David Tremain - The Beautiful Spy: The Life and Crimes of Vera Eriksen

To my wife, Evelyn

First published 2019

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

David Tremain, 2019

The right of David Tremain to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9107 0

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

All files in the National Archives are Crown Copyright and are reproduced with permission under the terms of the Open Government Licence. Quotes from Hansard contain Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.

Every attempt has been made to seek and obtain permission for copyright material used in this book. In certain cases this has not been possible. However, if we have inadvertently used copyright material without permission/acknowledgements we apologise and we will make the necessary correction at the first opportunity.

The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material in this book:

Arcade Publishing: Reprinted from Zigzag: The Incredible Wartime Exploits of Double Agent Eddie Chapman by Nicholas Booth, by permission of Arcade Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.; Ben Macintyre, 2007, Agent Zigzag, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc; Century, for extracts from Deadly Illusions by John Costello & Oleg Tsarev; Dover Publications for extracts from The Dictionary of Espionage. Spyspeak into English by Joseph Goulden; Henry Hemming for permission to quote emails between him and the author; The History Press, for an extract from The Spy Beside the Sea by Adrian Searle; Giles Milton, for an extract from Russian Roulette; Taylor & Francis, for permission to quote from KGB Lexicon by Vasiliy Mitrokhin; Nigel West, for extracts from Mortal Crimes (Enigma Books), The Crown Jewels (Harper Collins), and Spycraft Secrets: An Espionage A-Z (The History Press), as well as emails between him and the author; Wiley-Blackwell, for permission to quote from Anthony Masters The Man Who Was M Anthony Masters, 1984: All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. In addition, to Giselle Jakobs, for information on Vera Eriksen, Peter Miebies for his Dutch translation and Katherine Ritter Wallace for the illustrations of Nikolaus Ritter.

Unless otherwise specified in the Notes, all quotes and extracts have been taken from files in the National Archives at Kew (TNA). When quoting from these files some minor formatting changes have occasionally been made to ensure the text flows better, and accents added to French and German words where they were missed out in the original text because the typewriters of the time lacked those keys; otherwise, no changes have been made to the original punctuation or spelling. In these files many MI5 documents use the term German S.S. In this context it is generally meant as a generic name for the German Secret Service rather than Schutzstaffel, the Nazi Partys intelligence service. Likewise, the terms MI6 and SIS are used interchangeably to mean the overseas branch of the British Intelligence Service. The symbol @ is used throughout to indicate the word alias, as in Theodor MALY @ Paul HARDT.