by John Bryden
Stephens’s methods were not suited to men of Mayer’s calibre. They had the courage of their convictions and were honour-bound as German army officers. Many had been successful businessmen between the wars and they were generally mature, experienced, well-educated, and intelligent. Having only psychological pressure as a weapon, Stephens found himself dealing with Abwehr officers who were perfectly capable of facing him down. Rather than admit to failure, however, he was inclined to put reluctance down to having nothing worthwhile to tell.
Friedrich Rudolf was a close personal friend of Abwehr chief Admiral Canaris and headed up the Abwehr presence in France. Some of the fiercest and most desperate espionage and counter-espionage battles between the British and German secret services took place under his watch. In 1942, the following message from Abwehrleitstelle Frankreich to Berlin was intercepted and deciphered by the British:
Detailed report regarding capture between 23rd and 28 March of 13 secret transmitters working for the English Intelligence Service and 18 agents (including 8 W/T operators). 38 enemy transmitters have been rendered harmless and there are now only 3 enemy transmitters still working in the Occupied Territory. ALST has at its disposal 3 W/T connections with the English Intelligence Service.22
The last sentence means that Abwehr headquarters in France had “turned” three captured British wireless operators and were using them as double agents to transmit German-controlled messages back to the British. Nevertheless, all Rudolf could remember of that period was that a woman agent named Katze had been captured by Funkspiel (“radio game”), but she had revealed nothing of value. The only thing true about this statement was the name of the German double agent — Mathilde Carré, alias LA CHAT, alias KATZE.
While the report on Rudolf does not indicate who interrogated him, Stephens would surely have been involved given that Rudolf was a very senior Abwehr officer. In any case, Stephens approved the finding that “the prisoner is co-operative, but the infm [information] obtained from him is fragmentary and vague” because he had “devoted himself mainly to social duties … keeping himself in the picture only in a very general manner.” And further: “Domestic worries appear to have affected his memory and robbed him of the power to concentrate.”23
Either Rudolf was putting on an act, or he had been questioned only superficially. There is reason to suspect the latter. The first report on him was extremely sketchy, only four pages, with CSDIC(WEA) then asking the CI-War Room for a “show of interest” or the case would be closed. The OSS promptly replied that it would like Rudolf to be asked about the July 20 plot to kill Hitler, about the Stockholm spy Karl-Heinz Kramer, and about the Abwehr black-market organization “Otto” that operated in Paris. The immediate CSDIC(WEA) response was dismissive and the final report on Rudolf makes no mention of these entirely legitimate questions.24
In “A Digest of Ham,” Stephens shows many signs of being partisan, of not wanting to disclose Abwehr successes that could embarrass MI5 or MI6. In contrast, he is almost gleeful in noting that the interrogation of Colonel Hermann Giskes revealed in fine detail how Abwehr counter-intelligence in Holland trounced the wartime British secret-service upstart, Special Operations Executive (SOE).
When France, Holland, Belgium, and Denmark fell to the Germans in 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill proposed “setting Europe ablaze” by splitting off MI6’s sabotage division as a self-standing agency that would concentrate on sending agents into German-occupied Europe to organize sabotage and resistance cells. This was SOE, disliked generally in MI6 because sabotage incidents made intelligence-gathering harder since they put the Germans on their guard. Over a period of twenty months, Giskes captured every one of SOE’s agents as they landed by boat or airplane in Holland, and played back their captured radios, asking for and receiving nearly two hundred parachute drops of weapons and sabotage material.25 “Through and through, he riddled the Allied espionage organizations in that country,” Stephens wrote, “and many indeed were the SOE agents he successfully turned and played back.…”
This praise, however, was to have limited circulation. The Giskes interrogation report was to be handled “with a certain discretion as to publication and distribution.” When Giskes was sent back to Germany from Latchmere House, he spent several months at Bad Nenndorf under “an enforced vow of silence.” This was undoubtedly Stephens’s code for some kind of isolation.
Trying to suppress discovery of this British catastrophe was never going to succeed. Giskes could not be kept at Bad Nenndorf forever. Three years after being set free, his story was published in Germany as Spione uberspielen Spione (1949). An English-language edition, London Calling North Pole (1953), soon followed. Until then, the British officers who had been in charge of SOE had basked in some of the postwar victory glow. No longer. Former SOE agents who had lost comrades to the German concentration camps and firing squads suddenly realized the incompetence they had noted in SOE during the war had been pervasive. They began to speak out. To make matters worse, in 1953 a former SOE agent published a memoir, Inside North Pole, recounting how he had been captured by Giskes’s team, saw that the whole SOE effort in Holland was compromised, made a daring escape from prison, struggled for five months through occupied Belgium and France to get to Spain, Gibraltar, and back to England — only to be disbelieved by British intelligence and arrested as a spy.26
Stephens had first view of all of this. The Camp 020 interrogation of Hugo Bleicher — arguably the most adroit counter-intelligence agent of the war — is another sorry tale of SOE initiatives emasculated by the Germans, this time in France. Like Giskes in Holland, Bleicher and his colleagues, posing as French Resistance fighters, helpfully manned the lights that guided agent-laden British aircraft in, collected parachute canisters filled with weapons, and arranged that the weapons be stored in safe places where they could be accidentally destroyed. Whenever SOE-led Resistance groups got a little too strong, Bleicher arranged for their culling.27
These SOE disasters are candidly stated in Bleicher’s Camp 020 interrogation report. However, Bleicher was also the key player in the breakup of the Interallie spy ring set up in France in late 1941 by refugee Polish soldiers under Roman Garby-Czerniawski. He did this by seducing Czerniawski’s mistress, Mathilde Carré, alias LA CHAT. When all were arrested, he had Carré play back the network’s wireless set to London, learning thereby that the British intended some kind of strike against the French port of St. Nazaire. Berlin was alerted. The attack turned out to be a commando raid aimed at knocking out the port’s battleship-sized dry dock. It was a qualified success only because the forewarned defenders were not expecting an explosives-laden destroyer to lead the charge. The British commandos themselves were wiped out.28
This was as perfect an example as one could wish of a successful “double-cross” — the British term for continuing the transmissions of a captured spy in order to obtain intelligence from the enemy secret service. The German terms were Funkspiel, literally “radio game,” or, more generally, Gegenspiel, literally “contrary game” but equivalent in meaning to “double-cross.” Bleicher was drawing British blood by the method when MI5’s famed “Double-Cross System” was still in its infancy. His British secret service victim, however, was not SOE, nor MI6. It was, in fact, MI5.29
The Camp 020 report on Bleicher as received by the Americans through the CI-War Room makes no mention of St. Nazaire. It merely acknowledges that the Interallie radio was taken over and messages were exchanged with London. This, combined with the failure to pursue Rudolf on the same subject, is an example of the Camp 020 output being manipulated. If a prisoner seemed likely to have information that exposed MI5 mistakes, Stephens was not anxious to extract it, nor likely to report it.
Conversely, Stephens was quick to accept what he wanted to hear. In the one paragraph he devoted to the interrogation of Major Nikolaus Ritter, the Abt I Luft (air espionage) officer who had been spymaster to most of the double agents run by MI5 during the war, Stephens wrote wit
hout blush that “in all frankness he admitted his failure as an intelligence officer, but adduced it [was] in part to the superiority of the British Security Service.”30 Ritter did disclose, however, that in mid-1941 he had figured out that two of his most important agents, Arthur Owens and Wulf Schmidt (A-3504 and A-3725), had been reporting back by wireless under British control. He did not inform Berlin of this, he added — hardly likely for a man hand-picked by Canaris and who had the right to speak directly to him.31
Ritter operated from Ast Hamburg, the largest Abwehr espionage centre outside Berlin, and his chief, Herbert Wichmann, also landed up at Camp 020. Of him, Stephens noted:
Wichmann was willing enough to talk, but the trouble was that he had no memory. His many friends at Ham confirmed it; his few enemies admitted it. Under patient handling such facts as he could be made to remember were gradually drawn from him.
His espionage activities against Britain had not been markedly successful: “All attempts to spy on England,” he said, “were disappointing; in spite of much effort, nothing of value was ever achieved.”32
The trouble with this statement is that Wulf Schmidt had been dispatched to England as a parachute spy in 1940 and reported back to Hamburg by wireless until early 1945. If all the spies Ast Hamburg sent to England were failures, then that must have included Schmidt. That means the hundreds of messages TATE (Schmidt) sent were not believed. It would seem that the spy Stephens described as “the most remarkable double agent of the war” had not fooled the Germans after all. Stephens, however, was impervious to this logic.
Stephens did not want to hear of any failures by MI5, and was ready to ensure that the files did not disclose them. At its most extreme, this involved withholding embarrassing interrogation reports. The interrogation report on Major Ritter, for example, is missing from his file and there is no indication in what remains that he was ever asked a single question about Arthur Owens, a.k.a. SNOW, the first wireless spy MI5 supposedly doubled back on the Germans and the one most credited for the much-vaunted wartime victory of British intelligence over German intelligence. Indeed, all but one of the spies who were “turned” to become double agents between September 1939 and December 1940 were known by Stephens to have been dispatched by Major Ritter — SNOW, CHARLIE, RAINBOW, DRAGONFLY, GANDER, SUMMER, and TATE. There is nothing to indicate Ritter was asked about any of them.
Fortunately, Stephens could not control the interrogations done by the various American intelligence agencies. They went about their work with equanimity, and a genuine desire to discover where the Abwehr did succeed. The quality of the postwar interrogations in the National Archives in Washington is as day is to night compared to what survives in Britain’s National Archives (the PRO).
While Stephens is surely not solely to blame, the evidence is everywhere that he became obsessed with demonstrating that British intelligence had overwhelmingly dominated its Abwehr adversary, because of British superiority on the one hand and German incompetence on the other. It was probably Stephens who wrote the article in the September 1945 issue of Interim: British Army of the Rhine Intelligence Review that concluded, “Results of interrogations have shown that the view which has been held during the war is justified; the German Intelligence Service was almost uniformly corrupt, inefficient and stupid.”33
The writer attributed these deficiencies to “the most naive conceptions of British and American policy and method” and to the fact that “except in the most rare cases, the GIS had to recruit its agents not from idealists, but from the fearful, the avaricious and the opportunists.”
He was absolutely wrong on all counts. What it meant was he could not imagine how someone like Major Ritter, surely destined for some role or other in the secret intelligence services of postwar Germany, would be quite happy to see British intelligence continue to deceive itself.
1
1945
It was three months after Germany’s surrender and still there had been little progress in getting a handle on how decisions were made at the top of Germany’s secret intelligence service, the Abwehr. Its chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was dead, although how he had died was still uncertain, and his top aides were either still missing or out of reach as prisoners of the Russians.
Enter General Erwin von Lahousen. The U.S. Army intelligence officers who first interrogated him must have been delighted. Here before them — tall, slightly stooped, aristocratic in bearing, every inch an officer — was the Abwehr’s head of Abteilung II (Sabotage). It was he who had been charged with sowing confusion behind enemy lines. It was he who knew what explosions on what roads and railways, in what factories and military installations, aboard what ships, were to be credited, not to dive-bombers and submarines, but to the invisible army of saboteurs he must have led. Little was known. Eight saboteurs landed by submarine in the United States in 1943 had been captured, tried, and executed, but how many more had entered unnoticed? What damage had they done that had been assigned to other causes? This was the man who knew.
What he said was totally unexpected.
Lahousen revealed that he had actually discouraged sabotage against the Americans and British. Instead, he had been a member of an inner circle around Admiral Canaris whose members conspired against Hitler and did everything they could to undermine the Nazis. The story he told was incredible.1
Lahousen was Austrian. He came from an aristocratic family with a long tradition of military service. At the time of the Anschluss — Germany’s annexation of Austria in early 1938 — he was a forty-one-year-old senior intelligence officer with the Austrian General Staff, specializing in Czechoslovakia. To his surprise, shortly after the takeover he was invited to join the German intelligence service, known universally by its short title, the Abwehr. This did not make much sense, since he was an Austrian patriot, without much sympathy for the Nazis, and the Abwehr was Germany’s most secret of secret organizations. He was soon to learn, however, that it was precisely because of his dislike of the Nazis that he had been sought out.2
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris did not fit the picture of a secret service chief. On arriving at Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, in one of the several stately homes that had been converted to army offices on tree-lined Tirpitzuferstrasse, Lahousen faced a small man, standing five-foot-four, with white hair and bright blue eyes, dressed in the dark blue uniform of a naval officer.
The office at 74–76 Tirpitzuferstrasse was modest — simple furniture, a small safe, a sofa, and an iron bedstead so that its occupant could take a nap in the afternoon, perhaps, or for sleeping over in times of crisis. Instead of the usual portrait of Hitler on the wall, there was a signed picture of the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, a Japanese woodblock print, and a picture of Colonel Walter Nicolai, Germany’s spymaster of the First World War. A map of the world over the sofa completed the decor.3 The rest of the room was plain, almost tawdry, yet here Lahousen was, at the command centre of what he knew to be the largest and most sophisticated secret intelligence organization in Europe, and possibly the world.
At that very first interview — as Lahousen told his American interrogators — the Abwehr chief took him deeply into his confidence. Czechoslovakia was next on Hitler’s list, Canaris said. The Nazi leader was going to use the excuse of the Sudeten Germans to invade. As the Western powers and the Soviet Union would never stand for it, it would mean a European war. Lahousen was being drafted to help dampen Hitler’s enthusiasm for the venture. The Austrian officer was suddenly faced with the proposition that Germany’s chief of secret intelligence was planning to act against his own government.4
Canaris explained his strategy. He had in mind that the Abwehr should overvalue the intelligence reports coming out of Czechoslovakia. The strength of its fortifications and army, the will to resist of its people, the determination of its government — all this was to be deliberately exaggerated. The likelihood of British, French, or Russian intervention was to be emphasized. Lahousen’s role was to endorse the reports a
s an intelligence specialist on Czechoslovakia. This would give them tremendous credibility and might put Hitler off his plan.
Lahousen was taken aback. Canaris was sharing a mortally dangerous scheme with a stranger and non-German. Only someone with great confidence in his own judgment would dare such a thing. If the Nazis ever got hint of what Canaris was saying, he was a dead man.
They shook hands. Lahousen would do it. Thereafter a bond of absolute trust sprang up between the two men. Lahousen stuck by Canaris for the next five years, through plot after plot against the Nazis, until Canaris’s arrest and execution separated them forever.
General Lahousen’s opening remarks must have been riveting to his American listeners. And there was more, much more.
First of all, Canaris’s plan was all for nought. Hitler won what he wanted from Czechoslovakia without invasion. The Western powers, England and France, caved in to his demands with the infamous Munich Agreement of 1938 whereby the western edge of Czechoslovakia was shaved off and attached to Germany without the consent of the Czechs. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, came home from his meeting with Hitler waving a piece of paper and declaring “Peace in Our Time.” The generals opposed to Hitler were poised to oust him the moment he gave the invasion order. However, Hitler won what he wanted without having to give it and the rebellion melted away.
Hitler’s success over Czechoslovakia emboldened him and he next made territorial demands of Poland. Lahousen recalled Canaris’s very words at the time:
I am convinced that the other [G]reat Powers will not be caught this time by the “political sleight-of-hand tricks of this pathological liar.” War means a catastrophe far greater and beyond comprehension for Germany and all mankind [should there] be the victory of this Nazi system. This must be prevented under all circumstances.5
