Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  The only way to get an agent into Russia was through a legitimate port of entry, where travelers were closely scrutinized and thence watched throughout their stay. Moreover, the Russians used a system of infiltration inherited from the days of the Czar. Prospective spies against Russia were recruited all over Europe and smuggled into the Soviet Union, where they immediately fell into the arms of the secret police. The recruiters were agents provocateurs.

  In the face of such barriers, Canaris did not relish his new assignment. Such information as the Abwehr had was being obtained from four sources: from study of the few clues that appeared in Soviet publications, from legitimate returning travelers, from various exiles, and from Herr Klatt.

  This inscrutable man (whose real name and true identity were never established) was the Secret Agent Extraordinary of the Abwehr against the Soviet Union. Who he was, how he looked, and what made him work for the Abwehr, aside from purely mercenary considerations, I do not know. He was one of those wayward adventurers one encounters everywhere in the Balkans, making an obscure but lucrative living from all sorts of deals, some legitimate—most of them shady. Klatt lived in Sofia in the 1930’s. There he was engaged in business that apparently had nothing to do with systematic espionage until suddenly he blossomed out as a secret agent on a massive scale. He gained access to Soviet secrets and looked around for some organization on which he could unload them for the greatest profit. A survey quickly revealed to him that nobody but the Germans would be his customers; all others, interested as they were in his material, had no substantial funds to pay for it.

  At that time, in 1938, the Abwehr was not yet in residence in Bulgaria, so Klatt had to go all the way to Austria to make the initial contact. Shortly after the Anschluss, the Munich branch of the Abwehr was moved to Vienna and given expanded jurisdiction over the whole of southeastern Europe. It operated under a General Staff officer, Colonel Marogna-Radwitz, a devoutly Catholic, dignified and decent, Bavarian nobleman.

  In August, 1938, Klatt arrived in Vienna and was taken by a mutual friend to the colonel. He impressed Count Marogna, not so much with his personality (colorful but obnoxious), as with the material he had brought along and with his bona fides. He came to the first meeting with a startling amount of intelligence, especially about the innards of the Soviet Air Force. He claimed to have a link to the Soviet Legation in Sofia and said he was receiving the bulk of his information from the Soviet Union via short-wave radio. Although he was extremely accommodating, he steadfastly refused to reveal anything more about his sources, but he did volunteer to leave his material with the Abwehr so that it might be examined closely before a deal was made. Marogna promptly forwarded the dossiers to Berlin where they created a sensation. This was exceptional material and Klatt was greeted as the first gusher in an otherwise barren field.

  His material stood the test of the most painstaking checking. The discovery of this remarkable agent was considered so important that it was reported directly to the Chief of the General Staff, an unusual step, and, from then on, the Klatt material was handled with top priority by special officers in Berlin. His data became the basis of German planning against the U.S.S.R. on the highest echelon, something few spies in history could claim.

  When the deal was made (and it was fantastic in terms of money; Klatt was extremely expensive), the new master spy returned to Sofia to become the top ranking secret agent—and virtually the only direct-action spy—the Abwehr had working full-time in this important sector of the secret war. This phenomenal spy never disappointed his employers. And he never ceased to intrigue them. Marogna tried everything, as did Section III of the Abwehr, to penetrate this man’s secret. All efforts over a period of years to disclose anything at all about Klatt personally, and about his sources, proved in vain, and so in due course the usual suspicion arose that he was probably a Soviet intelligence officer planted with authentic information so that he could palm off misleading intelligence on the Germans when it really mattered.

  The suspicions seemed confirmed when several of Klatt’s claims were proven false. A day-and-night surveillance showed that, contrary to his statements, he had absolutely no contact with the Soviet diplomatic mission. Whenever he claimed he had received material from the Soviet Union by short-wave, the Abwehr monitors could find no trace whatsoever of such traffic. And yet, the intelligence was there and it proved authentic in all instances.

  A special effort was made to infiltrate the Soviet secret police for the sole purpose of finding out something about the suspected double agent. It was a complicated and costly affair, but all it revealed was that the Russians had some inkling of a monumental leak somewhere, but knew nothing about Klatt or his activities.

  Had the Germans searched for Klatt’s secret in Bucharest instead of Sofia, they would have read at least part of the riddle. The spy’s actual source was neither the Soviet Legation in Sofia nor some mysterious informants in the Red Army General Staff, but solely the obscure correspondent of a Tokyo newspaper, Isono Kiyosho by name, who had his headquarters in the Rumanian capital. From the correspondent the lines led straight to a house in a Toyko suburb, to the residence of Dr. Richard Sorge, the Soviet’s own master spy. Not that Sorge acted as a double agent, working also for the Germans, not directly, that is. Yet indirectly, without his own knowledge, he was doing exactly that. His network extended all the way from Tokyo to New York, with many way-stations along the route, including one in Bucharest. In the Rumanian capital, Kiyosho was his agent, receiving information for Sorge and relaying it to Tokyo, and sometimes even directly to Moscow.

  And, Kiyosho-san had still another assignment from Sorge. In Bucharest was located one of the major European outposts of the Japanese Intelligence Service specializing in Soviet matters, and so, Kiyosho’s assignment was to infiltrate that outpost, establish himself within it as a confidential informant, to find out what the Japanese were getting on Russia and from whom.

  Kiyosho did a thorough job. He told Sorge some of what he found out, but most of it he sold to Klatt. It was in this roundabout manner that Klatt could function so phenomenally; he received the intelligence about the Soviet Union from the files of the Japanese secret service through a Japanese newspaperman working for the Soviet Union via a German Communist, and sold it to Germans in the end. Klatt’s success was a testimonial to the superb cunning of that remarkable man, but also to the efficiency of the Japanese secret service, and especially to the utter baseness of the espionage game.

  Klatt served the Germans to the bitter end, because his sources never dried up. Even when Sorge fell down in 1941, Kiyosho continued to function, and, in 1943, Klatt moved to Bucharest on some pretext to be closer to his source. He never succeeded in gaining the unqualified trust of the Germans and was frequently on the verge of being unceremoniously sacked, not because his material was not satisfactory (it was uniformly excellent) but because his mystery continued to disturb his employers. Once, in 1945, only the personal intervention of General Heinz Guderian, then chief of the General Staff, saved his life; the Germans, totally exasperated by Klatt’s impregnable secret, decided to get rid of him for good by sending him to a concentration camp. Guderian was scandalized; the information the man was supplying was so invaluable that the General Staff Chief gave orders to leave Klatt alone, or else, he said, the best source of information about the U.S.S.R. would be lost.

  What happened to Klatt is a matter of conjecture. In March, 1945, when the collapse of Germany was imminent, he arrived in Vienna and appeared at the German secret service office there. He pleaded frantically for aid, trying desperately to escape from the onrushing Russians. He also asked protection for someone else who, however, never showed up: Kiyosho-san. The day after Klatt sought the help of the Germans, he vanished and was never seen again.

  Unlike the Germans who had to put virtually all their Russian eggs into Herr Klatt’s basket, the Poles worked massively on. the Soviet Union and were generally regarded as best informed about the Red Army. I
t was, therefore, with considerable anticipation that Admiral Canaris followed the Wehrmacht into Poland in 1939. He was keenly interested in a house on Pilsud-skego Square: headquarters of the Polish Intelligence Service.

  On October 1, 1939, the Abwehr occupied the house and found it to be in relatively good condition, with a hundred or more large safes intact. Abwehr locksmiths were flown in from Berlin and they went to work with everything from hairpins to blow torches, only to find that most of the safes were empty. Nothing of value was found about Russia, not even the names of individual Polish spies whom the Abwehr could have taken over.

  Shortly afterwards, a German officer on a daily constitutional near the ancient Polish fortress Leigonov noticed that the door to one of the old fort’s casements was wide open, and he entered to inspect the inside of the crumbling relic. He was surprised to find that the place was a vault and contained a number of steel cabinets. It was a part of the archives of Polish Military Intelligence. A hungry crowd of Abwehr specialists descended upon the find, but it also proved disappointing. Much of the data they found about Russia was stale; more of it was glaringly inaccurate; what good there was, the Germans had better.

  Efforts were made nevertheless to locate Polish agents who specialized in the Russians; soon enough, several of them volunteered their services. A special Abwehr-Kommando was set up to organize and direct these people, but their management became too much of a job and disgusted even the Abwehr officers. Most of these volunteers were ordinary scoundrels—unscrupulous, depraved and irresponsible individuals—whose low personal qualities inevitably showed up in their work. Many of them were mainly interested in revenge. They abused their privileged position under the Nazis to settle old accounts, murdering their enemies and especially venting their wrath on helpless Jewk

  More promising agents were imported from Finland and the Baltic states; the Abwehr desired to utilize the surviving intelligence officers of the armies of these countries destroyed by the Russians. Some of these men and women proved valuable recruits, but most of them were also disappointing.

  So the best the Abwehr could do was to smuggle agents across the new demarcation line in Poland and to find out whatever they could about the Red Army occupying the country.

  Most of the Russian equipment the Abwehr spies managed to identify was antiquated stuff in a badly neglected condition. From this, the Abwehr concluded that the Red Army’s armament was generally poor.

  Aside from these Abwehr efforts in the field of tactical intelligence (a low-level activity, whose preoccupation with humdrum technical detail never appealed to Canaris and which, therefore, was woefully neglected in the Fuchsbau), there was an agency within the General Staff that specialized in technical information with emphasis on the Red Army. It was called Fremde Heere Ost ( Foreign Armies East, with a sister agency called Foreign Armies West, concentrating on the French Army). It was headed by a gaunt, stone-faced ascetic intelligence perfectionist, Reinhold Gehlen by name.

  Gehlen was an authentic genius at the game, potentially capable of great things in intelligence, but he was badly hampered at this stage by the usual impediments to intelligence work within General Staffs: low budget, inadequate personnel, limitations of jurisdiction, and incompetence. The strictly restricted authority of his agency was reflected even in Gehlen’s rank. The head of this potentially all-important branch was a mere major.

  On the eve of Barbarossa, and in preparation for it, Gehlen and his specialists had to work solely with the tools available to desk-bound intelligence officers, the reports of military attachés, sources such as newspaper clippings and the oral reports of returning travelers.

  While later in the campaign, Gehlen succeeded in building his organization into an important cog in the German war machine, at this stage, his Foreign Armies East was performing just a little better than the Abwehr and much of the intelligence it succeeded in developing proved as inadequate as that of the Canaris organization. Moreover, his reports rarely reached echelons higher than Gehlen’s own. It never reached the level of Hitler, who urgently needed whatever information he could get.

  This led to a strangely inaccurate assessment of the Russian forces. Most of the Red Army equipment the Abwehr spies and Gehlen’s chair-borne analysts managed to identify in Poland was antiquated stuff in a badly-neglected condition. From this, German Intelligence drew the conclusion that in general, Soviet equipment was inadequate. Later, when the Germans found much high-quality material in the hands of the Red soldiers, Hitler thought the concentration of the old equipment in Poland had been a deliberate Russian ruse to mislead the Abwehr. Whether or not this was true cannot be determined, but after that, Hitler refused to believe virtually anything Canaris or his representatives told him about the Russians. Abwehr agents correctly identified seventy-seven Red Army divisions in Poland, but Hitler’s own intelligence officers questioned that, too. Still later, when he was deep in the Soviet Union, during one of his inconclusive offensives, Hitler was heard to remark ruefully:

  “Look at those Russian Panzers! How good they are, and how little we knew about them beforehand! If the Russians are ahead of us in anything,” he said with scorn, “it is espionage!” These few words reveal his contempt for what he called the Abwehr-Kram, the “hodgepodge rubbish” supplied by his own military intelligence service.

  Where mass was so important, and strategy decisive—in the historic onslaught on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941—intelligence and espionage necessarily played subordinate roles. For once, the Germans embarked upon a campaign with inadequate information about the enemy, but, for the time being, the effects of that inadequacy did not become evident. The situation was different in the Soviet camp, where good intelligence and espionage were a vital weapon, and at first, a sadly-neglected one.

  There was in Berlin in those days a rather obscure American, a forty-eight-year-old Texan named Sam E. (for Edison) Woods, an amazing many-sided man, educational expert, engineer, businessman, diplomat, a self-effacing cosmopolitan with a knack for making friends with men in the know. He had been serving since 1934 as commercial attaché-at-large to the United States Embassy, and he had proved extremely effective as a collector of secret intelligence, with his unassuming ways and his passion for anonymity. In fact, the Germans, who watched several members of the Embassy with eagle eyes, never paid the slightest attention to this “unimportant Mr. Woods.”

  In August, 1940, Woods received in his morning mail a single ticket for a reserved seat in a Berlin movie house, although he had ordered none. He went to the movie house and found in the next seat an acquaintance of his, a prominent German with close links to the High Command via Dr. Hjalmar Schact’s Reichsbank. Woods knew the man as a confirmed anti-Nazi who, however, understood how to conceal his real sentiments.

  They gave no signs of recognition, just sat next to one another, apparently engrossed in the screenplay. The two men went their separate ways when the show was over. At home Woods removed from his pocket a piece of paper that had not been there when he went to the movie house. It informed him that “conferences were then taking place at Hitler’s headquarters concerning preparations for war against Russia.”

  Woods forwarded the information to the State Department, where it was received with considerable skepticism, if only because, as Cordell Hull put it, the intelligence “was in marked contrast to the considerable evidence that Hitler was planning an invasion of Britain.” Woods was instructed, however, to follow up his lead, and several clandestine meetings followed in various movie houses in Berlin. The German assured the American commercial attaché that his information was absolutely reliable; it had come to him from someone in the inner sanctum of the Wehrmacht High Command. “In fact,” he advised Woods, “the air raids on England served as a blind for Hitler’s real and well-calculated plans and preparations for a sudden, devastating attack on Russia.”

  His friend gave Woods details of the rapidly developing “Build-Up East.” Among other things, he advised the A
merican attaché that “an organization of the Wehrmacht had been formed for the old twenty-one Russian Czarist regional governments, and that the economic staffs for these territories had been appointed.” He tipped him off, too, when the Germans began to print bales of Russian banknotes.

  On December 18, Hitler issued his historic Directive No. 21, cloaked under the code name Barbarossa. Even this was distributed only to a small circle of officers, who had to know about it. It contained instructions for elaborate camouflage and deception, with misleading maneuvers going by separate code names—Shark and Harpoon—to give the impression that the build-up was for intensified operations against England from Scandinavian bases.

  No amount of deception could keep the secret from Sam Woods. No sooner was Barbarossa issued than he was given its explicit details by his German friend : the German strategic plan was to drive simultaneously three savage wedges into Russia, the decisive one being in the center, stabbing at Moscow. He was also advised that Hitler had ordered all preparations to be concluded not later than the spring of 1941.

  This was January, 1941. By then, Secretary Hull had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the intelligence. Woods cabled that his information could be corroborated by a prominent German exile in the United States. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long was sent to interview the refugee, who confirmed the information. In January, Hull placed the reports before President Roosevelt.

  The State Department was then holding a series of confidential conferences with Russia in an effort to loosen the tie between Stalin and Hitler. At the conclusion of one of these meetings, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles revealed to Ambassador Konstantin Oumansky the information the Department had about Hitler’s intentions. This was the very first warning the U.S.S.R. had received, but Stalin simply refused to believe it. He regarded it as a clumsy British plant, smuggled to him via America, to muddy the waters of his relations with Hitler. There is reason to believe that he actually resented Oumansky’s decision to forward the report and censured the ambassador for his naïveté.