by John Bryden
One can see Canaris’s reasoning. Air intelligence could be key to winning or losing the next war. He had to be the best-informed in Germany of advances in military aviation and air defence by Germany’s neighbours, both to better assess the foreign danger but also to keep control over the flow of this intelligence to the Luftwaffe and to Hitler’s headquarters should it become necessary to choke it off occasionally. To ensure he could do the latter if the time came, he needed like-minded anti-Nazis in charge at Abt1/Luft at Ast Hamburg. In Ritter and Kramer he had them.
Preparing for a ground war was more straightforward. France was the traditional enemy, and Hitler’s foreign policy promised a clash sooner or later. The likelihood was that the initial battleground would again include Belgium and Holland, so Canaris flooded the three countries with spies well before the war, with more to come after it started. Some of them had the most ingenious covers.
Georges Delfanne — to give an example — was a twenty-seven-year-old former Belgian soldier who had knocked about in various odd jobs until recruited by the Abwehr. He was given the task of discovering what he could about the deployment of the Belgian army and set about it in classic spy style. Posing as a travelling salesman for special ink blotters, he toured Belgium on his bicycle, systematically visiting all military installations and encampments. His blotters were of a design especially useful to the military; sales were brisk and numerous, with Delfanne jotting down in his invoice book the names of the buyers and the location of their units. Before long, he was able to build up a complete picture of the Belgian army’s order of battle, which was supplemented by pencil sketches of fortifications, bridges, ditches, gun emplacements, and anything else of military interest. On the eve of Hitler’s invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940, the defences of Belgium had been laid bare.
What made Delfanne a living legend in the Abwehr, however, was his penetration of the great fortress of Eban-Emael, located near the Belgian-Dutch border. This massive structure, a small mountain riddled with tunnels connecting armoured cupolas, loomed over the Albert Canal. Completed in 1935, and garrisoned by 1,200 men, it was the key to the defences of Belgium and was considered impregnable. It was, however, to become forever associated with German military ingenuity, for it was famously captured by German troops landing gliders on its top and fanning out to blow up its big-gun emplacements with hollow charges. It surrendered in twenty-eight hours. Delfanne’s contribution was to sketch with his coloured pencils vital details of the fortress that could not be seen from the air.7
One can imagine Delfanne at work: Spring, the grass green and bright before the entrance blockhouse, the sentries enjoying the warmth of the sun, a young man leaning on his bicycle nearby, smoking a cigarette. Over his shoulder there would be a cloth satchel containing a refilled bottle of the local wine, a half baguette of bread, some cheese, and his pencils. His sample blotters would be in a leatherette portfolio strapped to a frame on one side of the bicycle. Somewhere, perhaps also in the satchel, he would have a schoolboy’s drawing kit comprising ruler, triangle, and protractor — everything he needed for triangulating the heights and depths of structures. In his back pocket would be his invoices with its names and locations….
The scene changes to May 10, gliders in the sky spiralling down like vultures, sweeping in to alight on the great back of the fortress, the little figures of men scurrying here and there, puffs of smoke, and panic within….
One can appreciate why it became the practice in wartime to shoot spies.
The idea of selling himself to the British as a double agent seems to have been Owens’s own idea, and it apparently took time for Major Ritter to believe that he had actually gotten away with it. Yet he had, and the results were very encouraging. It also showed that the Abwehr’s MI5 adversary was but a parody of the omnipotent, all-seeing British Security Service of myth and movies. Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) had depicted an organization of flint-eyed Englishmen in suits stalking a swarthy Bolshevik evildoer with relentless but noble professionalism. A German spy of superb cunning and method succumbed to the calculations and courage of British investigators in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935). Real life, Ritter must have thought, surely could not have fallen this far short of fiction, but it had.
Ritter decided to try the double-agent trick on the Americans, the nearest thing to a U.S. security service being the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On February 7, 1940, an American of German extraction named William Sebold arrived by ship in New York City from Germany. Agents of the FBI awaited him; he was expected. Before departing, he had used the excuse of having lost his passport to call in at the American consular office in Cologne, where he warned officials that he had information of tremendous importance to impart to the appropriate authorities in the United States. It was arranged that he be met on arrival.
The story Sebold told the FBI had echoes of that told to Scotland Yard by Charles Eschborn. He had a brother in Germany, he said, and their grandfather had been a Jew, so he had no choice but to agree to spy when asked. He had come from the United States to visit his mother, and on arrival was approached by an agent of the German secret service. He took his spy training in Hamburg, but was determined from the outset to turn against the Germans as soon as he arrived back in America. And here he was.
When he said that he was to build his own transmitter and find his own radio operator, the FBI obligingly built it for him, establishing it at Centerport, Long Island, and manning it with its own operators. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was warned of the illegal transmitter so that it would not take action when its signal was picked up. His messages were to be in a transposition cipher, a new key being derived every day from the popular novel by Rachel Field, All This and Heaven Too. Radio contact with Germany was made on May 20, 1940.
Again, as with MI5, the FBI did not take some of the precautions elementary to operating a clandestine wireless transmitter. It always sent from the same location, apparently forgetting that the Germans would know the FCC would detect the signal and have it raided. Indeed, the radio direction-finding stations of the Canadian Navy and of Canada’s Department of Transport quickly zeroed in on it.8 The Germans would have known that the only way that Sebold’s transmitter could stay alive was if it was under American control.
The Radio Security Service also missed this point. The Canadians sent their DF results to England and this led the RSS to inform the FBI that a suspicious transmitter had been detected on Long Island. The FBI replied that it knew this, and had its “exact location.” The British encouraged the Americans to allow the clandestine station to continue to operate until fully investigated and the “extent of the organization behind it ascertained.” In the meantime, the RSS copied the traffic and Strachey’s ISOS section occasionally broke it, coming up with FBI-concocted gems like this:
13 Nov. 1940
DUNN says U.S. Intelligence sends messages out of Germany by engraving them on silverware and camera parts, etc. Then they may spray them with a metal which is removed when the parts arrive here.
The FBI did not let on to MI5 that it was writing the messages until the following January.9
As for Sebold’s story of feared persecution, it was a lie. Canaris despised the Nazi security and intelligence services, and he was opposed to the persecution of the Jews, helping them whenever he could. Indeed, one of the spies Major Ritter sent ahead of Sebold was Lily Stein, also Jewish, and when, a year later, she was arrested, she too claimed she had feared for family members. If this were really so, she could have safely contacted the appropriate authorities the moment she set foot in America.
What was particularly remarkable about the Sebold case was the questionnaire he brought to show Lily and the other agents he was to contact. It asked for detailed information on bombers locating targets by means of intersecting radio beams, on “electric eye” proximity fuses, on protective clothing for mustard gas, on airborne bacteriological warfare, and on self-sealing aircraft fuel t
anks. In terms of identifying some of the current preoccupations of German war science, it was as revealing as the “Oslo Report,” which disclosed German interest in pilotless aircraft and long-range gyroscope-guided rocketry. It had been surreptitiously delivered to the British embassy in Oslo four months earlier.10
The item in the Sebold questionnaire on navigating bombers onto their targets by radio beams is especially noteworthy.
1. Find out if International Telephone and Telegraph Co. have offered to French and English Governments a new procedure of bombing which works as follows: The airplane is directed by some sort of ray against the target and crosses a second ray shortly before reaching the target by which the bombs will be released. Try to get particulars pertaining to the construction of the device, and find out how it has worked in tests and whether there have been negotiations in the French and English Governments, with the view of selling it to them.11
What was being described was the Knickebein system already installed in German bombers but the existence of which the British only puzzled out the following June from prisoner-of-war eavesdropping, mysterious equipment in downed German aircraft, and wireless decrypts. Once this technology was discovered, Churchill ordered “absolute priority” for the development of countermeasures.12
As for the other items on the questionnaire, the British were not yet seriously considering germ warfare, work on gas-proof clothing had only just begun, and scientists in Britain were only in the very early stages of developing proximity fuses.13 The latter was a major advance in tactical weaponry that the Allies managed to deploy later in the war. The idea was to have a miniature radio transmitter/receiver in the nose of a shell that would cause it to explode when near an aircraft or at a specified height from the ground. It was a war-winning weapon, in that it detonated anti-aircraft shells as they approached or passed by aircraft without having to actually hit them.
Had there been an information-sharing agreement between the Americans and British, the FBI could have been very helpful. Along with everything else, the Bureau could have told its MI5 counterparts that Sebold’s questionnaire was in the form of four microphotographs no bigger than “pencil points” stuck to the back of his watch. But instead, it would take MI5 another year to learn about microdots.
The really curious thing about the Sebold questions, however, which perhaps some of the FBI men might have wondered about, was why he had them written out on microdots in the first place? They could have been memorized.
The meeting with Major Ritter at the beginning of April 1940 was to be Owens’s last Channel-crossing, and the most devastating for Britain’s safety. Again the teletype machine Hamburg–Berlin clattered out the latest from Owens. The first message comprised a lengthy description of all the RAF repair and maintenance facilities in England, including those of the St. Athan air base, later to be bombed twelve times. Robertson, according to one of his notes to file, had obtained permission to send this information from Commodore Boyle, by then the new director of Air Intelligence.14
The second message was a follow-up on Owens’s earlier report about the British developing a device to detect aircraft at a distance:
Reference: Ast Hamburg 1252/39 I Luft 21.9.39
[Translation]
Agent 3504 reports 5.4.40 at a meeting in Antwerp:
The equipment in the above report is now installed along the entire eastern coast and has been tested for the first time in March, allegedly with success. Aircraft were perfectly detected from a distance of 400 km and more, and it is hoped to be secure from surprise attacks in the future.
The equipment is mounted on wooden towers, 20–30 feet high, 10–12 feet in diameter, some round, some square, some hexagon. On April 2, I counted six towers between Grimsby and Southbend, one of them stood directly on the coast at Lowestoft, the others placed at equal distances over this section. I cannot give you precise positions because the areas are strongly guarded. One can only drive by at high speed. To get close to the towers is impossible. I still hope to get further details some other way….15
It seems Owens had taken good advantage of his freedom and mobility. This time his information on radar was almost exactly right. He was describing the Chain Home radar system and correctly specified the range at which it could detect aircraft.
This was war-winning intelligence. If it came to a fight in the skies over England, the Luftwaffe had the numerical advantage. Electronic early warning would help the British even the odds. German scientists had been working on the idea themselves, but Owens’s report showed that the British had already got there. It would have been obvious to most German airmen that if the Luftwaffe were to do battle over England, the towers should be the first targets to be destroyed.
This typed entry appears in Liddell’s diary at the beginning of May: “He [Owens] has not been in a position to give the Germans very much from this country, except information we have planted on him.”16
If someone in MI5 had given Owens the Chain Home radar item to plant on the Germans, then something surely was desperately wrong somewhere in that organization.
6
November 1939–June 1940
Canaris earned high marks from Hitler for his part in the invasion and defeat of France, and rightly so. It probably would not have happened without him.
With the exception of Hitler, who was forever the optimist, things had looked pretty bleak to Germany’s military leadership when the British and French declared war at the beginning of September 1939. France alone had a larger army, and when her troops and tanks, backed up by the British Expeditionary Force, moved up to the Belgium frontier, Hitler’s generals were worried. A prompt attack while most of Germany’s air and ground forces were still in Poland would have brought a quick defeat, and none of them wanted that.1 No matter how much they despised Hitler, they could not forget that the French had gone out of their way to humiliate Germany after the Armistice of 1918, and it was not something they wanted repeated.
Fortunately for Germany, the French and British simply sat on their arms in the weeks needed to get the troops back from Poland. The two sides then lined up along the German and French frontiers, each waiting for the other to move. Hitler became restless and started pushing his generals to attack. It made them amenable to rebellion.
General Ludwig Beck, the former chief of the general staff who resigned in 1938 over Hitler’s plan to invade Czechoslovakia, began circulating secret memos disparaging Germany’s chances of winning against France and Britain, and predicting a war of attrition similar to that of the First World War. His fears were shared by many of the army’s leaders, including Beck’s successor, General Franz Halder, but when he began suggesting Hitler be deposed, there was reluctance. This changed when Hitler insisted that Germany take the offensive. Halder began talking of arranging an “accident” for the Führer.
The sixty-year-old Beck was a Prussian general of the old school, where the honour of the army and the Reich were intimately intertwined. He was appalled by the prospect of Germany once again violating the neutrality of Belgium, and worried about the damage this would do to Germany’s image before the world. He also argued that the United States would surely come on side with the British and French as it had in the First World War, making Germany’s defeat inevitable.2
Working with the Abwehr’s Colonel Hans Oster and his aide, Hans von Dohnányi, Beck came up with a plan reminiscent of the aborted coup attempt of 1938. It called for the troops stationed in Berlin under General Erwin von Witzleben to surround the government quarter the moment Hitler ordered the offensive against France. Beck would then become temporary head of state until a caretaker government was formed. Along with Witzleben and Halder, General Walther von Brauchitsch, the army’s commander-in-chief, and the quartermaster-general, Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, were on side. There were important civilians, as well, including the former Reich minister of economics, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. Canaris was on board, too.
The Abwehr’s role — as C
olonel Lahousen described it after the war — was to use its own specially trained commandos to rush in to seize and arrest the members of Hitler’s entourage and Hitler himself, if possible. Meanwhile, in anticipation of the coup, Canaris was to put out peace feelers. This at first involved trying to set up the Pope as an intermediary between the conspirators and the British and French. Dr. Joseph Müller, a prominent Bavarian Catholic and lawyer, was given the task of making the approaches to the Vatican under the direction of Oster and von Dohnányi. Müller arrived in Rome in mid-September, and by mid-October had the Pope’s commitment to help.3
The tactic Canaris used in Holland was more direct. On October 17, the MI6 office in The Hague received a telephone call from a Colonel Teichmann on behalf of generals Gerd von Rundstedt and Gustav von Wietersheim, both just then finishing up their command assignments in Poland. An army-led coup d’état was in the works, Teichmann explained, and the two generals wanted to know what terms Germany could expect from Britain and France for a cessation of hostilities. Chamberlain’s government was delighted when told of the overture, and shot back that a withdrawal from Poland and respect for Czechoslovakia’s autonomy would be the principal conditions.4
The involvement of von Rundstedt was important. He was then Germany’s highest-profile commander, having served in senior posts with the Reichswehr — the peacetime army — throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and the British would certainly have known of him. He had been approached by the conspirators in 1938 but had turned them down. This time, however, in the wake of the SS carrying out Hitler’s policy of subduing Polish resistance by executing the civilian leadership classes, he had changed his mind. Both he and von Wietersheim had protested the killings, but Himmler’s and Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen carried them out anyway.5
