, and messages were relayed via the British ambassador to the Holy See, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, to the Foreign Secretary. But Schellenberg’s superior officer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich’s security service including the Gestapo, had got wind of the discussions and when he saw the newspaper article his investigations intensified, forcing Oster to back off.

Since Klop was responsible for the newspaper article, and the BBC follow up, he may also have been behind another unexplained element of the fiasco. There are reports that, on the day that Stevens and Best were captured, a pirate German radio station or Freiheitsender broadcasted a call to arms to anti-Nazi Germans to rise up and overthrow Hitler. The BBC ran this as a news story and reported a ‘manifesto’ of this dissident station. Yet the BBC’s own monitoring service maintained that it had not picked up the pirate broadcast. As already mentioned, Dansey’s contact Carl Spiecker claimed to be able to make such broadcasts from a ship in the North Sea. And there was another highly secret outfit, the Joint Broadcasting Committee, which had been set up to make just the type of propaganda that this illicit broadcast represented. Among its early recruits were Guy Burgess and Klop’s close friend Moura Budberg. It later emerged that this team, run either by MI6 or by Vansittart’s personal intelligence agency, claimed to be able to deliver recorded messages for broadcast either inside Germany and its occupied territories or from Switzerland.156

One interested observer of this debacle was the young Nicholas Elliott, just starting out on a career as a diplomat and MI6 officer. He was the son of a headmaster at Eton and his social network included members of the Royal Family, the Cabinet and the Establishment at large. Through a family connection he had been recruited when he came down from Cambridge as an honorary attaché at The Hague by the newly appointed special envoy, Sir Neville Bland. Bland was a close friend of the head of MI6, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, who visited the Legation during the summer of 1939 and got to know Elliott. The aspiring spy also got to know Klop and acted as a go between with Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who sagely advised him not to take a holiday in Russia at the end of August 1939 as war would break out before he could get back. Elliott had met Best a couple of times and thought him ‘an ostentatious ass blown up with self-importance’. Stevens he liked, but concluded that his intense ambition to take the credit for ending the war before it really got started warped his critical faculties and prevented him seeing through the deception. The consequence was ‘as disastrous as it was shameful.’157

Elliott’s superior, ambassador Nevil Bland, took a different view, telling the Foreign Office in London that Best had been viewed with intense distrust by other members of the Passport Control Office and that they had resented the increasing ascendancy of Best over Stevens in the weeks running up to the Venlo incident. Bland went on to report gossip that Best had been in the pay of the Germans all along and was expecting a German war decoration for his betrayal. He complained, too, that Stevens’s deputy was not up to the job. All these allegations were emphatically rejected by Stewart Menzies.158

One of the unexplained elements of the Venlo incident is the role of the Czech Intelligence Service. They and the Poles had borne the brunt of Hitler’s aggression but they had offered more than passive resistance. They had well-developed networks of agents whose information they were willing to share. They had also, inevitably, been the target of penetration attempts by Hitler’s secret services, some of which succeeded. Klop and Dick White were responsible for liaison and by the end of the war Klop was regarded as a walking encyclopaedia on their activities.

František Moravec, who had been appointed head of the Czech Intelligence Service in March 1934, had formed a close working relationship with MI6’s man in Prague, Harold Gibson. Despite the debacle of Munich, in which Chamberlain effectively sold out the Sudetenland to Hitler behind the backs of the Czechs, Moravec still believed Britain was his best ally. He shifted £1 million in secret funds via neutral countries to London. On the eve of Hitler’s occupation of the Czech capital in May 1939, Gibson laid on a private plane to fly Moravec and ten of his most senior staff to London. Moravec transferred his most secret files to the British embassy, who shipped them to London in diplomatic bags that the Germans could not intercept. He liaised closely with the heads of MI5 and MI6 and was able to pass on to them intelligence brought out of Germany by his best agent, codenamed A-54 and later identified as Paul Thümmel, a high-ranking Abwehr officer. Since 1937 he had correctly predicted every step on Hitler’s route into Czechoslovakia.

Moravec was delighted when Thümmel re-established contact with him in London and set up a meeting for 15 June 1939 at the Hotel des Indes in The Hague. He revealed the existence of Plan White, for the invasion of Poland and information about the increased number of Panzer divisions. A-54 made another trip to Holland on 3 August. His rendezvous point on this occasion, with two of Moravec’s senior staff, was a small shop, known as De Favourit van Jansen, in Noordeinde in The Hague. It was run by an exiled Czech couple, Charles and Antoinette Jelinek, who traded in small objects d’art, Czech glass and leather work. Thümmel spent the evening sitting at a table in a backroom typing from memory full details of the invasion plan for Poland.

At the end of November, a matter of weeks after the Venlo fiasco, Thümmel was back in The Hague for three days, giving early warning of the rocket development that would lead to the V1 and V2 weapons. The bric-a-brac shop became Thümmel’s cover address for mail drops. Towards the end of March 1940 he revealed, using invisible ink in an otherwise innocuous letter, the plans for Germany’s attack on the West. On 1 May he correctly predicted that it would take place on the tenth.159

Klop had been in The Hague for most of the final months of 1939, gathering all the intelligence he could from Wolfgang zu Putlitz before he had to flee to Britain and assisting Richard Stevens in the Venlo negotiations. Another of Moravec’s agents was also in evidence. This one was less trustworthy. William Morz had worked for the German police in Hamburg and belonged to the Schwarze Kapelle – the resistance movement against Hitler – before becoming a collaborator with Czech intelligence. Unbeknown to them, he was a double agent working for the Nazis.

In April 1939 Dick White had issued a special clearance for Morz to be allowed into Britain. He had visited Major Josef Bartik, the Czech head of counter intelligence, at his new home at 53 Lexham Gardens, South Kensington and been despatched on a secret mission to Holland. He then tried to lure Bartik to a meeting near Venlo but the Czech officer, who had lost men to Gestapo kidnap squads in the past, was suspicious and insisted that the meeting take place well away from the German border, on the Dutch coast. He decided to hand control of Morz over to the British. Whether Klop was the liaison officer in the case at that stage is not clear but in 1940 he was involved in a frantic manhunt for Morz, who had by then been exposed as a German agent. Special Branch spent some time visiting West End nightclubs and Soho cafes after various sightings of the agent. Dick White thought he had spotted Morz working as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant but, like every other sighting, it proved to be mistaken. He noted:

Morz was never found but it was discovered that Franz Fischer, the instigator of the whole sorry Venlo episode, had also worked for the Czech Deuxieme Bureau.161

Back home Klop felt that it was time his artistic son joined the family business in secret intelligence. He arranged an interview which required Peter to meet a stranger, identifiable by his copy of the News Chronicle and an exchange of passwords, outside Sloane Square Underground station. A brief and inconsequential conversation took place, in elementary German and French, before the two parted and Peter later learned that he was considered unsuitable for secret work because he could not easily blend into a crowd. This may well have been true, but his father was hardly inconspicuous either and it represented yet another disappointment for Klop in his son’s progress into adulthood. Instead, Peter got a part in a revue. His father was dismissive: ‘Not even drama … vaudeville.’ For much of his son’s early career Klop maintained an ambivalent attitude, outwardly dismissive, even hostile, yet he would often sneak in unannounced, in the company of friends, to observe his performances and bask in the occasional successes. Peter was called up in 1942, serving briefly as a private in the Royal Sussex Regiment and the Royal Army Ordnance Corps before being transferred to a propaganda film unit under the aegis of the Directorate of Army Psychiatry. In 1940, at the age of nineteen, he had married the actress Isolde Denham. As he later admitted, he was ill-equipped to sustain such a relationship and Klop seems to have had little to offer in the way of parental advice or encouragement. Indeed, he had never felt able to explain the facts of life to his son, despite their lecherous conversations over ice-creams in the park during Peter’s childhood.

Klop worked throughout the war and beyond in close collaboration with Czech intelligence but it was a complex relationship. His contact, Vaclav Slama – Agent Sloane – was a lawyer and head of counter-intelligence. He had sources all over Europe, one of the most important being a mole inside the Swedish embassy in London. The Swedish Minister to London, Bjorn Prytz, had been involved in one of the most controversial peace-feelers of the war. On 17 June 1940, only a fortnight after the evacuation of Dunkirk, he had met his old friend Rab Butler, deputy to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, strolling back from lunch across St James’s Park. Prytz reported this casual encounter with one of the arch apostles of appeasement back to his government, including seriously injudicious remarks by Butler that appeared to have Halifax’s tacit encouragement. He said that no opportunity would be missed of compromise [with Germany] if reasonable conditions could be agreed and no diehards would be allowed to stand in the way. Halifax was reputed to have said that common sense and not bravado would dictate British policy.

The Swedes passed on these comments, with their implied criticism of Churchill, to Hitler. News of it leaked to a British journalist in Stockholm whose report back to London was quickly quashed by the censors but Churchill soon got to hear of it, from his ambassador and, most likely from surveillance by MI5. He issued a strong rebuke about Butler’s ‘odd language’ and impression of defeatism.162 This directly contradicted Churchill’s famous ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech on 4 June and another, made the day after Butler’s meeting with Prytz, in which he warned of the likelihood of imminent invasion and declared that if Britain and the Empire could stand up to Hitler men would forever say: ‘This was their finest hour.’

It is clear from MI5’s file on Prytz, only released in March 2014, that he was considered a continuing risk of indiscretion and unauthorised attempts to broker peace deals in contravention of Churchill’s policy of unconditional surrender. Sloane and Klop were able to report the content of discussions among Swedish diplomats and their contacts throughout 1941-42 on the Russian campaign, morale among German troops and civilians, and the influence of Japan on the war. Telephone taps recorded Prytz’s unofficial conversations with British sympathisers.163

The Czechs had good sources and were crafty operators but they had been the targets of determined penetration efforts by the Germans in the years of harassment and intimidation prior to 1939, while simultaneously providing a haven for persecuted German communists. MI5 had been warning from early in the war that refugees had to be regarded as potentially subversive in the German and Russian cause. There was enormous pressure on the Czech government in exile, prompted both by their British hosts and Stalin once Russia entered the war on the Allied side, to mount a showpiece act of resistance. The opportunity came with the appointment of the sadistic security chief, Reinhard Heydrich, as Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. With the help of the British Special Operations Executive, two Czech agents, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, were parachuted in to assassinate him. On 27 May 1942 they succeeded in fatally wounding him by throwing an anti-tank mine at his car as it slowed to take a hairpin bend. Terrible reprisals followed after the two assassins had been traced to the crypt of the Saint Charles Borromaeus Church where they committed suicide rather than be captured. Many of their supporters were killed and in the villages of Lidice and Ležáky every man was executed as were many of the women, while those left alive were sent to concentration camps. Children were sent to an extermination camp and the villages obliterated. This had a devastating effect on morale and naturally raised questions of why the British and Czechs in London sanctioned it, knowing there must be reprisals. One suggestion is that the intelligence services feared that Admiral Canaris was losing his grip on the Abwehr. They knew that in October 1941 the Gestapo had captured the Czech’s best agent, Paul Thummel, who officially worked for the Abwehr. Under interrogation he admitted he had also worked for the British and been in touch with Best and Stevens prior to their capture at Venlo. There was a distinct possibility that Heydrich was on the verge of seizing control. This would inevitably have led to a purge of Abwehr agents and their sources, depriving the British of one of their most valuable weapons – the double agents whom Klop and others ran so successfully throughout the war feeding the Germans false information which deceived them over Allied strategy including the landings in Sicily and the Normandy beaches.164