by Max Hastings
Even the Russians became dismayed by the losses of their own nationals in such operations, and in the winter of 1944 adopted a new policy – dispatching German deserters, or double agents, to fulfil Stalin’s demands. The GRU infiltrated ‘turned’ PoWs at the rate of up to thirty a week, though most promptly surrendered to the Wehrmacht on arrival. Scarcely any of the eighteen teams Nikolsky dropped behind the German lines between August 1944 and March 1945 were heard from again, including one deliberately parachuted into the midst of a battle. Such agents as did transmit later proved to have been under German control. Nikolsky commented dryly, ‘The results were far from encouraging.’
It is possible to detail the fortunes of one such mission, because a survivor later fell into the hands of British interrogators. What follows seems fantastic even by the standards of wartime special operations, but there must be significant portions of truth in it. Waldemar Bartsch was born in Ukraine to German parents, and was studying in Odessa when the Wehrmacht occupied the city in 1942. The British report describes him as ‘intelligent, has a good memory and is an opportunist. He appears to have no national loyalty,’ a verdict justified by his chequered experiences. Bartsch worked as an interpreter with the Luftwaffe until March 1944, when the Russians overran the area and dispatched him to become a forced labourer with an engineer battalion. A counterattack restored him to the custody of the Germans, who charged him with desertion. He was handed over to the Abwehr, who decided to use him as handler for a double agent, Mihail Kotschesche, a fellow-Ukrainian born in 1919.
Kotschesche had served with the Hungarian army until captured by the Russians near Kharkov in 1942. After some months as a prisoner, he was one of a group of twenty-seven chosen for training as a Soviet agent and dispatched to a spy school at Djetsoje Selo, twenty-five miles east of Moscow. There he underwent fifteen months of training in the Russian language, photography, wireless-operation and political indoctrination. He then spent a further three months in Moscow before being dispatched on a mission, with the codename ‘Dodi’. On 24 May 1944 he was flown to Kursk, and briefed for a drop in Hungary. He was provided with the uniform of a Hungarian sergeant, a large sum of cash, an American Tensor wireless set with a ten-metre wire aerial, and a table of frequencies to which he was told to add 3,000 kc on even days, and subtract 2,000 on odd ones. He also received a Hungarian prayer book, not for spiritual solace but as a coding key.
Kotschesche was dropped from a US-built Boston bomber, and it was scarcely surprising that he twisted his ankle on landing, since he had received no parachute training. He managed to hobble to a railway station, from which he travelled to his mother’s home near Svalava. He spent two weeks there, and hid his money, before obeying the instructions of his Russian handlers: to surrender himself to the police, admitting that he had been sent by Moscow, and thereafter play a double radio game in the enemy’s hands. The Hungarians spent three hours debating his fate, then gave him to the Germans, who allocated him an Abwehr codename as ‘Adam’, and Waldemar Bartsch as his handler. Kotschesche duly began messaging Moscow, first from Debrecen and then, as the Red Army advanced, from Budapest. He allegedly sent some material at the behest of the Germans, some on his own initiative to his Soviet customers. His Moscow orders required him to transmit only once a week. He signalled information on troop and vehicle movements, but was reprimanded by Centre when he mentioned American bombing: ‘American bombing of no interest. Stick to your instructions. Where are you living?’
On 22 August the GRU demanded to know what he had done with the money he had been given. Kotschesche replied: ‘Have spent 2,000 pengo on car hire. 2,000 left with mother to buy a horse.’ On 2 September he told Moscow: ‘The poor are waiting for the Red Army, the rich make for the west in a hurry. I saw in a restaurant three Hungarian and six German generals.’ On 19 October he messaged: ‘I have no clear picture yet of Budapest. There is unrest in city. Arrow Cross [fascist movement] supported by Germans have seized power.’ This brought a furious response from his Russian masters: ‘Stop sending unclear messages or you will be held responsible. Observe the political situation … Do not listen to rumours. They are fascist lies.’
It seems remarkable that the Germans, at such a late stage of the war, persisted with intelligence activities that could not be of the smallest practical use to their cause, but all institutions, including intelligence services, retain a zombie momentum even in the face of catastrophe: at the same period the Abwehr was still parachuting line-crossers behind the Russian front. Bartsch later told the British that he never doubted that Kotschesche was working for Moscow, but thought his own interests best served by keeping his mouth shut and appearing to collaborate with the Germans. Kotschesche frequently mocked his fellow-Ukrainian that he would not dare tell the Germans about his treachery, and boasted that he himself would be a big man when the Red Army arrived.
In December 1944, both men fled from Budapest to Vienna, where nervous local policemen arrested Kotschesche as a suspicious person – which, heavens knows, he was – and Bartsch had some difficulty securing his release. At the end of January 1945 they moved on to Graz, where the spy resumed transmissions to Moscow. He also acquired a twenty-year-old blonde lover named Ilse Killer, and passed the last months of the war in relative tranquillity. The Red Army arrived in Graz to find Kotschesche strutting as a self-appointed commissar, interrogating Austrian civilians. The ungrateful spy denounced Ilse, his girlfriend, as a German stool-pigeon, and she swiftly vanished, presumably into the maw of SMERSh. Bartsch escaped westwards, while Kotschesche’s ultimate fate is unknown.
What conclusions can be drawn from his tortuous story, as told to the British? The most obvious is that it would be unwise to accept a word of it at face value, though much of the narrative seems too circumstantial and fanciful to be untrue. Both Bartsch and Kotschesche displayed remarkable talents as intriguers, matching those of Ronald Seth, merely by dissuading two of the most ruthless regimes in history from shooting them. It seems unlikely that the doings of the two Ukrainians, which absorbed substantial Russian and German resources, yielded the smallest advantage to either side. They were flotsam, swept into the intelligence game for a season, who played a few hands before being swept away on the tide of war.
3 TARNISHED TRIUMPH
In the last months of the war in Europe, the Allied march to victory was sullied by repeated intelligence failures that cost many lives, wasted opportunities and granted the Germans entirely gratuitous successes, albeit afterwards reversed. Ralph Bennett of Bletchley’s Hut 3 believed that after achieving victory in the Normandy campaign at the Falaise Gap in August, euphoria distorted the judgement of Allied commanders, blinding them to both intelligence and prudence. In the early autumn of 1944 the codebreakers read a stream of desperate signals from German commanders in the West, describing their own forces as at the last gasp. For some days Eisenhower and his subordinates, as well as the British JIC – though emphatically not Winston Churchill – were convinced that the war was as good as won. Bennett notes that Ultra flagged Hitler’s acute concern about the vulnerability of the Moselle–Saar sector of the front, which Eisenhower ignored in favour of supporting Montgomery’s northern thrust. It remains highly doubtful, however, whether Patton – who commanded in the south – could have made a decisive breakthrough, even had he been given logistic support. Unfavourable terrain told heavily against attackers who took that road into Germany.
Bennett is surely right, however, to emphasise Montgomery’s culpability for failure to secure the Scheldt approaches to Antwerp at the beginning of September, when they stood open for the taking. Ultra repeatedly emphasised German determination to defend the estuary and thus deny use of the vital port to the Allies, together with details of shipments of German troops and guns to fortify positions on the east bank. Incomprehensibly, the British failed to interdict the German crossings, even after Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay warned Montgomery of this danger. In the face of the German stand on the Scheldt, Antwerp rem
ained unusable for almost three months after its intact capture, with crippling consequences for Allied logistics. The little British field-marshal’s neglect of crystal-clear intelligence, and of an important strategic opportunity, became a major cause of the Western Allied failure to break into the heart of Germany in 1944.
The same overconfidence was responsible for the launch of the doomed airborne assault in Holland on 17 September, despite Ultra’s flagging of the presence near the drop zone of 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions, together with Field-Marshal Walter Model’s headquarters at Oosterbeek. Had ‘victory fever’ not blinded Allied commanders, common sense dictated that even drastically depleted SS panzers posed a mortal threat to lightly armed and mostly inexperienced British airborne units. Ultra on 14–15 September also showed the Germans alert to the danger of an airborne landing in Holland. It was obvious that it would be very hard to drive the British relief force eighty miles up a single Dutch road, with the surrounding countryside impassable for armour, unless the Germans failed to offer resistance. The decision to launch Operation ‘Market Garden’ against this background was recklessly irresponsible, and its defeat remains a deserved blot on Montgomery’s reputation.
The greatest Allied intelligence disaster of the campaign was, of course, failure to anticipate Hitler’s 16 December 1944 Operation ‘Autumn Mist’, when two German armies smashed into the weakest sector of the US First Army’s front in the Ardennes. After the event, every senior American and British intelligence officer gazed ruefully upon the stack of Ultra decrypts that should have alerted Eisenhower and his generals. On 4 September the Japanese ambassador, Baron Ōshima, had met Hitler in East Prussia. The Führer asserted that as soon as his new reinforcement army was ready, he intended ‘to take the offensive in the West on a large scale’, exploiting poor seasonal weather to mask redeployment of his forces from the Allied air forces; the attack would come ‘after the beginning of November’. Yet although British and American intelligence officers read Ōshima’s report of that conversation, on 11 November the British Joint Intelligence Committee wrote: ‘The Germans may be planning a limited spoiling attack designed to upset Allied preparations and thus postpone the major Allied offensive, possibly even until the spring of 1945 … We do not think that the evidence warrants the conclusion that the Germans are planning a spoiling offensive.’
The official historians of intelligence say: ‘It is not a misuse of hindsight to hazard the judgement that the British chiefs of staff and the JIC made a fundamental mistake’ in failing to take this warning, together with other Ultra about the formation of Sixth Panzer Army and redeployment westwards of substantial Luftwaffe elements, with the seriousness they merited. Ōshima repeatedly restated his forecast of an offensive in the West, mentioning the prospect twenty-eight times in dispatches between 16 August and 15 December 1944. His messages, matched by other clues about German redeployments and concentrations, and the disappearance of panzer formations from the Eastern Front, should have rung bells at Allied headquarters. Ralph Bennett of Hut 3 noted later the other unheeded clues about the looming onslaught that Bletchley provided: massive train movements flagged in decrypts of messages in the German State Railways code; forward concentrations of Luftwaffe aircraft on a scale unseen for years; requests for intensive air reconnaissance of key sectors of the American front – ‘It was extraordinary that Ultra did not arouse more forebodings.’
The British bore much of the responsibility for the failure of analysis, because they led the Allied intelligence effort against the Germans, and SHAEF’s intelligence chief was their own Maj. Gen. Kenneth Strong. The British officer had been flown to reinforce Eisenhower’s team in North Africa following the February 1943 Kasserine Pass fiasco, and had been with the Supreme Commander ever since. He now directed a staff a thousand strong, and thus as bloated as every other element of that Anglo-American headquarters. He asserted in a 16 September SHAEF strategic assessment of the German condition: ‘No force can be built up in the West sufficient for a counter-offensive or even a successive defensive,’ and he never wavered from that view during the three months that followed.
A lifelong bachelor, Strong was an odd-looking figure, with bulbous cheeks and protruding ears. Bill Williams, Montgomery’s intelligence chief, included among his own multiple charges against Ike’s G-2 the accusation that he ‘wouldn’t go near the front if he could help it’. The Oxford don dismissed the career soldier in the top intelligence job as a ‘headless horror and a faceless wonder … Strong worried about everything.’ It should also be noted that intensive activity by OSS, MI6 and SOE in dispatching line-crossing agents into Germany failed to produce a single report about preparations for ‘Autumn Mist’. Enemy wireless silence prevented the Y Service from detecting anything amiss, and some important clues from PoW interrogations in the days before 16 December went unnoticed. The SHAEF intelligence chief was neither clever nor imaginative, and was indeed unfit to hold the top post on Eisenhower’s staff. But Williams at 21st Army Group did no better than his superior in anticipating ‘Autumn Mist’. The US Army was always sceptical about British willingness to allow amateur soldiers such as this thirty-two-year-old academic to rise to the highest ranks in intelligence departments. Gen. Omar Bradley wrote of Williams after the war: ‘He is brilliant but inclined to be erratic like most brilliant men … frequently wrong because he lacks the military background that we demand.’ Bradley cited a typical Williams remark: ‘My digestion is bad this morning – I’ve been eating my words for a week.’ Presumably this was said in the wake of the Battle of the Bulge.
In December 1944 both Strong and Williams were guilty of the same blunder as the JIC: they dismissed a scenario because it did not conform to their own logic. Strong wrote in his own post-war apologia for the Ardennes failure: ‘Members of the Intelligence staffs … were considered to be defeatists if they predicted anything but continued Allied success; if they expressed doubts about the future they were accused of being out of touch with the realities of the war.’ He said that the US First Army’s senior intelligence officer emerged from the battle with most credit, having warned that he believed the Germans were up to something. ‘Of all the officers concerned with Order of Battle intelligence,’ said Strong, ‘it was Col. “Monk” Dickson who came nearest to getting the correct answer to the riddle about the whereabouts of unlocated German divisions.’
The US Army throughout the war remained short of trained intelligence officers, but Dickson was one of its better practitioners – others included John Petito, Richard Collins and James O. Curtis. Strong admitted, however, that the American’s pre-Ardennes credibility was weakened by the fact that he had acquired a reputation for pessimism, indeed alarmism, ‘and we had therefore developed a habit of discounting some of the things he reported’. It should also be noticed that Dickson departed on leave for Paris on the eve of the Ardennes offensive. The historian Peter Caddick-Adams observes that if the colonel had been sure the Germans were about to attack, he would certainly not have quit First Army’s headquarters at such a moment, even though he was encouraged to take a break.
MI6’s report on the Ardennes surprise was circulated on 28 December 1944. ‘It can be stated at once,’ this said, ‘that Source [Ultra] gave clear warning that a counter-offensive was coming. He also gave warning, though at rather short notice, of when it was coming. He did not give by any means unmistakable indications of where it was coming, nor … of its full scale. This was largely due to new and elaborate deceptions staged by German security. German planning … must have been greatly helped by the insecurity of certain Allied signals … It is a little startling to find that the Germans had a better knowledge of US Order of Battle from their Signals Intelligence than we had of German order of battle from [Ultra].
‘There does exist in Intelligence, of which the present is a serious example, the tendency to become too wedded to one view of enemy intentions. It had grown to be generally believed that the Germans would counter-attack, head on, w
hen we had pushed them hard enough, probably in the Roer sector with its dams. This idea died hard … Unless Intelligence is perpetually ready to entertain all the alternatives, it seems only the evidence that favours the chosen view … There is a risk of relying too much on [Ultra]. His very successes in the past constitute a danger, if they lead to waiting for further information because “Source will tell us that”, or to doubting the likelihood of something happening because “Source would have told us that” … The Germans have this time prevented us from knowing enough about them; but we have not prevented them from knowing far too much about us.’
This was an impressively candid document – a tribute to the objectivity with which the Allied intelligence community and high command did most of their business. It is hard to improve on its judgements seventy years later, though it would have been graceful if Broadway had acknowledged that, in the absence of any useful material from agents of its own, the Allied armies’ commanders had little choice save to rely upon Ultra for their assessments. Bill Williams wrote a few months after the Ardennes, acknowledging that he shared with Strong and the JIC responsibility for an egregious lapse: ‘The record is not impressive … On the Ardennes offensive we were wrong … We gave a lead, but the wrong lead … The error did not lie with the Park [Bletchley], but rather in our attitude to the Park.’
Yet if the Battle of the Bulge gave the Allies a devastating shock, what mattered in the end was that the Germans lost it. During the months that followed, Wehrmacht intelligence atrophied in step with everything else in Hitler’s armies. Col. Alexis von Rönne of FHW had been arrested and executed for his role in the failed July bomb plot against Hitler. He was succeeded as German intelligence chief in the West by Col. Willi Burklein. In the absence of high-level decrypts, captured documents became the most prized German sources, of which the September ‘Market Garden’ plan, taken from a dead US officer on a Dutch landing zone in the first hours of the operation, was the most notable, and exercised an important influence in making possible that German victory. This was a rare success, however. FHW became so starved of resources, as well as of intelligence, that when tons of American documents fell into Burklein’s hands during the Bulge battle, most of them never even got translated.