by Max Hastings
A Canadian-born source, thirty-four-year-old Grace Buchanan-Dineen, was trained in secret writing before leaving Europe for the US late in 1941, provided with $2,500 together with Budapest and Stockholm mail drops. She was briefed that if she ran into trouble, she should cable the Abwehr’s Lisbon station ‘Ill. Require Operation’ – but this proved no help when the FBI arrested her in December 1942, following a British tip-off derived from a decrypt. She appears to have joined the Nazi payroll for the money – she was promised $500 a month. After a spell as a somewhat unconvincing FBI double, Buchanan-Dineen served almost four years of a twelve-year jail sentence before being paroled in 1948. The Germans learned nothing of value from her.
Twenty-four-year-old Robert Rousseau, ‘Rodolphe’, from Nantes, deserted from the French to the Germans in North Africa. In August 1943 he was sent for wireless training, then posted to Saint-Brieuc, with cover as head of a local recruiting office for the Todt Organisation. Late in October Rousseau told his handler he had joined the Resistance in order to acquire information. A few weeks later, however, some captured Gaullists under interrogation told the local SD that Rousseau had offered to sell them his wireless and codes. He was promptly arrested and dispatched to Germany – presumably to a concentration camp. Several Frenchmen at Vichy’s Washington embassy sought to serve the Abwehr, notably Lt. Col. Bertrand-Vigne, the assistant military attaché, and Charles Emmanuel Brousse, the press attaché. Another diplomat, Jean Musa, acted as a courier and as a conduit to sympathetic New Yorkers. Xavier Guichard of Vichy’s milice contacted a number of Frenchmen living in the US and invited them to provide intelligence, on pain of unpleasant consequences for their families still in France should they refuse. Guichard was eventually exposed and obliged to leave America.
There were large expanses of the globe where spying, or even a pretence of it, seemed an unproductive activity because they were strategically irrelevant. When a question was raised in London about running some double agents out of Canada, the responsible MI5 officer – Cyril Mills, of the well-known British circus-owning family – demurred. Even the Abwehr, he said, could see that nothing of much importance happened in Canada. Canaris disagreed. On 9 November 1942 a U-boat landed his man Werner Janowsky on the Gaspe peninsula. Following his subsequent arrest he was found to be carrying a Quebec driving licence taken from a Canadian PoW captured at Dieppe, but with an Ontario personal identification and address. Most of the $5,000 in Canadian currency with which Janowsky was supplied was time-expired – a mistake which prompted his capture after he used it to pay a New Carlisle hotel bill. He had already roused the proprietor’s suspicions by smoking German cigarettes and taking a bath at mid-morning. Among the possessions appropriated by the Canadian police were a Wehrmacht travel pro forma and diary, a .25 automatic pistol, radio, knuckle-duster, five US$20 gold pieces, a microfilm copy of coding instructions and a copy of Mary Poppins as a code crib. Janowsky was a thirty-eight-year-old former French Foreign Legionnaire who had a wife living in Canada, and knew the country. But no Allied secret service, even on a bad day, would have dispatched an agent into the field – at the cost of a substantial investment of Nazi resources, including the U-boat – so absurdly ill-equipped. Janowsky was fortunate to survive the war in British captivity.
Some Abwehr recruits were amazingly credulous about accepting post-dated cheques, for encashment following a Nazi victory. One, named Franz Stigler, was promised an estate in South Africa. Jorge Mosquera, a Chilean who had built up a substantial fortune in Germany, was told that if he did some spying for Berlin in the US, his Reichsmark holdings would be released. It is equally puzzling how the Germans supposed that an untrained civilian informant such as Mosquera, living on the US East Coast, could secure answers to questions posted by Berlin such as: ‘Since when has Curtiss delivered types P40 and P46 instead of P36A? Have there already been deliveries of B-17s?’
The personalities mentioned above, far from being unusual, were typical of those through whom the Abwehr professed to gather foreign intelligence for OKW. The consequence was that its overseas stations felt obliged to invent material to compensate for lack of the real thing. A striking example of the circularity of espionage was provided by Dr Karl-Heinz Kramer, a flamboyant Abwehr officer based in Stockholm and tasked with running penetration agents into Britain and the US. MI5 became alarmed when both Ultra and OSS in Switzerland revealed Kramer transmitting material from British sources. In April 1943, MI6 assigned Peter Falk of its Stockholm station to monitor the Abwehr officer and identify his informants – the German repeatedly cited a British agent codenamed ‘Josephine’. Who could this be? Once on the trail, Falk discovered that Kramer shared Richard Sorge’s manic appetite for fast living – it was hard to keep pace with either his sports car or his partying. Moreover, the German was constantly importuned for cash by the Japanese military attaché, Col. Onodera, whose remittances from Tokyo failed to arrive: Kramer loaned his ally $20,000 of Hitler’s money.
In December, MI6 got a break. An anti-Nazi Austrian woman in Stockholm offered her services to the British legation, along with those of a friend who was working as Kramer’s maid. Throughout 1944 she provided material lifted from Kramer’s wastepaper basket and desk – the latter opened with a key copied by impressing it in a butter dish. British alarm grew when inspection of the Abwehr man’s old passport showed that he had visited England before the war. Here was a hint that he might have established a real network, and MI6 received it during the tense weeks before D-Day. Could Kramer secure intelligence from Britain that discredited the ‘Fortitude’ deception plan, blew open the Double Cross operation?
Peter Falk gathered increasing evidence that Kramer was living way beyond his means, presumably by pocketing Berlin’s expenses money. Might not MI6 – the intelligence officer now suggested – blackmail and ‘turn’ the German, putting him on their own payroll? But D-Day was by then history: the moment of maximum danger for the Allied cause was past. Thus, Broadway sternly rejected such a sordid proposal: ‘We cannot do business with war criminals to save their necks. There is surely nothing very important that this peculiarly unpleasant rat could give us if he was allowed to leave the sinking ship.’ Only after the war’s end did Allied interrogations reveal the truth: Kramer had made fools of the British as well as the Abwehr. His ‘agent network’ was the figment of a fertile imagination; his reports to Berlin were founded in fantasy. MI6’s counterattack, the maid’s little melodrama with the desk key in the butter dish, had been pointless. All the players save Kramer himself, who enjoyed an unusually safe and comfortable wartime existence, accomplished no more than caged hamsters scrambling up their wheels.
The Abwehr cherished as gold dust all reports from its agents that seemed authoritative – which meant those provided by the British Twenty Committee, controlling 120 double agents, of whom thirty-nine were used more or less seriously to transmit false information, much of it drafted, or at least monitored, by Bentinck of the JIC. Oversight of the system by Col. Johnny Bevan, the peacetime stockbroker who ran the London Controlling Section in charge of Allied deceptions, required nice calculation to achieve a tempting blend of fact and fiction. When the Germans in February 1943 asked ‘Garbo’ to send them some current British railway timetables, Guy Liddell of MI5 was consulted. Hand them over, he said – they could do little harm when there were so many trains, most of which ran late. Contrarily Peter Loxley, Sir Alexander Cadogan’s private secretary, once rang Liddell to report that the Germans had condemned to death five Polish agents. Was there a chance that an exchange could be offered, for Nazi agents in British hands? Absolutely not, responded the MI5 officer: every surviving Abwehr man knew far too much about Double Cross.
In 1943–44 Germany’s intelligence service atrophied to the point of near-impotence. MI6 reports in May and June 1943 adopted a tone of condescension towards the enemy: ‘we have evidence from our signals of the disappointment felt in Berlin about the failure to predict the North African campaign or the
Casablanca conference … From the beginning of 1943 the Abwehr has been briskly, if amateurishly, wielding the weapon of deception. The Deception office has sponsored the issue of a considerable number of strategic lies or half-truths for ultimate consumption by us … The Abwehr relies on a very small number of pipes to carry the lie-stream to us and our Russian, American and, recently, French allies. But though the technique is elementary, the intention is obvious – to strengthen their guard on the Balkan flank by tricking us into over-estimating its strength.’ The British took for granted their mastery of Abwehr postings and overseas intelligence operations: ‘Since the fall of Tunis,’ reported the Radio Analysis Bureau, ‘several members of Abwehr Group Africa have been transferred after only a very short spell of leave to the Balkans. Obst. Lt. Seubert, at one time [chief] of the Abwehr group, has been visiting Sofia. Obst. Lt. Strojil, who has conducted operations in Greece, the Crimea and Tunisia, has been made Leiter II at Salonika, etc.’
Nazi self-deception had become institutionalised. In the summer of 1943, Himmler and Göbbels agreed that Hitler should no longer be shown the SD’s monthly reports on the German public’s mood, morale and responses to press and radio broadcasts. Thereafter, these went no further than their own desks. Meanwhile many neutral states, seeing Allied victory looming, adopted harsher policies towards Nazi residents and visitors. Under pressure from the British, in 1943 the government in Madrid insisted on closure of the Unternehmen Bodden – the Abwehr’s important ship-watching service – and in the following year Canaris himself was denied admission to Spain. The best sources by now available to the German military attaché in Chile, Major von Bohlen, were American aviation magazines, whose contents were prized in Berlin because hard to procure elsewhere. There was no longer any rational intelligence-handling process inside Germany, only – as Hugh Trevor-Roper put it – ‘a vortex of personal ambitions’.
From the summer of 1943 onwards, Trevor-Roper attended the monthly meetings of the London Controlling Section in the war cabinet offices. He told its chiefs that the atmosphere within German intelligence had become so paranoid that its officers no longer dared to filter and analyse material; instead, they merely passed on to the high command a mass of undigested and unassessed reports, most of them fanciful or composed by British hands. At the end of April 1943, so straitened were the circumstances of the Abwehr’s Sarajevo station that it begged Vienna for a delivery of 250 kilos of birdseed to feed its 150 carrier pigeons, while both Zagreb and Sarajevo were demanding more manpower to manage the birds’ lofts. There were also repeated bizarre requests from local Abwehr officers in Yugoslavia for supplies of shoe leather, which caused Trevor-Roper to suggest caustically that when the Allies entered the country they should be wary of well-shod men.
On 5 June 1943, Berlin asked its Tangier and Madrid stations to secure Allied order-of-battle information from North Africa. This request received a whimpering response: ‘The assignment cannot be carried out, as there are no agents in Africa.’ On 4 August Trevor-Roper reported on the chaos of Abwehr operations. In the three weeks preceding ‘Husky’, the Allied invasion of Sicily, he noted that reports were forwarded to Berlin making forecasts of Allied attacks as enumerated: Norway 3, Channel coast 4, Azores 1, Spanish Morocco 1, Southern France 6, Italy 8, Corsica 7, Sardinia 4, Sicily 6, Dalmatia 9, Greece 7, Crete 8, Dodecanese 8, Cyclades 1, Romania 2: ‘Evaluation at Abwehr HQ doubtless reduced this variety, but it can hardly have supplied any valuable positive conclusions.’ Trevor-Roper observed that the only exception to the pervasive vagueness of Abwehr analysis concerned the material submitted by the British through the ‘Mincemeat’ deception – the stranding on the Spanish coast of the corpse of a ‘Royal Marine officer’ carrying top secret papers about British plans – which was considered entirely reliable.
Canaris himself was in a state of chronic bewilderment. When his agent ‘Melilla’, hitherto little regarded, sent a 9 August message reporting Allied convoys en route for Sicily (after the landings there had started), the admiral signalled back personally, enquiring plaintively what the man thought would happen next. ‘Melilla’, a British-controlled double, told Berlin that he believed 100,000 men would land in south-west France. He followed up by reporting Allied forces heading for Corsica and Sardinia.
Trevor-Roper expressed bafflement that the Abwehr forwarded a mass of raw material to OKW ‘without distinguishing between the valuable local tactical information and the mass of general and particular strategic tripe’. His conclusion was that the Abwehr was ‘confessedly unable to evaluate its own reports … Berlin has no knowledge or solid opinion about the strategic future and therefore has to let the local generals and admirals make up their own minds by giving them prompt access to all the reports that come in. It dare not winnow, lest the generals should complain later that they had not been allowed to see the straws which in fact showed which way the wind was blowing.’ Admiral von der Marwitz, the German naval attaché in Istanbul, agreed: he was a prominent critic of Abwehr reports, in language echoing that of Trevor-Roper, as the MI6 officer noted with glee when he read the naval officer’s decrypted commentary.
Perversely, the weakness of German intelligence sometimes made it more difficult for the Allies to conduct deceptions ahead of their own big operations: it is hard to catch trout if baskets of crumbs are being emptied into the river around a fisherman’s fly. ‘The carefully orchestrated “signals” that the deception authorities were feeding into the enemy intelligence systems were usually swamped,’ in the words of official historian Sir Michael Howard, ‘by the “noise” generated by the mass of rumours, gossip, diplomatic indiscretions and garbled reports that the Abwehr collected and forwarded, largely unfiltered, to their head offices … The overworked officers at FHW [German high command intelligence in the West] learned to pay little attention to anything emanating from that source unless it was backed by more solid evidence such as air reconnaissance or Sigint.’ Allied deceptions became more successful from 1943 onwards, when air reconnaissance became impossible and some German officers, at least, felt obliged to take double agents’ reports reasonably seriously, for lack of information from anybody else.
Nevertheless, the Germans never became wholly gullible about everything, all the time: large Allied deception operations were staged in August 1943 off the French coast, involving the movement of scores of ships and hundreds of aircraft, designed to deflect attention from the impending landings in Italy. Von Rundstedt, commanding in the West, unhesitatingly rejected any notion that these Channel operations were serious, saying there was no doubt that anything big the Allies intended in 1943 would take place in the Mediterranean. OKW accordingly reduced German strength in France from forty-five divisions to thirty-five, and only began to increase it again in October, when it was obvious that an Anglo-American landing in France was becoming a practicable prospect.
The fall of Canaris as Hitler’s intelligence chief was precipitated by a Broadway coup: in January 1944, MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott stage-managed the defection of the Abwehr’s deputy station chief in Istanbul, Dr Erich Vermehren, together with his wife Elizabeth and later two of his subordinates. Vermehren gave the British a vivid personal account of conditions in the German intelligence community. The German wailed that the SD’s influence dominated, because its reports went straight to Hitler via Himmler. ‘The Abwehr is the Cinderella of the OKW,’ he said, ‘and has to accept officers who have no experience of foreign countries … The Abwehr in Turkey is ludicrously understaffed, and cannot hope to compete effectively with the British and American I.S., whose members outnumber the Abwehr by nearly 10–1. Officers at Abwehr HQ do not understand and are not interested in political or semi-political reports, preferring minutiae about divisional signs and numbers.’ Vermehren described Col. Georg Hansen, from March 1943 chief of Canaris’s intelligence branch, as ‘a great man’, the most efficient officer in the organisation, honest, cultivated, intelligent, energetic and determined to get results. Nonetheless, sai
d Vermehren, ‘there was no centralised grading office responsible for assessing the bona-fides or acumen of agents’. Just so, Trevor-Roper would have said.
On 16 February 1944, Allen Dulles commented somewhat priggishly to Washington on the sensational Vermehren defections in Turkey, saying that he himself had never encouraged such open switches of allegiance, because such people were more useful in place. He was assuredly mistaken in this case, because the Turkish affair completed the destruction of the Abwehr’s reputation in the eyes of the Nazi leadership, and plunged its stations into a condition of chaos and demoralisation from which they never recovered. A Broadway memorandum dated 24 March 1944, and marked ‘TOP SECRET’, bore the pencilled annotation ‘source is MI6’s man in Stockholm’. Five pages thereafter detailed the troubles of the Abwehr’s chieftain: ‘In the middle of February Admiral Canaris was summoned to the Führer’s HQ in Bavaria … He was warned that his stay there would probably last not less than 8 days so that it would be advisable for him to nominate somebody to replace him during his absence … [He chose] Col. Bentevigni, the chief of Section III. On arrival at the Führer’s HQ he got a very sour reception and was informed by [Field-]Marshal KEITEL that the Führer had seen all the material incriminating him and had decided that under the circumstances it was impossible for the Admiral to remain in office. CANARIS was ordered to take three months leave … The future organisation of the Abwehr was then to be decided in agreement with the chief of the SD (KALTEN-BRUNNER) and the chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SCHELLENBERG).’