A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  The proposal to execute Westrick as a warning was tempting. But was Westrick important enough to be made a public example? Yes or no, CYNTHIA nevertheless went to Canada, where she was instructed in the skills of the assassin. She was flown to London. There she passed through a modest terrace house at 1 Dorset Square, Marylebone, which in peacetime ran the affairs of an institution famed throughout Europe: the Bertram Mills Circus. With its extensive and unorthodox knowledge of Europe, the Circus now was a reservoir of experts to whom hand-picked Baker Street Irregulars came for information.

  She studied the files on prominent Vichy French collaborators, comparing them with knowledge she had gained in Washington. She reported to BSC that when Westrick caught Stephenson’s attention in the 1930s, he was already employed in reality by Hitler’s favorite intelligence chief, Heydrich.

  She left Dorset Square persuaded that it might be better to keep Westrick under secret observation until France was liberated. Such men would be needed to reconstruct the shameful story of collaboration at the top. The need to clarify that story was officially recognized when the house in Marylebone was identified by a plaque after the war—an exceptional breach of security:

  TO COMMEMORATE

  THE DEEDS OF THE MEN AND WOMEN

  OF THE FREE FRENCH FORCES. . . .

  WHO LEFT FROM THIS HOUSE

  ON SPECIAL MISSIONS

  TO ENEMY-OCCUPIED FRANCE

  AND TO HONOR

  THOSE WHO DID NOT RETURN.

  CYNTHIA might have become one who did not return, had Stephenson not convinced her to devote her ingenious mind to research, instead of risking recognition by pursuing the assassination plan.

  39

  “The satanic forces which were Nazism constructed their own instruments of rule with thoroughness and cunning. Heydrich was the fiendish brain of the Party and the State.” These were words in the case for the prosecution by the State of Israel of Reinhard Heydrich’s director for Jewish Emigration (meaning extermination), Karl Adolf Eichmann.

  Plans for the assassination of this man Heydrich were begun in New York, at the beginning of August 1941. They were carried out when the aftermath of Pearl Harbor was distracting attention from the fate of helpless civilians.

  The intended slaughter of innocents was revealed to BSC in an ULTRA recovery of an order by Reich Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, Hermann Göring. Stripped of its superencipherment, decoded, and dispatched to BSC in New York in that last summer of peace for the United States, it instructed Heydrich “to complete the mission imposed upon you [to] make all the organizational, practical and material preparations for a comprehensive solution of the Jewish question.”

  The specialists called to a conference in Room 3553 knew nothing of the order, or of the Heydrich file in front of Stephenson. They were men and women of varied talents, including Alexander Korda, his brother Zoltan, Louis de Wohl, an Oxford don who specialized in recreating the sights and sounds of Ancient Rome, and assorted eccentrics, including a linguist whose current field of research, West Slavic, might have been guessed from his costume—a long black leather coat and beard.

  Papers and drawings were distributed singly. Each contained separate information. It was the job of Stephenson’s chief administrator, Captain Herbert Rowland, to make sure they did not compare notes. This Canadian officer, BISON, had also to arrange the passage through U.S. Customs of a batch of yellow-fever serum.

  Rowland was asked to remain when the others withdrew.

  “Stephenson sat through the conference, saying little,” Rowland recalled. “The organization had been growing rapidly. The pressures had multiplied and become enormous—but you’d never suspect it. He was always elegantly dressed, clean-shaven, though he never seemed to sleep. His head was half-turning as a new man came through the side-door. He was a professor-type, shaggy gray hair, old country jacket with baggy pockets and corduroy trousers still smeared with what I’d swear was the clay of Bletchley Park. He sat down and reeled off figures. It dawned on me that he was talking of human beings and slave camps.”

  Stephenson asked: “What are the arguments for getting rid of Heydrich now?”

  “It will warn the slave-masters. Give the people hope,” replied the visitor.

  “Hitler will strike back at the very people whose support we need.”

  “The time will come when we’ll have to take the risk,” said the professor with flowing locks. “Fight terror with terror.”

  Stephenson stared through him.

  “We have to become monsters to destroy monsters,” said the visitor.

  Stephenson shook his head. “No—” He seemed to be miles away. Suddenly the eyes snapped. Rowland had the familiar experience of sensing the sudden flow of energy. “Take care of our guest.”

  Rowland nodded. He was skilled in tucking visitors into quiet backwaters. His new charge was “the mumbly kind of English agent, disinclined to move their lips or project their voices. German counterintelligence used deaf-and-dumb lip-readers to watch suspects from a distance. The lip-readers would be driven crazy by these English types. Swallowing their words came naturally to them. But in New York, inarticulate strangers attracted attention. We had to hide them.”

  The mumbly professor was introducing an intelligence technique that became a feature of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch.* It was a fine weapon, properly handled. The technique pulled together all the small details about an absent person until you could make him seem to speak and move before your eyes. Heydrich, its first victim, had been known to Stephenson, of course, since before the war. Later, Bermuda intercepts of the “Joe K” spy letters disclosed that Heydrich was responsible not only for Nazi party internal security, but for party intelligence abroad as well. “He now combines the Gestapo and the SS into a single office,” Stephenson had reported. “He controls all the powers of spying and intelligence, interrogation and execution.”

  Captain Rowland, in trying not to abuse U.S. hospitality, resorted to many stratagems. This is how it happened that shortly after the conference, his brother William, a young doctor at Polyclinic, near Madison Square Garden, found himself walking along a grimy street until he came to a certain store, where he stopped in accordance with instructions and gazed into the darkened window. It was a hot summer’s night in Hell’s Kitchen, and Dr. Rowland had seen too many victims of muggings dumped into his emergency ward to relish this business. A shadow loomed alongside. Had the doctor brought his bag? Well, of course he had, he replied impatiently. Then would he come this way?

  The doctor followed his scruffy guide. As a Canadian resident physician in a New York hospital, the less he knew about cloak-and-dagger the better. He trusted his brother, and did not need to know BSC’s purpose. He looked after the Canadian secretaries when they became sick, wondering sometimes at the way their numbers proliferated. If called to the bedside of a “businessman,” he would ask no questions about the emaciated body or fresh scars or an exotic fever. It did seem faintly ridiculous now to go to an apartment obviously rented for the occasion, at an address he must forget, to meet nine ruffians standing in an unlit room, faces averted while he went down the line giving each a yellow-fever shot. He knew the serum must have been flown down from the Connaught Laboratories in Toronto, because this was the only source at that time. He guessed his “patients” must be leaving for enemy territory. But why yellow-fever protection? Dr. Rowland was not to know that the Nazis often proclaimed “widespread plague” as an excuse for rounding up families for the death camps. The plagues might or might not be real. BSC could take no chances.

  “All agents were put through Canadian military books to give some protection if they were caught,” said Captain Rowland later. “They could claim to be officers entitled to treatment according to international law.”

  A way around the U.S. Neutrality Act was pioneered by New York artist Clayton Knight, who had flown with Stephenson in World War I. In 1940, he had organized a committee to help young Americans get to Can
ada to join the Canadian and British air forces. Another of Knight’s comrades in the first war had been Captain Fiorello La Guardia, who was Mayor of New York City during BSC’s residence there. La Guardia gave BSC protection by suspending the routine inquiries that would have revealed its true purpose—the regular fire and elevator inspections, for instance. La Guardia’s former legal adviser, Ernest Cuneo, was now on loan to President Roosevelt as a liaison officer with BSC. One of Cuneo’s jobs was to get the astrologer Louis de Wohl launched on his new career. The BSC Papers note that “his mission was to shake public confidence in the invincibility of Adolf Hitler and terrorists like Heydrich.”

  At a press conference on his arrival in New York, de Wohl said Hitler’s horoscope showed the planet Neptune in the house of death. Days later, a Cairo newspaper dutifully carried a statement by the prominent soothsayer Sheikh Youssef Afifi: “Four months hence a red planet will appear in the eastern horizon. A dangerous evildoer who had drenched the world in blood will die.” The report was widely syndicated as part of BSC’s scheme. A Nigerian priest conveniently saw a vision: “A group of five men on a rock . . . One short with long hair, one fat like breadfruit, the third monkey-faced and crippled. . . .” The five were recognized by newspaper readers around the world as representing Hitler and his chiefs. The priest predicted the sudden fall from the rock of the tall fair-haired blue-eyed one in jackboots.

  Such stories were echoed by muezzins from their minarets in Malaya, the Chinese in their temples in Hong Kong, and wherever else British propaganda warfare could orchestrate prophecies that would confirm de Wohl’s eminence in his field. In September 1941, the Associated Press carried reports of the annual convention in Cleveland of the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers. They agreed that the Führer’s star was setting. It would have been odd if they said anything else, since the Federation was a BSC creation. Its headliner was the “distinguished Hungarian astro-philosopher Louis de Wohl.” The Cleveland News ran a series of photogtaphs of de Wohl with a banner line: ASTROLOGY HAS TOO MANY QUACKS, HE SAYS.

  Indeed it had. The greatest of them all was now established in a modest Manhattan hotel. Benn Levy, the British playwright, had the job of climbing the fire escape each week to deliver the Hungarian quack’s salary in untraceable greenbacks through a back window, together with any advance information that de Wohl could drop into his now widely read column. The only stars de Wohl ever consulted were in BSC.

  While de Wohl, actually a captain in the British Army, prepared for one of his more devastating prophecies, Station M, near Toronto, was forging necessary documents and Camp X was reproducing conditions in which Heydrich was said to live. But in September 1941, his wife, Lina, and their three children turned Castle Hradcany in Prague into home when Hitler named him Reich Protector of Bohemia-Moravia. Here the doomed man held boozy parties and reminded his minions of Hitler’s tribute: “You have all the makings of a Führer of the Third Reich.”

  Hitler wrote to the Reich Protector: “I have accepted your plan for destroying the Czech nation. Basically it will cover three points: the Germanization of as great a proportion of the Czechs as possible; the deportation or extermination of those Czechs who cannot be absorbed and of the intelligentsia hostile to the Reich; and resettlement of the space freed by these measures with good German blood. To that basis I add my decree: that Czechs about whom there exists doubt from the racial standpoint—or who are antagonistic toward the Reich—must be excluded from assimilation. This category,” Hitler underlined, “must be exterminated.” The Bletchley transmission of this grim message confirmed the decision of Heydrich’s distant judges in New York, where stargazing de Wohl had already written the death sentence in his syndicated column: “Hitler’s chief jackal is moving into the house of violence.”

  With a portfolio of plans for the execution of Hitler’s mass-extermination orders, Heydrich would set forth for Berlin on Wednesday morning, May 27, 1942, stopping as usual at his office. Waiting for him at the hairpin bend in the road leading down the valley of the Vltava from the village of Jungfern-Breschen to the bridge over the river in Prague would be four of the nine “ruffians,” Boy Scout whistles in their pockets, one carrying a Sten gun, another a hand grenade. Their Baker Street instructor, ICICLE, had warned them: “It’ll seem a long wait, however short. Remember what George Jean Nathan said about Parsifal? It is an opera that begins at five-thirty. Three hours later you look at your watch. And it’s only twenty to six.”

  A different kind of wait had been long and frustrating for the brothers Korda, Zoltan and Alexander.

  Zoltan specialized in re-creating Nazi targets in the Canadian wilderness at Camp X. He would study plans and photographs, and then duplicate the key points of exit and entry. On these scale models, BSC agents could practice their burglary skills. But Zoltan was more at home in Hollywood. There he reproduced battles, and the cameras made them life-size. His patient and painstaking work at the isolated camp east of Toronto was even more illusionary. It could be destroyed on an order from some unseen authority. And there were no movie producers for Zoltan to bully.

  “He looked like Groucho Marx,” said Stephenson. “When some job was aborted, he’d pace up and down, shoulders hunched, peering at me over his enormous mustache, speechless because of course there was no tantrum he could throw that would change the decision.”

  Alexander knew every nook and cranny of Europe and had an incredible talent for discovering bits of old movies and newsreels that might help to visualize a place now under enemy control.

  “We never knew officially what we were doing,” Zoltan said later. “But—” shrug—“I wasn’t a middle-European for nothing. I knew the locality pretty well. It was one of many jobs, of course. Some of them work. Some you never hear of again. This one—well, it was special. I knew where, but I was very very curious about who. For months I would listen to the radio bulletins, waiting to find out. . . .”

  In Montreal, his brother waited for the plane that would carry him back to London. Alexander had finished the movie Lady Hamilton in six weeks. Its propaganda value was high. It made Churchill weep each time he saw it, and he saw it eight times. When Korda was not making films, “he would hop back and forth in unheated Liberator bombers cooking things up with Bill Stephenson,” said Korda’s wife, Merle Oberon, years later. Now he was being shown how to wear a life jacket for the umpteenth time. The pilot said it would keep him afloat for twenty hours. Korda said plaintively: “But I do not wish to float for twenty hours.” Someone called him to the airfield scrambler phone. It was Zoltan from Camp X. “You heard? It was Heydrich. . . .”

  “Who?”

  “The Butcher of Prague.”

  Korda put down the phone. Why Heydrich?

  BSC had developed a technique for synthesizing a psychological-behavioral pattern from random information gathered about a subject. Stephenson called these unconventional analyses Proso-Profiles. Prosopography was described after the war by Gilbert Highet,* one of Stephenson’s BSC men in New York, as being based upon Professor Ronald Syme’s work on the Roman Revolution. “You ask what was the Roman Revolution? It was the one in which Augustus, heir to Julius Caesar, took over and established himself and his family as the new monarchy. What Syme did was analyze Augustus’s henchmen, their families and background and social type. Then he demonstrated that in fact Augustus replaced the old senators and businessmen with hand-picked supporters to form a new ruling class. In modern times, you can do this with a dictator, examine his personality and friends, and make deductions from all the facts you’ve been able to learn.”

  Few knew about Heydrich when the BSC went to work on him. The final analysis said this about him:

  He was the protégé of Heinrich Himmler, Reich Commissioner for Consolidation of German Racial Stock. Heydrich was fanatical in his hatred of Jews, having himself some Jewish blood. For this reason, Himmler considered him safe. It was always useful to have the means of blackmailing one’s colleagues. . . . “
Nobody,” Heydrich declared in his anxiety to reach the top, “has greater contempt for Jews than myself. I intend to eliminate the strain.”

  The fate of “sub-humans” herded into Germany’s new mercy-killing centers to be executed on the strength of a physician’s oath that the victim was no use to society, the preparations that moved inexorably forward to redesign Europe’s entire railroad system to serve the future death camps, all such obscenities before the war were made tolerable by the pretence that if you could not actually see them, they could not be happening. In this atmosphere, Heydrich moved with single-minded purpose to a position so close to the Fuehrer that none dared touch him except perhaps Admiral Canaris, who directed the German High Command intelligence service (HICOMINTEL). But even Canaris lost control over young Heydrich. The Admiral had a dossier on Heydrich’s homosexual activities after he had been cashiered from the navy, but Heydrich had also become expert at ferreting out embarrassing information about colleagues and superiors, forging evidence for one end: the satisfaction of Hitler’s fantasies. Heydrich manufactured the evidence against the Soviet Russian generals that resulted in the great Stalinist purge of military forces. He produced counterfeit evidence against the German army’s commander-in-chief Werner von Fritsch who stood in the way of nazification, in a fashion that again touched Hitler’s sickly fancies, bringing the victim down with charges of sexual perversion.

  In November 1938,* the SS newspaper The Black Corps called for “the extermination with fire and sword, the actual and final end of Jewry in Germany.” Hitler made speeches in that month attacking Jewry, prophesying the annihilation of the Jewish race. On the night of the 9th, synagogues went up in flames all over Germany. Jewish homes were burned, Jewish stores pillaged, and some 20,000 Jews were arrested. The pretext for this wave of terror was the shooting of a Germany Embassy official in Paris. Ernst von Rath, shot by a young Jewish exile grieving for his victimised family in Germany. Hitler blew up the incident, decreed nationwide memorial services, and began systematically whipping an entire nation into a frenzy of hatred against “world Jewry.”