by Max Hastings
Dulles became an important semi-overt diplomatic figure, rather than a man of the shadows like Alexander Radó. He was a high-profile American, readily accessible to influential Germans. It was evident to all those with an eye to the future that the United States would be arbitrating this, and rumour asserted that Dulles was a secret representative of the White House. Far from him needing painstakingly to build networks of informants, everybody who knew anything – together with a generous quota of fraudsters who pretended to – beat a path to his door. He became friendly with Roger Masson, the Swiss intelligence chief, and met Hans Hausamann, founder of the Buro Ha, at the home of Zürich publisher Emil Oprecht. He held conversations with Major Max Waibel, who ran Swiss intelligence’s Lucerne station, though Waibel did not disclose his ‘Viking’ intelligence line into Germany. An intermediary acting on behalf of Walter Schellenberg also conducted an inconclusive dalliance with the American. All the parties exchanged a good deal of information, the usual blend of truth and falsehood.
Dulles was nothing like a traditional officer of any nation’s secret service; he had ambitions for his own role, far beyond mere espionage. Neal Petersen, editor of the Dulles papers, has written: ‘He was not just a semi-autonomous intelligence proconsul within the OSS, but a would-be grand strategist for the West.’ It is worth considering Dulles’ reports in some detail, because they vividly illustrate the virtues and vices of America’s most prominent overseas intelligence officer. He recognised from the outset that nobody in Washington had a coherent vision of how Europe should emerge from the war, and himself set about filling that vacuum. In December 1942 he was touting Count Carlo Sforza as Italy’s most respected non-fascist politician, and urging that the Allies should feed unrest in that country rather than invade it, with the prospect of fighting a campaign ‘against a united German and Italian military opposition’. To the very end of the war he argued against the Allied policy of insistence upon unconditional surrender: ‘Whatever our final policy towards Germany, we should today try to convince the German people that there is hope for them in defeat, that the innocent will be protected, while the punishment of the guilty will be through legal process.’
Many of Dulles’ dispatches read like the reports of a newspaper foreign correspondent, such as one of 14 December 1942: ‘Italy is full of German troops, and total estimated strength is between 150 and 200 thousand … Naples: Everyone criticizes Mussolini. There is unbelievable confusion. It is important to note that people understand that bombing raids are necessary. Rome: Government offices are all going to Frosinone, Avezzano, Chaeti, Aguila and Rieti; and hotels are being requisitioned for war purposes … Pistoia: main connection between Bologna and Florence … railroad bridges. Novi Ligure: two important railroad bridges. Verona: should be bombed immediately since it is an extremely important railroad center … Modena: At the end of January a special school for flame-throwing units will graduate 780 candidates as lieutenants.’
Dulles provided an ongoing stream of reports about the German domestic opposition – ‘the Breakers’, as he called them – whose spokesmen visited him with a frequency that suggested remarkable carelessness about their own security. The foremost of these was the enormous Hans Gisevius, the Abwehr’s Zürich agent, whom the OSS man dubbed ‘Tiny’. Dulles’ cook reported these visits to the German embassy, but until February 1944 Gisevius was able to cover himself in Berlin by asserting that he met the American on Canaris’s instructions. Among much else, he provided a list of allegedly trustworthy anti-Nazis who might serve in a post-war German government. Dulles eagerly forwarded this to Washington, and cabled in January 1943: ‘I am of the impression that this is the moment for a drive of vigor to effect a separation of the Nazis and Hitler from the balance of the German people, and hold out at the same time hope to the German people that surrender on their part does not mean that destruction will befall the individual and the state.’ On 3 February he described a meeting with ‘the prominent psychologist Professor CG Jung’: ‘his opinions on the reactions of German leaders, especially Hitler in view of his psychopathic characteristics, should not be disregarded’.
He dispatched many reports on enemy secret weapons, not all fanciful, for they had been supplied by his German visitors: robot tanks; ‘offensive preparations for warfare by gas. There are now available in quantities, large-calibre gas bombs’; test flights of fleets of flying-boats designed to be crashed on London laden with explosives. On 8 August 1943 he announced that ‘Gotham, and other points on our Atlantic seaboard, will be subjected to bombing by planes that are now being installed in several U-boats.’ On 25 April 1944 he suggested that ‘in Paris dogs are being requisitioned in large numbers’, and that German and Japanese scientists were exploring biological warfare. On 2 May Dulles reported the Germans experimenting with a weapon to freeze the atmosphere to 250 degrees below zero by tubes connected to the undersides of their fighters, which would then fly over Allied bombers and precipitate icing. ‘The Nazis regard the results as definitive.’
Fritz Kolbe, a minor diplomat born in 1900 who was serving as a German Foreign Office courier, arrived in Bern during the summer of 1943 with a briefcase bulging with secret documents, which he initially offered to the British. Morbid fears about trafficking with supposedly disaffected Germans – memories of Venlo – caused MI6 to rebuff him. He turned instead to Dulles, who welcomed him with open arms and gave him a source codename as ‘George Wood’. Thereafter, the courier smuggled more than 1,600 classified documents to the Americans, including information on the locations of V-1 and V-2 plants; about ‘Cicero’s’ raids on the briefcase of the British ambassador in Ankara; genocide in Hungary; together with a mound of Japanese material. The British, and especially Claude Dansey, continued to insist that Kolbe was a double agent. In truth, he was merely a drab civil servant who attracted little notice from his masters, but was motivated to defy and betray them by a profound decency.
Dulles was unloved by MI6, whose chiefs claimed that he ‘lends himself easily to any striking proposal which looks like notoriety’. Dansey included the OSS’s Bern chief in a broader dismissal: ‘Americans everywhere “swallow easily and are not critical”.’ Both Broadway and Hans Gisevius alerted Dulles that some US codes were compromised, though the Americans were slow to heed the warning and change them. Dansey was entirely wrong in questioning the authenticity of Gisevius and Kolbe as sources, but he was justified in suggesting that Dulles was naïve, especially about the German Resistance. Though its members opposed the Nazis, most were conservatives and nationalists who cherished extraordinary delusions that in a negotiation with the Allies following the fall of the regime they might successfully uphold Germany’s claims on the swollen frontiers Hitler had seized.
Dulles told Washington little about the grotesque Swiss profiteering from the conflict, notably by trafficking with the Nazis for a share of the spoils of the slaughter of Europe’s Jews. He must have known something at least about this, but was probably reluctant to expose dirty linen that might threaten his amicable relationship with the Swiss authorities and the security of his base of operations – neither MI6 nor the OSS station ever incurred the sort of harassment by Roger Masson’s intelligence service that fell upon the Soviet ‘Lucy’ Ring.
The American had plenty to say about German secret weapons, which confirmed reports reaching the Western Allies from other sources. On 24 June 1943 he sent a reasonably accurate report on German rocket-testing at Peenemünde, saying that quantity production was expected to begin in September or October, with larger models at an experimental stage. He also mentioned long-range giant cannon, but said that he lacked the technical knowledge to evaluate their potential. On 9 September 1943 he warned that the ‘rocket bomb should be taken very seriously’, and in December identified ‘Professor [Werner von] Braun’ as a key figure in its evolution. On 10 December he reported work on new advanced German submarines fitted with Schnorkel underwater breathing devices. He provided information on the German nuclear
research programme, though he could not offer any clues to the only question that mattered: how close were Hitler’s scientists to building a Bomb?
As for the plight of Europe’s Jews, on 10 March 1943 Dulles told Washington that thus far in the year, 15,000 German Jews had been arrested. On 12 June he described Hitler’s anger towards the Budapest regime for declining to hand over Hungary’s Jewish minority. In general, however, neither from Bern nor from other Allied intelligence sources was there was much traffic about the Holocaust, even in the latter stages of the war. This reflected not a conspiracy of silence, but rather a pervasive consciousness that the Nazis were killing large numbers of people all over occupied Europe – Poles, Greeks, French, Russian prisoners, Yugoslavs, Italians – together with a failure to recognise that the scale and nature of the Jewish genocide transcended all other manifestations of mass murder. Allied intelligence-gatherers focused overwhelmingly on transmitting and analysing information that seemed relevant to winning the war, rather than to illuminating the plight of Hitler’s victims.
On 12 June 1943, Dulles forwarded to Washington a brief from Gisevius about Hitler’s personal dominance of military operations; the fact that the Stalingrad disaster derived from the Führer’s acceptance of Göring’s assurance that he could supply the garrison by air; that Berlin’s decision to reinforce North Africa reflected defiance of his generals’ advice. Dulles described Kluge and Manstein as the ablest German commanders, but said that neither they nor any of their peers had the courage to resist the Führer’s will. This was useful and reasonably accurate background for US strategy-makers.
All the intelligence reaching Allied commanders before the Anglo-American landings in Sicily on 9 July 1943 and at Salerno on 3 September confirmed Hitler’s intention to abandon southern Italy. On 7 July Dulles cabled from Bern, reporting his German informants’ view that Berlin intended to treat the Italian people ruthlessly, but that the Wehrmacht would offer no serious resistance in the south, staking everything on a defence of the Po valley. On 29 July he went further, saying, ‘We have reports that southern Italy is being vacated by Nazi troops’ – the same message as was reaching the joint chiefs of staff through Ultra. They had no means of guessing that Hitler would change his mind when Kesselring, after tangling with the Anglo-American armies at Salerno, reported that he was confident of being able to contain them in the south for many months.
The dominant theme of Dulles’ reporting to Washington for the last two years of the war was that if the US threw its support behind the German opposition movement, Hitler could be overthrown and a peace negotiated with a new moderate regime. On 23 August 1943 he sent an emotional message suggesting that the domestic mood in Germany had become desperate: ‘There are no politically strong Generals in view, but Falkenhausen and Rundstedt are both known to be anti-Nazis. Göring is in eclipse and rumor in Berlin has it that he made an attempt to get to Sweden. Bormann and Himmler are in controversy.’ Next day, he waxed even more optimistic: ‘anything might happen in Germany … If we keep applying pressure [Hitler’s overthrow] most likely will happen before the end of the year.’ On 19 August he pleaded: ‘Can we not do something during or after the Quebec [Roosevelt–Churchill summit] conference in the way of appealing to the masses in the Axis countries? … If we take concerted measures in both the psychological and military fields of warfare, we can crack Germany and end the war this year.’
For months, Washington remained sceptical about Allen Dulles’ material from Fritz Kolbe, which seemed too good to be true. The OSS man was correct to emphasise that only the German army had the power to remove Hitler, and that fear of the Soviets dominated all German perceptions, reporting on 6 December 1943: ‘It is possibly difficult for you in Washington to realize the extent of the real apprehension of Russia in this part of the world.’ Much of his information about the tensions and power shifts within the Nazi hierarchy was accurate, for instance a November 1943 report that Himmler no longer thought the war militarily winnable, and that Speer was now economic supremo. In January 1944 he began to tell Washington about German Resistance groups’ hopes of killing Hitler. For the most part, Bern OSS’s political reporting about conditions in Germany was reasonably sound, but Dulles revealed a shaky grasp of military matters – scarcely surprising in a lawyer. Like many other secret warriors, he wildly overrated the capacity of guerrilla movements, and especially of the French Resistance, to make a strategic contribution to the advance of the Allied armies, though he was correct in his bitter criticisms of the Roosevelt administration for rejecting de Gaulle as the legitimate standard-bearer of Free France.
In the later war years there was surely a strand of envy in the attitude of MI6 and SOE, which were faced with the embarrassment that a host of Europeans of all political hues who were peddling information or striving for influence sought out Dulles, now the local American grandee, in preference to British agents. He cabled Washington on 30 July 1944, deploring British attempts to claim ownership of French and Italian partisans: ‘Am sorry to state that the Bern Zulu-SOE Chief’s general attitude is to try to monopolize relations with Resistance.’ He devoted much effort to compiling and dispatching material on the Wehrmacht’s order of battle, though this was far less accurate and comprehensive than was derived from Ultra. On one occasion he reported Tirpitz set to sail in nine days, though the giant battleship was then unfit for sea. On 29 April 1944 he urged parachuting OSS agents, arms and equipment into PoW camps, to empower their inmates to rise: ‘A few such outbreaks by prisoners would have a grave psychological effect in Germany.’ Here was an example of the sort of silliness that sometimes overtook OSS and SOE – implementation of such a plan would have provoked wholesale Nazi massacres of Allied PoWs, for no military advantage whatever.
On 19 February 1944, Dulles sent a long dispatch once more urging the importance of building foundations for a defeated Germany: ‘The only real question today is whether constructive regenerating forces will control and direct the fate of Europe, or whether forces of disintegration and anarchy will prevail.’ He urged that the Western Allies should immediately embark on a collaboration with the German Resistance to create a left-of-centre Berlin government-in-waiting that offered a credible alternative to communism. The flaw in all this was that it ignored towering realities on the ground: the Russians were storming westwards, and doing most of the hard fighting to destroy Nazism. The policy adopted by the British and American governments, of focusing on military victory followed by an occupation of Germany, was the only realistic course when any political design embracing German factions must open a disastrous breach with Moscow.
On 7 April 1944 Dulles reported that the German opposition, led by Gen. Ludwig Beck, was ready to move against Hitler. He added ten days later: ‘I do not believe that any able Nazi military officials are prepared as yet to throw open the western front to us. I do believe, however, that the collapse of Germany might follow a very few months afterwards, if we could get a solid toehold in the West.’ He constantly pleaded with Washington to authorise him to offer political incentives to anti-Hitler Germans – and was rebuffed. On 10 July 1944, ten days before Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded, he reported by radiophone to Washington: ‘A revolution [inside Germany] is not to be expected; the people are too apathetic and too closely supervised by the police. A collapse can only come as the Allied troops arrive. Further, no Badoglio development is likely here. The opposition movements are not in any position to take such a step.’ Three days later, however, he belatedly warned Washington that some big German development might be looming, though ‘I am not making any forecasts of success’.
In the same month he speculated about whether the passivity of the U-boat fleet indicated that it was being held in readiness to evacuate the Nazi leadership to Japan. On 9 August he claimed that Gen. Stülpnagel in Paris had attempted suicide. He reported realistically on the mood inside Germany following the failure of the Hitler bomb plot, saying on 19 August that Germans were too preoccupied with
coping with the miseries and privations of daily life to become politically interested or to concern themselves with anything much beyond their personal horizons. He wrote likewise of their attitude to Allied air bombardment: ‘Their reaction to the repeated raids is rather like that of an injured animal held at bay without any obvious means of escape … The Germans can see no way out except to continue the battle.’
He reported on 18 January 1945: ‘Norway and Italy may well be the first theaters from which German [troop] withdrawals start.’ He was an enthusiastic believer in a Nazi last-ditch ‘redoubt’ in southern Germany in the spring of 1945, and was less than perceptive when he reported in a radiophone dispatch on 21 March 1945: ‘The Russians are treating the Germans in the occupied territory on the whole very fairly … The Germans feel that the Russians are making a success of their occupation, and there is a growing feeling that they will make a greater success than the English and Americans will of theirs.’ Dulles led the US crusade for Austria and its people to be treated as Hitler’s victims rather than accomplices, which helps to explain why most of Austria’s many war criminals escaped indictment.