A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America's Most Important Spy in World War II

by Delattre, Lucas

  Finally, Colonel Cartwright agreed to talk to him, but briefly. Colonel Henry Antrobus Cartwright had served as military attaché since September 1939. He was not the ideal interlocutor. His principal mission in this period consisted of debriefing British pilots who had managed to hide in Switzerland after being shot down over Germany. He then tried to evacuate them to London. He would have done better to meet the air force attaché, Freddie West, an intelligence specialist, but he was not necessarily in Bern that day, and Kocherthaler had no time to lose.

  Colonel Cartwright did not listen to him for long. He realized rather quickly that Kocherthaler, who claimed to be in touch with Clifford Norton and the legation’s number two, Douglas MacKillop, knew neither one very well. He did not trust this man claiming to serve as an intermediary for a mysterious German diplomat who said he was prepared to turn over information for nothing and whose name he refused to reveal. He soon dismissed his visitor, politely refusing his offer. He did not even tell his colleagues in the secret service about the visit.

  Cartwright had just passed up a historic opportunity, but his caution was understandable. The English were very suspicious of secret (or supposedly secret) offers coming from Germany. They had received very strict instructions from the Foreign Office, which had warned them against traps. And then, English diplomatic circles were hesitant as a matter of principle about any contact with the German resistance. The reason for this was simple: they were afraid that the Russians were doing the same thing and were seeking to sign a separate peace with Germany, behind the backs of the English and Americans.

  Ernst Kocherthaler left the British legation annoyed. He immediately thought of contacting a representative of the United States, but did not know how to go about finding the right door to knock on and an attentive ear. It occurred to him to get in touch with his friend Paul Dreyfuss, a banker in Basel. Kocherthaler knew that Dreyfuss had an address book even larger than his own. So he called and told him briefly what he wanted to do.

  At the same time, Tuesday evening around six, in Bern, Colonel Cartwright crossed paths with Allen Dulles in the street. The scene took place in Dufourstrasse, very close to the American legation (which was a little further along, at Alpenstrasse 29 and 35). Dulles came by, as always, with his coat pockets full of newspapers and his pipe in his mouth. Cartwright spoke a few words in passing, before going on his way (the colonel had no time to dawdle, someone was with him): “You’ll probably receive a call from a German I just met. I don’t remember his name. A name with ‘tal’ in it: Knochenthaler or Kochenthaler, something like that. I think this cove will turn up at your shop in due course, so you should be on the lookout for him.”

  Bern, Wednesday, August 18, 1943

  The American diplomat Gerald (Gerry) Mayer got an early-morning phone call. It was 7:30. It is not known whether he was still at home or already in his office on Dufourstrasse. At the other end of the line was Paul Dreyfuss. The two men did not know each other very well. Paul Dreyfuss was calling the American to recommend to him one of his friends who wished to see him to talk to him about an “extremely important” matter. Who is he? “A Spanish citizen of German origin,” Herr Kocherthaler, who was going to call him at nine that morning.

  At nine o’clock on the dot, the telephone rang in Mayer’s office. A few minutes later Kocherthaler was in front of Gerald Mayer and set before him a sheaf of diplomatic cables from Berlin (accounts vary on how many documents: three, sixteen, twenty-nine?). He offered him a meeting with a diplomat friend from the foreign ministry, “a devoted anti-Nazi, prepared to work for the Allies by providing information.” This meeting would have to take place “before noon on Friday.”

  Kocherthaler did not know Gerry Mayer, an elegant man (thin mustache, twinkling gaze, half-smile) who, like Allen Dulles, bore the title of “special assistant” to the American envoy in Bern, Leland Harrison. In fact, Mayer was the local specialist for American propaganda, employed by the Office of War Information (OWI). In that capacity, he worked in close collaboration with Allen Dulles and the OSS, whose offices were in the same building as his, Dufourstrasse 26. Dulles was very appreciative of his young colleague at the OWI, particularly for his extensive knowledge of Germany.

  Not knowing that his interlocutor spoke German, Kocherthaler spoke to Gerry Mayer in English. The conversation was not long. It remained vague enough so that nothing confidential came out. The name of Fritz Kolbe was not mentioned, nor his position—Kocherthaler merely said that he was a “rare bird”—but the purpose of the offer was clear. There was something concrete on the table: a pile of copies of German cables stamped “top secret” (geheime Reichssache). Gerry Mayer leafed through them distractedly. He adopted a cool attitude, as though he had seen others like them, but he was beginning to find this very interesting. He asked his mysterious visitor to wait a moment in the anteroom.

  Now everything would move very quickly. Mayer rushed to Allen Dulles’s office on the floor above and told him of the surprising offer from his “German visitor,” a “man with the air of a Prussian general, clean-shaven, as straight as an I.” Dulles listened attentively, his pipe in his mouth. He asked Gerry Mayer to give him an hour or two, mindful that the day before, he had heard of Kocherthaler purely by accident from Colonel Cartwright. Before going back down to the ground floor, Mayer put the cables from Berlin on Dulles’s desk. It was a series of exceptional documents. Each one of them was signed by a German ambassador and personally addressed to Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. In one of them, Otto Abetz, ambassador of the Reich in Paris, spoke of the Vichy regime setting up a network of pro-German agents behind the Allied lines in North Africa. In another, the former minister Constantin von Neurath, now plenipotentiary in Prague, described the rise of anti-Nazi resistance in the Czech population. From Ankara, the German ambassador, Franz von Papen, sent an alarm signal about British agents, more and more of whom were entering Turkey through Istanbul. Based on these documents, Allen Dulles asked Gerald Mayer to maintain contact with Kocherthaler and to let him know that they would call him back later that day.

  Once Mayer had left his office, Dulles picked up the phone and called Colonel Cartwright at the British legation. “Can I come to see you right away?” The colonel could see him in half an hour. It was 11:30. Dulles went to see the British military attaché, who offered him a whiskey and told him about the interview of the day before with Kocherthaler, encouraging him not to take the offer seriously.

  When he got back to his office, Dulles weighed the pros and cons. With his pipe in his mouth, he looked distractedly out the window, entirely lost in thought. Was Kocherthaler an agent provocateur? Were the Swiss laying a trap for the Americans, so that if they were caught they could be expelled from the country? That would show the Germans that the Swiss were as harsh with Allied as with Axis intelligence agents. In that case, Dulles would be taking a big risk: Espionage was illegal in Switzerland and he could not fall back on diplomatic immunity. It could also be a trap set by the Germans themselves, handing him information without importance so they could decipher American code when he sent it to Washington. A classic trick. It was all too good to be true, Dulles concluded.

  But Dulles remembered an experience that had shaped his professional life. When he was posted to Bern the first time in early 1917, he had been sought out by an obscure Russian revolutionary who wanted to meet him. It was a Sunday. Dulles hadn’t even taken the trouble to talk to him, preferring not to cancel the tennis game he had scheduled that morning with a beautiful woman. A few weeks later, he had realized that the man who had wanted to see him was none other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin. From that day on, Allen Dulles had promised himself that he would never again turn down any meeting with an unknown. Without going that far back in his memories, he thought of a pronouncement made a few months earlier by General Donovan, the head of the OSS: “Every man or woman who can hurt the Hun is okay with me.”

  He had to agree to see this diplomat from Berlin. It
was a risk that had to be taken as a professional duty. Back in his office, Dulles let Gerry Mayer know that he wanted to meet the German and his intermediary, Dr. Kocherthaler, as soon as possible. “Between now and then,” Dulles added, “do a little investigation of this Kocherthaler.”

  Bern, Thursday, August 19, 1943

  There are contradictory versions of subsequent events. According to the most common, “a meeting was set for midnight in the apartment of Dulles’s assistant [Gerry Mayer] in the Kirchenfeld district. Dulles, in disguise, was to meet them at half past twelve. When he arrived, Dr. O. [Kocherthaler] and the secret courier, a man in a black leather jacket, were already there. Dulles was introduced as a Mr. Douglas, Mayer’s assistant.”

  Fritz Kolbe and, very likely, Ernst Kocherthaler (although his presence is not absolutely certain) arrived at Gerald Mayer’s apartment. Fritz Kolbe was wearing a black leather jacket, probably a little warm for the season. The two men were wearing hats. The atmosphere at the beginning was rather tense. They were evaluating, “sniffing” one another. No one had shaken hands in greeting. For an hour or a little more, Ernst and Fritz conversed with Gerry Mayer in German. After a while, Allen Dulles entered the room. The mood became a bit more relaxed. Even though everyone remained wary, Dulles’s presence tended to create a pleasant atmosphere around him. The man seemed benevolent and his words were often punctuated with a strong, infectious laugh.

  “Mr. Douglas” looked like a giant next to Gerald Mayer and Fritz, who was charmed by this man with the air of a gentleman. He saw some traits in common with Ernst Kocherthaler: same class, same warm ease, and same imposing height. But Dulles spoke very bad German, his accent was deplorable. He had Gerald Mayer translate some of Fritz’s statements. Before anything else, he looked at this small man from Berlin and silently analyzed Fritz Kolbe’s face. “He was short, stocky, and bald. He looked more like an ex-prizefighter than a diplomat. His eyes were sharp and searching, with a look that Dulles considered honest determination.” Dulles, who for the moment followed his intuition, did not make an initially negative judgment on the unknown man.

  At that moment, Fritz took a large brown envelope from his inside jacket pocket, with a red wax seal stamped with a swastika. The envelope was open, the seal already broken. Fritz took a sheaf of documents out of the envelope. He set the stack on the table.

  A stunned silence greeted this unexpected gesture. Dulles began to look through some of the cables. Some of them were carbon copies of original documents (or at least presented as such by this unknown man whom he still greatly mistrusted); others were almost illegible handwritten notes. Fritz Kolbe’s handwriting was particularly difficult to decipher. One of the cables dealt with the morale of German troops on the Russian front, another drew up a provisional summary of sabotage actions by the anti-German resistance in France, yet another dealt with a secret conversation between Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and the Japanese ambassador in Berlin.

  A long conversation got under way between Dulles and Fritz on Germany, Berlin, what went on behind the scenes in the regime. Fritz described the atmosphere in Berlin, the growing sense of fear, the German-language programs on the BBC that people listened to secretly. He described in detail the mini-“putsch” of Deputy State Secretary Martin Luther and answered questions from the two Americans about the strength of the SS apparatus. He described the morose atmosphere of the German legation in Bern (“morale in Bern legation is bad”).

  One of the highlights of the evening came when Fritz set out to describe very precisely the location of Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, and made a sketch of it in pencil, with the help of a map spread out on a coffee table. “The East Prussian German HQ is located on the east shore of a small Lake Schwanzeitsee … Headquarters are established about 7 kilometers east of Rastenburg and 28 kilometers south of Angerburg. Everything is extremely well camouflaged. Here is Hitler’s bombproof hideout situated underground … Here is Ribbentrop’s train … there are railroad sidings where Himmler and Göring set up quarters … A restaurant for diplomats, Jägerhöhe, is located 300 meters to the north …”

  The tension relaxed. Drinks were served. Fritz continued to provide revelations of the greatest importance. The Germans, he explained, had managed to decipher an American diplomatic message sent from Cairo on August 7, 1943. Dulles and Mayer thus realized that the State Department’s cipher had probably been broken. It was urgent to warn Washington of this security breach threatening the United States’s secret communications.

  And that was not all. Kolbe was like a magician pulling dozens of surprises out of his sleeve. Strategic revelations (“how the Spanish are delivering tungsten to the Germans,” “planned retreat of German troops as far as the Dnieper,” “German and Japanese submarines at the Cape of Good Hope”). Indications on the location of industrial sites worth bombing (“the Telefunken factory in Lichterfelde, near Berlin, which provides precision equipment to the Luftwaffe”). Details on the increasing disorganization of the German industrial system (“Long-term planning has completely disappeared in German war industry. Plans are made from day to day and subject to constant change. As a result many newly appointed women employees are advised to come to work but to bring their knitting because they might be without work for days on end”).

  At some point late in the evening, Fritz Kolbe indicated that the Germans had a spy who had firsthand information coming from London (code name “Hector” or “Hektor”). The source had direct access to Stafford Cripps, the minister of aeronautic production. In Dublin, another German spy, a “Dr. Götz,” was flourishing, and the Germans had a clandestine radio transmitter in the Irish capital. At the other end of the world, the Portuguese colony of Mozambique was an important German observation post. The consulate of the Reich in Lourenço Marques in particular regularly provided precise information about the movements of Allied ships in the southern oceans. The Americans were extremely interested. If they were true, these pieces of information were of vital importance for the future course of the war.

  To crown it all, Fritz gave the details of the cryptography used by the German Foreign Ministry. It was a very effective coding system. He explained its functioning: “A normal cipher book is used. Every word has a number group. In addition to this the outpost and the Foreign Office have identical pads, each page of which is usable once only. These pages are covered with numbers in 48 groups of five. These numbers are added to the original cipher number at the transmitting end and deducted at the receiving end. Sum total, without adding decimals, is received at Foreign Office, their pad additions are subtracted, and original cipher results.” This was known as the “one-time pad” system, which was much more secure than the American coding methods (where each letter corresponded to a given number). Unfortunately, Fritz could not say more about it. Codes changed constantly, and the Americans could not make much concrete use of these revelations. They sent the details provided by Fritz Kolbe to London for another evaluation.

  The Americans asked the unknown man from Berlin to tell them his name and to talk about himself. Fritz Kolbe laid his cards on the table, revealed his identity, told the story of his life, talked about the Wandervogel, and described his work for Ambassador Karl Ritter. He did not consider that he was in any way under suspicion and cited as proof of this that he worked in the Political/Military Department. He provided dates, gave a summary of his career, and supplied details on the subversive activities he had carried out in secret since the beginning of the war. In particular, he described the fraudulent use of passports brought back from Cape Town, which he said he had given to Jews to help them flee Germany. He told them that his earnings at the outbreak of the war were 700 marks monthly, plus 200 marks special confidence bonus. He even talked about his son and gave them his address in SouthWest Africa (“c/o Ui and Otto Lohff, in Swakopmund”) to establish his credibility and serve as a guarantee. He also mentioned the name of Toni Singer, his best friend in Cape Town. They asked him about his motivation
s. Did he want money? Fritz Kolbe said no, explaining the reason for his decisions: “What I do I do for an ideal, I ask for no remuneration except possibly for reimbursement of modest expenses.”

  This remark surprised the two Americans. “Is this a joke?” they both said. Ernst defended his friend’s good faith: “He thinks it is not enough to clench one’s fist and hide it in one’s pocket. The fist must be used to strike.” Fritz in turn added a few words: “It is not only one’s right but one’s duty to fight such a government…. My wish is to shorten the war. And at the end of the war, Nazism, fascism, and all the other isms of the totalitarian states should end. We will need American help against the Russians tomorrow in our and in their interest, but we must help them now. That is why I wish to establish contact with the Western democracies. All we ask as payment for our services is help and encouragement and support after the war.” “The war,” said Dulles, “must first be won. It is too soon to speak of what comes afterward.”

  Despite the late hour (it was three in the morning, according to Dulles’s memoirs), they continued to bombard Fritz with questions: Could he provide other information? Did he come to Bern often? Fritz answered that he might come back, but that it was not certain. A system of communication between Berlin and Bern had to be organized. In order to finalize all these practical matters, a second appointment was made for Friday morning, again in Mayer’s apartment. The four men took leave of one another. When he returned to his hotel that night—as he was to say later—Fritz felt “deep satisfaction.” He nevertheless wondered if he had not been in too much of a hurry to reveal everything he knew. “Perhaps this haste was judged badly,” he thought. For their part, the two Americans, still in Mayer’s apartment, briefly shared their first impressions of the man whose name they pronounced as Fritz Colby. They agreed in observing that the German had asked practically no questions and had not tried to lead the conversation into any specific subject. This was a rather good sign, but they shouldn’t allow themselves to be lulled by what might be a trap wrapped up in a remarkable performance.