The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [231]
But the damage from the affair was very great. The Service’s reputation inevitably suffered, and the Germans made tremendous propaganda capital out of it. For the rest of the war the painful Venlo experience coloured British opinions generally (and Menzies’s specifically) about responding to apparent German opposition elements. The capture of Stevens and Best, who spent the rest of the war in a series of prisons and concentration camps, gave the Gestapo a glorious opportunity of interrogating ‘members of the British Intelligence Services in positions of authority’ and obtaining a picture of the organisation’s activity. How much actual information they got from the two SIS officers, and how much from their double agent van Koutrik, remains uncertain. By mid-December 1939, however, the Germans were able to construct detailed and largely accurate charts of both Stevens’s and Best’s agent networks and in the autumn of 1940 their Informationschaft GB provided some fairly accurate information about SIS head office and the Z Organisation, quoting both Stevens and Best. Postwar interrogation of German intelligence officers suggested that, while van Koutrik had provided names and addresses of Stevens’s Hague station agents, ‘they knew nothing of the Best organisation prior to the Venlo incident’. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear from the German interrogation reports on Stevens and Best that both men provided plenty of information about SIS, if only because they believed the Germans already knew a lot.9
The Dutch government were deeply embarrassed by Venlo, and Anglo-Dutch relations suffered accordingly. A complete breakdown in diplomatic relations was saved only by Sir Nevile Bland’s considerable emollient skills, but General van Oorschot had to resign and the Foreign Office instructed SIS forthwith to cease all activities in the country. Rodney Dennys, head of the counter-espionage section, which operated separately from the Stevens-Best networks and had not been compromised, protested strongly and after Menzies had weighed in on his behalf was allowed to continue working, provided he moved his headquarters to Brussels. But when the Germans invaded in May 1940, Dennys, who evidently had not completely relocated to Belgium, spent a day and a half at The Hague burning files and card indexes. During the invasion Major Monty Chidson, the fluent Dutch-speaker who had briefly headed The Hague station in 1937, in one of D Section’s few real successes managed to seize the bulk of Amsterdam’s industrial diamond stocks (essential for machine tools) and, with the help of two Dutchmen, to bring them safely to England.
SIS’s relations remained frosty with the Dutch government-in-exile after the Germans occupied the Netherlands. From the summer of 1940, nevertheless, the Service managed to slip in a few agents. A Dutch naval officer, Lodo van Hamel, for example, was dropped in by air on the night of 28-29 August. Some went in by sea, including Pieter Tazelaar, put ashore at 4.35 a.m. on 23 November at Scheveningen near the seafront casino in full evening dress and smelling of alcohol, wearing a specially designed rubber oversuit to keep him dry while landing. Rather than leaving him ‘somewhere on the dunes’, the aim was for him immediately to be able ‘to mingle with the crowd on the front’. Having landed on the beach, his colleague Erik Hazelhoff sprinkled a few drops of Hennessy XO brandy on him, to strengthen his ‘party-goer’s image’.10 But without reliable contacts inside the Netherlands these agents were all sent in blind, which made the effort especially hazardous. Van Hamel, for example, was soon captured and executed by the Germans. Of fifteen agents sent in over the eighteen months from June 1940, all but four lost their lives, a fate which intensified Dutch ill-feeling towards SIS. The Special