Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  Rado went into hiding, but he was hunted, and not only by the police. His own associates, who somehow never liked him, now supplied voluminous information about him to the Swiss and the Germans, but also to the Russians, charging that he had embezzled some of the funds of the network for some stock speculations in New York. A lot of money was involved in this gargantuan espionage operation and the sum that allegedly vanished into Rado’s pocket was said to be in excess of one hundred thousand dollars.

  Pursued from so many quarters, Rado embarked on a pathetic Odyssey that led, through treacheries and disillusionments, most probably to death from a bullet fired by a Soviet secret policeman. After Margaret’s defection, shattered both romantically and professionally, he tried to quit—something no spy master is ever permitted to do. He pleaded with the Director in Moscow to grant him leave and then to permit him to retire gracefully. The answer was no. In his plight Rado sought salvation from a new association, the British. He approached a key British agent in Geneva known to him as John Salter, and the Briton took him to Colonel Cartwright, a British Military Attaché in Berne. A vague deal was made, binding on neither, but fatal to Rado. The Russians found out about it and put a price on his head.

  In the meantime, France was liberated and Rado escaped with his wife to Paris. But every one of his successive hideouts was discovered by the Russians. Paris became too hot and he slipped away to Cairo. He placed himself at the disposal of the British secret service there, but someone denounced him and the British refused to have any dealings with the man. Those were the days of the Grand Alliance; the British were still complying with Russian demands, and now these demands included the extradition of Rado. A trigger man of the Soviet secret police was sent especially to Cairo to collect him, and the British delivered the fallen spy.

  What happened after the Russian colonel left Cairo with Rado nobody knows for sure. According to one version, which I was told by the source apparently best qualified to speak, Rado was first taken to Prague on his way to Moscow. There, according to this story, he managed to escape and reached the extraterritorial haven of the British diplomatic mission. But the Prague chief of the British secret service had orders from London and, for a second time, they handed him over to the Russians.

  In Moscow, it is claimed, he was tried by a special tribunal of the secret police. According to some, Rado was sentenced to a long term and was shipped off to an Arctic prison camp. According to others, he was shot in a basement cell of the Lubyanka. Whatever happened, Rado is dead, for even if he still lives, a fallen spy is but a breathing corpse.

  13

  Rhapsody in Red

  Thou that cometh from on high,

  Stilling suffering and pain,

  When despair is doubly nigh,

  Doubly quickening like rain;

  Ah, I long for pain to cease

  And for joy to give me rest!

  Lovely peace,

  Come, ah come, into my breast!

  This English translation of Goethe’s melancholy Wanderers Nachtlied was written by an American woman in a German prison on a dismal March night in 1943, only a few hours before her execution. She was Mildred Harnack-Fish, a handsome New Yorker who had married Arvid Harnack, scion of a great German family of statesmen, poets and thinkers. A school marm by profession, a genteel and genial, high-spirited, self-effacing, dedicated person, she could have lived life out to a serene conclusion under different stars. But the violent challenge of Nazism turned the schoolteacher into a rebel and a spy. She perished with her husband and a small band of fellow conspirators who had set themselves up in opposition to Hitler.

  If, despite their martyrdom, the names of Mildred Harnack and her fellow conspirators are rarely honored and little known, it is because they were humble members of an ill-starred movement. They failed, and they paid a bloody price.

  Aside from the Red terror in Russia, this underground German war was the bloodiest of its kind in history. Its fatal casualties far exceeded those of the United States in the liberation of Europe. In the state of Saxony alone, sixteen thousand and sixty-nine persons were executed for treasonable activities against the Hitler regime. The city of Hamburg had four hundred and fifty-eight such dead. The Gestapo blotter of a single month on the eve of the Second World War showed that only six hundred and three persons were arrested for ordinary crimes, but one thousand and thirty-six for political crimes. According to the roster of the post-war organization, Victims of Fascism, which carefully examined every claim, more than a quarter of a million Germans participated in one or another underground group which actively opposed the Nazis.

  Some of the anti-Nazi plotters formed themselves into informal intelligence groups and placed their services at the disposal of foreign governments. The survivors today resent being called spies, but their activity was, in fact, espionage. The material they smuggled out of Germany was specific and detailed, disclosing the contents of top secret documents, the verbatim text of operation orders, the battle order of the Wehrmacht, the movement of troops, timetables, logistic material and, above all, evidence of Hitler’s intentions.

  These operations were unprecedented. Never before had there existed, on such a scale, a secret service composed of lone wolves and free lancers performing voluntarily the intricate function on which governments spend so much money and effort.

  The group supported itself from the private resources of its own members. It operated on its own technical facilities. No official secret service aided or maintained it; on the contrary, innumerable monkey wrenches were thrown into the works by the bureaucratic intelligence services of the Allies for whom these lone wolves were doing a job.

  Some of the intelligence was shipped West, especially to London; some of it went East, especially to Moscow. Mildred Harnack was a member of a group that banked on the Soviet Union. The group to which she belonged came to be known as Rote Kapelle or the Red Orchestra, because it worked like a company of instrumentalists, trained and led by a conductor.

  The maestro was a shadowy figure deep underground, known as Agis. He was a remarkable young man, Harro Schulze-Boysen by name, a first lieutenant in Goering’s Luftwaffe, son of a naval officer, a lineal descendant of Grand Admiral Tirpitz. He was dedicated body and soul to the struggle against Hitler. In 1939, Schulze-Boysen expressed the personal philosophy that motivated him: “This war will bury the old Europe, together with its civilization as it existed to date,” he wrote, “and then, when the air is cleansed, the atmosphere will be healthier. Our own lives, it seems to me, are no longer important. Vivere non est necessere. At any rate, I propose we should all show we are worthy human beings.”

  Lieutenant Schulze-Boysen was a devout Communist, but he succeeded in concealing his political orientation and was able to hold down a post inside one of the Luftwaffe’s intelligence organizations. There he had access to some of Germany’s most closely-guarded secrets.

  His group was as remarkable as he was. The Red Orchestra operated in cells that in turn combined to form two separate rings—a small, inner ring of the organization’s one hundred and eighteen leaders and sub-leaders; and a large, outer ring of rank-and-file secret agents and propagandists. It was an enormous organization; it had branches as far away as Brussels and Marseilles. Although the Red Orchestra was avowedly Communist, it had only a handful of proletarians among its members. Most of them were middle-class intellectuals, professionals and artists.

  The group maintained its own elaborate communications network, and constantly changed the location of its transmitters. One night they would be sending messages from the X-ray room of a woman physician’s office in Berlin’s best residential district. On another night, in the guise of repairmen, they would drive up in a van to a manhole on Moritzplatz, a drab working-class neighborhood, open the manhole and place a tent over it. While passers-by thought a cable was being repaired or the sewer cleaned, radio specialists of the Red Orchestra were putting Schulze-Boysen’s latest messages on the air.

 
; In the summer of 1939, the Red Orchestra merged with a newer group, led by a man known as Caro. He was Mildred Harnack’s husband, Arvid, a high-ranking government official. Like Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack was a dedicated man. Up to the date of the merger, his organization had confined its activities to propaganda, plastering the walls of Berlin with little posters printed on their concealed hand-presses, but under Schulze-Boysen’s impatient, energetic leadership, the new, enlarged organization began to broaden its activities. While Hitler was at war only with the West, their efforts were half-hearted and groping, not because their pro-Soviet orientation had dampened their anti-Nazi ardor, but because they could not establish a working liaison with Western intelligence organs. But when Hitler’s honeymoon with Stalin was drawing to a close, the group undertook a series of groping free-lance operations even before Moscow’s emissaries called for their services. That happened in June, 1941.

  On a balmy morning of that month, a short, broad-shouldered man went for a stroll in the Tiergarten. At a secluded spot off the beaten path, he sat down on a bench, took out the morning’s Voelkische Beobachter and read.

  A few minutes later, a solemn-faced, hard-eyed man walked by. The little man got up, followed the passerby and then, behind a cluster of low trees, he joined him. For several hours, they strolled together.

  This was an emergency conference of the utmost importance, one Soviet spy winding up his business and handing over his affairs to another. Even in the murky underworld of spies, the little bullet-headed fellow was a mystery man. He was known only as Alexander Erdberg, his nom d’espion, but he was a highly-trained, full-time professional operative of the Fourth Bureau.

  Erdberg belonged to a relatively small ring of resident agents operating behind the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, actually out of the private apartment of Counselor Bogdan Kobulov. Kobulov’s ring, and another directed by the more orthodox official spy, General Tupikov, the Military Attaché, was well-nigh all that the Soviet Union had in Germany, except the organization of Erdberg’s staid companion on this morning’s stroll. He was Arvid Harnack, Caro of the Rote Kapelle.

  In spite of Stalin’s blind complacency, Kobulov saw the war approaching and knew that his diplomatic group could not stay long in Germany. Kobulov searched far and wide for a band of trustworthy native Germans in whose hands he could entrust the conspiracy. He picked the Red Orchestra.

  Harnack accepted the invitation with alacrity. In subsequent meetings he introduced Erdberg to Schulze-Boysen and others he had selected to act as his radio operators. One was a metal worker named Hans Coppi, a member of the underground Communist Party in Germany; the other was a prominent author and theatrical producer, probably not a Communist at all, Adam Kluckhoff by name. At 56, he was one of the oldest members of the group.

  In Kobulov’s apartment Harnack and Schulze-Boysen received their instructions from Kobulov and the two military attachés, Tupikov and Skornyakov. Erdberg taught Schulze-Boysen, Coppi and Kluckhoff the operation of clandestine radio sets. Harnack was handed the code books and given lessons in the difficult art of cryptography. He was also appointed treasurer and received thirteen thousand five hundred marks from Kobulov.

  The glaring shortcomings of this network of amateurs became evident at once. Harnack and his associates were not short on enthusiasm, and they did not lack excellent intelligence material. One of the very first dispatches they sent to the Fourth Bureau was a comprehensive report on the Luftwaffe. They followed it up with a warning of an imminent German offensive along the Dnieper. But because of Harnack’s inexperience as a cryptographer, these important reports were so badly enciphered that the Fourth Bureau could not make head nor tail of them. Coppi and Kluckhoff constantly neglected even to call Moscow on their radios and remained silent most of the time while the Fourth Bureau’s operators tried frantically to raise them. Something had to be done at once.

  In August, therefore, Erdberg ordered his best agent in the West, Captain Victor Sukulov, to go to Berlin. Sukulov was stationed in Brussels where he was the Petit Chef of a Soviet network covering the Low Countries and France. His importance was attested by his string of code and cover names: Dupuis, Lebrun, Fritz, Cirin, Arthur, Alamo, Charles, and, most frequently, Kent. In Brussels, he was Vincente Antonio Sierra, a wealthy merchant from Uruguay, who lived in an elegant villa on Avenue Sieghers with his mistress, Margarete Barcza, the widow of a Hungarian.

  His group had its headquarters in a villa on rue des Attrebates, rented from an elderly Belgian lady who thought her tenants were important international businessmen. In actual fact, they were. Señor Sierra did business with the Nazis on an impressive scale and even recruited labor for German factories.

  Following his instructions from Moscow, Sierra went to Germany on an official permit issued to him through his influential German contacts, on a train that also carried a contingent of his slave laborers. He met Harnack and Schulze-Boysen in the Tiergarten, following the pattern established by Erdberg; and Harnack took him to Coppi and Kluckhoff.

  The Señor was now Kent again, and he went to work at once. He built new radios and repaired old ones; he gave postgraduate courses in operative technique to Coppi and Kluckhoff ; he brushed up Harnack on his cryptography; and he tightened the administration of the group. He recruited a number of other agents, whose names were supplied to him by the Fourth Bureau from the roster of trustworthy Communists. He also looked up Herr von Scheliha, the old-fashioned gentleman in the Foreign Ministry, who was still doing some spotty espionage work, although it was much inferior to his previous contributions.

  His presence in Berlin, brief as it was, fulfilled Erdberg’s fondest expectations. After that, the Caro group functioned with clock-like precision, the value of its messages second only to the intelligence from Roessler via Rado. Among the Rote Kapelle’s material were the strategic plans of the German High Command in the fall of 1941; the times and places of scheduled German parachute raids and planned attacks on British convoys en route to Murmansk; and an enormous amount of information enabling the Fourth Bureau to keep the order of battle of the Wehrmacht always up to date. Once, the Rote Kapelle even saved the Russians from the disastrous consequences of a lost Russian code. The book was captured by the Germans at Petsamo in Finland and was used in the familiar carillon game. Schulze-Boysen discovered the trick and warned the Russians who could then turn the carillon against the bell ringers.

  In this formidable network, even Sukulov represented only the second echelon. Sukulov was called the Petit Chef—the Little Boss. Over him, conducting the whole complex orchestra, was the Maestro, the Grand Chef—the Big Boss, forming, with Sorge in Tokyo, and Rado in Geneva, the legendary troika, or Big Three of Soviet espionage in World War II. He was also known as the General, an elusive master of espionage, who had appeared virtually everywhere between Moscow and Shanghai, Madrid and Buenos Aires.

  He was a Pole. Leopold (Poldi) Trepper was his real name; he was born in 1904 in the ghetto of Cracow. Poldi used his real name for the last time in 1932 when, after a frantic chase of rainbows, he arrived in Moscow to throw in his lot with the Bolsheviks. He was twenty-eight years old, a married man, and a total failure in life. He thought he might try his hand at espionage.

  The Polish branch of the Comintern obtained for him an appointment with a talent scout of the Fourth Bureau, who recognized in Poldi an exceptional talent. His new bosses put him through a five-year-long educational training period that took him through Moscow University, the Moscow College of Diplomacy, and the Fourth Bureau School.

  When Poldi emerged from this wringer, he was a different man: a suave operator who spoke Polish, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, French, English, and Spanish with equal fluency. He was sent to Paris as Monsieur Jean Gilbert to establish himself behind a front: the Simex Corporation of exporters and importers, with plush offices on the Champs Elysées and a Hollywood-type executive suite for Monsieur Gilbert.

  In the back of Gilbert’s swank office was a hidden room, w
here he became Poldi Trepper again. It housed his radio, the safe with the codes and ciphers, his little black books with innumerable useful addresses, the roster of his sub-agents. A hidden door led from his big office into this small one and a staircase went from the hidden office into the backyard of another building.

  The hidden room was secured with a special radio transmitter attached to a clock that had to be wound once a day. When all was well, the little transmitter emitted signals at regular intervals to the security guard in the front office. When the signals stopped, something was wrong. In an acute emergency, a warning could be sent out without waiting for the clock to do the job.

  From that office in Paris, Gilbert’s tentacles reached to every German government office, not only in Berlin and Paris, but also in Brussels, The Hague, Copenhagen, everywhere in occupied Western Europe. Working for him were the outstanding agents of the Fourth Bureau. Contact with Moscow was chiefly by radio. Trepper had transmitting and receiving sets in Brussels and The Hague, three in Switzerland, the new stations in Berlin, and two in France: one in Paris operated by a Polish refugee, another in Pecq near Paris, in the hands of Robert and Lucie, a French Communist couple.

  The net’s chief signal officer was the Professor, so called because his knowledge of radio techniques and transmissions was unique in the underground. He was also called Hans, Hermann, and Bergmann. His real name was Johann Wenzel and he hailed from somewhere in East Prussia. An aging man who spent his life in the Comintern, the Professor was getting tired, terribly tired of it all.

  Until June, 1941, his station in the villa in Brussels was well oiled, ready for instant use, but silent.

  Then the Professor suddenly became operational, as did his scattered colleagues in France and Holland, and even inside Germany.

  The monitors of Canaris’ signal corps, the Funk-Abwehr, pricked up their ears at their station in Cranz, East Prussia. The monitors jotted down the signals and rushed them to Berlin, but no matter how the Abwehr’s best cryptoanalysts tried, they could not break the code.