by Max Hastings
The Germans never concentrated their codebreaking talents and resources in the fashion that was essential if they were to accomplish big things. An American analyst observed after interrogating the chief German codebreakers in 1945: ‘Neither the Abwehr nor the head of OKW/Chi seems to have had an adequate idea of the difficulties faced by the cryptanalysts … Directions always came too late.’ The British genius lay in creating a partnership between the free spirits of the civilian academic codebreakers and a highly disciplined system of analysis and dissemination. Germany, among the most organised societies on earth, failed first in making best use of its cleverest minds, and second in devising innovative technology to provide the support indispensable to breaking machine ciphers in real time. Wehrmacht intelligence officers asserted that their most useful sources in the second half of the war, when aerial reconnaissance ceased to be feasible in the face of Allied air superiority, were – in descending order – captured documents; human observation on the battlefield; sigint traffic analysis; and material derived from open sources – reading Allied newspapers and listening to the BBC.
At Bletchley, Britain’s codebreakers had to perform tasks which called for supreme concentration in conditions of relative discomfort, especially winter cold. The plight of Chi’s people and the German army’s cryptographic headquarters was much worse, however. In November 1943 British bombing destroyed or severely damaged most of the Tirpitzüfer houses in which they worked, and the B-Dienst lost a large part of its filing system. It was hard to focus on complex mathematical problems while shivering in dust-shrouded offices that lacked windows and doors. Moreover, almost nightly attacks deprived staff of much chance of sleep. Fenner reckoned that the codebreakers’ output – the number of signals they broke – diminished by two-thirds in the winter of 1943–44, and never recovered thereafter, amid repeated evacuations and transfers to temporary quarters. He himself was married to a Prussian army officer’s daughter, Elise, and the couple’s spirit was crushed by the death of their only son on the Russian Front. From 1944 to the end of the war, Chi became almost entirely preoccupied with German cipher security – a role in which, of course, it also failed. The struggle to crack higher Allied wireless traffic was almost abandoned. It was left to the tactical eavesdroppers of army radio intelligence in the field to do what they could with lower codes and traffic analysis.
Each month between January and June 1944, Chi logged 3,000 decrypted messages – ‘VNs’, as they were tagged, ‘Verlässliche Nachrichten’, reliable reports – the German equivalent of the British ‘most secret sources’. The vast majority, however, addressed Allied housekeeping issues, or the affairs of such neutrals as the Turks. Fenner and his comrades read a hundred diplomatic signals a day dispatched by twenty-nine secondary powers, which generated hectares of paper and helped to convey to themselves, and in some degree also to their superiors, an illusion of useful activity. They wasted much effort cracking messages out of ‘real time’: an extreme example was a report from Japan’s Moscow ambassador about the economic and military condition of the Soviet Union, dispatched to Tokyo on 10 December 1943. This was finally broken on 11 October 1944; a copy fell into American hands after the war, annotated by a Chi clerk ‘solved after delay’.
Germany’s finest cryptanalysts also cracked a 23 August 1944 Argentine message from Beunos Aires to London which read: ‘The Economic Office for Sugar and Alcohol approves the extension of the intermediate agreement for 2 years and deems it suitable to ask for an increase of the quota.’ If this seems banal, in 1945 the Allies captured thousands of painstakingly filed ‘VNs’ that made even less exciting reading. Until 1943 the Germans could claim some useful, though never decisive, codebreaking successes. For the rest of the war, however, Chi illuminated little more than sugar quotas. Bletchley, Arlington Hall and Op-20-G mined plenty of dross, but in its midst were seams of gold. Berlin could boast no such assaying triumph.
2 ‘CICERO’
It is a scene from some 1920s Hollywood espionage drama: in a sumptuous diplomatic drawing-room, a mustachioed aristocrat with a name that defies parody plays Beethoven on a grand piano, while upstairs a villainous little Balkan servant photographs his secret papers for sale to the enemy. The British take just pride in their intelligence triumphs in World War II, but the staff problems of Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, ambassador to Turkey, represent a sorrier aspect of the record. It was one of the German secret service’s last successes, if it can be dignified as such, for it did scant service to Hitler’s cause.
Knatchbull-Hugessen had served in Ankara since 1938, living with his wife Mary at the British residence beside the embassy in the hills of Cancaya, above the capital. It is well known to history that in 1943–44 he employed a valet who sold his secrets to the Germans. It is less familiar, and almost defies credibility, that as early as 1941 the Abwehr was receiving material from his safe, lifted by other hands. In October and November of that year Dr Viktor Friede, Canaris’s local station chief, boasted that he had accessed Hugessen’s papers. Moreover, in a second January 1943 incident, the ambassador’s then valet Andrea Marovic telephoned the German embassy to report his master’s departure for Adana to meet Winston Churchill. When the Foreign Office in London got wind of this and instructed Hugessen to dismiss Marovic, he prevaricated. He said that he could scarcely be expected to fulfil his duties without a valet, and would do nothing until a substitute was recruited. The Foreign Office scolded Hugessen, saying the matter was ‘a serious one which admits of no delay’. Marovic was belatedly dismissed on 15 May, and temporarily replaced by a footman. Two months later, Hugessen hired Elyesa Bazna to fill the role, despite being warned against the man by the Turkish authorities.
Bazna was a self-confessed rogue, greedy and always in trouble. The son of a Muslim religious teacher, born in southern Yugoslavia when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, he drifted through a series of chauffeuring jobs from which he was sacked for incompetence, and once served a sentence in a French penal camp where he acquired some lockpicking skill. On his release, in his own words, ‘I became what everybody becomes who has never learned a job and has nothing behind him but his wits – a kavass.’ As a domestic servant and chauffeur he worked successively for American, Yugoslav, German and finally British employers. Fancying his own voice, in off-duty hours he trained to become a professional singer. By 1943, however, this cocky little man found himself depressed by his own condition: he was thirty-eight, and a self-avowed failure. While working at the German embassy he idly photographed a few letters, which prompted an inspiration: ‘I was a person of no consequence … Why not set up as a spy?’
He secured a domestic post with the first secretary at the British embassy in Ankara, and began reading his employer’s private papers between leisurely baths in the residence bathroom. He also embarked on an affair with the secretary’s teenage nanny Mara: ‘her arms were entwined around my neck more often than my fourteen ties’. Their relationship continued when Bazna became the ambassador’s valet, and she was a wide-eyed witness to his transition from casual villain to committed spy. After his luncheon, the ambassador invariably played the piano in the drawing-room, leaving his keys within reach of Bazna, who made a wax impression of those which opened the dispatch box and safe. Hugessen always took the most important papers into his bedroom, offering the valet and his camera further opportunities. ‘I am doing all this for my country,’ Bazna told Mara solemnly as he set forth for the marketplace – or rather, for the German embassy. He said that he was working to keep Turkey out of the war, while the British and Americans were conspiring to drag her into it.
The wife of German counsellor Albert Jenke – who chanced to be Ribbentrop’s brother-in-law – gave Bazna a frosty reception when he arrived with his first wares late on the night of 26 October 1943: he had once been her own least favourite servant. Bazna announced that he had fifty-six photographed documents to sell for £20,000. Jenke viewed the caller as he might have examined a beetle in the bath,
but duty compelled him to pass Bazna on to a case officer, an Austrian SD man named Ludwig Moyzich who served Schellenberg’s Department VI of the RSHA, under cover as commercial attaché.
Moyzich thought the valet ‘looked like a clown without his make-up’. He was initially disbelieving about both the material and the means by which it had been acquired, which reeked of cheap melodrama – or, more plausibly, of an enemy deception. Bazna claimed that he was motivated by his own father’s killing by the British, but it was obvious that he was a mere mercenary. Berlin duly paid up, and Bazna set about photographing his employer’s papers day after day, then week after week. One stolen memorandum summarised quantities of war material being delivered to Russia by the Western Allies; there was much correspondence about Britain’s efforts to drag Turkey into the war; most appetising of all, in German eyes, was a summary of exchanges between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at their November 1943 summit meeting in Tehran. Properly analysed in Berlin, the latter material could have told the Germans a good deal about the Allies’ most closely guarded secret, Operation ‘Overlord’, the planned invasion of France. But this document, like others from the same source, never received the sort of imaginative scrutiny it deserved. Within a few months Bazna – whom the Germans codenamed ‘Cicero’ – had secreted a fortune, £300,000 in sterling. It was enough. He was rich, and he was losing his nerve.
In January 1944, Roosevelt informed Churchill of an OSS report that a German agent had secured details of diplomatic negotiations between Britain and Turkey. The British assumed a leak from Turkish sources, but this was of course the work of Bazna. Fritz Kolbe of the German Foreign Ministry had tipped off Allen Dulles in Switzerland, who in turn informed Washington. A month later, with British intelligence increasingly convinced that the leak came from the ambassador’s staff, Bill Cavendish-Bentinck prepared deception documents – supposed war cabinet papers relating to peace feelers from Bulgaria to the Allies – which were placed in Knatchbull-Hugessen’s briefcase.
Nobody touched the bait. Bazna had downed tools as both a spy and a valet. Abandoning both his British and his German employers, in April 1944 he set off on a riotous spending spree, and indulged this for some weeks before both he and the hotels he patronised discovered that the Germans had paid him in forged British banknotes. He should have guessed as much when they so readily surrendered such huge sums. Despite a spasm of dubious fame when his story became public after the war, he died broke in 1970, his vainglorious dreams shattered. Given the game Bazna played, however, he might consider himself fortunate to have preserved his life and freedom.
When the Foreign Office learned of the ‘Cicero’ affair, Knatchbull-Hugessen merely mumbled that he had found Bazna ‘a good servant’. Incredibly, although recalled from Ankara, he was given another posting in Brussels. When captured German files revealed the full facts in 1945, the permanent under-secretary Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote in his diary: ‘“Snatch”, of course, ought to be court-martialled, but I must think over this.’ Cadogan’s eventual decision was predictable: the foremost imperative must be to protect the Foreign Office’s reputation, which meant shielding this booby to whom an ambassadorship had been entrusted. Though Knatchbull-Hugessen received a ‘severe’ formal reprimand in August 1945, he was allowed to retire on full pension two years later, and published a complacent memoir of his diplomatic career before the Ankara débâcle became public knowledge.
Stewart Menzies fulminated over the ‘Cicero’ case, calling it ‘an appalling national disaster’. It was certainly true that it reflected deplorably upon the Foreign Office. Though it became the most notorious example of diplomatic insecurity, it was by no means the only one. When the story was revealed to the world by Bazna himself in the 1950s, many people expressed amazement that, with such figures as Knatchbull-Hugessen in positions of influence, the Allies had won the war. It defied imagination that a British ambassador in a sensitive neutral capital should have exposed his personal papers to the attentions of a newly employed Yugoslav valet – to three successive ones, had the full facts been known. The cover-up after the event, protecting from disgrace an Old Etonian schoolfriend of Anthony Eden, reflected the worst traditions of the British Establishment.
How much, however, did the coup profit the Nazi war effort? Hugh Trevor-Roper, in his May 1945 assessment of German intelligence, mused about Berlin’s failure to exploit the Hugessen papers. Broadway knew that Walter Schellenberg’s exaggerated respect for MI6 caused him to assume that ‘Cicero’ was a British plant. Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘Thus the most successful scoop of [the RSHA’s] Amt VI, being the capture of genuine documents from which the nature and incidence of “Overlord” might have been inferred, was never acted upon.’ For months after ‘Cicero’s’ material started to reach Berlin, it was dismissed as an Allied deception. When it was belatedly acknowledged as authentic in the spring of 1944, OKW did make the significant deduction that the Allies would launch no major operation in the Mediterranean while they addressed the liberation of France, which was obviously imminent. But Hitler dissented. The only decision-maker who mattered continued to believe that some Balkan initiative by the Allies was still plausible. As for the spy himself, when Bazna quit there is no evidence that anybody in Berlin cared. By that stage of the war, the glimpses he provided of Allied motions seemed of little practical value to the Nazi cause, even had they been credited.
An overriding handicap to exploitation of the ‘Cicero’ documents, like all other German intelligence product, was that by the winter of 1943–44 the initiative in the war had passed irretrievably to the Allies. Intelligence must inform action, and there was now no course available to Germany to counter Anglo-American initiatives, even granted secret knowledge of them. In August 1944 Turkey broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, though wisely declining to become a full belligerent. With or without the insights on British diplomacy provided by ‘Cicero’, nothing could change the overarching reality, plain to the Ankara government, that the Germans were losers.
3 THE FANTASISTS
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris insisted to the end of his life that the Abwehr produced sound information, which Germany’s high command failed to use. This was nonsense. The Wehrmacht acquired some good operational intelligence through codebreaking, direct observation, eavesdropping, staff analysis and air reconnaissance while the Luftwaffe was able to fly, but the Abwehr could scarcely blame on Hitler’s interference the fact that its foreign informants were contemptible, most much less impressive than ‘Cicero’. Countess Freda Douglas, for instance, was the wife of a well-known German agent, Albrecht Archibald Douglas. She left Romania in 1940 following an arrest on espionage charges, then after falling out with her husband travelled to America, where she was arrested by the FBI after Allied decrypts from Chile mentioned a ‘Countess D’. She told her interrogators that she had agreed to provide information after being threatened by the Nazis’ Santiago embassy.
In 1942 Prince Charles de Ligne was arrested by the Abwehr and sentenced to death after confessing to aiding the Belgian Resistance. He was reprieved, however, after ‘giving his word of honour as an officer and a prince’ that he would switch sides and work loyally for Germany. He was thereafter sent to Spain, but promptly abandoned his employers and made his way to Britain. Major Brede, his handler, later told Allied interrogators that he had always doubted the sincerity of de Ligne’s change of allegiance, but ‘ran the risk because the Abwehr was at that time very short of useful contacts’.
Werner Waltemath, born in Germany in 1909, emigrated to Brazil in 1930. A decade later he returned to visit his sick mother, was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and trained as a wireless-operator. In July 1941 the Abwehr sent him back to Brazil, where he built his own radio transmitter. As soon as he tapped out his MNT callsign, however, this was pinpointed by US direction-finders. Similarly, Brazilian police alerted by the Americans intercepted secret letters he dispatched to Madrid, containing microdots and reports written in phenol invisible ink
. On 1 June 1943 Waltemath’s house was raided by police, who found his radio, microfilm and other paraphernalia concealed in a cavity under the living-room floor. He received a twenty-five-year jail sentence, while a fellow-expatriate whom he had recruited to his network, Hans-Christian von Kitze, became a double agent for the British.
Three barely literate Moroccans, stranded in France, were trained at the Abwehr spy school in Angers, then dispatched to report back from their own country. The only communication the Germans received thereafter was a letter, written in Aspro invisible ink, thanking them for their kindly treatment, and for the invaluable assistance in getting home. A French Abwehr spy named du Chaffault, twenty-six years old and from Tours, recruited in 1942, proposed himself for a posting to Montevideo, which he may have considered a safe distance from the war. He was trained for a mission to the United States, and lacking wireless skills was provided with invisible inks. In July 1943, OKW sanctioned his move to America. To travel first into Spain, he was provided with a German passport in the name of Wenzel, several hundred dollars and some pesetas, with the promise of more if he produced results. He reached Bilbao, where he acquired a local girlfriend. When he left the city, he told her that he would be sending her letters from America for onward transmission to the Abwehr. Thereafter, the Germans and the Spanish girl alike lost track of him. Most likely, and in common with the rest of the above, he vanished into the mass of human flotsam clinging to a fugitive existence in every community in Europe.
