The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  The Abwehr’s next attempt to place an agent in Ireland took place on 21 March 1941, when a Heinkel III took off from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport carrying in its bomb bay twenty-nine-year-old Sgt Gunther Schütz. The sergeant had done some amateur espionage while attending the German Commercial School in London in 1938. He had been seconded from wartime service in the artillery to serve the Abwehr, briefed to transmit weather and shipping reports, and especially information about the Belfast shipyards. He had been trained in meteorology, and carried a microscope with which to create and read microdot messages. As well as a copy of an English novel entitled Just a Girl as key to his coding, together with 3,000 genuine US dollars and a thousand English pounds which he soon discovered were forged, he carried a South African passport in the name of Hans Marchner, along with a bottle of cognac and a salami to solace his five-hour sojourn in the belly of the Heinkel.

  Schütz leapt from the plane into bright moonlight 6,500 feet above Ireland, and was knocked unconscious by the force of his landing. Awaking with a nosebleed to find himself being studied with interest by a local man, he buried his parachute and flying-suit, and started walking. For hours he did not dare accost anybody, but was finally driven to ask the way to Dublin. It was sixty miles away, he learned – he had been dropped in Co. Waterford, far south of his intended destination. Two policemen on bicycles soon stopped him and discovered his wireless set and equipment. He enquired nervously what would happen next. ‘Don’t worry, we will hang you, that’s all,’ said the constable amiably. Nobody had told the wretched Schütz about Irish jokes, and he suffered days of terror before finding himself imprisoned with most of his Abwehr comrades.

  Hermann Görtz was arrested on 27 November 1941, during a police raid in Dublin’s Blackheath Park district, launched in search of IRA men, not German spies. The Abwehr’s final bid to put agents into Ireland ended as swiftly and absurdly as all the others. On 16 December 1943 a young Irishman named John Francis O’Reilly was parachuted into Co. Clare, near Morveen. Three days later he was followed by a second man, thirty-five-year-old John Kenny, who had offered his services to the Germans after being detained in the occupied Channel Islands and interned near Brunswick. On landing in Ireland, both men were swiftly picked up by the police – O’Reilly had accepted his assignment merely to secure a passage home from the Luftwaffe. Soon after the war ended, all the Abwehr men in Athlone camp were freed, but Hermann Görtz was informed that he was to be deported to the British Zone of occupied Germany. On 23 May 1947, on receiving this news he immediately took poison in the Aliens’ Registration Office at Dublin Castle. He was fifty-seven, a pathetic and in some ways sympathetic figure, tormented by self-pity and almost insanely miscast as a foreign agent of the Third Reich.

  Yet if Görtz’s story ended with a death, the Germans who landed in Ireland knew that whatever hardships they might suffer in Athlone camp, nobody was going to kill them. Operating in a neutral state, they enjoyed the comfortable assurance that the price of failure would be mere imprisonment, not a rendezvous with the executioner. And before laughing too loudly at the absurdity of the Abwehr’s operations, it should be recalled that if Hitler had conquered Britain, Ireland would have shared its fate. Irish jokes would have stopped as assuredly as Irish neutrality would have been forfeit.

  2 NO MAN’S LAND

  Other neutral states which opted out of their neighbours’ existential struggle provided theatres much more important than Ireland for the two sides’ secret operations. In cities where lights burned brightly and a semblance of tranquillity persisted, the rival belligerents sustained their contest for mastery, but with buttoned foils. There was childish jostling for advantage: German attachés in Ankara flaunted before their British counterparts tins of Gold Flake cigarettes captured by the Fallschirmjäger in Crete. In Lourenço Marques, where the local British, German and Italian agents shared quarters in the Polana hotel, there were spats about which nation’s radio news bulletins should be aired in the hotel lounge, resolved only when the management banned all of them.

  Bern, Lisbon, Madrid, Stockholm became intelligence street markets, where agent-handlers rendezvoused with the men and women who devilled for them at mortal risk in enemy territory. In the Press Room of Stockholm’s Grand hotel, British and American correspondents and spies mingled daily with Germans. Gold and cash were passed – sometimes huge sums in many currencies – stolen documents received. Local policemen gave aid to favoured clients: Portugal’s security chief Agothino Lourenço, an ardent pro-Nazi and close acolyte of President Salazar, ensured that the local Abwehr received copies of every passenger list for BOAC’s Clipper flights to England. The Spanish until 1944 indulged a huge German espionage operation. A search at British Bermuda of two Spanish liners, the Cabo de Hornos and Cabo de Buena Esperanza, homebound from the US, revealed them to be carrying Axis agents with dispatches written in secret ink.

  The jungle of allegiances became especially intricate in Afghanistan, where almost every senior military and political figure was in the pay of one belligerent or another, and often of several. Axis intelligence chiefs convinced themselves that Indian nationalism was the product of their subtle machinations – though in truth, of course, it derived entirely from domestic sentiment. Bhagat Ram Gumassat was the brother of a nationalist hanged by the British for murdering the governor of the Punjab. He became a frequent guest at the German embassy in Kabul, where he helped to arrange the journey to Berlin of his leader, Subhas Chandra Bose. (The Russians, obscurely, convinced themselves that even when Bose later recruited an ‘Indian National Army’ to fight against the British, he was in the pay of MI6. In the NKVD’s words: ‘He maintained personal contacts with Hitler which allowed British secret services to be informed of the Germans’ plans with regard to India and the Middle East.’) Gumassat arrived one morning at the Soviet embassy in Kabul to explain that, though the Germans supposed him to be their man, he wished instead to serve Moscow. Centre took him on its books as agent ‘Rom’. In February 1942 the Abwehr gave him some weapons and a handsome sum of cash, to promote sabotage in India. In a final dizzying twist, Rom gave most of the money to the USSR’s Defence Fund.

  In every neutral capital, intelligence officers puzzled over the perennial enigma of their trade: which side was this or that source really serving? Often the answer was both or neither, merely their own pockets. In Istanbul, an Armenian Turkish informer named Shamli received 650 Turkish pounds a month from the Japanese, 350 from the Germans, the same again from the Hungarians and a similar sum from Europa Press, a news organisation. A large Italian colony in the same city gossiped in the Casa d’Italia, the former Savoyard embassy now a social centre. Rome’s intelligence operations were controlled by its military attaché, Lt. Col. Stefano Zavatarri, whom nobody held in much regard. A Turkish secret policeman said contemptuously: ‘The Italians are Hitler’s “petits chiens” – “lapdogs” – they make use of the lowest type of agent – mongrel Greeks, Armenians, moslems, Jews from the slums. The Turks get whatever they want from this type of agent and then, when they deem the time propitious, lock him up.’ The Italians did no better in Rio de Janeiro, where in October 1941 they persuaded Edmond di Robilant, a senior executive of the Lati airline, to start a secret shipping-movement monitoring service. He was given a wireless and $2,600, some of which he used to rent a rabbit farm in Jacarepaguá from which to transmit. The fact that he failed to provide a single report did not spare him from a fourteen-year sentence for espionage after Brazilian police arrested him in September 1942.

  SS Sturmbannführer Hans Eggen travelled regularly to Switzerland to collect information, notably from two businessmen, Paul Holzach and Paul Meyer-Schwertenbach. Each, however, briefed Swiss intelligence about the meetings, and nobody was confident about their allegiance, even after OSS’s Allen Dulles received reports based on Ultra decrypts specifying the information they had given to Berlin. Meanwhile in Stockholm Col. Makoto Onodera, the Japanese military attaché, who was esteemed i
n Tokyo, relied heavily on information from a Polish officer named Peter Ivanov – who also reported to the Poles in London.

  Foreigners arriving in Portugal’s capital from the battered and darkened cities of Europe were enthralled by the jangling white trams, café orchestras, flowers everywhere. Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: ‘Lisbon, with all its lights, seemed after two years of blackout like a celestial vision … For the first day or so I just wandered about the streets, marvelling at the shops, the restaurants with their interminable menus, the smart women and cafés sprawling over the pavements … By night the cabarets, the dancing lights, the bursts of jazz music coming through half opened doors – Pleasure stalking the streets, with many trailing it.’ German operations in Lisbon were based on their five-storey consulate, most of it occupied by the Abwehr and SD, though MI5 also held a list of 135 local addresses used by their staff, often for private purposes. In the spring of 1942 the Abwehr’s Major Brede, a Luftwaffe officer unwillingly posted into intelligence, informed Canaris that his Lisbon station was corrupt from top to bottom. The admiral dismissed the charge out of hand, but of course it was true.

  Most meetings and transactions on neutral turf were conducted discreetly and uneventfully, because it suited everybody to preserve the tranquillity of the international brokerage houses. In September 1940 the MI6 officer ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale used Lisbon’s San Geronimo church as a rendezvous to deliver a wireless set and codes to a French intelligence man who bore them back to Vichy, from which some of the Deuxième Bureau’s men, prominent among them the French codebreaking chief Gustave Bertrand, sustained contact with London until November 1942. He then went on the run until he was extracted from the Massif Central by an RAF aircraft in June 1944.

  Amid all the indulgent wining and dining in neutral capitals, however, at intervals there were dramas and spasms of violence when deals went wrong, suspected traitors were silenced, or the local authorities checked spies’ perceived excesses. On 20 April 1940 MI6’s man in Stockholm was arrested and charged with seeking to sabotage Swedish iron ore exports to Germany. This provoked one among many explosions from the British ambassador, Sir Victor Mallet, who wrote to London: ‘I do not want you to think that I am blind to the fact that it may sometimes be necessary to employ methods of this kind when we are waging a war against an enemy who hits persistently below the belt. But my complaints are, firstly, that our sleuths seem to be thoroughly bad at their job: so far they have achieved little in Sweden beyond putting me and themselves in an awkward position. Secondly, I am inclined to doubt whether the game is worth the candle in a country where not only are the police and the military very much on the alert … but where a policy of mutual confidence has shown itself repeatedly to be the one which pays best.’ Broadway’s man in Stockholm received an eight-year jail sentence, its severity reflecting the perceived might of Germany and weakness of Britain in the summer of 1940.

  Stalin demanded the deaths of foreign enemies even more whimsically than did Hitler. When he heard that the former German chancellor Franz von Papen, now serving as Hitler’s ambassador to neutral Turkey, had held a meeting with the Pope, and was being touted as a possible head of government if the Nazis could be ousted, he was so angry that he ordered von Papen killed. An NKVD attempt took place in Ankara on 24 February 1942 which failed when Moscow’s Bulgarian assassin blew himself up with his own bomb, leaving von Papen only slightly injured. Meanwhile the Kremlin convinced itself that Argentina, home to a quarter of a million German-speakers, was a major Nazi base, and on Stalin’s personal orders the NKVD burned down the German bookshop in Buenos Aires and arranged scores of other incendiary attacks on enemy property. Charges were planted in warehouses holding goods bound for Hitler’s empire, and aboard ships that carried them. The FBI and OSS shared Russian paranoia about Argentina, and were disgusted by its government’s interpretation of neutrality, whereby when a given number of alleged Nazi agents were arrested and jailed, the same number of Allied sympathisers was also rounded up. Similar even-handedness was displayed over releases: when Argentina’s military government belatedly broke off relations with Germany in January 1944, 116 known or suspected Axis agents were arrested. Most, however, were soon set free, and in the FBI’s bitter words ‘are undoubtedly once again active on behalf of the Reich’.

  The Western Allied secret services seldom murdered anyone; assassination was seen as a dangerous game to start, as was confirmed by the reprisals following the 1942 killing of Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia. In 1944 MI6 considered, then rejected, a scheme for targeted killings of Abwehr personnel in France. Bill Bentinck agreed, saying that while he was not squeamish, this seemed ‘the type of bright idea which in the end produces a good deal of trouble and does little good’. An episode in Spain became one of MI6’s uglier legends. Paul Claire was a French naval officer employed to help run agents into France by sea. In July 1941 the British embassy in Madrid reported in acute alarm that Claire had visited the Vichy French naval attaché, confessed his secret war role, and demanded help to escape into France. What was to be done? If he crossed the frontier, he would be free to tell the Germans whatever he chose. Alan Hillgarth, the buccaneering naval attaché, was given a dramatic mandate by Broadway: ‘liquidate Claire’ or seize a member of his family as a hostage to secure his silence.

  At 1 a.m. on 25 July, MI6 officer Hamilton Stokes reported that he and Hillgarth had successfully lured Claire to the British embassy and ‘drugged him into unconsciousness’. The pair then set out by car for Gibraltar with Claire prostrate on the back seat. ‘C’ drafted a personal signal to the Rock, ordering that the traitor should be seized on arrival, charged with treason and held incommunicado. This order became redundant, however, when MI6’s Morocco representative, who chanced to be in Gibraltar, signalled: ‘Consignment arrived … completely destroyed … owing to over-attention in transit … Damage regretted but I submit it is for best.’ A later report explained that Claire had suddenly recovered consciousness while the car passed through a village in Andalusia, and started shrieking at passers-by for help. His captors silenced him by a crack over the head with a revolver which proved fatal.

  Sir Samuel Hoare, the Madrid ambassador, was furious about the potential scandal. Menzies admitted that Claire should never have been posted to Spain, and there was indeed embarrassing fallout. Vichy French diplomats in Madrid protested to the Spanish Foreign Ministry, and on 12 August Radio France broadcast a more or less accurate report of the affair, describing how Claire’s captors had silenced local villagers who heard his screams by saying, ‘Don’t get upset, it’s only a member of the embassy gone mad and we are taking him to a Sanatorium.’ On 14 August the London Daily Telegraph carried a mocking story headed ‘Nazis Invent a Kidnapping’. As is often the case with such sagas, the report seemed so fantastic, and Berlin so chronically mendacious, that few readers at home or abroad gave it credence. In July 1942 Commander Ian Fleming of naval intelligence informed the Red Cross that Claire was ‘missing believed drowned’ en route to Britain on the SS Empire Hurst, which had been sunk by enemy aircraft on 11 August 1941, a fortnight after the Frenchman’s actual death. MI6 felt obliged to pay Claire’s widow a pension to sustain this fiction, ‘however repugnant it may be to reward the dependants of a traitor’.

  On the other side, on 12 May 1944, Bletchley decrypted a somewhat hysterical message to Tokyo from the Japanese minister in Madrid, complaining about a young fellow-countryman of his named Sakimura, who had been roaming the Spanish capital expressing enthusiasm for the Allied cause. The minister told the Foreign Office: ‘Under these circumstances it seems to me that there is no other course open to us but to set aside all half-hearted or humane methods and take drastic steps, availing ourselves of the assistance of some such organ as the Gestapo, and eliminating him.’ There is no evidence, however, that Axis agents acted on this undiplomatic proposal.

  Stockholm was a key observation post for every intelligence service, though in the early war years British shi
p-watching operations were hampered by some strongly pro-Nazi Swedish naval officers. The Norwegians maintained an intelligence mission led by Col. Rosher Lund, which did useful work among its fellow-Scandinavians. The local MI6 station generated seven hundred reports a month, mostly fragments of information about German forces in the region, collected by travelling businessmen. Among the many charlatans who offered information was a Russian émigré who, late in 1943, offered MI6 a source in the Japanese legation, together with an economist in Berlin who could provide gossip from Göring’s housekeeper. More profitable was a Dane codenamed ‘Elgar’ who, for more than a year starting in December 1942, delivered sheaves of material about Nazi industry, including some V-weapon intelligence. On one occasion in the autumn of 1943, ‘Elgar’ arrived in Stockholm with a consignment of industrial acid brought from Germany, in which were hidden glass bottles containing three hundred filmed reports. In January 1944 ‘Elgar’ was caught by the Gestapo and told everything he knew about his MI6 contacts in Stockholm. For good measure, he threw in some fantasies about British spy groups in Berlin, Hamburg, Bonn, Königsberg and Vienna. These revelations may have saved the Dane’s neck, since he survived the war in German captivity.

  The NKVD’s Colonel Boris Rybkin, under cover as embassy first secretary, played a key role in Soviet covert operations in Stockholm, many of which were concerned with securing supplies of commodities. A popular Swedish actor, Karl Earhardt, became an intermediary for purchasing high-tensile steel for aircraft construction. The Wallenberg family, which controlled the Enskilda Bank, profited handsomely from exchanging Russian platinum for scarce industrial metals. Rybkin’s wife Zoya, his fellow-NKVD officer, described how one day she saw several ingots on her husband’s desk. ‘Tin?’ she asked curiously. ‘Try lifting one,’ said the colonel, and she found herself barely able to do so. Nonetheless, whatever the successes of the NKVD’s Stockholm as a commercial conduit, the modern official historians of Soviet intelligence frankly admit that it failed to establish networks in neighbouring Scandinavian countries, and especially in its attempts to explore German nuclear research, heavy water production in Norway and suchlike. The principal intelligence value of Sweden to the Russians, as to all the Allies, was as a window on Germany.