Among the mysteries, the case of Leczyca was the most enigmatic. Leczyca was a town of only ten thousand people in the district of Lodz, off the beaten path of armies, devoid, it seemed, of anything of interest to an invader. It had a garrison of only one hundred and fifty soldiers and even they had been hastily sent to the front, leaving the town without a single soldier. And yet, squadron after squadron appeared over the small city, until Leczyca had the unhappy distinction of being the most intensely bombed area for its size in the world.
Staff officers asked themselves why the Nazis were dropping tons of bombs on such a singularly wasteful objective. Sixteen air raids failed to solve the puzzle. The seventeenth told the tale. While it was in progress, the countryside suddenly quaked and roared with a cataclysmic explosion. The city was destroyed; hardly a window was left intact within a radius of fifty miles.
The Germans had touched off one of the largest secret munitions dumps in Poland. Its very existence was known only to a few of the highest Polish officers. How did the Germans know about it?
The answer was given by inference a few days after the conclusion of the campaign. A group of foreign newspapermen was taken on a conducted tour to the ruins of Warsaw, and Colonel von Wedel, their guide from the High Command’s press section, was asked to explain the secret of this amazing success. The colonel answered with unusual candor: “Victory was due to our superior arms and to our superior intelligence service”
Intelligence and espionage have figured prominently in all of history’s great wars, but never before had the debt the warlords owed to their spies been so publicly acknowledged.
The tragedy of Leczyca was an illustration of what von Wedel meant. For several years before the war, a German spy had been stationed in Leczyca to keep an eye on the city’s great secret. On the day of reckoning, Leczyca was among the first targets of the Luftwaffe. The dump was skillfully concealed. Despite the beam of the local agent’s radio on which the planes flew to their target, it escaped sixteen raids. But so certain were the Germans of their information that they returned for the fatal seventeenth time.
The same accuracy prevailed elsewhere. Military trains, for example, do not operate on timetable schedules, and their destinations are known only to a few. Yet the bombing of Polish rail communications was carried out with uncanny exactness. On September 5, for instance, an army transport left Warsaw’s Central Station en route to the front. Its secret routing called for its arrival at Praga station, on the other side of the river, fifteen minutes later. A few minutes before the train was due at Praga, German planes appeared from nowhere and bombed the station out of existence. The transport was marooned, blocking the progress of following trains. A single spy, planted within the stationmaster’s office in Warsaw, operating a clandestine transmitter, had alerted the Germans and thus prevented thousands of troops from reaching the front.
Obviously, someone was turning a new page in the annals of war. There was more to Germany’s military might than met the eye. The secret mission of Gruppenfuehrer Naujocks that ushered in the greatest war in history somehow became the bizarre symbol of a new kind of war.
This fresh conflict had a mysterious, intriguing new dimension. Deep in its bowels fought a brand new army, organized well in advance to fight in a brand new war.
It was an army of spies.
To be sure, throughout all recorded history spies have played an important part in both diplomacy and warfare, but never before like this.
As World War II was about to break, an American historian of the secret service drew up an estimate of the world’s espionage population and found that there was hardly a white spot left on the map. The globe was covered with intelligence officers, secret agents, femmes fatales, confidential informants, troublemakers, and police spies.
This was a remarkable increase, if only because espionage is by no means an activity whose growth should normally keep pace with the growth of mankind and the progress of civilization. The halcyon days of espionage were supposed to be over. In fact, they were just beginning.
2
The Fox in His Lair
On August 31, 1939, the Wehrmacht, deployed for the campaign in Poland, sizzled with excitement and tension. But in a plain, tastelessly furnished office in Berlin, a small, sallow man with snow-white hair sat back and relaxed. To Wilhelm Canaris, the actual outbreak of war was an anticlimax. He had worked long and hard to pave the way for it; now battles that the Wehrmacht still had to win or lose were far behind him. He and his men had fought their own underground war with enormous determination and rare skill. Though they had lost some skirmishes, they had won most of the battles. Now they felt confident they would win the war.
Who was this man, this great captain and brain of the vast underground army? Certainly the most important spymaster of World War II, Canaris was also one of its most controversial characters. “Seldom,” wrote a former high official of the German secret service, “has a figure of historical importance been judged with so many contrasting verdicts as the small, silent, eccentric figure, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the German Military Intelligence Services.”
His enemies regard Canaris as the sinister originator of the Hitler regime’s vilest crimes. His friends eulogize him as the spiritual leader of the pathetic anti-Nazi movement, a man who died a martyr for his courage and convictions. And there are those who brand him a traitor whose betrayal of the Wehrmacht in its darkest hour was directly responsible for Germany’s defeat.
A lot of nonsense has been written about Canaris. He has been portrayed as Germany’s greatest mystery man of all time—the sly link between the intrigues and cabals of the two world wars. He was said to have been one of the lovers of Mata Hari and has been called “the admiral who never wore a uniform,” though he spent the greater part of his adult life in that of the German Navy. He has been described as a humanitarian and moralist, but also as a lifelong intriguer.
In fact, the greater part of Canaris’ life was humdrum. He was born at Aplerbeck near Dortmund, in the heart of the Ruhr, on January 1, 1887, the youngest of three children of a prosperous mining engineer. It may be symbolic that in his youth he received the nickname “Kiecker,” which in English would mean either “Peeper” or “Snooper.” Young Wilhelm joined the navy and, during the First World War, dabbled in intelligence work, though it was not yet his specialty. He commanded a U-boat in World War I, and after the war the old battleship Schlesien. Then came the last sinecure, a gentle hint that his navy had no more use for him. In the early thirties, he was given a shore assignment as commandant of Swinemuende, an insignificant naval station on the Baltic, where he had a couple of coastal guns and nothing but seagulls to shoot.
Then, suddenly and inexplicably, on January 1, 1935, he succeeded Captain Konrad Patzig as the head of the Abwehr, the military intelligence service. Canaris was forty-eight, but he seemed far older. He was small, soft boned and slender, had a quiet voice and leisurely gestures, his shallow skin furrowed by wrinkles, his hair snow-white. His subordinates called him der Alte—”the Old Man.”
Canaris was continually pulled to and fro between the amorality of his job and his innate moralism, between a mystic belief in chance and a meticulous dedication to purpose. He was a good man and a weak one, an opportunist and a compromiser, forever vacillating between firmness and procrastination. His character was mirrored in everything he did, even in his pursuit of his favorite sport, sailing. “He always keeps close to the wind,” a friend once said, “and sails forever with sloppy sails.”
He was sensitive to a degree which, as someone remarked, was “incompatible with his choice of the career of an officer and which caused him to regard force and any expression of force with horror.” Perhaps because he was himself so unsoldierly in appearance, he looked with aversion upon dashing officers. The mere sight of a decoration on a soldier’s chest provoked him to sardonic outbursts and sufficed to bar the man from his entourage. He preferred to wear civilian clothes and he surr
ounded himself with officers who were as non-military as possible.
His inner sanctum on the top floor of the Abwehr building, called by insiders Fuchsbau or “Fox Lair,” reflected the hodgepodge of this strange man’s character. Its furnishings had no style or taste. On his desk stood a little piece of bric-a-brac which Canaris had chosen as the symbol of the Abwehr: the familiar little statue of three monkeys who hear, see and speak no evil. One wall was covered with a big map of the world. On the other walls hung three pictures: an autographed photograph of Generalissimo Franco (reflecting his consuming love of Spain, his adopted country, whose civil war in 1937 he helped to ignite) ; a Japanese painting of the devil; and a picture of his favorite dachshund, Seppl.
This strange man had neither friends nor confidants, but he was inordinately fond of dogs. His concern for his canine companions once threw his adversaries into confusion. Traveling with an assumed name on a fake passport, Canaris visited Spain in 1936 to plot the coming rebellion. The Republican police spotted him and tapped his telephone, for Canaris occasionally committed the apparent indiscretion of calling Berlin longdistance.
The Spanish monitor heard him talking about an ailing dog, and receiving from someone in Berlin a detailed report on the pet’s bowel movement. The police were positive this was a clever code and cryptoanalysts burned the midnight oil trying to decipher it. They couldn’t. Canaris really was talking about a sick dachshund.
Canaris personified the secret service at its worst. He was a politician, therein violating the very first rule of the secret service by using the information his agency procured as a weapon for his own plots. He came into the Abwehr a convinced Nazi, then drifted away from Hitler and wound up in a conspiracy against him. He is now frequently described as one of the top leaders of the anti-Nazi plot, but his real contribution consisted of omissions rather than commissions. He let the Nazis plant their spies within the Abwehr and permitted the anti-Nazis to plot behind his back. And he tried, with a good deal of success, to use both groups for his own ends.
In the end the Nazis hanged him on a specially constructed gallows with thin piano wire to deepen and prolong the agony of his death. Hanging may be, as Wotton remarked, the worst use a man can be put to, but it seems reasonable that he deserved his savage death.
But on September 1, 1939, he was still years from this mildly elevated terminal point of his career. In fact, he was at the pinnacle of his power and fame—because, strangely enough for a man of mystery, Canaris was internationally famous. The Abwehr was Hitler’s greatest prop and Canaris was one of his most valuable accomplices.
In a semi-official history of the Abwehr, Paul Leverkuehn, a Hamburg lawyer who served as an intelligence officer throughout the war, wrote of Canaris: “He was more than the titular head of the Abwehr. It was very largely his creation, and when he was removed it began rapidly to disintegrate. In fact it would not be a great exaggeration to say that the Abwehr was Canaris, and Canaris was the Abwehr.”
On the eve of war Canaris had a permanent staff of eighteen thousand men and women, with additional thousands in the field serving as confidential informants.
Canaris himself stood alone at the apex of this hierarchy. Under him were five major sections. There was the Central Section, headed by that courageous and determined anti-Nazi, Colonel Hans Oster, the executive officer of this labyrinthine web. The Foreign Section, under Captain Buerkner, maintained liaison with foreign powers. Section II, under Colonel von Lahousen, was responsible for sabotage and other underhanded secret operations. Section III was charged with Abwehr in the true sense of the term—security, counter-espionage, and counter-sabotage.
Secret intelligence (including espionage) was the responsibility of Section I, also called Geheimer Meldedienst, or Secret Information Service. It was organized in three “subsections” (one each for the army, navy and air force) and five groups. Among these, Group I-G developed ingeniously concealed weapons, extraordinary methods of microphotography, invulnerable secret inks; it forged passports and manufactured all the sinister paraphernalia indispensable to the efficient functioning of a secret service. Group I-I was in charge of wireless communications, including the design of clandestine radio equipment for agents in the field (the so-called Afus) and the organization of secret (black) radio networks.
Section I had a relatively small staff at headquarters in Berlin, in a five-story stucco building on the Tirpitzufer. In the field, it maintained an enormous network of so-called V-men (the “V” standing for “Vertrauen,” or confidential, in this context). Many were permanent resident agents; still more worked on a temporary, hit-and-run basis. The majority of the V-men were volunteers whose chief motive in aiding the Nazis was their sympathy for Hitler’s New Order. A handful were mercenary spies, but they were not paid well, on the sound theory that the best intelligence cannot be bought.
But no matter how firmly entrenched Canaris seemed at the apex of this hierarchy, he knew that his lonely place was perilous. He would have been indeed a negligent spymaster had he not known of a danger that threatened both himself and the Abwehr: Reinhard Heydrich, the young boss of the Gestapo whose Sicherheitsdienot (security service) was a vulgar imitation of Canaris’ Abwehr.
The Abwehr’s chief function was to defend Germany from foreign opponents by aggressive espionage and defensive counter-espionage. Heydrich’s SD, designed to defend the Reich from the “inner foe,” was supposed to perform largely police intelligence functions. But this demarcation could not be maintained. Beneath a veneer of collaboration, and even personal friendship, Canaris and Heydrich battled for control.
Heydrich was determined to dismantle the Abwehr until it was confined to military intelligence. Although this plan was based primarily on professional ambition, he also had a personal reason for disliking Canaris. Heydrich was Canaris’ junior by seventeen years, but both men were products of the German navy. There was one difference: Canaris had risen to the rank of rear admiral and left the navy with honors and dignity; Heydrich made the grade of a junior lieutenant, then foundered and was kicked out.
Though he was now in a position of enormous power, Heydrich’s hurt pride still made him self-conscious with Canaris, in whom he saw the navy personified.
For his part, Canaris went to considerable lengths to carry out his instructions and make Heydrich happy. He encouraged Heydrich to visit him at his home, persuaded him to become his neighbor in a Berlin suburb, and cultivated an apparently warm social relationship. But he was thoroughly contemptuous of the young Nazi, and Canaris had a trump card, as secret services usually do. He had evidence in the little safe he kept in his private office in the Fuchsbau that this fanatical, Jew-baiting Nazi bloodhound, Heydrich himself, was partly Jewish in origin.
The Nazi espionage service pitted against the Abwehr was a catch-all organization, called Reichs Sicherheits Haupt-Amt, or RSHA for short, the Main Department of Reichs Security.
Headed by Heinrich Himmler, it was organized in major branches whose functions and duties ranged from the selection and training of personnel to weird medical experiments using inmates of concentration camps as human guinea pigs. Its Sections IV and V performed police functions. Section IV was the dreaded Gestapo, headed by Heinrich Mueller, set up to combat opposition to the regime, to persecute the churches and the Jews and also to carry out the usual police supervision of all ports of egress and ingress. Section V was the Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo of Arthur Nebbe, the Reich’s orthodox criminal police.
Intelligence and espionage were concentrated in the SD Sections III (Inland) and VI (Foreign), over which Reinhard Heydrich ruled supreme. The Nazis’ aggressive espionage was a job reserved for his Section VI, the notorious Amt Sechs, where he was aided by a shrewd, opportunistic intellectual named Walther Schellenberg, a pinch-faced little busybody whose cold efficiency and penchant for methodical intrigue well supplemented Heydrich’s broader approach to the activity.
Section VI was developed step by step, until it became the
Nazi counterpart of the Wehrmacht’s cloistered Abwehr, a secret service in all but name, complete to functional and regional sub-sections patterned after the Abwehr’s structure. Though considerably smaller than the Abwehr, Heydrich’s agency actually duplicated its functions, frequently arrogating to itself prerogatives which should have been exclusive to the Canaris organization.
Heydrich’s ideas ran along unorthodox lines. To him, the direct approach was contemptible because it was too simple. His secret service was constantly teeming with weird plans for savage enterprises. Even those few he succeeded in translating into practice sufficed to establish Heydrich as one of the most insidious, but undeniably one of the most brilliant, spymasters of this nefarious age.
In a sense, Heydrich is the most misunderstood and underrated figure in the espionage history of World War II. Although it is Canaris’ picture that is etched on the imagination of the world as Germany’s master spy, Heydrich certainly gave him a run for first place. Some even think Heydrich surpassed Canaris in the efficiency and effectiveness of his operations, although this remains, in the nature of these things, a moot question.
Everything about this man was obscure or mysterious, including his origin. He was born in Halle in 1904 to the director of the Music Academy, whose name was listed in a contemporary directory as “Bruno Richard Heydrich (properly called Suess).” It was this parenthetical addendum in the old directory that made Heydrich reticent about his birth and youth. “Suess” was a common Jewish name in Germany.
Too young for war in 1914–18, he joined a terrorist youth organization after the peace and at the age of fifteen already had a reputation as a proficient assassin. He joined the navy as a cadet, advanced to the rank of lieutenant, but was then abruptly cashiered. He had several love affairs running simultaneously, including one with the daughter of a naval architect. When the young lady became pregnant, her father demanded that Heydrich marry her. The lieutenant refused in righteous indignation. He would never marry a woman, he said, who succumbed so easily to a seducer. The naval architect took the case to Admiral Raeder and Heydrich was discharged.
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