by Max Hastings
He forged business relationships with German companies eager to break into the profitable markets of occupied Europe, and especially with the Nazis’ Todt Organisation. From the latter he secured and fulfilled a large order for cheap spoons and forks to be issued to Germany’s multitude of prisoners, political and military. A Paris branch of Simexco, called Simex, opened an office above the famous Lido restaurant, from which it serviced many of Trepper’s agents. While this remarkable and expensive operation was useful for sustaining the GRU networks’ cover, there is no doubt that Gourevitch, the pharmacist’s son from Kharkov and former stalwart of the Young Communist movement, also hugely enjoyed his masquerade as a rich businessman, playboy and patron of the black market.
He provided no testimony about the attitude adopted towards himself and his circle by ordinary Belgians, who hated the occupation and lived in terror of the Nazis, but it is easy to guess. There is little evidence about what intelligence ‘Kent’s’ informants collected for Moscow, though he professed that his Todt Organisation contacts enabled him to join the ‘Lucy’ Ring in warning of the forthcoming invasion of Russia. What is certain is that Centre’s funding of the networks stopped abruptly in June 1941, with the expulsion of Soviet diplomats from Western Europe. Thereafter, Gourevitch and Trepper were dependent for cash upon the profits of Simexco and Simex. It was a droll twist that the two agents were thus obliged to become energetic and notably successful capitalist entrepreneurs as well as communist intelligence-gatherers.
Now, in September 1941, here was Trepper asking Gourevitch if somebody from Simexco could find a credible excuse to visit Prague and Berlin. ‘Kent’ said that he himself was the only person with the cover and connections to secure the necessary authorisations. He began by throwing a lavish rural picnic, followed by a dinner at home, for his foremost German friends, at which he told Kranzbühler of the business trip he wanted to make. The Nazi officer responded without hesitation that ‘Vincente Sierra’ had always been helpful to German interests; he was sure the necessary documents could be provided. And so they were. In October 1941 Gourevitch travelled without hindrance through Germany to occupied Prague, where he set about reconnoitring the addresses supplied to him by Moscow. He disliked what he found. The premises echoed empty. He felt an instinctive unease – and walked away. His hunch was right: the Germans had rolled up the GRU’s Prague group months earlier.
Gourevitch moved on to Berlin, where he checked into the city’s grand Excelsior hotel. He then addressed the contacts named by Centre: Ilse Stöbe, Harro Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack and others. In response to a phone call, Stöbe’s mother told him that Ilse was in Dresden, and uncontactable. Next he tried Kurt Schulze, the former taxi-driver who acted as the Stöbe network’s wireless-operator – and met with more success. He visited Schulze’s house and spent several hours briefing him on new radio schedules, also supplying the book phrase necessary to encode messages.
Then Gourevitch set off to reconnoitre 19 Alternburger Allee, which he described as ‘a big, imposing house’ – the Schulze-Boysens’ home. He returned to the Excelsior without approaching it, having merely satisfied himself that he was not being followed, then filled the following morning with business meetings on behalf of Simexco. That evening, at last he telephoned the Schulze-Boysens, and gave an agreed password to Harro’s wife Libertas. She cheerfully urged him to come on over; her husband was at work in the Air Ministry, but she would be happy to see him. Gourevitch suggested that instead they should meet at a nearby U-Bahn station and take a walk. He would be readily identifiable by the cigar he was smoking and the crocodile briefcase he carried. Fifteen minutes later ‘an elegant young woman’, walking rapidly, approached him without hesitation and extended her hand. ‘Call me Libertas,’ she said. Her friendliness dispelled the Russian’s apprehension. He was impressed by her professionalism: no watcher, he said, would guess that they were meeting for the first time. ‘I never forget that I am acting a part,’ she said. She added that her husband had long awaited ‘Kent’s’ arrival – he wanted the GRU man to meet some of their friends. The network was in fine shape, she said – ‘we are all safe and sound’ – working hard and absolutely committed to their common ideals. To be sure, life was not easy, ‘but the future looks brighter today than it did yesterday’ – because of the Soviet agent’s arrival.
She warned him not to telephone again, because they assumed that their line was tapped; for all his fluency in German, Gourevitch’s accent was obviously foreign. She asked his name, which momentarily embarrassed him, because he was unable to reciprocate her frankness. ‘Call me Valdes,’ he said. They both laughed. Libertas talked about her work for the Propaganda Ministry, producing cartoon films for the regime. She warned him that his clothes, in which the GRU man took such pride, marked him out as a foreigner. Then they parted, and the Russian returned to the Excelsior.
The following evening, amid a heavy snowfall, he approached an agreed rendezvous, at which he almost suffered heart failure when approached by a uniformed officer. Then Harro Schulze-Boysen of the Luftwaffe introduced himself, saying eagerly, ‘I’m thrilled to see you.’ He led Gourevitch to his home, where they donned slippers as they came in out of the whiteness. The visitor was shown into a handsome library, in which he noticed Russian books alongside German ones, some of them Soviet publications. Schulze-Boysen could scarcely be described as security conscious, though he said that he could explain away such reading matter to the Gestapo as necessary for his work at the Air Ministry. He told Gourevitch that not only did he love poetry, he also wrote verse himself, though he now found the times unsympathetic to his muse. He proffered a glass of vodka, observing laconically, ‘spoils of war’. Then they sat down to dinner.
As they talked, Gourevitch reflected later, ‘I could not rid myself of a sense of unreality. It seemed completely incredible that, amid a reign of terror, when everybody was spying upon everybody else, a group of men could have successfully penetrated the organs of state and the armed forces at risk of their lives, so that Germany could regain its honour and the German people their freedom.’ He suffered a difficult moment when Schulze-Boysen asked him directly how it was possible that Russia was surprised in June 1941, when his own group had warned repeatedly of ‘Barbarossa’s’ imminence. Neither ‘Kent’ nor any man save Stalin could provide an answer.
Gourevitch recorded that, in conversation alone with Schulze-Boysen when Libertas left them after dinner, they agreed that there was no purpose in his meeting other members of the group; it sufficed that the visitor had given the vital communications instructions to Kurt Schulze. They parted after warm embraces, and the Russian returned to his hotel. He then spent hours composing a detailed report for Moscow on the conversation, written in secret ink in a pocket notebook. By yet another of the black comic chances inseparable from espionage, on reaching Brussels in the first days of November 1941 he found that his ‘invisible’ notes were perfectly legible, probably exposed by the heat in the railway carriage from Berlin – ‘Kent’ would have been at the mercy of any inquisitive border policeman. But no such figure intervened, and he survived his perilous journey unscathed. He dispatched a long report to Moscow, detailing the German armed forces’ predicament in Russia as described by Schulze-Boysen. This was supposedly shown to Stalin, though it included one false and highly damaging piece of information: a claim that Canaris had successfully recruited to the Axis cause André Dewavrin, ‘Colonel Passy’, General de Gaulle’s chief of intelligence in London.
The Berlin networks now began to relay reports to Moscow via the Trepper group’s transmitters. It was during the months that followed that the Germans picked up their signals. While still ignorant of the identities of Harnack, Schulze-Boysen or any of their contacts, they deduced that these were communist agents, addressing Moscow, and christened the network Die Rote Kapelle – the Red Orchestra. This name distinguished it from the regime’s other important secret enemy – Die Schwartz Kapelle, the Black Orchestra, the n
ame given to those striving to encompass Hitler’s death.
Among early fruits of the Orchestra’s renewed labours, as relayed to Stalin’s State Defence Committee on 2 December 1941, was a report on the Wehrmacht’s fuel state, showing reserves adequate until February or March; thereafter, the Germans were pinning their hopes on exploiting the Soviet oil wells at Maikop. Moscow was told that the Luftwaffe had suffered severe losses, especially in Crete, and was reduced to a serviceable strength of 2,500 aircraft. A further December report warned of a new Messerschmitt variant armed with two cannon and two machine-guns, capable of 600kph; a proximity-fused anti-aircraft shell; development work on hydrogen-peroxide-fuelled aircraft. Army Group B, said the Rote Kapelle, would attack on an axis through Voronezh in the spring – as indeed it did. Berlin intended its troop concentrations to be completed by 1 May for the advance on the Caucasus. On 17 January the Stavka – armed forces high command – also received an intercepted Italian cipher telegram from Bucharest, reporting a block on Romanian rail traffic, to allow through hundreds of German troop trains, headed for southern Russia.
The Russians were warned of a German deception plan codenamed ‘Kremlin’, designed to promote expectations that Hitler’s forces would renew their winter assault on Moscow – conspicuous Luftwaffe reconnaissance of the city approaches, a fake attack order dated 29 May 1942, signed by Field-Marshal Kluge of Army Group Centre. By 23 March the GRU was asserting: ‘This summer the Germans will attempt not merely to reach the Volga and Caspian, but also to carry out major operations against Moscow and Leningrad.’ The Red Orchestra remained insistent that Moscow was a secondary objective – that Stalingrad and the Caucasus were Hitler’s prime targets. The Stavka, however, chose to ignore its agents; Stalin deployed his armies for the 1942 fighting season on the assumption that the threat to the capital was the most serious. The information garnered by the Red Orchestra and the ‘Lucy’ Ring, at such risk to so many lives, altered little in the Kremlin’s decision-making, but would soon sweep away the spies: Germany’s counter-intelligence agencies began to fumble their way towards exposure of the networks led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen.
7
Britain’s Secret War Machine
1 THE SHARP END
Britain’s intelligence machinery worked better than that of any other nation at war, and exercised an especially critical influence on the war at sea. A case history: just after the fall of darkness on 8 November 1941, a squadron of the Royal Navy, Force K, led by the light cruisers Aurora and Penelope, sailed from Malta’s Grand Harbour, then steamed north at high speed, thrashing the sea. At 4 a.m., 140 miles east of Syracuse, the British warships met an Italian supply convoy bound for North Africa. Having worked up-moon without their presence being detected, the cruisers trained their six-inch guns and opened fire, bursting open the night with starshell before raining high explosive on the hapless enemy. For half an hour they wrought devastation: seven merchantmen totalling 39,000 tons were left sinking or sunk, together with one of the six destroyers of the Italian close escort. From Aurora’s bridge, Captain William Agnew’s only signal of the action was a warning to his ships, ‘do not waste ammunition’, because stocks at Malta were low. An enemy covering force of two heavy cruisers and four more destroyers, lacking radar, failed to intervene. At 1 p.m. the triumphant British squadron reached its Maltese anchorage unscathed, to receive the congratulations of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, C-in-C Mediterranean, on an action that he described as ‘a brilliant example of leadership and forethought’. Mussolini’s foreign minister Count Ciano fumed in his diary about the engagement, ‘the results of which are inexplicable. All, I mean all, our merchant ships were sunk.’ The Royal Navy had fallen on them ‘as wolves among the sheep’.
On 24 November, Force K repeated this success. Its crews were enjoying a roistering shore leave when news reached Valletta of another Axis convoy in transit. The sailors were hastily herded back on board, then the sleek cruisers set forth to sea. After hours of manoeuvring to deceive enemy reconnaissance aircraft about their course, at 3.45 p.m. they caught two German freighters, Maritza and Procida, carrying fuel to the Luftwaffe at Benghazi in jerrycans stacked as deck cargo. Escorting torpedo boats fled. The British cruisers launched a dramatic attack during which their anti-aircraft guns fought off Luftwaffe Ju-88 bombers, while the main armament ranged by radar on the merchantmen. The crews hastily abandoned ship as the fuel cargoes erupted in flames. The destroyer Lively picked up German and Italian survivors before the squadron retired to Malta at twenty-eight knots.
These successes, and others in the same season, were not the fruits of mere ‘forethought’ by naval officers, as Cunningham’s congratulatory signal suggested – they represented early achievements of Ultra in the war at sea. From June 1941 Bletchley was reading not merely the Luftwaffe’s traffic, which highlighted its chronically poor fuel position in North Africa, but also an increasing stream of signals – six hundred in July 1941, rising to 4,000 a year later – reporting enemy Mediterranean convoy movements, and Rommel’s logistical difficulties ashore. It was true that the Germans also had significant wireless intelligence successes in the Mediterranean war – the B-Dienst was breaking and reporting British messages which revealed some of their own convoy movements, and the Afrika Korps enjoyed the fruits of excellent sigint about Britain’s Eighth Army. But Ultra’s contribution was critical in enabling Cunningham’s warships to interdict Axis supply traffic until early 1942, when British naval losses and German dominance, especially of the air, for several months made it impossible to exploit decrypts, in the absence of warships to mount attacks and fighters to cover them.
Here, as everywhere, the unchanging reality was that intelligence alone was useless, unless sufficient force was available at sea, in the sky, or on the ground to use secret knowledge effectively. Ultra never provided forewarning of all German movements. Until the very end of the war, there were periods in which the enemy’s imposition of wireless silence, delays or interruptions in the delivery of decrypts, prevented the Allies from putting them to practical use. Churchill demanded testily of Auchinleck, then his Middle East C-in-C: ‘Are you getting these priceless messages (which have never erred) in good time?’ The response acknowledged that Ultra was ‘of great value’, but added, ‘some arrive in time to be operationally of use, others not so’. Even the combination of spies, air reconnaissance and Ultra failed to prevent one of the notable British humiliations of 1942, the passage up-Channel of the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen, pride of Hitler’s fleet, within twenty miles of the cliffs of Dover. This was an event that shocked Parliament and Churchill’s people in that season of heavy defeats in the desert and the Far East.
The ships had been deployed to Brest in the spring of 1941, at a high-water mark of Nazi expansionism, but it had since become plain to Berlin that they served no useful purpose on the Atlantic coast save to provide targets for the RAF’s Bomber Command, which had damaged all three. The destruction of the Bismarck in May showed that Hitler’s big ships could no longer hope to venture into the Atlantic shipping lanes. He thus determined that they should return to a German port – which became known to the British. French agents of MI6 maintained a harbour watch at Brest, while RAF photographic reconnaissance aircraft daily monitored the ships’ condition. On 24 December the Admiralty informed RAF Commands that a German breakout eastward could take place at any time. Late in January 1942, Ultra revealed Scharnhorst’s gun crews exercising aboard the heavy cruiser Scheer in the Baltic. Multiple intelligence sources reported all three big ships slipping out of Brest for night steaming trials, then returning before dawn. They also noted the reinforcement of German light forces in the Channel, and intensive minesweeping activity. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, told the chiefs of staff on 3 February that a concentration of Luftwaffe fighters on the Channel coast suggested that Scharnhorst and its consorts intended to brave the passage, though he was unaware that Hitler had given orders for them to tac
kle the Narrows in daylight, when German air superiority would be most effective, and would almost certainly deter the Royal Navy from committing its own heavy metal.
How did the British propose to deal with the German run for home? A critical point was that no capital ships of the Home Fleet were deployed anywhere within range. It was indeed deemed unthinkable to risk them within easy reach of the Luftwaffe, especially a few weeks after the destruction of Prince of Wales and Repulse by Japanese torpedo-bombers. Responsibility for stopping Vice-Admiral Otto Ciliax’s squadron would rest with destroyer and torpedo-boat flotillas stationed along the English south coast, and even more with the RAF and Fleet Air Arm, whose squadrons were brought to short notice in accordance with a plan for this contingency, codenamed ‘Fuller’. Just two British submarines were also available, to patrol off Brest.
On 5 February, Ultra revealed Ciliax hoisting his flag aboard Scharnhorst. Three days later, AOC Coastal Command warned RAF Fighter and Bomber Commands that a breakout was likely ‘any time after Tuesday 10th February’. On the 10th, however, C-in-C Bomber Command stood down half of his modest Fuller force, without informing the Admiralty. This may not have been in keeping with the spirit of effective air–sea cooperation, but it reflected the RAF’s cavalier mindset, which resisted any responsibility to assist the navy, when its own overriding priority was to bomb Germany. A stream of Ultra intercepts showed the Kriegsmarine conducting intensive minesweeping operations in Heligoland Bight, which removed the last lingering doubts about the German ships’ destination.
Admiral Ciliax’s squadron sailed from Brest at 10.45 p.m. on 11 February, and from that moment everything that could go wrong for the British did so. Bletchley Park encountered unusual difficulties breaking into naval Enigma: messages for 10, 11 and 12 February were not decrypted until the 15th. The submarine Sealion, having braved immense risks to penetrate Brest approaches on the afternoon of the 11th, withdrew to recharge its batteries having seen nothing unusual. Had the Germans set forth as planned at 5.30 p.m., Sealion must have seen them, but Ciliax’s sailing time was put back two hours because of an RAF bombing raid. Three Coastal Command night-reconnaissance aircraft were aloft, monitoring the track taken by the German squadron, but the ASV radar of that period was primitive. Amid the darkness, one crew saw nothing on its screen; a second found its set unserviceable; a third was recalled early because of fog at base, before the German ships reached its search area. Even when daylight came and a photographic reconnaissance aircraft overflew Brest, low cloud and a German smokescreen prevented its crew from seeing that the big ships were gone. British coastal radar stations failed to draw appropriate conclusions from concentrations of enemy fighters in the air and attempts to jam their own wavelengths.