Klop : Britain's Most Ingenious Secret Agent

304 Pages·2014·5.07 MB·English

by  Day

CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements

1. Magdalena
2. Grenadiers
3. Nadia
4. Bolsheviks
5. London
6. Vansittart
7. Exiles
8. Secret Agent
9. War
10. Vera
11. Lisbon
12. Schellenberg
13. Max Klatt
14. Switzerland
15. Moura
16. Defectors
17. Otto John
18. Peace

Glossary
Bibliography
Endnotes
Index
Plates
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
W
hat started out as a simple task – to turn the assorted reports of Klop Ustinov’s
espionage exploits into a coherent story – has escalated into an epic journey
from the tropical heat of Ethiopia in the nineteenth century through the Russian
Revolution and two World Wars to the icy tundra of the Cold War. As it grew in
scale and complexity it became ever more difficult to keep track of the many
characters that flitted in and out of the narrative, not to mention the
incomprehensible military and intelligence acronyms. To aid navigation a
glossary of principal characters and organisations has been included towards the
end of this book.
Inevitably much of the preliminary research was done at the National
Archives at Kew where the staff were, as ever, patient and knowledgeable. I
relied heavily, too, on the resources of the London Library and the British
Library and, to a lesser extent, on the Imperial War Museum, Churchill Archives
and Cambridge University Library.
I was drawn to the United States by the meticulous investigations of
Professor Richard Breitman and the Interagency Working Group who supervised
the release of around ten million pages of documents under the 1998 Nazi War
Crimes Disclosure Act and distilled them into a single volume of essays. Some
former members of the team were among the enthusiastic research advisers and
assistants who guided me through a couple of fruitful weeks at the US Archives
at College Park, Maryland.
Despite the best endeavours of the language teachers at the Goethe Institute
in London, my command of German would not have been adequate to the task
without the generous time and effort of Günter Scheidemann and his colleagues
in the reading room of the German Foreign Office archive in Berlin; and
likewise Marco Birn and colleagues at the Baden-Württemberg state archive in
Stuttgart. Thanks also to the licensing department of the archives in Stuttgart and
Ludwigsburg for permission to reproduce photographs. Other photos were
provided by The National Archives, the Imperial War Museum, Getty Images,
Mrs Elizabeth Head, and under Crown copyright from government records. The
publishers, Macmillan, authorised the use of extracts from Klop and the Ustinov
Family by Nadia Benois.
My thanks to all those at Biteback who contributed to the book’s publication,
particularly commissioning editor Mick Smith and editors Hollie Teague, Olivia
Beattie and Victoria Godden. Various individuals weighed in with advice and
support during the research stage, among them Ustinov family friends Cathy
Bazley, Emily Beanland, Owain Hughes, June Lewis-Jones and Liz Head, née
Brousson, who was incredibly generous with her time and hospitality. Special
thanks are due to Klop’s grandson, Igor Ustinov, for permission to use
previously unseen sketches from Nadia Benois’s notebooks and for his
encouragement and thoughtful insights.
All of these people have helped me get closer to the truth about an elusive
subject but cannot be held responsible for errors and misapprehensions. It has
always to be borne in mind that the original source for much of what follows
was two world champion raconteurs, Klop and his son Peter, and they may, just
occasionally, have been guilty of that failing so often attributed to journalists –
not letting the facts get in the way of a good story.
CHAPTER 1: MAGDALENA
N
obody wants to be known as a bedbug. Except Klop Ustinov. The Russian
diminutive was more fun than doleful Jona, the name his parents gave him. He
looked the part: only 5ft 2in., his head slightly too big for his body; his
protruding grape-green eyes shamelessly undressing any attractive woman who
crossed his line of vision. What’s more, he shared the tiny parasite’s capacity to
turn up, not exactly uninvited but quite surprisingly, in more than a few of their
beds. He was a real-life spy with more lovers than James Bond. Like Bond, he
was a man who appreciated fine food and wine. But he was no 007, licensed to
kill. Codenamed U35, his mission was to beguile and confuse.
Bond’s creator Ian Fleming and Klop Ustinov were contemporaries. Fleming
masterminded subversion in Spain and Portugal for naval intelligence while
Klop was intriguing with MI6 double agents in Lisbon during the Second World
War.
Sir Dick White, the only man ever to be director of both MI5 and MI6,
nurtured Klop’s career from its earliest days. He described him as his best and
most ingenious operator.1 The problem is to explain how, and why, he earned
such an accolade.
Several other countries had better claim to his loyalty. Money and notoriety
were not his motives. He was never rich, usually lived beyond his means, and
would rather die than cash in on the many secrets he harboured. He left no
memoirs. Yet to all appearances he was neither especially secret nor even
discreet. His battlegrounds were the social salons of Europe; his disguise the
showman’s talent to entertain and amuse; his most potent weapon the
spellbinding art of the storyteller: all the qualities which shaped his more famous
son Peter Ustinov as an actor, director and raconteur.
Klop’s friend and fellow MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott might have been
thinking of him when he described the attributes needed to succeed:
They will be personalities in their own right; they will have humanity and a capacity for friendship;
and they will have a sense of humour which will enable them to avoid the ridiculous mumbo-jumbo
of over secrecy.2
He explained that it was all about gaining other people’s confidence and
occasionally persuading them to do things against their better judgment.
Peter Ustinov said of his father that he regarded life as a superficial exercise,
an extent of thin ice to be skated on, for the execution of arabesques and figures
of fun. Klop would have agreed with Cecil Rhodes that to be an Englishman
meant that the first prize in the lottery of life had been won. Rhodes was a
commanding figure of the British Empire. For Klop, the lottery of life had its
origins in two other imperial dynasties – Russia and Ethiopia.
*
On a plateau 3,900ft above the Bechilo valley, the great brass cannon called
Sebastopol gave out a roar that could be clearly heard two miles away. It was the
most powerful weapon in the armoury of the Emperor Theodore, modelled on
the Russian guns that faced the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava.
The fearsome, unpredictable despot had conquered his rival tribes and ruled
over all the fabulous lands of Abyssinia, better known now as Ethiopia. He was
the latest embodiment of an uncertain lineage which traced its roots to the
Biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He had heard of that terrible
slaughter in the Crimea and now believed that he, too, could strike fear in the
redcoated soldiers of the British Army gathered on the plain before Magdala, his
impregnable mountain fortress, towering 9,000ft above sea level.
In January 1868, 10,000 British and Indian soldiers and 30,000 support staff
and hangers-on landed at Annesley Bay on the Red Sea. They were under the
command of Lieutenant General Sir Robert Napier, veteran of the Sikh Wars, the
Indian Mutiny, the North West Frontier and the second Anglo-Chinese War. He
didn’t stint on equipment. There were forty-four Indian elephants, 2,538 horses
and 16,022 mules to carry his men plus 300,000 tons of arms and supplies. They
built their own railway and negotiated safe passage with the emperor’s enemies.
The vanguard of fighting men made an extraordinary forced march across
400 miles of uncompromising terrain. They crossed the Bechilo valley,
labouring up the side of the ravine through intense heat with insufficient water,
and now stood implacably before Magdala, come to right a tiny wrong.
Theodore had insulted Queen Victoria, whose dominions extended beyond his
imagination.
He had previously hoped to be friends with Her Majesty and made diplomatic
overtures. She had responded with a gift of silver embossed pistols. But when
the British Foreign Office failed to reply to his overtures with sufficient alacrity
or respect he took their representative hostage. Charles Cameron spent more than
four years in captivity. He was joined by the emissary sent to negotiate his
release, Hormuz Rassam, and by missionaries, European artisans and
adventurers, and various princelings of rival tribes. The princes were hostages
against the continued subservience of their tribes. Their lives depended on
Theodore’s murderous black moods, often occasioned by strong drink. Among
the European hostages was Moritz Hall, a former Polish soldier, a Jew who had
converted to Christianity and an opportunist who had agreed, under duress, to
build Theodore’s great cannon.
Legend has it that Moritz was chained to the gun to prevent him escaping.3 If
so, he was lucky to survive: its barrel was flawed and eventually burst upon
firing. Theodore took it as an ill-omen that his stronghold would fall to the
mighty force of redcoats assembled by General Napier. And Magdala did fall.
But only after Theodore, in a quite unexpected act of clemency, released all his
European hostages; he had previously propelled his native captives to their
deaths over a sheer cliff. He had already seen some of his best troops cut to
pieces by rocket fire and new Snider-Enfield rifles, which were capable of firing
ten rounds per minute. They were slaughtered as they hurtled down from their
fortress in a hopeless spear charge on the British positions. Imperial pride would
not countenance surrender. Theodore hoped that freedom for his prisoners and a
peace offering of 1,000 cattle would suffice.
Down the mountain on the Easter Saturday of the year 1868 came 61
hostages, with 187 servants and 323 animals. Among them was the hapless royal
armourer Moritz Hall with his wife Wayzaru Walatta Iyassus, otherwise known
as Katarina, the daughter of a German artist and an Ethiopian princess. By Easter
Sunday there was an addition to their ranks – Mrs Hall gave birth to a baby girl.
In the midst of such momentous events her birth might have passed
unnoticed, but the celebrated American war correspondent Henry Morton
Stanley recorded the new arrival for his readers. He had the child’s name as
Theodora, in tribute to the emperor. Maybe Morton was mistaken, maybe her
parents pragmatically changed their minds, but eventually the child was
christened Magdalena. At the age of twenty Magdalena would marry an
aristocratic Russian-born Protestant, of German nationality, who was well over
twice her age. Their eldest son was Jona Ustinov, otherwise known as Klop.
Stanley’s attention was quickly diverted to the storming of the fortress, on
Easter Monday. Drummer Michael Magner and Private James Bergin won the
Victoria Cross for leading a heroic assault, cutting through the brushwood
defences with their bayonets and leading the charge on the dispirited defenders.
Theodore committed suicide, with one of Queen Victoria’s pistols, rather than
endure the humiliation of capture; the victorious troops discovered his liquor
store and pretty soon ran riot, looting and pillaging until Napier eventually
restored some sort of order.4
Theodore’s fortress contained many religious and imperial treasures, some of
which he himself had looted during his conquests. These were auctioned and
carried back to Britain. A good few of them ended up in the British Museum, the
Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Collection – the tangible legacy of a
military adventure in which no territory was captured, no other tribute exacted
and no trade links established. Theodore’s son and heir, Prince Alemayehu,
accompanied the retreating British Army, as did his mother until she succumbed
to illness and died. Alemayehu was introduced to Queen Victoria at Osborne on
the Isle of Wight, tutored by his guardian Captain Tristram Speedy and then
given a traditional education for an English gentleman, Rugby public school and
Sandhurst military college. He lived in Leeds until he died of pneumonia at the
age of eighteen, a sad and disorientated figure. At Queen Victoria’s insistence,
he was buried in the crypt beside St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Moritz
Hall, his wife and family, including the infant Magdalena, were part of that
military procession back to the landing point on the Red Sea. Nobody knew it
then, but Magdalena’s destiny dictated that she, too, would become part of an
enduring British legacy. Her family settled in Palestine, in the ancient city of
Jaffa which now forms part of Tel Aviv in Israel. Her mother Katarina retained
her links with Abyssinia, returning in 1902 to become a lady-in-waiting at the
court of the Emperor Menilek and a close friend of his wife, Empress Taytu.
Magdalena’s brother, David, became a counsellor of state to the next emperor,
Haile Selassie.5
Magdalena’s father, Moritz Hall, was born in 1838 in the Polish city of
Cracow, then part of a Russian protectorate. Two years later Magdalena’s future
husband, Platon Ustinov, or Oustinoff, was born in St Petersburg, the son of an
extraordinarily dissolute father and an exceptionally beautiful mother. Their
wealth dated back to the last years of the seventeenth century when Adrian
Ustinov made a fortune in the Siberian salt trade. He had noble antecedents and
a family crest that bore a salt press, an eagle’s wing, a star and a bee buzzing
across two blades of wheat.
Adrian’s son, Mikhail, settled in Saratov in southern Russia on the lower
reaches of the Volga River. Thanks to an imperial favour he acquired estates
covering 240,000 hectares, employing 6,000 serfs. Mikhail in turn had five sons.
The fifth, Grigori, installed his beautiful wife Maria in a St Petersburg town
house while he set himself up in a separate property in the same street where he
could give full rein to his debauched tastes. Breakfast consisted of a banquet of
caviar, smoked salmon, suckling pig, hard-boiled eggs, anchovies, pickled
herrings and salted cucumbers, washed down with vodka and supplemented with
a bevy of teenage peasant girls, recruited from his country estates, whom he
seduced, singly or several at a time, until lunch. After that he could repair to the
Moscow English Club, where only aristocrats were admitted, for an evening of
drinking and gambling. Confronted with such licentiousness, his youngest son
Platon developed a puritan streak.
Platon had seemed destined for a career in the Chevalier Guards regiment of
cavalry but at the age of twenty-one a fall from his horse left him temporarily
paralysed and with lung damage. He travelled to the Mediterranean to
convalesce, staying in a Protestant mission hostel in Palestine. There he
succumbed to the preaching of a Protestant pastor from Germany, Peter Metzler,
and the good looks of his daughter, Maria. He invested money in their mission
and then invited Pastor Metzler and his family to return to Russia with him to
manage his estates. Displaying a wilfulness and disregard of the consequences
that characterised his life, Platon refused to take an oath of allegiance to the tsar,
on the grounds that he had embraced the Protestant religion and could not
simultaneously swear devotion to the Orthodox Church.
While his father Grigori’s personal and private immorality was no bar to his
social standing, Platon’s public rejection of one of the pillars of the Russian state
provoked a scandal. Exile and disgrace beckoned. He sold his share of the family
estates and moved to the Germanic kingdom of Württemberg, which was an
astute move. In 1846 King Karl V had married the tsar’s daughter, Olga. Queen
Olly, as she liked to be known, welcomed Platon and granted him citizenship.
So, when Württemberg joined the confederation of states that formed the
German Empire, in 1870, Platon became an accidental German.
Not that he spent much time in the fatherland that had adopted him. He
married the pastor’s daughter, Maria Metzler, and made the most distressing
discovery, on his wedding night, that he was not her first lover. Most husbands
of the time would have been scandalised by such a revelation; it was beyond
forgiveness as far as the puritanical Platon was concerned. He disowned her
immediately but for many years refused a divorce. In his outrage and shame he