The Venlo Sting: MI6's Deadly Fiasco

Introduction

World War II was only 70 days old when the German SS agent, Walter Schellenberg, under direct orders from his boss Reinhard Heydrich, grabbed two British Secret Service agents on neutral ground between the Dutch and German borders and whisked them away for interrogation. There was never the least chance of either of the captives withholding information under interrogation but there was also the small matter of one of them, at the time, happening to have upon his person a list of active British agents working in the Netherlands. The men had been operating alongside intelligence officers of the Netherlands which at the time was neutral and which was acutely embarrassed by the whole incident. The British agents had come to the rendezvous at Venlo with the knowledge and blessing of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, expecting to meet a high-ranking German general who purported to represent active dissident elements within the German army. They had, in fact, run headlong into an SS trap which was sprung with both deadly efficiency and pantomime farce. For the British, it highlighted the amateurish and haphazard way in which MI6 operated and for the Germans, with a much more ruthless approach, the capture of the British agents, Sigismund (Sigi) Payne Best and Major Richard Henry Stevens, who walked wide-eyed and unsuspecting into five years of captivity in concentration camps, was almost too easy to be true.

Strategic intelligence is the kind of intelligence most likely to be subject to wide margins of error. It is argued by some historians such as Richard Overy that in 1939 both Germany and the two Western powers, Britain and France, were notably deficient in strategic intelligence and ‘approached the Polish crisis with a profound misperception of the intentions, room for manoeuvre and military-economic strength of the other side’.¹ Britain and France appeared to use what intelligence they had on Germany to do no more than reaffirm their preconceptions that Hitler could be appeased and ultimately deterred, whereas Hitler used intelligence about them to confirm his own view that, when it came to the crunch, neither would live up to their commitments to supporting Poland if it meant war. Both sides were blinkered and both sides were wrong, leaving them no room for manoeuvre when the crisis of August 1939 boiled over uncontrollably.

The limitations of the intelligence-gathering agencies on both sides were compounded by limitations on the way intelligence was analysed and presented to both sets of leaders. Given that most strategic intelligence was gathered through diplomatic channels, the roles of Sir Nevile Henderson at the British Embassy in Berlin and Herbert von Dirksen at the German Embassy in London, whose ‘elegant bearing… aristocratic manners… fluent English and polite ways charmed many in Britain’² should have been crucial, but Dirksen was to write later that ‘During [his] term of office in London, Hitler never once took the trouble of following up on British offers of negotiations, even if only as a pretence.’³ Most intelligence work was done by military attachés and those from Britain, Poland, Sweden, the United States and France often worked more closely than their political masters, meeting in regular session to collate information which had the benefit of interpretations from different perspectives.

Interception of communications had become more important as a source of intelligence replacing diplomatic channels over time and countries varied in their proficiency at this regard. With Berlin and Vienna being the central relay points for many European cable systems, Germany was able to intercept and read some, though not all, of the diplomatic telegraphic traffic of Britain, France, Italy and Japan, although not, it would seem, of the Soviet Union. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring’s private intelligence outfit, the Forschungsamt, operating independently of the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence), also tapped telephones and bugged hotel rooms successfully but spent most of their time spying on rivals and opponents of Göring’s own power base within Germany. Much diplomatic signals traffic was coded and Britain, unfortunately, could read neither German nor Soviet codes; however, the British and French secret services, particularly the latter, enjoyed a modest success in employing other means of overcoming the difficulties of getting information out of the totalitarian states. When war clouds covered Europe in 1939, these two agencies received significant intelligence from the Polish 2nd Department (Oddsial II), which had a large network of informants working in Germany and the Soviet Union, and from the Czech secret service.

It was not only intelligence about Germany that informed policy but also information about allies, in particular how strong they were militarily and how committed they were politically to oppose Germany. For instance, British knowledge (or more precisely lack of knowledge) of French strategy might be illustrated by the fact that the British military attaché in Paris in 1939 had visited only one French army unit in the field during the previous 12 months. It was thought that taking too much interest in the military capabilities of one’s allies was a little infra dig and showed a lack of confidence in them. On the other side, Hitler, working hard to get the support of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, for his agenda was nevertheless careful to give Italy as little information as possible about German capabilities.

It was also necessary for intelligence analysts to gauge the relevance, validity and accuracy of intelligence according to the source, which was made more difficult by the fact that provenance was sometimes kept secret from them for security reasons. Even when the agents and attachés had done their sometimes dangerous work and presented their findings to those whose job it was to act on them, it was often the case that the intelligence would be distorted and manipulated by its end-users to favour one viewpoint or another according to personal prejudices and ambitions. In the summer of 1939, for instance, Dirksen made repeated attempts to see Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and get his reports about the mood and attitudes of those British leaders he mixed with in London submitted to the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, but many of them, especially if they were at odds with the impression that von Ribbentrop was trying to give, failed to reach the leader’s desk. As far as Britain trying to understand what Germany’s next political or military move might be, it is as well to remember that Hitler’s own generals were often kept in the dark and only informed of decisions at the last minute. This may well have been attributable to Hitler’s capricious nature but it also gave the generals the shortest possible time to object to plans about which Hitler knew they would raise concerns.

The Munich agreement of September 1938 at first seemed like a recipe for ‘peace for our time’ as Chamberlain so dramatically and unwisely put it. However, it turned out to be merely a brief ray of sunlight breaking through the storm clouds of German ambitions in Eastern Europe which quickly closed in again and darkened the skies. Hitler had signed what he saw as a worthless piece of paper but had been denied the small war he had seemed to crave. His ambitions, however, were in no way diminished. The Sudetenland, which had been so meekly conceded to him, was only another small step on the road to the realisation of the greater German Reich he had dreamed of since 1923, that would stretch from the Rhine to the Don, from the Black Sea to the Baltic.

When Hitler had shown his contempt for British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s ‘piece of paper’ promising ‘peace for our time’ by marching into Prague on 15 March 1939, the British government revised its attitude towards dissident elements in the German military, whom they had previously treated with much distrust and some disdain, and now looked upon them as one of the few remaining ways of avoiding war. There was now no doubt that more territories would be threatened by the formidable German military machine without even the semblance of legitimate justification for annexation of the sort that had allowed the fudging of Austria and the Sudetenland. The problem was still, however, the level of credence that could be allocated to dissident German emissaries or even if they were genuine dissidents at all. Their existence could all be an elaborate deception of strategic proportions aimed at sapping the Allied will to tackle German ambitions head-on. Investing too much hope in the possibility that some German generals might refuse to obey orders when told to fight was to risk a weakening of resolve when the hard decisions had to be made. On the other hand, if there was truth in the claims of deep unrest within the German High Command at the prospect of a full-scale European war breaking out then it would be folly not to seek more certainty. Little progress had been made between the British government and German emissaries before Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 but the British, now officially at war with Germany, still looked for ways to avoid fighting, at least until their rearmament programme was more advanced.

In the Netherlands, ‘Sigi’ Payne Best was instructed to liaise with Major Stevens and look into a claim that a senior German officer, the aristocratic Prussian General Gustav Anton von Wietersheim, commander of the 14th Panzer Korps and an officer in the category of the ‘old school’, was prepared to meet British Intelligence and provide vital information about the dissident movement within the German army. Von Wietersheim had often been in open disagreement with Hitler over the Führer’s characteristically incautious military strategy and was known to have criticised Hitler’s plans of action first in August 1938, between the Anschluss of Germany and Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when Hitler had hurled a tirade of abuse at him for arguing, and second in August 1939, just prior to the invasion of Poland.

Best had been working outside the normal intelligence community but Stevens was the head of the British Passport Control Office (PCO) in The Hague which was actually well known to be little more than diplomatic cover for the local SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) station.⁴ Both men were led to believe that authority to develop the contact had come from the highest level of British government. A sceptical Best was assured that the German conspiracy was indeed a reality and of great significance and that von Wietersheim was willing to meet him and Stevens to discuss possible terms of an armistice if the Nazi regime could be toppled from within. After protracted negotiations, it was agreed with German intermediaries that Best and Stevens, along with a Dutch agent, Dirk Klop, would meet von Wietershein at the Café Backus in the Dutch border town of Venlo on 9 November 1939.

On the fateful day, Best, with Stevens and Klop as passengers, drove his car through Dutch border control and up to the Café Backus which was only few yards from the German checkpoint. As they were getting out of their car, another car, loaded with armed men, burst through the open German border gate and raced towards them, screeching to a halt before them and preventing their car from moving. As machine-gun-wielding thugs leapt forward, Best and Stevens failed to react quickly but Klop, an experienced field agent, threw open one of the car doors and jumped out, firing three shots into the German vehicle as he ran for cover before he was shot in reply and fell to the ground mortally wounded. Best and Stevens were dragged out of their car at gunpoint, bundled into the German one and whisked away into Germany to spend the next five years in Gestapo detention in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps.

This dramatic and fatal incident was, of itself, innocuous and low key in its earliest evolutionary manifestations before being hijacked by the higher Nazi intelligence agencies for propaganda purposes, but it was the culmination of years of failure by British Intelligence to clean up its shambolic operations in the Netherlands. When a small-time agent provocateur Franz Fischer took advantage of this chaos to create a fiction about dissident German generals and drew British Intelligence into a conspiracy. This exceeded all his expectations and gave him the chance to ingratiate himself with Heydrich. The whole plot soon came to the attention of both SS leader Heinrich Himmler and Hitler when it acquired enhanced importance and was closely monitored for any light it might throw on real internal German army opposition to Nazi rule. It suddenly became crucially significant, however, when most of the Nazi leadership narrowly avoided assassination in a bomb plot that culminated in a devastating explosion in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich hours before the proposed final meeting at Venlo. These hitherto unrelated events now, through an accident of pure happenstance, became intimately connected and facilitated a significant propaganda coup for Heydrich. In order to understand how the Venlo incident played into the overall narrative it is necessary to look at the relationship between the intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands in 1939 and how they had developed since World War I to come together so fatefully in that small Dutch town on the German border on 9 November 1939.

The small-time petty crook and German agent provocateuer Franz Fischer. (Wikimedia Commons)

CHAPTER 1

British and Dutch Intelligence

In May 1940 when the German war machine launched its invasion of France and the Low Countries, Dutch Intelligence, under Lieutenant-General Hendrick A. C. Fabius, destroyed its secret archives to prevent them falling into enemy hands. This was done to protect agents and operatives, especially those who had been, and in many cases still were, involved in espionage or spying against the invaders. German archives, too, suffered similar fates at the end of the war. This somewhat hinders the job of research into the history of British-Dutch intelligence operations up to that point but a number of documents survive and personal memoirs give some insights into how the agencies’ relationship had developed since 1914.

When World War I broke out in August 1914 the Netherlands had chosen to remain neutral. The nation’s more natural affinity was to Germany, with which it had never engaged in hostilities, but forging an alliance with Germany risked its East India colonies suffering a repetition of their fate in the Napoleonic Wars when Britain had temporarily taken them over. They were later returned but being on the losing side again could mean they would be lost for good this time. The British made even less comfortable allies having only recently been at war with the Boers (Dutch colonists) in South Africa. Dutch attitudes towards the British changed, however, after the German invasion of Belgium when the Netherlands faced encirclement and was flooded with Belgian refugees. At this point the Netherlands was an oasis of military inaction at the centre of the conflict but, devoid of foreign soldiers, it presented itself as a highway for every kind of civilian traffic – including inevitably, given its strategic importance, spies and intriguers of all shades and allegiances.

Both the British and Germans saw the Netherlands as a back door in and out of Germany from an espionage viewpoint and also potentially as a route for military invasion. If Winston Churchill had got his way, he would have occupied the country militarily but that would have seriously undermined Britain’s assertions that it was fighting to defend the neutrality of Belgium and to prevent a German invasion of the Netherlands, so from that perspective Churchill’s plan was clearly a non-starter politically. All this made the Netherlands a hot spot of intelligence recruitment and activity and consequently it had become ‘the principal espionage playground for the whole war’,¹ with deserters, escapees, and spies (some of whom were all of these things at the same time) of several nations, including Russia, milling around, probing, plotting, and machinating in a maelstrom of intrigue.

Pre-war intelligence agencies throughout Europe were quickly reorganised in 1914 with the advent of war. Years before that, in 1889, the Germans had created General Stab Abteilung IIIb, which was the intelligence service of their General Staff, but it had never really been taken seriously until the outbreak of war after which, under Major Walter Nicolai, it grew to impressive size with over 1,000 staff. In 1911, the German navy had followed suit and founded its own intelligence agency, Nachrichten-Abteilung im Admiralstab, and during the war the two agencies were particularly active in the Netherlands, spying on Britain. For its part, in an attempt to put intelligence on a professional basis in 1909, Britain had seen the creation of the Secret Service Bureau whose Foreign Section, run by George Mansfield Smith Cumming (‘C’), went on to establish a presence in Brussels and Copenhagen.

When static trench warfare in Flanders drew the combatants into its iron grip, battlefield intelligence was restricted to balloon and aircraft surveillance and so the emphasis of Cumming’s work turned instead to procuring political and economic intelligence about the enemy. This left armies in the field deprived of the best operational agents and so the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) decided to set up its own military intelligence agency. Meanwhile Britain and France had established a joint intelligence venture based in Folkestone and operating across the North Sea in Belgium and northern France with espionage routes funnelled through the Netherlands.

This gave the British no fewer than three intelligence agencies: Army HQ in France, which was part of the BEF, the War Office in London and the SIS. The Folkestone operation was set up as part of SIS. Not surprisingly, no single one of them was willing to share intelligence with either of the other two. The official British network in the Netherlands at that time responsible for counter-intelligence, commercial intelligence, anti-smuggling and military intelligence was run by Commander Richard Bolton Tinsley, a pugnacious 38-year-old former naval officer from Liverpool who had a fearsome reputation as a brawler and was at one time described by Ivone Kirkpatrick, another British agent, as ‘a liar and a first-class intriguer with few scruples’; he had few admirers on either side of the English Channel.² He used a fake business, The Uranium Steamship Company, as a cover while he tracked down and monitored German agents working in the Netherlands. Tinsley was actually lucky to be in the Netherlands at all. In 1911, he had been declared persona non grata for getting on the wrong side of Dutch river police commandant Inspector François van’t Sant over a dispute about Russian Jewish refugees he was ushering through the port en route to Palestine. The British government, however, was pressured by Cumming to have Tinsley, who he had identified as just the sort of man he needed to work for MI6 in the tough and dangerous Dutch seaports, readmitted to the Netherlands.

The German Imperial Consulate General coordinated the Kaiser’s secret agents from a white, castle-like office building, the Witte Huis, not far from Tinsley’s own office. The German naval intelligence service in the Netherlands, known simply as ‘N’, was run by Carl Gneist in Rotterdam and was especially active against Britain with agents such as Paul Vollrath, Martin Rehder and Dr Willy Brandt. As Tinsley also attempted, the Germans recruited Dutch citizens, especially fishermen, and paid them well for their services, which included keeping a look-out for Royal Navy warships in the North Sea. Chris Northcott describes in great detail the activities of German agents in his excellent book MI5 at War and it is worth looking at two German agents he writes about to illustrate the role of German Intelligence in the Netherlands during World War I.³

On 12 May 1915, a Dutchman, Haicke Petrus Marinus Janssen, an ex-merchant seaman who had, at one time, been awarded a life-saving medal from the British Board of Trade, had left Rotterdam for Hull, then London and Southampton, posing as a travelling cigar salesman. In Southampton, he was observed loitering in the vicinity of the docks and was seen to make frequent journeys to the Isle of Wight. While staying in the Crown Hotel from 24 to 28 May he sent five telegrams to the firm Dierks & Co. ostensibly to order cigars but in fact to send coded messages about British shipping. A German agent, Hilmar Dierks, had set up post boxes in the Netherlands to which German agents in Britain would send their reports, but Dutch Intelligence had uncovered the location of the post boxes and all communication through them was monitored. A search of Janssen’s flat uncovered price lists of cigars that were found to be secret codes.

Wilhelm Johannes Roos was another ex-Dutch naval rating who operated, like Janssen, as a cigar salesman but Roos spied in Edinburgh where he, too, was caught sending telegrams to Dierks. It was discovered that Roos, who tried to commit suicide by breaking a window and cutting his wrist, had been detained in a mental health unit prior to the war but he was deemed fit enough to stand trial. At the court martial in Westminster Guild Hall on 16 July, Janssen admitted the espionage charges brought against him and tried to bargain for his life by cooperating with the authorities, but the intelligence he offered up was already known. The relationship between British and Dutch Intelligence made it certain that Janssen would be tried wherever the British wanted him to be tried. Both he and Roos were sentenced to death. On the early morning of 30 July 1915, both men were both executed in the Tower of London by a firing squad of the Scots Guards. Janssen, who rejected his right to be blindfolded, was first to die at 06:00.

The Dutch themselves had only a minuscule intelligence agency but what little they had was run by Lieutenant-General Fabius in Generale Staf sectie III (GSIII),