by Max Hastings
He sought to strengthen his cover by publicly taunting Soviet diplomats when he met them at international receptions, but the stress of his fantastic high-wire act increasingly told on him, and was reflected in massive infusions of alcohol. In the company of Hanako, he succumbed to morose, drink-fuelled monologues, especially when she begged him to give her a child: ‘I am an old man. I am going to die soon. I can do without a baby! Oh, poor Sorge. You should study so that you can get along without Sorge …’ One night he crashed his motorbike, with agonising consequences – many days in hospital and the loss of his teeth. For the rest of his life he could swallow meat only if it was minced.
He had sense enough to abandon biking, and instead acquired a small car. He embarked on a whimsical cultural improvement programme for Hanako, persuading her to read Gone With the Wind, which he himself considered ‘magnificent’. Several hundred pages later she said, ‘I like Captain Butler.’ Perhaps providing a glimpse of his self-image, Sorge demanded, ‘Do you think I am like Rhett Butler?’ But Clausen wrote later about him: ‘He is a true communist … He is a man who can destroy even his best friend for the sake of Communism.’ He could also destroy a comrade. The spy’s treatment of his wireless-operator was cavalier, even brutal. And his lifestyle was ever more at odds with the ideal of a dedicated servant of the Party. Sorge had made himself probably the best-informed secret agent in the world. Nonetheless, his rashness made an ultimate train wreck inevitable, even if in 1939 this still lay a surprising distance in the future.
By the coming of war, the Soviet Union’s huge expenditure on espionage, and its access to highly placed communist sympathisers in many lands, should have made the Kremlin the best-informed centre of government on the planet. Yet those in Moscow who received and processed the reports from the field were far too fearful of offending the only audience that mattered – Joseph Stalin, master of the Kremlin – to forward any intelligence that was likely to prove unwelcome. Even when important information reached Moscow, it was seldom properly reviewed, far less exploited by policy-makers. Christopher Andrew has written: ‘The Soviet capacity to understand the political and diplomatic intelligence it collected … never approached its ability to collect the intelligence in the first place.’ Stalin acted as his own analyst, preferring to drill endless wells of espionage in search of imagined conspiracies rather than to use intelligence to inform policy-making. Soviet intelligence officers feared for their lives, with good reason, if they told Stalin what he did not want to hear. He seemed to credit only reports that identified plots against himself or the state, at home and abroad. Where these did not exist, Russia’s most senior intelligence officers invented them. Stalin used the product of his codebreakers to some effect where and when this was available, but entered the greatest conflict in history almost blind through his own acts of will.
After Munich, with the doom of Czechoslovakia sealed, the Czech intelligence chief František Moravec was approached by three rival bidders for his services: Admiral Wilhelm Canaris for the Germans, Colonel Louis Rivet for the French, and MI6’s local man, Major Harold Gibson, for the British. Mistrusting the French, Moravec determined to throw in his lot with Britain. In anticipation of the Nazi occupation he did his utmost to reinforce links with local informants before himself leaving his country. He was able to transfer to London large sums of foreign currency, and hoped thus to ensure that he could sustain a Czech intelligence service in exile, though few of his agents were ever heard from again. On 3 March 1939 the Abwehr’s Paul Thummel, Moravec’s best German source, met him in Prague and reported that the city would be occupied on the 15th. ‘Agent A-54’ also warned that his entire staff would be seized by the Gestapo, and could expect no mercy. Moravec was amazed that Thummel declared himself willing to continue his own collaboration. The only proviso, said the Abwehr man, was that the Czechs must ensure that everything about himself in their files was destroyed. With that assurance, the two men parted. Thummel said, ‘Good luck, Colonel. This is not goodbye but Auf wiedersehen.’ The German officer took away with him two addresses for future correspondence, one in Holland, the other in Switzerland.
In Prague on the night of 13 March, Harold Gibson of MI6 – ‘Gibby’, as Moravec always called him, a small, slight figure with a moustache in proportion – drove a car into the Czech Intelligence Department’s garage. This was loaded with hundreds of files packed in canvas bags, which were borne away to the British embassy. The following afternoon, a Dutch civilian plane chartered by Broadway landed at Ruzyn airfield outside Prague to collect passengers for England – Moravec and ten officers of his staff. He chose them unsentimentally, he wrote later, taking those who would be most valuable in London, and those who knew too much to be left to the Gestapo. He felt obliged to leave behind his own wife and two daughters, and indeed to conceal from them his intended destination: he said he was merely making an overnight trip to Moravia.
The plane took off with difficulty amidst a snowstorm, which for a time threatened to force them down into the path of the approaching Germans. Moravec carried a briefcase containing 200,000 Reichsmarks and 100,000 Dutch guilders in cash – about £32,000 – to provide his little team with further seed money for future operations. As the plane passed over the mountains where lay Czechoslovakia’s frontier, the colonel buried his head in his hands and sobbed unashamedly at the prospect of exile. After a brief stop in Amsterdam, the party landed safely at Croydon. When former Czech prime minister Edvard Beneš later arrived in London, Moravec reported to his Putney residence to offer his services and those of his officers, which were readily accepted – his role was formalised the following year, when Beneš formed a government in exile. The colonel’s wife and children escaped from Prague and walked to safety in Poland, from whence they joined him in Britain.
In June 1939 Moravec was delighted to receive a letter, forwarded from a Zürich cover address, which began, ‘Dear Uncle, I think I am in love. I have met a girl.’ On the same page was a secret ink message, appointing a rendezvous in The Hague. It was from agent A-54, the Abwehr colonel Paul Thummel. The Czech officer who duly met him early in August warned Thummel that Moravec’s shrunken organisation no longer had cash to lavish upon him as generously as in the past, but the German responded dismissively that ‘more important matters than money are at stake’. He told the Czech that an invasion of Poland was planned for 1 September, and provided details of the latest Wehrmacht order of battle. He also handed over a list of Polish traitors working for the Germans. Thummel subsequently provided the Nazis’ amended timetable, including on 27 August a final date for the Polish invasion of 3 September 1939. For the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and now of all Western Europe, the sparring was over: the death struggle had begun.
* Both the GRU’s and NKVD’s officers and agents referred to their respective headquarters as ‘Centre’.
* Hamburger, like many others in this book, used a variety of names in the course of her career, starting out as Kuczynski and ending up as Werner. To avoid confusion, only one name is used throughout for all those described.
2
The Storm Breaks
1 THE ‘FICTION FLOOD’
The first significant excitement of the British secret service’s war came in November 1939. A document later known as the ‘Oslo Report’ was sent anonymously to the British legation in Norway, then forwarded to London by its naval attaché. The parcel that reached Broadway contained several pages of German typescript and a small cardboard box. It represented the outcome of an earlier ‘feeler’ message to the legation, saying that if the British wanted to receive details of new scientific developments in Germany, they should make a minor change in the wording of a BBC broadcast to Germany: instead of starting, ‘Hello, this is London calling’, it was to say, ‘Hello, hello, this is …’ This was duly done, and after a short delay the ‘Oslo Report’ was submitted.
Its narrative covered a remarkable range of enemy activities. The anonymous author asserted that the
Germans were developing acoustic and radio-controlled torpedoes; detailed the wavelengths on which German radar stations were operating; suggested bombing the Luftwaffe research station at Rechlin; and much else. The box contained a trigger tube, to be employed for new anti-aircraft shell proximity fuses. But the credibility of the whole document was undermined by the inclusion of two nonsenses: a claim that the Luftwaffe’s Ju-88 bombers were being produced at the impossible rate of 5,000 a month; and that a German aircraft-carrier, the Franken, was approaching completion at Kiel. These mistakes contributed to a verdict by Whitehall that the document should be dismissed as a German plant.
But the report was also read by Dr Reginald Jones, the outspoken, combative, twenty-eight-year-old assistant director of Air Ministry scientific intelligence. Jones shines forth as an authentic star in the wartime secret firmament. He was a social hybrid, son of a sergeant in the Grenadier Guards who displayed precocious brilliance at his south London school, and later proved as much at ease holding forth at grand country-house parties as fighting his corner in meetings chaired by the prime minister. Having had a notable early career in physics and astronomy at Oxford, where for a time he worked under Frederick Lindemann – later Lord Cherwell – he became fascinated by the possibilities of exploiting infra-red technology for the detection of aircraft, and in 1936 went to work for the Air Ministry. He was intolerant of slow-mindedness or bureaucracy wherever he encountered it, and there was plenty of both at Broadway Buildings, where after a brief stint at Bletchley Park he was invited to share an office with Fred Winterbotham.
In the course of the war Reg Jones became one of the foremost British investigators of German air technology. In November 1939, however, his achievements still lay in the future, and he was seen in Whitehall simply as a pushy young ‘boffin’ who seemed too free with his opinions in the presence of senior officers. Jones, almost alone, elected to believe that the Oslo document was authentic. His instinct became a near-certainty in the summer of 1940, when the Luftwaffe began to use the Wotan navigational beam to guide its bombers over Britain, exploiting principles mentioned by Oslo’s author. R.V. Jones, as he is known to posterity, found the information invaluable in devising counter-measures during the ‘Battle of the Beams’ that influenced the Blitz – which gained him the ear and the admiration of Winston Churchill. Again and again through the years that followed, when the British gained hints about new German weapons – the acoustic torpedo, for example – Jones was able to point out to service chiefs that Oslo had warned of them. After the war, in a retrospective on his own intelligence career, the scientist used the example of the 1939 document to urge that ‘casual sources should not be treated flippantly. It was probably the best single [scientific intelligence] report received from any source during the war.’
Only after an interval of almost forty years did Jones establish the document’s authorship. It was the work of a forty-five-year-old German physicist named Hans Ferdinand Mayer, who adopted a scientific career after being badly wounded on his first day in action as a conscript in 1914. He had been employed by Siemens since 1922, doing work that resulted in the award of eighty-two patents and the publication of forty-seven papers, and also spent four years as professor of signals technique at America’s Cornell University. During the inter-war years he formed a warm friendship with an Englishman working for GEC named Cobden Turner, who became godfather to Mayer’s second son. The German was especially impressed by a good deed: when he told Turner about the tragic case of a Jewish schoolchild disowned by her Nazi father, the Englishman arranged for the little girl to come to England, where for eight years she lived as a member of his own family.
When the international horizon darkened, on what proved Turner’s final visit to Germany Mayer told him that if war came, he would try to supply Britain with information about German scientific and technological progress. In late 1939 the scientist exploited a chance business trip to Norway to make good on his promise. He borrowed an old typewriter from the porter at the Hotel Bristol and composed the ‘Oslo Report’, which was dispatched in two parts to the British embassy on 1 and 2 November. Mayer also wrote directly to Cobden Turner, suggesting further contact through an intermediary in neutral Denmark. But although this letter caused two British security officers to visit and question the GEC man, for reasons unknown nothing was done to open communication with Mayer – MI6’s official history makes no mention of this courageous German. In August 1943 Mayer was arrested by the Gestapo in his office at Siemens, and charged with listening to the BBC. He was confined in Dachau, but was fortunate enough to be employed in a technical plant, where he survived the war. His brave gesture was prompted by admiration for Cobden Turner, whom he liked to regard as a representative Englishman. Recognition of Mayer’s contribution, however, came only from Reg Jones.
Among the reasons the ‘Oslo Report’ received such a chilly reception is that it was debated in Whitehall just as the British secret community reeled in the wake of a successful German ruse. On 9 November 1939, during the first, passive phase of the war that became derisively known as the ‘sitzkrieg’, the two senior MI6 officers in the neutral Netherlands, Captain Sigismund Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens, drove with a Dutch officer in Best’s Lincoln Zephyr car to a rendezvous at the Café Backus, situated between the Dutch and German border customs barriers at Venlo. Within minutes of their arrival, they were seized by armed men. When the Dutchman drew a pistol and fired at one assailant, he was himself shot dead. Best, Stevens and their local driver were then hustled 150 yards to the frontier: their kidnappers were Nazi counter-intelligence officers of the SD, led by the branch’s later boss, Walter Schellenberg, who was narrowly missed by the Dutch officer’s bullet. The British spies were fortunate enough to keep their lives, but spent most of the rest of the war in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In contradiction of myths about heroic silence under interrogation, Stevens and Best told their abductors what they knew about MI6, which was plenty: its Continental operations were chiefly conducted from their own Hague station.
‘The Venlo incident’, as it became known in Whitehall, derived from an approach some weeks earlier by supposedly anti-Nazi German generals eager to negotiate with Britain. MI6 became much excited by the prospect of brokering a deal, though the Foreign Office was prudently sceptical. Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote in his diary on 23 October: ‘I think they [the German “plotters”] are Hitler agents.’ The war cabinet was informed a week later, and Winston Churchill, then still First Lord of the Admiralty, expressed violent objections to any parley. But the government authorised MI6 to continue discussions, provided – as Cadogan strictly instructed – nothing was put in writing to the supposed dissidents. The British ignored the danger that their interlocutors would play not merely a diplomatic game with them, but a rougher one. They should have been alert to such an outcome, because the Nazis had previous form as cross-border kidnappers: in April 1934 they had lured to the German frontier a Czech intelligence officer, twenty-nine-year-old Captain Jan Kirinovic, then rushed him across. A Gestapo witness gave evidence at Kirinovic’s subsequent trial that he had been arrested on German soil, and Kirinovic was sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour. Although in the following March the Czech officer was exchanged for two German spies, he died insane a few years later as a result of the drugs administered to him by the Gestapo, notably scopolamine.
In November 1939, it was symptomatic of MI6’s institutional weakness that its Hague station employed Folkert van Koutrik, an Abwehr informant. The supposed representative of the disaffected German generals, ‘Major Schaemmel’, was in truth the RSHA’s Schellenberg, whom the British officers obligingly supplied with a wireless transmitter. Either Hitler or Himmler personally authorised the kidnapping, which the British at first sought to keep secret. When an official asked Cadogan what was to be said about ‘the brawl in Holland’, the subject of fevered rumour and speculation, the permanent under-secretary ordered the issue of a ‘D’ Notice, forbidding
mention of it in the British press. Amazingly, for a fortnight after Venlo the German ‘conspirators’ sustained a dialogue with MI6, until on 22 November Himmler lost interest and the Germans shut down the exchange after sending a last derisive message to Broadway. The Nazis then publicly announced that Best and Stevens had been engaged in an assassination plot against Hitler. Meanwhile van Koutrik’s betrayal went so far undetected that he secured employment with MI5 in London, and it was very fortunate that he broke off contact with the Abwehr – perhaps for lack of means of communication – because it was within his later knowledge to have betrayed elements of the Double Cross system to them.
Inside Whitehall, MI6 sought to talk down Venlo, arguing that the Germans had behaved crassly by grabbing the two officers instead of sustaining a double-cross game with them. It is hard to overstate the episode’s significance, however, for the future course of the secret war. British espionage activities on the Continent, such as they were, suffered a devastating blow: the Germans were able to relieve Best of a list of his station’s contacts, which he had taken in his pocket to the rendezvous. The reputation of the secret service within the British government, not high before the débâcle, afterwards sagged low indeed. Guy Liddell of MI5 speculated in his diary that Best, a preposterous figure who affected a monocle, might have been a double agent – ‘the real nigger in the woodpile. [He] had apparently been in fairly low water and it was noticeable that after he became associated with [Dr Franz] Fischer [a Nazi double agent in Holland] he seemed to be very well in funds.’ There is no reason to think Liddell’s suspicions justified. Mere bungling was responsible for the fiasco, though Walter Schellenberg asserted later that Best was willing to be ‘turned’. Meanwhile, the Dutch were embarrassed by the revelation that one of their own intelligence officers had been complicit in a British plot, which strengthened the Nazis’ propaganda hand by compromising Holland’s proclaimed neutrality.