Storming the Eagle's Nest
Page 15
After the Fall of France, Dansey’s Swiss section was under pressure to deliver. Deliver it did. From the earliest days of the Axis, the Foreign Office in London had doubted Mussolini’s commitment to an alliance with Hitler. After the disastrous Alpine campaign of June 1940, the similarly disappointing adventure in Greece the following autumn, and the beginnings of the RAF bombing campaign of Italian cities, the British Foreign Office deemed intelligence on the country’s morale vital. Replete with his old contacts in Rome, West excelled himself. Between the end of summer and the end of the year he delivered more than seventy reports. These covered every aspect of Italy’s domestic, political, social and economic situation. This was gold dust. In the view of the Foreign Office it confirmed the importance of Switzerland as ‘the easiest and most natural channel leading into Italy … [for] establishing contact with dissident and revolutionary elements’.8 As a consequence, the consulate in Lugano in Canton Ticino (adjoining Italy) was expanded to provide a base for more MI6 operatives in Italy. By this time, to the human intelligence of agents worldwide had been added the signals intelligence derived from the rapidly developing science of cryptanalysis, later epitomised by the work of the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. This was of immense value in its own right, did much to turn the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943, and conceivably turned the course of the war. However, it did not replace but rather complemented human intelligence. For human intelligence (HUMINT) dealt with different issues from those of signals intelligence (SIGINT). It trafficked things like morale, industrial production levels, domestic shortages, issues in the Axis leadership and so on. By the middle of 1942, the Joint Intelligence Committee was rating the Swiss human product as ‘the most valuable and amongst the best reports received from any quarter’.9 Nine months later in the spring of 1943, Dansey reported that MI6 was running agents from Switzerland in Germany itself, Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
3
So by the time Dulles had got his feet underneath his desk in his apartment in Herrengasse 23, Dansey was cock o’ the walk and not necessarily particularly welcoming to what might be regarded as competition. Competition, too, that had the funds to compete for the services of agents, the stock-in-trade of intelligence services. The Americans quickly won a reputation for free spending. One of Dansey’s ‘attachés’ recalled their arrival as ‘like a man with a loud hand-bell which he rang as loud as he could in the town square while shouting for wares and calling his customers’.10 An MI6 agent in Geneva was horrified when a newly arrived American operative threw open his suitcase and revealed that it was literally packed with currency. Cash, the American helpfully explained, to buy agents and information. Dansey knew Dulles from the intelligence community in Berne in the First World War but from the first regarded him as a trespasser on his own territory. He instructed Vanden Heuvel to be uncooperative; ‘above all’, Vanden Heuvel was told, ‘keep his nose away from our files’.11 Shortly after Dulles’s arrival in Berne in November 1942, a note appeared in the Journal de Genève flagging his arrival as ‘a personal representative of President Roosevelt’ for ‘special duties’.12 This barefaced advertisement was the antithesis of Dansey’s approach to his profession and confirmed his worst suspicions. Dulles was an opportunistic rival, not a colleague. Duly and dutifully lunched by Vanden Heuvel, the return match in which Dulles outdid the Briton on the quality of wine and food did perhaps not endear him to his new colleagues. It was a relationship whose ambiguities would soon be compounded by the Kolbe affair.
Dulles himself knew Switzerland from his days as a junior diplomat in the First World War. Born in 1893, his maternal grandfather was secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison. His elder brother John Foster Dulles would do the same job for Dwight Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. Graduating from Princeton in 1916, the younger Dulles joined the diplomatic service and was attached to the US legation in Berne. Here he distinguished himself one quiet spring afternoon in April 1917. He was duty officer at the legation when the phone rang. The caller announced himself as Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Here was an informant known to the legation as an authority on the rapidly unravelling situation in Russia. Tsar Nicholas had abdicated on 15 March 1917 and there was revolution in the air. Lenin said he was en route to Berne and must speak to a member of the legation staff on a matter of utmost urgency. Dulles, tall, good-looking, with a well-developed interest in women, had a date. He firmly declined the opportunity and told Lenin that no one else would be available to see him until ten o’clock the following morning. ‘Tomorrow’, Lenin told Dulles, ‘will be too late. I must talk to someone this afternoon. It is most important. I must see someone.’ As far as Dulles was concerned there couldn’t be much that would not wait till the following morning. ‘Ten o’clock tomorrow,’ he countered.13 By then, though, Lenin was already returning to Russia on the famous ‘sealed train’, rather like, as Churchill put it, ‘a plague bacillus’.14 Arriving at Petrograd station on 17 April 1917, he at once instigated the mischief that would lead to the October Revolution. It was this that he wished to disclose to Dulles, forewarning of Russia’s exit from the First World War.
Dulles’s career survived this embarrassment, not least because he turned out to be the right man at the right time with connections in the right place. Given the isolationist stance of the United States in the 1930s, the country had given little thought and fewer resources to intelligence-gathering in Europe. After Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and – more significantly – the Arcadia Conference later that month in Washington, all changed. At the White House Roosevelt and Churchill had made the key strategic decision of placing the war in Europe as a priority above that in the Far East. The powerhouse that was the USA accordingly turned its energies to the matter of intelligence-gathering on the Continent. This meant Switzerland. Formed on 11 July 1941, the nascent US foreign intelligence-gathering organisation was given the snappy name of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI). It was headed by another old friend of Claude Dansey, a maverick millionaire lawyer called ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. Of Irish extraction, Donovan’s nickname was acquired on the football field and followed him to the US 165th Regiment. He led the regiment’s 1st Battalion on the French Western Front in the autumn of 1918 and won the coveted Medal of Honor. His subsequent career as a lawyer showed all the gusto that he had hitherto displayed. He made things happen. ‘Switzerland’, he wrote to President Roosevelt, ‘is now, as it was in the last war, the one most advantageous place for the obtaining of information concerning the European Axis powers … information from Switzerland is far more important than from any other post.’15 What was needed was a station there and the right man at its head: ‘we need badly a man’, Donovan continued, ‘… to tap the constant and enormous flow of information that comes from Germany and Italy’. In Donovan’s opinion, the forty-nine-year-old Dulles was just that man. A lawyer like Donovan, Dulles spoke French and German, knew the intelligence ropes, was a hands-on spymaster, and familiar with Berne. Roosevelt was persuaded and in the autumn of 1942 Dulles was asked to set up a secret service office that would cover all the occupied territories and the Third Reich itself. For this purpose the COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). It comprised a secret intelligence service, the equivalent of MI6, and a secret operations service, a counterpart to the SOE. After the war, it would evolve into the CIA. Dulles would be its first civilian director.
On 7 November 1942, Dulles caught the last train up through the Vichy border town of Annemasse before Operation Anton closed the Swiss frontier. He carried on his person a large sum of ready cash, reputedly as much as $1 million. In the winter of 1942–3, as Paulus’s army collapsed in Stalingrad, Dulles settled into his apartment in Herrengasse 23, a fourteenth-century house in the cathedral quarter in Berne. One of the OSS staff, Cordelia Hood, recalled that it was ‘a beautiful apartment with a big terrace in the back that overlooked the Aare, then you looked up and saw the whole Bern Oberland mountain ran
ge, the Eiger, and the rest of the mountains. It was almost kitschy it was so postcard perfect.’16 It was also practical. As Dulles himself wrote, ‘Between my apartment and the river below grew vineyards which afforded an ideal covered approach for visitors who did not wish to be seen entering my front door on the Herrengasse.’17 This was sensible, for the Gestapo were soon watching the premises day in, day out. Here Dulles set about reviving old contacts and cultivating new ones. Almost the first of these efforts got him into a tangle with the British.
4
In February 1943, Dulles was approached by a gangling German Abwehr officer called Hans Bernd Gisevius. Formerly of the Gestapo, Gisevius was an able bureaucrat who had risen to work for the head of the military intelligence service, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Born in 1887, Canaris himself had joined the Kriegsmarine as a seventeen-year-old. He had seen action against the British in the Falkland Islands in the light cruiser Dresden. Subsequently he was trained as a submariner, commanded a U-boat, and by 1932 was commanding officer of the battleship Schlesien. On his forty-eighth birthday in 1935 he was appointed head of the Abwehr. Never a member of the Nazi Party, it was later said that Canaris – a wiry little intellectual – hated not merely Himmler and Hitler, but the whole Nazi political system. He certainly surrounded himself with those of a similar bent, Gisevius included. Moreover, his position was an excellent one for turning his beliefs into practice, into plots. As Dulles was later to put it,
An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy. Its members can travel about at home and abroad under secret orders, and no questions are asked. Every scrap of paper in the files, its membership, its expenditure of funds, its contacts, even enemy contacts, are state secrets. Even the Gestapo could not pry into the activities of the Abwehr until Himmler absorbed it. He only succeeded in doing so late in 1943.18
It was this pull that enabled Canaris to appoint the lanky Gisevius as vice-consul at the German legation in Zurich. Here Gisevius’s talents and inclinations might be put to best use. He might also keep Canaris in touch with MI6. This was an organisation with which he had surprisingly long-standing contacts, so much so that some have suggested that Canaris was an MI6 double agent. Gisevius duly made contact with MI6 in Berne in the form of the spry and suave Vanden Heuvel. On introducing himself to Dulles on 9 January 1943, Gisevius disclosed his identity and questioned Dulles as to the Allies’ likely attitude towards Germany in the event of Hitler’s removal. He omitted, though, to mention his contacts with MI6. Vanden Heuvel had taken the precaution of installing his own agent in Herrengasse to keep an eye on Dulles. This was the British butler with the irreproachably English name of Henry Baldwin. Vanden Heuvel was duly tipped off by Baldwin, who could scarcely fail to have noticed the striking, shambling figure of the 6’ 6” Gisevius. Vanden Heuvel warned Dulles of MI6 suspicions that Gisevius was a Nazi plant. Nevertheless, on 14 January 1943, Dulles again met Gisevius at the Herrengasse appartment. Dulles duly reported this meeting to Washington on a cipher.
This was all well and good. However, Canaris had a mistress in the form of a Polish woman called Halina Szymanska, the wife of a Polish officer imprisoned by the Soviets. Vanden Heuvel’s successor, Nicholas Elliot, recalled:
Madame Szymanska was a formidable lady. Canaris used to come to various neutral countries to lay her. And in the course of the pillow talk be used to talk to her freely and once told her about the secret meeting between Franco and Hitler. It is clear to me that Canaris knew exactly what he was doing and that she would pass this on.19
Whether in bed or elsewhere, what Madame Szymanska did discover was that the Germans had broken the Americans’ code. This was duly passed to Andrew King, Vanden Heuvel’s number two, who ran the Polish agent. Dulles was of course himself informed. Three months later in the course of another meeting with Gisevius in Berne, Dulles was told a splendid story. It concerned the building of forty huge seaplanes in Nazi-occupied Rotterdam. They were to be manned by suicide squads and used to bomb London. Despite the Szymanska warning, Dulles passed this back to Washington not in one but two telegrams. Dansey, who remained highly sceptical of Gisevius, thought this a piece of misinformation or disinformation, designed to deceive. Dansey was beside himself. He told Vanden Heuvel: ‘could you report to the fool [Dulles] who knows his code was compromised if he has used that code to report meetings with anyone, Germans probably identified persons concerned and use them for stuffing. He swallows easily.’20
*
All this merely formed a prelude to the Fritz Kolbe affair, the second act of which appears to have taken place on 18 August 1943, just as Italy was falling into chaos. This was the day after Kolbe’s rejection by Cartwright and – as it so turned out – the day after an air raid that showed the power of intelligence: the RAF bombing of the rocket research centre at Peenemünde (Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde) in the Baltic that set back the production of the V-2 rockets by anything up to a year.
According to one account, Kolbe attended mass in Berne cathedral before being taking under the convenient cover of the vineyard up to the Herrengasse apartment – away from the prying eyes of the Gestapo. Ushered into Dulles’s large ground-floor office, he held his briefcase in such a way as to catch his eye. His line with Dulles was just as with Cartwright. ‘I want to see Germany defeated in this war,’ Kolbe declared. ‘It is the only way to save my country. I think I can help in securing that defeat. I am an official of the German Foreign Office and I see all the telegrams that pass through the Department. I have copies of them in this briefcase. I brought them into Switzerland in the diplomatic bag, and I am willing to turn them over to you. There are more where these came from.’21 Kolbe drew a key from his watch chain, unlocked the case, and opened it on Dulles’s desk. Dulles lit his pipe and picked up two reports at random. One was a detailed account of the Japanese army’s plans for an offensive in Burma. The second – rather topical on that day – was plans for the use of V-weapons against England. ‘Your experts’, Kolbe told Dulles, ‘will need to study them to make sure they are genuine.’22 Dulles concurred. The only problem was that the experts were British.
The documents duly found their way to Claude Dansey’s desk in London. Dulles had of course been duped. A colleague speculated that Dansey concluded: ‘It was clearly impossible that Dulles should have pulled off this spectacular scoop under his nose. Therefore he had not. The stuff was obviously a plant, and Dulles had fallen for it like a ton of bricks.’23 This particular colleague was Kim Philby, who had by now – in his own words – drifted from the SOE to MI6. Philby, among others, counselled caution, suggesting the documents should be checked. Dansey was outraged. It was out of the question to let Dulles and OSS ‘run riot all over Switzerland, fouling up the whole intelligence field. Heaven knew what damage they wouldn’t do. Such matters had to be handled only by officers with experience of the pitfalls that beset the unwary.’24 The documents were nevertheless passed on to Philby for verification by the counter-espionage section. This was done by finding if any of them matched intelligence from a different source – in this case from the Ultra decrypts from Bletchley Park. ‘I chose for his scrutiny’, recalled Philby, ‘a striking series of telegrams from the German Military Attaché in Tokyo to the German General Staff which had been transmitted through diplomatic channels.’25 Commander Alastair Denniston headed up the Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park. Two days later Denniston called Philby. The telegrams matched.
Dansey of course was appalled. He was only mollified when Philby explained he had not credited the documents to the OSS and that as head of the Swiss section credit might reasonably be attributed to Dansey himself. ‘Carry on,’ Dansey told Philby. ‘You’re not such a fool as I thought.’26 According to Philby, his motive in verifying the material and ensuring that credit was given where credit wasn’t due was to get himself promoted to a role of greater value to his Soviet masters. ‘I regarded my SIS appointments purely in the light of cover-jobs, to be carried out sufficientl
y well to ensure my attaining positions in which my service to the Soviet Union would be most effective.’ Needless to say, the secrets also found their way to Moscow.
Kolbe, though, was a find and a huge one. His second visit to Berne on 7 October 1943 was followed by many. He would later be regarded as one of the most important spies of the Second World War. His rejection by Cartwright and acquisition by Dulles helped the American’s make his mark in the nest of spies in Berne in the early autumn of 1943. Once having done so, the pipe-smoking, avuncular Dulles turned to the matter of conducting extra-marital affairs.