[I started out on this project thinking that it would be a fairly straightforward book review. It turned out to be one of the most fascinating but also most puzzling series of incidents that I have explored on coldspur. It led me down unexpected pathways, and into some apparently unexploited archives. At the same time I have not been able to perform proper justice to the theme since the cited sources are so vast. Because of its size, I have split the report into two. I analyze the text of Verkaik’s book in this segment. I shall publish Part II, in which I shall place Verkaik’s claims in the context of published histories about the Battle of Arnhem, and its possible betrayal, on May 15. That will give a chance for readers to digest my interpretation of Verkaik’s book before moving on to the broader picture.
Despite the wealth of referenced material, much of which I have not been able to inspect yet, the overall exercise has enabled me to put a stake in the ground concerning Verkaik’s claims, which I hope will act as a provocation and spur for future historians. This is a B (Businesslike) report, with occasional more detailed analysis necessary for inspecting Verkaik’s rather dubious methodology.]
Contents:
Introduction
‘The Traitor of Arnhem’
Part 1:’ The Dutch’
Part 2: ‘The British’
- Blunt as Saboteur?
- Further Errors
- Dubious Sources
- Blunt and the Leaks
- Diversions
- Blunt and MARKET GARDEN
- Kraemer & the Microdots
- A Chronology
Part 3: ‘The Soviets’
Intermediate Conclusions
Envoi
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Introduction
In May 2024, Robert Verkaik’s book The Traitor of Arnhem, promoted on Verkaik’s website as ‘the incredible never-before-told story of the role played by the Cambridge Spies in the British defeat at Arnhem’, was published. It appeared in the USA the following spring. Robert Kershaw, who has written several books on World War II, and specifically on Arnhem, provided a blurb: “Original, thought-provoking and exceedingly well written. I have not read such a convincing portrayal of the German intelligence war in Holland. A worthwhile read.” I was thus enticed, acquired and read the book, and provided a thumbnail review last summer, when I wrote:
Verkaik’s thesis is that Anthony Blunt passed on to the Soviets information about the Arnhem operation, which they in turn gave the Germans, as a ploy to help the Red advance on Berlin. While his text contains some major errors, Verkaik presents some engagingly fresh research on the leaks of 1944. I am going to have to read this book again, very carefully, before passing full judgment, but it seems to me utterly incredible that Blunt (who did many stupid things) would have consciously leaked information to help the Germans, as he would have known that he would face the hangman’s noose if detected. Verkaik may have made some major mistakes of identification.
I now return to that promised fresh analysis. The Battle of Arnhem, in September 1944, was the culminating engagement of the operation MARKET GARDEN, designed to drive a wedge through German-occupied Holland and forge a path to the Ruhr. It was a disaster, and stories soon circulated that the details of the assault on Arnhem had been betrayed. According to established lore (whether correct or not), the major Arnhem traitor was a Dutchman named Christiaan Lindemans, aka ‘King Kong’, as Verkaik recognizes. I believe that the first time I came across Lindemans was in the Spycatcher books by Oreste Pinto. Pinto, a Dutchman who had worked as an interrogator engaged by MI5 in the first part of the war, had delivered in the late 1950s what were for me some spellbinding radio programmes describing his encounters with refugees from Europe, in which he tried to determine whether they were Nazi spies. I do not recall a programme about Lindemans specifically, but he features prominently in The Spycatcher Omnibus, which is still excellent reading, even though it needs to be treated with a healthy dose of scepticism. It has much relevant information about tradecraft, although the sensitive reader may wish to skip Pinto’s unfashionable – and incorrect – notions about the contributions that female spies can offer.
‘The Traitor of Arnhem’
Verkaik’s book has a new twist. It covers the disaster of Field-Marshal Montgomery’s Operation MARKET GARDEN (of A Bridge Too Far fame), in which thousands of Allied soldiers were lost after a parachute drop that left them stranded without supplies, surrounded by German troops who had apparently been informed of the plans of the assault at Arnhem. The flyleaf description is a little disturbing, however. It is headlined by an ambitious claim: ‘Revealing the hidden role of the Cambridge spies during this Allied defeat, this is the story of the startling betrayal that changed the course of World War II.’ ‘Cambridge Spies’ – in the plural? And ‘changed the course of the war’? An exaggeration, as well as a statement of the obvious: however Arnhem turned out, that was the course the war took. Moreover, the war’s outcome was determined by then. The blurb on the onside cover then goes on to state:
The Traitor of Arnhem tells the never-before-told story of this famed operation and of the spies working to cause the catastrophic defeat. One traitor is a terrifying giant of a man, a supposed hero of the resistance who sends hundreds of fellow freedom fighters to torture and death; the other is an aristocrat and [sic!]an English gentleman, working from inside the heart of the Allied war effort in London. Both of them are working for the Russians.
‘Never-before-told’ thus has a subtle meaning. It specifically introduces the notion of a second spy, of equal importance. That would be news. As might the revelation that Lindemans was – like Blunt, as yet unidentified, of course – working for the Russians. (Whether, at 6’ 3”, and 250 lbs., thus my height, but a bit bulkier, he was a ‘terrifying giant of a man’, must be up for debate.) That disclosure of Soviet affiliation was indeed new to me. I checked out the Wikipedia page for Lindemans – not a guaranteed reliable source, of course – but a good place to start, and to discover references. In its first sentence the entry declares that Lindemans was a ‘double agent’, but it does not suggest that he was working for the British and the Germans at the same time: it states that he was working ‘under Russian control’. Yet that unlikely scenario is not supported by any other datum in his profile. There is no source given for that assertion. A later sentence claims that ‘the loss of this battle prolonged the war for six months and allowed the Red Army to enter Berlin first’, but the reference given is irrelevant. Was the Soviet occupation of Berlin going to happen anyway, was it a fortuitous outcome of the Arnhem fiasco, or had the exploit seriously been initiated by Moscow with that goal in mind?
Thus Verkaik set himself a challenge. He wanted to present the Lindemans side of the story as if it were new, but also needed to introduce Blunt with equal billing, while working with possibly dubious material. Yet the book is called The Traitor of Arnhem, in the singular, not The Traitors. And what about the Cambridge Spies? Were the remaining four of the whole quintet equally involved? In addition, the book’s subtitle is The Untold Story of WWII’s Greatest Betrayal and the Moment that Changed History Forever: a foolish and debatable claim, as well, and through the use of ‘forever’ an absurd and unnecessary reinforcement of the ‘hackneyed ‘Changed History’ theme. Neither of the names of the traitors appears in any of the introductory material, or in the professional blurbs on the back-cover. Blunt does not appear until Part 2 (‘The British’), which starts on page 103. What is going on? Is this a book that lost its way?
- Part 1: ‘The Dutch’
I am going to spend little time on Part 1, ‘The Dutch’, since it presents an uncontroversial account of Lindemans’ career, and the political background, culminating in the incontrovertible evidence that, in mid-September 1944, Lindemans passed on to the Germans information about the imminent paratroop landings in the Netherlands. Two aspects of this segment, however, are important. Verkaik describes Lindemans’ mission into German-controlled territory as being managed by Captain Peter Baker, an officer who was working for Airey Neave in MI9, helping stranded or escaped British fliers or POWs exploit the ‘ratlines’ to return to Britain. The Dutch resistance had been heavily compromised by the Abwehr officer Hermann Giskes’ Operation NORDPOL (by which fake SOE transmissions were sent back to London), and thus resistance units in the Eindhoven area had to be informed in person of the coming operation. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands recommended Lindemans, and Baker was entrusted with the task of inserting him behind the lines. Lindemans claimed that he learned of the details of MARKET GARDEN from Baker, and thus was able to pass them on when he had his assignment with the Abwehr on (or about) September 14. While Baker may have been innocent in his trust of Lindemans, he himself was to come under fire a month or so later when he disobeyed instructions, and caused a Dutch circuit to be betrayed, leading to the loss of life of many British paratroopers and Dutch resistance workers. (Verkaik does not cover that sequel.)
Yet the second significant aspect of Verkaik’s account is that he provides solid evidence that Lindemans, on September 15, provided ample detail about the coming attack on Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem to General Student’s Headquarters, and to Kiesewetter of the Abwehr. Even though General Student, commander of the 1. Fallschirmarmee [Parachute Army] was somewhat removed from the action, being based at Vught, in the south-west of the theatre of operations, he could well have alerted other sectors of the Wehrmacht. That should have allowed the Wehrmacht to prepare for the airborne attack, and indeed some units (such as the SS School in Arnhem) did take up defensive positions. Verkaik waffles over Kiesewetter’s ‘reluctance’ to take bolder action, however, and then claims that ‘to varying degrees, Hermann Giskes, Gerhard Huntemann, Ernst Kiesewetter and Richard Christmann all believed Lindemans betrayed Arnhem’.
What is significant, however, is that in his Appendix 2, Verkaik provides the documentary evidence of Lindemans’ providing warnings about Arnhem, based largely on Bletchley Park decrypts. As early as August 22, Lindemans informed his Abwehr controllers that the Allies were planning ‘the dropping of great numbers of parachute troops in the assembly areas of the insurgents’. (This was no doubt the cancelled COMET operation.) After mentioning Lindemans’ visit to the HQ of General Student on September 15, Verkaik refers to the testimony of Abwehr officer Richard Christmann when interrogated at Camp020. In Chapter 9, he had quoted the telling words from KV 2/496:
CC [the cryptonym for Lindemans] further reported that he had succeeded in getting American and British officers to talk about a big aerial landing to take place on 17/18 September. CC gave us the positions of 400 heavy guns. From 16 September, all the Dutch special troops were to be mobilized. The aerial landings were to take place in the Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem areas . . .
The author notes that Student’s intelligence chief reported Lindemans’ disclosures to General Walter Model, head of Army Group B, at 10.50 pm that day. It would be quite incredible that he did not also inform his boss, and Student’s consequent denial of any knowledge (which I shall inspect more closely in the coming bulletin) is infinitely suspicious.
Lastly, from the Lindemans side of the story, Verkaik reproduces another ULTRA intercept sent to Fremde Heere West on September 15, echoing Lindemans’ intelligence regarding the Allied intentions to move from Eindhoven to Arnhem [my italics]. Yet Verkaik then ties himself in knots. He refers to the information that Abwehr officer Huntermann told his interrogators as showing that Lindemans mentioned Arnhem as an intended objective. Yet the archive tells otherwise. In Huntermann’s file, KV 2/967-02, on page 16, Huntermann’s deposition appears as follows:
Certainly, nothing was talked about in my presence concerning an imminent landing in the Arnhem area. Only much later, about February 1945, GISKES told me on an occasion in Wiehl during a private conversation that “CC” had been a perfectly amazing V-Mann, as he had reported about the whole Arnhem action beforehand.
Verkaik ends this section of the Appendix by quoting Giskes’ statement, in Operation North Pole, that Lindemans said nothing about Arnhem to Kieswetter, since he probably had no idea where the attack was going to begin. Any further comment on these deceptive claims is superfluous, except for the reminder that one should not really trust any of these testimonies on their individual merits.
In all this detailed but flawed analysis of the shenanigans surrounding Lindemans, Verkaik fails to explore the contradictions of oral testimony being gainsaid by wireless intercepts. Instead of focusing on Lindemans’ role as a double agent (which was wholly true: he was accordingly not fully trusted by the Allies or the Germans), Verkaik wants to avoid the matter. (Remember, the main theme of this book is that Anthony Blunt betrayed the Arnhem Operation.) He thus claims that ‘there was more to Lindemans’ treachery than meets the eye’, making a giant leap of induction, and proposes instead that Lindemans was working for the Soviets. The author attempts to finesse the obvious points of Lindemans as primary informer over Arnhem, diminishing his role in favour of that of Blunt the master-schemer. It is not a very convincing story. With that framework in place, Verkaik switches to the British side of things.
Part 2: ‘The British’
- Blunt as Saboteur?
I shall not analyze the whole text in detail, but instead concentrate on the method by which Verkaik tries to accumulate evidence to show that Blunt was indeed the spy named JOSEPHINE, an agent supplying information to the German Embassy in Stockholm, whose codename had been picked up in decrypted Abwehr radio traffic. Indeed, the first chapter of the critical Part 2, ‘The British’, which sets up Blunt’s role as a schemer, starts with the German Foreign Office in Berlin receiving a message from Stockholm on Saturday September 16, 1944, indicating that JOSEPHINE has provided intelligence that an Allied airborne operation in the environments of Arnhem, Tilburg and Eindhoven would be executed between September 17 and 21. Verkaik makes a superficially reasonable case that JOSEPHINE’s information enabled the attack to be crumpled, using testimony from such as Walter Schellenberg of the Sicherheitsdienst and General Bittrich. Yet his statement (on page 109), quoting Schellenberg under interrogation, that Kraemer’s intelligence had helped the Germans ‘appreciate the serious intention of the landings’ so that he could ‘stress to the staff concerned the seriousness of the position’ is a patent distortion. First, he gets the reference wrong: it is on page 44 of KV 2/152-2, not p 59. Second, Schellenberg had just confirmed that the information was received too late, several hours after the landing. Verkaik simply leaves out the critical context. He also states that material from JOSEPHINE had been received since ‘at least 1943’ and that Hitler and Jodl regularly read her reports, thus confirming that this was no sudden disclosure. Yet JOSEPHINE merits little mention in the intelligence histories of World War II. Who was he or she?
Verkaik goes back in time to build his case for Blunt’s extended duplicity in that role. After the customary introduction of Blunt and his three Cambridge colleagues (Cairncross being an outlier) in 1939 and 1940, Verkaik sets out his tale with Blunt’s recruitment by MI5, and his swift progress in becoming Liddell’s personal assistant. No dates are offered, however, until September 24, 1940, when Liddell is dining with Blunt and Burgess. On the same night, MI5’s temporary accommodation at Wormwood Scrubs is bombed, and Verkaik dramatically introduces Blunt as being behind this assault, somehow managing to engineer it from his comfortable lodging at the Courtauld Institute. Verkaik’s bravado is astonishing.
The author states that the German bombers had ‘targeted’ the MI5 office; Liddell wrote in his diary that ‘part of the registry had been burnt by incendiary bombs’. Yet dropping incendiary bombs by traditional bombers (like the Heinkel 111 P-4, the Dornier 17Z-2 and the Junkers 88A-4) was a haphazard business. As Julian Hale writes in The Blitz: 1940-41, ‘the methods of target-marking were crude and largely ineffective.’ The aircraft relied on a parachute illumination bomb and the B1E1 incendiary. Hale goes on to write:
These lightweight weapons had a tendency to drift in the wind after they were dropped, sometimes for a considerable distance. Therefore, no matter how accurate the marking, the subsequent aiming-point for the bombers could be wrong for hundreds of yards.
Since these markers were used for preparing for the mass raids to follow, and the main targets at that time were the docklands of London, it sounds as if Wormwood Scrubs had been hit by an unlucky drifting incendiary rather than being ‘targeted’, as Verkaik claims.
Verkaik draws upon Pinto, quoting Friend or Foe?, to offer another theory. He quotes what Pinto wrote in the Finale of the Omnibus (p 469):
. . . Wormwood Scrubs was dive-bombed. It seems more than a coincidence that the Luftwaffe should adopt the one method of ensuring that a particular target should be hit when to all the world, apart from the select few, that target was merely an ordinary prison. I am certain in my own mind that the secret had leaked out and the raid was a deliberate attempt to smash the nerve centre of MI5.
I have several problems with this account, in which Pinto never suggests that this was anything but an assault designed by the Germans alone. Verkaik omits an important sentence after ‘dive-bombed’, namely: “Fortunately, only the equipment block was hit and the personnel office escaped damage.” That does not suggest a well-focused attack, but rather only a single raid that missed the personnel offices. Hardly ‘an attempt to smash the nerve-centre’. (And how many personnel would be around at night-time, anyway?) Pinto’s assertion is that the prison was ‘dive-bombed’, presumably by Stukas. Hale writes nothing about Stukas (Junkers 87 B0-2) in his book, but most research indicates that they had been withdrawn by September 1940.
As Francis Dickinson wrote:
The Stukas were withdrawn from the Battle of Britain when, between August 8 and 18 1940 Germany lost 20% of its Stukas to the RAF. Those were clearly unsustainable losses – and the Germans had a fight coming up against an enemy that was known to not have one of the strongest air forces in the world; the Stukas were needed for the Russia campaigns where they wouldn’t be quite such easy targets. The lesson was learned – dive bombing was a great tactic against enemies who didn’t have a first-rate air force but they were very hard to provide cover for and fighters could shoot them down pretty easily if the Germans didn’t control the skies.
The Stuka could carry conventional bombs, but did not use incendiaries, so far as I can judge. MI5’s Registry had not been destroyed by a direct hit with a 500-lb. bomb. Lastly, Verkaik’s notion that the secret of Wormwood Scrubs as the new home of MI5 had leaked out, and that the Luftwaffe intended to damage it to protect Blunt stretches credulity to the limits. That was surely not what Pinto had in mind.
Nevertheless, Verkaik, confident that the attack resulted from insider information, enthusiastically pursues his victim. He discounts two known German agents, Bill Hooper and Folkert van Koutrik, as suspects, because they had lost the ability to contact their Abwehr handlers. That left the Russian spies. “Even though the Nazis and the Soviets were allies, the Soviets retained a strong diplomatic presence in London”, writes Verkaik, following up with “Was this Blunt’s way of announcing to his Russian handlers that he had arrived and that he was to be taken seriously?” Yet he then adds a farcical observation: “We may never know, but what is certain is that Blunt will have had good reasons for helping to destroy the MI5 registry and its card index to cover up his and his fellow spies’ communist links.”
Where to start with this fanciful nonsense? Let me count the ways:
- Even if the Soviets maintained a strong diplomatic presence in London at the time, an NKVD handler for the Cambridge spies was not among them. Gorsky had been recalled in February of 1940, in the wake of the Krivitsky visit, and would not return until November of that year (as Verkaik later states on page 123). Blunt thus had no contact at the Embassy.
- Blunt might have tried to use a back-up channel, namely Bob Stewart at the CPGB, but if he had approached him with an appeal to ask the Soviet Embassy to arrange with the Luftwaffe to bomb the Registry at Wormwood Scrubs, he might have received an astonished response. It would have constituted an enormous risk on Blunt’s part to expose himself in that way.
- If such a message had indeed successfully been routed to Moscow, no one would have dared take action on it unless Stalin approved. For the Generalissimo then to initiate communications with the Luftwaffe for such a recondite reason sounds implausible. Moreover Hitler was already starting to make plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
- If the invitation had been taken up, the ability of some German bomber to locate Wormwood Scrubs at night-time, and accurately drop an incendiary on MI5’s Directory without harming any other part of the building, would have shown extraordinary precision.
- If the goal had been to destroy the records of the communist links of Blunt and his colleagues, it would have been a mission in vain. Apart from the fact that the archives had recently been photographed (a fact of which Blunt may have been unaware), Blunt’s communist opinions were well-known, and he had been recruited despite them.
- Blunt’s handlers did not even know that he had been recruited by MI5, let alone were looking for evidence that would convince them of his seriousness as an agent. The fact that he had joined the Security Service would have been a coup in itself. They would have been patient in waiting for him to extract valuable intelligence rather than approve his attempting picaresque ventures requiring Nazi co-operation in order to prove his credentials.
This was for me the flimsiest scaffolding on which to redefine Blunt’s persona as a spy. As if the cerebral Blunt would ever have dreamed up such an idea, let alone have tried to put it into practice. I moved onwards from this absurd hypothesis to determine how accurate Verkaik was on other aspects of Blunt’s career, and the activities of his colleagues.
- Further Errors
On page 123, the author describes Kim Philby in 1941 as ‘a happily married man . . . whose wife was expecting their first daughter, Josephine’ (probably not named after the spy). Yet Philby was not Aileen’s lawful husband: he was still married to Litzi at this time. On the same page, Verkaik claims that Guy Burgess, who had recently seen a copy of Jane Archer’s report on Krivitsky (assuredly via Jenifer Williams, although the author does not say so), ‘fled the country with Isaiah Berlin on a madcap scheme to journey to Moscow’. Verkaik wonders whether Burgess thought that Krivitsky’s ‘testimony about aristocratic Etonians was too close for comfort’. How running away with Isaiah Berlin would resolve anything is not explained. In any event, as I carefully described in Misdefending the Realm, it was not ‘a madcap scheme’, but a secretly arranged exploit approved by Lord Halifax, in an attempt to exploit Burgess’s connections with the Comintern for the purpose of assuring Stalin that Churchill was not about to cozy up with Hitler. It was called off when the crisis passed.
Verkaik next describes (on page 131) the Moscow agreement that allowed for cooperation between the Special Operations Executive and the NKVD, resulting in the PICKAXE operation whereby Soviet agents would be trained in Britain and then dropped by the RAF ‘deep into enemy territory’. He claims that at that time the ‘illegal rezidentura’ was already running as many as forty British communist spies including the Cambridge Five. The assertion might possibly be true, but it lacks any evidence, and it may derive from what the unreliable Philby himself wrote. Verkaik has the Soviet liaison with SOE, Colonel Chichaev, arriving in London on November 18: he actually came on September 30. He then has the Soviet agents trained at Beaulieu ‘partly under the tutelage of Kim Philby and Guy Burgess’. While Burgess and Philby had set up the original training programme at Brickendonbury Manor, they had both left SOE by the time Chichaev arrived, Burgess having been fired in November 1940, and Philby joining MI6 (which was the sworn enemy of SOE) in September 1941. When Verkaik describes how the Radio Security Service had picked up illicit wireless signals near the Soviet Embassy in September 1942 (p 146), he claims they indicated that ‘freelance NKVD radio operators . . . were sending back coded messages to the Kremlin’. There were none: the RSS rooted out unauthorized transmissions very promptly, lest they be German operators.
After this inauspicious beginning, the author gets more into his stride, yet it is still difficult to distinguish the vague hypotheses from the hard facts. The nub of the story is the involvement of Blunt with the shadowy Abwehr source known as JOSEPHINE, and the investigation includes the study of the vast number of files on Karl Heinz Kraemer (KV 2/144-157), the air attaché at the German Embassy in Stockholm, who was running JOSEPHINE (as well as an agent named HECTOR) who ‘appeared to be working in the UK’. While JOSEPHINE was certainly (but maybe temporarily) the Swedish naval attaché, Oxenstierna, and HECTOR the air attaché, Cervell, the pot is boiled by the fact that items coming from source JOSEPHINE could cover other identities. As Verkaik writes in a note 12 to Chapter 15: “Josephine was the first in a long list of code names used by Kraemer. For the sake of simplicity – and following MI5’s own lead – we [who?] collapse them all into a single heading.” Moreover, in his diary entry for September 21, 1945, Guy Liddell wrote:
Kremer [sic] has now admitted that his main source of information was Count Toggenberg who had a number of special sources. His reports were passed on under the cover name of Josephine from 1942 until the spring of 1944. Thence till Nov. 1944 under the cover ‘reliable agent’.
Of course there are no grounds for believing that Kraemer was telling the truth.
- Dubious Sources
While I am an eager supporter of Verkaik’s apparently careful inspection of the archives, I am not so impressed with some of the less reputable sources he brings into the equation. It would entail a multi-month project for me to study those fourteen Kramer files, so I set out trusting him on what he uses from them as source material. Yet my credulity soon began to be stretched. Moreover, Chapters 13 through 15, which are the kernel of his book, setting up the complex and powerful role of Anthony Blunt, contain some rather dubious anecdotes. The author’s goal seems to be to describe a network where Soviet espionage in Britain, and counter-espionage against the Germans, had Blunt as their hub, by virtue of his assigned job of intercepting the diplomatic bags of neutral nations, his closeness to Herbert Hart (sharing an office at Blenheim Palace), Hart seeking Blunt’s help in investigating the search for JOSEPHINE and HECTOR, and Blunt’s appointment by MI5 to be the liaison with MI6 over the sensitive matter of ULTRA intelligence-sharing. Verkaik uses The Crown Jewels, and Triplex, both by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, to bolster his story of Blunt’s power and effectiveness as a hub of intrigue.
Yet he throws in some unnecessary or questionable squibs as well. For instance, he brings in an important member of the GRU’s Rote Kapelle, Leopold Trepper, but his presence in the tale seems solely to offer an opportunity for Verkaik to describe Trepper’s links to Harry Pollitt (the head of the CPGB), and how Trepper was involved with an Englishman who spoke fluent French, and thus that person might have been Anthony Blunt. More egregious is his citing with authority an unpublished memoir by Peter Falk, MI6’s man in Stockholm, as reproduced in a very strange book by Hugh Thomas titled The Unlikely Death of Heinrich Himmler. (Verkaik does not admit to reading Falk’s memoir himself.) According to Thomas, Falk had, with the help of Kraemer’s housekeeper in Stockholm, discovered in a safe some copies of important high-level papers taken from the Quebec Conference in August 1943, which included top-secret discussions between Roosevelt and Churchill. For some reason, Falk, instead of alerting his own bosses to the find, arranged to meet Blunt at the Reform Club in December 1943, where he expressed his concern that the documents might fall into the hands of the Soviets.
Yet Blunt’s reaction was extraordinarily clumsy. After suggesting that the documents were fake (why?), he lost his temper when Falk argued that they were not so. “I can categorically assure you there is no cross-knowledge”, he told Falk. “The Russians know nothing about this; they’re only interested in the timing of the second front.” Verkaik fails to point out that for Blunt to claim such omniscience would have been very suspicious: as would have been his drawing attention to his knowledge of what they were singularly interested in. The author then inserts a volatile observation (p 154): “Among the other sensitive papers in Kraemer’s safe were reports that detailed how Heinrich Himmler and Walter Schellenberg had held secret talks in Stockholm, where they discussed working with the British in return for immunity from prosecution. This was information Blunt knew would feed Stalin’s paranoia that Britain and Germany would reach a separate deal and turn on him.”
Is that credible? That Himmler and his intelligence chief Schellenberg would have to meet in Stockholm to have ‘secret’ talks about such a plan? That, when they were there, the secrecy of their talks was such that Kraemer was party to them? And that Kraemer then wrote multiple reports [sic] when the last thing that Himmler would have wanted was there to be any incriminating record of the conspiracy by the couple? Yet a few pages later, Verkaik changes his story to something even bolder (page 168): “Anthony Blunt’s earlier intelligence from Kraemer’s personal safe, alluding to secret negotiations between Himmler and the British taking place in Sweden, made such a scenario [a peace deal between Hitler’s and Russia’s Western Allies] even more credible in the eyes of the Kremlin.” If indeed an actual negotiation meeting with a British official had taken place, Kraemer might well have made a brief record for possible insurance or blackmail purposes – but ‘reports’?
Verkaik then goes on to write (p 154): “There is no record of whether Blunt passed on Falk’s documents and suspicions to his MI5 superiors. It seems very likely that he didn’t.” Yet it seems to me even more probable that the encounter never happened, what with the failure of Falk to inform Menzies and others of the find, the unlikely and inappropriate encounter with Blunt, Blunt’s own expostulations showing he was intimately familiar with Soviet intelligence needs, and his further concealing of the fact of the leaked reports. Why would he want to bury an important lead about German espionage? And what would be the outcome if his silence had been discovered when the news leaked elsewhere? Moreover, Verkaik implies that Blunt turned this information over to Stalin, as if feeding Stalin’s worst fears were a sensible strategy for the master-spy. Would that have been a helpful tactic in the cause of beating Hitler? Stalin may have heard rumours of such dealings originating from Dulles in Geneva, but there would seem to be little sense in amplifying the risk. Maybe it was all too complicated for Blunt, and he simply passed on anything he thought might be valuable. Verkaik never claims that Blunt actually did pass on such intelligence, and he offers no source documents that describe the transmission of these events, and I cannot find any reference to such in Triplex or The Crown Jewels.
Verkaik records, in some puzzlement (and maybe with a measure of dismay), that a report by MI6 officer Patricia McCallum commissioned in the 1970s by MI5 to investigate the JOSEPHINE story (which appears in the Kraemer trove at KV 2/157) ‘mysteriously makes no mention of Falk’s name or of his meeting with Blunt so it would appear that there was no official record of this meeting’. Yet he has an answer. “We do know that when Falk tried to raise the matter of the Kraemer material with his SIS boss that he was warned to keep quiet. He later discovered the source of the warning was Anthony Blunt.” But “we” do not “know” that for a fact. Verkaik’s source is again Falk’s unpublished memoir, page 56. It is difficult to believe that Blunt would have such sway over senior officers in MI6 that they would agree to stifle such an item of obvious dynamite.
While the author has chosen to rely more on the improbable and unverifiable testimony of Falk than the records provided by McCallum, and the Kraemer archive that she uses, he trips over himself on one critical matter. McCallum does indeed describe some of the activities of a domestic in the Kraemer household, recruited by Falk and given an identifier (36704), who succeeded in obtaining some papers and documents, such as Kraemer’s passport. She even lays out a scheme whereby, in May 1944, based on specifications sent from Stockholm, MI5’s Hart provided MI6’s Cowgill with a duplicate key based on the impression the agent acquired. The evidence for that appears in KV 2/144, and Verkaik acknowledges the incident on page 154. Yet McCallum never describes the massive purloining of confidential material – a theft that, if it had been carried out without detection, really stretches the imagination. In addition, Verkaik predominantly uses the unpublished memoir by Peter Falk, which Hugh Thomas claimed was in his possession when he wrote The Unlikely Death of Heinrich Himmler in 2001.
Here the story differs. This time the Austrian ‘walk-in’ was happily married to an assistant at the British legation. Falk’s secretary, Bridget, ‘approached’ her, hired her as an agent, and together they recruited Kraemer’s maid as ‘Frau H12’, or agent 36704, ‘to help cut her new master down to size’. As Thomas relates it:
She soon discovered that Krämer kept a drawer in his desk into which some five messages a week disappeared. It was kept permanently locked, the keys unhitched from his neatly folded trousers and left on the dressing table only when he had his daily bath at 6:45 p.m., in which he would luxuriate for half an hour.
Falk knew they were on to something. Using slightly warmed butter that was immediately replaced in the refrigerator, ‘Frau H12’ took an impression of Krämer’s keys, from which an architect in the British legation was able to draw a design for duplicates. The copied keys worked, and ‘Frau H12’ provided Falk with a constant stream of material that was rapidly photographed at the Legation and returned in hours.
Is this melodrama credible? What an extraordinary set-up for the household of an Abwehr officer, where a maid is able to conveniently borrow a key, and gain access to the kitchen, where she surreptitiously takes a mould of a key, and then places the butter back in the refrigerator for later pick up when it solidifies? Falk does not explicitly state that the key was created locally, but he does not acknowledge that the design had to be sent to England for reproduction. (Nigel West writes that a local locksmith was involved.) Yet the other implications are sinister. How did Frau H12 know that five messages a week disappeared into a locked drawer unless she was watching her employer all the time? Moreover, we know (from the Kraemer PF) that several items of information purloined from the Kramer residence were forwarded to MI6 and MI5 in London in the months before the incident with the keys.
I can well believe that Falk fabricated the wilder elements of his story, perhaps to conceal the role of ‘Most Secret Sources’, namely ULTRA intercepts, which played such a large part in the Kraemer surveillance operation. (I shall analyze McCallum’s interpretation of events, and examine the conflicts in all the variations of the Agent 36704 story, in Part 2 of this report.) Yet my overwhelming conclusion is that Verkaik must have come across these conflicts, and chose to ignore them, favouring the anecdotes that suited his thesis best, while hoping that no-one would spot the anomalies. Serious historians do not do that: if they come across conflicts, they try to explain them, and to assess the reliability of testimony depending on the actors and the situation. Falk is the one probably fantasizing (since he leaked so many different versions of the adventure), but one cannot exclude the possibility that Cowgill and Hart may have been collaborating in planting false evidence on the file about the receipt of key specifications.
Despite these alarming gaucheries, Verkaik has made a not unreasonable case that Blunt was in a position at that time to be a far more dangerous spy for the Soviets than, say, Kim Philby. And Blunt was a busy man. Not only did he have his regular job with MI5 to carry out, he pursued his artistic interests at the Courtauld, and he also ran agents. First was his boyfriend Jack Hewitt, who joined the Royal Artillery, where he tried to provoke suspected fifth columnists. Between them, Blunt and Burgess ran Erik Kessler, a Swiss diplomat, and Andrew Revai, a Hungarian who had been planted by Moscow into the ‘Free Hungarians’ group. Blunt had reportedly developed a female source within the Swedish Embassy staff, one codenamed LEMON, who was in fact an English widow called Susan Maxwell. In addition, his uncanny ability to inspect all the relevant intercepted items from diplomatic bags suggests an energy that one would not normally associate with the languid art historian.
- Blunt and the Leaks
Yet at this stage Verkaik makes an extraordinary leap. In Chapter 15 (titled Secrets of D-Day), immediately after the Falk incident, he writes: “Guy Liddell’s diary only says Blunt had now [sic] successfully traced the Josephine leak to the Swedish air attaché in London, Frank Cervell.” The entry is shamefully undated, but Verkaik follows up with a memorandum from Blunt. “Blunt wrote to SIS baldly stating: ‘The source of information is to be found with the Swedish Military attaché in London’”, giving as the source an item from KV 2/146 dated February 13, 1945. Yet this was fourteen months after the Falk recruitment, and five months after the failures at Arnhem! It is, however, fairly easy to turn to Liddell’s diaries to examine the relevant entry, on February 10:
I spoke to C. [Menzies] about Hart’s memo on the JMA [Japanese Military Attaché in Stockholm]. He said he would very much like to see the memo. He thought that possibly the best course would be to put the matter up to the JIC coupled with the information about the leakage of operational information through Kraemer. I told C. that we thought that the leakage in this country was probably through the CERVELL-TURNER combination. He suggested that we might try and put through a piece of hot information and see how it came out in Stockholm. This seems a good idea.
Apart from the lamentable management of chronology, there is no mention here that Blunt had been responsible for tracing the leak, but Verkaik does offer some equivocal observations about Blunt’s further actions. He claims that, rather than moving to expel Cervell and Oxenstierna, Blunt had convinced his bosses that that it would be more useful to keep the pair in London so that disinformation could be passed on through them. He offers no source for this claim, but Triplex (a source frequently cited by Verkaik) on the contrary shows, in Blunt’s report on Oxenstierna, given to Guy Liddell, undated, but probably deriving from the autumn of 1943, that Blunt was convinced of Oxenstierna’s duplicity. He confidently recommended his recall to Sweden. Oxenstierna had been removed from his post at the end of 1943. The first half of the JOSEPHINE/HECTOR duo had had his wings clipped, yet JOSEPHINE endured. (McCallum wrote that Oxenstierna’s Personal File had been destroyed.)
Despite these anomalies, Verkaik then writes that MI6 wanted to take more robust action, and to approach the Swedes to have Kraemer ‘kicked out of Sweden’. And then Menzies came up with a plan to flush Cervell out by planting on him ‘rather hot’ material. Citing a memorandum dated February 13, 1945 [sic!], Verkaik writes that Blunt ‘poured cold water on the idea by arguing that Cervell was only interested in military production figures’. Thus Blunt openly contradicted his earlier advice about using the suspects as intermediaries, but was able to challenge successfully the ideas of the head of MI6. Then Verkaik jumps back to Liddell ‘who now believed he had shut down Josephine’, and turned to other matters concerning the coming ‘invasion’ of Europe in the summer of 1944. That is not good historiography.
I decide to check out Verkaik’s Endnote for the source of the Blunt challenge. He gives it as KV 2/146-2: it is actually in KV 2/146-1, and it consists of a memorandum written by Liddell to Menzies that referred to their recent conversation concerning the possible leakage. It appears as sn. 198a. The relevant text runs as follows:
When I saw you the other day you suggested that a possible method of testing this out might be through planting some rather hot information on TURNER or CERVELL. I mentioned this to Blunt, who feels that this would be well worth trying, but is quite certain that the only kind of information that CERVELL would really be interested to pass on would be something connected with the technical side of aircraft.
There is no evidence of a note from Blunt informing MI6 of the conclusion about the Swedes, either in KV 2/146-1 or KV 2/146-2. In any event, Verkaik grossly misrepresents the tenor of Blunt’s challenge: it was not made directly by him, and it was framed in far more positive terms than those in which Verkaik represents it. Herbert Hart was the main point of contact with MI6 on the matter.
Further damning evidence of Verkaik’s chaotic sense of chronology, and misrepresentation of the facts, appears when he relates how Kraemer got wind of a plan to expel him, and informed Hans Schaefer of the Deutsche Lufthansa of his suspicions. The conversation was reportedly relayed back to Falk in Stockholm, who passed it on to Hart in London. Verkaik presents this as happening immediately after Blunt’s challenge. Yet the reference he gives is p 17 of KV 2/144-1, which indeed does record Kraemer’s concerns, but in a letter sent to Hart by someone locally in MI6, since it refers to ‘our representative in Stockholm’. Moreover, it is dated March 4, 1944 – almost a year before the give-and-take between Liddell and Menzies. It was at this stage that I abandoned any opinion I might have held that Verkaik should be taken seriously as a historian.
- Diversions
Three further chapters (Sixteen through Eighteen) appear before the main course of the investigation into the Arnhem debacle (Part Three: ‘The Russians’). Chapter Sixteen is titled War of Spies, and it continues the theme from the previous chapter, which introduced the topic of how Blunt offered up to Moscow many secret bulletins and documents about the plans for D-Day. This comes as no surprise, since Triplex and The Crown Jewels provide eminent evidence that Blunt handed over hundreds of items in this period. The latter book informs us that Blunt handed over 1,771 documents between 1941 and 1945, and page 168 lists a depressing series of documents concerning D-Day that he handed over to the Soviets. His revealing details of FORTITUDE plans for D-Day was an outrage, considering the fact that breaches in security in Moscow could have led to the plans getting into German hands.
Yet there is one further passage from this period that shocked me. Verkaik is trying to describe the range and depth of the Soviet espionage machine. He writes (p 167):
Chichaev was at the heart of a highly organized and sophisticated espionage and counter-espionage operation. The embassy was run by a cadre of NKVD officers who employed 40 local British staff. Chichaev oversaw a steady flow of secret Soviet agents travelling between Sweden and London. There were also satellite offices scattered across the capital, some known to British intelligence and some not, Chichaev could call upon an unknown number of agents to carry out Moscow’s bidding, among whom the best known were the Cambridge spies, but the truth was there were many more, perhaps hundreds of British and foreign diplomats, spies, couriers, and cut-outs working for the Soviets.
I do not know where Verkaik retrieved this information, which is, I believe, mostly nonsense, a few truths amplified for dramatic effect. The only Endnote he provides for this passage concerns the ‘steady flow’ clause, and is given as KV 2/2927-2, p 17. I looked it up. It describes an interrogation carried out on Walter Habecker in June 1946, and all it says is:
KRAMER & NESPER
Two Russian agents who were sent through SWEDEN to ENGLAND and then from ENGLAND were dropped off near STUTTGART during the latter part of 1943. KRAMER was arrested, but NESPER escaped into Switzerland.
So much for a steady stream of competent and dedicated agents exploiting that fragile Stockholm-Leuchars (Scotland) air link (the Ball-Bearing Run), and being trained for serious espionage work.
- Blunt and MARKET GARDEN
Chapter Seventeen (Bridge of Spies) focusses more on Philby’s accession to the headship of Section IX, and then sets the scene for the MARKET GARDEN Operation, emphasizing that the bold approach was made as an attempt by Montgomery to reach Berlin before the Soviets. In parallel, of course, the Soviets would have great interest in seeing such a thrust repelled: hence their assumed interest in having details of the Operation leaked to the Germans. They accordingly (claims Verkaik) applied pressure on the London rezidentura: Verkaik cites The Crown Jewels for the facts that Chichaev and his team were instructed to engage the Cambridge Five more aggressively in intelligence-gathering, and that on September 15, Blunt told his controllers that ‘he wanted out and that he had handed over his final secret documents’. Yet page 190 of The Crown Jewels says no such thing: it merely states that Blunt ‘had a meeting with the rezidentura’ (which does not sound very clandestine), at which he told his controller that he proposed to return to civilian life. He did indeed take up his appointment of Surveyor of the King’s pictures – but not until April 1945 – and he continued to work thereafter for MI5 for two days a week, and went on helping the Soviets throughout that year. It is as if Verkaik wants to burden Blunt with an ominous conscience just before the Arnhem landings.
In the next chapter Eighteen, the last of this section (Arnhem Betrayed), the author describes the receipt by Kraemer, on the evening of September 15, of a letter in his diplomatic baggage containing seventeen microdot documents. The following morning, when he had magnified and decoded the report, he discovered very detailed information about MARKET GARDEN. He passed it on to Berlin, although the news merely confirmed what he had heard from other sources. Verkaik writes:
Kraemer was able to act so quickly because he had been given vital authoritative context for the Arnhem intelligence on September 13/14 ‘when he received a separate report telling him that an airborne landing in Holland was imminent and giving the exact locations in England of the 1st British, 82nd and 101st US Airborne Division, the three paratroop divisions to be deployed in Operation Market Garden.
What Verkaik does not state here, however, is that Kraemer claimed that this earlier, separate report had come from the Japanese military attaché Onodera (see McCallum report, Appendix II, p 62), and that he said that Onodera had been given the intelligence in a trade with the Swedish General Staff.
Verkaik claims that this second report did provide more detail about the precise landing-sites, and that it allowed the Germans to organize properly for the coming raid. Yet that claim is in opposition to what the various histories state: the above message describes departure locations, not landing-sites. After the war, German officers claimed that they had been totally surprised. (Of course, their testimonies should not necessarily be trusted, and Student in particular was equivocal, as I shall explain in the coming second instalment.) Moreover, Roger Hesketh’s detailed analysis of FORTITUDE and MARKET GARDEN, written in 1949, but not published until 2000, very explicitly presents JOSEPHINE as being a source resident in Stockholm. (Again, to be covered in Part 2 of this report.) Yet how had that intelligence been acquired and transmitted? “Certainly it remained a mystery to both the Germans and the British how the Josephine intelligence had reached Kraemer in Stockholm”, writes Verkaik.
It will come as no surprise to readers that Anthony Blunt was (in Verkaik’s opinion) the mastermind of this project. He writes:
It is much more likely that the microdots were planted on the diplomatic mail by someone with access to both the highest-grade British intelligence and the diplomatic courier mail system. A Sweden ABA regular air service between RAF Leuchars in Scotland and Stockholm’s Bromma airport that ran throughout the war and ferried diplomatic bags between the two countries in a matter of hours was the subject of many MI5, MI6 and Abwehr penetration operations.
This analysis all leads to Blunt, with his access to secret war plans, his control of the embassy mailbags, his wide access to GC&CS’s code-breaking efforts, his contact with Peter Falk, and his association with Chichaev. Not only that, Blunt (so asserts Verkaik) was ‘MI5’s foremost expert on microdots’, and he was called upon by MI6 ‘to decipher their more difficult microdot cases.’ The reference given is KV 2/197, the Personal File of Paul Fidrmuc. It contains a speculative analysis of some microdots (‘duff’) reported by Blunt in December 1943 – hardly substantial enough evidence to support the claims about Blunt’s pre-eminence in the field. And what are ‘difficult microdot cases’? The dots are either magnified, and become legible, or they do not. The eagle eye of a Poussin or even pointilliste expert would not be of much help here.
Yet the insinuation is clear. Verkaik does not state it explicitly, but the assertion would appear to be as follows. Encouraged by his Soviet handlers, Blunt used a Soviet-provided camera to photograph seventeen highly confidential documents describing the Arnhem attack, converted them to microdots, added those dots to existing documents in the Swedish diplomatic bag, and allowed them to be transported on the Spitfire flight out of Leuchars to Stockholm. Thereupon the Swedes, who were accustomed to receiving paper copies of documents, and who would not be expecting microdots, let alone any created with a Soviet-supplied camera, would happily pass them on to Kraemer without suspecting that they might be a plant. Kraemer likewise accepts them (on September 15, the same day that Blunt received his urgent instructions), and he reproduces them the following morning in his wireless messages to Berlin, where they are mysteriously neglected for a couple of days. Blunt managed the receipt of the documents, the conversion to microdots, the inclusion in the Swedish diplomatic bag – as well as the exploitation of a convenient flight from Scotland to Sweden – and the eventual delivery to Kraemer, in less than three days.
- Kraemer & the Microdots (not to be confused with Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas)
The degree to which nobody should be trusted in these twisted reminiscences, however, is proven by a careful re-inspection of that first paragraph of the chapter, where Verkaik writes that Kraemer ‘the German air attaché and Abwehr agent based in Stockholm, received a letter in his diplomatic baggage from Agent Josephine containing 17 microdot documents’. If the letter had been sent via the Swedish diplomatic bag, how did it get transferred to the corresponding German container when simply being passed across the city? Moreover, on the following page, Verkaik writes:
When he was interrogated after the war, Kraemer claimed that he had been sent the second, more detailed, Arnhem warning from a Hungarian diplomat called Josef Fuellop based in Madrid, the same source who had fed him details about D-Day. From Madrid, claimed Kraemer, the microdot photographs had been sent by Hungarian diplomatic bag to the Hungarian legation in Berlin. Here, they were placed in a new envelope and sent by the Hungarians to the German embassy in Stockholm, where Kramer had collected them. Kraemer believed the intelligence had come from a source of Fuellop’s in England.
Whether this unlikely tale was questioned by his interrogators at the time might possibly be revealed by a close study of the subject’s files. Thus we are left with a sequence of actions whereby someone in the UK (Josephine?) deftly manages to get some microdot information, photographs of original documents somehow extricated from the highly secret planning centre at Sunningdale, to Madrid (not an easy task given the lack of London-Madrid air links at the time), whereupon Fuellop passes it on to the Hungarian legation, which in turn succeeds in exploiting some swift transport to Berlin. Notwithstanding the fact that Berlin would be a more suitable destination for this package, the local Hungarians decide to send it instead to the German Embassy in Stockholm, which presumably alerts Kraemer to its arrival, after which he collects it, examines the letters and the microdots, decodes the text (whether it was enciphered by the Swedes or the Hungarians is not clear, but that presented no challenge to Kraemer), and uses his teleprinter to send their contents on to the Foreign Office in Berlin, where they sit for two days. Maybe this story was concocted to get Blunt off the hook. Verkaik rightly dismisses the sequence of events as being almost impossible from a logistics standpoint. Yet he never describes exactly what was in the seventeen documents that Kraemer received, nor does he suggest that the intelligence ascribed to Fuellop under interrogation was in fact part and parcel of the Josephine package from London. Why not?
Could there really have been two packages, both containing microdots? Kraemer’s testimony implies that i) he was accustomed to receiving microdots in the diplomatic mail via the Hungarian Embassy, sourced from Madrid; ii) on this occasion the information reached him on that route on September 15, only three days after the outline plan was created and briefed to commanders on September 12; and iii) the Swedish General Staff must have acquired the news from a contact in London who had access to the plans. Verkaik simply shifts the whole unlikely farrago from Fuellop in Madrid to Blunt in London without exploring the circumstances of the earlier leakage. At the same time he implicitly raises all the former questions I presented about Blunt’s supposed use of microdots, and Kraemer’s sudden ability to recognize their existence, and to interpret them. It is a muddled and illogical account that simply throws out clues in a random fashion, expecting the reader to make his or her conclusions, as if the whole business were a poorly written detective story.
McCallum’s report does at least bring up the paradox. She does not inspect in depth the methods by which the Swedes gained the intelligence, nor does she question why the anomalies were not picked up during Kraemer’s interrogation. She merely writes: “There is no record of any leakage from the Swedish Embassy in London on or near the Arnhem date (17.9.44) but, it should be perhaps be noted, CERVELL was in Sweden during the month of August; arriving back in the United Kingdom on 11.9.44.” That was a weak statement, implying that wireless interception would infallibly pick up any sign of information being passed on clandestinely, ignoring the possibility of the diplomatic bag’s being used. (Was that deliberate, because of Blunt’s role in handling those devices?)
[In fact, the McCallum report merits a dedicated piece of analysis in itself. It is full of anomalies and contradictions, such as attributing to ‘Most Secret Sources’ (ULTRA) the fact that Kraemer’s messages were being intercepted, while elsewhere declaring that there were no records of such available between August and December 1944. As another example, McCallum ascribes MI5’s lethargy in following up leakages to its not wanting its claims of having unearthed all Abwehr agents and illicit communications to be shown to be false, while she indicates that MI6’s persistence in pursuing the leak was due to the fact that it had invested so much in penetrating Kraemer’s household. Moreover, I have no idea why MI5 commissioned a junior MI6 officer to perform the study. In fact, McCallum worked for MI5. I am uncovering fresh information, and shall return to her fascinating contribution in my next two coldspur instalments.]
Apart from the fantastical aspects of these exploits, I am astonished that Verkaik does not draw attention to the moral dimension of the purported action. Hitherto, Blunt (an odious character for whom I have no sympathy) had been supplying his Soviet masters with documents copied illegally. At least the Soviet Union was an ally in 1944. Out of some perverse impulse to help Stalin in his plans for taking over as much as possible of German territory, Blunt agrees to provide critical strategic information concerning battle-plans to diplomats of a neutral country who have been shown to be leaking highly confidential information to a German agent, and he performs the task independently. If his actions had ever been detected he would have been hanged as a traitor. At this stage, I was ready to conclude that Verkaik’s whole story was nonsense, or that if Blunt did somehow manage to pass on secret documents, it was part of the overall deception campaign to mislead the Nazis about the target of the parachute regiments. (Verkaik had, of course, already mentioned Blunt’s aspirations for using the Swedes in a disinformation exercise.)
- A Chronology
One might expect a disciplined historian to provide a careful chronology of those September events, so that the reader could assess how the Germans responded to the various warnings about a parachute landing in the Netherlands. Verkaik does not perform this service, but an inspection of the last pages of Chapter Eighteen (with some vaguer items from Chapter Nine) does allow a rough timeline to be assembled, as follows. (I use primarily data from the McCallum report and Verkaik’s text.)
10.9.44 Eisenhower gives green light to MARKET GARDEN plan (Verkaik)
10.9.44 BRUTUS issues message warning of attack in northern Germany (Hesketh)
10.9 44 Outline plan communicated to CoS, Allied Airborne Army (McCallum)
11.9.44 CERVELL returns to UK (McCallum)
11.9.44 General Model issues order to prepare for airborne landings (Verkaik)
11 & 12.9.44 Air Vice-Marshal Trafford describes deployment of FUSAG (Kraemer)
12.9.44 Final date & briefing for MARKET GARDEN (McCallum)
12.9.44 Battle orders handed to commanders in London (Verkaik)
13.9.44 Blunt receives plans, and converts them to microdots (Verkaik)
13.9.44 KRAEMER is given report on Airborne Divisions by ONODERA (Kraemer)
13.9.44 KRAEMER’s information is passed promptly to Berlin (Kraemer)
13.9.44 LINDEMANS meets BAKER at Hotel Metropole in Brussels (Verkaik)
LINDEMANS is given mission to warn Dutch resistance in Eindhoven (Verkaik)
14.9.44 Blunt exploits flight to Stockholm to get documents to the Swedes (Verkaik)
14.9.44 KRAEMER is asked to report on 6th Airborne Division (ULTRA: McCallum)
14.9.44 (night) KRAEMER receives report from Fuellop (Kraemer)
15.9.44 Captured LINDEMANS reveals big aerial landing on 17-18/9/44 (Verkaik)
Landings to take place at Eindhoven, Nijmegen & Arnhem (Verkaik)
LINDEMANS gives BAKER’s name to Germans (Verkaik)
15.9.44 LINDEMANS’ intelligence is picked up by GB (ULTRA: Verkaik)
15.9.44 KRAEMER passes microdot information to Air Attaché (Kraemer)
15.9.44 KRAEMER reports on BRUTUS’s content (Hesketh)
16.9.44 Horrocks briefs his tank commanders in Leopoldsburg, Belgium (Verkaik)
16.9.44 Landing of airborne divisions in Holland [?] (McCallum)
17.9.44 (noon) General Bittrich is alerted to airborne landings (Verkaik)
17.9.44 (noon) Paratroopers have not yet crossed North Sea (Verkaik)
17.9.44 Landing of airborne divisions in Holland (Verkaik)
17.9.44 (pm) KRAEMER’s message from JOSEPHINE arrives in Berlin (Schellenberg)
It is one thing to muddle one’s notes, and introduce some maybe inconsequential errors in one’s work, but quite another to distort the chronology and misrepresent facts so egregiously that a fantasy is created to promote a highly dubious theory. At this stage, I concluded that I would not be able to comment properly on Verkaik’s narrative unless I engaged in a thorough inspection of the Kraemer file myself – not something in the compass of my ambition. This is Chapman Pincher country, and my inclination was to judge that Verkaik was a charlatan who had committed a fraud against the reading public. I had by now developed my own theory about what was going on. I decided that I would continue my analysis, but that I would not attempt to verify any more of his claims in depth, since his integrity had in my mind been demolished. I thus follow up with a broad summarization of his remaining story.
Part 3: ‘The Soviets’
By this stage I had become worn out by the author’s irritating method of construction – the constant meandering between time and place, the overdone melodramatic insertion of historical context, the introduction of authoritative-sounding ‘facts’, supported by specific Endnotes, many of which turned out not to be ‘factual’ at all, the constant insinuation of possible evil-doing by Blunt without any proper analysis, the lack of cool assessment of all the evidence that the author has collected, and, consequently, the absence of any judgment of what all that he has laid out means. Perhaps it would all be resolved in the final section.
Yet Part 3 is a continuation of the previous style: leaping around in time, the text padded with historical filler, some relevant, some not, much worthy imaginative investigation coloured by a good amount of rhetorical questioning and illogical thinking – and a deterioration in the quality of the prose, with syntactical errors that suggest that some late, rushed emendments were made before publication. The overall message is that the Soviets were behind it all, responsible for the infiltration of both Dutch intelligence and of SOE, and for the leakage of secrets from ministries in London, and that Philby and Blunt masterminded a grand scheme to delay the progress that the Allied armies made in western Europe so that Stalin’s objectives for Berlin could be met.
Verkaik develops his theme crabwise. We learn about Churchill’s deal with Stalin in Moscow; Oreste Pinto returns to the scene, since he encounters Lindemans in Belgium after he has been appointed head of the Dutch Counter-Intelligence Mission attached to SHAEF. Pinto challenges Lindemans, and he is about to interrogate him in Brussels on September 15 when he learns that Lindemans has been given orders to go elsewhere. Instead, Pinto is soon able to interrogate one of Lindeman’s agents, Cornelis Verloop, who attests that Lindemans had met Colonel Kiesewetter of the Abwehr on September 15, and had told him about the planned paratroop drop beyond Eindhoven. Pinto is furious when he later learns that Lindemans has been allowed to escape. On October 28, 1944, Lindemans was nevertheless arrested and soon sent to Camp020 on Ham Common in London.
There follows a rather laborious account of the events, including the interrogations – not just of Lindemans, but of Kraemer, too. Decrypted messages from Bletchley Park proved that Lindemans had been passing intelligence to Giskes, the Abwehr chief in Holland. Kraemer is revealed to be not only JOSEPHINE, but a source called PETERSON HASSO. SHAEF became concerned about the accuracy of Kraemer’s intelligence concerning its plans to cross the Rhine. In March 1945, Stewart Menzies expresses his concern to MI5 that Kraemer must have a source in London. Kraemer was captured in May 1945, and taken to Camp020, where he gave probably false answers to his interrogators, claiming that the Japanese attaché Onodera was the chief source of his information, but that the Fuellop network had been the best source of his JOSEPHINE material. Walter Schellenberg, the Sicherheitsdienst foreign intelligence chief, joins the throng, and admits that Kraemer’s intelligence sources were a mystery, adding that his information on Arnhem came too late to be of real use. MI6 and MI5 disagree about the reality of a source in London revealing secrets.
The background theme is trying to identify who JOSEPHINE was. Was he or she a single person, or a collective name for a bunch of sources? Verkaik trips over himself in this analysis, since he admits that the latter is true, but sets up his major rhetorical question again and again: Was Blunt JOSEPHINE? On page 263, the author reaches his spectacular climax: If Blunt was willing to betray his own MI5 colleagues to the Soviets, he was surely happy to pass on intelligence on Allied operations to the Germans. Moreover, the failure of Operation MARKET GARDEN was a ‘disaster for the world’. Yet there is more to come. Lindemans commits suicide on July 18, 1946. Stalin’s son appears in the plot. Lindemans’ mistress was apparently later killed in an eerie car-crash in South Africa. It turns out that Kraemer had been suspected of playing a double game, and the Germans conducted a thorough audit of all the material he had sent to Berlin. The investigation was led by a Count von Posadrosky, who ‘concluded that Kraemer’s intelligence was carefully blended mix of falsehoods, truths and half-truths planted by the Allies as part of a sophisticated deception plan’.
If the reader’s head is not already spinning, the farrago continues. Kraemer is held at Bad Nenndorf, but Kim Philby holds his file. Fuellop denies ever using microdots. Leo Long is involved, abetting the deceit while working for SHAEF. Verkaik suggests that Blunt, after his secret mission to Germany to retrieve Edward VII’s letters, sent microdot versions of them to Moscow under cover of diplomatic mail. (Really?) Verkaik repeats the error of having Philby responsible for training the SOE PICKAXE agents. He suggests that Liddell may have been the Fifth Man. Ladislas Farago’s Game of the Foxes (published in 1971, which provides a breakdown of German intelligence operations) is introduced. Farago wrote that Kraemer had ‘longstanding’ connections in Britain: Verkaik interprets this to mean that Kraemer may have been feeding the Luftwaffe targets during the Blitz, bringing us all back to Pinto’s suspicions about the bombing of Wormwood Scrubs in 1940.
Verkaik believes that the McCallum report was written as a response to the Farago revelations, but since it was not published openly until 2003, it is hard to see what he means by this. Yet he has a more precise challenge. He accuses McCallum of covering up for Blunt, since she never mentions his name. Verkaik regards it as ‘inconceivable’ that she was unaware of Blunt’s guilt at the time (1974), and that she must have known that he had confessed to being a spy. Yet to reveal to a lower officer (Verkaik claims that she worked in the Registry during the war) the dark secret of the amnesty deal done with Blunt would have been an incredible step by the few officers in MI5 who knew about it. MI5 could not have risked the story getting out. And, if McCallum had been trusted, it would have been unimaginable that she would not have been instructed to stay well clear of any hints of traitorous activity by him. That seems a very ingenuous conclusion by Verkaik.
Intermediate Conclusions
Thus the tale runs to its melodramatic conclusion. By now, Verkaik shows that he firmly believes that JOSEPHINE (one person) was Blunt. If Blunt was not that figure, it leaves three possibilities (he asserts): one, that Kraemer was a genius, manufacturing first-class intelligence from disparate sources; two, he was a liar about his sources, and made it all up; and three, that Kraemer was indeed a pawn of the Russians, but JOSEPHINE was someone other than Blunt. To me there is another explanation, but I shall not lay it out until later. Verkaik concludes, at the start of the final paragraph of his book, as follows:
What we can say is that if Blunt was Josephine – and at the very least there are reasonable grounds for suspecting he was – then Blunt can be argued to be the most devastatingly successful and destructive spy in history.
After all this palaver, that is a very weak conclusion: a misrepresentation of the essence of the case, and a lukewarm endorsement of the hypothesis. It is hardly the ringing reinforcement of the claims made on the book’s cover.
In any event, some clear messages stand out. On September 15, both Lindemans and Kraemer issued statements that drew attention to a probable attack on Arnhem. MARKET GARDEN was not approved until September 10, whereafter detailed plans were worked out. The specific plan for Arnhem did not officially reach Belgium until September 16. If it was not Blunt, from whom did the two gain their intelligence? Yet, for me, the greatest flaw in Verkaik’s argument is the fact that, after providing solid evidence of Lindemans’ treachery and betrayal of information, the author attributes far more importance to the flimsy connection that Blunt may have had with Kraemer, and the latter’s relatively harmless report, which incidentally arrived late. Verkaik builds around this shaky scaffolding a fantastical story about Blunt as the mastermind of a broad Soviet exercise. Why? Is it a dramatic breakthrough in interpretation? And how is it borne out – or negated – by what previous historians have written? I thus needed to inspect a number of works.
My analysis of these, and my conclusions, will appear on coldspur on May 15.
Envoi
As I was developing this piece, an extraordinary event occurred. Early in January, I received an email from someone called Piers Blofeld, who introduced himself as a writer who had recently completed a book about Anthony Blunt, to be published this May. He told me that he had found coldspur ‘an invaluable resource in the last couple of years’, and that he was ’deeply appreciative of the trailblazing’ that I had done in the field. He thought I might be interested in reading his book, and he offered to send me an electronic version.
But there was more. He explained that his book had emerged from the work he had performed on a book by a client of his, namely Robert Verkaik. He was evidently a literary agent. He had joked to Verkaik that he was bound to turn up a Cambridge spy in his researches, and when Verkaik discovered the McCallum report, lo and behold, he learned that Anthony Blunt had run the JOSEPHINE investigation for a time. It was then, apparently, that Blofeld was taking over the project. He wrote to me as follows:
However, it was late in the day – the book was due to be delivered and so I rolled up my sleeves to work with Robert to make sense of it. The report can be dated with decent certainty to the early 1970s and McCallum was an old MI5 lag [sic] – and on first reading Robert agreed with her that the whole affair was a ‘mystery’ which was unlikely to be solved. I was not so sure: it seemed odd for instance that a report investigating a possible high level double agent at the heart of British intelligence did not mention the fact that the officer investigating was a high level double agent at the heart of British intelligence. The questions mounted – and together we built a case that Blunt was passing secrets to the Nazis to slow the allied advance and help Stalin win the race to Berlin.
Blofeld and I exchanged a few emails. I pointed out to him several errors that I had found in The Traitor of Arnhem. Since he admitted that he had been more than an agent, actually a ‘collaborator’, he was very interested in my comments, and even described how large the role was that he had played in the book’s development: “I would also say that as indicated the Blunt development in Robert’s book came very late in the process of writing it: deadlines loomed and my focus then was on trying to make sense of it as a theory for the reader not in nailing down every fact.” This was quite alarming. I went to check how Verkaik acknowledged his agent’s contribution. And there it lay, on page 348:
This book would not have been possible without the extraordinary narrative talents of my agent, Piers Blofeld. His thoughtful collaboration from beginning to end has allowed the story to be written on a much bigger canvas.
The Agent as Author. Had Blofeld actually been responsible for the mess? Did Verkaik take full responsibility?
I had in fact heard from another coldspur correspondent about Blofeld’s coming book. I explained my antipathy to reading e-books, and Blofeld promised to send me his last proof copy, which arrived a few days later. I read about six pages before hurling it violently aside. It was obvious, despite all his flattery, that he had not read a word of what I had written about Blunt. There was no place in the Acknowledgments for coldspur. I expressed my annoyance to him that he had wasted so much of my time. At first he tried to blame me for acting in bad faith, for obtuseness, and for vanity, but he eventually apologized after I pointed out the absurdity of his seeking my opinion on his silly book when it was at the ‘uncorrected proof’ stage, and after he had misled me about his indebtedness to coldspur. Enough said. We parted on congenial terms, although a further blow-up a few weeks later (over the Costello autopsy reports, when Blofeld accused me of stealing his research) caused an irretrievable breach in relations. Nevertheless, Blofeld’s communications still constituted a very revealing statement about the evolution of Verkaik’s book. It had indeed ‘lost its way’, as I had hazarded on my second reading.
(Latest Commonplace entries are viewable here. Do not forget to check out Part 2 of this story on May 15!)
