by John Bryden
Also, the early wireless sets were heavy and cumbersome, requiring bulky glass vacuum tubes and other components rather than today’s tiny transistors. Batteries were also a problem, due to size, weight, and their short life, as were the required aerials, usually a single wire having to be stretched out some thirty feet or more. A practical, lightweight transmitter/receiver for a lone spy in enemy territory was developed by the British just before the Second World War, but it never came into general use.
Finally, something also needs to be said about the terminology of espionage.
In the English-speaking world, the Americans are the exception with their use of the word agent to refer to a person on the staff of a security or intelligence gathering agency — e.g. the special agent of the FBI. Everywhere else in the world, agent is used as a synonym for spy, and this book does, too, except with respect to the FBI. The principle types are:
Spy/Agent:
A person used against a target country to secretly collect sensitive information.
Double agent:
A spy who has been caught by the target country but instead of being imprisoned is forced (usually) to pretend to his original spymaster that he is still free in order to have him send in deceptive reports. The American term is “controlled agent.”
Penetration agent:
A spy whose mission is to get inside the secret services of the target country. The British term is “mole.”
Triple agent:
A spy whose assignment is to get inside the enemy secret service by offering to be a double agent.
Key to acronyms:
CSE
Communications Security Establishment (Canada)
DHH
Directorate of History and Heritage, Canadian Forces (Ottawa)
FBI
Federal Bureau of Investigation (Washington, D.C.)
FDRL
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library
LAC
Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa)
NARA
National Archives and Records Administration at College Park (Washington, D.C.)
NSA
National Security Agency (Washington, D.C.)
PRO
Public Record Office at Kew (London )*
* The PRO is now known as The National Achives (TNA). However, because much of the research for this book was done before the name change, PRO is used instead of TNA throughout.
PHH
The multi-volume printed record of the hearings of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, 1946. It contains the transcripts and findings of the previous hearings and is available in major American reference libraries.
The title of the printed record of the hearings is below:
Pearl Harbor Attack: Hearings Before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Pursuant to S. Con. Res. 27, A Concurrent Resolution Authorizing an Investigation of the Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Events and Circumstances Relating Thereto. 79th Congress. Congress of the United States. (1946)
1. Ian Colvin, Chief of Intelligence (New York: Victor Gollancz, 1951), 218–19.
1. Cunningham to Ladd, Memorandum, 27 Jan. 1944, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 126, Doc. 65-37193-144. Strong was a long-time member of British intelligence, having formerly headed MI14 of the War Office, the military intelligence section responsible for Germany. (Not to be confused with General George V. Strong, G-2, in Washington.)
2. Minutes of meeting re CI [Counter-Intelligence]-War Room planning, Feb. 1945; Note on meeting with Lt.-Col. Robertson, 12–25 Jul. 1945: PRO, FO1020/1281.
3. Ayer to FBI Director, 4 Nov. 1944, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 177, 65-54077(1); Hoover to Ayer, 2 Jun. 1945, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 126, f.37193(11).
4. FBI Director to Ayer, 6 Dec. 1944, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 126, f.37193(11).
5. This number comes from “Bibliography of the GIS,” 17 Dec. 1945, PRO, KV3/8. Franz Seubert, in 1941 head of Referat 2 of IH West at Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, told American interrogators the number of informers and spies kept on file by the Abwehr’s Zentralkartei der V-Leute ran into the “thousands”: Cimperman to Director, 29 Jan. 1944, with attached interrogation, NARA, RG65, (230/86/11/07), Box 35, File 100-274818.
6. For the sequence and details of the establishment of these interrogation centres, including the forward interrogation unit at Diest in Belgium, see R.W.G. Stephens, Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies (London: Public Record Office, 2000), 71, 82, 113.
7. Minutes of meeting of CI-War Room, Feb. 1945, PRO, FO1020/1281.
8. For an exhaustive description and assessment of the SD and RSHA, see the sixty-one page U.S. Army interrogation of Dr. Wilhelm Höttl, 9 Jul. 1945, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 61, 65-47826-252-34. Höttl was a senior officer in the RSHA, working first in Amt III and then Amt VI.
9. The 1947 kidnapping by the Soviets of Col. Bernhardi and the attempted kidnapping of Wilhelm Kuebart, both formerly of Fremde Heere Ost, is described in CIC Special Agent Charles Hayes to HQ, 970th CIC Det., 7 May 1947, NARA, RG319, Box 472, IRR000391.
10. Richard Gehlen, The Gehlen Memoirs (London: Collins, 1972), passim.
11. According to his son-in-law, Col. Manfred Blume, Hamburg IL chief Nikolaus Ritter was deliberately evasive during his Camp 020 interrogation for fear of being tried as a war criminal: Benjamin Fischer, “The Enigma of Major Nikolaus Ritter,” Centre for the Study of Intelligence Bulletin 11 (Summer 2000): 8–11.
12. John Court Curry, The Security Service: Its Problems and Organizational Adjustments, 1908–1945 (London: Public Record Office, 1946), 51–52. He saw it as a positive change. It wasn’t.
See also, Thomson’s fascinating memoir: Basil Thomson, My Experience at Scotland Yard (New York: Doubleday, 1923), 7. He questioned Mata Hari, the most famous of all female spies. Having noted mentally that “time had a little dimmed her charms” because she appeared to be about forty, he let her go like a gentleman: “Madam … if you will take the advice of one nearly twice your age, give up what you are doing.” She did not, and was later shot by the French.
13. Curry, Security Service, 228–33. R.W.G. Stephens’s “A Digest of Ham” was published as Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies with an introduction by Oliver Hoare in 2000 by the Public Record Office (London). Hereafter it is cited as: Stephens, Camp 020.
14. Stephens, Camp 020, 117.
15. For instance, Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Bat (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1926).
16. Oreste Pinto, The Spycatcher Omnibus (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1964), 52.
17. On the need to get confessions, see Stephens, Camp 020, 109; and Curry, Security Service, 229.
18. Stephens, Camp 020, 7. For details on the abuse of prisoners and use of torture at Bad Nenndorf, see article by Ian Cobain, Guardian, 17 Dec. 2005.
19. Liddell Diary, 16–22 Feb. 1944, PRO, KV4/193.
20. Stephens, Camp 020, passim. See also, Curry, Security Service, 228–32.
21. Stephens, Camp 020, 281–83. Before the war, Mayer had been a refrigerator salesman.
22. Rudolph to Berlin, 5 Apr. 1942, Canaris W/T intercepts, 26, PRO, KV3/3. Given that the texts of intercepts were withheld from Camp 020 during the war, the interrogators at CSDIC(WEA) may not have known of this message when they questioned Rudolph.
23. Final report on Friedrich Rudolph, 26 Mar. 1946, CSDIC(WEA), NARA, RG65, IWG Box 189, 57039. See also, PRO, KV2/266.
24. First CSDIC(WEA) on Rudolph, 15 Nov. 1945; Correspondence between War Room and CSDIC, 3, 19, and 21 Dec. 1945; and Final report on Rudolph, 2 Apr. 1946; PRO, KV2/266. Numerous documents are missing or withdrawn from this file, one as recently as the year 2000. Stephens would have been the commandant of CSDIC(WEA) at the time.
25. H.J. Giskes, London Calling North Pole (London: William Kimber, 1953), 88.
26. Pieter Dourlein, Inside North Pole: A Secret Agent’s Story (London: William Kimber, 1953).
27. Cimperman to FBI Director, 4 Oct. 1945, enclosing Cam
p 020 Interim Interrogation Report on Hugo Bleicher (Appendix B), 38, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 184, File 65-56185. The identical report is in NARA, RG319, Box 331, XE003464. There is no “final” report in either place.
28. Abwehr Major Richard Heinrich (HARLEQUIN), captured during 1942 the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa, told an MI6 interrogator that the Germans knew of the impending raid and prepared for it: Testimony of Richard Heinrich, 18 Apr. 1943, PRO KV2/268. When MI6 asked for information on the defences of St. Nazaire, the Germans operating the captured Interallie wireless set recognized the significance of the request and reported it to the Abwehr in Berlin: Erich Borchers, Abwehr Contre Resistance (Paris: Amiot-Dumont, 1950), 179. Mathilde Carré alludes to the wireless exchange with London in I Was ‘The Cat’ (London: Souvenir Press, 1960), 139.
29. Both Carré and Borchers refer repeatedly to being in contact with British intelligence through “Room 55” of the War Office. This was MI5’s cover address: Curry, Security Service, 203, 390. In Secret War: The Story of SOE, Britain’s Wartime Sabotage Organization (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), 37–40, Nigel West says it was MI6 that was in contact with Interallié without giving a source. I have gone with Curry, Borchers, and Carré.
30. Stephens, Camp 020, 92.
31. Peter Day and Andrew Alderson, “Top German’s Spy Blunders Helped Britain to Win War,” Sunday Telegraph, 23 Apr. 2000: n.p. The document on which this article was based was not found when this author looked for it (Jan. 2012) in PRO, KV2/85–87. Day and Alderson wrote the article following the release of one of the earliest batches of MI5 files, so perhaps it was subsequently withdrawn.
32. Stephens, Camp 020, 364. Wichmann stuck to his story that he knew little of the day-to-day operation of Ast Hamburg and that what he had known he had forgotten. The only spy he could remember that Hamburg had on file was DER KLEINER — Arthur Owens, also known as SNOW to the British. Otherwise, the Camp 020 interrogators got nothing from him: PRO, KV2/103. One would have thought Schmidt would have made an impression.
33. “The End of the German Intelligence Service,” Interim: British Army of the Rhine Intelligence Review 8 (24 Sep. 1945) DHH, 581.009(D2). This publication was classified SECRET and was primarily for the edification of British army intelligence officers.
1. Office of Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality: Interrogation Division, “Interrogation of General Erwin Lahousen,” comprising Canaris’s Secret Organization (Parts I and II), and Sidelights on the Development of the 20th of July (III), Sep. 1945, PRO, KV2/173. According to a covering letter, the reports were prepared by the Third U.S. Army Interrogation Center.
2. For details of Lahousen’s recruitment, see K.H. Abshagen, Canaris (London: Hutchinson, 1956), 87–88. Abshagan was Lahousen’s trusted deputy and had direct knowledge and experience of his anti-Nazi activities. The MI5 file on him, however, contains information only on his pre-war career as a journalist: PRO, KV2/390. The description of the morning meetings of the Abwehr department heads is from Affidavit of Leopold Buerkner, Nuremberg Trials, 22 Jan. 1946, www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/Buerkner.htm.
3. Abshagan, Canaris, 79. He says it was a print of a “demon,” which would be the impression of someone unfamiliar with Japanese woodblock art of the Edo period.
4. V/48/F8 to V.F., 15 Dec. 1945, with attached reports of Lahousen, PRO, KV2/173. The reference to Czechoslovakia is from the Lahousen interrogation report (I,1). All subsequent disclosures by Lahousen described in text are from this report unless otherwise noted.
5. “Lahousen,” I, 3. The words in parenthesis correct the grammar of the translation.
6. “Lahousen,” III, 1. He specifies 80 Tirpitzufer here. See also, Abshagan, Canaris, 161–2. The assertion that this plot never existed in Heinz Höhne, Canaris (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 377, is negated by Lahousan’s testimony. Lahousen used the word Reichsicherheitshauptamt for Nazi Security Service but the Nazi secret services had not yet been unified. He meant Sicherheitsdienst.
7. “Lahousen,” II, 11. The underlined words are as in the document. Lahousen merges the 1941 and 1942/43 missions to Spain that Canaris undertook for Hitler, the first specifically about Gibraltar and the second especially about allowing German troops to cross into Spanish territory. See also, Abshagen, Canaris, 212–13. According to the German consul-general in Barcelona at the time, Spanish soldiers would have received a German army crossing into Spain “with open arms.” Kempner to Hoover, 13 Jun. 1946 with attached “treatise” of Hans Kroll, NARA, RG65,IWG Box 153, 65-37193. For an examination of this subject, see Leon Papeleux, L’Admiral Canaris entre Franco et Hitler (Tournai, Belgium: Casterman, 1977). Note that Lahousen’s interrogation was not available to him.
8. “Lahousen,” III, 12, 18. The wording in the document is “… and used these ‘confidants’ for active counter-activity.” In the original German, the word was likely Vertrauensmann. The use of Jewish “V men” is also reported in Abshagan, Canaris, 101, who notes that it was made possible because the identity of persons recruited for the Abwehr had to be kept secret and so were exempt from screening by the Gestapo. The FBI and MI5/MI6 were aware that some of the spies they had captured were Jewish but this was unlikely to have been known by the U.S. Army intelligence officers who first interrogated Lahousen.
9. “Lahousen,” III, 18. Matzky was appointed by General Franz Halder, Chief of the General Staff, who was a dedicated opponent of Hitler and already had been involved in several plans to overthrow the regime.
10. He was then chairman of the CI-War Room, the Allied agency then responsible for distributing the reports from the various interrogation centres.
11. “Lahousen,” II, 5; C.J. Masterman, The Double-Cross System (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1972), 122–23, 131–32; and Curry, Security Service, 249. See also, F.H. Hinsley and C.A.G. Simkins, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. IV, Security and Counter-Intelligence (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office Books, 1990); and Frank Owen, The Eddie Chapman Story (New York: Julian Messner, 1954). There have been several books since 2000 in the same vein. Deceiving British Intelligence for decades as to his importance must have been a career high for the con man.
12. OSS X-2, V/48/F8 to VF, 15 Dec. 1945, PRO, KV2/173, Doc. 2a. This document is marked for the WR-CI, the Counter-Espionage War Room, which means it and the attached reports were seen by Colonel Robertson.
13. “Lahousen,” III, 19, PRO, KV2/173 (the typos and capitalizations are as in text). The index of the MI5 file on Canaris lists Helen Alexandre Theotoky in connection with Canaris in 1937 (date partially obscured) with mention of two further reports from her in 1941 — on 16 Jul. 1941 and 25 Oct. 1941. A note on the file ( PRO, KV3/8) indicates the actual documents were removed in 1960.
14. F.S. Penny to Director [of FBI], with attachment, 25 Jun. 1944, NARA, IWG Box 210, 65-37193-233.
15. “It appears unlikely that it will ever be possible to determine the degree to which Canaris was merely providing a refuge for kindred spirits or was consciously building an apparatus that in due time could be directed against the regime”: Harold Deutsch, The Conspiracy Against Hitler in the Twilight War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1968), 62. This is the usual assessment of Canaris’s role in the opposition against Hitler. In his public statements afterwards, Lahousen downplayed or avoided disclosing much of what he revealed at his original interrogation.
1. For an excellent overview of the tension between the SA, the SS, and the army, see Robert J. O’Neill, The German Army and the Nazi Party (London: Corgi Books, 1968), passim.
2. For an excellent description of how Hitler used a splintered Parliament to obtain absolute power, see William L. Shirer, The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 150–200.
3. Jacques Delarue, Histoire de la Gestapo (Paris: Fayard, 1962), 188. This is my translation of his French translation of the original German. The description of the Roehm killings is mainly from
this book.
4. Ibid., 206.
5. Nicholas Reynolds, Treason Was No Crime: Ludwig Beck (London: William Kimber, 1976), 52–61.
6. Conversation with Admiral Konrad Patzig, ONI Intelligence Report, 23 Feb. 1946, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 177, 66-56830. Patzig was Canaris’s immediate predecessor as head of the Abwehr, 1932–34. He was ousted because of his resistance to takeover by the SS.
7. Walter Schellenberg, The Labryinth: Memoirs of Walter Schellenberg (New York: Harper & Bros., 1954), 155. Admiral Raeder would have been aware of this relationship when he nominated Canaris.
8. For two excellent contemporary expositions of Hitler’s political tactics, see Hjalmar Schacht, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Vol. VIII, 3 May 1946–15 May 1946 (Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal,1948), n.p (testimony also online by name and date); and Franz von Papen, Memoirs (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1955).
9. Franz Liedig, “German Intelligence Branch and 20 July,” reprinted in Interim: British Army of the Rhine Intelligence Review 14 (Feb. 1946). DHH 581.009(2).The early date of this document and the fact that Liedig had close ties to Canaris that predated him being asked to join the Abwehr, give a great deal of weight to this testimony. It contradicts the assertion that Canaris was “under the führer’s spell” until 1937 (Höhne, Canaris, 211–18). Of course he had to dissemble and pretend to be an acolyte of the Nazis. How could he do otherwise? His successor, Georg Hansen, did exactly the same thing. Höhne’s evidence that he was actually in sympathy with Hitler is not credible.
