The Spy and the Devil by Tim Willasey-Wilsey

Set in the 1930s, The Spy and the Devil focuses on the years when MI6 was a nascent service and British foreign policy was dominated by trying to understand Hitler and Nazism as well as the spectre of appeasement. 

The author, Tim Willasey-Wilsey—a former British diplomat, Visiting Professor of War Studies at King’s College London and Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)—brings decades of geopolitical insights and an academic’s eye for detail to bear on this narrative. He spent three years researching this book. 

By accessing a trove of newly unearthed documents, family correspondence, and declassified materials—combined with extensive interviews and trips to archives across Europe— Willasey-Wilsey reconstructs a figure whose life intertwined with some of the most dramatic episodes of the 1930s. That the principal figure in the book was adviser to Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, used to meet Hitler and was also a British spy is simply incredible. It is this duality that is the substance of the book.

Willasey-Wilsey has woven three narratives into one. The first is about the central character in the book, Baron Wilhelm “Bill” de Ropp, a Baltic aristocrat turned MI6 agent who infiltrated the highest echelons of the Nazi elite. The second is about British foreign policy in the inter-war years. The third is about the evolution/transition of MI6 in the same period from an ad hoc network of gentleman amateurs to a more professional, strategic organistation. De Ropp’s story is central to that evolution. It is Willasey-Wilsey’s great achievement that he manages to weave these different strands into one compelling book.

Bill de Ropp is a Baltic-German from Lithuania, who studied at Birmingham University and became a British citizen in 1914. His career was varied. He began by joining the British army’s Air Intelligence team (propaganda & interrogations) under press baron Lord Northcliffe due to his linguistic flair. He rose to become the most effective British secret agent (Agent 821) of the 1930s, reportedly holding “at least a dozen meetings” with Hitler before the war to gain advanced knowledge of Nazi thinking. At least 70% of the British Foreign Office’s political intelligence on Germany in the years leading up to WWII was provided by him. 

His cover? A representative of the Bristol Aeroplane Company in Berlin. His real mission? To be Britain’s eyes and ears in Hitler’s inner circle.

The key to de Ropp’s success was his relationship with Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue. Rosenberg was close enough to Hitler to offer valuable insights into the regime’s thinking. Through Rosenberg he was able to meet Hitler and assumed the role as an interpreter of British opinion. Resultantly, de Ropp became one of the very few Westerners with an inside track on Hitler’s court.

Bill de Ropp’s cultivations of Alfred Rosenberg and of Adolf Hitler are a master-class in espionage, demonstrating that Bill possessed innate skills as a spy. One of the tactics that he employed was to encourage Rosenberg in his belief that Great Britain was a natural ally of Nazi Germany. Bill de Ropp allowed him to believe in that and “kept it alive in Rosenberg’s consciousness for many years to come”.

Likewise, Hitler was convinced enough to tell de Ropp in their second meeting: “If you could keep me informed of what, in your opinion, the English really think, you will not only render me a service, but it would be to the advantage of your country.” Both Hitler and Rosenberg felt they were using de Ropp to get useful inputs on England!

Willasey-Wilsey is sensitive to a facet of spying that is often overlooked. This is the emotional and psychological cost of espionage. Like spies the world over, de Ropp lived a double life for nearly a decade, constantly under threat of exposure by the Gestapo, Abwehr, or SD. The Gestapo was the German secret police, the Abwehr was military intelligence, and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) was the SS’s own security service. What saved him was his meticulous tradecraft and discretion but the toll it took on his psyche and personal life was immense.

After the outbreak of war in 1939, de Ropp fled Germany for Switzerland, where he continued to report to MI6, though his information was increasingly sidelined. The intelligence community’s opinion on him became divided. While some in MI6 remained supporters, others viewed him with deep suspicion. By 1944, de Ropp’s reports were dismissed by some as little more than Nazi propaganda—an unfair judgment born more of bureaucratic rivalries than of evidence.

At the end of the War, MI-6 terminated de Ropp’s services with a final gratuity of £500. Thereafter, de Ropp taught German in a college in Hereford. He died in 1973. 

The book is also a nuanced account of Britain’s often uncertain policy toward Nazi Germany. The intelligence provided by de Ropp—particularly on German rearmament and air power—could have been vital in shaping a more assertive British response in the late 1930s. That it was often ignored underscores a recurring theme: intelligence is only as good as the policymakers who receive it.

The opportunity for MI6 came in 1938 when Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, requested the agency to draft a strategic paper “What should we do?” to deal with Hitler. This led MI-6’s chief, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, to consult de Ropp. It was this spy who, through his insights, helped “MI6’s evolution from being a service providing low-level tactical information to the strategic organisation” it became for the British government. 

The author explains that to modern readers the idea of a country asking its intelligence service for an opinion hardly seems a revolutionary idea, but at the time of de Ropp, it truly was. The Foreign Office of the 1930s viewed the Secret Service with distaste and disdain. The distaste came from the prevalent view of the ungentlemanly nature of spying and, even worse, having to accept intelligence officers as members of embassies abroad where they might land an ambassador in trouble by being caught suborning an official or even subverting the host nation. The disdain arose from those same secret servants being seen as rather uncouth, not good cocktail party material.

The MI6 counter-viewpoint was, the author continues, that Foreign Office diplomats tended to live in an ethereal bubble of polite society detached from the real Hobbesian world of crime, conflict and general brutishness. The Foreign Office boys were seen as thinkers whereas MI6 boys liked to think of themselves as doers.

There was also some intellectual arrogance involved. In 1930 only one member of MI6 – Frederick Winterbotham, Head of Air Intelligence – was a graduate. Many of the MI6 reports which landed on Foreign Office desks were very tactical; a snippet here about a communist arriving at Harwich from Holland, or a paragraph there about a new model of artillery being developed by a Czech munitions firm.

The Foreign Office was able to tolerate tactical MI6 reports about weapons or extremists, but it regarded strategic foreign policy thinking and analysis as exclusively its own domain.

The underlying theme that MI6 was able to convey in “What Should We Do?”, the author explains, was that Britain had got itself into a desperate fix and needed to use all its skill and cunning to get itself out of a mess of its own making. The key message was that Britain should avoid a war until it had re-armed. Indeed, this was exactly the policy adopted by Neville Chamberlain after Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia had destroyed the Munich agreement.

The author has some interesting insights on MI6 and its evolution. For example, he underlines how MI6’s own limitations hindered the effective use of de Ropp’s intelligence. There was no formal case officer structure in place so coordination was difficult, and internal politics eventually led to de Ropp’s marginalization. Likewise, since the agency was only used to low-level tactical reporting and not yet accustomed to strategic nation-state espionage, it had not yet developed the skills to run a case of the complexity that Bill de Ropp conducted.

He also laments how Whitehall ultimately sidelined de Ropp’s intelligence; how the British establishment flinched from confronting Hitler’s revanchism. He writes “There is nothing more dispiriting than producing good intelligence for it to be ignored by government because it is inconvenient and would require significant and burdensome changes in policy.” 

De Ropp’s signal contribution was to change the perception of MI6. Even in 1930, the MI-6 was not convinced that Germany was their prime concern. In 1934, the agency “saw Germany as a potential ally in the more important battle against Bolshevik Russia”.  Here the master spy became a catalyst to convince his bosses in London otherwise.

Another point that Willasey-Wilsey makes is that from time to time MI6 officers stationed abroad recruited good agents but almost always from people they had met in the course of their duties as PCOs (Passport Control Officers). The concept of targeting, as a professional exercise, was more than a decade-and-a-half in the future. It would become standard during the long years of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. 

Critically, there was no system of approving what de Ropp would tell Rosenberg and others on his return from each of his visits to London. The dilemma was that a secret agent like de Ropp could not convey British government policy without exposing himself; but neither could he espouse ideas that were at odds with the national interest.

Stylistically, The Spy and the Devil strikes a fine balance between academic rigor and narrative momentum. His endnotes and bibliography are meticulous, and the inclusion of archival photographs, letters, and maps enhances the book’s authenticity and accessibility.

The true poignancy of Bill de Ropp’s life is that despite providing such high quality intelligence, his contributions were often discounted or misunderstood – victim both to the nascent, sometimes chaotic state of MI6 and to policymakers’ ambivalence toward the Nazi threat during the interwar years.

Willasey-Wilsey provides a powerful tribute to the spy when he writes that  Bill de Ropp helped put MI6 on the map. Without him “What Should We Do?” could not have been written and MI6 might have remained a source of low-level tactical information rather than the global geopolitical service that it is today.

If there is one lesson that the book offers it is the consequences of what happens when states refuse to see the world as it is, preferring to obfuscate inconvenient facts. 

As a writer, it is difficult to believe that this is Willasey-Wilsey’s first book simply because he combines the precision of a scholar with the pace of a seasoned storyteller. His research is impeccable and exhaustive. The result is a deeply rewarding work.

Tilak Devasher is an author, a former Member of the NSAB and a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat.