by Iles, Greg
He closed the black notebook and reread the name on the cover: V.V. Zinoviev. Who was this mysterious Russian? How was he tied to the Rudolf Hess case? If Zinoviev had warned Israel in 1967 of some apocalyptic danger, had he voluntarily given this book to Alfred Horn? Stern shivered with a sudden rush of déjà vu. Alfred Horn. The name buzzed in his brain like a swarm of bottleflies. Where had he seen it before? In some intelligence report? On some tattered list of Nazi sympathizers crossing a desk in Tel Aviv?
He forced his mind away from the question. He forced himself to think of the telephone, the phone that waited in the bizarre Nazi shrine room. To think of Hauer and Gadi, waiting anxiously for his call. He had to make contact with them. Yet in spite of Ilse’s warning about a nuclear weapon, in spite of his conviction that Israel actually was in danger, Stern felt oddly certain that the key to the whole insane business—both past and present—lay within the thin volume in his hand.
If the papers Hans Apfel found in Spandau Prison proved that Prisoner Number Seven was not Rudolf Hess, what did this strange book reveal? Horn had said it related to May of 1941. Did this book, finally, reveal the secret of Rudolf Hess’s real mission to England? Did it name Hess’s British contacts? Did it reveal the full scope of the threat to Israel? Could it silence the maddening hum at the back of Stern’s brain when he heard the name Alfred Horn?
This notebook, he thought, not the Spandau papers, is Professor Natterman’s Rosetta stone of 1941. I only hope I live to tell the old fool about it.
Stern opened the black cover and began to read: I, Valentin Vasilievich Zinoviev, here record for posterity the facts of my service to the German Reich, specifically my part in the special operation undertaken in Great Britain in May 1941 known as “Plan Mordred”. I do so at the request of the surviving Reich authorities, to the best of my ability, adding or omitting nothing.
I was born in Moscow in 1895 to Vasili Zinoviev, a major in the army of Alexander Ü . At seventeen I became a soldier like my father, but after rising to the rank of sergeant I was recruited into the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police. I was promoted rapidly there. Some of my colleagues criticized my methods as overly harsh, but no one denied the results I achieved. Looking back on the bloodbath of 1917, I believe many of those same colleagues would say that my methods were not harsh enough. But they are dead now, and that is another story.
When I received word in 1918 that Tsar Nicholas Ü and his family had been executed by the Bolsheviks, I decided to make my way to Germany. Strange to choose the vanquished nation as my sanctuary, but I did. Of all the Western nations, I had admired Prussia’s military most. The journey was a nightmare. Europe was a shambles, but by using Okhrana contacts I finally managed to pass through the frontier into Poland. From there I had little trouble. Germany was in chaos. The people were starving. Armed gangs roamed the streets at will, preying on the unwary and stripping returning soldiers of their decorations.
Chief among these gangs were the Spartacist Communists. I could scarcely believe I had fled Lenin’s revolution only to find more of the same madness awaiting me. Quickly seeing how things stood, I offered my services to a band of Freikorps, one of the groups of German ex-officers and enlisted men who were trying to reestablish order in their country. The Freikorps leadership appreciated my special talents and put me to work immediately. These were farsighted men. Even at that early stage they were planning for the next war.
At their request I refrained from joining the Nazi Party throughout Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. They preferred to use me as a “cat”s paw” whenever actions were required where absolutely no risk of being traced back to the Party could be tolerated. Because the chief enemy of the Nazis was the Communist Party, I proved invaluable, and soon came to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of Hitler’s newly created SS.
Though I never developed more than the most superficial personal relationship with this strange character I admired his efficiency. Himmler saw to it that some of my Okhrana methods were taught to members of his counterintelligence unit—the SD. It was through these endeavours that I came to know a promising young officer named Reinhard Heydrich.
Because of what happened later, I should mention my service in Spain. In 1936 I accompanied Germany’s Condor Legion to Spain, to help Generalissimo Franco in his struggle against the Republican Forces—which were actually controlled by the Spanish communists and a few generals borrowed from Stalin. I served as an interrogator, my chief responsibility being interrogation of communist prisoners. It was this eighteen-month period that would later rise up to thwart my greatest mission, but who could foresee it then?
Back in Germany, I worked closely with Heydrich on a special program which I had helped initiate after the 1919 communist uprisings in Germany. Because yet another world war seemed inevitable, certain Nazi leaders expressed a desire that we should infiltrate not only the German Communist Party, but also the communist organizations in those countries likely to be enemies of Germany in the next war. By 1923 we had put a large number of agents in place, and by 1939 we had the most extensive anti-communist intelligence network in the world. There were losses and defections, of course, but the strategy remained sound.
Two years later (January 1941) Hitler informed Heydrich that a powerful, highly-placed clique of Nazi sympathizers existed in England, men who wished to arrange a peace treaty with Germany. These Englishmen claimed to be in a position to seize their government, if only two obstacles could be got out of the way. The main obstacle was Winston Churchill, who considered Adolf Hitler his personal nemesis. The second was King George VI, who—unlike his dethroned older brother—was a fervent anti-Nazi. Hitler’s English sympathizers saw this dethroned brother, then called the Duke of Windsor, as a malleable alternative British monarch.
Hitler charged Heydrich with removing the human obstacles to this alliance, and Heydrich naturally turned to me. Because an Anglo-German alliance would virtually guarantee the destruction of Stalin’s regime, I volunteered immediately. Heydrich’s plan, though complex in execution, was simple and ingenious in theory. We would assassinate both Churchill and the king, then lay the blame on our archenemies the communists, just as the Nazis had done with the Reichstag Fire!
To accomplish this, Heydrich envisioned using one of the British communist cells infiltrated by our agents. He asked if I thought we might dupe one of these groups into carrying out the assassinations for us, and I must admit that I expressed pessimism. The revelation of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 had disillusioned communists around the world; consequently, I considered the chance of finding western communists still fanatical enough to attempt a suicide mission very small. But Heydrich was undaunted.
On his orders I set to work bringing his plan to fruition. The communist cell I chose for the operation was based in London, and, from our point of view, was under the command of one Helmut Steuer—a former Wehrmacht sergeant. This Helmut deserves special mention, for he, like the unit he had created, was unique.
Helmut had been spying on communists since Munich, where he was “sole survivor” of the massacre at the Hauptbanhof. When he “fled” to Britain (on our orders) the British communists welcomed him as a hero. His bond with them was so strong that when these communists went to Spain to fight in the International Brigades in 1936, Helmut went with them.
Heydrich could not believe it. It was an insanely dangerous thing for Helmut to do, but I understood. He was a young man then, a man of action, and he craved danger. In Spain he fought heroically for the Republicans, all the while feeding information to the Fascists on the movements of the very armies he was fighting in!
Helmut lost an eye at Guernica, and probably because of the accuracy of his own reports! It was truly a miracle that he survived at all, yet his service in Spain made him irreproachable in the eyes of his English comrades. After returning to England—
Stern stopped reading. His heart was pounding. He put his finger to the paper, traced the sentences backward an
d read again: Helmut lost an eye at Guernica. “My God,” he muttered. “I’ve found you out at last. Alfred Horn … You’re not Rudolf Hess, and you’re not Zinoviev either.”
Stern’s mind raced as he tried to assimilate this new information. There actually was a Helmut involved in the Hess affair—just as the Oxford draft research had claimed. Professor Natterman would be extremely disappointed to hear it! Stern heard himself laughing. It all fits, he thought with satisfaction. I simply couldn’t accept the idea that Rudolf Hess had survived the war, that he had wormed his way into South Africa’s power elite, and I was right! “Well,” he murmured, “let’s find out exactly what Helmut the great German spy did during the war.” Stern picked up reading Zinoviev’s narrative where he had left off.
After returning to England, Helmut—on our orders—organized his own communist cell. It was small (six men, not counting Helmut) and every man had been seriously wounded either in the Great War or in Spain. In his communiques Helmut called them his Verwunden Brigade—the “Wounded Brigade”. These men had come from the British working class, and no men ever felt more betrayed by their government than they. The flower of their generation had been slaughtered in the Great War, yet they had survived.
And when a neighbouring republic was threatened by a newly risen German monster, their government had not only turned its back, but disparaged its sons who went to defend the democratic ideal that their friends and brothers had died for in the Great War. There is no hatred like that of idealistic men who have been betrayed. Even the Hitler-Stalin pact had not disillusioned these men. They saw it merely as an adroit political move by Stalin—a temporary alliance that would be rescinded as soon as Russia could defend herself against Germany.
If any Englishmen could be made to take up arms against Churchill and their king, I knew, it was Helmut’s Verwunden Brigade. I arrived in London in April of 1941, armed with secret documents bearing the signatures of the highest officials of the Soviet Communist Party—all excellent forgeries, of course. This deception was risky but necessary. No communist cell, however fanatical, would undertake an operation of the magnitude we planned without the full weight of the Party International behind them. My mission was to symbolize this authority. I was the holy messenger sent from Moscow, the sacred city, and the documents I carried sanctified my crusade. They made the planned assassinations sound like the first shot of a worldwide communist revolution. One document even bore Stalin’s signature! The SD forgers had done their jobs so well that I myself was tempted to believe in my newfound power.
Of the operation itself there is much to tell, and yet little. The mechanics were relatively simple. From English collaborators and German agents-in-place we received regular reports on our targets’ daily movements, along with predictions of their future agendas. That part was easy. Churchill tramped all over the country with his fat cigar, inspecting troops or viewing air-raid damage. With an assassin willing to die in the deed, the prime minister was as good as dead. King George presented a more difficult but not insurmountable problem. Though better-protected than Churchill, he occasionally left Buckingham Palace to put on a show of solidarity with the common people.
What made the mission especially difficult was Hitler’s commandment that the operation be carried out on the tenth of May. Limiting the mission to a single day meant that our assassins would have to strike regardless of circumstances. I wasn’t concerned about their chances of survival; on the contrary, we wanted to insure that the assassins would be killed in the accomplishment of their mission. But I also had to be reasonably sure that the targets would be sufficiently exposed for our men to reach them. When I expressed my apprehension to Heydrich, however he assured me that Hitler had devised a diversionary ploy that would bring our targets into the open on the given day. At the time he would tell me no more than that.
With Helmut’s help I set to work selecting our assassins. We had decided to choose three men—one man for each target, with one backup man in case of unforeseen circumstances. The men we ultimately chose were named William Banks and William Fox. I shall never forget them. The confusion caused by the similarity of their names was circumvented by their nicknames. Banks, a red-haired giant, was known as “Big Bill”, and the more diminutive Fox as “Little Bill”. The backup man-selected by Helmut was a distasteful little fanatic named Sherwood. This Sherwood almost wrecked the operation on the first day.
During the Spanish war he’d been captured at Jarama, and the first time he saw me he turned pale as a fish. When Helmut asked him what was wrong (I spoke little English) Sherwood asked if I had ever been in Spain. Naturally I said I hadn’t, whereupon the little man told his comrades that I could have been the twin brother of a certain El Muerte, a sadistic Russian interrogator who worked for the Germans in Spain. Helmut laughed outright, and the rest of us joined in. All but Sherwood. The memory had shaken him badly. It had shaken me too. In Spain—where I had used my Okhrana methods ruthlessly—the communists had christened me El Muerte.
My job was to motivate Banks and Fox to carry out their suicidal attacks. Helmut had prepared them well, and this made my role much easier From the day he founded his tiny cell, Helmut had promised his disenchanted men that when the revolution came, they would be called on by Moscow to carry out the first strikes against the Imperialist oppressors. My years in the Okhrana had given me an encyclopaedic knowledge of communist-methods and terminology, and I used it to the full in dealing with these Englishmen. I told them solemnly that Hitler intended to break his pact with Stalin and attack Russia within thirty days. To this terrifying news I added the usual Stalinist drivel, that while the industrialized nations would eventually fall like rotten apples from the tree, the war had presented an opportunity we could not afford to let pass. Now was the time for revolution, I cried with passion, and the names of the martyrs who struck down the imperialist leaders would be engraved forever in the histories of the new world.
Stalin, I told them, had decided to save Russia and ignite the worldwide revolution in one daring stroke. Not only were Churchill and George VI to die, but the leaders of imperialist France and the fascist leaders of Italy and Germany. The forged documents I carried added the weight of holy writ to my tale, and these two Englishmen accepted it all with grave pride. It was a sobering thing to see—two men who had fought so bravely for their homeland agreeing to bring it to its knees. Of course, in their minds they were liberators—downtrodden proletarians who would free their fellow countrymen from the clutches of warmongers like Churchill.
One week before the target date we received reports that Churchill would be spending the weekend of May 10th at Ditchley Park, a private country house owned by a friend. The king, of course, would be at Buckingham Palace. Soon afterwards I received a coded message from Heydrich, outlining the “diversion” that Hitler would provide. The Führer had ordered an air raid on London for the night of May 10th—to occur simultaneously with our mission. And not just any air raid, Heydrich said, but the largest bomber strike yet visited on the city. Hitler believed that such a raid would not only provide us with a perfect diversion, but would also demonstrate to the English the futility of continued struggle against Germany.
The moment I read this message I decided to change the strike date to May 11th, regardless of Hitler’s orders. I knew that our targets would not leave their protected shelters during the air raid, and if our assassins attempted to break into Ditchley Park or Buckingham Palace, they would be shot dead long before they reached their targets. But on May 11th—when both Churchill and the king would emerge to view the unprecedented bomb damage of Hitler’s raid—the chances of success would be highest.
The weapon we chose for the attacks was the British Sten gun. Although prone to jamming, the Sten was easily concealable and insured that a high number of bullets would penetrate the targets. Each man was to carry a revolver as a backup in the event of a jam.
Five days before the strike date, I suggested to Helmut that we dismiss the
alternate—Sherwood—from training. Helmut agreed, and informed Sherwood of the change. From this moment on, things began to go wrong.
First “Big Bill” Banks, the man assigned to kill Churchill, refused to remain in the safehouse during the final days before the strike date. His parents lived in London, and he wanted to spend his last days with them. Helmut’s best efforts could not change the man’s mind.
“Little Bill” Fox—the man assigned to King George—had no family, and agreed to stay in the safehouse with us. Together we passed the days playing cards and listening to the radio. At night around ten-thirty “Big Bill” would show up to make sure the plan had not changed. Twice during this period Sherwood found an excuse to break orders and come to the safehouse. I should have found some way to kill the Bolshevik rat, but since “Little Bill” was with us all the time, I couldn’t risk doing it in the house.