Thanks to Rado’s scoop, the Kremlin knew exactly in what direction the wind was blowing and set its sails accordingly. The signing of the Russo-German pact in August, 1939, had its grotesque aftermath in Rado’s private underworld. On August 26, 1939, he received orders from the “Director” in Moscow to dismantle his German ring and stop spying on Germany. Stalin was taking the pact rather seriously.
Rado must have thought this was a senseless order and that it was a pity to destroy such a well-oiled ring. He disobeyed his instructions, as he had many times before, and kept his German ring going. As we shall see, his insubordination made all the difference between victory and defeat for the Soviet Union. The fat little spy in his landlocked Swiss hideout could see more clearly than the supreme dictator in the Kremlin. It was, therefore, simple for him to return to full operations when in October, 1940, he received instructions from Moscow to resume speed.
Rado had about fifty agents working for him, going by all sorts of cover names, living all kinds of double lives. Two of them—Sissy and Taylor—loomed up at this critical moment. Sissy was Rachel Duebendorfer, a woman of obscure Balkan origin but Swiss by a marriage of convenience; she was working in the International Labor Office, an agency of the League of Nations. Taylor was Christian Schneider, a German by birth. He was Rachel’s colleague at the I.L.O. until he gave up his legitimate job and became a full-time cut-out for Rado.
Rado was using three aliases: Albert and Kulicher, and then, throughout the war, Dora. He kept in touch with Moscow through three clandestine radio stations. One was operated by Jim, the wayward British expatriate; the second was managed by a French couple, Edmond (Eduard) and Olga (Maud) Hamel, from the back room of their legitimate radio shop; the third was operated by Rosie, Rado’s twenty-one-year-old paramour, a pretty Swiss girl named Margaret Balli.
It was not too difficult to operate such a network in Switzerland. The country was the ideal, traditional locale of wartime espionage, facilitated by Swiss democracy with its scrupulous regard for civil rights; Switzerland’s geographical location in the heart of Europe; its role in high finance as the banker of the belligerents; and the fact that the Swiss themselves had a very real stake in espionage, which they regarded as their country’s first line of defense. Most anxious to keep a constant check on German intentions insofar as their own country was concerned, the Swiss Army Intelligence Service (the world famous Nachrichtendienst) utilized all sources of information, their own as well as the agents of others. The N.D. was frequently willing and even eager to make deals and barters with foreign agents as long as their activities were not directed against Switzerland.
It was from Switzerland that the Fourth Bureau received its most explicit warning, “from Dora to Director.”
It was June 10, 1941, a cloudless, beautiful near-Summer day in Geneva. Rado was just getting up when his home telephone rang. It was Taylor, violating the most elementary rule of good espionage. Rado himself would violate the rules wholesale, but he disliked it when his cut-outs got in touch with him in this direct manner.
“Yes … What do you want?” he barked.
“I have to see you at once,” Taylor said. “I’ll come to your house right away!”
“That’s impossible,” Rado replied. “We’ll have to meet somewhere,” but Taylor broke into his sentence:
“This matter cannot wait,” and hung up. Fifteen minutes later, a cab drove up in front of a restaurant and out of it stepped Taylor, making his way in stages to Rado’s house. His boss waited for him in his study.
Taylor, a stolid, somewhat slow-witted German of extreme reserve, was almost breathless.
“Sissy has put me in touch with the most phenomenal source we ever had,” he blurted. “She refused to tell me who he is and how she got hold of him, but he is as real as life, has direct lines to the German High Command and has his own lines of communications. And he’s safe ! He’s working for the Nachrichtendienst. They vouch for him and protect him!”
He gave Rado the first piece of information he had received that morning from the mysterious contact and left. Rado spent an hour, writing a concise message, enciphering it (something he rarely did himself), then pondering whether to send it. It was monumental news, if it was true. But if it was not, he would make a fool of himself and bring down upon his head the wrath of the Director.
At last, when it was almost eleven o’clock, he called Jim from a booth and asked his chief radioman to meet him at a street corner. Rado was still worried when they met, almost shaking with fear, but Jim calmed him down. He simply took the piece of paper with the cipher on it from Rado’s trembling hand and left the shaking spymaster at the street corner.
That night, two officers of the German radio monitoring station at Cranz in East Prussia, combing the air waves for other people’s secrets, picked up a message. It attracted their attention because it was repeated again and again, on wave lengths 18.9 and 21.3, for hours every half hour, always the same monotonous signals, identical five-figure groups. The Germans had monitored the station before, but they never succeeded in breaking its cipher. It was, of course, Jim in Geneva:
“From Dora to Director, source : Taylor. Hitler’s attack on Soviet Union definitively scheduled for June 22. This is new date representing postponement from original June 15. Hitler reached decision only two days ago. Report from absolutely reliable new source, received by Swiss General Staff via special diplomatic courier. More to follow.”
The message reached Moscow that night, but it was not deciphered until the next morning. It was immediately sent to General Kuznetsov, the Director, who was in the Kremlin, attending a military discussion in Stalin’s office. The general was called out of the meeting and was handed the message. He returned to the conference and read it out loud.
Stalin still remained skeptical, but the others around the table no longer shared his doubts. The conceited dictator who alone could have given the order to meet the onslaught still preferred not to give it.
Who was the source of the message that Stalin so rashly disregarded?
Not far from the discreetly cloaked headquarters of the Swiss Military Intelligence Service in Lucerne was the modest office of a small, esoteric publishing house, Vita Nova by name, the publisher of books with a liberal Catholic philosophical slant. It was run by a short, owlish, ascetic-looking man. He called himself Rudolf Roessler, and it may be that it was his real name.
It happens but rarely that a single individual spy can exert decisive influence on the main course of history, but Rudolf Roessler was such a person. According to Alex Foote, it was mainly his contribution that enabled the Red Army to beat Hitler.
Roessler was born on November 22, 1897, in Kaufbeuren, Germany, the son of a Swabian forestry official. He worked as a journalist in Augsburg and later became the manager of a theatrical association in Berlin. When the Nazis came into power Roessler had to flee. He found a haven in Switzerland, and, from then on, his life was devoted to anti-Nazi activities. He settled in Lucerne with the aid of a young friend, Dr. Xavier Schnieper. Throughout his subsequent espionage activities, Schnieper remained his sole confidant and associate. He became the representative of an enormously powerful German conspiratorial group that extended into the highest echelons of the High Command and the Foreign Office.
Schnieper was friendly with a major of the Swiss Intelligence Service in whose house also lived a certain Uncle Tom, apparently a relative or a friend of the family. In fact, Uncle Tom was Colonel Svoboda, Military Attaché of the Czechoslovak Government-in-exile. Roessler placed his information at the disposal of the Swiss and also gave it to Uncle Tom for the Czech secret service in London. At the same time, he tried to establish a working relationship with General West, the British Military Attaché in Berne, ex officio resident chief of the Secret Service. But West turned him down, probably because his sources happened to be the same German dissidents with whom the British, after the shock of the Venlo incident, refused to cooperate.
With
no other place to go, and realizing that the Swiss and the Czechs could never defeat the Nazis by their own efforts, Roessler groped for a link to the Russians. Schnieper introduced him to Sissy and she brought him to Taylor. Until then, Taylor had never amounted to much as a secret agent, but his association with Roessler was so highly valued in Moscow that he was taken into the Fourth Bureau’s fraternity as a charter member with a monthly stipend of eight hundred Swiss francs.
Sissy and Taylor were the only members of Rado’s ring who ever met Roessler in person. All the deals were made through Taylor. They were substantial even financially because Roessler insisted that he be paid well for his services. It was Taylor who picked up Roessler’s information and forwarded it to Rado; and it was he again who took the money back to Roessler. Roessler agreed to work for Rado, but only on his own terms. He was never to reveal the sources of his information, and, in all those years of co-operation, he merely hinted that his chief contact in Germany was a senior officer in Hitler’s High Command for whom he coined the name Werther. Even today, it is not known who Werther was.
When Roessler’s first message arrived in Moscow, the one heralding the imminent outbreak of the Russo-German war, this new source of information was received with skepticism. Kuznetsov asked Rado to tell him more about his new contact, but there was little Rado could tell. Kuznetsov was amazed by the quality of Roessler’s information and impressed by the promptness with which it was obtained and transmitted, but he suspected a plant and for some time refused to accept the material as genuine. The suspicion was not to last long. According to Foote, this was the only time Moscow was willing to cooperate with an “unvetted source,” a man who remained as mysterious to his employers as he was to the Germans against whom he worked.
To the end, Roessler remained outside the Rado ring. Foote was assigned to transmit most of his information, but the two never met and even years later the Englishman thought Roessler was a certain Czech named Selzinger.
Roessler was to be paid seven thousand Swiss francs a month and special bonuses for scoops. He made it clear from the outset that he would not accept orders from the Center in Moscow or from Rado in Geneva. Roessler subsequently earned what is regarded as an astronomical sum in espionage. Between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1944, he was paid a total of three hundred and thirty-six thousand francs in monthly stipends and about two hundred and fifty thousand francs in bonuses. He was given a cover name, Lucy, after the city of Lucerne, where he lived; and Taylor resigned his job at the I.L.O. to be available as a full-time go-between.
Roessler was a gusher. He furnished to the Fourth Bureau the order of battle of the Wehrmacht on a day-to-day basis, including the exact location and mission even of single battalions; operations plans and orders well in advance of their execution; diplomatic information of the utmost importance.
He supplied the German operation order for what became the decisive Battle of Rostov, where Marshal Timoshenko succeeded for the first time in stemming the tide of the Wehrmacht’s advance. He delivered the operation order for the Battle of Moscow, which enabled Marshal Zhukov to make his own arrangements. He furnished the operation plan of the Battle of Stalingrad, including the disposition of all German forces, the emergency plans for Goering’s aborted air lift and voluminous data about logistics.
“Not only did he,” Foote wrote, “provide the day-to-day dispositions in the Eastern front, but also Lucy could, and did, provide answers to specific questions. It frequently happened that Moscow had lost sight of such-and-such a division. An inquiry was put through to Lucy and in a matter of days the answer would be provided, giving the composition, strength and location of the unit in question.” Sometimes Lucy’s reports followed a unit all the way from its inception to its extinction. He would report that such and such a division was about to leave its sinecure in France for the Eastern front. He would follow with the date of departure, the route of transportation and the destination. He would wind up by reporting the arrival of the unit, its order of battle and its operations order, pinpointing the exact sector where it would be thrown into the struggle—and when.
“As far as Moscow was concerned,” Foote remarked, “this was obviously the most important function Lucy could perform. Russia, fighting with her back to the wall and scraping up her last resources, was obviously vitally interested in trustworthy information regarding the armed forces ranged against her—and this Lucy supplied.”
Roessler was not a spy in the usual sense of the word, for he had no direct access to the secret information he was peddling. He performed the function of a conveyor belt. He received his information from his mysterious source in Germany, and, to this day, nobody knows for certain how he obtained it, especially so swiftly. Some say he had access to the diplomatic pouch of the Swiss; others say he was on the Europe-wide clandestine radio network of the Red Orchestra, the other enormous espionage ring that flooded the Fourth Bureau with material straight from the safes and files of Hitler’s diplomatic and military apparatus.
The Fourth Bureau is usually stingy with monetary rewards and it is even stingier with praise, but Lucy received the highest accolades from the Director. Among the intercepted communications of Rado’s Dora period, there are scores that contain nothing but thanks which Rado was to convey to Roessler. It is generally agreed today that Lucy’s contribution to the Russian victory was of the greatest significance and “the effect of the information [he supplied] on the strategy of the Red Army and the ultimate defeat of the Wehrmacht [was] incalculable.”
Roessler continued to work for the Russians until June, 1944, but shrewdly covered his rear by also working for Swiss Intelligence.
At one point during the war, Hitler toyed with the idea of invading and occupying Switzerland. During those weeks and months, Roessler’s importance to the Nachrichtendienst became crucial. He procured all the pertinent data, including private conversations Hitler had about Switzerland, and placed them at the disposal of the Nachrichtendienst. He received no remuneration whatever from Swiss Intelligence, except that he was allowed to function unmolested for others.
The chief of the Swiss Intelligence Service, Colonel Roger, insisted that Roessler’s information of those critical weeks enabled the Swiss Federal authorities to forestall the projected German invasion by staging a timely counter-offensive of their own in the military and diplomatic fields. Colonel Roger gives Roessler full credit for averting war from Switzerland in 1939–45.
With Roessler’s help and by their own remarkable efforts, Rado and his fifty agents managed something that was unprecedented in the whole history of espionage. No comparable network has ever succeeded in staying in business with such an elaborate apparatus for so long and with such feverish activity. By 1942, the total of outgoing messages averaged eight hundred per month. Rado had to use daily all three of his radio transmitters and he had to drive his operators as hard as he could. This was almost too good to be true or too good to last forever. An end was inevitable and when it came at last, in stages in 1943 and 1944, it was due to a combination of the carelessness that forever characterized Rado’s operations, of the chaos that goes even with the best-managed war, and of the jealousies that are rampant in the secret service.
Rado persistently violated many rules of good espionage, but none of his trespasses was as serious as his amorous involvement with “Rosie,” the pretty Swiss demoiselle, Margaret Bolli. She was a native of Geneva, what the Germans call ein Maedchen aus gutem Hause, a young lady of good family. But behind her philistine façade, she was a Communist activist, member of the inner circle of Léon Nicole, the .bigtime Swiss Comintern agent, whose hatchery supplied the fish for the Soviet espionage nets in Switzerland.
Nicole introduced Mlle. Bolli to Rado, and the aging master spy, never before seized by this kind of passion, completely forgetful of his wife at home, was promptly smitten by the young woman’s charm. As a prospective spy, the Bolli girl was a very rough little diamond at best, but Rado in his amorous b
ias saw in her a great operative and he had her learn radio telegraphy and cipher work from Foote.
Rado’s love for Margaret never slackened, but she gradually cooled to the elderly man. Before long, she found herself yearning for the companionship of younger men and became involved with a handsome barber in Geneva, Hans Peters by name. Now she had to live still a third secret life, for she was anxious to conceal her faithlessness from Rado.
Young Peters had more than just romantic interest in Margaret. He was a German by birth and was in secret communication with the German consul in Geneva. The German counter-espionage organization, operating out of the consul’s office, was fully aware of the existence of a Soviet network in Switzerland, but it was frustrated by its inability to locate its transmitters, break its ciphers or to find out anything concrete about it. All they had were a few scattered clues that showed Miss Bolli was a member of the ring and operated one of its radios.
Her private life was investigated and it became quickly evident that she was restive and frustrated in love. Young Peters was put to work and it did not take long for Gretel to fall head over heels in love with her Hansel. In her infatuation she could keep no secrets from him. In the end, she even delivered to him the book on which her code was based, a German volume entitled Es geschah in September—It Happened in September.
In October, 1943, Margaret was arrested, on evidence the Germans had slipped to the Swiss. She was trapped in Peters’ arms during a tryst in his apartment, to which the ungallant suitor had also invited the police. From then on, the decline and fall was only a matter of time and before long, the phenomenal ring of Alexander Rado was smashed.
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