officer in Best’s Lincoln Zephyr car to a rendezvous at the Café Backus, situated between the Dutch and German border customs barriers at Venlo. Within minutes of their arrival, they were seized by armed men. When the Dutchman drew a pistol and fired at one assailant, he was himself shot dead. Best, Stevens and their local driver were then hustled 150 yards to the frontier: their kidnappers were Nazi counter-intelligence officers of the SD, led by the branch’s later boss, Walter Schellenberg, who was narrowly missed by the Dutch officer’s bullet. The British spies were fortunate enough to keep their lives, but spent most of the rest of the war in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In contradiction of myths about heroic silence under interrogation, Stevens and Best told their abductors what they knew about MI6, which was plenty: its Continental operations were chiefly conducted from their own Hague station.
‘The Venlo incident’, as it became known in Whitehall, derived from an approach some weeks earlier by supposedly anti-Nazi German generals eager to negotiate with Britain. MI6 became much excited by the prospect of brokering a deal, though the Foreign Office was prudently sceptical. Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote in his diary on 23 October: ‘I think they [the German “plotters”] are Hitler agents.’ The war cabinet was informed a week later, and Winston Churchill, then still First Lord of the Admiralty, expressed violent objections to any parley. But the government authorised MI6 to continue discussions, provided – as Cadogan strictly instructed – nothing was put in writing to the supposed dissidents. The British ignored the danger that their interlocutors would play not merely a diplomatic game with them, but a rougher one. They should have been alert to such an outcome, because the Nazis had previous form as cross-border kidnappers: in April 1934 they had lured to the German frontier a Czech intelligence officer, twenty-nine-year-old Captain Jan Kirinovic, then rushed him across. A Gestapo witness gave evidence at Kirinovic’s subsequent trial that he had been arrested on German soil, and Kirinovic was sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour. Although in the following March the Czech officer was exchanged for two German spies, he died insane a few years later as a result of the drugs administered to him by the Gestapo, notably scopolamine.
In November 1939, it was symptomatic of MI6’s institutional weakness that its Hague station employed Folkert van Koutrik, an Abwehr informant. The supposed representative of the disaffected German generals, ‘Major Schaemmel’, was in truth the RSHA’s Schellenberg, whom the British officers obligingly supplied with a wireless transmitter. Either Hitler or Himmler personally authorised the kidnapping, which the British at first sought to keep secret. When an official asked Cadogan what was to be said about ‘the brawl in Holland’, the subject of fevered rumour and speculation, the permanent under-secretary ordered the issue of a ‘D’ Notice, forbidding mention of it in the British press. Amazingly, for a fortnight after Venlo the German ‘conspirators’ sustained a dialogue with MI6, until on 22 November Himmler lost interest and the Germans shut down the exchange after sending a last derisive message to Broadway. The Nazis then publicly announced that Best and Stevens had been engaged in an assassination plot against Hitler. Meanwhile van Koutrik’s betrayal went so far undetected that he secured employment with MI5 in London, and it was very fortunate that he broke off contact with the Abwehr – perhaps for lack of means of communication – because it was within his later knowledge to have betrayed elements of the Double Cross system to them.
Inside Whitehall, MI6 sought to talk down Venlo, arguing that the Germans had behaved crassly by grabbing the two officers instead of sustaining a double-cross game with them. It is hard to overstate the episode’s significance, however, for the future course of the secret war. British espionage activities on the Continent, such as they were, suffered a devastating blow: the Germans were able to relieve Best of a list of his station’s contacts, which he had taken in his pocket to the rendezvous. The reputation of the secret service within the British government, not high before the débâcle, afterwards sagged low indeed. Guy Liddell of MI5 speculated in his diary that Best, a preposterous figure who affected a monocle, might have been a double agent – ‘the real nigger in the woodpile. [He] had apparently been in fairly low water and it was noticeable that after he became associated with [Dr Franz] Fischer [a Nazi double agent in Holland] he seemed to be very well in funds.’ There is no reason to think Liddell’s suspicions justified. Mere bungling was responsible for the fiasco, though Walter Schellenberg asserted later that Best was willing to be ‘turned’. Meanwhile, the Dutch were embarrassed by the revelation that one of their own intelligence officers had been complicit in a British plot, which strengthened the Nazis’ propaganda hand by compromising Holland’s proclaimed neutrality.
A further consequence of Venlo was that the British became morbidly suspicious of any approach – and there were several, later in the war – by Germans professing to represent an ‘anti-Hitler Resistance’. In one sense their caution was prudent, because most of the aristocrats and army officers who became engaged in plots against the Nazis cherished absurd fantasies about the Germany they might preserve through a negotiation with the Western Allies. Former Leipzig mayor Karl Gördeler, for instance, was a nationalist with views on German territorial rights in Europe that were not far short of Hitler’s. Even had the Führer perished, there would have been nothing plausible for Germany’s enemies to discuss with his domestic foes. At the very least, however, British paranoia about suffering a repeat of the Venlo humiliation permanently excluded MI6 from some useful sources, which the Russians and later the Americans were left to exploit. Moreover, for the rest of the war Broadway’s chiefs maintained an exaggerated respect for their German adversaries, derived from the memory of having been fooled by them in November 1939.
Through the icy winter months of the ‘Phoney War’, the GC&CS at Bletchley struggled with the intractable Enigma problem, while Broadway’s spies produced little or no useful information about the enemy and his intentions. Kenneth Strong of War Office Intelligence wrote: ‘We had a continuous stream of callers from the Services with an extraordinary variety of queries and requests. What were the most profitable targets for air attacks in this or that area, and what effect would these attacks have on the German Army? Was our information about these targets adequate and accurate? How was the German Army reacting to our propaganda campaigns? I found some quite fantastic optimism regarding the effects from propaganda. The dropping of leaflets was considered almost a major military victory.’
Some MI6 officers went to elaborate lengths to conceal their lack of agent networks. Reg Jones cited the example of Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, who was responsible for France, and fed to Jones’s branch a succession of tasty titbits on the German Ju-88 bomber, allegedly collected by spies. First there was information about its engines; then its electrics; and somewhat later its armament. Jones teased Dunderdale that he must have secured a copy of the aircraft’s operating handbook, then fed extracts to Broadway, to create an impression of multiple sources. The hapless officer admitted that Jones was right, but begged him to keep his mouth shut. He could keep his bosses much more interested, he said, by drip-feeding the data. This was not the only occasion when Dunderdale – like officers of all intelligence services – sought to ‘sex up’ the means by which his material had been acquired. He also produced details of German troop movements supposedly secured by agent networks, which in reality derived from French intercepts.
Much could be learned from an enemy’s wireless transmissions, even without breaking his codes, through ‘traffic analysis’ – the study of signal origins, volume and callsigns to pinpoint units, ships, squadrons. Useful information was also gleaned by the ‘Y Service’, eavesdropping on voice transmissions, and by breaking simple enemy codes used for passing low-grade messages. The French forward cryptographical unit was based at ‘Station Bruno’, in the Château de Vignobles located at Gretz-Armainvilliers, fifteen miles east of Paris. Bruno received an important reinforcement following the fall of Poland. Guy Liddell of MI5 recorded on 10 October 1939 that seventeen Polish cryptanalysts were seeking asylum in Britain. Bletchley Park shrugged dismissively that it had no use for them, even though its chief Alastair Denniston had met some of the same men in Warsaw a few months earlier, and knew that their claims to have penetrated Russian and German ciphers ‘can to some extent be maintained’.
Denniston suggested
