It is the summer of 1939.

Ernest Tennant, a very well-to-do man, travels to Germany.

Again, one more time.

This time, I believe, with the blessing of his government,

where heretofore, he and Graham Christie and Conwell Evans have been

providing information to Van Citrus and amateurs, and their information, while extremely accurate,

is regarded condescendingly sometimes, I think, when I've read this. Charles, the Tenant Mission

is the strangest episode of a series of strange episodes.

What was the ambition? What was the thinking why Ernest Tenet agreed to it and what the

hopes were for the mission? He, Tenant conceives of this entirely on his own, but he gets in touch with Ten Downing Street

to Horace Wilson, who then liaises with Chamberlain, and offers his services to go incognito,

plausibly deniably, as it were, to visit Ribbentrop, his old friend with whom he'd set up the Anglo-German

fellowship. They'd seen very little each other for about 18 months, but he thinks that he may be

able to, that he believes that Hitler and Ribbentrop was still anxious for friendship with

this country, which even Horace Wilson, the doyen of appeasement at the point still found

improbable. But the Downing Street has sponsored a handful of these sorts of missions,

and so they agree to do it as long as their connection is kept secret.

The mission takes him to a castle in Austria, which von

Ribbentrop, who is a compulsive false witness, a.k.a. liar, tells him that he's recently acquired

it, I guess the presumption is, with his earnings or his wife's wealth,

but in fact it's a confiscated castle, Schloss Fussel.

And in this conversation, Ernest, a tenant learns enough to understand that Ribbon,

...