Sigismund Payne Best

Captain Sigismund Payne Best OBE (14 April 1885 – 21 September 1978) was a British Secret Intelligence Service agent during the First and Second World Wars.

[1][2] Born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and raised at 26 Strawberry Hill Road, Twickenham, Middlesex, Best was the son of Downing College, Cambridge (B.A.

[2] Best served as a captain in the First World War; first as a member of the Intelligence Corps—owing partially to his poor eyesight and his command of French, German and Flemish[7]—and later as the second officer of the GHQ's Wallinger London bureau.

[8] Captain Best was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre.

Although he was married to a Dutch wife, his tall figure, spats and monocle made him, in the eyes of many Dutchmen, the embodiment of a British spy.

On Friday afternoons he regularly played music with his 'neighbors' Prince Hendrik, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and husband of Queen Wilhelmina.

The Hague was an important place in the Z-network, Dansey having established the regional headquarters of his network in the two neutral countries where he had worked during the First World War: Netherlands and Switzerland.

[13] Best, Stevens and Dutch Lieutenant Dirk Klop (pretending, for neutrality's sake, to be a British national) began a series of meetings, which, despite the Britons' misgivings about Fischer[clarification needed] and his putative friends (who were in fact SD agents), culminated in what pretended to be an agreement to form, post-Hitler, a united German-British front against the Soviet Union.

[citation needed] In London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, having seen Hitler violate the Munich agreement by seizing Czechoslovakia, was more than ready to foment a German coup.

The next day, in a daring and violent abduction, Best and Stevens were kidnapped from the Café Backus on the outskirts of Venlo; Klop was fatally wounded in the shootout with German agents and rushed to Berlin.

Fluent in German and having the protection of the Gestapo, he was able to make life in Sachsenhausen as palatable as he could, collecting a good wardrobe of clothes, a library of books and a radio to keep himself informed with the progress of the war.

Bell and Bonhoeffer's efforts to interest the British government in supporting German anti-Nazi forces failed in large part because of Churchill's distaste for Chamberlain's actions and the fear of another Venlo Incident.