Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  Notes

  1. Mark Wheeler, Britain and the War for Yugoslavia, 1940–1943 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1980).

  2. David Stafford, Britain and European Resistance, 1940–1945: A Survey of the Special Operations Executive, with Documents (London: Macmillan, 1980).

  3. Neville Wylie, Britain, Switzerland and the Second World War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  4. M. R. D. Foot, SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940–46 (London: BBC, 1984).

  5. Kim Philby, My Silent War (London: Grafton, 1989 [1968]).

  6. Malcolm Tudor, Special Force: SOE and Italian Resistance 1943–1945 (Newtown, Powys: Emilia Publishing, 2004).

  7. Michael Pearson, Tears of Glory: The Betrayal of Vercors, 1944 (London: Macmillan, 1978).

  8. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship, 1915–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2005).

  9. Shirer, Rise and Fall.

  10. Bosworth.

  11. John Pimlott, Rommel and His Art of War (London: Greenhill, 2003).

  12. David Irving, The Trail of the Fox (London: Papermac, 1977)

  13. Irving.

  14. Basil Davidson, Special Operations Europe: Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War (London: Gollancz, 1980).

  15. Marko Attila Hoare, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  16. Hoare.

  17. Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches (London: Penguin, 1991 [1949]).

  18. Bosworth.

  19. Shirer, Rise and Fall.

  SEVEN

  Spy City Central

  Overnight Switzerland was transformed into the centrepiece of Britain’s intelligence effort against Nazi Germany.

  NEVILLE WYLIE

  1

  On the afternoon of Tuesday 17 August 1943, three weeks after the fall of Mussolini, a short, balding man with big ears could be seen walking circumspectly up to the front door of the British legation in Thunstrasse, Berne. He rang the bell, and was duly admitted. Soon he found himself being shown into the office of the military attaché, Colonel Henry Cartwright VC. The Colonel was a veteran of the First World War, a former POW, author of numerous escape attempts. He thought himself a good judge of men. Cartwright’s visitor was clutching a briefcase and seemed nervous. Well he might be. He was a German diplomatic official about to declare his willingness to share state secrets with the Allies.

  Fritz Kolbe was a forty-three-year-old official at the Foreign Office in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse. His job as an assistant to Ambassador Karl Ritter entailed screening and distributing top-secret messages between the ambassador’s office and various diplomatic posts abroad. As Ritter was himself Joachim von Ribbentrop’s right-hand man, Kolbe was exposed to a great deal of highly sensitive intelligence. Deploring the activities of the Nazis – he was a fervent Roman Catholic – he determined to use this information to help the Allies win the war. In the summer of 1943, Kolbe wangled the job of taking some sensitive documents to the German embassy in Berne, the Reich’s window on freedom. He filled a briefcase with samples of his wares. These were mimeographs of signals intelligence. Some were from western Europe, some from the Eastern Front, some from the Far East. On reaching Berne, he arranged an introduction to Cartwright through a friend, a German Jew called Dr Ernst Kocherthaler. Once in the attaché’s presence in Thunstrasse, Kolbe steeled himself to say his piece. The risks were very high and the consequences were likely to be momentous. Failure would mean the Gestapo, torture and the concentration camps. Success would mean defeat for Germany, the Fatherland. The choice was stark and Kolbe was a man of tremendous courage. He explained to Cartwright who he was, what he wanted to do, why he wanted to do it, and – by way of a climax – plucked a handful of the copies from his case and thrust them in front of the attaché.

  From the start of the interview, Cartwright had been unimpressed. This was Switzerland. The intersection of Europe was the one place where the agents of the Allies and the Axis could live with relative impunity in close proximity to their counterparts, subsisting on the currency of information. This information might be available anywhere, but Switzerland was by far the best place to barter and exchange such goods – preferably for ready Swiss francs. This was nothing new. Since the ‘discovery’ of Switzerland in the nineteenth century, her great peaks had drawn the well-heeled and well-informed from all over Europe and beyond. What could be more natural than the exchange of gossip, information, ideas that would later be dignified by the term ‘intelligence’? The Swiss cities and resorts became hotbeds of spying. Indeed the profession came of age in Switzerland during the First World War when the country acted as the neutral ground where all parties to the war met, talked and struck deals. In 1920 the establishment of Geneva as the League of Nations headquarters put the finishing touches to the country’s status as a bring-and-buy stall for international secrets. In 1928, Somerset Maugham, one of the most popular novelists of his day, published a highly influential spy novel. Ashenden proved a prototype for Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and John le Carré. The book was based on Maugham’s own experiences of working for MI6 and was naturally set in Switzerland.

  If this was Switzerland, this was also the summer of 1943. No sooner had Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Manstein’s brilliant initiative seen the retaking by the Wehrmacht of Kharkov than a counteroffensive from the Soviets had culminated in the Battle of Kursk. Operation Citadel had ended in the middle of July with the Wehrmacht losing 550 tanks and more than half a million men killed, wounded or missing. The Allies had just invaded Sicily, and Italy was clearly on the cusp of abandoning the Axis. With the war on a knife-edge, the Allies and the Reich were both desperate for intelligence that might turn its course. What could be more valuable than to know what the enemy intended to do and how he intended to do it?

  Intelligence gleaned in Switzerland about German preparations for the Kursk offensive was the crown jewels of a network known as the Lucy Ring. The information was arguably decisive in the Wehrmacht’s defeat. The Abwehr – the German army secret service – had been alive to the prospect of an Allied landing on the vulnerable shores of Italy. A brilliant British deception plan involving fake papers suggested the landings would take place in Greece and Sardinia. Operation Mincemeat (wonderfully set out in Ewen Montagu’s The Man Who Never Was and Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat) had fooled the Abwehr and the assault had already come in Sicily. Now the Allies had got wind of a rocket research centre somewhere on the Baltic. Here, what Goebbels would later christen the revenge weapons – Vergeltungswaffen – were being developed. What more could be discovered in Switzerland? The battleship Tirpitz was lying low in a Norwegian fjord. A British plan was developed to attack her using midget submarines. By what underwater defences was she protected? Hundreds of such questions puzzled the minds of military planners on both sides of the war. Switzerland was the place where such intelligence could be bought. The place was awash with spies, saboteurs, turncoats, chancers, agents and every sort of agent provocateur. It was once said that the whole of Switzerland was one clandestine conversation.

  The Swiss themselves could hardly be excluded from the dialogue. They were anxious, though, not to be seen to promote spying lest it compromise their neutrality. Hitler regarded Switzerland as a fire hydrant through which gushed the secrets of the Reich. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop thought this alone sufficient reason to invade the republic. The Swiss secret service – Nachrichtendienst – accordingly had to be seen to keep a strict and impartial eye on all foreign agents irrespective of their hue: French, Italian, British, German, American, Soviet and indeed Chinese and Japanese. In early 1940 this even-handedness went as far as penetrating the Zurich station of the British secret service, MI6. Still, the head of the Nachrichtendienst, Brigadier General Roger Masson, judiciously maintained friendly relations with his Allied counterparts and selectively exchanged intelligence.

  Meanwhile the warring parties maintained counter-intel
ligence operations to hamstring their enemies’ clandestine activities. The Gestapo trailed Allied agents, earmarked some for possible assassination – including Cartwright himself – and kept a twenty-four-hour watch on Allied premises. The Allied stations reciprocated. Missions of all nationalities had to be very sensitive to counter-intelligence operations both by the Swiss and their enemies. Agents provocateurs were aplenty. Several attempts had already been made to foist them on Cartwright.

  *

  This was precisely what Kolbe was taken for by the Colonel. The attaché was in any case under strict orders to turn away anyone purporting to be an anti-Nazi volunteer. He refused even to look at the papers Kolbe had strewn over his desk. ‘Sir,’ declared Cartwright, ‘you take me for an utter fool. I am not an utter fool. I know that you are sent as a plant to get me into trouble but in the remote possibility that you are not a plant, then, sir, you are a cad. And I do not deal with cads.’ With that Kolbe was dismissed and shown the door.1

  Nevertheless he persisted. The German presented himself at the private residence of the legation’s head of chancery. Again he was given a very British cold shoulder. Only at this point did Dr Kocherthaler suggest to Kolbe that he might try the Americans. After all, the Allies were allies. The US legation in Berne was long established and had its own military attaché in the form of Brigadier General Barnwell Legge – a robust and rubicund figure who just happened to be on excellent terms with his opposite number, Cartwright. Moreover, shortly before the Swiss borders were entirely closed by Operation Anton, a specialist in security matters had arrived in Berne via Spain and France. His name was Allen Welsh Dulles, his cover name the very British ‘Mr Bull’. A meeting was set for 19 August at which Dulles would be able to form his own opinions of Cartwright’s reject.

  2

  From the point of view of the British spymasters in Berne, the Americans had come rather late to the party and overdressed.

  Although intelligence-gathering is the world’s second-oldest profession and proverbially just as respectable as the first, states had not set up professional organisations for such purposes until the First World War. Britain’s Secret Service Bureau was founded in 1909 and is ‘the oldest continuously surviving foreign intelligence-gathering organisation in the world’.2 It developed into a number of separate sections. Of these, MI6 – also known as the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS – concentrated on espionage overseas. It established itself under Sir George Mansfield Cumming (‘C’) during the First World War, and employed agents as diverse as the MP and novelist John Buchan, the celebrated cricketer Colonel Freddie Browning, and the future children’s writer Arthur Ransome. It achieved just enough to avoid disbandment at the end of hostilities. Only just: ‘In the 1920s the British Secret Service, with a worldwide remit, had a total complement of fewer than two hundred people, sixty-odd at home and approximately twice that number abroad.’3

  With the re-emergence of the threat of Germany in the thirties, attention was focused by its new chief Sir Hugh Sinclair on the Nazi threat. The logistics of the organisation meant it was natural that it should work hand in hand with the Foreign Office. This liaison took the form of the establishment of a Passport Control Officer within embassies, a function that provided a degree of cover – and diplomatic immunity – for clandestine activity. Such a system depended on the good will of the ambassadors concerned, and in this respect Berne proved problematic. Despite the proximity of Switzerland to Germany and her familiar advantages as a market for intelligence, the head of the British legation was intransigent. This was Sir George Warner, appointed to the Berne mission in 1935. Born in 1879, educated at Eton and Balliol, Sir George was a punctilious gentleman of the traditional diplomatic persuasion who regarded intelligence-gathering with distaste. Tampering with mail and tapping phones he thought a violation of Swiss neutrality and an abuse of its hospitality. It compromised his stance with his hosts and he shunned the presence of the grubby mackintoshed men from the intelligence service in his legation in Thunstrasse. Soon he was to be outshone by his colleagues in MI6.

  Claude Dansey was one of the few people who justified the moniker of a legend in his own lifetime. Born in 1876, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey sprang from a family of country squires. He had been educated at Wellington and subsequently seduced by Oscar Wilde’s lover ‘Robbie’ Ross. After the sort of experiences that England could offer her children in the heyday of her empire – the Matabele Rebellion in 1896, an insurgency in Borneo, a lieutenancy in the Boer War – he joined MI6 at Cumming’s personal request in August 1917. Twenty years later one of his recruits, Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Cohen, described him as a ‘“copybook” secret service man. Dapper, establishment, Boodles, poker-playing expression, bitterly cynical, but with unlimited and illogical charm available, particularly for women’.4

  Dansey became increasingly critical of his employers. He once described his chief, Admiral Sinclair, as ‘a half-mad paranoid who preferred to communicate with his people exclusively via messages left in a locked box – to which only his equally half-mad sister had the combination’.5 He felt that as the MI6 workforce was virtually unpaid, it lacked the incentive to excel. He observed that all the taxi drivers in any given city in the world knew the address of the head of MI6 operations as the Passport Control Office. It was an open secret. And he believed – correctly as it turned out – that MI6 knew precious little about what was going on in the armed camp of thirties Europe. Nevertheless, it was with Sinclair’s blessing – or at least agreement – that in 1936 Dansey was tasked with setting up a shadow or tandem operation to MI6. This worked on rather different principles and was – amongst other things – an insurance policy against the exposure of its parent. Dansey’s Organisation Z specialised in gathering intelligence in Germany and Italy (where Dansey was stationed to keep an eye on Mussolini). It employed industrialists and businessmen as agents. It paid them for their trouble. Cover was commercial rather than diplomatic. The HQ in Bush House on the Aldwych in central London appeared in the guise of Geoffrey Duveen & Co – export department. Another façade was an export–import company called Menoline, its offices a mile north at 24 Maple Street, off Tottenham Court Road. Very Ian Fleming, very Claude Dansey. The spy Kim Philby described Z very simply as ‘designed to penetrate Germany from bases in Switzerland’.6

  *

  Conrad O’Brien-ffrench was Dansey’s Agent Z3. Born in 1893 as the second son of the Marquis de Castelthomond, he had joined the Canadian Mounties as a seventeen-year-old, fought in the Battle of Mons, joined the secret service, become a highly distinguished mountaineer, then turned professional painter. In the early thirties he had been asked by Dansey to rejoin the secret service as Agent Z3. His mission was to set up a travel agency in Kitzbühel, offering tours of the Tyrol. This enabled him to develop a network of anti-fascists in the Tyrol itself, Bavaria and the northern Italian Alps. A friend of Ian Fleming – also resident in Kitzbühel – the handsome, dashing, multilingual womaniser was one of the inspirations for James Bond. On 11 March 1938 Conrad was alerted by one of his agents to Wehrmacht troops heading south from Bad Tölz and Rossenheim in Bavaria towards the Austrian border. This heralded Anschluss. Realising the potency of the intelligence, Conrad broke cover by phoning the news from Kitzbühel directly to the Foreign Office in Whitehall. He then warned all his local contacts: ‘I met Louis de Rothschild … hastening towards the station.’ The following day, Conrad made his escape to Switzerland. He was just in time. ‘I caught the train that night and by next morning fanatical Austrian Gestapo officials were ripping the soles off passengers’ shoes in the search for money and incriminating documents.’

  *

  Switzerland being Switzerland and George Warner being George Warner, it was necessary that a number of Z personnel were designated to cover the republic. The official MI6 station was tactfully located in Geneva under the usual cover of Passport Control Officer. When the outbreak of war in September 1939 finally caus
ed Warner to relax his stance on spies, Organisation Z was able to slip into the shadow of MI6. Dansey himself and his principal staff at once decamped to the Peterhof hotel in Zurich. Here Dansey was styled consul. At the end of the year his promotion to assistant chief of MI6 dictated a return to the London headquarters at 54 Broadway, a quarter of a mile from the House of Commons. Now, despite the presence of Organisation Z, the British tended to rely on the French for Allied clandestine presence in Europe. In the spring of 1940 this was a policy that unravelled disastrously with the fall of Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, France and the loss of almost all Allied agent networks across northern, eastern and western Europe. No one had foreseen the sudden collapse of these countries. The inability of MI6 to identify the lack of political will in France to fight the good fight was later regarded as its greatest wartime failure. In June 1940, minds were concentrated in London. The consequence was that ‘Overnight Switzerland was transformed … into the centrepiece of Britain’s intelligence effort against Nazi Germany.’7 When Warner was replaced shortly before the Fall of France by Sir David Kelly – a First World War intelligence officer – Thunstrasse became Britain’s most important base for secret operations on the Continent.

  Its operatives were a colourful crew. Following Dansey’s departure, the MI6 station head in Zurich was Count Frederich ‘Fanny’ Vanden Heuvel. Son of a papal count, he had excellent connections with the Vatican, had been brought up in Berne, spoke Schweizerdeutsch to perfection. Tall, dressy, languid and famously courteous, he was the caricature not of a spy but of a diplomat. He was a figure out of P. G. Wodehouse who liked to sport lavender spats with his morning suit: a Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Gussie Fink-Nottle or Bingo Little. His number two was Andrew King, later exposed as a communist and homosexual at a time at which Bolshevism was beyond the pale and intercourse between those of the same sex illegal. King had been a couple of years below the spies Kim Philby and Donald Maclean at Cambridge. The agent, who knew nothing of film-making or films, worked under the commercial cover of Alexander Korda’s famous London Films company. It was said that Korda, a Hungarian by birth and Englishman by choice, supplied agents in the form of refugees while Dansey supplied the cash. The military attaché was Colonel Cartwright, a veteran of the Kaiser’s POW camps. The air attaché, Group Captain Freddie West, was a First World War Royal Flying Corps ace and VC to boot. Losing a leg in the conflict had not deprived him of his joie de vivre. Transferred from Rome to Berne after the outbreak of war, his nocturnal swimming parties in the summer of 1940 scandalised the upright citizens of the sleepy Swiss capital. Well informed about the Regia Aeronautica (the Italian air force), West discovered the existence of its Swiss counterpart only after his arrival in the capital. It was said that the legation’s standing with General Guisan’s representatives was much compromised by the lamentable standard of the Allied military attachés’ skiing. An exception was presumably made in the case of the one-legged West.