Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  The Funk-Abwehr was under the command of Major Werner F. Flicke, a wizard at locating transmitters. Slowly and gradually, through innumerable trials and errors, Flicke’s men groped their way from Norway through Germany proper, via Holland to Belgium at last, and then to Brussels, to the suburb of Erbettes and, finally, to a villa on the rue des Attrebates.

  The groping lasted almost six months. It ended on the fatal December 13, 1941. That night, the villa was encircled by agents of the Abwehr and the Secret Field Police. At 11:30 p.m. sharp, the agents slipped thick cotton socks over their boots, sneaked into the villa and made their way to the second floor so quietly that none of the three Soviet operatives who happened to be in attendance heard their coming. The Germans pounced upon them and seized the scattered paraphernalia of their work, but in the commotion one of the spies, a stalwart man named Mikhail Makarov, still managed to destroy the code books. And the Professor was not in the building.

  The Grand Chef happened to be in Brussels on that day and while the raid was on, he appeared at the villa to deliver some urgent intelligence for transmission. He ran into the arms of the German agents and was seized at once, but in that pinch the Grand Chef put on an act of fantastic audacity. He pretended to be a peddler of rabbits, of all things, and impersonated a rabbit peddler (whatever that may be) so convincingly that the Germans, amused and fooled by his antics, let him go. He immediately alerted his apparat. Most of them fled, escaping the German noose.

  Trepper returned to Paris and Sukulov went to Marseilles. The apparat was left in the hands of young Colonel Yemerov, going by the code name Bordo. The Professor took over all transmissions, operating from his home in Brussels. It took the Germans another six months to locate him. On June 30, 1942, they finally nabbed the Professor in front of his set, transmitting his last message to Moscow.

  He was the first really big fish in the Abwehr’s net and they went to work on him. Under the pounding, the old Bolshevik broke and betrayed the whole intricate apparat: his associates, the codes, the rules, the entire system of Soviet espionage. He opened the floodgates.

  In the Abwehr’s files reposed hundreds of messages that had been sent between Moscow and its spies and that had been intercepted. Among them was the order sent a year earlier to Sukulov telling him to go to Berlin and tighten up the Harnack operation. Confident of their code and pressed by urgency, the Russians had been indiscreet enough to include in the message even the names and addresses of the spies Sukulov was to see.

  Now that message came out of the files and, with the Professor’s help, the Germans were able to understand it for the first time. It read:

  “KLS de RTX. 1010. 1725. 99wds. qbt. From Director to Kent, personal. Proceed at once to three addresses listed below in Berlin and ascertain why wireless connection consistently fails. In the event of further interruptions, take over transmission. Work of three Berlin groups and transmission of intelligence of the utmost importance. Addresses: Neuwestend, Altenburger Alley 3, third floor right. Caro.—Charlottenburg, Fredericia Street 26a, second floor left. Coppi.—Friedenau, Kaiser Street 18, fourth floor left. Adam and Greta Kluckhoff. Remember ‘Ulenspiegel’.—Password everywhere: Director. Advise until October 20. At all three places, resume (I repeat) resume radio plan the morning of the fifteenth. qbt. 50385. ar. KLS de RTX.”

  A year and twelve days after the message was sent, on August 30, 1942, the Gestapo picked up Schulze-Boysen as he was leaving the Air Ministry. Three days later, they got Harnack at a summer resort. One by one, the scattered musicians of the Red Orchestra ended in the net, until only Sukulov and Trepper were missing. Sukulov was trailed to Marseilles and was arrested on a train in November, trying to evade his pursuers by going north. Now the last manhunt began—for the Big Boss, Poldi Trepper himself. His cover, the Simex Company, was raided by German Kommando but Monsieur Gilbert was gone. On his desk, however, the Germans found an appointment calendar. It listed Trepper’s periodic visits to his dentist. The Abwehr nabbed him as he was under the drill.

  14

  War in the Wings

  Italy entered the war on June 10, 1940, not to hasten, but to benefit from France’s collapse. Mussolini came in with Hitler’s reluctant permission. The Fuehrer was confident that, whatever mischief Il Duce could perpetrate, it would not materially affect the outcome. He recalled an impudent quip of World War I attributed to General von Falkenhayn. When, in 1915, the Kaiser was told that Italy planned to switch sides, von Falkenhayn assured the sovereign that it would not make any difference. “You see, your Majesty,” he said, “if they’re against us, we need ten divisions to beat them. If they’re on our side, we’ll still need ten divisions to help them.”

  Sure enough, by the following spring Mussolini came to regard every day, when nothing unpleasant befell his forces, as a day won. May 24, 1941, appeared to be such a day. On the Pincio, the trees abandoned themselves to the balmy caresses of a glorious Roman spring. On the elegant Via Condotti, the smart ladies of Roman society paraded; nothing in their finery betrayed the austerity of a country at war. But on that day a seemingly insignificant event occurred which was destined to have a special impact on the future of Mussolini’s Italy. Admiral Franco Maugeri became director of the S.I.S., the Italian Office of Naval Intelligence.

  Not yet 46 years old, Maugeri was a slight, slender figure with prematurely gray hair and keen gray eyes; he had an informal manner and was innately modest. He was an intellectual, well bred, well read, and had a preference for desk jobs, because he was inordinately susceptible to seasickness and sunburn. He had previously served in S.I.S. between 1927 and 1929. At that time, S.I.S. was an extremely small agency; its entire staff consisted of ten officers and twenty enlisted men. It maintained not a single secret agent, either at home or abroad. Its job was to collate the periodic reports of the Italian Naval Attachés and to perform the other routine duties of desk-bound intelligence.

  During those years, there was an extremely intimate relationship between the Italian and British navies. When the Italian Navy was originally built up before the First World War, it was designed to fight alongside the British Navy as an auxiliary force. Many Italian naval officers became imbued with this tradition and continued to regard themselves, even when their country had drifted apart from Britain, as honorary officers of the Royal Navy. Admiral Maugeri, a determined anti-Fascist, was a member of this pro-British group. When he became director of S.I.S., it became a clandestine British agency at the very heart of the Italian military establishment, for all practical purposes functioning as the Italian branch of the British Naval Intelligence. This clandestine function was never regarded as improper or treasonable, either by Maugeri or his subordinates. On the contrary, they were firmly convinced that by aiding Britain in their own way they were saving Italy from total extinction.

  When Maugeri returned to S.I.S. in 1941, it had changed radically. It consisted of three major regional organizations, with headquarters in Madrid, Istanbul and Shanghai (each under the respective Italian Naval Attachés) ; and four functional sections bearing the letters B, C, D and E. Section B was the efficient “black chamber,” monitoring foreign radio traffic and translating the codes and ciphers of others. Section D was the intelligence service proper. The material that B and D procured was fed to Section C which collated and evaluated it. Section E was exclusively counter-intelligence and counter-espionage.

  Heading Section D was Commander Max Ponzo. He was short, squat and sturdy, built like a miniature bull. He had a swarthy complexion and nervous, darting eyes which gave him a shifty, sinister expression. He was brilliant and resourceful, courageous and aggressive. By the strength of his personality, Ponzo dominated the whole S.I.S.

  Before Maugeri’s arrival, Ponzo had set up an intelligence and espionage network such as S.I.S. had never before possessed. He established several tight rings in neutral countries like Switzerland, Spain, Turkey and Portugal. He even established a minor ring in the United States. One of the room service wai
ters in the Wardman-Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., where Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State Cordell Hull lived, was a Ponzo spy.

  While considerable information flowed from his networks abroad, the best material was procured right at home. Ponzo concentrated his efforts in Rome on the American Naval Attaché, probably on the assumption that Americans, being very much like Italians, outgoing and trusting, loquacious and boastful, would make easy targets for his snoopers.

  Between 1939 and 1941, Captain Thomas C. Kinkaid, USN, was American Naval Attaché in Rome. He was a gallant officer of the line, who was destined to make a great name for himself in later years. There was, however, a serious loophole in his office. The department was badly understaffed and because Washington could not send him United States personnel, Kinkaid was compelled to hire a few Italians.

  At least one of those employees worked for Ponzo. He was a fairly highly-placed clerk and had occasional access to the safe. He managed to make a duplicate key to it and from then on, until the United States entered the war, S.I.S. knew the exact contents of that American safe.

  Early in 1941, Kinkaid was recalled and Captain Lester N. McNair, USN, replaced him. McNair decided, undoubtedly upon instructions from Washington, to hire a few spies. Freelance espionage was a favorite pastime of certain Italian ladies, and among them McNair found an attractive and charming young woman who appeared to be a splendid candidate.

  She was Signorina Elena (her last name is covered by charitable anonymity). She was sufficiently well situated in Roman society to develop some useful sources and was of a romantic disposition, generous with her affections when the occasion required.

  Elena found herself in something of a dilemma; she really did not know how and where to pick up the information Captain McNair expected. She solved the problem in the traditional manner by becoming a double agent. She called Ponzo, exposed herself as an American spy and volunteered to keep Ponzo posted about the affairs of the Americans and to pass on to McNair whatever information Ponzo wanted to slip into American files. The arrangement satisfied all concerned, including Captain McNair, who never found out about Elena’s double deal.

  On December 11, 1941, Italy declared war on the United States and this made Elena vastly more valuable since she was virtually the only spy the U.S. Navy had left in Rome.

  Before his departure, McNair arranged that the young lady was to send her material to Colonel Barwell R. Legge, the American Military Attaché at Berne, Switzerland. With Ponzo continuing to manage this minor but stimulating phase of American espionage, arrangements were made for a courier from Legge to call at Elena’s apartment on Lungotevere to pick up her information. Ponzo made his own arrangements to observe the visitor; he was anxious to find out who else was working for Legge in Rome.

  Agents of S.I.S. were posted around the building and Elena was instructed to signal the arrival of her visitor by displaying a quaint assortment of laundry. If the courier was a man, she was to put a bathing suit in her window; if the visitor turned out to be a woman, she was to hang out a towel.

  Ponzo’s agents did not have to wait long. In due course, a dainty bathing suit appeared in the window. An hour later a man came out of the building and Ponzo’s agents followed him along the broad, tree-lined avenue on the left bank of the Tiber, until they saw him meet a warrant officer they knew was working for Major Pontini’s Section E in S.I.S., the counter-espionage branch. They saw the two shake hands, enter a waiting car and drive away in apparently the most cordial manner.

  The Ponzo agents, sent to trap a single American spy, had encountered two! And—horribile dictu—one of them was a trusted carabinieri of Major Pontini. They reported the discovery to Ponzo and Ponzo in turn tipped off the major. Pontini received the news with a burst of laughter.

  “My dear Max,” he said, “that enemy agent whom you’ve been following so cleverly—he’s no more an enemy agent than you are. He’s one of my own officers. The Americans in Switzerland hired him to work for them and at a good, fat price, too ! Ah,” he sighed with mild contempt, “che stupidità americana!”

  Such are the vagaries of espionage when it ambles into war from haphazard peacetime beginnings.

  It took some time for American Intelligence to get adjusted to the challenge of war. It was different with British Intelligence.

  Ponzo was sending a steady flow of excellent intelligence to the Italian Navy about the movements of British ships in the Mediterranean. As soon as a British vessel passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, either entering or leaving the Mediterranean, a signal advised the fleet of it. In Algeciras, the Spanish city bordering on Gibraltar, the Italian Consul was a member of Ponzo’s espionage ring. He lived in the Hotel Reina Cristina, whose owner was in sympathy with Italy and allowed him to build an observatory on the roof. It had powerful telescopes, long-range binoculars on firm tripods, chronometers, and cameras with telescopic lenses. In a room of the hotel, the consul had a clandestine transmitter on which he reported his observations to Rome every few hours. In this manner, Ponzo was told almost immediately when a British ship passed through the Straits.

  That dazzling espionage coup at Algeciras was what could be called elaborate eyewash, the way S.I.S. had of giving the impression that it was in the war against the British up to its neck. Nobody seemed to notice that virtually the entire S.I.S. effort vis-à-vis the British was confined to this operation. It escaped attention that Ponzo was as conspicuous for his absence in London, for example, as he was conspicuous for his presence in Algeciras. During a visit to Rome, Admiral Canaris boasted to Count Ciano about his splendid spy net in Britain, claiming that one of his spies was sending to Hamburg up to ten signals a day. (It was actually the British carillon.) Ciano had to concede that Italy had nothing comparable to that. The S.I.S. had nothing at all in Britain. Still more remarkable was the fact that Commander Ponzo had not done to the British what he had so brilliantly done to the Americans. He neither ensnarled them with double agents nor relieved them of their secrets with aggressive espionage.

  Admiral Maugeri made a startling statement after the war. “Actually,” he wrote, “I doubt that there were many British spies in Italy. There really was no need for them. The British Admiralty had plenty of friends among our high-ranking admirals and in the Ministry of Marine itself. I suspect the English were able to get authentic information straight from the source.” What he omitted to say was that his own S.I.S. did much of the necessary spadework for British Intelligence.

  On a colorful old Roman street named after the dark little stores which lined it, the via delle Botteghe Oscure, dwelt a remarkable individual, and Max Ponzo lived under his spell. He was one of Italy’s most prominent barristers, Giovanni Serao, a man of dizzying brilliance. He was short and heavy set, but an extremely agile man, with a luxuriant beard. His eloquence was unique even for Italy. His clients included some of the country’s noblest houses and greatest corporations and a string of big foreign firms such as Paramount Pictures and the Canadian Pacific Railway as well. For many years, Signor Serao served as the legal adviser of the British Embassy in Rome and performed so effectively in that capacity that he was knighted for his services to the Crown. He was the only Roman entitled to hear himself addressed as Sir Giovanni, and he relished the title.

  Serao was Ponzo’s father-in-law, and more than that, the idol of his son-in-law. Serao himself gave the British all sorts of confidential information, which he procured in the course of his practice; thanks to his intimacy with Ponzo, he could also supply military and naval intelligence of the highest order. For all practical purposes, Giovanni Serao was the clandestine chief of the British Secret Service in Rome.

  Before Franco Maugeri’s arrival in S.I.S., Ponzo’s contribution had to be limited by sheer necessity. His superiors were no parties to the plot. He had to operate on his own. Serao’s Embassy connections were broken at the outbreak of the war. Serao and Ponzo had to confine their services to limited intelligence which they slipped to
the British as best they could, mainly through a surreptitious contact with the British Legation that remained at the Vatican. Even this was of great value.

  The British had an accurate appreciation of the Italian fleet and refused to regard it as a mortal threat to Britain’s control of the sea, but its nuisance value was recognized. There was some apprehension, in particular, about the forty-odd submarines owned by the Italians, which could have wrought havoc with British shipping in the Mediterranean if properly employed. Naval Intelligence succeeded in acquiring the special code used by the Italian submariners.

  An ingenious officer on Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham’s staff hit upon a fantastic idea. Devising signals in the Italian code, and impersonating the Italian command, he would dispatch an Italian submarine to a certain spot in the Mediterranean to attack supposed Allied merchantmen. When the hapless submarine arrived at the spot, it was met by British destroyers waiting to send it to its doom.

  In this manner, the British decimated Mussolini’s submarine arm. The operation would have continued most probably to its inevitable conclusion had it not been for an accident. The British ordered a certain Italian submarine to one of those spots where the destroyers were waiting, but that particular sub happened at the time to be in drydock at La Spezia.

  The blunder alerted the Italians and ended the game, but severe damage had already been done.

  Rommel was hammering the British mercilessly in Africa, and he was being supplied by shipping across the Mediterranean. The conspiracy inside the S.I.S. became of essential importance. On March 25, 1941, mysterious information alerted Admiral Cunningham to an ominous stirring of the Italian Fleet. Some of its major elements, led by the battleship Vittorio Veneto, were supposed to move in the direction of the Aegean to draw off elements of the British Fleet from the route of those Italo-German convoys. That obscure message resulted in a great British naval victory on March 28, in the memorable Battle of Cape Matapan. In Churchill’s words, “This timely and welcome victory off Cape Matapan disposed of all challenge to British naval mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean at this critical time.”