Dulles continued to report Kolbe’s material. It was not until April 1944 that the British analysts came around and admitted that they had found that only 4 percent of the reports were inaccurate—an extraordinary record for any agent reporting from within an enemy country. At this point the American military agreed to full dissemination of the Kolbe material. Not only did the cables and dispatches—the final count was some 1600 documents—give vital insights into German policy and plans, but the copies of cables also enabled Allied cryptanalysts to complete the deciphering of the heretofore only partially broken Nazi diplomatic ciphers. And if this were not enough, Kolbe’s information included an instance in which, presumably unbeknownst to Hitler, Peter Kleist, a ranking foreign office official, was dispatched to Sweden to approach Soviet diplomats with an offer from Ribbentrop to negotiate an end to the fighting on the eastern front. The Soviet embassy refused to meet Kleist.
Kolbe continued to make his daring trips to Switzerland well into 1944, when in the aftermath of the July 20 attempt to assassinate Hitler, the intensified Nazi security measures made the journey impossible.*
Fritz Kolbe is an authentic hero of the German resistance to Hitler. He survived the war, but was never able to regain his footing with his “denazified” former colleagues who were busily establishing the new German foreign office. After some time in New York this gallant German, who in his active days had never sought any compensation, retired to Switzerland, where he lived on a CIA pension.
The evaluation of a new source offering fresh reports on critically important targets on which little or no hard data are on record remains a constant intelligence problem. If a spy is involved, his claimed access to the data and his motives for reporting it are closely examined. His reports are evaluated for possible internal contradictions. If the agent is active, he can be queried on areas in which his reporting can be tested against existing data known to be true. There are a score and more of such tests, but most take time and some require relatively easy access to the agent. In the Kolbe affair, the war was hot, time was precious, and communications between the isolated Bern station and OSS headquarters were clumsy and time-consuming. Given the obstinate British evaluation, it is a credit to Allen Dulles that he chose to march to his own drum and press ahead until the Kolbe reports were recognized for the treasure they were.
But as in so many incidents in secret intelligence there was an element in the Kolbe story that remained hidden from most of us who were involved while the case was running. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of British cryptanalysts, and the cooperation of Polish, Czech, and French liaison colleagues and a lone German spy, the Nazi military and intelligence ciphers had been broken sometime before Kolbe became active. This success—code name ULTRA—rivaled only by the American triumph of breaking Japanese ciphers (code name MAGIC), was one of a handful of the great secrets of World War II. The ULTRA information made a vital contribution to the Allied victory in Europe and Africa. No secret was more tightly held or more rigidly compartmented within the services. Knowledge of the break was restricted to an absolute need-to-know basis.
The only element of OSS known to me to have had access to ULTRA on a continuing basis was the London office of X-2, the OSS counterespionage section in England. Although General Donovan was “indoctrinated”—the term for having been briefed and granted access to the ULTRA material—he was rarely in a position to follow it on a regular basis. To my knowledge James Murphy, chief of X-2, was the only OSS officer based in Washington who was indoctrinated and fully informed. It was his responsibility to keep General Donovan briefed on the most important ULTRA data.
At the time Kolbe appeared, the British were able to check his personal background and his reports against the ULTRA holdings. OSS could not have done so—those of us in OSS responsible for evaluating the Kolbe documents in Washington had no knowledge of ULTRA. It was nine months after the initial evaluation of the reports before the comparison of Kolbe’s data to the ULTRA material carried the day in London, and his reports were given formal recognition. Called the “Boston Series” by OSS, Kolbe’s information is now recognized as the very best produced by any Allied agent in World War II.
The limited dissemination of high-security intelligence reports and the rigorously compartmented knowledge of sensitive operational activity are essential security precautions. In practice, this means that even at relatively high levels of command, one senior officer may not have been briefed on a Top Secret Code Word operation being run in a nearby office. This imposes a heavy responsibility upon intelligence executives. The in-house dissemination of information must be organized so that those with the need to know are well enough informed to spot potential conflicts of purpose without spending every working hour staying abreast of everything that’s going on everywhere. The answer is not a near-perfect flowchart, but a reasonable body of experience and seat-of-the-pants common sense.
My continuing effort to move closer to the action succeeded in January 1945, when I was assigned to the German Branch in London. Navy Lieutenant William Casey had just been named chief SI (secret intelligence collection) for OSS in Europe, and was supervising the effort to infiltrate agents into Germany. I may have come in through the side door, but it had opened on the serious world of secret operations.
*An American writer and intelligence “expert” has described Kolbe as “bouncing back and forth from Berlin to Bern.” Such an authority must have an unusual high-risk tolerance to describe an agent bouncing over the dangers involved in filching Top Secret documents from closely guarded Berlin offices, enduring air raids along the rail line, and slipping through a half dozen Gestapo checkpoints while carrying his death-by-torture warrant in a shabby briefcase.
Chapter 4
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LONDON
When I left Washington my assignment was to prepare plans and earmark personnel for the OSS European headquarters that Allen Dulles was slated to establish in postwar Berlin. By the time I reached London in January 1945 it was obvious that it might be months before he would be establishing the OSS station in Berlin. The Battle of the Bulge and the furious fighting in the Ardennes were convincing proof that the Wehrmacht was far from collapse.
Without tipping his hand, Hitler had assembled a strike force of ten armored divisions, eighteen mechanized infantry divisions, with ample air support, and the necessary supplies and fuel. In forty hours the Germans had blown a hole twelve miles deep and at least six miles wide in the Allied lines. Tanks were within fifteen miles of Liège.
Plans for the Berlin station were set aside. In the meantime I was to make myself useful in London—that is, useful to Navy Lieutenant William J. Casey, the newly appointed chief for secret intelligence collection in Europe. I welcomed the new assignment.
Housing was in short supply, and I was lucky when Bill Casey invited me to share his quarters at 87 Harley House. The flat was a short walk from the OSS headquarters at 70 Grosvenor Street, and just around the corner from the American embassy on Grosvenor Square. Milton Katz, who would become dean of Harvard International Law School and serve as legal counsel for the Marshall Plan, was the third member of our brief ménage à trois. I had, of course, heard of Casey, whom General Donovan had brought into OSS from the Navy. By November 1944, when Casey was posted to London, he had gained a considerable reputation as one of General Donovan’s protégés and troubleshooters.
General Donovan and Casey were birds of a feather—highly intelligent, aggressive, ambitious, and self-made. Both were lawyers descended from Irish Catholic immigrants. They were furiously hardworking, impatient, demanding of everyone about them, and with a keen sense of public service. And both were ardent conservative Republicans. Donovan was a born leader, capable of commanding intense respect and loyalty. He was brave, not to say reckless, and had a reputation as one of the most decorated American officers in World War I. Bill Casey took a bit more knowing.
In the hours we spent together, I pieced together Casey’s backgr
ound. After graduating cum laude from Fordham, Casey enrolled in the Catholic University School of Social Work in Washington. He was prepared to help the struggling poor, but had no interest in handing a dole to anyone who appeared to have no intention of ever going to work. He enrolled in a Brooklyn law school, and shaved twelve months from the three-year course while holding a full-time job. Before Casey’s law practice was established, he began part-time work for the Research Institute of America drafting newsletters, books, and digests of the New Deal legislation. The business boomed, and Casey moved to RIA headquarters in Washington.
Casey’s work at RIA and private practice were highly profitable, but he had a strong sense of public service. In September 1942 he became a consultant to the Board of Economic Warfare. Pinpointing and attacking choke points in Hitler’s economy by preemptive buying and strategic blockades was interesting, but not enough so to satisfy Casey. In 1943 he put his career aside and was commissioned a lieutenant (JG) in the Navy. Even if Casey’s poor eyesight had not ruled out sea duty, the Navy would not have submerged anyone with his economic savvy in a routine job on a headquarters staff. Casey found himself prodding shipbuilders into manufacturing more landing crafts—and earning only a fraction of his civilian income. This was not what Casey had in mind when he signed on with the Navy.
Casey knew little about OSS, but guessed that it would offer more action than his Navy desk job. When a friend tipped him to the OSS need for a more effective secretariat and registry, Casey presented himself to Lieutenant Colonel Otto Doering, the OSS executive officer, as a master of document control. In what General Donovan later referred to as “jig-time,” Casey reorganized the secretariat and reduced the chaos involved in attempting to cope with the sixty thousand cables, dispatches, reports, studies, and other bits of paper that engulfed the OSS headquarters. He also established channels controlling the access that some thirty section chiefs had used to report directly to Donovan.
When Casey arrived at the London headquarters as a Navy lieutenant, a modest rank in a city bulging with senior officers, he carried orders from General Donovan to create a secretariat there similar to the one he had organized in Washington. Colonel David K.E. Bruce, OSS chief in Europe, had not asked for this bounty and was not immediately impressed by the rumpled, relatively junior officer Donovan had sent to do the job. But time was precious, and rather than argue the need for a reorganized secretariat, Bruce accepted Casey as a special assistant whose experience with the Board of Economic Warfare could be put to good use. This, plus Casey’s ability to hone masses of material into succinct reports, complemented his reputation as one of General Donovan’s protégés.
While on duty in Washington, I had developed a good picture of OSS activity in Europe. By June 1944, and the landings of the Allied troops in Normandy, OSS—in close coordination with the British—had successfully organized espionage and resistance operations in the occupied areas—France, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Individual Germans were recruited as agents in place in Germany and abroad. Aside from operations in the south, OSS activity in France was mounted from England and controlled by the OSS London headquarters. Operations in the south of France were staged from Algiers. All this activity was closely coordinated with the British, and OSS operations mounted from England were subject to approval by the British.
As OSS gained experience and developed its own resources, the British insistence on control began to chafe. General Donovan had for some time considered the possibility of infiltrating agents—by parachute or cross border—into Germany in the manner of the operations conducted in France and other Nazi-occupied areas. The British did not agree.
It was one thing, and difficult enough, Sir Stewart Menzies, chief of MI-6, the British secret intelligence service, informed OSS, to parachute agents into an area occupied by a hated foreign power. It was quite another matter to drop spies into a country policed by its own pervasive and highly efficient security forces, and where there was no organized resistance group that might offer the slightest support to an agent. If an agent was young and hardy enough to survive the drop, and to sustain life entirely on his own, the British asked, how could he also be expected to collect and report intelligence of any significance?
Here, an aside. Within the next decade, I would be embroiled in exactly the same issue—not with the British, but between CIA and the Washington foreign policy establishment.
In 1944, and as long as OSS operations were staged from England, the British position would stand. But General Donovan, as Casey assured me, was not one to take no, or even maybe, for an answer. After all, Allen Dulles had established “a few” agents in Germany, and this, as far as Donovan knew, was at least as much as the sophisticated Brits had achieved. In August, shortly after the Allied troops swept the Wehrmacht away from the Swiss border, Dulles was able to cross into France for his first meeting with General Donovan in twenty months. In Washington, I had picked up bits and pieces of this session. In London, Bill Casey gave me his more intimate view of the discussions.
Before the first session ended, General Donovan, with the thirty-one-year-old Casey at his side, had propositioned his star operative. Wasn’t this the moment to begin parachute and line-crossing operations into the Nazi heartland, both to collect intelligence and to foster resistance activity?
Dulles disagreed. He had made his views known even before he left Washington. From the outset in Switzerland, he sought agents who had primary access to strategic information. It was technically possible, he admitted, to slip an occasional agent across the Swiss border into France, Italy, or Austria, but even this required a modicum of cooperation by the Swiss. As for crossings into Germany, Switzerland was not likely to risk becoming known as a staging area for clandestine warfare in the Third Reich. The Swiss were prepared to resist any German attack; Switzerland was not ready to incite a confrontation with the Wehrmacht.
More to the point, Dulles said, what access could any agent bold enough to cross into Germany hope to achieve? Was it not wiser to concentrate on Germans who in the course of their everyday activity had access to strategic information, and to approach them while they were abroad? Why not focus on recruiting agents—of any nationality—who had legitimate business or diplomatic responsibilities that allowed them legal access to Germany and to likely sources of important information?
The bits of these discussions that became known at my level in Washington were not sufficient to warrant a strong opinion. My feeling, however, was to a degree based on my experience as a reporter. One informed source was worth more than a dozen men in the street.
As for resistance activity, Dulles had assured Donovan, the returns were not all in, but Hitler had already put hundreds to death on the grounds they were somehow involved in the July 20 assassination attempt. The Gestapo was now running down the relatives of most of those only remotely involved in that plot. In the opinion of most Germans, Dulles averred, a successful anti-Nazi revolt would only hasten the much propagandized “unconditional surrender” of the German homeland. The prospect of such a surrender played into the hands of Hitler’s propagandists. How could any resistance movement hope to sell Germans the notion of unconditional surrender to the Soviet horde?
General Donovan and Casey agreed with Dulles’s approach, but were not convinced that there was no role for inserting agents behind the German lines. As the Allies pushed the Wehrmacht back to the German borders, military resistance would stiffen and there would be even more need for behind-the-lines support. Until that happened, Donovan would reluctantly postpone any intensive effort to infiltrate agents into Germany. He had not, however, abandoned the idea. I was not present at any of these discussions, but long after-hours sessions with Casey provided the details.
Bill Casey’s observation that General Donovan was interested in establishing a permanent national intelligence service was the first time the thought occurred to me. Such a service, Donovan thought, should most logically evolve from OSS. He
wanted to be sure that his vibrant, fully staffed and experienced organization survived the war intact and with a proven record of competence. He realized that when the fighting in France and the Lowlands slowed, a significant part of the OSS mission in Europe would wind down, with the most motivated warriors peeling off for assignments scattered throughout the Far East. He was concerned lest this cause some of the OSS European activity to be folded into existing military organizations.
When I left Washington the full impact of the near disaster on the Ardennes front had not fully registered. The Wehrmacht had been contained, but fighting still raged along the front. The German offensive demonstrated an Allied intelligence failure—in Casey’s words, “a colossal failure.”
The day following the attack, Casey cabled Donovan an urgent request for a more active role in Germany, underlining the need for military intelligence and suggesting that with the eventual breakdown of security in Germany, the opportunity for agent activity was much improved. He pointed out that Hitler’s Reich was awash in foreigners, all of whom had ample reason to resist and fight against their German jailers. There were some two million Russian prisoners of war who might be stirred into revolt against their hellish imprisonment. The thousands of slave laborers and even volunteer workers—Poles, Belgians, French, and Dutch—scattered throughout Germany were another potential pool of activists. And who better to contact these people than survivors of the European labor movements—trade unionists, socialists, and even communists—who had managed to escape from Germany and find safe haven among the Allies? The OSS Labor Desk already had extensive contact with this group, and had found them responsive and enthusiastic collaborators. Their intimate knowledge of German industry had already proved invaluable.
A Look Over My Shoulder Page 6