The punishment was filmed. A medal was struck for the film makers; it bore Heydrich’s profile and the word Rache (Revenge). All over Europe, revenge was taken in a similar fashion. From a village in Norway to Oradour-sur-Glane in France, families were either incinerated within burning barns or machine-gunned as they tried to get away.
As for the assassins, their escape plan was never completed. The SS division Das Reich, acting on an informer’s tip, tore down the church where they had taken refuge. Inevitably, they found the false tomb. Two machine guns were lowered into the crypt, and everyone inside was killed either by bullets or by a subsequent fire caused by setting alight gasoline poured on the bodies.
Hitler flew to the funeral of the Protector. “He was one of the greatest defenders of our greater German concept,” he proclaimed.
In Stern Park Gardens, Illinois, and in Bohemia, Long Island, the citizens voted to change the names of their communities to “Lidice.”
The Destroyer of Lidice, Karl Frank, was eventually hanged. After the war, a socialist member of the British Parliament questioned the wisdom of provoking such killers. The MP, Robert Paget, challenged the Baker Street concept of sending agents on missions that stung the Nazis into reprisals that in turn created more civilian hatred against the occupiers. “This was our general idea when we flew in a party to murder Heydrich,” Paget protested. “The main Czech resistance movement was a direct consequence of SS reprisals.”
Was it worth the loss of so many innocent lives? That was Paget’s question. A voice from the past replied: “The killing of Heydrich was an act of justice that lightened our darkness and gave us hope.”
The surprise witness had been working for the Destroyer of Lidice as a gardener. He was a Baker Street Irregular, an Englishman named Richard Pinder.
Pinder put aside his anonymity to defend wartime actions because the MP’s questions had started a discreet parliamentary inquiry. Otherwise, like so many others, he would have taken his particular secret to the grave. He had been training guerrillas in sabotage when caught in a German drive to round up men for forced labor. Pinder’s fake papers were made out in the name of a Frenchman whose occupation was given as horticulteur. Frank, as Deputy Protector of Czechoslovakia, had taken over the big estates of a wealthy Jewish family and had applied for a professional landscape gardener. Pinder wangled the job. Thereafter, he was the silent witness of Frank’s career as a gangster-tyrant.
“It is true Frank avenged Heydrich’s murder,” he said years later. “But in all the occupied countries, the Nazis were liquidating communities once they had served their purpose. Czechoslovakia was industrially very important to the German war machine. The people fed the guns until it came their turn to die.”
A new and more ghastly form of warfare had overtaken the world. For the sake of individual survival, millions died. Was it worth it? “The question never arose in stark terms,” Stephenson once commented. “Mankind created the conditions. Mankind reacted to terrors of its own making. We were on a course dictated by our own inventiveness.
“In mid-1942, on the day Heydrich died, the Soviet Union put pressure on Roosevelt to launch an invasion across the English Channel. The British War Cabinet that day was forced to say that opening a Second Front now would be suicidal. Civilian morale inside Fortress Europe had to be prepared, and our guerrilla forces had to be supported by most of the population. There was only one way to mobilize popular support for the secret armies, and that was to stage more dramatic acts of resistance and counterterrorism.”
* R & A was later described as “the first concerted effort on the part of any world power to apply the talents of its academic community to official analysis of foreign affairs,” by a former CIA officer, R. Harris Smith, in OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency. Smith, writing in 1972, presumably was denied access to British records at that time still classified.
* Gilbert Highet, a Scot, was a professor of classics at Columbia University when he joined BSC in 1941. In 1943, he was commissioned in the British Army, left as a lieutenant-colonel in 1946 to resume his academic career at Columbia, and achieved pre-eminence as an educator, scholar, author, translator, and poet. He became a U.S. citizen in 1951.
* The year is significant. The fact of the systematic extermination of Jews was public knowledge in Germany, in the democracies of Europe and America, and in the Soviet Union. As Stephenson later commented: “It is impossible to deny that Hitler’s actual liquidation policies were known to have started even while Western and Russian leaders appeased him.”
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While these deadly campaigns were waged in Europe, Stephenson had to play politics. It was a foretaste of the problems that face an intelligence service in free societies. Matters of life and death on the perimeter of a network tend to lose urgency at the center. In order simply to survive, the directors of the agency have to be vigilant against attacks from within the society they defend.
A future chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen W. Dulles, moved into Room 3663 at Rockefeller Center a month after Pearl Harbor. American academics began to be seen in English country lanes around Bletchley, so that in time ULTRA was served by Telford Taylor, the future distinguished Columbia University professor; William Bundy, future Assistant Secretary of State and editor of the influential Foreign Affairs; Lewis Powell, who would sit on the Supreme Court.
Slowly, reluctantly, the British were disclosing more about their secret agencies. Just as hesitantly, Americans entered an underworld that in peacetime would offend upholders of free speech and an open society.
By the time Dulles occupied quarters there, BSC realized it would have to fight for its survival in New York. Its relationship with Americans was becoming as intricate as the tangle of pneumatic tubes winding through 630 Fifth Avenue from one BSC office to another, speeding canisters between the message centers that kept the secret of who worked where. Dulles eventually left for a key intelligence post in Switzerland. He wanted an expansion of co-ordinated U.S. intelligence and he had known Donovan since he was Assistant Attorney-General in Washington. If anyone could overtake the British, it was Donovan, he felt.
Attached to Dulles at BSC were prominent Germans snatched out of Gestapo hands by the British—a former chancellor and leader of the German Catholic Center party, a former Prussian cabinet minister, an assortment of diplomats. They made an odd group, but they had a common purpose in briefing Dulles for his mission to make use of anti-Hitler forces inside Germany. Their political fight for survival was directed against professional British intelligence officers who refused to believe their reports of a German resistance movement.
The British had become cynical about German reports of opposition to Hitler. Admiral Canaris, Germany’s most professional intelligence chief, had earlier divided European governments by floating these deceptive reports. By the time Canaris genuinely sought an escape hatch from a collapsing Nazi empire, his record in the British file marked “K” made London feel an obligation to let him stew in his own juice. This resulted in quarrels with Dulles and OSS, who felt an equal obligation to pursue such contacts. “The Atlantic divided both sides in time as well as space,” Stephenson commented later. “Each side had arrived at a different stage in experience.”
New York was an unreal environment for anyone trying to visualize anti-Nazi groups in Europe. Allied intelligence agents who were superb in the field tended to become churlish, quarrelsome, and neurotic at New York headquarters, where the staff seemed far removed from the bloody struggle. Hardship was a relative term. There, the need for parachutes was associated with a shortage of nylon stockings. The secretaries walking through the portals of Rockefeller Center wore short skirts or slacks for the sake of economy, but they could still get the fruit and candy that children in Britain either had forgotten or never knew.
The realities were plainer in the ciphers flowing through Rockefeller Center. When the SS commander in Warsaw, General Franz Kutschera
, was sentenced to death by the guerrilla Polish Home Army, the policy aspects had to be studied in New York. Details of his quarters, his appearance, and his habits were assembled at Camp X, using information supplied by Baker Street, including timetables radioed by three girls who had studied the victim’s movements. In Poland, the secret army’s policy was to strike at the Germans responsible for terror in as public a manner as possible. Kutschera was killed by nine executioners armed with light machine guns and grenades in an operation that lasted sixty seconds. Stephenson said later: “If the Warsaw rebels had received no encouragement, the city would have been razed anyway. The hardest decisions were made by those enemies of the Third Reich who slipped out of the occupied territories to help plan secret operations that must endanger their own comrades.”
The mathematics of secret warfare were unknown to the Allied military establishment. The lesson had yet to be learned that apparently primitive methods of warfare can be combined with the most modern techniques; that if the regular armies have been defeated, guerrillas can play a major part in defensive strategy until the regular armies can be reconstituted, whereupon the guerrillas assist in offensive operations.
“We could argue that a brigade of guerrillas was worth thirty regular army brigades but it made no dent on conventional military minds,” recalled Bickham Sweet-Escott, the Baker Street Irregular drafted from the higher financial realms of the oil industry. Furthermore, any such argument was hampered by the obsession with secrecy. This made the companionship of Dulles important to BSC.
Dulles and his colleagues were under as much political pressure as Roosevelt. And the President was in turn feeling the formidable pressure of the Soviet Union by mid-1942 when he was visited by the drab little Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, sent by Stalin to demand an early invasion of Europe. Molotov had been told in London that the cross-Channel invasion was not possible that year. But Stephenson was shaken to learn, on the last day of May 1942, that Roosevelt unthinkingly had speculated to Molotov that “we expect the development of a Second Front this year.”
Molotov treated this as a formal commitment. It put Britain on the spot. Small-scale intelligence raids, scattered guerrilla operations, did not impress the politicians, the press, or the conventional militarists, who were looking for spectacular battlefield victories, big naval engagements, and the mass bombing of enemy cities. The last came under a portentous title: the Strategic Air Offensive. Stephenson opposed mass bombing. He felt vindicated when the Strategic Air Offensive results demonstrated that there were more Allied airmen lost in the first year of mass bombing raids than there were German casualties. Stephenson’s instinct was for guerrilla warfare, which gave priority to individual leadership, inventiveness, and lonely courage.
Secret warfare did not make headlines, however. It produced no glamorous young heroes for front-page treatment. BSC’s difficulties in paying agents and armies increased just when Hoover and the FBI became less sympathetic, and misunderstandings began to arise between British secret-warfare planners in London and the new foreign-intelligence organization run by Bill Donovan.
The BSC Papers recorded: “Hoover keenly resented Donovan’s organization when it was first established, because he feared that its interests would clash with the authority of the FBI, particularly in Latin America. His resentment extended to BSC. Indeed, realizing that he could attack Donovan’s organization most effectively by attacking what was then its mainstay, he began shortly before Pearl Harbor to treat BSC with ill-concealed hostility, and his purpose was quite evidently to suppress its activities if he could. In that purpose, he had the backing, among others in the administration who were latently anti-British, of Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State.
“Immediately after January 1942 [when Allen Dulles moved into BSC quarters] a joint committee was set up to coordinate all Anglo-American intelligence activities. At its first meeting, which was attended by Hoover, Berle and Stephenson among others, Berle proposed that BSC should maintain liaison with no other agency than the FBI. Stephenson resisted the proposal and went on to refer to the pending McKellar bill [which would prevent all foreign intelligence agencies from operating within the United States] pointing out that in its present form it would mean the end of his organization inasmuch as the bill stipulated ‘all records used by foreign agencies would be liable to inspection by U.S. government authorities at any time.’
“Berle replied with a smile that this was regrettable but that it was too late to effect any modification since the bill was already on the President’s desk awaiting signature.
“Stephenson left the meeting before it was over. With Donovan’s help, he persuaded President Roosevelt not to sign the bill unless and until it was modified to allow adequate safeguard of BSC’s legitimate interests.”
Sweet-Escott reckoned “I spent forty per cent of my time fighting the enemy and sixty per cent of my time fighting our friends.”
The biggest challenge was to meet the rapidly rising costs of BSC operations. Payment in full had to be made for American services at the same time that the secret armies had to be paid in Nazi territory—not wages, but money to buy food, bribe officials, travel, and purchase goods. BSC was forking out cash in both directions. If cash was unavailable, BSC offered services. There was always the collateral of the French gold in Martinique. This concept by which secret-warfare loans could be raised in the United States was extended to cover whatever natural wealth was locked behind the British economic blockade. It became increasingly important for BSC to keep redramatizing its usefulness to the United States.
Fortunately, it could do this in economic terms in South America, where the dangers from both Nazi and Japanese conspiracies were only now disturbing American complacency about the area; and where it was suddenly evident that the British could sabotage the sources of wealth and raw materials.
Buried in Latin America were the metals of war and those minerals and exotica for which there was a demand created by new and sophisticated weapons: vanadium, mercury, tungsten, and tin; mica, bauxite, chromium, and antimony. BSC had thrown a noose around the source of these materials. Specialists on this vast region drew up estimates of the riches stored behind the blockade. Some treasures were not immediately recognizable as such. The cinchona bark of German-dominated Bolivia, for instance, was required for a variety of medicines and drugs wanted by the secret armies.
Ecuador’s balsa wood was needed in large and continuous quantities for the nonmetal Baker Street spy planes. If German-influenced suppliers or middlemen tried to sabotage the supply, the way to strike back—as specified in BSC guidebooks—was to cause damage by fire at the strategic locations or foment labor troubles through BSC-run union organizers.
The treasures locked in the “vaults” of Latin America were like stocks and bonds held in the BSC “bank” as collateral against loans. The banker might be small and weak but he had the unusual advantage of directing potential bank robbers. BSC’s sections were run by economic-warfare experts. One section was called “The Physical Security of Strategic Raw Material Supplies from Latin America” and contained six separate Security Zones. In each Zone, BSC controlled an apparatus neatly dovetailed into the existing police system.
Generations of British explorers contributed to the BSC files in New York. They catalogued methods by which British agents and their friends could damage the economies or manipulate the politics of ten supposedly neutral countries in Latin America. Neat files labeled “Vulnerability to Sabotage,” for instance, were specific in analyzing the weak points in each republic’s socioeconomic structure so that agents might know where to strike if a government or an industry failed to fall into line with British policies.
Senior American officials were shocked before Pearl Harbor to discover that a foreign intelligence agency on American soil was cold-bloodedly examining ways to change or overthrow neighboring governments. After the U.S.’s entry into the war, BSC’s conspiracies began to seem more like prude
nt safeguards.
British strength lay in precision of knowledge, which ranged from the personal records of influential Axis-directed Japanese and Germans in key industrial areas to the development of knockout drops made from poisons even more inaccessible than the Venezuelan curare that was in such demand among agents in Europe. William Rowland, the Canadian doctor whose brother was Stephenson’s aide, experimented in New York with new drugs. He sought a mix that would escape the notice of someone drinking at a bar. Strychnine is easily detected. Gallamine, though hard to find, is smoother than curare. Herb and Bill Rowland spent many happy hours sipping alcoholic concoctions in the quest. Their final formula, far superior to the usual knockout mixture called “Mickey Finn,” was passed to U.S. agents.
The secret armies needed foreign currency, which Stephenson bought through New York bankers or through Donovan. Millions of dollars’ worth of funds were shipped to London for parachuting into Europe. But the basic currency was not dollars or pounds sterling; it was a currency of trust, which ran the length of the chain, from Americans made privy to why the cash was required suddenly to guerrilla leaders whose word was as good as their bond. Sackloads of francs, zlotys, guilders, kroner, and lire were smuggled up to Canada for transfer by air.
The Baker Street financial section arranged barter deals whereby wealthy businessmen and bankers in the occupied zones lent cash on the promise it would be repaid after the war. This took a lot of arranging. The leader of a Paris network, in urgent need of money, called on a French banker for help. How was the banker to know the agent was genuine? The banker was told to make up any phrase. This phrase the agent then radioed to London. When the phrase was broadcast in a regular BBC program to occupied Europe, the financier knew his visitor was not a criminal exploiting the strange situation. Large sums were handed over by other anti-Nazi businessmen, who required no receipts and took everything on trust.
A Man Called Intrepid Page 44