By the beginning of April, the steady flow of intelligence enabled the British to intensify attacks on the shipping which had to feed Rommel’s forces in Libya on a substantial scale. So effective was this surreptitious co-operation that Commander Malcolm Wanklyn in the submarine Upholder could win the Victoria Cross for his apparently uncanny ability to track down and sink German supply ships. An outstanding victory was scored in April, when a task force of four destroyers was guided to a large convoy. In this one action, fourteen thousand tons of enemy shipping, fully loaded with war materials for Rommel, was destroyed.
As time passed, Ponzo developed better communications with the British. A sympathetic S.I.S. agent in Berne became a pipeline to British Intelligence there. And still later the British managed to plant a clandestine radio transmitter in Rome. Now Ponzo needed a go-between to take information to the operator. His eye fell on the Countess Montarini, an Englishwoman by birth, married to an Italian nobleman, the mother-in-law of a gallant young lieutenant of the Italian Navy. She worked as the direttrice of Elizabeth Arden’s beauty salon.
Each morning, on her way to the shop, the Countess stopped at the church of the Trinità dei Monti for a brief prayer. Leaving, she would stop in front of the church to look down to the elongated Piazza di Spagna below, at the bottom of a flight of steps, inhaling the beauty of the sight.
At this famous Piazza, Rome is at its best. In the center of the square stands Bernini’s fountain, La Barcaccia. It was made in the shape of a barque of war, spouting water from its marble cannons. Leading down to it is the Scala di Spagna, a flight of one hundred and thirty-eight steps.
When the Countess Montarini descended the grand staircase, she might pass a young man who stood on one of the steps. There would be nothing unusual, apparently, in this chance encounter, but, in fact, it was an ingeniously devised means of communication. The step on which the young man waited for the passing of the signora had a special significance. Each of the one hundred and thirty-eight steps meant a specific, separate message according to an elaborate system of codes. Each step had a different meaning when counted from the top or the bottom. Additional messages were passed on by having members of the ring do something specific on individual steps, such as lighting a cigarette, blowing a nose or cupping a hand over an eye.
The Countess was not only a transmission belt; she also gathered much useful information on her own. The Arden Beauty Salon was patronized by many of the most influential women of Rome, including the wives, daughters, and mistresses of Axis diplomats and officers. They gossiped freely while having their hair done, their faces mudpacked, and their nails manicured.
The Countess hired operators who could be trusted and taught them how to listen to the conversations of their celebrated clients and how to pose loaded questions without making them even slightly suspicious. Frequently the mention of a name would start the ball rolling. An operator once reported to the Countess that one of her clients had told her she wanted to be especially attractive since she was to have a reunion with her husband she had not seen for more than a year. She was the wife of a general assigned to the African front. From this pebble of information it was possible to develop the intelligence that the general’s recall had ushered in a complete reorganization of the Italian command structure in Libya.
Meanwhile, in Africa, Rommel went on to his greatest triumphs. He reached his peak in the summer of 1942 when he defeated the Eighth Army between Gazala and Tobruk, and then chased what was left of it almost to Cairo.
The British managed to halt his advance at El Alamein. In August, however, Rommel returned to the offensive, only to be finally checked this time. He could not go beyond El Alamein and saw his chances of conquering Egypt go up in the sand dust of the Western Desert.
There were several factors that robbed him of ultimate glory: the British utilized the interval he had granted them to shake up their high command, to send General Sir Bernard Montgomery to lead the Eighth Army, and to give him adequate reinforcements. But fully as important as what Monty received was what Rommel did not get: reinforcements and supplies via Italy and especially that confounded “shprit”—his word for gasoline.
Marshal Kesselring was sending all the fuel that Rommel was asking for, but somehow only a fraction of what left Italy ever arrived in Africa. As Liddell Hart put it, the Desert Fox was “vitally crippled by the submarine sinkings of the petrol tankers crossing the Mediterranean.”
The Germans were sure there was a leak. A special detachment of the usually infallible Funkabwehr, the Abwehr’s radio monitoring service, was brought to Italy to search for outgoing messages. They failed to find a single suspicious signal. Another special detachment, this one from Abwehr III (counter-espionage) was sent into Italy, and, in close co-operation with the brave carabinieri of Section E of the S.I.S., they instituted a manhunt for the presumed spies. The source of the leak was never found. The leak itself was never plugged.
What actually happened was simplicity itself. Since wars cannot be conducted in silence, the Italians had to advise their African command about these convoys. Their routing was radioed to Africa in a naval code that nobody expected the enemy to break. But someone at the Italian end had slipped the key of that sacrosanct code to the British and also advised them promptly whenever the code was changed.
Rommel was effectively deprived of his “shprit.” In the words of Captain Liddell Hart: “That decided the issue, and once the enemy began to collapse at their extreme forward point they were not capable of any serious stand until they had reached the western end of Libya, more than a thousand miles back.”
Ponzo’s operation continued until the Italian Armistice in September, 1943. When the Germans occupied Rome, the city became too hot for him; and he was needed in Taranto, to the south, where the Italian Navy was being resurrected to a new life in a new war, this time to do exactly what most of its flag officers wanted, to fight against the Germans.
On October 10th, Max Ponzo sneaked out of Rome. Disguised as a straggler, he succeeded in making his way to Taranto where he was received with open arms. The morning after his arrival, he was named chief of the reconstituted Italian Naval Intelligence, with the wholehearted approval of the Allies.
The situation in Rome remained in excellent hands. Admiral Maugeri disappeared underground and became one of the chiefs of the resistance organization inside the Eternal City.
Countess Montarini’s position became untenable. She could no longer maintain her masquerade. Her son-in-law, the naval lieutenant who was himself on the periphery of the ring, escaped to the Allies at the first opportunity, and that tipped off the Germans to the mother-in-law’s true sentiments. With the help of friends, she vanished from sight, although she never left Rome. She disappeared into the vast palace complex of Prince Colonna, where she remained in hiding until that June day of 1944, when at long last Rome was liberated by the Allies.
15
A Man Called “Ramsey”
In the spring of 1935, a tourist arrived in New York en route to Berlin from Tokyo. He registered at the Hotel Lincoln on West 44th Street as Dr. Richard Sorge, a foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of Germany’s major newspapers.
The intelligence services of various countries had tried to keep up-to-date biographical cards on this fascinating man, but it proved somewhat difficult to follow him on his erratic course. His “suspect card” in the files of American counter-intelligence dated back to 1929 and contained a number of melodramatic entries. It put down Sorge as a very important member of the great Soviet espionage apparatus.
This Sorge was a melancholy intellectual who had been born in Baku, in Southern Russia, in 1895. His grandfather was Adolph Sorge, secretary to Karl Marx at the time of the First International; his father was a German engineer working for an oil firm in the Caucasus; his mother was more obscure, said to be a Russian. He was a sensitive, good-natured, studious boy, somewhat spoiled by his parents who called him “Ika.”
When, as a youngster, he moved with his family to Germany and found out more about his grandfather’s association with Marx, he became deeply interested in Socialism. The First World War (in which he fought at Ypern and Langemark) supplied the ferment for his ideas and, when it came to an end, young Richard groped his way to the Bolsheviks. A strange woman played an important part in Sorge’s conversion. She was the wife of a professor under whom he studied at Kiel University, the familiar neglected faculty wife who lures a student into a campus romance. She was considerably older than Sorge and she turned him into a fanatical idealist and took him to the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks received him with open arms and gave him odd conspiratorial jobs in various parts of Europe. Eventually he was absorbed by the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army General Staff and became a full-time Soviet espionage agent. Inside the apparatus he was known by the cover name “Ramsey.”
He was a key operative in the “Shanghai Conspiracy,” a major espionage operation of the late Twenties and early Thirties, when Soviet interest was focused on China. From Shanghai he returned to Moscow, but in May, 1933, he went to Germany where he joined the Nazi Party. He developed contacts with the new German intelligence agencies mushrooming under Hitler and joined General Karl Haushofer’s geopolitical study group, the quasi-scientific propagandists of the Lebensraum idea. He joined the editorial department of the Frankfurter Zeitung, which sent him to Japan toward the end of that same year.
In Tokyo, Sorge lived in a big house in an excellent residential district. He joined the German Club, became a confidant of the German Ambassador and an informant of the German Military Attaché. The Germans regarded Sorge as one of their own and trusted him implicitly. The only objection the Embassy men had to him was that he was prone to start affairs with their wives. They did not know that Nazism was only a cover for his real mission.
This was the situation in 1935, when Richard Sorge suddenly showed up in the United States. He traveled under his own name, on his own genuine German passport, with papers to show that he was en route to Frankfurt for conferences with the newspaper he represented. He carried no incriminating documents. Except for one visitor, he was alone all the time.
His sole visitor was also a stranger among strangers, traveling on a foolproof “legend.” He was a captain of the Fourth Bureau, sent especially from Moscow to deliver into Sorge’s hands a fake passport for a clandestine detour to Moscow.
For a few weeks Sorge vanished from sight. His editors in Germany were left with the impression that he was still in New York, but the letters and postcards they received from Sorge during this period had been written by him in advance and were mailed at proper intervals by the courier.
Sorge reached Moscow unobserved and found a new man, General Uritsky, at the head of the Fourth Bureau; and he also found a whole set of new policies based on an uncanny estimate of the situation.
As seen through a Kremlin window, the Europe of 1935 was unsettled and turbulent. France was as usual in the throes of grave domestic controversies. Britain seemed firmer, but its stability was deceptive. The Kremlin was looking through Hitler rather than at him. Germany was a problem, Uritsky told Sorge, but subsidiary in importance, and well under control. The problem of the Third Reich would resolve itself, either when Hitler collapsed under the weight of his own blunders, or when he was destroyed by war.
Soviet intelligence was mainly interested, Uritsky said, in what would happen after Hitler’s collapse. The United States was certain to have a hand in his destruction and would, therefore, emerge as the dominant world power. Consequently, he said, Soviet intelligence was moving fast to cover the United States. It was moving even faster to provide coverage for the countries that Uritsky expected to become stepping stones in the ascendancy of the United States. Foremost among these was Japan, with whom a showdown seemed inescapable. Sorge was to probe for the signs of that showdown and to find out in what direction the Japanese expected to move: whether against the Soviet Union or against Britain and the United States. He was to discover Japanese aspirations and intentions, its war potential and the secrets of its war machine, and especially to survey on a month-to-month basis Japanese relations with the United States as they deteriorated toward war.
Uritsky gave Sorge a generous budget, considerable independence and a new radio operator, a heavy-set, stolid German named Max Klausen, whom Sorge knew from his Shanghai days.
Sorge returned to New York, then went on to Germany, and finally back to Tokyo. Klausen followed him in a roundabout route: in Tokyo he found a primitive radio set built by a predecessor and made a new one with a maximum range of two thousand five hundred miles. He was set to operate his “music box” from behind the façade of an export-import business, selling German presses for blueprints and fluorescent plates, an excellent front to attract such customers as the Japanese Army and Navy, the big Tokyo banks and Japanese industrial plants.
When Klausen arrived in Tokyo in November, 1935, he found plenty of work awaiting him. Sorge was already receiving invaluable information daily on the policies and plans of the Japanese Government from a certain Hozumi Ozaki. He was a confidant of Prime Minister Prince Konoye, a highly respected publicist who was a charter member of the Breakfast Club, a cabal of the highest political and diplomatic echelons where much of Japan’s secret diplomacy was openly discussed.
Within the spy ring, the Soviet Union was called “Wiesbaden,” after the famous German spa. It was to “Wiesbaden” that Klausen sent his signals via a Soviet relay station that was located near Vladivostok. The traffic was in a numerical code keyed to the pages of a German statistical year book. Klausen used the call letters AC to which he added a number and two letters, changing the latter frequently. “Wiesbaden’s” call signals began with XU and followed the same arrangement. To the radio operators in “Wiesbaden” Klausen was known as “Fritz.”
For six years, Klausen operated his station without interruption and his was a busy transmitter, indeed. Sorge managed to procure an incredible amount of information. In 1939, “Fritz” made a total of sixty transmissions, totaling twenty-three thousand one hundred and thirty-nine words. The peak was reached in 1940, when almost thirty thousand words were sent.
Ozaki remained Sorge’s most important supplier of information, but there were other informants. Altogether his ring totaled thirty-six members, from a fifty-seven-year-old dressmaker to a twenty-one-year-old clerk at the China Research Institute, the cover-name of a Japanese intelligence agency. Among Sorge’s employees were government officials, journalists, artists, students, two brokers and a physician. Some of them had access to the files of the Japanese secret service. Additional intelligence was acquired from the files of the German Embassy which were open to Sorge.
Included in the mass of intelligence were innumerable original documents, many of them given to Ozaki by high-ranking government officials who sought his advice. Ozaki was able to pass on to Sorge certain top secret state papers which Prince Konoye had given him. The documents were photographed on microfilm and taken out of Japan, mostly by couriers who came especially from Moscow to collect them, but occasionally by Klausen or by Sorge himself. Within a few months, Max carried to Shanghai a score of microfilm rolls of a thousand frames each. This was followed by another shipment of thirty rolls, then many more, until a regular shuttle service was operating between Tokyo at one end and Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Manila at the other. Sorge himself once went to Manila as an official courier of the German Embassy, carrying confidential documents in the diplomatic pouch. He also had microfilm copies of those same documents under his shirt. The pouch was consigned to Berlin; his microfilms were for Moscow.
Sorge’s material was of extreme importance in shaping Soviet policies. Although Japan was regarded as the Soviet Union’s perennial competitor in the Far East and its most likely enemy in war, Sorge steadfastly assured Moscow that Japan would not attack the U.S.S.R., but in the end would wage war against the United States.
These reassuring
dispatches culminated in a message which Sorge had Klausen put on the air very early in October, 1941. By then, the Soviet Union was reeling under the savage onslaught of the Nazis. In 1941, during the first few months of the Russo-German war, the Red Army lost millions of men; reinforcements were desperately needed to stave off defeat. If only the Far Eastern divisions of the Red Army could be moved to Europe !
In his last dispatch, Sorge advised the Fourth Bureau without equivocation that the Japanese Government and High Command had definitely made up their minds not to move in a northerly direction against the Soviet Union, but they would strike south against British possessions, against the Netherlands East Indies and the Philippines, and across the Pacific against the United States. That last message advised Moscow that Japan would definitely launch an attack on the United States “probably in December [1941] but certainly not later than January, 1942.”
The Kremlin was relieved and moved enormous contingents of their Far Eastern army to Europe, using these reinforcements to stem the German advance in the last moment. Sorge’s intelligence saved the day for Stalin; probably it saved the Soviet Union itself; it certainly saved Moscow. The Germans were at the outskirts of the city. They could see the onion-topped churches and the tall building of the Moskva Hotel. The Red Army had suffered all the anticipated losses, but miraculously it was still in the field, and, more than that, putting in fresh divisions. Hitler asked General Franz Halder, the chief of his General Staff, how the Russians managed to conjure up those fresh divisions, but Halder could not explain the mystery.
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