The Bedbug (30 page)

At the beginning of 1947 it was decided that Klop must have one more try at cracking the Klatt case. He was sent back to Camp King, the American military interrogation centre at Oberursel just north of Frankfurt and told to make ‘a direct and unreserved attack on Klatt as a Soviet agent’.

He was to team up once more with the American interrogator Arnold Silver, who went on to a senior position in the CIA. Silver had already had several attempts at getting Kauder to tell the truth. He and his Hungarian mistress were under guard in a comfortable house on the camp’s perimeter and appeared unaware that every
room was bugged. Klatt’s off-the-cuff remarks to his woman friend were often more revealing than his answers to direct questions.

Silver was not at first impressed by Klop’s interrogation technique. He complained that Klop had tried to intimidate Kauder by leading him to believe that unless he told the whole truth immediately he would be handed over to the Russians. This, said Silver dismissively, made no impression on Kauder, who simply regurgitated stories he had already told. He and Klop subjected Kauder to hours of intensive questioning during which he refused to confess. Then, in a prearranged move, Klop ordered Kauder out of the room and he was marched away under armed guard, not to his mistress in their comfortable house but to a stark cell. The implication must have been clear enough. An hour later Kauder tried to hang himself. He had written a suicide note maintaining that he had told the truth and never suspected that Ira was a Soviet stooge. He was cut down and given a few hours to recover before being brought back the interrogation room. Still in a semi-coma induced by sleeping pills he had taken as part of the suicide attempt, finally he admitted that he had realised very early on that he was being fed Soviet disinformation but dare not admit it because his income would dry up and there would be terrible reprisals from the Germans. In this vulnerable state he was required to confront Ira and attempt to get him to confirm that he had been working for the Soviets all along. It didn’t work, but it did serve to convince Klop and Silver that Ira was running rings round Kauder and had been for years. Klop then had another go at breaking Ira and got five different stories out of him in the space of an hour, all of which were dismissed as fiction.
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Silver was dismissive about Kauder’s co-conspirators. He said later:

Turkul was a useless oaf who had lent his name to the Klatt network as the man who allegedly recruited sources in the USSR. He never recruited even one source … Ira Longin was an intelligent liar who could spin off sixty cover stories in as many minutes.
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Since there were no longer grounds to detain them, Kauder, Turkul and Ira Lang were released in mid-1947. Kauder continued to masquerade as a spymaster, offering his non-existent Soviet networks to visiting CIA men to no avail. Klop returned to London apparently full of admiration for the way Silver and his team were operating at Camp King. According to Silver, Klop told a colleague that the operation at Oberursel was the most professional intelligence and counter-intelligence interrogation centre he had ever seen.

And yet, whatever Silver’s opinions really were, General Turkul continued to operate as a source of Soviet intelligence for the Americans. FBI special agents working in Germany had convinced themselves that Turkul was one of the few White Russians genuinely opposed to the Soviet regime. They complained about his arrest and interrogation, insisted he had their complete confidence, and re-employed him when he was released. Later investigation has confirmed that Turkul was supplying Mussolini, but more importantly in the longer term, he was an agent of Vatican intelligence in their behind-the-scenes determination to stem the tide of Communism. He had been involved in the 1930s in Intermarium, sponsored by MI6 among others, an organisation whose objectives included a Catholic alliance of East Europeans opposed to Communism.
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Post-war, the Americans attached Turkul to Reinhard Gehlen’s espionage unit. Gehlen had been head of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front and a regular recipient of the Max Klatt organisation’s traffic during the war. Now he was working for the Allies, recruiting many of his former comrades, in the Cold War offensive against the Soviet Union. He became effectively head of the West German intelligence service until increasing evidence that his organisation had been penetrated by Soviet agents, including Turkul, led to his downfall in 1968.

It surely must have astonished Klop, as he observed the blunders that beset Western intelligence services in the early stages of the Cold War, that such people continued to prosper when he had so comprehensively debunked their reputations.

CHAPTER 14: SWITZERLAND

I
n January 1946 Klop was in Switzerland, teaming up with his old friend Nicholas Elliott, who was MI6 head of station in Berne, to investigate Russian espionage. Elliott returned to London on leave and went to see Guy Liddell, still technically Klop’s boss at MI5, to say that MI6 required Klop’s services for another month because he was doing extremely useful work. Liddell was astonished to discover that MI6 had not briefed their own man on evidence that was emerging from interrogations of German intelligence officers about the extent of Soviet penetration, not only in Germany but in neutral and Allied countries. He briefed Elliott on the corroboration being obtained from a Soviet defector in Canada, Igor Gouzenko, and commented:

This of course should really be a job for SIS but I have never been able to discover that anyone is taking an interest in following up all the various leads from the Kopkow case.
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Horst Kopkow was a major in the Gestapo who had investigated two Russian spy rings set up to infiltrate Germany, the Rote Kapelle and Rote Drei, but had also been responsible for the capture and death of many British agents. When he was captured his knowledge was considered so useful that he was brought to Britain and questioned at length. His interrogators produced a sixty-page report. Officially, Kopkow died of bronchopneumonia
in 1948 but recent American investigations suggest that he was simply ‘disappeared’ by British Intelligence so that he could carry on supplying anti-Soviet information unrecognised. This investigation led to a statement by the German War Graves Commission that Kopkow had changed his name to Cordes and did not die until October 1996 in Gelsenkirchen.
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There was no shortage of work for Klop and new avenues kept opening for him. Agent Sloane was about to return to his native Czechoslovakia and hoped U35 might join him in Prague.
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In February Klop told Guy Liddell that he was full of ideas of a short- and long-term kind – the details of which have been deleted from the published version of Liddell’s diaries.
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In September 1946 Dick White, presumably recalling that Klop had been brought up in Palestine, suggested using him as a cut-out man or intermediary to liaise with secret agents from the Jewish Agency. It was the time of the British Mandate when the Jewish terrorists of Irgun and the Stern gang were wreaking havoc in pursuit of the establishment of a Jewish state. The Jewish Agency pursued the same goal – and would eventually form the first government of Israel – but during the war they had established friendly links with British intelligence in combating the Nazis and this had continued once the war was over. Teddy Kollek, the future mayor of Jerusalem, was the main point of contact and by 1946 was based in London. MI5 was simultaneously suspicious, intercepting his mail and tapping his phone, and anxious for any help they could get in stemming the rising death toll from bombings and ambushes. They were particularly fearful that the terror campaign might be switched to London, with Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin a prime target for assassination. While they were prepared to cultivate Kollek they wanted to keep him at a distance, fearing that he might infiltrate their organisation or reveal the extent of his contacts at an embarrassing moment. Part of the bait he was offering was to give British intelligence access to the Jewish Agency’s network of spies throughout Europe and
in Russia. Klop was proposed as Kolleck’s contact on the grounds of his considerable experience and maturity. As it turned out, Kollek had already struck up a rapport with a counter-terrorist officer, Anthony Simkins, who went on to be deputy director general of MI5.
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By December 1946 Klop was again discussing his future with Guy Liddell but fretting that he might become ‘an embarrassment.’ He was presumably concerned that his Russian ancestry, and Russian wife, might make him suspect in the dawning of the Cold War. Liddell did his best to reassure him that there was still plenty of work and that he should continue with his interrogations and gather new evidence of Russian methods of infiltration.

Klop returned repeatedly to Switzerland, spending weeks at a time with Nicholas Elliott and his family, as the two of them investigated the Russian
Rote Drei
. Elliott had been a diplomat at the British Embassy in The Hague after the declaration of war and, as night duty officer, was the first to know of the German invasion of Holland on 10 May 1940. He stayed on, with the British Minister Sir Neville Bland, helping the Dutch Royal Family and the head of Dutch intelligence, General van Oorschot, escape to Britain. After his own return he joined the Intelligence Corps and was posted to Cairo and then to neutral Turkey where he alternated between Ankara and Istanbul. The embassy was overflowing with intelligence officers, equally matched by their opposite numbers from Germany and both constantly under surveillance by the Turkish secret police. The British ambassador, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, never lived down the embarrassment caused by agent Cicero, his valet, who photographed documents from his safe while the ambassador was in his bath and sold them to his German handler Ludwig Moyzisch. Despite that setback, Elliott had scored a noteworthy success in handling the defection of Dr Erich Vermehren, assistant to the head of the Abwehr in Turkey, and his wife Elisabeth. They were both anti-Nazis and Elliott found himself dealing with ‘a highly strung, cultivated,
self-confident, extremely clever, logical minded, slightly precious young German of good family’. He smuggled the couple out of Turkey, in company with two other defectors. This triumph, in the summer of 1944, threw the whole German intelligence service into confusion and led ultimately to the dismissal of the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris. An internal MI6 assessment praised Elliott for handling the operation with ‘consummate skill and sympathy, but with just the necessary touch of firmness’.
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Klop had a peripheral role in the defection, monitoring the fallout in Lisbon where Vermehren’s mother worked as a journalist for German newspapers. Although every bit as much of an anti-Nazi as her son, she returned to Germany immediately when she heard of her son’s defection, hoping that by doing so she would spare the rest of her family from persecution. Klop reported that there was a feeling among her friends in Portugal that Erich had behaved rashly and inconsiderately and that good Germans did not defect in times of war however much they opposed the regime.
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Later in his career Elliott was to be associated with two MI6 disasters. He was the duty officer who obtained authority for navy diver Buster Crabb’s ill-fated attempt to spy on the warship that had brought President Khrushchev to Britain in 1956 when the Prime Minister had vetoed all spying activity. Crabb had an impressive wartime record as a diver but was a little past his prime and possibly not fit enough for this mission. He made one recce under the ship in Portsmouth harbour, looking for evidence of a new propeller design but failed to return from a second dive and is presumed to have got into difficulties. Some of the Soviet crew reported spotting him in the water, which led to a diplomatic incident. Crabb’s headless body was only found in nearby Chichester harbour a year later. And in 1963 Elliott was sent to Beirut, where he finally succeeded in getting his close friend Kim Philby to confess that he had been a Soviet agent. Incredibly, he then returned to London, allowing Philby to slip away to Moscow before he could be arrested or exposed.

But when he took over in Berne in the summer of 1945, Elliott’s stock was high as he and Klop investigated a microcosm of the entire Soviet espionage network worldwide. The two men and their families had long been friends.

Elliott, a laid-back, witty character himself, gave full acknowledgement to Klop’s talents as
bon viveur
, wit, raconteur, mimic, and linguist. He appreciated his delightful company and excellent cooking. Klop’s signature dish was
rognons de veau liègoise
, veal kidneys cooked in their own fat with potatoes and juniper, which he would prepare in his tiny flat in Chelsea Cloisters and carry round to friends’ homes in his father’s leather top hat case.
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For his part Klop enjoyed the family atmosphere and made friends with the Elliott children, particularly four-year-old Claudia. Nadia and her sister made a ‘klop’ ragdoll for her. There is a certain irony in Klop showing affection for the Elliott children. In July of 1945 he was briefly in London, having returned from Lisbon, and accompanied Nadia to the hospital to see Peter and Isolde’s first child, and their first grandchild, Tamara. He was not, according to Nadia, an enthusiastic grandparent, seeming to regard the onset of a new generation as a shock and a calamity that he had never expected to happen to him. Tamara, in hindsight, got the same impression, recalling him to be ‘short and an odd character, not terribly fond of children’.