556 • USTINOV, IONA VON
According to his confession, Uren had been introduced to Spring-
hall in April 1943, and he had a further five meetings with him and
was intending to see him at a further rendezvous. He was cashiered
at a court-martial and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. No-
body at the embassy was implicated, although as Clark noted at the
time, it was probably not a coincidence that a member of the Soviet
military attache ́’s staff, Andre ́Graur, who previously had been impli-
cated in an espionage case in Sweden, left the country four days after
Springhall’s arrest.USTINOV, IONA VON.Known as ‘‘Klop,’’ Iona von Ustinov was a
former press attache ́at the German embassy in London before World
War II. He was an importantMI5source, and when he resigned, he
recruited a replacement,Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who copied docu-
ments he removed from Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop’s of-
fice and supplied them toDick White, who relayed them toSir
Robert Vansittart, the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser.
Klop was married to the artist Nadia Benoist, and his son Peter
Ustinov became an actor. During World War II he was sent to Lisbon
to cultivate anti-Nazis, and in 1946 participated in an MI5 operation
to entrap the atom spy Dr.Allan Nunn Mayby masquerading as
his Soviet contact. WhenPeter Wrightmet Klop at the end of his
clandestine career, he was dismayed to find him abandoned by the
Security Service and very short of money.
–V–VANSITTART, SIR ROBERT.The chief diplomatic adviser to the
foreign secretary between 1938 and 1941, Sir Robert Vansittart was
educated at Eton and had been the permanent undersecretary at the
Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938. Known as ‘‘Van,’’ he was an en-
thusiastic consumer of intelligence and undertook a personal mission
in his Bentley for Neville Chamberlain to the Sudetenland to assess
Czech defenses in 1938. His inspection mistook the lax Czech fron-
tier guards for regular troops and resulted in an adverse report to the
prime minister, who was left with the false impression that the