by Max Hastings
During the early years of Hitler’s rule he ingratiated himself enthusiastically and successfully with the foremost Nazis. In 1935, aged forty-eight, he was appointed chief of Germany’s intelligence service, controlling both espionage abroad and counter-espionage at home, though Himmler ran his own domestic security service, the RSHA, under Ernst Kaltenbrunner, with the Gestapo as its enforcement arm. As Trevor-Roper noted, ‘All German politicians of consequence sought to set up their own information bureaus (just as they also sought to establish private armies) as additional supports for their personal authority; and it was essential to the purpose of these bureaus that their results should be the private property of their chiefs.’
The RSHA was no more efficient than the Abwehr, but it wielded more influence through its direct subordination to Himmler. MI6 noted that it achieved good penetration of neutral embassies in Berlin, which yielded useful information. Meanwhile, Canaris’s service had stations around the world and intelligence cells within every formation of the Wehrmacht. The admiral’s early years of office saw a dramatic expansion of his empire; he achieved a reputation for administrative efficiency and diplomatic skills, both in his handling of the Nazi hierarchy and in dealing with prominent foreigners. Until at least 1942, the service’s prestige stood high both inside Germany and abroad.
Canaris was instinctively secretive, even before he became a spymaster, and more so thereafter. Within the rambling warren of offices in a row of converted mansions on Berlin’s Tirpitzüfer, where the Abwehr had its headquarters until it was bombed out in 1943, he seemed to glide almost invisibly from one room to another. So he did too on his frequent travels to other countries, especially Spain: a signed portrait of Franco, its dictator, adorned his office wall. He seldom wore uniform – an oddity in Nazi society, which was obsessed with fancy dress. He was elaborately courteous, not least to subordinates, and something of a hypochondriac who took too many pills. He relaxed by riding regularly and playing a smart game of tennis. His passion for animals was much remarked: he was followed around Abwehr headquarters by two dachshunds, to which he talked constantly. One of them once fell ill while Canaris was visiting Italy, and he telephoned at length to Berlin to discuss its condition. His Italian companions assumed that he was speaking in code about great issues of state, but his obsession with the dog was authentic. He often said that he trusted animals more than people; it was probably more accurate to say that he liked them better. In conversation, whether professional or social, he was a master of equivocation. Few people were ever sure what Canaris really thought, which was supposed by contemporaries to reflect his depth of character. More likely, it masked chronic indecision.
Although technically a branch of OKW, the Abwehr quickly became Canaris’s personal fiefdom. Throughout the war his men achieved considerable success in suppressing dissent and capturing Western Allied agents operating in Hitler’s empire, which did much to sustain the admiral’s standing in Nazi high places: Col. Franz von Bentevegni, who ran counter-espionage, was one of Canaris’s few impressive subordinate appointments. Yet the Russians were able to sustain their astonishing espionage activities inside Germany until 1942, and military leakages persisted until 1945, even if the huge matter of Germany’s broken codes lay beyond Canaris’s remit.
The agents his officers dispatched to gather information abroad were almost all unfit for the role. It is odd that Berlin never attempted to recruit spies to dispatch to Britain who might have passed for gentlemen. Even in 1940, the accent and manners of the upper class remained a passport to social acceptance in Churchill’s embattled island. The writer Cyril Connolly wrote an angry letter to the New Statesman complaining that when he himself was detained as a possible spy, he was immediately released when it was discovered that he had been educated at Eton. The experience of the Cambridge Spies, deemed beyond suspicion as members of the upper-middle class, suggests that if the Abwehr had dispatched to Britain a few Nazis with passable table manners and some skill as fly-casters or grouse-shooters, they would have been asked to all the best houses.
As it was, however, when two of Canaris’s key men, Col. Hans Pieckenbrock, the head of intelligence, and Col. Erwin Lahousen, head of sabotage, were sacked in 1943, this was no gesture of Nazi spite, made for political reasons; it was the consequence of their obvious incompetence and of their departments’ failure. German secret operations abroad deployed immense labour for negligible results. One of the Abwehr’s most notable recruits was naval lieutenant Heinrich Garbers. He was a vegetable farmer’s son, a passionate Nazi, who in 1938 had sailed across the Atlantic in a thirty-foot yacht, the Windspiel, which he constructed himself. Amid the Allied naval blockade, the Germans devised the notion of dispatching agents to far-flung places in sailing boats too humble to attract the attention of the enemy. In 1941 and 1942 Garbers made epic forays to South Africa and Namibia respectively. Thereafter he captained the little schooner Passim, which made two immense voyages at an average speed of six knots. The boat sailed under the name of the Santa Maria, and flew successively French, Spanish and Portuguese colours as Garbers deemed appropriate. In 1943 he carried three Abwehr men, codenamed ‘Walter’, ‘Fred’ and ‘Jim’, to Argentina, in what he afterwards described laconically as ‘an uneventful voyage of 65 days’.
In a nautical sense it may be true that nothing much happened, but relations on board were poisoned by the mutual loathing of Walter and Fred, while Jim was perpetually prostrate with sea-sickness, which cost him a drastic weight loss. The passengers were successfully delivered to a reception committee of Argentine sympathisers at Rio del Plata, who presented the Passim’s crew with coffee and oranges before the little vessel turned about and sailed home. Garbers, plainly a man of iron, seemed wholly untroubled by his experiences. He returned safely to Europe and received the Ritterkreuz. There is no evidence, however, that his passengers contributed anything to the Nazi war effort. Likewise, the Hungarian air force officer Count László Almásy crossed 2,000 miles of North African desert to deliver two agents to Egypt in May 1942, a remarkable achievement, and Almásy later inspired the novel and film The English Patient, though its version of this enthusiastic Nazi was fanciful. His passengers, however, did nothing on arrival to justify their epic journey. Nearer home, it became increasingly clear to the British monitoring the Abwehr’s wirelessed reports that its network of overseas stations and informants produced almost nothing that was both new and true.
As Trevor-Roper pursued his researches through the ever-growing harvest of Bletchley decrypts, ‘We soon became aware that “the little Admiral” was a far more complex and controversial character than we had supposed. As the incompetence of his organisation was progressively revealed to us, we discovered, or deduced, something of the politics in which he was involved, and we noted his feverish travels, in every direction, but especially to Spain, which distinguished him sharply from our own more sedentary chief’ – Stewart Menzies. For several decades after the war, Canaris was treated as a major figure of the era, the subject of several weighty biographies. The foremost element in the Canaris mythology was a claim that he had been a secret crusader against Hitler, who had given active assistance to the Allied cause. Several German writers energetically promoted this view, because their post-war society was desperate to identify virtuous men who had dared to raise their hands against the vast evil of Nazism, and suffered martyrdom in consequence.
It is now plain that such claims were unfounded. Until 1938 Canaris was an ardent supporter of the Nazis, and for years thereafter Hitler frequently used him as a personal emissary abroad. The admiral worked amicably with Reinhard Heydrich of the RSHA. The two families socialised: Frau Canaris and the executive planner of the Holocaust sometimes played the violin together. From 1939 onwards, the admiral became increasingly gloomy and nervous – colleagues noted him drinking heavily. Trevor-Roper regarded it as an absurd delusion that Canaris was the directing brain of ‘the other Germany’. The Abwehr’s chief, in his view, was a man of
limited gifts, who confined his anti-Nazi activities to making his organisation a haven for officers who shared his rising distaste for Hitler and his supporters, and who resisted active complicity in the Nazis’ atrocities. Canaris’s fastidious nature recoiled from the coarseness of their conduct, perhaps more than from its insensate barbarity.
The only Abwehr officer known to have been a source for MI6 was Hans-Berndt Gisevius in Switzerland, a Prussian lawyer of giant physical proportions who served five years in the Gestapo and hated it, before transferring to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1938 and thence to the Abwehr. Canaris sent him to Zürich under diplomatic cover as vice-consul, and thereafter he passed information to Halina Szymańska, whom he knew was an informant for both British and Polish intelligence. Gisevius provided material for twenty-five reports dispatched from Bern to Broadway between August 1940 and December 1942, some of them citing Canaris’s professed opinions; also among his sources was Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht.
Szymańska, the conduit, was the formidable and beautiful wife of the former Polish military attaché in Berlin, and once dined with Canaris in Bern. Much of Gisevius’s material was accurate: in January 1941 Szymańska passed on his report about German aircraft stocks, together with the Abwehr man’s opinion that an invasion of Britain was ‘off’. In April she quoted Gisevius’s view, based on information from Schacht, that Hitler would invade Russia during the following month – which indeed was then his intention. But, as usual with intelligence, the German also passed on some rubbish: on 28 March 1941 he told Szymańska that German forces would not take the offensive in Libya – two days before Rommel launched a major onslaught.
Gisevius’s contribution, and those of a handful of his colleagues, scarcely made the Abwehr a pillar of Resistance against the Nazis. Its wartime shortcomings were the product of indolence and incompetence rather than of considered treachery. Canaris was a poor delegator, who chose weak subordinates. German intelligence had one notable success abroad, in suborning Yugoslav officers ahead of their army’s 1941 emergency mobilisation, in time to sabotage the process, but thereafter its espionage operations were uniformly unsuccessful. The admiral was nonetheless too much a German patriot actively to assist his country’s enemies. Like many such people of the time, he harboured muddled political views. A monarchist and a conservative, Franco’s Spain was his spiritual home; he travelled there as often as he could, not merely to visit the large Madrid Abwehr HQ at Calle Claudio Coello 151, but also to commune with like-minded Spanish politicians and grandees. The Abwehr’s ship-watching service in Spain, the Unternehmen Bodden, monitoring Allied movements through the Straits of Gibraltar with the aid of advanced infra-red technology, and reporting them to the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe’s Air Fleet 1 in Italy, formed the most impressive element in the organisation’s overseas operations.
Yet if Canaris bears much responsibility for the shortcomings of Germany’s ‘big picture’ intelligence, he could never have run an honest operation under the dead hand of Hitler, any more than Moscow Centre could do so in the shadow of Stalin. Reports on the condition and prospects of the enemy were permitted to reach conclusions only within parameters acceptable to the Führer. This crippling constraint was symbolised by Hitler’s annotation on an important intelligence report about Russian agricultural conditions: ‘This cannot be.’ Kurt Zeitzler, chief of the army general staff, wrote on 23 October 1942, the eve of Stalingrad: ‘The Russians no longer have any reserves worth mentioning and are not capable of launching large-scale offensives.’ Himmler in 1944 declared without embarrassment that his first requirement from Germany’s intelligence services was not truth, but loyalty to the Führer. This was an important statement, the most vivid expression of the huge weakness of the Abwehr and the RSHA throughout the Second World War.
Historian Michael Handel has written: ‘Leaders in a democratic system are generally more inclined to consider a wide variety of options than those who have always functioned within authoritarian or totalitarian political systems. In authoritarian countries, where the climb to the top is an unrelenting struggle for power, habits of cooperation and openness are usually less developed … Tolerance for ideas that deviate from the “party line” … are seen as personal criticism.’ These features of almost all dictatorships crippled German intelligence activities beyond the battlefield, and sometimes also within it. Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, was far more interested in using the RSHA as a weapon against the Nazi empire’s internal enemies than as a means of securing information about its foreign foes. Hitler never wished to use intelligence as a planning or policy-making tool. He recognised its utility only at a tactical level: the Nazis were strikingly incurious about Abroad.
Yet the fact that the Abwehr was an unsuccessful intelligence-gathering organisation did not mean that Hitler’s armed forces were blind on the battlefield: their access to tactical intelligence was generally good. In the first half of the war Germany’s wireless interceptors and codebreakers enjoyed successes which would today seem impressive, were they not measured against those of the British and Americans. The Wehrmacht had excellent voice-monitoring units, which in every theatre of war provided important information. ‘The Y Service was the best source of intelligence,’ said Hans-Otto Behrendt, one of Rommel’s staff in North Africa. In August 1941, aided by an Italian employee, two agents of the Sezione Prelevamento – the ‘extraction section’ of Italian intelligence – opened the safe of the military attaché’s office at the US embassy in Rome. They removed his codebook – Military Intelligence Code No. 11 – and photographed it. This enabled the Axis to read substantial traffic through the ensuing ten months, and proved a seriously significant intelligence break. In 1942 it had especially grievous consequences for Eighth Army in the desert, since the US military attaché in Cairo, Col. Bonner Fellers, reported in detail to Washington on British plans and intentions. A German intelligence officer paid generous tribute to ‘this incomparable source of authentic and reliable information, which … contributed so decisively during the first half of 1942 to our victories in North Africa’.
At sea, some of the Royal Navy’s ciphers were found aboard the British submarine Seal, captured off the German coast on 5 May 1940, owing to an extraordinary and culpable failure by the minelayer’s officers to destroy its confidential papers. The Kriegsmarine was able to read much of the Royal Navy’s North Sea traffic until August 1940, and some warship communications until September 1941. Throughout the first half of the war, the Kriegsmarine’s B-Dienst read the Royal Navy’s convoy codes, with grievous consequences for Allied shipping losses. Even where signals could not be decrypted, radio-traffic analysis enabled Axis intelligence staffs to judge enemy deployments remarkably effectively, at least until the second half of the war, when Allied commanders became more astute and security-conscious. Patrolling, air reconnaissance and PoW interrogations all provided streams of useful data to German operational commanders, as did open-source information – enemy newspaper and broadcast monitoring.
In the first phase of the war until 1942, while the Wehrmacht was triumphant on battlefields across Europe, these sources sufficed to tell its commanders all that they felt they needed to know about the world, and about their enemies. Victories masked the abject humint failures of the Abwehr. As long as Germany was winning, why should anyone make trouble about imperfections in the war machine? It was only when Hitler’s armies started losing that hard questions began to be asked about the Reich’s abysmal political and strategic intelligence. Hitler himself was, of course, much to blame, but Canaris exercised operational responsibility. The admiral fell from grace, though it was by then far too late – probably impossible, for reasons institutionalised in the Nazi system – to repair his corrupt and ineffective espionage organisation.
While anxious not to be a bad man, Canaris lacked the courage to be a good one. Far from being a substantial historical figure, he was a small one, grappling with dilemmas and difficu
lties far beyond his capabilities. Trevor-Roper professed to see a close resemblance between the admiral and Menzies, his British counterpart. Both men were conservative, honourable – and weak. By a trifling coincidence, Canaris had a mistress in Vienna whose sister was married to Menzies’ brother. Trevor-Roper came to regard the Abwehr as ‘a mirror image of [MI6], with many of the same weaknesses and absurdities … I recognised, across the intervening fog of war, old friends of Broadway and Whaddon Hall transmuted into German uniform in the Tirpitz Ufer or at Wansee.’ The admiral did little to merit his eventual fate at the hands of Hitler’s executioners: he frequently talked treason, but did nothing to further it. Far from becoming a martyr to the cause of a ‘good Germany’, he was merely an incompetent servant of an evil one.
3
Miracles Take a Little Longer: Bletchley
1 ‘TIPS’ AND ‘CILLIS’
In the winter of 1939, MI6 came under scrutiny and fierce criticism within Whitehall, intensified by the Venlo fiasco. Stewart Menzies, knowing the precariousness of his position as ‘C’, compiled a twenty-six-page document defending his service, in which he risked playing one card which might – and did – save his bacon. He promised his masters that the country was ‘about to reap the fruits’ of MI6’s liaison with Allied secret services in a fashion ‘which should be of inestimable benefits to the Air Ministry within a few weeks, and probably to the Admiralty within a month or two’. The significance of this vaguely expressed claim was that Menzies believed that Bletchley Park, with the help of the French and Poles, was close to cracking some German ciphers. Such successes could go far indeed towards compensating for MI6’s humint failure. His expectations would remain unfulfilled for much of the year that followed. Few even within the intelligence community dared to hope that Britain could emulate, far less surpass, the 1914–18 triumphs of Room 40. Admiral Godfrey, head of naval intelligence, wrote to Menzies on 18 November, saying that ‘whether or not Cryptanalysis will ever again give us the knowledge we had of German movements in the late war’, MI6 should exert itself to plant agents in enemy ports to report shipping movements. Godfrey did not seem to expect much from the codebreakers.
