Fritz carried out the entire operation by manipulating the papers in a drawer of his desk hidden from prying eyes. Unfortunately, the wax caught fire and the operation almost turned into a disaster. He just managed to save his package and put out the flames. After wiping his forehead and opening the window to dispel the odor of burnt paper, Fritz went back to work with his heart pounding. Finally the package was ready. Fritz was not dissatisfied with the result: the seal marked with the eagle and the swastika had a rigorously authentic appearance. As for the weight of the package, he knew that diplomatic pouches were never weighed, neither going nor coming.
Fritz took the early evening train on Wednesday, October 6 from the Anhalter Bahnhof, as he did the first time (departure at 8:20). Ordinarily, the trip from Berlin to Basel took sixteen hours. But because of air raids, delays had become very frequent, and the trip might last as long as three days. Once he was in his compartment, he called the attendant of his car aside and, handing him a handsome tip, asked to be the first to be warned if there was an alert. “I am terrified of bombs and I would be a bit reassured if you were to warn me in advance,” he said. In fact, Fritz wanted to have time to get rid of his documents in case of danger.
At four in the morning, the porter rapped sharply on the door of his compartment. “Blue alert, sir,” he said. That meant that an attack was imminent. It was not yet a “red alert,” but he had to act quickly. The train had stopped. Fritz had kept his clothes on. He quickly got off the train holding his briefcase close to himself. The spot was deserted. They were in the middle of the woods, “probably between Frankfurt and Karlsruhe.” The moon lit up the rails. Then the other passengers began scrambling out of the train. A baby cried. A man yelled that he had lost something in the confusion. Fritz took cover in a ditch below the tracks.
At that point a plane headed directly for the train. It was a light English bomber, a Mosquito, an isolated plane flying low. The plane fired a few salvos at the locomotive. There was no answering fire: a passenger train like this one had no antiaircraft guns. The plane soon disappeared. But a few moments later, a huge explosion was heard a few hundred meters in front of the train. The plane had dropped a bomb on a trestle. Although not completely destroying it, the bomb had seriously damaged the track, making it impossible to continue the trip. There was a long wait before another train could replace the first one, on the other side of the trestle. Night passed, morning, and afternoon. Finally the journey could continue. The passengers had to cross the trestle over a precipice on foot, which took a long time. Fritz was irritated that he had lost an entire day from his schedule.
Going through customs in Basel was nerve-wracking. As much as, if not more than the first time, Fritz had violent stomach pains and was perspiring so profusely that he was afraid of attracting the attention of the customs agents. He knew that in the event of a thorough search, he would have no hope of escape. Nothing was worse than this precise moment. A German customs agent was looking at him with a particularly suspicious air. Did he suspect? Fritz tried to maintain all the composure at his command. He looked directly into the eyes of the man in uniform, attempting to keep his gaze as cold as possible, keeping his pouch in plain sight under his arm (“above all, appear to have nothing to hide,” he said to himself). The official motioned him through.
Even though he was still in the “German station” of Basel, Fritz was now in Switzerland. He headed for the men’s room and locked himself in a toilet. He tore open the outer envelope and removed the documents not intended for the German legation in Bern and put them in his coat. The official envelope was replaced in his briefcase. He burned the now superfluous envelope and flushed the ashes down the bowl. He went out and took a taxi across the Rhine to the Swiss station of Basel (Basel SBB), where he caught the train to Bern. Before getting on the train, he found a telephone booth from which he called 146 at Adelboden, Ernst Kocherthaler’s number. The Americans were immediately informed that “Wood” had arrived.
It was Thursday, October 7, late at night, when Fritz arrived in Bern. His friend Ernst was already in town. The next morning, after delivering the diplomatic mail to the German legation, he and Fritz met at a café, as they had the first time. Ernst informed Fritz that the Americans had impatiently been waiting for his return and that they wanted to see him that very evening. “At 11:30 tonight, Gerald Mayer will pick you up in his car on Kirchenfeld bridge. It’s a Triumph sportscar. You will wait in the shadows at the southern end of the bridge. To identify himself, he’ll switch on his headlights once he’s in the middle of the bridge. They are blue because of the curfew.”
That evening the meeting took place as planned. At 11:30, Fritz jumped into Gerry Mayer’s car. “Glad to see that you made it back again,” he said in a friendly voice, adding that they were going to see Mr. Douglas. Fritz admired Gerry Mayer’s handsome Triumph, wanted to talk to him about the Horch that he had had to give up because of the war, but unfortunately the trip was very short. After taking a few narrow cobblestone streets in the old city, Mayer steered his car onto a road along the River Aare. The Triumph was going very slowly, with no lights. Soon it reached a point below the Kirchenfeld bridge whose metal outline could be seen forty meters above. The height seemed dizzying. Mayer turned off the engine. At this very dark spot, there were few passersby and it was easy to pass unseen. Mayer asked Fritz to get out alone and explained how to get to Dulles’s house through the garden in back, up a steep path through dense shrubbery. “Go on alone. I’ll rejoin you up there in a little while. You’re expected.”
A few minutes later, Fritz Kolbe was in Herrengasse 23. Glass in hand, he savored this moment of stolen freedom and appreciated the very “old England” comfort of the ground floor living room. The principal lighting in the room came from a large fire in the fireplace. Allen Dulles—a poker in one hand, his pipe in the other—frequently stirred the fire and added logs when necessary. Gerald Mayer arrived a few minutes later. Dulles contemplated the sheaf of documents that Fritz had just deposited on a coffee table. There were two hundred pages of documents, half copies of cables, half Fritz’s handwritten notes in German, in a cramped handwriting that only Ernst Kocherthaler was able to decipher. Dulles did not have time to read the documents in detail that night. Out of curiosity, he skimmed through the “delivery.”
The ambassador of the Reich in Paris, Otto Abetz, gave a list of the French whom he suspected of sympathizing with the Allies and whom he recommended should be arrested. From Spain, there was a message that the Falangist authorities had agreed to make new deliveries of “oranges” to Germany. The “oranges,” as Fritz was to explain a short time later, designated tungsten, a strategic material that the German armaments industry desperately needed. From Latin America came information that a particular Allied sea lane was threatened by U-boats in the Atlantic. Was Dulles interested? He let nothing show.
The conversation continued late into the night. Even more than the documents he had brought from Berlin, Fritz’s opinions seemed to intrigue the Americans. They asked him even more questions than in August. He indicated on a map of Berlin some sites that, according to him, were worth bombing. “This particular Telefunken plant produces precision instruments for the Luftwaffe…. There in the Lichterfelde district is the enlarged SS barracks, housing the Leibstandarte SS, Hitler’s personal guard.”
Fritz had time to dwell at some length on his motivations, his family, his opinions. The Americans wanted to gather information, but they also wanted to determine whether Fritz contradicted himself and whether his explanations were plausible. They spoke again of the Wandervogel, and at length about Madrid and Cape Town. Fritz was made to understand that no detail was superfluous. Dulles and Mayer were interested in everything, including details that might seem useless. “Where are the principal shoe factories in Germany?” they asked him in the course of the conversation.
Life in Berlin and the general atmosphere of the capital of the Reich seemed to interest them just as much as revela
tions of a political or military nature. Fritz was asked to speak of his friends and contacts in Berlin. He naturally mentioned his friend Karl Dumont in the ministry, but also Count Waldersee, the Wehrmacht officer whom he had met in Professor Sauerbruch’s circle, with whom he had hit it off in the summer of 1943.
Between Friday, October 8 and Tuesday, October 12, the date of his departure for Berlin, Fritz came to see Dulles several times, using all possible tricks to avoid being followed. He slipped furtively through the arcades of the old city, plunged into shops that had back doors, and multiplied zigzag movements, always arriving at the back door of Herrengasse 23. Most of the time, meetings took place late at night. In his nocturnal movements through Bern, Fritz wore his hat pulled low on his forehead and used a different coat from the one he wore during the day. To avoid attracting the slightest suspicion, he accepted all dinner invitations from his colleagues in the legation. Dulles and Mayer never saw him arrive before eleven at night and did not let him leave before two or three in the morning. He came to see Dulles in company with Ernst Kocherthaler. The two friends had stopped meeting during the day, because they thought that their connection might attract suspicion.
This nocturnal activity was harmful to Fritz’s reputation. The managers of the Hotel Jura looked at him strangely. Obviously they were suspicious of him. Was the hotel in contact with the Gestapo? To avoid any unpleasant surprises, Fritz decided to pass himself off as a Don Juan. In his discussions with colleagues from the German legation, he frequently spoke teasingly of the “pretty Swiss women, who were not all that timid.” One night, he spent a few hours in a brothel in Bern (Café Colombine), after which he made an appointment with a local doctor who specialized in venereal diseases. At the end of the visit, he was presented with a bill, which he carefully preserved in order to have concrete evidence available in the event of a later interrogation.
On Tuesday, October 12, 1943, Fritz had to leave for Berlin. Before his departure, the Americans agreed with him about ways of improving their future collaboration. It was not certain whether Fritz would be able to return to Bern anytime soon: Diplomatic courier assignments were handed out sparingly. Could they figure out a secure and regular means of communication? Sending mail to Ernst Kocherthaler, as Fritz had done with his September 16 letter, was much too dangerous for everyone. “You have to be much more cautious!” the Americans admonished him.
One idea was decided on: Fritz could from time to time send to a third person based in Bern a perfectly innocuous message on an ordinary postcard. Alerted by this signal, the Americans would know that Dr. Bur had brought home to Obernai “material” provided by Fritz in Berlin. An American agent could come to get the package in Alsace a few days later. The envoy would be introduced as M. or Mme. König. It was decided that Fritz’s “mailbox” in Bern would be that of Kocherthaler’s brother-in-law, Walter Schuepp. A librarian by profession, Walter Schuepp was, according to Fritz, a “good Swiss citizen” who was perfectly ordinary. He had the twofold advantage of being completely unnoticed in the local scene and of living very near the OSS offices in Bern (his address was Gryphenhübeliweg 19). Even though they were not really very close, Ernst Kocherthaler trusted him enough to involve him in this delicate enterprise.
And suppose the Americans wanted to contact their agent in Berlin? Fritz proposed a scenario: “One of your contacts in Berlin just has to call me at my office (telephone number: 11.00.13) claiming to be ‘Georg Merz.’ We’ll arrange to meet at my apartment on Kurfürstendamm.” Dulles and Mayer carefully noted this proposal. What Fritz did not know was that apart from him, the Americans had no contacts in Berlin. Even if they had, they never would have sent one of their agents to Fritz’s apartment, not yet being able to state with certainty whether he was a sincere friend of the Allies or a double agent working for the Gestapo.
Fritz was delighted with these secret arrangements. The more schemes and complicated tricks there were, the happier he was. He insisted that he be informed by certain coded signals whether his messages had in fact been received. Thanks to his contacts in business circles who were constantly going back and forth between Switzerland and the Reich, Ernst Kocherthaler could have food parcels sent to Fritz, containing sardines, butter, coffee … These parcels, Fritz suggested, could be sent at regular intervals but would contain coffee only if the messages from Berlin had been received in Bern. The Americans and Kocherthaler were not enthusiastic, but they promised Fritz that they would do as he wished.
Before leaving, “Kaiser” wanted to repay the 200 Swiss francs that he had been given on his first trip by Allen Dulles. In order to do this, he had brought with him two gold rings (probably the wedding rings from his two marriages). He wanted to exchange them for money at a jewelry shop in Bern. The Americans dissuaded him, telling him that he should use his time for more useful things. They nevertheless agreed to keep the two rings as mementos of him.
Fritz asked the Americans if they could give him a revolver, but Dulles and Mayer thought that a firearm would only worsen his case if he were caught. Fritz was disappointed, but in any case he had what he needed in Berlin—in a drawer at home he kept a little revolver that he had brought back from South Africa, and he counted on using it on the day when the Gestapo came to arrest him.
The return train trip from Bern to Berlin went off without incident or air raids. He left on Thursday afternoon and arrived in Berlin the following morning. Among the diplomatic cables he was carrying in his briefcase was one from the chief of the German legation in Switzerland, Otto Köcher, telling Ribbentrop that Swiss neutrality would be preserved at all costs. “Switzerland cannot join the Allied cause,” he wrote in this cable of October 7, 1943. It was known in Berlin that the Americans were putting pressure on Switzerland, whose airfields they wanted to use for raids on Germany. Otto Köcher was well informed: The leaders in Bern had no intention of quarreling with Germany.
London, November 1943
Colonel David K. E. Bruce, head of the OSS in London, was a multimillionaire, a Democrat, and the son of a senator and son-in-law of Andrew Mellon, the American steel magnate and former secretary of the treasury. All information coming from Europe passed through him and his services before being communicated to OSS headquarters in Washington. In late November 1943, David Bruce received a note from Norman Holmes Pearson, his colleague in charge of counterespionage (X-2) in London. This eight-page note concerned Fritz Kolbe (“Subject: Wood case”). This was a synthesis of everything that had been written by the Americans and the English since early August about “George Wood.”
The document was full of mistakes, including in the presentation of facts: “On 16.8.43 an individual known as Wood appeared in Geneva carrying a diplomatic bag from the German FO…. His first approach was through a German Jew named Kochenthaler.” In this note, Fritz Kolbe was presented as a “somewhat naïve and romantic idealist” who “made no special effort to find out which of the cables were of special interest,” but who “made no attempt to lead the conversation into any particular channels.”
Dansey’s theory, according to which Kolbe was a navy officer who had been a double agent in the 1920s, was reiterated as a plausible hypothesis. What could be concealed behind “George Wood”? A German attempt to decipher the OSS Bern messages? To avoid this risk, everything had been done to confuse matters: none of the cables transmitted by “Wood” had been transcribed and “sent in the German text or even a literal English translation summary of the original cable,” in communications between Bern and London. Every proper name had been changed, whether of people or places. “We are keeping close watch on cipher security in re-wording,” Dulles wrote in one of his secret messages to Washington. In accordance with these elementary precautions, the word Grand meant the German foreign minister, Porto designated a German foreign embassy or legation, Grimm was used for Germany or German, Zulu was the equivalent of the United Kingdom, Red was France, Storm designated the German legation in Bern, Vinta was Ribbentrop, Apple was Ot
to Abetz, Fat Boy was Göring … Hitler had no alias.
Another hypothesis: “Wood” was working for a sophisticated operation aimed at drawing the Americans into a trap. He came to Bern only to awaken their interest in order to be in a better position to deceive them a little later on. That could not be ruled out. But an analysis of Wood’s messages did not provide anything, for the moment, to support that hypothesis. “To the contrary, a certain amount of interesting material from an X-2 [counterespionage] point of view has been revealed.”
In particular, Fritz Kolbe had provided material to help identify “Josephine,” a mysterious mole well placed in London who was providing high-class information to the Germans. Thanks to “Wood” and the Ultra machine, the British identified the spy, about whom they knew that he was supervised at a distance by the Abwehr office in Stockholm. The British secret services discovered that “Josephine” was the Swedish naval attaché in London, Johann Gabriel Oxenstierna, a diplomat who was particularly well informed about the movements and preparations of the Royal Navy.
Count Oxenstierna was not himself an agent of the Reich, but his professional mail was read at the defense ministry in Stockholm by a secretary who was working for the Germans. The Abwehr’s liaison agent in Stockholm was Karl-Heinz Krämer, known as “Hektor” in the secret German documents. In September 1943, London demanded that the Swedish authorities recall the naval attaché. They reacted sharply and took several months to accede to the demand. Finally, Count Oxenstierna was expelled in the spring of 1944. A certain number of high British officials, who had been particularly talkative in their discussions with “Josephine,” were disciplined.
Fritz Kolbe’s credibility was no doubt increased by the discovery of “Josephine.” However, in early November, the number-two of the British secret services, Claude Dansey, asserted that “there is nothing in them [Wood’s cables] which could affect the course of the war.” Others, beginning with Allen Dulles, were less categorical. Fritz Kolbe had enabled the Americans to put pressure on Ireland to put an end to German espionage activities in that country. The Dublin authorities had been urged to confiscate a clandestine radio transmitter, the existence of which Kolbe had revealed. Moreover, Kolbe made it possible to verify the impact of some of the Allied bombing of major German cities. For example, he provided the official Nazi report of bombings on October 2 and 3, 1943: “EMDEN: 20 bombs struck the Nordsee Werfte. MUNICH: IG Farben has been severely hit, also Dynamit AG, Allgemeine Transport Gesellschaft, Metzeler Gummi Werke … Slaughterhouse and main railway station were also hit. KASSEL: damage was done to Panzer locomotives and howitzers at the Herschel Werke. Junkers factory was not hit.”
A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America's Most Important Spy in World War II Page 14
