Newly opened papers contain startling evidence that in the postwar scramble to secure information about Russian communists, British Intelligence “turned” Horst Kopkow, faked his death and used him to fight the Cold War.

Evidence emerged in the 1980s that Britain had become a refuge for suspected war criminals, but few would have believed that the Government had gone even further and put a man like Kopkow on its books. Details of how MI6 snatched Kopkow, 35, from war crimes investigators, inventing his fake death from “bronchopneumonia”, are revealed in private papers made public only now. The papers belonged to Vera Atkins, a senior officer of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain ’s secret wartime body. After the war she mounted a one-woman investigation into the fate of her agents behind enemy lines.

The Atkins documents have been corroborated by newly declassified secret papers in the British and American National Archives. MI6 declined to comment on the Kopkow case. However, intelligence sources indicated yesterday that the service itself was taken aback by the evidence. To date, Britain has denied that it engaged in the dark arts used by the Americans, whose employment of Nazis to catch Communists has been well-documented. British intelligence sources pointed out that Kopkow was not in the league of “the butcher of Lyons”, a reference to Klaus Barbie, the most notorious war criminal employed by the Americans.

The Kopkow case is uniquely chilling because the MI6 men who spared him were colleagues and “handlers” of his victims. Among those whose torture and death he sanctioned were men and women of the SOE and MI6 agents.

While Kopkow’s information may have been considered valuable, it was in fact useless. The head of MI6’s Russian desk when Kopkow was captured was Kim Philby, exposed as a Soviet spy more than 15 years later.

Precisely how long Kopkow was employed by British Intelligence remains murky. German records state that he adopted the name Cordes and died in Gelsenkirchen in 1996.

SPY AGENCY

• Set up in 1940 in London, the SOE grew to number 10,000 men and 3,000 women. Senior staff went to public school and Oxbridge, but agents included a former chef, an electrician and a car dealer’s daughter
• Life expectancy of a wireless operator in occupied France was six weeks
• Of 39 women agents sent to France, 13 were killed
• The Secret Intelligence Service chief called the SOE amateur, dangerous and bogus

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