WALKER, DAVID• 563paid to ‘‘Bridgeman Taylor,’’ and Von der Goltz was challenged with
this new evidence. Under cross-examination at Scotland Yard by
Basil Thompson,Vernon Kell,andthedirector of naval intelli-
gence, AdmiralReginald Hall, Von der Goltz confessed to having
participated in a campaign of sabotage in Canada and the United
States, orchestrated by von Papen. Von der Goltz was granted an im-
munity from further prosecution in England and deported to
America, where he gave evidence to a grand jury investigating von
Papen’s secretary, von Igel, and another agent, Hans Tauscher. Von
der Goltz’s testimony received wide publicity and formed the basis
of a British government White Paper published in April 1916, as well
as his own book,My Adventures as a German Secret Agent, which
was published in New York in September 1917.–W–WALKER, DAVID.As aDaily Mirrorsports reporter with six years’
experience, David Walker was not an obvious choice as a saboteur,
but in August 1938 he was invited to lunch at the Royal Automobile
Club in Pall Mall, and the first suggestion was put to him that he
might like to undertake some interesting work abroad for the govern-
ment. He had been abroad a few times to help out the paper’s foreign
correspondents and had a limited grasp of German and French. In
preparation for his mission to Switzerland, Walker recalls that he ‘‘re-
readSomerset Maugham’sAshenden.’’ Like Ashenden, Walker’s
cover was that he was a novelist writing a book, but he was warned
that his rendezvous with a potential agent had compromised him in
the eyes of the Swiss authorities, so he quickly moved to Bucharest.
There he was drawn into the fringes of theIron Gatesfiasco and the
ill-fated attempt to sabotage the Ploesti oilfields, forcing him in Octo-
ber 1940 to flee to Athens.
In Greece Walker’s connections with the British government be-
came more overt and, on one occasion, he was sent to Belgrade as a
king’s messengerto deliver dispatches toArchie Lyall. Over the
following months, Walker flitted across the Balkans, from Sofia to
Bucharest, from Belgrade to Tirana. After the Axis invasion of Yugo-
slavia, he joined up with the remainder of the British Legation, which