Georg Hansen Faced Espionage Charges in London Before 1927 Deportation
By Harlan Pryce ·
Caught in a 1927 London dragnet for Soviet espionage, Hansen was deported to the USSR before later rising to lead Nazi military counterintelligence.
Georg Hansen and Wilfred Macartney were stripped of their stability in London when the British security apparatus closed in on them in January 1927. The cost of their alignment with Moscow was a forced departure and a permanent slot in the files of the Security Service.
January 1927
The Security Service does not forget, and it does not discard. In the archive of the National Archives (UK), under the catalogue reference KV 2/655, lies a brief but damning summary of a life lived in the shadows. The file's catalogue entry records that Georg Hansen, a German national, "was arrested in London in January 1927 and charged, together with Wilfred MACARTNEY, with an offence relating to espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union."
There is no expansive narrative provided in the catalogue description, only the cold outcome of the encounter: Hansen was deported to the USSR. He was placed within a specific, perilous category of surveillance: "The Security Service: Personal (PF Series) Files. SOVIET INTELLIGENCE AGENTS AND SUSPECTED AGENTS." To be entered into the PF series is to be formally tagged as a person of interest, a target whose loyalty is not only questioned but quantified as a threat to the state.
For Macartney and Hansen, the 1927 arrest was not merely a legal hurdle but a rupture. In the eyes of British intelligence, they were conduits for a foreign power, operatives moving through the fog of the interwar years. The catalogue entry does not specify what secrets they sought or what they managed to send back to Moscow, only that the offense was sufficient to trigger an immediate expulsion from British soil.
Resistance and the Abwehr
What follows the deportation is where the archival record meets a startling contradiction. Public records indicate that Georg Alexander Hansen did not remain a footnote in a British police ledger. He rose through the ranks of the German military, eventually becoming an Oberst (Colonel) in the Generalstab. More remarkably, he entered the inner sanctum of German intelligence.
According to the public record, Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, appointed Colonel Hansen as his successor to lead military counterintelligence before Canaris was removed from office in February 1944. This creates a dizzying paradox: a man once arrested in London for spying for the Soviet Union was later entrusted by the Third Reich to hunt for exactly those kinds of agents.
But the shadow of the 1920s may have lingered. The public record also places Hansen among the participants in the German Resistance against the Nazis. Whether his early contact with Soviet intelligence informed his later opposition to Hitler, or whether his climb through the Generalstab was a mask for a more complex set of loyalties, remains a matter of speculation. The transition from a deported spy to a Colonel of the Generalstab is a leap that usually requires either a complete erasure of the past or a very powerful protector.
Portland and the Admiralty
When viewed alongside other entries in the KV series, Hansen's 1927 arrest appears as an early beat in a long, rhythmic campaign of Soviet penetration. The Security Service's PF series captures a spectrum of betrayal that spans decades. For instance, the catalogue entry for Harry Frederick Houghton (KV 2/4381, KV 2/4384, KV 2/4478, KV 2/4385) records a clerk in the Admiralty Underwater Detection Establishment at Portland who conspired with another employee, Ethel Gee, to pass classified material to the Soviet Union. Houghton's activity lasted from 1951 until his arrest and conviction in 1961.
Then there is Arthur Alexandrovitch Adams (KV 2/3788), described in the catalogue as "one of the most important Soviet espionage agents known to have operated in North America." Adams entered the United States illegally under business cover in 1938, shifting his focus in the 1940s to penetrate the American atomic bomb project.
Hansen's 1927 case is distinct from the technical thefts of the Cold War era, but it belongs to the same lineage. Whether it was a clerk in Portland or a German national in London, the objective was the same: the steady erosion of Western security through the placement of assets in strategic positions. Hansen, however, achieved a level of infiltration that few others did—not by staying in the shadows, but by ascending to the very top of the military apparatus he once worked against.
The record for KV 2/655 terminates with his deportation to the USSR, leaving the bridge between a Soviet agent in London and a Colonel in the Generalstab unbuilt.