The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [303]
In early December 1943 luck took a turn with a walk-in. A ‘strongly anti-Nazi’ Austrian woman, separated from her Swedish husband, came to the British legation and asked to speak to ‘someone who spoke German’. Fielded by an SIS officer, she ‘did not disclose the nature of her business until she had been safely conducted . . . out of the reach of S.O.E., YN [the naval attaché], etc.’. The woman then declared that her best friend, also Austrian, worked as a maid for Krämer and had chanced upon some important-looking documents which she had copied. These appeared to be drafts of telegrams about air intelligence from Britain and included a ‘request to Josefine [sic] for information’. This first contact duly led to a meeting with the friend and to the recruitment of both women. Throughout 1944 the maid supplied more message texts and other papers from Krämer’s desk, waste-paper basket and coat pockets. Moreover, after coolly borrowing and copying the key to his desk drawer which he always kept locked (by taking its impression in a dish of butter), she was able to abstract and copy by hand no fewer than eight current and old passports, which showed his travel movements since 1938. These included a short visit to England in the month before the outbreak of war, which naturally sounded alarm bells in London.
After the end of the war, when SIS were able to interrogate Krämer himself, and assemble reports from both German and Swedish sources, it appeared that the energetic and creative Krämer had been misleading both the British and his own Abwehr superiors. His reports from ‘very reliable sources’ were mostly reworked second-hand material acquired from intelligence-peddlers in Sweden and elsewhere, though amid this was information derived from genuine Swedish service attaché reports originating in London. Although MI5 had effectively rumbled Krämer before the end of 1943, there were residual worries about him up to the early summer of 1944, especially in the tense few weeks before Operation ‘Overlord’ (the invasion of France by Allied forces), when it was feared that even the slightest security lapse could jeopardise the invasion. Learning in May 1944 that Krämer had been ‘laying aside considerable savings every month’, and was suspected of pocketing ‘quite large sums from the expenses allowed for paying agents’, Peter Falk thought that the German might be susceptible to being ‘bought’ by SIS, especially since he had briefly been involved in running a concentration camp and believed that he was on the Allies’ list of war criminals. But Broadway vetoed the proposal. ‘We cannot do business with war criminals to save their necks,’ wrote a Section V officer. ‘There is surely nothing very important that this peculiarly unpleasant rat could give us if he was allowed to leave the sinking ship,’ added Cuthbert Bowlby on 11 June, ‘and the “leakage” is now so much less dangerous than before “Overlord” started.’
During the second half of the war, the Helsinki station-in-exile under Harry Carr continued to operate from Stockholm. In December 1942 Menzies congratulated Carr for ‘considerable progress in work of your station during last six months’. This was ‘particularly commendable