All the King's Men (3 page)

The German Embassy had offered the services of one of their most highly regarded criminal investigators, someone who had an excellent record for flushing out radicals and political dissidents. Krimminalrat Boemelburg was allowed carte blanche in his search for any disaffected German refugees who might wish to vent some ancient grudge against the British monarch.

He exercised his relative freedom with prudence. Though he enjoyed semi-diplomatic status, he kept himself at a distance from the German embassy staff. He preferred to take a room at a hotel in the Paris suburb of Neuilly where he could entertain his contacts with perfect discretion. He was not just an ordinary policeman.

Born in Elberfeld in 1885, Boemelburg had worked in Paris from 1906 to 1911, during which time he became fluent in French and developed a deep attachment for the city. He served in the ‘Kaiser’s Army’ throughout the Great War, was wounded once and awarded the Iron Cross, second class. During the 1920s he settled in Berlin and went into business for himself. But the young entrepreneur became increasingly alarmed by the political
currents of the day, in particular the activities of the Communists and the threat of a much-heralded revolution. On 1 December 1931 he joined the National Socialists. (Party No. 892239.)

His first political activities were with the
Sturmab-teilung
, or SA – literally Storm Detachment. These were the familiar brown-shirted thugs who attended most Nazi political meetings. However, Boemelburg had the presence of mind to quickly sense which way the wind was blowing, and left the ill-fated SA after just six weeks to join the SS (SS No. 47269). He was assigned to the security section, the
Sicherheitsdienst
– or SD, where he was quickly recognized as ‘a highly disciplined Teutonic Knight with a passionate loathing for Communism’. He rose quickly through the ranks, graduating from the SS Leadership School in Charlottenburg in 1938 as SS-Obersturmfuhrer, just before being sent to Paris.
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Though Boemelburg was ostensibly on the lookout for German dissidents, he was in fact engaged in intelligence work. His real purpose was to seek out and make contact with those elements of French society who might be sympathetic to the Nazis, or who might just wish to earn some cash. Sometime during that summer of 1938, Déricourt and Herr Boemelburg were introduced. There is a story that Boemelburg’s son, who was a student in Paris at the time, met Déricourt at an aerobatic display and later introduced him to his father. But that story is apocryphal
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– it was Bodington who made the introduction, ‘How would you like to meet a real German spy?’
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This was the start of a very important relationship and what an odd trio they were. A 28-year-old French pilot who dabbled in a bit of clandestine aerial photography and courier work, a 30-year-old English would-be spy, and the 53-year-old Nazi intelligence agent, dining together away from the gaze of Parisian society out at the hotel in Neuilly. These two individuals – Nicholas Bodington and Karl Boemelburg – were the most fortunate
acquaintances Déricourt ever made. How Bodington knew who Boemelburg was is anybody’s guess, but it wasn’t long before the secret was shared by others and the little summer idyll was brought to an end.

About the time of the Munich crisis, in September 1938, the French authorities finally tumbled to Boemelburg’s real purpose and he was summoned to the office of the Director-General of the Ministry of the Interior in the Rue Saussais, where he was informed in the classic language of the diplomatic world that his activities conflicted with his official status and that he was henceforth
persona non grata
. He left Paris that night.

Two years later, in June 1940, the newly promoted Sturmbannfuhrer Boemelburg returned to Paris. He drove down the Rue Saussais, entered the Ministry building and marched into the same office where in 1938 he had been humiliated. He confronted the same unfortunate individual and ordered him out from behind his desk with the words, ‘That is my desk from now on!’
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II
‘…The Hand of Albion’

At the beginning of 1939, Whitehall government departments received a number of alarming reports from MI6 which claimed that the long-held view that Hitler planned to invade Russia and capture the Ukraine was out of date. The German Chancellor, claimed MI6, had recently switched his plans to a surprise attack on the West. During the remaining nine months of peace the reports that followed varied wildly and helped to confuse government planners about any real threat of war.
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MI6, today the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), was the secret service charged with the responsibility of providing the British government with intelligence from abroad. It gathered this material through an extensive network of agents scattered about the globe who operated as secret receptacles for the kind of information foreign governments prefer to keep to themselves. At the beginning of 1939, MI6 operated two separate networks of agents. The first was, by secret service standards, conventional while the second was very unconventional, very extensive and very, very secret.

This ‘other’ network was controlled by an extremely powerful man within MI6, Claude Dansey, whose career with the service reached back almost to its roots. He had a reputation within the service as a man of great charm and wit who was utterly devious, extremely dangerous and occasionally downright terrifying. His pedigree, like that of the service, was a bit ropey.

The Secret Service Bureau was created in 1909 by a
government alarmed by a series of reports (completely false) that there were extensive networks of German spies at work in Britain. The first head of the secret service was a retired naval commander named Mansfield Cumming who had a distinctly swashbuckling view of the business of intelligence gathering. He told one of his recruits, the author Compton Mackenzie, ‘Spying is capital sport!’
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Cumming travelled around Europe, usually in a disguise he had purchased from Bermans and Nathans, armed with nothing more lethal than a swordstick. He quickly earned a reputation as a tough advocate for his new profession, though at first the Bureau owed more to the traditions of the Boy Scout movement than to anything we would recognize today as espionage. The First World War changed everyone’s attitude towards secret intelligence, though at some cost.

The single most important ‘intelligence’ lesson that emerged from the trenches – a lesson that virtually became an operational article of faith – was that there should be one and only one organization responsible for operating networks of secret agents abroad and that organization must have a complete monopoly over the evaluation and distribution of secret intelligence. In the chaos of Flanders, three, and sometimes four, separate British networks operated side by side, not counting the networks operated by the Belgians, the French and eventually the Americans.
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In July 1917, Claude Dansey, a forty-year-old veteran of the late colonial wars, transferred from MI5, the War Office department responsible for security at home, to Cumming’s secret service to try to sort out the confusion that reigned within the networks in Holland.

Low-class agents [sell] the same information and [draw] pay from more than one service. The professionals in Holland have now brought their competition to such a pitch, that nearly every third man is a
Secret Service agent working for one of the belligerents, if not for both. If they [agents] find an allied service is getting better information than they do, some of them are not above giving information to the Germans about their successful competitors.
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Secret agent disloyalty aside, there was a far greater risk of disaster from information that was corrupted before it ever reached the chiefs of staff, simply because it came from too many disparate and unco-ordinated sources. Any piece of news that came from two or more separate sources was automatically considered to have been corroborated and was therefore given a higher degree of credence. Because agents sometimes sold the same piece of information to as many purchasers as were available, it was often the case that a very insignificant piece of intelligence was given an extremely high rating. Consequently it wasn’t long before the military lost confidence in
any
intelligence that was delivered to them. Cumming, a classic megalomaniac, sought to change all that. By the end of the war, largely due to Dansey’s efforts in Holland and an equally brilliant controller in Belgium, Captain Henry Landau, Cumming’s ambitions were realized and the quality of intelligence improved beyond measure.
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Paradoxically, the advent of peace actually threatened the very existence of the secret service. With the ‘German monster’ crushed, the government could see no obvious threat from abroad that warranted the retention of an organization which it felt was an embarrassment. The very idea of an official British organization secretly engaged in opening foreign government mail had never sat well with English sensibilities. In the event, however, the secret service was rescued by the Russian revolution.

Cumming successfully convinced the government that the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia was engaged in a vast scheme to infiltrate and subvert British trade unions and so export the revolution. The government had been handed a
new
threat from abroad and the future of the secret service was assured.

By 1921, when Cummings moved his headquarters to 1 Melbury Road, in London’s Holland Park, he had created a professional organization built around a framework that has survived until today. In June 1923, when he died on his favourite office couch, Cumming bequeathed to his colleagues an expanding empire that would eventually become one of the most powerful and influential organs of government. He also bequeathed his own title. He was known throughout the service as ‘C’, and since then every director of MI6 has borne the same initial. More importantly he had secured for MI6 an absolute monopoly over all secret foreign intelligence gathering
and
the means to do it. MI6 had been placed, for administrative purposes, under the control of the Foreign Office. Through that august institution MI6 agents were provided with diplomatic cover and were attached to British Embassies as Passport Control Officers. Their ostensible role was to issue passports and visas, whereas their real function was espionage.

By the 1930s, however, that arrangement had begun to fail. The hideous spectre of international Communism, so skilfully conjured and then exploited by Cumming ten years before, had effectively obscured the government’s perception of developments in Germany. Very few British politicians were greatly disturbed by the political turmoil in that country, though one man who was, Winston Churchill, relentlessly badgered MI6 for a clearer picture of events in the old enemy’s camp. Unfortunately, the current ‘C’, Admiral Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair, found it difficult to oblige. Successive governments had pared MI6’s budget to the bone. The Passport Control network had been allowed to run down and was virtually an open secret within the diplomatic world, while Churchill’s demands for better intelligence only served to highlight MI6’s complete lack of penetration in Germany. MI6 was virtually bankrupt
and many of its staff were being paid out of Sinclair’s own pocket. In 1936 he sought a solution with the man who was at that time the PCO at the embassy in Rome, Claude Dansey.

Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey was born on 21 October 1876 in London’s South Kensington to Captain Edward Dansey, an officer in the Life Guards, and the Honourable Eleanore Dansey, a daughter of the second Lord Gifford. The young Dansey’s childhood was spent at innumerable addresses, in both Britain and France, as the family fortunes tended to fluctuate with his father’s success on the Turf. With the promise of a career in his father’s regiment, young Claude was enrolled at Wellington College, an institution that provided an ‘education of a military tenor’. Unfortunately, this period of relative stability was interrupted by an outbreak of diphtheria in 1891 which killed two boys and closed the school. Dansey was removed to Belgium, where he was entrusted to the care of the English College at Bruges.

But it would seem the young Claude was not destined to complete a normal education, for in 1893 Dansey was discovered to be involved in a homosexual ménage that rocked the college to its foundations. Claude admitted to having been seduced one holiday weekend at Windsor by Mr Robert Ross, one of Oscar Wilde’s more notorious lovers. His father, infuriated by the risk of scandal, removed his son from boarding school education and from any hope of the Life Guards too. The entire affair was swept under the carpet and Claude was sent abroad.

He enlisted in the British South African Police, saw action in Rhodesia against the Matabele and Mashona in 1896 and further action in Sarawak with the British North Borneo Company Police in 1899. He returned to Africa, was involved in the relief of Mafeking in 1900 and soon after joined the Intelligence Department of the British Army’s General Staff. Then from 1904 to 1909, in what was one of the last of Britain’s colonial wars, the young
Captain Dansey served as an Intelligence Officer with the British Somaliland Protectorate in operations against the so-called ‘Mad Mullah’, Muhammad’Abdille Hassan.

Sometime around 1911, Dansey seems to have slipped unobtrusively into the newly formed secret service and under the robust influence of Mansfield Cumming. At the end of the Great War, Dansey left intelligence work, preferring to make a career in the business world, and during the 1920s made a great many important contacts in America and Europe. But fortune failed to smile and following the Wall Street Crash in 1929 he returned to Britain and to what was by then MI6.
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