ON MARCH 12, 1938, JUST TWO DAYS BEFORE PERCY GLADING AND his accomplices were sentenced, German troops marched into Austria in what was euphemistically called the Anschluss, meaning the “connection” or “annexation.” Even if the troops were welcomed by many Austrians, this was an invasion in all but name. The territorial expansion Hitler had set out in his memoir Mein Kampf was now under way. Spain looked set to become another nation in which a democratically elected government was to be replaced by a dictator, now that the Spanish Civil War had swung decisively to the Fascists. By the summer of 1938, the greatest threat to world peace did not come from Moscow but from right-wing dictators. As the News Chronicle put it, “sooner or later the democracies will have to stand.”
Earlier that year an MI5 source inside the German embassy in London, the aristocratic diplomat Wolfgang zu Putlitz, reported that German espionage operations against Britain had begun. The days of cooperation between German and British intelligence were a distant memory. MI5 needed to infiltrate pro-Nazi organizations in the capital, and do so fast.
M’s response was to take on two new agents, both of whom were unlike any others he had recruited: they were German. Their job was to penetrate the German expatriate community in London and try to win over Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. The trouble was, one of M’s new agents was gay and had refused to join the Hitler Youth. The other was a passionate opponent of Nazism who had recently married a Jew. But if M could teach British Fascists to pass themselves off as Communists, perhaps he could get these two to disguise themselves as devout Nazis.
One was Harold Kurtz, codenamed M/H, a twenty-five-year-old German later given the nickname “The Porpoise” on account of the way he liked to leave the bathroom soaked in water after his ablutions each morning. Kurtz would go on to write distinguished biographies of the Empress Eugenie and Marshal Ney. He was bad with money, smoked as if it was good for him, and was fond of drink. He was also a pronounced Anglophile desperate for British citizenship, which is what M promised when taking him on.
The same was broadly true of M’s other new agent, Friedl Gaertner, a stunning divorcée who had recently arrived in London after her sister’s marriage to Ian Menzies, brother of the senior MI6 officer and future “C” Stewart Menzies. Friedl Gaertner’s sister had met Ian Menzies after he saw her perform at the London Casino. At the time she had been wearing nothing but a diaphanous pink body stocking. When Stewart Menzies later met Friedl, he tried to recruit her as an MI6 agent, asking her to go back to Nazi Germany on his behalf, but she refused.
“Though willing to work,” explained Stewart Menzies, “her whole heart is set on living over here.” So he suggested that she work for MI5 instead and put her in touch with M.
After their first meeting, M described Friedl Gaertner as “an extremely level-headed and intelligent person” whose “one aim and object in life is to secure a permit to work in this country and to remain here,” adding that “there is no doubt whatever about her very considerable personal attractiveness.”
This gave M an idea. He suggested that she should pose, in every sense of the word, “as a sort of super high-class mannequin,” that is, model, who was new to London and who wanted to help the Nazi cause. After taking the weekend to think about it, Friedl Gaertner agreed to work for MI5. But she drew the line at pretending to be a model. Instead, M, or “Michael,” as she called him, found her a job as a secretary for Dennis Wheatley, his novelist friend. Once he was happy with her cover, a version of the one he had first given Olga, M spymaster launched her and Kurtz at the German community in London.
M wanted to take on many more agents, but he did not have the resources. He later bemoaned his “financial starvation” at this time and the government’s failure to take “a more courageous attitude.” Because of a lack of funds, it seems, he also lost the exclusive services of E. G. Mandeville-Roe, or M/R, by then a trusted figure in several extremist right-wing groups with close ties to Nazi Germany. Instead, Mandeville-Roe began to combine his work for MI5 with espionage for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which was quite a turnaround for a man who had recently railed in print against “the Ghetto descendants of Throgmorton Street.”
M was stretching himself perilously thin and was now running far too many agents. He later warned that “no officer can efficiently look after more than eight agents,” adding that “six is probably a better number.” By the summer of 1938, M had over a dozen in play. This was hazardous, both from their point of view and from his.
“I shall always endeavour to be available,” M wrote to one agent, adding elsewhere that an MI5 officer must “be at the beck-and-call of the agent—not the agent at the beck-and-call of the officer.” The danger attached to this, one rarely acknowledged, was that M might lose sight of himself.
“The officer will have to be continually adapting himself to agents who vary very much in character and personality,” M later warned, when describing his craft. “This is one of the most important items in regard to the handling of agents, for while the officer must always adapt himself to the agent, and not the agent to the officer, the latter must be constantly on his guard in order to see that he does not become that terrible creature, one who is ‘all things to all men.’”
This is a curious line, one that stands out from M’s other writings on espionage. He had been running his stable of agents for most of the last fourteen years, almost without pause. The need to mold himself to so many different personalities during that period must have left him in danger of losing touch with himself, or knowing exactly what he believed in.
On top of all this came the mounting threat of war, which had escalated suddenly over the summer. By early September 1938 the Munich Crisis, as it was later known, began to approach its nerve-racking crescendo. Hitler continued to call for the partition of Czechoslovakia and the transfer of the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, refusing all talk of compromise.
M Section was understaffed and overworked. The movement M had once belonged to had become the greatest threat to world peace. War seemed to be imminent. In London there were rushed marriages. Trenches were dug in parks to serve as makeshift air raid shelters. Children were evacuated from the capital, air raid wardens were recruited, and millions of gas masks were distributed as the crisis intensified. Almost twenty years after the end of the last war, Britain appeared to be just days away from another bloody conflict against Germany.
At the height of this crisis, M produced a stark reassessment of his old friend William Joyce. One of M’s informants, probably John Hirst, another comrade from his days in the British Fascists, no longer felt that “Joyce’s loyalty can be relied upon. He [Hirst] thinks that Joyce has been keeping in constant touch with the NSDAP [Nazi Party] over the last week or so.” M’s agent had even heard Joyce declare that “if there is war with Germany I will be shot rather than take any part in it on behalf of Britain.” At this point, tears had run down Joyce’s cheeks, rolling over his scar, before he went on shakily, “but I am convinced that we shall one day see Germany the master of Europe.”
“Joyce’s personality, which is always highly emotional, has become more hysterical during recent weeks,” added M, who had finally accepted, it seemed, that his erstwhile brother-in-arms could pose a threat to national security. The following day a warrant was taken out to intercept Joyce’s mail. This bore fruit almost at once.
The day after the Munich Agreement was signed and the Sudetenland was ceded to Germany, MI5 intercepted a suspicious letter addressed to Joyce. It came from Ernst Bauer, who was known to MI5 as a Nazi spy.
The following month Joyce’s business partner, Angus MacNab, went to Belgium and got drunk with a stranger who was, unfortunately for him, an MI6 informant. MacNab revealed that he was on his way to Cologne to meet the same Ernst Bauer. The following morning, displaying all the tradecraft of a goldfish, MacNab asked the MI6 informant if, by any chance, he had mentioned the name “Bauer” last night, because if he had, this had been a mistake. The informant replied that indeed he had.
“For God’s sake,” said MacNab, “forget that I ever mentioned such a man or such a name.” Understandably, this plea had the opposite effect. A report of this exchange made its way to MI5, and MacNab’s colleague, William Joyce, was added to a list of Britons to be rounded up in the event of a war.
In the weeks after the Munich Crisis, as a necklace of barrage balloons, or “blimps,” was installed around London to force the German bombers higher when they attacked, M looked frantically for more agents to launch at Fascist organizations. He even turned to Vivian Hancock-Nunn. Having already asked Eric Roberts and Jimmy Dickson to do the same, M instructed this gentleman lawyer to reinvent himself as a Fascist, and in late 1938 Hancock-Nunn duly joined an extreme right-wing organization called The Link.
In his new guise as an enthusiastic Fascist, the country squire went off to have lunch with the man who ran The Link, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, previously director of naval intelligence. Domvile encouraged Hancock-Nunn to visit Nazi Germany with The Link, promising him “personal introductions to the principal Party leaders.” Although the MI5 agent did not take him up on this offer, the following year one of M’s other agents did.
In July 1939, a new agent codenamed “M/T” made her way to Nazi Germany on a trip organized by The Link. On August 2, the group went to visit Berchtesgaden, in the Bavarian Alps, to admire from a distance the Kehlsteinhaus, or Eagle’s Nest, where Hitler liked to stay. As they took in the view, their coach was boarded by two uniformed men. They began to shout. To her horror, M’s agent realized that they were yelling out her name.
“I must admit that for a moment I got a bit of a fright,” she wrote, which may have been an understatement. “I was asked to come out of the coach, which I did, and was then taken up to the house and inside; after waiting in a room for a while I was taken into another room where Hitler was sitting in an arm chair. Another man came into the room and spoke to him, and also acted as interpreter for us.”
M/T had been working for M as an agent for less than a year. She had no training and very little experience. Her name has never been revealed, but it is not hard to work out.
In one report she described herself as the wife of “Leonard Robert XXXX,” adding that her father-in-law was a German-born British citizen with a German-sounding name. Although her name has been officially redacted, it is possible to see that it was roughly five letters long. On that trip there were just nine women with names that sounded remotely German: Fraus Kunze, Frederich, Heler, Kemper, and Goetze as well as Mrs. Rusge, Mrs. Volkerborm, Mrs. Stramer, and Mrs. Tesch. Just one of these women was married to a “Leonard Robert,” and her surname was five letters long. This was Mrs. Tesch. Although her father-in-law was a Danish-born British citizen, in every other respect Kathleen Tesch perfectly matches the description of M/T. Her husband, Leonard Robert Tesch, was a legendary bug enthusiast, the founder of the Amateur Entomologists’ Society, and thus a man well known to M.
Kathleen Tesch, or M/T, was a tiny housewife who was particularly fond of dogs. She came across as an entirely ordinary and unassuming member of the public, the daughter of a Yorkshire pithead engineer who lived in the quiet Home Counties village of Whaddon, where she was best known for her imaginative costumes at the local village fete. M saw other qualities in her, and recruited her as an undercover agent for MI5. Now she was in Nazi Germany sitting opposite the man who was about to start another world war. Her only disappointment was that he hardly noticed her.
“Hitler seemed to be quite unaware that I was in the room,” complained Tesch, “and he strongly impressed me as a man who lives in a dream world entirely his own. I cannot say whether it was his normal mood or not, but I thought at the time that if a hundred people had been in the room he would not have known. He looks much older and more care-worn than his photographs appear; and though this may sound a silly description of him, I can only describe him as he appeared to me—as a man who is one moment burnt up with a kind of fire, and the next absolutely spent and unaware of anything. A good deal of the time was spent in complete silence which I tried to break by making such idiotic remarks as ‘What a very beautiful view.’… To be candid, I felt rather uncomfortable, not because of the importance, but because they seemed to know very much more about me than I did about them!”
They knew a certain amount about her, but not that she was working for MI5. Had it emerged that Kathleen Tesch was really a British government agent, it is unlikely that she would have made it out of Nazi Germany. The reason she had been hauled off the coach and presented to Hitler like this was simply that her name, Tesch, was “a very honoured one in Germany.” Apparently, Hitler wanted to relay this information to M’s agent in person. When he came out of his daze, Hitler managed to present Tesch with an autographed copy of Mein Kampf embossed with a silver eagle. She returned to the coach, no doubt a little shaken.
Given what we know today about Hitler’s drug use, it is possible that Kathleen Tesch had met him in a lull between injections. But even without the drugs, it is not surprising that Hitler should have come across as preoccupied during early August 1939. Several weeks after presenting this MI5 agent with a signed copy of his book, the German leader formalized an alliance that made the outbreak of war almost inevitable.