A Spy Among Friends Read Free Page B

Putlitz.
    Putlitz was a ‘complicated man’, Elliott wrote, torn between his patriotism and his moral instincts. ‘His motivation was solely idealistic and he went through acute mental torture at the knowledge that the information he gave away could cost German lives.’ One evening in August, Elliott took Putlitz to dinner at the Royale Hotel. Over dessert, he remarked that he was thinking of taking a holiday in Germany: ‘Is Hitler going to start the war before we get back at the end of the first week of September?’ he asked, half in jest. Putlitz did not smile: ‘On present plans the attack on Poland starts on 26 August but it may be postponed for a week, so if I were you, I’d cancel the trip.’ Elliott swiftly reported this ‘startling statement’ to Klop, who passed it on to London. Elliott called off his holiday. On 1 September, just as Putlitz had predicted, German tanks rolled into Poland from the north, south and west. Two days later, Britain was at war with Germany.
    Not long afterwards, the German ambassador to The Hague showed Wolfgang Putlitz a list of German agents in the Netherlands; the list was identical to one which Putlitz had recently handed over to Klop Ustinov and Nicholas Elliott. Clearly, there must be a German spy within the MI6 station, but no one for a moment suspected Folkert van Koutrik, an affable Dutchman working as assistant to the station chief, Major Richard Stevens. Van Koutrik had ‘always displayed perfectly genuine faithfulness’, according to his colleagues. Secretly he was working for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and ‘by the autumn of 1939, the Germans had a pretty clear picture of the whole SIS operation in Holland’. Van Koutrik had obtained the list of German spies Putlitz had passed to MI6, and passed it back to German intelligence.
    Putlitz knew ‘it could only be a matter of time before he was discovered and dealt with’. He immediately requested asylum in Britain, but insisted he would not leave without his valet, Willy Schneider, who was also his lover. Putlitz was whisked to London on 15 September, and lodged in a safe house.
    The loss of such a valuable agent was bad enough, but worse was to follow.
    On 9 November, the head of station, Major Stevens, Elliott’s new boss, set off for Venlo, a town on the Dutch border with Germany, in the expectation that he would shortly bring the war to a speedy and glorious conclusion. He was accompanied by a colleague, Sigismund Payne Best, a veteran military intelligence officer. Elliott liked Stevens, considering him a ‘brilliant linguist and excellent raconteur’. Best, on the other hand, he regarded as ‘an ostentatious ass, blown up with self-importance’.
    Some months earlier, Stevens and Best had secretly made contact with a group of disaffected German officers plotting to oust Hitler in a military coup. At a meeting arranged by Dr Franz Fischer, a German political refugee, the leader of the group, one Hauptmann Schämmel, explained that elements within the German High Command, appalled by the losses suffered during the invasion of Poland, intended to ‘overthrow the present regime and establish a military dictatorship’. The Prime Minister was informed of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, and Stevens was encouraged to pursue negotiations with the coup plotters. ‘I have a hunch that the war will be over by the spring,’ wrote Chamberlain. Stevens and Best, accompanied by a Dutch intelligence officer, headed to Venlo in high spirits convinced they were about to link up with ‘the big man himself’, the German general who would lead the coup. In fact, ‘Schämmel’ was Walter Schellenberg of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party intelligence agency, an intelligent and ruthless master spy who would eventually take over German intelligence, and Dr Fischer was in Gestapo pay. The meeting was a trap, personally ordered by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
    Shortly before 11 a.m., they arrived at