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By Root 2867 0

double-agent operation run by the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD: security service). Although General Wiedersheim actually existed, he never turned up to any of the five meetings Stevens and Payne Best had with supposed emissaries. But the Germans tantalisingly increased the pressure in early November. After a meeting with a ‘Hauptmann Schaemmel’ (actually the SD officer Walter Schellenberg, who was running the operation), Stevens told London on 7 November that a ‘coup d’état will be definitely attempted’ whatever the British government’s attitude might be. The same evening he telephoned London to say that ‘to-morrow, the big man himself is going to meet us’. But the next day (phoning at midnight), although they had had another ‘satisfactory meeting’, due to a German military conference which Wiedersheim apparently could not avoid ‘big man did not come, but sent most cordial message, and probably coming tomorrow’. Following this meeting Stevens proposed flying to London to report in person and hoped to brief a senior Foreign Office official to carry on the negotiations.

The scene of the Venlo incident as depicted in the Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf, 30 December 1939.

So it was that on 9 November 1939 - a grey, overcast day - Stevens, Best and Klop (himself masquerading as the British ‘Captain Copper’), along with Best’s driver Jan Lemmens, headed for Venlo on the Dutch- German frontier. The rendezvous was at the Café Backus, situated beyond the Dutch border post and about 150 yards short of the German one. In a script prepared for a radio broadcast after the war, Stevens described a peaceful scene on the day: ‘No one was in sight except a German customs officer who was strolling towards the Dutch customs house and a little girl who was playing ball with a big dog in the middle of the road.’ ‘Schaemmel’, standing on the café veranda, waved a greeting. The man in charge of the German snatch squad, captured and interrogated by MI5 late in the war, told his side of the story: ‘As soon as Schellenberg recognized the approaching car of the two British agents he gave the arranged signal by taking off his hat.’ Firing machine guns in the air, the squad rushed forward and captured Stevens, Best and Lemmens. Klop opened fire, and was himself fatally wounded.

Beyond the wider fact that Stevens and Best had been completely taken in by the Germans, their tradecraft that day was deplorable. Stevens was carrying some coding material, and Best had a list of agents’ names and addresses with him. They travelled to Venlo in Best’s own distinctive American Lincoln Zephyr car. Perhaps because there had been two previous meetings at the same venue, no one thought to reconnoitre the area ahead of time on 9 November, and there was no contingency plan in case things went badly wrong. Stevens’s and Best’s own attempts at security, keeping the dealings with ‘Schaemmel’ and the others completely to themselves at The Hague station, meant that there was no opportunity for any of Stevens’s colleagues to assess the German emissaries or the operation as a whole. Stevens’s head agent, moreover, had himself taken on an assistant, Folkert van Koutrik (code-named ‘Wallbach’), in the summer of 1939, who was shortly thereafter turned by the German Abwehr, and proved to be a very valuable source indeed, so much so that by the autumn of 1939 the Germans had a pretty clear picture of the whole SIS operation in Holland, a fact which clearly informed their subsequent interrogation of Stevens and Best.

The Venlo disaster came at a bad time for the Service. The changeover at the top and the early wartime pressure to produce results, combined with enthusiastic initiative on the ground (not always a bad thing), meant that the operation was pressed forward with perhaps more despatch than should have been the case. The fact that Best was Dansey’s man, moreover, cannot have helped such ambitions as Dansey may have had for Sinclair’s job. Stevens and Best, however, were not acting independently and, albeit based on their own judgment of the case, proceeded only after