Pieter Brijnen van Houten

Pieter Brijnen van Houten (born August 24, 1907 , † November 24, 1991 ) was a Dutch intelligence officer ( GS III , MI5 ).

Pieter Brijnen van Houten (1963)

Life and activity

Van Houten had worked for the Dutch intelligence service GS III and for the British intelligence service MI5 - for this under the code name "Cat" - since the 1930s. During these years he worked for the newspaper The Telegraph in Utrecht for camouflage purposes .

Due to his position in the secret service, van Houten was targeted by the National Socialist police officers in 1940 at the latest, who classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or considered important, which is why, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, they should be located and arrested with special priority by the SS special commands following the occupation forces. It is not clear whether he actually fled to Great Britain.

After the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, van Houten fled to Great Britain. To camouflage his escape, the British secret service faked his death by issuing an official death certificate for him and burying a coffin that supposedly contained his body in the Oud Eik en Duinen cemetery in The Hague.

Fonts

• Fire watch in de coulissen. Een kwart eeuw secret services , 1988.

literature

• JG Kikkert: De zeven levens van The Cat; een halve eeuw contraspionage in oorlogs - en vredestijd 2003.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on van Houten on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .