Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  Churchill was, of course, given full access to the Woods reports, but until March, 1941, the Prime Minister, too, refused to accept the momentous information at face value. He probably rejected it for some psychological reason, because it sounded too good to be true; and he certainly rejected it on apparently sound intelligence grounds, because his own Joint Intelligence Committee advised him without qualification not to indulge in any delusions about a life-saving Russo-German war.

  By then, the British Secret Service was functioning well on the Continent. Its newly-established agents reported in pinpoint detail the movement of German troops, but nothing much could be made of that scattered tactical intelligence. Hitler’s war was extremely fluid. His conflicting ideas necessitated constant redeployments. The conclusions that could be drawn from those disconnected reports, covering usually only small areas with no direct relationship to the whole, were hazy at best.

  In addition, the German system of deception was working extremely well. The Wehrmacht remained in force all along the Channel, went through all sorts of landing exercises and leaked voluminous information about Sea Lion, as if that dead beast were still robust and kicking. In Moscow, General Koestring, the German Military Attaché, received instructions to befuddle the Soviet General Staff with a plausible tale of his own. Koestring told the Russians that “inasmuch as the operations in the West had been concluded, the Germans intended to replace the older men in the East with younger men so that the former could be employed in German production.” Another reason, he said, was that training and supply conditions were better in the East and there was no danger of air attacks. The Soviet General Staff was not wholly inclined to believe his tales, but it was discouraged in its skepticism by Stalin who explicitly forbade any doubts in Hitler’s best intentions.

  On April 7, 1941, the Joint Intelligence Committee presented Churchill with an estimate of the situation. They conceded that Germany had huge forces in the East, and that the Germans would fight Russia sooner or later, but concluded nevertheless that a war at that time appeared unlikely. And on May 23, they reported that “rumors of impending attack on Russia had died down.”

  The Prime Minister already knew much better. Late in March, he had instructed Major Morton to procure for him the originals of the more significant raw reports. He came upon a report that suddenly revealed the whole complex story.

  It was from one of Britain’s most trusted sources, an agent to whom Churchill has paid glowing tribute in his war memoirs without identifying him otherwise. The agent, observing the movement of German troops in Central and South Eastern Europe, located five Panzer divisions in Poland near Cracow, where they were certainly not needed to attack England. Yes, Churchill thought, the Fuehrer must be planning some maneuver in the East. Then unexpectedly, the pro-German Yugoslav government was overturned in a coup. Two days later, on March 29, another signal arrived from the same agent reporting that three of those five divisions were being hastily moved to Rumania. This still left two divisions in Cracow. Now what did this mean, the Prime Minister asked himself. The transfer of a single Panzer division is a major operation, necessitating the shuffling of twenty trains. Sixty trains, Churchill figured, are not moved for a whim, however whimsical Herr Hitler might be.

  There must be some motivating factor, he thought, for those five Panzer divisions being in Cracow at all, and that reason, he concluded, could only be an impending war against the Soviet Union. The departure of three of the five divisions for Rumania then suggested to the Prime Minister that Hitler had temporarily abandoned his plan to attack the U.S.S.R. and was to mount a punitive expedition against Yugoslavia to retaliate for the coup. After its conclusion, Churchill reasoned, the Panzers would rejoin the others at Cracow.

  The Prime Minister no longer doubted. Next day he wrote of his discovery to Eden, who was in Athens, working hard to anticipate developments. Churchill sketched in what soon proved to be uncannily accurate details, the actual moves of Hitler, which were yet to come. Seven days before the Yugoslav campaign was unleashed, Churchill told Eden that it was certain to come, adding that Greece would be next. He told him that after Yugoslavia and Greece, Hitler would turn against the Russians.

  He was so convinced of the accuracy of his deductions that three days later, on April 3, he instructed Sir Stafford Cripps, his Ambassador in Moscow, to advise Stalin personally of his assumptions based on “sure information from a trusted agent.” There was no response until April 12, and then only a cable from Cripps that he had not yet delivered the message. Churchill was stung; he cabled Cripps to do as he was told. Still things moved slowly. The message was delivered only on April 19, and then to Andrei Y. Vishinsky, Under Secretary in the Foreign Commissariat, and not to Stalin. At last, on April 22, word came from Cripps that Vishinsky had assured him the message had been handed to Stalin.

  If Oumansky’s warning from Washington irritated the Soviet dictator, the message from the British Prime Minister made him seethe. Now he was convinced (was not this the proof?) that Churchill was behind the insidious campaign to alienate him from Hitler. “Nothing that any of us could do,” Churchill later wrote, “pierced the purblind prejudice and fixed ideas that Stalin had raised between himself and the terrible truth.”

  By then, even Moscow was buzzing with rumors about the imminence of a Russo-German war, but, in view of Stalin’s attitude, it was dangerous to express such fears. The German Naval Attaché signaled to Berlin on April 24, that German visitors in Moscow spoke rather loosely about Barbarossa, and, he added, the British Ambassador predicted that war would break out on June 22 ( !), the exact day that was yet to be fixed by Hitler.

  Nothing ignited the imagination of the Soviet Ambassador in Berlin. He assured Molotov, and Molotov in turn assured Stalin, that the last thing the Germans intended to do was to attack the Soviet Union. He reported he was so certain that the rumors lacked foundation that he had made arrangements to hold the annual outing of the Embassy—on June 22.

  In the face of such reassurances, Stalin ordered an investigation to track down the rumor-mongers and punish them severely. The chief of his secret police reported that the perpetrator was an intelligence officer of the General Staff’s Fourth Bureau, serving as technical adviser with the Soviet Embassy in Berlin. Upon Stalin’s instructions, the man was to be recalled and sent to Siberia, but he managed to escape at the last moment, and so lived to see his fears come true and to relish Stalin’s monumental humiliation.

  12

  Footloose In “Sicily”

  The Soviet Union, traditionally the leading espionage power of the world, had inherited a complex secret service organization from Czarist Russia and had both enlarged and improved it.

  The pre-war Soviet espionage organization was brilliantly and purposefully organized and was managed with exceptional skill, despite a frequent change of directors, and in spite of frequent duplications. Altogether, the Kremlin had at its disposal six major intelligence organizations, five of them operational in various fields, one in charge of strategic evaluation. This latter was the so-called Confidential Department of the Secretariat of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, a conveyor belt for the transmission of intelligence from the procurement agencies to the Politbureau and the Central Committee.

  Among the five operational agencies, the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army General Staff and the Foreign Department of the Commissariat (later Ministry) of the Interior, the notorious NKVD, were equal in importance and influence. A third branch was the political intelligence department of the Narkomindel (Foreign Commissariat), with a sub-section in Tass, the official news agency, whose correspondents abroad doubled as spies. The others were the industrial and commercial intelligence department of the Commissariat of Foreign Trade; there was also the intelligence apparatus of the Communist International, which had its headquarters in Moscow and branches throughout the world in the regional Communist Parties, both legal and illegal.

  The Soviet combine was able to set up and m
aintain an unprecedented network of active operatives abroad. These were both professional spies and enthusiastic lay agents, chosen from among local Party members and Soviet sympathizers. There was said to be, at the headquarters of the Comintern in Moscow, a master index card file of some four hundred thousand persons throughout the world who could be counted upon to serve Soviet intelligence at one time or another, in one way or another.

  The Soviet secret service was unique for another reason—in the understanding and manipulation of conspiracies. Blending conventional espionage with political conspiracy, the service, for utter ruthlessness and comprehensive coverage, surpassed any of its opposite members in the capitalist countries.

  At some time in 1937, the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army General Staff acquired an exceptional agent. On the staff of the German legation in Warsaw was a staid Silesian aristocrat, an aging, impeccable career diplomat of the old school, Rudolf von Scheliha by name. He was apparently the prototype of the striped pants diplomat, very correct and formal, suave and soigné, with expensive tastes in food and women. He was married to an elderly lady of considerable means and was drawing a respectable salary, but his substantial revenue still was not enough to cover his expensive love affairs and, especially, his gambling losses.

  With the help of a German journalist to whom Scheliha had confided his woes, a Soviet agent made contact and, by holding out money as bait, enticed the old-fashioned gentleman to become an old-fashioned spy. From 1937 on, Scheliha kept the Kremlin well supplied with intelligence about every development in German-Polish relations and was the first to alert the Fourth Bureau when these relations showed signs of deteriorating.

  In February, 1938, he was engaged in an especially costly liaison with an exquisite lady of Warsaw’s best society, and at an all-night card party in the Polonia Hotel he lost some fifty thousand zloties (about ten thousand dollars). His friends gave him until the end of February to settle the debt—upon his honor.

  On a trip to Berlin, he made a frantic search of confidential files for information that would bring a high price and found the evidence of Hitler’s impending moves on Austria and Czechoslovakia, with Poland as a more distant target. Back in Warsaw he met his Soviet go-between and the horsetrading began. Scheliha asked for ten thousand dollars, a sum the Fourth Bureau had never before doled out to a single agent. They offered him one thousand dollars in American currency, with the suggestion that he improve upon it by selling the dollars on the black market. The bargaining continued for the better part of February.

  At last, on February 26, Scheliha received a circumspect invitation to spend the weekend at Zakopane, a fashionable winter resort. He was instructed to go on skis to an abandoned hunting lodge high in the Tatra Mountains. In the lodge Scheliha found a courier specially sent from Moscow. He had six thousand five hundred dollars with him and offered it on a take-it or leave-it basis. To lend proper emphasis to the offer, he told Scheliha bluntly of instructions to kill him at the lodge if he refused. Scheliha dickered no longer. He handed over his document and took the money. By selling the dollars on the black market as the Russians had suggested, he realized far more than he needed to pay his gambling debt.

  After this incident, the Fourth Bureau more or less blackballed Herr von Scheliha, despite the high quality of his information. Even so, he was kept in the fold and continued to work for the Soviets even after his own country was actually at war with them.

  In the fall of 1938 a young Englishman arrived in Geneva, Switzerland, looking for a woman carrying a string shopping bag with a green parcel in it and holding an orange in her right hand. He himself wore a white scarf around his neck and held a leather belt in his hand. Anyone familiar with third-rate movies could deduce from this quaint mixture of grocery and haberdashery that these were spies. The foreman of Soviet spies who arranges such rendezvous had either a lurid imagination or some marvelously prescient acquaintance with the Late Late Show.

  The youthful Englishman was a vague adventurer who had graduated summa cum laude from the school of hard knocks on the Loyalist side of the Spanish Civil War but was otherwise an innocent abroad. At the central post office the woman came, exactly on time. She was slim and moderately good looking, in her early thirties, with a sexy figure and good legs. Her black hair was combed back and her dress was simple.

  Without looking to the right or left, she walked up to the fidgety young man and gave the melodramatic password, a silly question to which she received the required silly answer.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but where did you buy that belt?”

  “I bought it in an ironmonger’s shop in Paris,” the youth answered. Then he asked, “Where could I buy an orange like yours?”

  “Oh,” the woman said, “I could give you mine for an English penny.”

  The young man was Alexander Foote, a native of Britain, who here was called Jim. The woman was called Sonia, although her real name was Ursula-Maria Hamburger Schultz; she was assigned to “Sicily,” which in reality was Switzerland. Jim had just been recruited in London at $300 a week, although he had no qualifications whatever for the spy trade. Jim, Sonia, and their colleagues were puppets manipulated from 19 Znamensky Street in Moscow, where the “Director” of the Fourth Bureau had his headquarters. More immediately they were manipulated from a house in Geneva near the observatory in Bellevue. That was where Albert lived.

  Albert was Alexander Rado, a Hungarian cartographer of international reputation and partner in a reputable Swiss firm of map-makers, called Geopress. He was the manager of this particular Swiss “roof,” the technical name of a specific espionage ring operating behind a legal front. Rado was a short, rather rotund little man, with a round, gentle, scholarly face. Arthur Koestler knew Rado well, not as a spy, but as a human being and friend in whose house one could eat well and have excellent conversations. Koestler still waxes sentimental when he talks of Rado.

  “He was kind and warm-hearted by nature,” Koestler recalls, “but very shy and inhibited in personal relations, as true scholars sometimes are, and also rather absent-minded and awkward in his movements, so that he always reminded me of that pathetic character, the Fat Boy, bad in studies, bad at games, and the good-natured target of practical jokes.”

  Until 1937, Rado lived in Paris, where he operated a minor press agency from two barely furnished rooms in the Rue de Faubourg St. Honoré. He was sent to Switzerland to organize a new network. Until then, the Red Army had depended largely on reports pouring in from Soviet military attachés, like General Putna in London, and from the Apparat, the world-wide espionage arm of the Communist International. The Fourth Bureau had its own men in the field, like Colonel Bykov in the United States and General Krivitsky in The Hague, to maintain liaison with the Apparat’s lay agents, but the coverage was slipshod and produced spotty results. And even this inadequate organization was badly shaken by the great purges of 1937 at home and subsequent defections abroad. Putna was called home and executed. Krivitsky deserted. Agents who worked for them had been liquidated.

  So Rado, the little fat man, who would sweat profusely from the brow whenever the most trifling matter went wrong, set out to construct an enormously intricate net, not with any efficiency—of this he was congenitally incapable—but with instinctive purposefulness and shrewd improvisation. If ever there was a comic spy, Rado was that man. He was timid and constantly violated the rules of good espionage. His boners were innumerable. Forever stumbling over security precautions, he handled the ring’s funds with bohemian carelessness and observed none of the trade’s Spartan rules in his private life. He was a sentimentalist and a soft touch, trusting indiscriminately all who attracted his sympathy. He was loved by his civilian friends, as Koestler’s homage to him shows, but he was intensely disliked by his operatives.

  Yet Rado managed to muddle through to greatness in this fantastic business. He performed better, and produced more valuable material than any of his colleagues or opposite numbers in any one of the secret services.
Rado tapped the anti-Nazi underground inside Germany and soon had agents inside the Wehrmacht High Command itself and in virtually every war-essential agency of the Nazi government. Even today, long after the whole ring has been blown to bits, only a handful of his contacts have been identified. By late 1938, Rado was getting vast quantities of information and was the busiest man in Switzerland. He devoted a full day’s work to his Geopress in downtown Geneva and every minute of what was left to the management of his clandestine pastime. The latter required enormous attention to detail with plenty of paper work, because at this stage Rado had no “music boxes,” no secret radio transmitters, at his disposal. He was getting so many documents in their original form, or as transcripts, that he could not have encoded them all and put them on the air even if he had wanted to.

  He would photograph these documents on 35mm film and send them by courier to the military attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Paris. From there they were either sent on to Moscow by other couriers or radioed to the “Center” over a transmitter operated by the French branch office of the Fourth Bureau.

  Until 1939, the pattern which emerged from these documents was not clear. But then suddenly the evidence Rado was waiting for started to pour in. On April 6 or 7, he received on microfilm a German order dated only three or four days earlier. A couple of weeks later, he sent a courier to Paris with another batch of film clips on which was reduced a lengthier document, a variation on the same theme. These two papers were copies of Hitler’s orders to start translating “Case White” (the operations plan against Poland) into practice.

  What was made of these reports in the Kremlin nobody at this end can tell. But was it sheer coincidence that on April 17, 1939, a few days after Rado’s information had reached Moscow, the Soviet Ambassador to Berlin spoke of the possibility of a Russo-German rapprochement during a routine meeting with Baron von Weizsaecker, Under-Secretary in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs? Was there no connection between Rado’s information and Stalin’s decision to conclude a pact with Hitler?