• • •
Back in March 1913, the Baron von König was preparing to defend himself in a fraud trial.16 The allegation was that a game of cards had been rigged. The baron was a habitué of gambling salons across Europe and was thus an ideal witness. Suave, immaculately dressed, with all the confidence of aristocracy in middle age, the baron knew that the court in Imperial Berlin would eat out of his hand. The whole affair was a mistake, in his opinion. The victim of the alleged fraud was a young man, who had, perhaps, taken a little too much drink. The atmosphere of the casino had clouded his judgement; it was only to be expected that he hadn’t stopped betting when he was on a losing streak. In due time, the young man would learn from his experience.
The baron gleamed coolly at the court through his round spectacles:
Judge: So, how is it that you became known to the police in several countries as a swindler?
Baron von König: I explain it in two ways. First, this opinion was put about by the French Government as rumours peddled by the press. I am still a member of all the gaming clubs of Paris. Secondly, I have the firm conviction that the name of von König is that of a swindler who won large sums of money at Davos and Chiavenna. I have become the object of all sorts of blackmail, to the point where it has become untenable. I have even asked to be confronted by the persons concerned, and they immediately said ‘Hold on! this isn’t the same man. The von König who we saw had an aquiline nose!’ …
Judge: The central police of Paris say you are the head of an organised gang living off thefts in luxury trains, deception and rigged games.
Baron von König: It’s completely untrue!
Judge: Furthermore, it is stated that you participated in the theft of a post-bag full of jewellery in September 1908 in Münster.
Baron von König: Clearly, there the police are the victim of a bad joke. I have never been to Münster …
There was a problem with the baron’s testimony. It was, from start to finish, a fabrication. He wasn’t a baron, he wasn’t even called von König and he was guilty as hell:
Judge: How did you come to be called by this name?
Baron von König: I don’t really know.
Judge: So you are using a false name?
Baron von König: All gaming houses keep a roll of their members, and it is sent to all similar clubs in Europe. For me it is disagreeable if the name ‘Rudolf Stallmann’ were to appear.
Judge: Why do you use a title of nobility?
Baron von König: Because these days it gives many advantages: for example, a better prospect of being well received in hotels.
The charming and sophisticated non-baron whose name wasn’t ‘King’ had honed his skills over many years of deception. Born in 1871 to a Berlin jeweller, Rudolf Stallmann had quickly become bored with the pleasant import–export job which he took on leaving school. He’d travelled to South America, picking up languages, false names and money with ease, along with a criminal record for larceny. The biggest danger to his career-plan was being banned from casinos, which were venues where he could befriend the innocent before fleecing them at the tables where they played at rouge et noir. By 1913, he’d managed to get himself arrested in London, which led to his being extradited by the Bow Street Magistrates and sent to trial in Germany, from where newspapers around the globe covered the story:
King of Card Sharpers
Rudolf Stallmann, alias Baron Korff Koenig, known as the king of the card sharpers, who was extradited from London, was sentenced at Berlin to one year’s simple imprisonment for fraud, nine months being deducted from this sentence on account of his imprisonment during the inquiry … Owing to Stallmann’s astute defence and the difficulty in proving card sharping when practised by an expert, it was generally thought that Stallmann would escape altogether.17
The learned judge in Berlin saw past the stiff collar and the ill-gotten suit and silk tie. Rudolf Stallmann, once the King of the Tables, was sent down and sentenced to three years’ ‘loss of honour’. It was time for the Baron von König to get a new name and a new direction to his career.
Needless to say, an experienced card player like the baron had an ace concealed up his sleeve. In 1908, the French police had their eye on him. The cause of suspicion was that Stallmann was passing large sums of money to a man called Wehrpfennig who was almost certainly a German spy. Stallmann soon found himself in the hands of Jules Sébille, head of the French security service. The false baron was surely headed for a long period of imprisonment. Yet, through some switch of the cards which we cannot hope to understand, there was an unexpected twist to the story. Stallmann became a legitimate and surprisingly effective operative for French intelligence work. ‘In the course of the year 1908, I entered into contact with Monsieur Sébille … From this moment I carried out frequent tasks for Monsieur Sébille.’ The king had become an agent of the French intelligence service.18
‘All my staff are blackguards,’ remarked Captain Mansfield Cumming, the head of Britain’s intelligence service, in 1911. Working for Sébille was no defence to a charge of card fraud, but once Stallmann found out how to work his way in the murky world of intelligence, it soon became clear to this particular blackguard that the underworld was tailor-made for him. The former Baron von König was now turned out as the well-dressed Rodolphe Lemoine. He ‘loved life, money, good meals, risqué stories, cigars “rolled on the naked thighs of Havana girls” … Always acting the great lord, with a sweeping gesture and easy money.’19 In the French Security Service, Lemoine could bring his talents of charming people into revealing their secrets, and then blackmailing them, into full bloom. For the French, it was even better. Lemoine didn’t need a salary. Years of gambling fraud meant that he could work on expenses only – although with Lemoine, the baronial habits of top-flight hotels, Havana cigars and the choicest vintage wines made the distinction between salary and expenses a somewhat foggy one.
In his new career, Rodolphe Lemoine had all the paraphernalia of a traditional spy. He was taught the use of secret inks and false letterheads. After a period of coercing officials in post-war Catalonia to work secretly in French interests, his job had settled down. Now he was to find and bring in contacts, to provide fake passports, to lubricate transactions involving foreign code books and secret documents. So the dealings with Wehrpfennig in 1908 (which had brought Lemoine to the attention of French intelligence) was by no means his last dealing with a German traitor. As a native German speaker, he was the perfect agent for bringing Germans into the fold. Lemoine/Stallmann was no longer the Baron von König. He was now a French agent with the cover-name Rex.
• • •
It is the last week of May 1932. A German of the officer type, though not in uniform (neat moustache, military bearing, decently cut hair, sensible suit, ought to have a monocle), walks into the French Embassy in Berlin and asks to speak to the military attaché. Within ten days an operative of French military intelligence – the Deuxième Bureau – writes to Herr Lustig, in a slightly obscure way, offering a business meeting in Paris. The operative is a Monsieur Lemoine, aristocratic and suave. He speaks German like the native he is. He is Rex. Within a short while, Herr Lustig has become Source Traurig and he knows someone who might be useful, a Dr Martin who was something in codes and ciphers during the war.20
This new contact sounds quite promising, but the Deuxième Bureau aren’t particularly impressed. Dr Martin doesn’t appear in their files. Source Traurig is, sadly, rather small fry. After all, the previous year, Rex netted the Deuxième Bureau a very large fish. It was the same story – man walks into Embassy and so forth – but this other man was not so snappily dressed, and his connection was much, much better than some unknown Dr Martin. In June 1931, Hans-Thilo Schmidt had walked into the French Embassy in Berlin. And the connection he offered was with none other than the man who had just been appointed Chief of Staff of the communications intelligence division of the German Army. This officer – Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmidt – had been in
command of a communications intelligence unit during the war, going on to a position on the Imperial General Staff. Colonel Schmidt was the brother of the walk-in, Hans-Thilo Schmidt. Source Asche (or, in the French version, ‘H.E.’) was about as big a fish as you can imagine in the spy business. No wonder Herr Lustig was transmuted into Source Traurig (cover-name ‘Sorrowful’); he didn’t stand a chance in this game.
Rex had handled the recruitment of Hans-Thilo Schmidt and the process had been just the same: a check with Paris, some obscure correspondence, a clandestine meeting. On 1 November 1931, Hans-Thilo Schmidt checked into a hotel in Verviers, a Belgian town not far from the German border. The hotel clerk handed him a note, while concealed in a deep club chair behind a newspaper and a cloud of cigar smoke, a well-heeled gentleman, 60ish, confident, looked on comfortably through his glasses. The gentleman was sizing up the business contact ahead of the meeting. The note invited Schmidt to the gentleman’s suite, number 31 on the first floor, any time after twelve o’clock. By twelve o’clock the gentleman had gone upstairs. The only thing wrong with the gentleman was that he was no gentleman at all. In suite 31, whisky in hand – and with an envelope containing Schmidt’s travel expenses nearby – was Rodolphe Lemoine, alias Rex. Rex’s job was to win the confidence of Herr Schmidt (whose real name was so boringly ‘Smith’ it couldn’t be made up) and to vet Schmidt’s ability to play a cool game.
There was no ideology involved in Hans-Thilo Schmidt’s coming forward for the great play. Perhaps it was because he felt overshadowed by his older brother, perhaps because his Iron Cross had failed to open doors for him after the war, or perhaps because his mother had been a baroness who’d lost her ‘von’ – that so-important badge of German aristocracy – when she married a mere Schmidt. Whatever the reasons, Hans-Thilo felt that he was not doing well enough in the world. Married with two children and with a failed business or two behind him, Hans-Thilo Schmidt needed money. Lots of it.
One reason Schmidt needed the money was his enjoyment of the good things in life, like whisky and cigars. Other financial pressures came from his affairs. Mrs Schmidt had got wise to Hans-Thilo’s habit of seducing the maids and nannies. Each time she fired one, the next one was selected for her lack of physical charms. This stratagem, however, had apparently failed to discourage Hans-Thilo. (Even the children had noticed the stunning ugliness of the girls and their father’s behaviour when mother was out.)21 These affairs cost money. So did the holidays and the nice suits which Hans-Thilo coveted. From the comfort of his armchair, Rex took all this in with one scan of his steel-blue eyes. He now proceeded to bring in Hans-Thilo himself, and in doing so, Rodolphe Lemoine completed his own journey from card sharp and prisoner to one of France’s most valued intelligence agents.
Rex ordered cigars and whisky for Hans-Thilo Schmidt. Perhaps it was nerves, or perhaps it was a premonition about where this path would lead him, but the walk-in downed several whiskies in short order while Rex attempted small talk to put him at ease. Schmidt explained his brother’s new job. Until 1928, Oberst Rudolf Schmidt had been the officer in charge at the Chiffrierstelle: the German Army’s own cipher office. Hans-Thilo was out of a job and his brother, the colonel, had put in a word with his successor at the Chiffrierstelle, who needed an assistant. Thus, Hans-Thilo himself had become privy to the innermost signals secrets of the German armed forces. In other words, the new contact could offer far more than a fraternal relationship with Oberst Rudolf Schmidt, he could offer highly prized intelligence in his own right. And then Hans-Thilo Schmidt began to describe to Rex the most secret secret of all: the German armed forces had converted a commercial ciphering machine called Enigma. Hans-Thilo Schmidt had access to the operating procedures and how the machines were set up. And on him, right now in suite 31, Hans-Thilo Schmidt had a selection of documents which looked as if they proved everything he said.22 The game was on and it was the biggest game yet of Rex’s long career.
3
MIGHTY PENS
On mighty pens uplifted soars the eagle aloft.
Gottfried van Swieten
Libretto for The Creation, Part II
Marian Rejewski was never cut out to be a spy. Nothing could have been further from his life than the skulduggery enjoyed by Rex and the wheeler-dealing by Bertrand. Indeed, it would not be until he was 40 years old that anyone would put Rejewski forward for a course on intelligence and even then that probably did not include modules on trafficking in code books.1 What made Marian Rejewski tick was mathematics and he looked and lived the part. Number seven of seven children, wearing glasses, he was as serious as he appeared. Perhaps a little shy, he was a natural student for the cryptographic course at Poznań – except for the fact that he was already past it. In 1929, when the course was beginning, he was 23, had already completed his Master’s degree with a dissertation called ‘Theory of Double Periodic Functions of the Second and Third Kind and its Applications’ and was hardly a student any more. Marian Rejewski was set to become an academic in Professor Krygowski’s department, not an owlish apology for a spy. First of all, though, it was necessary for the aspiring mathematics professor to go to Göttingen for a two-year course of postgraduate study. Göttingen was the place to go: it was where the masters of twentieth-century mathematics and physics all were (Hilbert, Born, Courant, Heisenberg, Wigner, von Neumann, et al.).
Despite his having been well set on an academic career as a mathematician, Rejewski was diverted into code-breaking. Krygowski himself had been asked to put forward the best candidates for the cryptology course. Rejewski was clearly the best (as well as being bilingual, the legacy of a childhood growing up in German-controlled Wielkopolska). So, regardless of his previous studies, or maybe because the Master’s dissertation had already been done and graded and the course at Göttingen didn’t begin for a few months, Rejewski did the new course. And because he was Marian Rejewski, he came out top, the only student to get a distinction.
Still, there was no career in cryptology, so Rejewski went to Göttingen and his name went on to the reserve list. The reserve list was not where Enigma was going to be cracked. Moreover, you cannot let young chaps straight out of university, however bright they are, on to the biggest cryptological problem of the century without some sort of vetting, and if the young chap in question has gone off to the very country that is the origin of the problem, that’s the end of the matter. So much the worse for Maksymilian Ciężki and his plan to get the best Poznań mathematicians to decrypt the Enigma.
Although Marian Rejewski wasn’t going to serve an apprenticeship in the Biuro Szyfrów, it was nevertheless possible that some others in the same cohort might do. The others were necessarily chaps slightly younger than Rejewski but two of them, still working towards their Master’s degrees, stood out. They were more buzzy and sociable than Rejewski and less committed to the academic life. Henryk Zygalski was a 21-year-old, from near Poznań, and Jerzy Różycki, the same age, came from Wyszków, a town a few miles outside Warsaw. Zygalski liked music; they both liked parties; they both liked girls; and they both liked the mind-bending puzzles of double-transposition ciphers. So, as well as being put on the reserve list in case of hostilities, they were both invited by Maksymilian Ciężki to see if they might care to do a little puzzle-solving in their spare time.
• • •
Rex looked at the documents that Hans-Thilo Schmidt had brought with him to Verviers. They might be the genuine article. Discreetly fingering the envelope with the travel expenses, Rex suggested another meeting. Sunday week, same location. With as many documents like this as you can provide. Your present salary? Five hundred Reichsmarks a month? Well, here’s three times that, to cover your travel for both journeys.
On 8 November 1931, Hans-Thilo Schmidt, now code-named Asche, was back in Verviers. This time he was there to make the acquaintance of a Monsieur Barsac, a gentleman who could supposedly tell a fake code book from a real one. ‘In the salon, smoky from cigars, float the “flon-flons” of a radi
o. Rex introduces his man. Schmidt is standing, glass of whisky in hand. A smile lights up his face … “M. Barsac, you will, I’m sure, be satisfied.”’2 Monsieur Barsac was the cover-name for the man from Section D. As Section D only had one man, that man was Gustave Bertrand.
Agent Asche – Hans-Thilo Schmidt – produced his goods. Bertrand the deal-maker could disguise his identity but not his surprise. From the large cardboard container an astounded Bertrand drew out, one after the other: an organisation chart for the German Army Cipher Office; a code book for coordinating the wavelengths and other technical matters for transmitting Enigma signals by wireless; instructions for a hand cipher, with settings, for use by the German Army General Staff; a Reich War Ministry study on poison gas procured from Schmidt’s unwitting brother; a technical note on the Enigma machine model with plugboard connections; the Gebrauchsanweisung [Instructions for use] for the Enigma machine; the Schlüsselanleitung [Guide to settings] for the set-up of the Enigma machine.
Every one was rubber-stamped GEHEIM – secret.
But the time for admiring this magical bounty was short. Like his namesake Cinderella, Hans-Thilo Schmidt had to catch his train back to Berlin and put the documents back where they belonged before the final strike of the clock. So, while Rex and Schmidt listened to the flon-flons, talked over the price, added more cigar smoke to the air, and sloshed around some more brandy, Bertrand was despatched upstairs, where his colleague Bintz was waiting in the bathroom with a camera. No cigars or brandy for them, in a dark room, where they were to make history in photographic form.
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