The Bedbug (37 page)

It was recognised from the start that there was a high risk that he would be tipped off somehow that the ring in Canada had been
broken and his own position jeopardised. It was at this point that Klop was brought in.
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It was suggested that if Nunn May kept the rendezvous but his new handler failed to show, Klop should play the part of the Soviet handler, exchange signs and passwords with May and hope to persuade him to hand over secret documents which could then be used in evidence against him. If no documents materialised, Klop was then to warn Nunn May about what had happened in Canada and say that contact was being terminated. Nunn May would then be kept under close surveillance to see whether he tried to warn other traitors to lie low.
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When Guy Liddell first heard about it, talks were already going on at a high level and consequently, he complained, the whole thing was wrapped up in about four layers of cotton wool. He added: ‘Most people have not realised quite that an atomic bomb has been dropped in Japan and that the world now knows quite a lot about it.’
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One of the first steps the security services had taken was to deny Nunn May access to his own work notebooks, recently shipped back from Canada, or any other reports relating to atomic weapons. Now Liddell proposed a dramatic reversal of this policy. Nunn May should be fed a couple of secret but relatively innocuous papers in the hope that he would be tempted to hand them over to his new controller at the first rendezvous. Sir Wallace Akers, director of the Tube Alloys project, as Britain’s end of atomic research was known, was briefed to carry out the plan. Nunn May then confounded them by refusing to accept the papers on the grounds that he was not currently part of the research team and had no need of them.

As the date of the first rendezvous approached, Commander Len Burt of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch was brought in. He was on secondment to MI5 and, unlike their officers, he had powers of arrest. Burt was to watch over the rendezvous from the first floor of the Museum Tavern and use the pub telephone to call a telephone kiosk in Great Russell Street where one of the MI5 agents on the ground could take orders if they were to move in and
grab either Nunn May, his contact, or both. Tommy Harris of MI5 was to drive around the museum area on the lookout for Russian secret service agents who might also be carrying out surveillance.

MI5 felt it had a number of options, none of them ideal: if the rendezvous took place and officers were sure secret papers had been exchanged they could arrest Nunn May and his contact; or they could let Nunn May walk away but remain under surveillance and arrest the Soviet agent once Nunn May was out of sight; or they could continue to keep both under surveillance pending a round of arrests at the Canadian end.

A decision had to be made at the highest level. Prime Minister Clement Attlee consulted the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, and US President Harry Truman. Their first instruction, in mid-October, was that suspects in Canada and Britain should be discreetly interrogated without any publicity. MI5 felt constrained to point out the impossibility of such a policy. Recording it in his office diary, Guy Liddell indicated that serious consideration was being given to sharing the secret with the Russians in any case. He wrote:

It was in our view better to wait for another two or three weeks until a decision had been reached about handing over the atomic bomb to the Russians. A memo has been prepared by the FO [Foreign Office] on these lines and the question will be submitted to Attlee and Mackenzie King.
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So the decision was to do nothing. To watch and wait and keep Klop in reserve in case an opportunity arose to use him.

Meanwhile, Kim Philby continued to keep Moscow abreast of the investigation, reassuring them on 18 November 1945 that neither Nunn May nor his Soviet controller had turned up for four scheduled rendezvous fixed for 7, 17, 27 October and 7 November. He passed on MI5’s opinion that Nunn May had not put a foot wrong: no suspicious contacts; no signs of being afraid or worried;
and carrying on with his academic research. They had come to the conclusion that Nunn May was a tough customer who would not crack unless confronted with convincing evidence.

Philby also revealed that the matter was now a political decision at the highest level and that this involved consideration not only of maintaining friendly diplomatic relations with the USSR, but also of the future control over atomic secrets.
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In the event the watchers kept a thankless vigil in Great Russell Street throughout October, November and December without result. When the network was finally wound up in January, Nunn May confessed to Burt remarkably quickly, apparently shaken by the police officer’s detailed knowledge of his rendezvous arrangements and passwords. It was only towards the end of his life that Nunn May actually admitted that he had been tipped off by the Russians that his cover was blown and all contact was severed. There had been no question of him keeping the rendezvous.

The Russians seem to have been aware of Klop’s activities. He appeared in an undated document in NKVD files in a list of British agents who were reporting on individuals at the Soviet embassy in London and other Communist organisations. The list mentioned a number of journalists, among them Lady Listowel, daughter of a diplomat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, who published a postwar anti-Communist news sheet,
East Europe and Soviet Union
. Another writer, codename ‘Brit’ and identified as a journalist named Morton, had supposedly been keeping the Soviets’ military attaché and intelligence
rezident
in London, Major General Ivan Sklyarov, under observation. Sklyarov and his assistant, Col. Simon Kremer, had been responsible for the recruitment of the atom bomb spy Klaus Fuchs, who was introduced to them by Jurgen Kuczynski. In MI5 files now available at the National Archives, agent Brit is frequently referred to as a source on Russian activities but his identity is not revealed. Klop is described in the NKVD list as a White Russian officer.
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Blunt had filed a full report on Klop during the war and Philby had plenty of opportunity to add to it.
Klop for his part had warned Dick White in 1946 that Philby’s first wife, Litzi Friedmann, was a Communist and Soviet agent. At the time, they were getting divorced and maybe because of that the information was discounted.
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Nadia’s sister Olia had lived throughout the war in Berlin. She had divorced her first husband and married his cousin, Ernest Steiner, who was, like her, a Russian émigré. He worked for the German electronics giant Siemens. Somehow, Nadia managed to track them down in the British controlled zone of Germany and, with Peter’s help, arrange for them to come to Britain. Quite how she achieved this at a time when thousands of displaced persons and refugees across Europe were being refused entry she never explains. It seems she got no encouragement from Klop who was so angry about it he threatened to leave her. Nevertheless, he delivered the couple from London to Barrow Elm in October 1946, before returning to Switzerland. When he returned to find them still comfortably ensconced in his country home more rows ensued. Klop went back to Switzerland once more, returning in 1948 and this time his attitude to his sister-in-law and her husband completely changed. Nadia herself had been away in Italy, working on costumes and set design for Peter’s film
Private Angelo
about a reluctant soldier in the Italian army. She arrived to find Klop, Ernest and Olia working as a team looking after a couple of defectors who had been granted political asylum.
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It was an occasion for another of Klop’s tall tales. He maintained that he had somehow procured enough lobster to concoct a lobster bisque, complete with cognac, cream and cheese, and had decanted it into a jar, which was travel with him and his defectors on the train from London to Gloucestershire, securely contained in his father’s old top hat box. Unfortunately Klop then placed the hat box upside down in the luggage rack and halfway through the journey observed, with a mixture of amusement and horror, that the bisque was dripping steadily on to the unwitting defector’s Homburg hat.
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It has not been possible to identify the victim of this deluge with any certainty but the most high-profile case of that time was the Soviet scientific adviser on aircraft and jet propulsion Grigori Tokaev, who had been sent to Germany by Stalin to bring back scientists from the German rocket research programme, by kidnap if necessary. Instead he fled into the British zone with his wife Aza and young daughter Bella and sought sanctuary. He had to be kept in a safe house because it was assumed that the Russians would send an assassination squad to silence him.

Tokaev needed delicate handling. He had not wanted to come to Britain at all and was furious when he discovered that the Canadians with whom he had been in contact prior to his escape were going to hand him over. He objected to Britain’s part in the Potsdam agreement under which Russia, America and Britain agreed the division of Germany into different control zones and he believed that Britain was in the habit of handing back defectors.
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Tokaev was able to give his interrogators some useful information about the state of Russian aeronautical research and was considered a prime asset for propaganda purposes. But his over-the top denunciations of Stalin and the Soviet system, serialised in the
Sunday Express
, were considered by some to be counter-productive. He was then involved in an attempt to lure a second defector Colonel J. D. Tasoev from Germany. Tokaev had been taken to Germany secretly in an RAF officer’s personal plane to persuade Tasoev to join him in Britain. The SIS officer overseeing the operation took a unilateral decision to bring the new man back immediately on the return flight. Tasoev was put up in MI5’s safe flat in Rugby Mansions, Kensington, and promptly changed his mind and demanded to be taken home. News of the fiasco leaked out and questions were asked in Parliament.

MI5 was further alarmed when it discovered that one of Klop’s former surveillance subjects, the White Russian Anatole Baykolov, was in touch with Tokaev. Baykalov was the subject of considerable suspicion that he was a plant by Russian intelligence,
despite the fact that he was reportedly receiving covert funds from the Americans, through the Marshall Aid scheme, to finance an anti-Soviet campaign group.

As a result of the Tokaev case, Dick White, who was by then head of counter-intelligence at MI5, prepared a report on all twenty Russians who had defected since 1927. Only one, Vasilyi Sharandak, had chosen to come to Britain. He was a low ranking translator and black marketer who fled from Hungary in July 1947. Like Tokaev, he told his interrogators that it was widely believed in Russia that Britain handed defectors back.

Although Dick White could not have known it at the time, this was probably the result of the botched defection of Constantin Volkov in Istanbul in the summer and autumn of 1945. Volkov was deputy head of Russian intelligence in Turkey and approached the British embassy offering what White described as ‘a sensational catalogue of information’ including a list of Soviet agents in Britain. The local representative of MI6 was dubious and referred the case back to London. During the inevitable delay Volkov and his wife were forcibly repatriated by the Russians and never seen again. It only emerged later that the delay had been largely the fault of Kim Philby, the case officer in London who would have known that he was likely to be exposed by Volkov’s revelations. White’s report was not declassified until February 2014.
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CHAPTER 17: OTTO JOHN

I
n October 1950, Dick White began setting up a German counterespionage section of MI5. The deputy director, Guy Liddell, noted that this was necessary because the emerging West German state was to have consulates and diplomatic representation in foreign countries and could be expected to resume espionage activities. Klop had been given the job of establishing good relations with them which, it was hoped, would bear fruit.
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This coincided with the establishment of a West German equivalent of MI5, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, otherwise known as the BfV, short for
Bundesamt für Verfassungschutz
. Its first director was a controversial choice. Otto John had been proving himself useful to Britain since he gave up his duties broadcasting black propaganda for Sefton Delmer when the war ended. Like Klop, he had been employed in interrogating captured German officers, and with his legal background he had assisted at the Nuremburg War Crimes trials. Latterly he had worked for a London law firm involved with cases involving German refugees and anti-Nazis. He contemplated taking British citizenship and was supported in that endeavour by Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who had been in overall charge of the Political Warfare Executive including Sefton Delmer’s propaganda section. He felt that John was ‘not getting a square deal’ and lamented the fact that Peter Loxley, the Foreign Office liaison officer with MI6, who presumably knew as
much as anyone about Otto John’s contribution to the war effort, had died in a plane crash and was not around to lend his weight to the application. Others who had been involved with him were decidedly cool on the idea, despite an acknowledgement that in 1943 he revealed to MI6 in Lisbon the existence of the rocket development plant at Peenemunde, where the VI and V2 flying bombs were made; and the location of submarine building pens and an underground aircraft factory. The Air Ministry, which was thereby given the opportunity to bomb these facilities, candidly admitted that they had not really believed Otto John’s tip off. Sefton Delmer paid tribute to his hard work but did not consider that it merited special treatment. John Street at the Foreign Office commented that John’s loyalties lay with the German resistance movement rather than with the Allies and Aubrey Halford-MacLeod, who had replaced Loxley as MI6 liaison, added that he doubted whether John merited special treatment on the basis of his services to MI6.
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