The Spy and the Devil: The Untold Story of the MI6 Agent who Penetrated Hitler’s Inner Circle, Tim Willasey-Wilsey, Blink Publishing, £22. 

Britain’s overseas intelligence agency, the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6 (the alternative name it adopted just before the Second World War), does not release its records to the public. Its business is to collect secrets that other governments do not want known, and the identities of those who agree to provide MI6 with that information must be protected permanently. Sometimes their stories emerge later, usually when they themselves reveal them. But researching the lives of those who supplied intelligence to MI6, however long ago, requires persistence, lateral thinking and a good deal of luck. Tim Willasey-Wilsey, in telling the story of one such agent, Bill de Ropp, certainly did the hard yards in terms of research, and was fortunate in finding family members willing to help. Although de Ropp’s existence, and some of his activities were known before, this is the first detailed account. It is a compelling read, admirably succinct and sometimes thrilling.

Baron William de Ropp was one of a family of Baltic aristocrats whose fortunes produced eccentric allegiances and adventurous careers. In Bill de Ropp’s case, that included enlisting in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and later offering his services to MI6, for whom he performed a range of missions for nearly 30 years. In 1924, he was involved in the notorious affair of the Zinoviev Letter, ostensibly sent by the Soviet Comintern to the British Communist Party during the first British Labour government. The letter was leaked to damage Labour’s reputation during the general election campaign, suggesting the party was controlled by the ‘Reds’ in Moscow.

I was particularly interested in these chapters, since the Zinoviev affair inhabited my own professional life for many years. Wilsey’s identification of de Ropp as the mysterious ‘Captain Black’, said to be involved in producing and despatching the forgery from Latvia, solves a longstanding puzzle and is an important contribution to what we know about this mysterious episode. I remain unconvinced that the letter originated in a plot hatched earlier in 1924 within MI6, but the ‘whole truth’ is almost certainly unknowable. Still, every new discovery adds another piece to the jigsaw, and Bill de Ropp is an interesting addition to an already colourful cast of characters.

At first glance, de Ropp’s recruitment as a British agent seems extraordinary, but his story is less singular than it appears. In the early years after the end of the First World War, British politics, civil service and professions contained not a few men whose wartime experiences on the fringes of Russia and in the Baltic States left them rabidly anti-Bolshevik and willing to use their position and talents to counter Soviet influence, sometimes in unorthodox ways. Many of these were part of the inner core of British society, in the 1920s a relatively small group: men who had gone to the same school and university, served together and married each other’s sisters. They were joined by a number of displaced but like-minded foreigners, including de Ropp; many of them were members of the Savile Club, as he was.

Though de Ropp’s own background was exotic, he fitted in: energetic, adaptable, with considerable linguistic skills and useful experience in aviation and engineering. These qualities made him a desirable recruit for MI6, under siege from Treasury cost-cutting yet still expected by the Foreign Office and Service ministries to provide a full range of intelligence. They needed people who were willing to go anywhere and do anything, but also knew how the world worked.

De Ropp was sent to Berlin under journalistic cover, and it is the story of his activities in Germany during the 1930s that make The Spy and the Devil particularly fascinating. De Ropp infiltrated senior Nazi circles even before Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, becoming a close associate of Alfred Rosenberg. He met Hitler at least twice, and, though he had little contact with senior figures like Göring or Goebbels, he made enough connections to confer valuable access to the higher reaches of the Nazi party – even if this occasionally raised doubts in London about his allegiance.

What interested Hitler’s inner circle most was what de Ropp could tell them about British opinion, and whether divisions within the government and the military establishment weakened Britain’s will to oppose German ambitions. Similarly, the British were interested in divisions within the Nazi hierarchy, and the extent of German popular support for National Socialism. De Ropp could provide useful intelligence on both.

Of course, his reports for MI6, however cogent, were only one element in a wide range of information reaching the British government. In addition to diplomatic and military reporting, economic intelligence on Germany was particularly important in the early 1930s, indicating that rampant inflation and high levels of debt were fuelling the growth of political extremism on both left and right in Germany. This was significant, particularly in the light of a report from the British Embassy in August 1931 of a speech by Hitler stating that ‘Democracy is driving our people into one misfortune after another.’

In addition to official reporting, a variety of informal networks fed intelligence to prominent figures like Vansittart and Churchill – even Neville Chamberlain, dismissed wrongly by de Ropp as an ‘elderly ostrich with an umbrella’, had his back channels. Throughout the 1930s, the British government drew on all these sources as it tried to work out what Hitler wanted, what he might do to get it, and whether there was a way to avoid outright conflict, while buying time for rearmament.

Based on his research, Wilsey considers de Ropp the key supplier to MI6 of political and strategic intelligence on Nazi Germany, drawing particular attention to memoranda submitted in the late 1930s on German intentions, containing information he says only de Ropp could have provided. It is difficult, when documentary evidence is sparse, to assess the significance of the intelligence produced by any individual agent, and the claim that de Ropp was ‘certainly one of the most significant [agents] in MI6’s history’ (p. 400) is impossible to prove when the record has so many gaps.

Wilsey himself is properly cautious as to the detail of much of de Ropp’s career, and his verdict in Chapter 27, ‘How important was the Bill de Ropp case?’, is measured. But there is no doubt that the book adds important detail to what we know about the work of the small, cash-strapped MI6 in the interwar period, as its primary focus shifted gradually from the Bolshevik to the Nazi German target during the 1930s. What we learn from Bill de Ropp’s career, and his successful penetration of higher Nazi circles, does not change the story of British policy towards Germany in the approach of war, but it does enrich it. He was a larger than life character, whose background, exemplifying the fluidity and complexity of European geography and inter-state relations between the wars, informed his work for MI6 and thus enhanced the quality of the intelligence fed into the policy machine. That makes his story, and therefore this book, an important one.