Twentieth-Century Spies

by Neil Root

Genres: Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Political idealism? Financial reward? The thrill of the chase? What drives a person to risk their life by entering the deadly world of high-level espionage? 

A unique investigation of the most important cases of the twentieth century, this exploration of the world’s most glamorous and dangerous job – including information newly released under the Freedom of Information Act – will keep you enthralled until the last page. Find out the dark secrets of:

• Sidney Reilly, considered by many to be the greatest spy of the century and an inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond

• The ‘Atom Bomb’ spy Klaus Fuchs, who gave the Russians atomic capability

• George Blake, who betrayed over forty British agents, and is still alive in Moscow

• The Cambridge Spies, the double agents who did more damage to British intelligence in the twentieth century than any other group

Neil Root’s insightful book focuses on the personalities of these enigmatic figures, discusses their motivations and influences, and asks whether they were heroes, traitors or just scapegoats.

Release date: October 1, 2011

Publisher: Summersdale

Print pages: 320

Sample

This book is a survey of ten of the most interesting spy cases of the twentieth century. It does not claim to be an exhaustive account of the century’s espionage, and the focus is specifically on those who spied for another country, one to which they were not attached or had no allegiance to by birth, citizenship or employment. The ten cases were chosen to illustrate the full range of motivations for spying, such as financial gain, political ideology, dissatisfaction with society or misplaced loyalty to friends or countries, as well as the circumstances that may coerce someone into committing espionage.

Spying stretches back to ancient civilisations, with various examples from ancient Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire. One of the first major spy networks in more recent times was that organised by Sir Francis Walsingham in Elizabethan England. In the twentieth century, which saw two world wars, the Cold War and numerous other conflicts, the gathering of intelligence against enemies became more sophisticated and ruthless as the political stakes were raised and the technology of espionage developed more rapidly. There was also a massive growth of peacetime spying: knowing what your potential enemy was doing in peacetime became as important as defeating that enemy in a war. By the time that spies were being arrested within the CIA and FBI in the 1990s, the world of espionage was almost unrecognisable from that ninety years prior. The ten spy cases presented here, ranging from Mata Hari at the beginning of the century to Aldrich Ames at the end, illustrate the development of espionage and showcase the most interesting personalities involved.

The celebrity exotic dancer Mata Hari was caught up in the paranoia of World War One, when the fear of spies was suddenly pervasive. Other spies from the first few decades of the century were more defined by political ideology and its impact on political events, mainly the rise of communism and the spread of fascism. Some, such as the Cambridge Five, Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were greatly influenced by political idealism, while others were more focused on their own gain, loyal to themselves and their own intellect more than anything else. As the divide between the West and the East widened, John Vassall experienced the Soviets’ newly developed blackmailing techniques, and those involved in the Profumo Affair were manipulated and played largely due to their own carelessness. For Aldrich Ames, political alliances and loyalty mattered little; money was all.

It should be noted that this book includes the first in-depth analysis of the memoirs of Anthony Blunt, a member of the Cambridge Five ring of spies and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. His memoirs, publicly released in the summer of 2009, give Blunt’s considered view of his espionage, treachery and public disgrace. As a former spy and an intellectual, Blunt is adept at not divulging incriminating details, but in the emotion of old age, in the midst of his own ruin, he gives us more than he perhaps realises, with rare honesty and emotion.

As late as 1999, a tiny elderly woman named Melita Norwood, aged 89, was exposed as a former Soviet spy, with some saying that her work for the Russians was as important as that of Kim Philby or Klaus Fuchs. This is debatable, but the frail, bespectacled lady filmed outside her cottage for the television news was far from the popular image of a spy. Her spying had been mainly done in the 1940s and contributed to the Soviet atomic effort. She was not prosecuted, as she was so old and it was so long after the event, with the Soviet Union then extinct for almost a decade. But it is also possible that any prosecution would have embarrassed the British secret services because of security lapses they allowed to happen decades before.

The importance of public opinion should not be underestimated. The public’s view of its own security is paramount in the minds of elected government officials in democratic countries, although in totalitarian regimes security information is largely kept hidden from the public. It is certainly the case that the anti-German paranoia in France and Britain led to the extreme way in which Mata Hari was dealt with, for example. Likewise, the Cambridge Five changed the way that treachery was viewed in Britain and its secret services forever, and the anti-communist feeling in the United States from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s affected greatly the attitudes of the FBI, CIA and American public opinion in general.

Throughout the twentieth century, the public’s interest in espionage has been reflected in fiction and films about spies, which have been popular ever since such books as Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands and William Le Queux’s novels were written before and during World War One, playing up to the anti-German feeling. Graham Greene’s spy novels, which were informed by Greene’s own experiences as an intelligence agent, would also later have a huge impact, as would the work of John le Carré (David Cornwell, also an intelligence agent) and Len Deighton. But perhaps the greatest influence on the way that espionage grew in the public consciousness in the West were the novels of Ian Fleming, who worked in Naval Intelligence during World War Two, and the resulting James Bond film franchise. More recently, Tom Clancy’s novels have created a blueprint in the minds of the public about the CIA.

This book contains the facts about true spy cases which are often more incredible, thrilling and complex than fiction. The motivations of those who spied or were accused of spying for an enemy power in the twentieth century are often as interesting as the events themselves and key to understanding how a person may become a traitor. Childhood experiences, political and social idealism, hatred of the establishment and a keen need for adventure and thrills are among the main factors in turning to espionage for a foreign power. The promise of financial reward, entrapment by blackmail or simply propitious circumstances may also play a part in certain cases. The reader must make his or her own final judgements when it comes to motivations, with the known facts serving as tools to that end. The survey offered here is an attempt to understand the reasons why these people spied (or if they spied, in one or two cases) against the social and political world in which they lived, as well as hopefully being an interesting read too.

In the early morning of 15 October 1917, a forty-one-year-old woman was woken up in the Saint-Lazare Prison in Paris by Father Arbaux and two ‘sisters of charity’. Captain Pierre Bouchardon was there too – the tall, nervous military prosecutor who had arrested the woman. Also present was her lawyer, Edouard Clunet. The woman had been sleeping, and the guards at the prison were to remark later that it was a peaceful sleep. After the sisters had roused her, the woman was told that her time had come.

‘May I write two letters?’ she asked. Captain Bouchardon agreed, and she was given writing materials. She wrote the letters very quickly as she sat on the edge of the bed in her cell. The letters were entrusted to her lawyer. The woman then began to get dressed. She was tall and sat down to put on her thin black stockings. Next she put her black velvet cloak over the silk kimono she had been wearing over her nightgown. She then strapped on a pair of high-heeled shoes. Her jet-black hair was braided, and she placed a black felt hat on her head. Finally she put on a pair of black kid gloves. Turning to the people in her cell, she spoke calmly. ‘I am ready,’ she said.

She was led out to a waiting automobile. It was just after 5 a.m., the air was chilly and fresh, and the woman would have been glad to have her heavy cloak. Paris was silent and unaware as the car made its way towards the army barracks at Vincennes. The barracks was part of an old fort that the Germans had attacked in 1870 during an earlier war with no direct connection with the Great War then raging, which had brought about the unique circumstances for the woman’s imprisonment.

None of the Parisian public knew she was in the car, but many knew her name. She was now plump and in early middle age, but her face was very pretty and still possessed the quality that had transfixed so many men. Her name was Margaretha Zelle, but if anyone had been awake in Paris on that dawn, they would have known her as Mata Hari.

•

With an almost mythological figure such as Mata Hari, it is important to separate fact from fiction and assess the faction that lies somewhere in the middle: the legend versus reality. Some have suggested that she was the original femme fatale, a woman who was dangerous to know. This is possible, as she met her end in France, where the term ‘femme fatale’ originated, and her life and death certainly possessed the required notoriety. She is known as a spy and as an exotic dancer. She was no doubt the latter, and the confidante of many high-placed men, but was she a spy? And if she was a spy, what was her motivation? Or was there a conspiracy against her? The answers surely lie in her life, but after so long, is it possible to know the answer definitively? This is an especially difficult question, as Mata Hari herself liked to create her own legend during her lifetime. She laid the foundations of her iconic status solidly.

Undoubtedly she is the most infamous female spy in history. The subject of countless Hollywood films, she was perhaps most famously played by Greta Garbo in Mata Hari (1931). Characters obviously based on her have also appeared frequently on television, and she has been the focus of scores of newspaper articles and books. The fact is that the legend of Mata Hari has glamour, intrigue and the air of conspiracy. This all sells. She has also been a feminist icon to some women – the strong-willed woman wronged by the male dominated society in which she lived. Or was she a strong and emancipated woman who could more than hold her own against the men around her? Was she really a cold and ruthless spy who sent people to their deaths through the information that she passed or a victim of circumstance? The truth might be either, or somewhere in the middle. But there is one absolute certainty – any study of twentieth-century spies has to begin with Mata Hari.

•

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, on 7 August 1876, the second of four children of Adam Zelle and Antje van der Meulen. Adam Zelle was a milliner by trade, and ran a successful hat shop in Leeuwarden, the capital city of the northern Dutch province of Friesland. He adored his only daughter. She would say later that her father thought of her as ‘an orchid among buttercups’. Margaretha was a confident child, and from a young age she enjoyed wearing colourful and outlandish clothes. She also loved to tell her friends at school fantastic tales about herself, often stories that elevated her birthright. She said, ‘I was born of illustrious ancestors’ and ‘my cradle stood in Carminghastate’, referring to a large mansion in Leeuwarden where local nobility lived. This early myth-making would develop further in Margaretha, and it would colour her personality as an adult. She was something of an exhibitionist with a love of the dramatic, and her dress, behaviour and grand claims about her past would create her legend but also work against her later. At school she was well liked, and she showed a strong flair for languages.

Adam Zelle made successful investments in the burgeoning oil industry, and so the family lived comfortably during Margaretha’s early years. She attended exclusive private schools and was no doubt a well-educated child with social aspirations. The role of young women of Margaretha’s class at that time was a very conventional one. She was expected to get a good education, to be able to conduct herself in upwardly mobile social circles and attract and marry a man with a steady income and good prospects; to give him children and know how to organise and run a large household. However, this usual route was thwarted for Margaretha when her father was declared bankrupt in 1889, when she was thirteen years old. Adam Zelle had made some risky speculations on the stock market and lost everything. The Zelles were forced to sell off all their furniture and move to a poor area of the city – quite a comedown from the affluent one in which they had lived until then. Adam went to Amsterdam to try to start again (or so he claimed) and left Antje, Margaretha and her three brothers behind.

Antje did not fare well bringing up the children alone with no money, and she succumbed to depression and then illness. In 1891 she died suddenly, when Margaretha was just fifteen years old. Her father returned to Leeuwarden for the funeral, but he did not take in his children again. They were separated and went to live with various relatives. Margaretha went to live with her godfather Heer Visser in the town of Sneek, south-west of Leeuwarden – but soon after, at his suggestion, went to the town of Leiden (Leyde) to train to be a kindergarten teacher. The headmaster of the training school was Heer Wybrandus Haanstra, and the teachers were taught to discipline the children strongly. Margaretha’s character was not well suited to the job, as she was not a natural disciplinarian.

Margaretha was not to proceed on this career path anyway. The headmaster became enamoured of her and began to make advances. It seems that she returned his attentions in a small way, and the ‘romance’ caused a scandal, forcing Margaretha to leave the school. How aggressively Heer Wybrandus Haanstra had made a play for her and the extent to which she encouraged him is impossible to say, but in a small Netherlands town in the late nineteenth century any whiff of an affair outside marriage was exceptionally controversial.

It is important to note here how attractive Margaretha already was to men. Basically, she stood out. She was 5 ft 5 in tall at a time when the majority of women were far shorter. She also had black hair, dark eyes and a slightly olive complexion, a rarity among the generally light-haired, blue-eyed and fairer-skinned people of the Netherlands. Some who knew her as a child thought that she might have had some Jewish or Javanese blood – Java was then part of the Dutch East Indies. Margaretha was developing into a very sensual woman, a quality that would define her in the eyes of men and in general. At that time, however, this made her life even more difficult. Her godfather refused to accept her back into his home because of the scandal, and she was forced to go and live with her uncle, Heer Taconis, in The Hague. There she helped the domestic household, but one wonders if this would have been fulfilling for a young woman approaching eighteen of Margaretha’s confident personality. This confidence was no doubt strengthened by the attention given to her by men.

Her life was to change after she saw an advertisement in a newspaper, the first of many twists of fate or opportunities she was to seize throughout her life. The pattern was already forming. Her childhood experiences had forged her into a wilful and determined young woman who was learning to use her charms to get what she wanted. The fact that she had had a pampered beginning that had instilled in her a need for social prestige and the expectation of a comfortable future was fundamental to the development of her aspirations and therefore actions. The double blow that her father had lost everything and her mother had died when she was so young had forced her to become fiercely independent, even if in that age a woman needed a man to operate in respectable society. Coupled with her natural need to be admired by those around her and her capacity to invent and reinvent herself (this would be proven in coming years), she was set already on the path that would make her a legend after her death. Of course, her life would ultimately end in tragedy, and along the way there would be many intrigues, the high life and hard times to come.

The advertisement that young Margaretha, hungry for a new direction, saw in the personals column of a newspaper was to change the course of her life: ‘Officer on home leave from Dutch East Indies would like to meet girl of pleasant character – object matrimony.’ It was not placed by the suitor himself, but by his friend. The suitor was Rudolph MacLeod, and he was no doubt surprised by his friend’s action without his consent, but when Margaretha wrote to him he decided to answer her. MacLeod was Dutch but of Scottish descent, an army officer who had received a medal. At thirty-eight, he was twenty years Margaretha’s senior, and he had health problems that had brought him back to the Netherlands temporarily. MacLeod’s heavy drinking would also make his health worse and was an ominous sign of what was to come.

Margaretha met MacLeod and they fell in love. His attraction to Margaretha was obvious; to her, he was a distinguished man in uniform and perhaps a passport out of her current restrictive world. Most importantly though, he was probably a replacement father figure for her own father, to whom she had been very close. Margaretha would grow into a very independent woman who was something of an opportunist and risk-taker, but she was also young and vulnerable with no money of her own. When MacLeod proposed to her, Margaretha instantly accepted.

Margaretha had told her prospective husband that both of her parents were dead as she was not sure if he would find her now poor and ageing father impressive. This was an early sign of Margaretha’s ruthlessness in getting what she wanted, but it should be remembered that Adam Zelle had effectively abandoned his children. There was a problem, however: a law which stated that a female could marry at the age of sixteen but not without the consent of her parents, and not until she was thirty years old without consent. If her parents had both indeed been dead there would have been no problem, but with her father still alive, she had to get his consent. Margaretha could not wait another twelve years. She confessed to MacLeod that she had deceived him, and he forgave her. Her father then gave them his consent, and they were married on 11 July 1895, just three months after their engagement. The local gossip was that the marriage had been forced by pregnancy, but this was not the case. Their first child, named Norman John, was born on 30 January 1897.

The early signs were that the marriage was not to be a happy one. MacLeod was a heavy drinker and a womaniser, and he took to hitting Margaretha when he was in his alcoholic stupor. Domestic violence at this time was not uncommon, with many husbands acting in ways that would be unacceptable today. MacLeod’s behaviour was largely caused by an obsessive jealousy which made him paranoid about his wife’s loyalty; this was not helped by the fact that many men found her very attractive. Then the news came that MacLeod was going to be transferred to Java. Margaretha welcomed the news. It was her big chance to make a different life, and to fulfil her ambitious social aspirations. Java was exotic, and the young Margaretha had already developed a love and need for this. Java was to shape her as a person and bring about the greatest invention of her life: herself. Arriving in the city of Abawara with baby Norman and her husband, Margaretha was captivated by this mystical place. But MacLeod soon reverted to his old ways, and took a native concubine. There is also some evidence to suggest that MacLeod raped Margaretha more than once on Java. His jealousy had also not abated. Margaretha wrote: ‘My husband won’t get me any dresses because he’s afraid that I will be too beautiful. It’s intolerable. Meanwhile the young lieutenants pursue me and are in love with me. It is difficult for me to behave in a way which will give my husband no cause for reproaches.’

MacLeod became more and more hostile, refusing to allow Margaretha to learn the Malay language spoken on Java, probably for fear she would integrate too well (however, Margaretha secretly learned the language, using her great aptitude for linguistics). He was also abusive to their servants, and it cannot h. . .