Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  Yet it was an obscure, young SS lieutenant who emerged from this chaotic setup as the real man of destiny. He was one Guido Zimmer, and he was sick and tired of the war. He hoped that the impending spring offensive of the Allies would force the surrender of the Germans in Italy and permit him to go home to his wife and children. He was shocked when, during a visit of the Austrian Gauleiter to Wolff’s palatial headquarters, he overheard a plan to leave a scorched Italy to the Allies and withdraw the army intact to an impregnable redoubt in the Alps from where the Nazis could continue the war indefinitely.

  This was not the only indiscreet thing Zimmer overheard. From certain remarks of Colonel Eugene Dollmann, Wolff’s chief of staff, Zimmer assumed that Dollmann, too, had had his fill of the war. “If only we could get in touch with the Allies, we could stop this verdammte war once and for all,” was the way Dollmann had put it.

  Zimmer knew how to get in touch with the Allies ! Among his acquaintances was a titled Italian playing it safe on both sides of the fence. He was Baron Luigi Parralli, a former representative in Europe of American automobile manufacturers. Parralli seemed to be a fascist, and was on friendly terms with Wolff and his Nazi ilk, but he also aided Italian Jews to escape and kept up friendships with certain liberals in Switzerland.

  Zimmer told Parralli about Dollmann’s remark, about widespread dissatisfaction among high-ranking SS officers, even going so far as to hint that Wolff shared it. Parralli agreed to carry the ball to the Allies, but got only as far as a schoolmaster named Max Husmann, widely known in Switzerland as a dedicated busybody with excellent connections. Husmann carried the tidings to a friend of his, Dr. Max Waibel, who happened to be a major in the Intelligence Division of the Swiss General Staff. This was how the vague idea of the embryonic plot eventually reached the Allies—from Zimmer to Parralli to Husmann to Waibel to Dulles.

  Dulles was not entirely unprepared for this intelligence. His agents had reported to him distinct signs of dissatisfaction among the Germans in Italy. According to one such agent, a German staff officer, who was spending a day in Zurich, openly spoke of defeatism at his headquarters. According to another, the German consul in Lugano was shopping around for an Allied representative to whom he could talk peace.

  Dulles decided to advise Washington and ask authority to open negotiations. Waibel was delegated as Swiss representative at the negotiations. In the meantime, Parralli carried young Zimmer’s plot directly to Wolff and Dollmann and, as Zimmer had anticipated, obtained their agreement to negotiate. Wolff delegated Dollmann to represent him at the first meeting with the Americans, held at the Bianchi Restaurant in Lugano.

  Such things take time, despite their desperate urgency. It was not until March 8 that Wolff himself actively entered the plot. He was met at Chiasso on the Swiss frontier by Husmann, who took him to Dulles in Zurich.

  Wolff was ebullient, bearing gifts. Among them were two prominent Italian Partisan leaders he had picked from Gestapo jails in Verona and Milan as proof of his good faith. One of them, Professor Ferruccio Parri, happened to be an old friend of Dulles. He was destined to become Italy’s first Prime Minister after the liberation.

  Dulles listened silently to the garrulous Nazi as he promised to deliver Northern Italy, lock, stock and barrel. He appreciated Wolff’s intentions, but realized that the Nazi lacked the power to make good. And it dawned upon Dulles that the deal was far too big, even for him. Never before had an intelligence operation been conducted on such an enormous scale for such high stakes. It had vast military implications, involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers and enormous stores. Even more important, it also had immense political implications. The Allies were committed to the Kremlin not to make a separate peace with the Germans, and this segment of the German Army that appeared ripe for the picking was big enough to warrant Soviet objections that might throw a monkey wrench into the deal.

  To cover his own flank, Dulles asked Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander at Allied Forces Headquarters in Caserta to send a couple of senior officers to participate in the negotiations. Alexander delegated Major General Lyman L. Lemnitzer of the U.S. Army, his chief of staff, and British Major General Terence S. Airey, his chief of Intelligence. A special O.S.S. team had to smuggle them into Switzerland. They lived with Dulles on Herren Street behind permanently drawn blinds, but there was a bit of incongruity in their carefully cultivated incognito. During the long wait, Airey acquired a companion, a dachshund named Fritzel. He sometimes threw all precautions to the wind and sneaked out of the old house to buy dog biscuits for Fritzel.

  There were other complications, too. Wolff’s job was to persuade Kesselring to surrender. Just when the Field Marshal appeared to agree, he was replaced by a timorous general named Heinrich von Vietinghoff, who struck a Hamletian pose, when confronted with the proposition. Then a new fly appeared in the ointment. The Nazis, who had sent Wolff to spy on Kesselring, also sent an SS brigadier named Harster to spy on Wolff. Harster, to whom Wolff in his innocence had confided the plot, reported it to Himmler and the Reichsfuehrer instructed Kaltenbrunner to step in and abort it. By then, however, there was a certain defiant autonomy in such matters among the regimented Nazis, and, while Wolff made a tearful, abject promise to his boss that he would drop the plot, he continued the negotiations with increased vigor, urging Dulles to hurry up and consummate the deal.

  The Russians also got wind of the developments and put such pressure on the Allies that, on April 23, Alexander instructed Dulles to discontinue the negotiations. They stayed discontinued for only a few days, after which they were resumed because the Allies decided this was too good a deal to abandon on account of Russian objections.

  Any maneuvers of this kind are crowded with unscheduled mishaps and one such unexpected intervention almost thwarted the deal. On one of his return trips from a meeting with Dulles in Switzerland, Wolff’s convoy was ambushed by Italian Partisans near a place called Cernobbio. Wolff tried the telephone and put in a call to Waibel in Berne, asking for help. Waibel alerted Gero Gaevernitz, who rushed to Chiasso where he met a man named Donald (Scotti) Jones, an O.S.S. liaison officer to the Italian Partisans. Gaevernitz instructed Jones to rescue Wolff—and thus an American secret agent went to the aid of a German general threatened by Italian resistance fighters ! Jones reached the villa where Wolff was hiding, extricated him and took him through Partisan lines to safety, a feat he could accomplish only because amico Scotti was known and completely trusted by the Partisans.

  At last, on April 27, three months after Zimmer started the ball rolling, two emissaries of the German High Command in Italy were flown to Alexander at Caserta and signed, on behalf of Vietinghoff and Wolff, the capitulation document. The Italian front was to cease to exist as of noon of May 2, 1945. The document was then flown to Bolzano where Vietinghoff and Wolff were waiting to ratify it. But they had an unexpected visitor, Gauleiter Franz Hofer of Austria, the man in charge of the mythical redoubt to which the German Army in Italy was to retreat for Hitler’s last stand. Hofer telephoned Himmler and Kesselring, denouncing the plotters.

  While Dulles in Berne and Alexander in Caserta were waiting for word that the war in Italy was over, fighting flared with new violence inside the German high command. Kesselring, peremptorily returned to supreme command in Italy, ordered that Vietinghoff and Wolff be arrested, but his orders were not carried out. Then he called Wolff on the phone, talking for more than two hours, trying to persuade him to cancel the surrender. Wolff refused to yield. At 10 p.m. on May 1, the cease fire orders went out to the German troops, effective at noon next day. At 11 p.m., the German radio suddenly announced that Hitler was dead, but Kesselring still refused to sanction the surrender in Italy. At 1:15 a.m. he was still obstructing the cease-fire order with the limited power at his command. He yielded at 4:30 a.m. when he finally realized that he was up against the united high command at Bolzano and, most important, against Karl Wolff, who proved a tower of strength in the crisis.

  Seven and a hal
f hours later the war was over in Italy. Instead of intransigent, last-ditch fighting, peace had been bought at an infinitesimal cost, in sweat rather than blood, by the big man in the rumpled tweed suit. Dulles proved that the secret service, so important in war, is capable of engineering peace out of the chaos and confusion of the conspiracy of men. This was the major lesson of the Dulles operation, a lesson we neglected to learn on July 20, 1944 in Germany, and then woefully disregarded in the summer of 1945, in Japan.

  22

  The Surrender of Japan

  On the morning of May 8, 1945, President Harry S. Truman called reporters to his office in the White House to announce officially the surrender of Germany. When he completed the reading of his joyous proclamation in his flat Missouri voice, he personally distributed to the reporters a mimeographed “appeal to Japan,” which was for immediate release.

  The appeal read:

  “Nazi Germany has been defeated.

  “The Japanese people have felt the weight of our land, air and naval attacks. So long as their leaders and the armed forces continue the war, the striking power and intensity of our blows will steadily increase and will bring utter destruction to Japan’s industrial production, to its shipping and to everything that supports its military activity.

  “The longer the war lasts, the greater will be the suffering and hardships which the people of Japan will undergo—all in vain. Our blows will not cease until the Japanese military and naval forces lay down their arms in unconditional surrender.

  “Just what does the unconditional surrender of the armed forces mean for the Japanese people?

  “It means the end of the war!

  “It means the termination of the influence of the military leaders who have brought Japan to the present brink of disaster.

  “It means provision for the return of soldiers and sailors to their families, their farms, their jobs.

  “It means not prolonging the present agony and suffering of the Japanese in the vain hope of victory.

  “Unconditional surrender does not mean the extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people.”

  Seated in front of a radio in my office in a Restricted building, I listened to the reading of this appeal with a lump in my throat, for I had written the statement the President had just released. It was the opening salvo in the Second World War’s last major intelligence operation, the product of three years of groping and inching toward this goal.

  In the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D. C., I was part of a small group with a big objective—to bring about Japan’s surrender by non-military means, or, as our basic directive, Operation Order 1–45, spelled it out: “To make unnecessary an opposed landing in the Japanese main islands, by weakening the will of the High Command, by effecting cessation of hostilities, and by bringing about unconditional surrender with the least possible loss of life to us consistent with early termination of the war.”

  This was a preposterous undertaking. Out in the vast Pacific, millions of men fought and bled toward victory. Yet here in Washington just ten of us tried to accomplish this same objective. This was Op-16-W, the Special Warfare Branch of O.N.I., a Secret operational intelligence agency preoccupied largely with psychological warfare and certain other special activities I still am not at liberty to disclose.

  Op-16-W was formed in 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor, the prodigal brainchild of one of the U.S. Navy’s most extraordinary officers. He was Lieutenant Commander Cecil Henry Coggins, a naval surgeon specializing in obstetrics whenever he served in the Medical Corps. But most of the time he was off on special assignments, dabbling in all sorts of intelligence work. Dr. Coggins, a slight, crew-cut, narrow-eyed, humorless man of unbounded energy and enthusiasm, was, like Allen Dulles, an espionage buff.

  Early in 1942, Dr. Coggins happened to read my book, German Psychological Warfare, and decided to become the Navy’s pioneer psychological warrior. He envisaged the application of this kind of assault on the enemy navies, using persuasion instead of the compulsion of arms to paralyze the fingers, as he was wont to put it, that pulled the triggers.

  I first met Coggins in August, 1942, when he called upon me in New York unannounced at the Committee for National Morale, where I then worked as director of research. He introduced himself, sat down at my desk and outlined to me in supercharged words an elaborate plan he had hatched to organize a psychological warfare branch inside Naval Intelligence. He invited me to join him as his chief of research and general idea man. I told him I could not very well hope to be accepted in O.N.I. because I was then still a citizen of Hungary and had been in this country less than five years. Moreover, little Hungary having seen fit to declare war on the United States, my status was that of an enemy alien.

  “Never mind,” Coggins said. “I’ll fix that.”

  He gave me my instructions, as strange as this strange man was himself. This was in August, on a hot summer day, but Coggins told me: “Be in Washington on December 4. Go straight from the Union Station to the Fairfax Hotel. Don’t register, but go directly to room 307 and enter without knocking. The door will be unlocked. Be there at 5 p.m. sharp. I am now going somewhere in the Pacific, but will see you in Washington.”

  More than three months later, at the exact time, I was on the third floor of the hotel, standing outside room 307, when the door opened. There was Coggins, and inside the parlor of the suite I found three more people. They were Captain Zacharias; Joseph Riheldaffer, an elderly commander; and a young lieutenant named Booth. Three hours later I was hired as a “secret agent,” because my status as an enemy alien made any other entry into O.N.I. administratively impossible.

  Coggins solved my draft status in a similarly melodramatic fashion. I was then classified 1-A, but Coggins called on my draft board in New York, identified himself as a physician and told them I had suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be committed to a “psychiatric institution.” I was promptly reclassified 4-F and remained in that category until my thirty-eighth birthday, in September, 1944, when I ceased to be eligible for the draft and Coggins could take me out of the institution.

  My office was in a restricted part of a makeshift frame building called “Temporary-L” near the Lincoln Memorial, an architectural survivor of the First World War. Op-16-W occupied three rooms flanked by Op-16-Z, headed by Riheldaffer, and a secret branch of the Bureau of Naval Communications.

  Our neighbors at “Z” had one of the most fascinating jobs in war-time Washington: interrogating prisoners of war, exploiting captured documents, scanning censorship intercepts and doing odd jobs in cerebral espionage. They were, for the next four years, to supply the ammunition for our own operations.

  My first job in 16-W was to devise a plan for a frontal psychological assault on the personnel of Doenitz’s awesome U-boat arm. Up to one hundred and eighty enemy submarines were prowling all along the Atlantic Seaboard. We had hardly any defenses against them, and almost no offensive weapons.

  Never before had a propagandist established within an American intelligence organization been given classified information and permitted to talk directly to the enemy. Now I suggested that we begin operations with a series of broadcasts to the U-boat men, based on this intelligence. The idea was promptly approved by Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations.

  I concocted a character who would act as the U.S. Navy’s official spokesman to the officers and men of the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy. I created this personality at my typewriter out of thin air in a thirty-page legend like the cover story prepared for a spy. I gave the mythical person a name, Robert Lee Norden, because it sounded indigenously American with a slight touch of Confederate chauvinism, yet was easily understandable and pronounceable by the Germans. I gave him a rank—Commander, USN—sufficiently high to command respect, but not too high to alienate junior officers and enlisted men. I gave him a birthplace, parents, an education, a career, wife and children, hobbies and pets, until the character lived, at least in our own min
ds.

  We breathed life into this figment of my imagination by placing the myth inside the body of a remarkable officer whom we found right next door at “Z.” He was Ralph Gerhart Albrecht, a distinguished international lawyer in civilian life, a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, doing delicate “special” jobs at “Z.” Albrecht was tall, erect to the point of being ramrod stiff, his gray hair closely cropped, with a clipped mustache in the British style and a commanding presence and voice. He spoke German with absolute fluency and with only that slight touch of accent necessary to leave the listener in no doubt that the speaker was an American and not a renegade German.

  To make him real, even in an administrative sense, we entered “Norden” in the Mail Room and applied for inclusion in the Naval Register. This was a wise precaution, for he was to receive bundles of fan mail from his audience, separated from him by an ocean and a war, yet finding means of writing to him. In the course of the war, Commander Norden delivered six hundred broadcasts to the German U-boat Arm. He became famous and respected by the U-boat men, except by Doenitz, who detested him.

  In his broadcasts, Norden forever sided with the ordinary U-boat man, telling him that he was being sent deliberately into certain death by Hitler and Doenitz. Once, when my researches revealed that not a single non-com or enlisted man had ever received the coveted Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, we wrote a script for Norden bemoaning this fact. The risks of operational cruises are identical for all ranks, he said. Then he asked, “Why this discrimination?”

  A few days later we found an item on the ticker announcing the award of the Knight’s Insignia to a couple of chief mates in the U-boat Arm, with the words: “The Fuehrer, upon recommendation of Grand Admiral Doenitz, was pleased to award the Ritterkreuz to,” and so forth. Norden was on the air within hours, extending his congratulations to the decorated men from the lower deck, but adding, “There was only one error in the citation. The Fuehrer awarded the Ritterkreuz, not at the recommendation of Grand Admiral Doenitz, but at the recommendation of the United States Navy.”