The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [182]
On the military side, in February 1938 Sinclair himself cabled Monty Chidson at The Hague suggesting that the recent purge of the German armed forces ‘makes available officers who will be antagonistic to the Nazi Party and might succumb to tempting offers from us . . . Funds are available. ’ Similar wires were sent to Prague, Paris and Brussels. Chidson was asked if Krüger (TR/16) might be asked to find a disaffected officer, for which the Service would be prepared to pay ‘a very handsome bonus’. In addition, ‘a considerable sum would be available for payment to the officer himself, such sum being dependent on the position he held and the consequent value of his information’. Krüger had been reporting on the Luftschutzbund (the air defence organisation, in which he was employed), and also naval shipbuilding (as he had done for so many years). In June 1937 he supplied secretly taken photographs of destroyers being fitted out at the Germania Werft in Kiel. Towards the end of the year the Economic Section VI in Head Office noted reports and maps, useful ‘from a bomb target point of view’.
By the late 1930s, Krüger, now over sixty, was beginning to run out of steam and thinking of retiring. There were increasing comments about the inaccuracy of his reports and security in Germany, too, was tightening. He had a scare in March 1938 when the Gestapo visited him after he had been spotted near an airfield. Krüger (who by this stage was known as ‘016’) continued to work on naval matters and coast defences, meeting his case-officer in Rotterdam every month up to 18 July 1939, when the next meeting was scheduled for 20 August. ‘He failed to arrive,’ reported The Hague on 24 August, but a postcard purporting to be from him had been received proposing a meeting in Germany. This aroused suspicions since it was the first time he had ever ‘suggested that someone should visit him in 12-land [Germany]’. The Head Office minuting on the report was uniformly pessimistic. ‘This is one of the agents [Jack] Hooper said the Germans knew of,’ wrote one officer. ‘Looks as though he has been liquidated.’ ‘He may well have written the post-card under the direction of the Gestapo,’ observed Howard. ‘Looks like a trap,’ added Vivian. So it was (and, wisely, no one was sent to meet him in Germany), though the Service did not discover until after the war that Krüger had been betrayed by a member of The Hague station staff, Folkert van Koutrik, who had been recruited by the Abwehr in October 1938.16 A proforma for the Finance Section on 7 November 1939 laconically records poor Krüger’s fate. By the entry ‘To whom payment discontinued’ was typed ‘016’; and against ‘Remarks’: ‘Agent presumed “dead”’.
The patchy state of secret intelligence in the period immediately before the war was revealed in late June 1938 when Rex Howard asked each of the Head Office sections to report on whether or not their German requirements were being met. Menzies, head of the Military Section IV, replied that he was ‘satisfied with the efforts although the results are disappointing in that we have no military source of any standing and have to rely on numerous small fry’. Winterbotham remarked: ‘Results are not very good but I am hopeful.’ Rather more encouragingly, Captain Russell (for whom Krüger was an important source) reported that penetration