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of Houbigant’s Quelque Fleurs perfume that he kept in his desk; Klop’s memory for fine detail demonstrating a skill valuable to storytellers and spies alike. That he should strike up such fellow-feeling in an official of the Cheka was fortunate. He had discovered on arrival in St Petersburg that his family had been living on the ‘Fifth Line’ of Vassilievsky Island, the once fashionable suburb now overrun by Bolshevik squatters. To his distress, he soon discovered that his father had died of dysentery a year earlier and his mother and sisterhad moved to Pskov, about four to six hours rail journey south west of St Petersburg near the border with Estonia. He needed a Cheka 24-hour travel permit to visit them and the family reunion was necessarily brief though long enough for Klop to promise to make the arrangements to get the two women out of the country. Typically, his abiding memory years later was of the pretty, freckled peasant girls, their hair tied back by a kerchief, whom he saw on the train. The kerchief became a small fetish that he liked to try out on later girlfriends. 41
Despite the great risks involved, Klop decided to leave Russia briefly and make contact with Maltzan from the Estonian capital of Reval. There is a record in German Foreign Office archives, dated 13 July, simply stating that the Württemberg citizen Ustinoff was returning to Russia and requesting that Gustav Hilger should be informed by radio. It added that he would not be travelling on a German passport. If Klop filed a fuller report at that stage it has not survived in the records. But it is significant that he was already working with Gustav Hilger, Maltzan’s other secret emissary to the Soviet Union. Hilger was born in Moscow in 1886 and brought up there. He studied engineering in Germany but returned to Moscow in 1910 to work for his father-in-law’s crane company, travelling all over Russia. He was interned during the First World War and on his release worked for the main commission for aid to German prisoners of war in Russia assisting their evacuation with only limited and reluctant help from the Soviet authorities. He was briefly expelled when relations between the Russia and Germany were broken off but returned in June 1920, and was witness to the starvation, misery, and desperation, of the population. 42
On his return to St Petersburg, Klop had found lodgings with Nikolai Nikolaevitch Schreiber. He was an inventor who had lived in the next street when Klop’s parents had an apartment in St Petersburg and had been courting Klop’s sister, Tabitha. He was a suspiciously fortuitous landlord for a man who was gathering intelligence for Germany. Schreiber had been a Rear Admiralof the old Imperial Russian Navy, a specialist in torpedoes and mines. During the First World War he had been in charge of planning the minefields in the Baltic and Black Sea intended to keep the German fleet at bay. He had worked in close contact with the British Admiralty, including the development of a British invention, the paravane, a mine clearance device.
Klop’s quest for travel permits for his mother and sister took him from the Cheka to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here again he managed to charm his way into their good books. According to his son, Peter, his best contact there was Ivan Maisky, which would be yet another extraordinarily lucky break. Maisky had been in London prior to the First World War, at the same time as Klop. His circle of friends included the radical writers George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Beatrice Webb. From 1932 to 1943 he was Soviet ambassador in London, a man of enormous influence and importance in the Allied relationship against Germany. There is no doubt the two knew each other at that time, but it is less clear how they could have met in 1920. Maisky was then a local government official in Samara, near the Kazakhstan border. It is not impossible, with his literary interests, that he visited Gorky’s House of