Authors: Nick Barratt
When interviewed by SIS on 28 February 1947, Helfand provided a fairly inaccurate version of events, failed to name the man who approached him and could not recognise either photograph. Nevertheless, two months later, a note was placed on Oldham’s file that linked Bessedovsky’s account to Krivitsky’s, and in October Serpell forwarded another report from Oldham’s file to Roger Hollis, the future Head of MI5 after 1956 and at the time involved with Counter-Subversion activities. However, there the matter was left for a further three years, until Henri Pieck surfaced after World War II and agreed to be interviewed by MI5 in the spring of 1950. It is clear that the main area of interest was finding out more information about King, though the Oldham case was mentioned in the same context in a briefing note prepared on 6 April 1950:
It was evident that he had a fair knowledge of the King case which he said he had picked up from gossip. It was agreed that he need not be told about Oldham and that our policy in regard to the information he should be given must be determined by the information which Pieck gives us.
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It is clear that the nature of the inquiry was highly sensitive, and confirmed that deliberate steps had been taken to cover up the Foreign Office leaks in the 1930s.
Moreover, as government policy in the King case had been to keep the whole thing quiet, no gratuitous information should be given to [REDACTED] in this connection.
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The interview with Pieck took place between 12 and 16 April and proved very revealing, as he named several key people that he tried to snare as well as those with whom he had some success:
Before leaving for Geneva, Pieck was instructed to make contact first with Mr O’Donnell of the British consulate and it was intended that through him he should meet other employees of the Foreign Office. He therefore took an apartment above that of Mr O’Donnell and he still remembers trying to provide himself with an excuse for meeting O’Donnell by dropping a pen from his window which he hoped would land somewhere inside O’Donnell’s property. Unfortunately the pen landed in the street.
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Pieck was more successful mingling with British folk at the clubs in Geneva, such as The Bavarian and the International Club where associates such as Alec Russell, interpreter for the League of Nations, and Challoner James, correspondent for the
Daily Mail
, facilitated his introduction to British officials. One of the officials was clearly still well connected in high circles, as his name was redacted from Pieck’s interview. Pieck also provided more detail about Harvey and Oake, confirming that Oake had undertaken some work on his behalf, as well as the indiscretion of Harvey that made the whole operation possible.
It was through Harvey and his daughter Enid that Pieck got to know Raymond Oake and other Foreign Office employees. Pieck remembers with amusement how one day Harvey forgot his keys and allowed him to fetch them from the office. At that time Pieck thought his reliability was being tested so [he did not make] use of this opportunity.
Pieck’s first candidate for recruitment was Raymond Oake [who] lived considerably above his income. Pieck was continually [lending him] money and did not rate him very highly. After leaving Geneva [he visited] Oake in England. He went to stay with
him in Herne Bay and Oake visited him in Holland. Pieck told Oake the same story he told King about the possibility of his earning money through a banker at The Hague in exchange for confidential information from the Foreign Office. Oake, however, did not respond… Pieck met Oake for the last time at his wedding in London. Oake, Pieck admits, was ‘a very bad mistake’.
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However, Pieck was able to provide more information on ‘Hans’, whom the intelligence services had gradually connected to Joe Perelly and Galleni. Given his artistic talents, he sketched him as well.
Description: height, about 6 feet 1 inch; black hair; dark eyes, wore spectacles; childish face; always appeared to be smiling; Soviet national; appeared to come from the Caucasus or Kirghizstan [sic], as he was slightly Asiatic in appearance; had engineering experience; spoke English with an American accent. Hans knew America and England very well and had a good knowledge of English life and customs.
Hans first met Pieck in 1933 in Amsterdam and remained as his controller until early in 1936. He relinquished control of Pieck after JH King.
Hans had a very good knowledge of the British Foreign Office for Pieck considers he was briefed very well while he was running JH King.
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Given the additional information that Pieck was able to provide and finally recalling Krivitsky’s advice from 1940, Oldham’s case file was reviewed once more in the hunt for Hans/Perelly/Galleni. A note in Oldham’s file, made on 26 May 1950 by Ann Glass, records her recollections of a meeting she’d had two days previously with Oldham’s former friend and associate Thomas Kemp, who had somehow managed to not only remain in post at the Foreign Office, despite his role in the Oldham scandal and the purge of the Communications Department in 1939, but indeed rise further through
the ranks. In 1940, George Antrobus painted a glowing picture of Thomas Kemp’s role in organising the work of the King’s Messengers:
The man who has had the charge of these things for many years is an encyclopaedia of unique knowledge… he is in touch with all the travel agencies, railway companies, and steamship lines to every part of the world. His name is Mr Thomas Kemp and he is, I think, the calmest and most self-possessed person I have ever met.
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At the time of Glass’s interview, Kemp been granted a certificate for the Executive Class of the civil service two years previously, having been appointed a Higher Executive Officer on 1 April 1946. Rather undermining Antrobus’s testimony, Kemp was only able to shed a little light on a possible way that Oldham was able to smuggle information out of the Foreign Office, even when he was on site.
It was difficult to sort out the scraps of information which Mr Kemp was able to recall, but in referring to the generally lax state of things existing at that time in regard to King’s Messengers, he said that Oldham had, without authority, made out several courier’s passes.
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This enabled him to despatch material to a chosen destination, but still required someone to take them. Clearly no-one was working with Oldham so he needed an unwitting accomplice. Once again, Kemp put forward a possible candidate:
Mr Kemp also told me that a colleague of Oldham’s in the cipher department was a certain Commander Acland, who had a crippled son who was wounded in the 1914 – 1918 war. This man was anxious to get a job in the Foreign Office but was not successful; Oldham used quite frequently to give him the bag to take to Rome and it was Mr Kemp’s impression that Oldham was
using young Acland as an unconscious courier and it was also Mr Kemp’s impression that Rome was in some way connected with Oldham’s espionage activities.
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When pressed for more detail about Joe Perelly, Kemp’s ‘encyclopaedic’ memory grew somewhat hazy.
Kemp of course remembered the Oldhams very well but he did not at first recall anything about Joe Pirelli [sic]. However, he later said that he did remember such a man having been mentioned by Oldham and Mrs Oldham, but was not sure whether he himself had met him. In view of this he was not, of course, able to give me a description of Pirelli [sic].
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I showed Mr Kemp the drawing made by Pieck of HANS and he looked at it for some time, saying that the face did seem familiar to him.
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Kemp was hiding behind the fact that 17 years had elapsed since the Oldham suicide had been covered up and probably did not want his role in proceedings dragged up again in case they damaged his new seniority. Indeed, given his role in tracking Joe, it was stretching credulity to breaking point to suggest that he was not sure whether he had met him – something picked up by Glass later in her report. It may simply have been embarrassment, to be confronted with the image of a man who had made him look foolish and almost brought his career to an abrupt halt.
It will be seen from 21a of Oldham’s file, extract at lv of Pirelli’s file, that Mr Kemp did in fact meet Joe Pirelli in 1933, but since he does not remember him the only hope of discovering whether he may be identical with Pieck’s HANS is to try and find Mrs Oldham through her sons, the Wellsteds.
While gossiping about Oldham, Mr Kemp said that Mrs Oldham would certainly remember Pirelli and suggested that we
should be able to find her through her sons by her first marriage, Thomas and Raymond Wellsted. Mr Kemp has not heard of her since the beginning of the war, when she went to join her son Raymond who was in the army and stationed in Belfast.
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This line of investigation would instigate the final tragic act in the Oldham saga as attention turned to the whereabouts of his widow in the hope that she might be able to reveal more information about Pirelli/Hans. Records show that Lucy had taken a series of furnished lodgings in west London with her son, James Raymond Wellsted, in the 1930s before indeed joining him in Belfast during the war. They reappeared in Hammersmith in 1945 and 1946 before dropping out of official records. However, within a month of Ann Glass’s note, Lucy had been found – floating in the Thames, her body dragged out of the water at Richmond Pier at 5.55 am on 27 June 1950.
An MI5 agent, WJ Skardon, was hastily despatched to find out more from the coroner’s officer for Richmond, PC William Bridges, who was attached to the nearby Kingston police station. Skardon filed a report on 4 July based on his discussion, which raised almost as many questions as it answered:
Certain difficulties have arisen in this case since the only person who could identify the body, Bohdan Tymieniecki, a Pole and the landlord at 24 Drayton Street [Ealing, where Lucy had been living in furnished apartments] was able to do so only to a limited extent. He said that the clothing was the clothing of Mrs Oldham and the earrings on the body were hers, but he thought that the face was fuller than that of his lodger. The autopsy shows that the body was in the water for about half an hour and there would be no change in such a short time, although it is agreed that the effect of refrigeration does have the effect of producing a somewhat bloated condition.
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At the time of her death, Lucy had been living with James Wellsted, but according to the report he
…
vanished from the same address at the same time, or within a few minutes, of his mother on the morning of 26 June.
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James was eventually apprehended and charged on 10 July with obtaining £3 by fraud, while various other creditors came forward demanding money. He was put on probation for two years, with the chairman of the magistrates stating that his was a ‘tragic case’. At the coroner’s inquest into Lucy’s death, a verdict of suicide was returned with worries about her financial situation given as the main reason for drowning herself in the Thames.
There seems to be a sufficient reason for mental depression in the case of Mrs Oldham, due to the fact that her banking account with the Westminster Bank, Ealing branch, is overdrawn. Correspondence found at her lodgings by the coroner’s officer also shows that Coutts’ Bank, Park Lane branch, have closed Wellsted’s account and asked him to return unused cheques. Further letters indicate that Wellsted is in debt and has uttered a number of worthless cheques locally during recent months.
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Yet there are inconsistencies that do not quite add up. Both mother and son were unaccounted for during a period up to 24 hours and at least from 2.30 pm the previous afternoon (witness statements disagree on the exact time of their last sighting) before Lucy’s body was recovered from the river the following morning. Where were they during this time? Why had Lucy ended up in Rich-mond and decided to end her life by drowning at 5.30 am? It is unlikely that we will ever know the answer. It is tempting to speculate that she was alerted about the reopening of the investigation into her husband’s activities, and that it was primarily focused on her. Given Kemp’s former connection with the Oldham family it is not unreasonable to assume that he let her know what was happening. It may have been this knowledge that drove her to suicide.
With Lucy dead, there seemed little point in pursuing the inquiry further. In any case, far more damaging revelations were to follow with the flight of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow in 1951, holding a press conference on
11 February to announce their defection to the USSR. Five years later, the King affair became public knowledge when Levine published a book about the case in America. The Foreign Office at first denied the story and then, embarrassingly, was forced to admit the leaks once they realised a Member of Parliament was planning to raise a question in the House of Commons. Intriguingly, Thomas Kemp chose this year to retire from the Foreign Office, enjoying a full pension until his death in Sussex in 1978.
One last effort was made to contact Lucy’s older son, Thomas Wellsted, at the height of the Cold War in 1974, part of the Fluency Committee’s attempt to flush out any further Soviet operatives within government after the defection of Philby in 1963. However, Wellsted could provide no further information about Oldham or Perelly, other than a photograph taken in the garden of the Bell Inn at Hurley around 1926. Thereafter, Oldham’s file was left to gather dust.
What the British forces did not know was that the hunt for Bystrolyotov had been in vain. Oldham’s handler had also been caught up in Stalin’s purge and, following his return to Moscow in 1935, witnessed at first-hand the end of the Great Illegals and the dismemberment of the entire espionage machinery. Abram Slutsky died in mysterious circumstances on 17 February 1938; Mally was imprisoned on 7 March 1938 and executed six months later; Bazarov was arrested on 3 July 1938 and Bystrolyotov was rounded up on 18 September. He was sent to the prison camps, and was not released until 1954. Bystrolyotov died in 1975, but not before revealing some of the secrets of his work as a Soviet agent to Emil Draitser in an interview in 1973, just before the final entries were made on Oldham’s file. Bystrolyotov had outwitted the British to the last.