Britain's Worst Intelligence Disaster of W. W. II

The Second World War was only a little over 70 days old when, on November 9, 1939, at the Dutch border town of Venlo, a few feet from the German frontier, two unsuspecting British agents of the SIS (MI6), Sigismund "Sigi" Payne Best and Major Richard Henry Stevens were kidnapped at gunpoint by a special team of Nazi SS operatives of Reinhard Heydrich’s Sicherhitsdienst (SD) and quickly sped to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Killed in the melee was Dutch intelligence agent, Dirk Klop. This incident, which often gets lost amidst the greater actions of the World War II, was arguably the greatest intelligence loss by the British during the conflict and was the result of the failure by British Intelligence to properly coordinate its disorganized operations in the Netherlands. This event is the main focus of Norman Ridley’s The Venlo Sting. Ridley has written extensively in his previous books about the interrelationship between British Intelligence and significant events of World War II.

Ridley further writes how the so-called Venlo incident was a major propaganda coup for both SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his key deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, and allowed them to link these agents to the attempted assassination of Adolph Hitler by Georg Elser which had taken place the day before at the Burgerbraukeller in Munich and will provide part of the justification that Hitler will use to justify the invasion of the Netherlands at the beginning of the Blitzkrieg of May 10, 1940.

He further outlines how unsubstantiated but insistent rumors of high-ranking German generals plotting to overthrow Adolph Hitler and his dictatorship from within gained credence with then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and set the stage for a chain of events which will end with the catastrophe at Venlo.

Using a series of primary and secondary sources including the papers of Payne Best housed in the Imperial War Museum as well as copies of the War Cabinet Minutes from September 1939 and the memoirs of various parties, Ridley shows how the SIS in the Netherlands, with support from Chamberlain, further investigated the extent of this internal German opposition and were thereby duped by a small town petty crook working for the SD, Franz Fischer, to set up a meeting with a dissident German general. In fact this was a trap engineered by Heydrich through his deputy, Walter Schellenberg and executed by their “dirty tricks” operative, Alfred Naujocks.

Both Best and Stevens would spend the entire war in captivity being shunted around to and from various concentration camps. Partly as a result of their interrogations and the subsequent concerns of the British government, their intelligence operations in the Low Countries were dismantled at a very precarious time in the war.

One of the major surprises for the reader might be the shattering of the myth of the strength and infallibility of British Intelligence. Instead, Ridley, using his extensive knowledge of British wartime intelligence, shows how its early activities during the war were less than stellar and often poorly organized. This will change as the war progresses and British Intelligence activities will be strengthened in many ways not the least of which will be the work done at Bletchley Park, the breaking of German codes, and the capture of German Enigma Machines.

While those readers interested in espionage operations during the Second World War will find much interesting information in Ridley’s account, his narrative suffers somewhat through various tangents in his exploration of the intricacies of intelligence gathering in the Netherlands, the details of opposition to the Nazi regime and the conspiracy theories of the Hitler assassination attempt which detract from the drama of the main event of this book which is worthy of a television drama in itself. The author would have been better served to have provided more focus on the events leading to Venlo as well as the effect this had on the incoming Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who thereafter would be highly disdainful of any information regarding German opposition and possibly led to his formation of a competing intelligence entity known as the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

However, there is much of interest for the reader in this book including the often over-looked description of both agent’s time in captivity as well as their correspondence with each other in the post-war era in which they disagreed on the nature of their captivity, including the results of their repeated interrogations.

This book is the first publication to focus on the Venlo incident since Payne Best’s personal memoir, The Venlo Incident, was published in 2009 and the first by a historian since Leo Kessler’s Betrayal at Venlo was published in 1991 and is well worth a read by students of the Second World War. The book is published by Casemate Publishers and consists of 224 pages with 25 black and white photographs of the book’s main characters and places of interest.

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Note: The Venlo Sting is also available in e-editions.

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