The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  This report covered three months’ activity by a single group, and such campaigns of terror were taking place across the entire western Soviet Union occupied by the Germans, in competition with those of the Nazis, and likewise responsible for a host of deaths.

  The NKVD sought to exercise far more rigorous control of partisan operations than did SOE or OSS, because it was conducting a struggle in what then passed for its own homeland. In one important respect, the Soviets enjoyed an advantage over the British and Americans in promoting guerrilla war. If Churchill was sometimes callous about the human cost of ‘setting Europe ablaze’, Stalin was unfailingly so. His indifference to losses among the fighters, and to consequences for the civilian population, rendered the partisan campaign one of the darkest manifestations of the Kremlin’s commitment to ‘absolute war’.

  13

  Islands in the Storm

  1 THE ABWEHR’S IRISH JIG

  Many of the nations involved in the war were riven by internal factional struggles, sometimes to the death, which persisted throughout the years in which the Allies grappled with the Axis. This was true of China, France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Burma, India, South Africa, Canada, French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, to name only a few. The major belligerents thus found themselves striving to induce local activists to direct their fire – sometimes literally – at the other side in the global struggle, rather than at their own compatriots. This often proved more difficult than calming rival wolf packs.

  Ireland occupied a marginal place in the global struggle, but both sides cherished mirror apprehensions lest it should become a haven for their foes. The Irish Free State, or Eire, had achieved a qualified independence from Britain less than twenty years before war broke out. To the chagrin of nationalists, six counties of predominantly Protestant Ulster remained part of the United Kingdom. Memories of the ugly 1916–21 struggle to expel the British remained raw. Though Eire was still in name part of the British Commonwealth, throughout the war prime minister Éamon de Valera espoused a stubborn neutrality, resisting all blandishments to join the Allied cause even when America, Ireland’s warmest friend, became a belligerent. Yet while de Valera defied the wrath of Winston Churchill, on whom the Irish depended for their subsistence, he was also obliged to combat domestic foes. The rump of the so-called Irish Republican Army, made illegal in Eire in 1936, remained fanatically opposed to the island’s partition, and to the settlement with Britain. IRA terrorists sustained a campaign of sabotage and murder against the British – in 1939 there were extensive bombings on the mainland – and also defied the Dublin government.

  At the outbreak of war, the Germans identified Ireland as fertile soil, and the British agreed. Late in September 1939 MI6 delivered a luridly sensationalist report on conditions in Eire, claiming that ‘an attempt at revolution by the IRA does not appear to be out of the question’. A German-owned hotel at Inver in Donegal became a focus of British concern, because Hitler’s embassy staff sometimes stayed there – though so did British officers, including young Lt. Philip Mountbatten, RN. From Berlin’s viewpoint there was little merit in intelligence-gathering, because Ireland harboured no significant military secrets, and there were only 318 German and 149 Italian residents in the whole island to provide expatriate support. The Abwehr remained nonetheless convinced that if the underground IRA could be persuaded to resume its campaign of sabotage against military targets in the British North and on the mainland, Berlin would profit. Thus, between 1939 and 1943 a procession of Abwehr emissaries strove to link arms with the terrorists against their common foe.

  A pervasive strand in all Germany’s Irish operations was an awesome ignorance of the country, much greater than that of the British about say, Albania. Berlin’s first agent, dispatched in February 1939 before hostilities began, was one Oscar Pfaus, who was briefed ahead of his departure by a Celtic folklore enthusiast named Franz Fromme, who bored the agent half to death. Pfaus, having travelled to Dublin via Harwich, presented himself to the hard-drinking ‘General’ Eoin O’Duffy, leader of Ireland’s fascist Blueshirts, spiritual allies of the Nazis. Could O’Duffy put him in touch with the IRA? Since the Blueshirts and the Republicans represented bitterly opposed interests, this suggestion outraged the ‘general’. But Pfaus eventually contrived to meet the IRA Army Council, and in the best tradition of stage spies tore up a pound note and presented one half to the Republicans, so that when they sent a representative to Germany to discuss arms shipments, he might identify himself. Then Pfaus went home.

  The IRA decided to pursue the German offer, and dispatched as its negotiator Jim O’Donovan, who took a boat to Hamburg accompanied by his wife. On their arrival, German customs discovered that Mrs O’Donovan had concealed about her person several cartons of cigarettes, and subjected her to a robust strip-search. The high-minded O’Donovan exploded with rage: the couple departed home in dudgeon, without any guns. During the months that followed, the Abwehr became increasingly exasperated by what it considered the irresponsible behaviour of the IRA, which attacked English cinemas, phone kiosks and letterboxes in a fashion that contributed nothing to German victory, nor to Irish unification. In January 1940, when the Republicans staged a spectacular arms raid on the Irish army’s magazine at Phoenix Park, the exasperated de Valera rounded up every IRA man his policemen could catch, and introduced internment without trial. If the prime minister hated the British, he now disliked his erstwhile fellow-freedom fighters almost as much. The Phoenix Park raid was a turning point, because it made Ireland’s government explicit foes of Germany’s Republican allies.

  The Abwehr now dispatched a new agent, to instil some Teutonic discipline into IRA operations. Ernst Weber-Drohl was a diminutive Austrian, already over sixty, who had forged an incongruous career as a circus strongman. His sole qualification to represent Hitler was that he had fathered two children by an Irish girl. Just before he set out by U-boat for the Emerald Isle, his intended wireless-operator avowed such a violent dislike for Drohl that he refused to accompany him. In March 1940 the little strongman thus found himself alone as he paddled a dinghy through darkness and heavy surf to the shore, clutching a wireless transmitter and a bundle of money. The rubber boat capsized, the set was lost, and a bedraggled spy floundered ashore and made his way to Dublin.

  There he presented himself at the house of Jim O’Donovan, who waived the memory of the Hamburg customs humiliation and became his temporary host. Drohl delivered a message addressed to the IRA Council and signed by himself, of which the most significant passage read: ‘The Pfalzgraf Section very urgently requests its Irish friends and IRA members to be so good as to make considerably better efforts to carry out the [Abwehr’s] S-plan … and to be more effectual against military as opposed to civilian objectives.’ The Austrian added an apology: instead of handing over to the secret army US$15,100 entrusted to him by Berlin, the amount was $600 short, because he needed cash himself. Shortly afterwards, while staying in a Dublin hotel he was arrested by the police and charged with entering Ireland illegally. In court the agent claimed that he had come to Ireland merely to seek out his children – his wife was in Nuremberg. The Irish Times reported: ‘Weber-Drohl’s lawyer said that the accused had had no evil intentions when he stepped on to Irish soil. Rather, the motives which had occasioned his course of action were extremely praiseworthy.’ Although discharged after paying a £3 fine, he was almost immediately re-arrested and interned. When eventually released the Abwehr’s agent stayed in Ireland, eking a living in his old circus role, having lost interest in serving the Fatherland.

  The German embassy now urged Berlin that Nazi agents should have no further traffic with the IRA, which merely worsened relations with the Irish government. Yet the Abwehr’s fascination with exploiting Germany’s enemies’ enemies as friends remained undimmed. A thirty-five-year-old political science lecturer and ardent Nazi, Dr Edmund Veesenmayer, was appointed ‘Special Adviser Ireland’. The Abwehr consulted with Francis Stuart, an intellectual fa
natically committed to the nationalist cause, who turned up in Berlin in the midst of a world war to lecture on Anglo-Irish literature. An IRA man named Stephen Held also arrived via Belgium in April 1940, and presented the Irish half of Oscar Pfaus’s torn pound note. Held advanced an imaginative proposal that the German army should effect an amphibious landing near Derry, to occupy British Ulster, though he offered no advice about how the Royal Navy’s objections to such a venture might be overcome. In the following month, IRA chief of staff Sean Russell also reached the Nazi capital, having travelled from New York via Genoa. All these men urged the Germans to seize a historic opportunity.

  The Abwehr’s next emissary was Hermann Görtz – the biker who had spied his way into Brixton prison back in 1936. It seemed an extraordinary choice, to dispatch to Ireland a middle-aged lawyer who had never seen the place in his life, but witnesses at the airfield from which his Heinkel III bomber set forth on the evening of 4 May 1940 were impressed by his cheerfulness and even insouciance. He had trained with No. 800 Construction Demonstration Battalion, the commando unit which later became the Brandenburg Regiment, and nurtured heroic aspirations. Görtz parachuted from the night sky without accident but landed near Ballivor, Co. Meath, seventy miles from his intended drop zone. During the descent he lost both his wireless set and the spade with which he intended to bury his parachute.

  He dumped his flying suit, tore up his maps and threw the fragments in a river, then started walking south in search of Mrs Iseult Stuart, wife of the Republican literary lecturer in Berlin. He was now clad in breeches, riding boots, pullover and a beret, and also carried his World War I campaign medals, a somewhat indiscreet gesture for a secret agent. After a long, hard trek he reached Mrs Stuart’s door at Laragh Castle, just west of Dublin. She summoned Jim O’Donovan, who drove to collect the visitor. Görtz wrote later: ‘Then I came to Dublin where I met some pleasant people who neither knew nor wanted to know anything about me and I moved around freely.’ But the spy was brought face to face with the chaotic loyalties of Ireland when he met four young Republicans who demanded the cash he had brought from Germany, and menaced him for half an hour before he was taken to the house of the IRA’s Stephen Held.

  On 7 May 1940, in the midst of Dublin an IRA gang sought to seize a courier carrying correspondence to Sir John Maffey, Britain’s representative in Ireland. This prompted a shoot-out between the gunmen and the police, and infuriated the Irish government. Hermann Görtz vented on his hosts a passionate harangue about the irresponsibility of such conduct; it was obvious that the Irish authorities would now harry the terrorists. The German was fearful of being imprisoned and convicted as a mere spy, rather than – as he saw himself – a colour-bearer for his nation’s all-conquering armed forces. He bullied the IRA into mounting a search for the Luftwaffe uniform he had dumped. When they unsurprisingly failed to find this, he demanded that a tailor should be found who could make him another.

  On the night of 22 May the inevitable happened: police raided the Helds’ house. They missed Görtz but found his parachute, together with codebooks, information on Irish military installations, and a thick wad of currency. They arrested Stephen Held and Iseult Stuart, though the latter was swiftly released. Görtz’s next movements remain uncertain. He later claimed to have escaped the police dragnet and taken refuge in the Wicklow mountains, where he suffered much from hunger and rain, but this version is disputed. All that is assured is that through the months that followed several women, impassioned Republicans, sheltered him in Dublin, under an alias as ‘Mr Robinson’. He dispatched reports to his employers through seamen sailing to the Continent, none of which ever reached Berlin, and which would have done little good to the Abwehr if they had. This lonely, unhappy, cultured and frankly pitiable figure became so desperate to get home that he strove in vain to buy a boat in which to sail there.

  The German ambassador in Dublin, Dr Hempel, said crossly that he assumed the Görtz saga was a British plot, designed to drag Ireland into the war on the Allied side; the Dublin government was furious that Berlin was collaborating with its terrorist enemies of the IRA. Yet still the Abwehr refused to give up. As planning advanced for Operation ‘Sealion’, an invasion of Britain, Berlin became desperate to deploy agents in Ireland, in case the island became strategically important. In June 1940, two more agents of Abwehr 1’s Hamburg section were dispatched. Walter Simon was another remarkably elderly candidate for partisan war, fifty-eight, a German seaman who had spent the First World War in an Australian internment camp. Like Görtz, he was a veteran of an earlier unsuccessful espionage mission: in 1938, while reconnoitring British armament factories and airfields, he met some Welsh nationalists who claimed a willingness to serve Germany, and gave each £20 and a Rotterdam mailing address. In February 1939 he was arrested at Tonbridge, imprisoned, and in August summarily deported. It might be expected that this experience would have dimmed Simon’s enthusiasm for secret war, but now he accepted the identity documents of Carl Anderson, a Swedish-born Australian, and set forth for Ireland. He was told to stay away from the IRA and communicate with Berlin through a code based on the first verse of Schiller’s ‘Das Liede von der Glocke’, which he had learned by heart.

  On the night of 12 June, a U-boat stole into Dingle bay and landed Simon, who buried his wireless set and headed for Dublin. He was quickly spotted, trailed from Tralee and arrested. His possession of a large wad of cash was incriminating enough, but he knew his fate was sealed when his wireless set was also produced in court. Committed to Mountjoy prison, he was promptly accosted by a startled prisoner who exclaimed, ‘Are you here too?’ Simon riposted angrily, ‘Idiot!’ The two men were not supposed to know each other, but ‘Paddy Mitchell’ was Willy Preetz, the Abwehr’s second agent, who had been landed separately on the same mission. The British tipped off Dublin that Simon was a known German agent, and the two men settled down for a long war behind bars.

  And still Abwehr bunglers kept coming: the Germans convinced themselves that Bretons, fellow-Celtic nationalists, might be woven into their Irish narrative. In July 1940 a Breton helmsman sailed the thirty-six-foot yacht Soizic to Ireland bearing three spies – Dieter Gaertner, Herbt Tributh and Henry Obed – all carrying papers as South African students. Their mission was codenamed ‘Lobster I’, but the agents were far from being marine creatures, spent the voyage prostrate with sea-sickness, and were immediately detained on landing. On 8 August, at the height of the Battle of Britain a U-boat sailed from France carrying Sean Russell, the IRA’s chief of staff, together with Frank Ryan, a left-wing veteran of the Spanish Civil War. About a hundred miles west of Galway, Russell became violently ill, expired, and was buried at sea. Ryan thereupon chose to return to Berlin, where every kind of dark suspicion arose, as it soon did also in Dublin. Had Russell been poisoned? In truth he was almost certainly the victim of a burst gastric ulcer.

  The Germans’ next agent was Helmut Clissman, who at least had the advantages of knowing the country and being married to an Irish wife. There was no U-boat for Clissman, however. His passage was entrusted instead to a highly experienced sailor, Christian Nissen, aboard a cutter named the Anni Braz-Bihen. Clissman had received training with the Brandenburgers, and was accompanied by a wireless-operator. All the Germans’ preparations were confounded, however, when the cutter collided with a three-day Atlantic gale, gusting to Force 10. The engine broke down; the crew proved grossly incompetent. Nissen eventually decided to take his exhausted and disaffected charges back to Brest, where they arrived in September.

  In the autumn of 1940 Hermann Görtz found himself receiving discreet visits in his secret havens from all manner of Irishmen, prominent politicians among them, who were eager to forge links with a representative of the nation that looked set to secure mastery of Europe. The German agent implored his IRA hosts to make their peace with de Valera, though he had by now realised that statesmanship was not among their skills. He wrote bitterly: ‘Nothing more than weakening intrigues and exchanges
of fire with the police were achieved instead of battle with the enemy, which they had promised.’ Stephen Hayes had succeeded Russell as IRA chief of staff, and Görtz rebuked Jack McNeela, his ADC: ‘You know how to die for Ireland, but how to fight for it you have not the slightest idea!’

  A grumpy Irish governess named Mrs Daly was persuaded in November 1940 to become a passenger on the neutral Japanese ship Fushimi Maru, sent from Spain to evacuate a handful of Japanese nationals from Dublin. In addition to carrying a codebook for Hermann Görtz hidden in an alarm clock and messages secreted in her underwear, she was also nominated official courier for the Irish ambassador in Madrid. Görtz eventually received Mrs Daly’s messages, which revealed the Abwehr’s confusion about how best to act in the winter of 1940–41, when a threat of British invasion seemed to loom over Ireland. In December, the Irish army’s General Hugo MacNeill held talks with Henning Thomsen, the ‘strutting Nazi’ who served as counsellor at the German embassy, about such a contingency. The Blueshirts’ O’Duffy was also present – a fervent hater of the British who asked that if Churchill did invade, the Germans should parachute weapons captured on the Continent to arm Irish Resistance.

  Berlin offered a promise that Irish ports were safe from Luftwaffe bombs unless or until the British seized them. Görtz somehow got hold of a wireless set, and persuaded Anthony Deery, an IRA member who had a day job as a Dundalk post office radio technician, to dispatch his messages. This Deery did, until caught by the police early in 1942 and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. In the interval, Görtz’s dispatches did little service to the Nazi war effort, for most merely lamented his own troubles.