It seemed impossible to believe that an airplane as large as the B-17 could be controlled by something so simple.
Captain Allen handed Douglass a set of earphones. He put them on in time to hear Canidy call the tower and request taxi and takeoff permission.
[FIVE]
The Swiss-German Border 0905 Hours 29 January 1943
The train that rolled slowly to a stop in Lörrach, just across the border from Basel, was the first train that Unterinspektor Lorin Wahl of the Geheime Staatspolizei had been directed to examine on his own, without supervision.
Wahl was tall, slender, and blond-haired. His face was scarred with acne and his skin was pale. And his prominent eyes were pale blue. Lorin Wahl had been born in Munich in 1918 to a working-class family. He had joined the National Socialist Transportation Corps at sixteen, anticipating a career in either truck or rail transportation. Later, his father, who had early on joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and was then employed in the administrative offices of the Gauleiter for Schwabing, had enough influence with the Gauleiter himself to arrange that his son be taken on by the Bavarian State Police.
It was not anticipated by either of them that he would actually become a policeman, but Lorin Wahl did extraordinarily well in the basic police school; and when an administrative bulletin came down from Berlin directing the recruitment into the Gestapo of promising young police cadets, he was immediately thought of. He was not only undeniably Aryan, but his father was in that now-esteemed group of National Socialist Party members known as the “Unterfünftausender.” His Party card carried a number below five thousand.
At nineteen, Lorin had become a Railway Police Cadet, his records indicating that he was a candidate for the Gestapo. He took a number of courses designed both to train him as an investigator and to convince him that the entire fate of the Third Reich depended on the vigilance of the Gestapo.
At the age of twenty-two, he was assigned as a probationer to the Gestapo office in Dresden, where he worked for twelve months under the close supervision of experienced inspectors, met their approval, and took a final examination.
A week after his twenty-third birthday, he was notified of his appointment (subject to a year’s satisfactory performance) as an Unterinspektor of the Gestapo and issued a Walther PPk .32 ACP semiautomatic pistol and the credentials of his profession. These consisted of an identification card (bearing his photograph and the signature of Heinrich Himmler himself) and the Gestapo identity disk, an elliptical piece of cast aluminum bearing the Seal of State and his serial number.
The disk announced that the bearer possessed: authority to arrest anyone without specification of charges, immunity from arrest (except by other officers of the Gestapo), and superior police powers over all other law-enforcement agencies. Illegal possession of the Gestapo identity disk was a capital offense, and loss of his disk by a member of the Gestapo was punishable by immediate dismissal.
On his appointment, Lorin Wahl was transferred from Dresden to the Stuttgart Regional Office in Württemberg-Baden, with further detail to Freiburg, twenty-four kilometers from the French border and three times that far by road from Lörrach, the first stop inside Germany for trains in-bound from Basel.
He took a small furnished apartment in a pension owned by the mother of one of the other Gestapo officers. It was the first time in his life that he did not have to share a bathroom.
The Kreditanstalt branch bank in Freiburg advanced him the money to purchase an Autounion closed coupé, a nice car, formerly the property of a Jew who had been relocated and had died, according to the records, of complications resulting from an appendectomy at a place called Dachau in Bavaria. Wahl had been told Dachau was a sort of reception center where the Jews were taken for classification before being relocated in the Eastern Territories.
Lorin Wahl was permitted to bill the Freiburg Suboffice of the Gestapo for the expenses involved in the official use of his personal car. The officer-in -charge had informed him that since Gestapo officers were never off duty, anywhere they drove their personal automobiles was on official duty. The payments he received for the use of his car would be more than enough to meet his loan payments.
He was first started out under supervision examining trains crossing the German-Swiss border just the other side of Lörrach. Later, he would be allowed on his own. While most of the travelers in and out would be perfectly respectable Swiss with business in Germany, he was told, there would be people illegally attempting to leave—“and not all of them Jews, Wahl, keep that in mind!”—or to enter Germany. In the latter category would be spies, French, English, and others.
He was instructed to examine identity documents and entrance and exit visas with extraordinary care, and to detain anyone whose documents, or behavior, was not absolutely beyond question.
“It is better, Wahl, to temporarily inconvenience some perfectly respectable businessman than to let an illegal, an enemy of the state, slip through.”
After a month of supervised duty, he was finally judged competent to work by himself, as of 28 January.
On the next day, he left his apartment an hour before he really had to, just to make sure that a flat tire or some other mishap would not keep him from meeting the Basel train.
The nominal inspection of the train was a responsibility shared by the Border Police and the Railway Police. The Gestapo was present as much to see that the others did their jobs properly as it was to personally inspect the train and its passengers.
Regulations required that the conductor of every train prepare and furnish a passenger manifest, identifying each passenger by name and listing his or her seat or compartment. Wahl’s first duty was to take the manifest and compare it with a list of persons furnished, via Stuttgart, by Berlin. These were people believed by headquarters to be likely to try to leave or enter Germany illegally. He was of course expected to make sure the Border Police searched the passenger manifest for names of people who were fugitive from German law, and whose names were provided by Berlin on a separate list, through regular—as opposed to Gestapo—channels.
But it had been explained to him that he was really looking for people whose names would not be on any list. Spies do not identify themselves.
In the first of the three first-class wagons-lits on the train, something caught Wahl’s eye.
There was nothing that he could put his finger on. It was a gut feeling. He had learned in school that gut feelings were not to be dismissed as unprofessional. There was even a proper word for them: intuitive. He had been told that over time he would be able to “intuit” something illegal, to “sense it intuitively.”
Something didn’t ring true about the young Swiss who was alone in the first-class compartment.
In Wahl’s professional judgment, it was unlikely that the young Swiss was a spy, or any other kind of an enemy of the state. He was too young for that; he didn’t look like a spy. What he was, Wahl thought, was a healthy young man of German blood who because of a line drawn on a map was able to sit safely on the sidelines while his brothers were dying in Russia to protect European culture. And it was entirely likely that in his luggage there would be a dozen or so twenty-one-jewel Swiss watches.
Wahl decided to have a look at the young Swiss’s luggage. He would examine it politely, of course, but with more care than the Border Police had examined it. And perhaps ask a few polite questions.
It would be nice, he thought, if he could make an arrest on his very first day of unsupervised duty. And especially nice if it was this “neutral” German-Swiss for smuggling contraband.
He made his way to the first car of the three first-class wagons-lits and, without knocking, slid open the door to the compartment.
The young Swiss was standing up, in the act of putting one of his suitcases on the luggage rack. Or taking one of them down. He looked just a little nervous.
“Guten Tag, mein Herr,” Wahl said, correctly. “Passport, please.”
“It’s
already been examined,” the young Swiss said, “by the Border Police. ”
“Passport, please,” Wahl said impatiently.
The young Swiss shrugged and took the document from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and handed it over.
Wahl carefully compared the photograph in the passport with the young Swiss’s face. It was without question him. He asked the ritual questions, date and place of birth, address, and occupation, and the young Swiss without hesitation replied with answers that matched the information on the passport.
“You’re going to Sweden?” Wahl asked.
“That’s right.”
“What is the nature of your business in Sweden?”
“I can’t really see where that’s any of your business,” the young Swiss replied.
Wahl took his Gestapo identity disk from his pocket and displayed it in the palm of his hand.
“Gestapo, mein Herr, ” he said. “I decide what is my business.”
“I’m an electrical engineer,” the young Swiss said. “In the employ of Carl Färber und Söhne. I’m going to our Stockholm office.”
Wahl nodded curtly.
“Take your luggage from the rack, please,” he said.
“That’s been examined, too,” the young Swiss said.
“I wish to examine it again,” Wahl said.
The young Swiss shrugged. Annoyance was all over his face.
There were three pieces of luggage on the rack.
The young Swiss took them down, one by one, and laid them on the seat. Then, he gestured at them.
“Help yourself,” he said.
Wahl opened the first suitcase and felt through its contents carefully. It was thin-sided, so there was no possibility of a hidden compartment. He found nothing in the first suitcase of a suspicious nature.
In the second, he thought he was onto something. In feeling the rolled-up socks, he touched what appeared to be a hard object concealed inside them. He unrolled the socks. It was a small bottle of aftershave lotion.
“You can put those back,” Wahl said, and opened the third case.
Lorin Wahl had perhaps two seconds to see that the third case held the uniform of an Obersturmführer SS-SD.
He felt a hand over his eyes, pulling his head back, and then for a brief moment, there was a sharp pain at the base of his neck.
And then he felt nothing at all.
Eric Fulmar and Stanley Fine, equipped with diplomatic passports and in civilian clothing, had traveled to Switzerland by air via Dublin and Lisbon. In Fine’s luggage, exempt from customs examination, there had been the equivalent of $10,000 in Reichsmarks; a Swiss passport in the name of Martin Reber; the identification card and travel authorization for SS Obersturmführer Erich von Fulmar, temporarily attached to the staff of the Reichsführer SS in Berlin; and identity cards and travel authority in fictitious names for travel to Budapest for Professor Dyer, Gisella, and Fulmar.
The Reichsmarks and the American passports were genuine. The Swiss passport and the SS-SD identification and travel authority were forgeries. The counterfeit German identity and travel documents were to be used in case von Heurten-Mitnitz could not produce similar documents on his own. Or in case he changed his mind at the last minute and refused to help.
The basic cover story was that Fine and Fulmar were employees of the Department of State who were being sent to the United States Embassy in Bern for duty as consular officers. There was a three-week period (fifteen working days) before newly arrived diplomatic personnel had to present themselves to the Swiss Foreign Ministry.
Subtleties of international law and diplomatic custom were involved: Until they actually presented themselves to the Swiss Foreign Ministry and were issued the identification cards issued to accredited diplomatic personnel, so far as the Swiss were concerned—and even though they would be traveling on diplomatic passports—they would not in fact be accredited diplomatic personnel.
Under the ground rules laid down by the Swiss, who knew full well that there were as many spies and agents in Switzerland as there were in Lisbon or Madrid, Switzerland was not to be used as a transit point by Allied agents with diplomatic status to enter or leave France, Germany, or Italy.
If two Americans with diplomatic status were caught in such activity, they were expelled from Switzerland, and the U.S. Ambassador or chargé d’affaires was handed a note informing him of the Swiss government’s regret that owing to the shortages caused by the war, the United States must reduce its diplomatic staff by two individuals.
If there was a reduction in the authorized staff of a Western embassy, there was an equal increase in the staff of an Axis embassy. Or vice versa.
Individuals who were not officially accredited as diplomats were of course liable to prosecution by Swiss authorities if they violated Swiss laws regarding espionage or immigration; but the various ambassadors could not, of course, be held responsible for the actions of their countrymen who were not officially accredited to their embassies.
Upon arrival in Bern aboard a Swiss Air transport, Fine and Fulmar had boarded a railroad train for Zürich. Fine left the train there, taking with him Fulmar’s luggage and U.S. diplomatic passport.
Fulmar continued on to Basel, traveling now on the forged Swiss passport with a forged German “traverse only” visa. It had ostensibly been issued to Martin Reber, an electrical engineer in the employ of Carl Färber und Söhne, Zurich, and stated that Reber’s purpose was to traverse Germany— meaning without permission to leave the train—en route to Stockholm, where Carl Färber und Söhne, who were manufacturers of electrical timing equipment, maintained an office.
When the train had stopped at Lorrach, just inside the German border, for German customs examination, he found the suitcase that had been placed in his compartment. It held a Freiburg-Kassel railway ticket and the uniform of an SS Obersturmführer.
He would change into the uniform and then dispose of the civilian clothes and Martin Reber’s suitcases. Reber’s Basel-Stockholm ticket would be burned.
All that would then be necessary would be for Fulmar to leave the train at Marburg an der Lahn and establish contact with Gisella Dyer. From there, Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz and/or Standartenführer Johann Müller would take over and arrange transportation for Fulmar and the Dyers to Budapest, where they would enter the pipeline.
The best-laid plans of the OSS began falling apart when Unterinspektor Lorin Wahl of the Gestapo decided to see if he could catch the goddamned Swiss doing something, anything, wrong.
XIV
[ONE]
Little Ross Bay County Kirkcudbright, Scotland 1105 Hours 29 January 1943
Little Ross Bay was near the mouth of the Solway Firth, not far from the English-Scottish border. There wasn’t very much on its western shore. No towns, no villages, just one narrow road, and the cliffs. And the cliffs weren’t much either, not compared to the White Cliffs of Dover. They rose no more than a hundred feet from the rocky beach at the shore of the choppy Little Ross Bay.
But it was just what Richard Canidy wanted—a place with nobody around, with cliffs that could be made to look from the air like the mouths of the sub pens at Saint-Lazare.
H.M.’s Government made the site available to their American allies for a nominal cost, and the Kirkcudbright Constabulary was ordered to evacuate a specified area of the site for a twenty-four-hour period beginning at 1700 28 January.
On 25 January, a platoon of U.S. Army Engineers had gone to Little Ross Bay in an eight-truck-and-two-jeep convoy and spent three days in the blowing rain and icy winds doing what none of them could see any purpose for. But according to a rather passionate speech from the battalion commander himself, whatever it was, it was vital to the war effort, and was consequently to be regarded as a secret that absolutely could not be allowed to become known to the enemy.
What the Second Platoon of “Baker” Company, 4109th Engineer Light Equipment Battalion, did was erect from the base of the cliff a framework of four-by-eigh
ts 60 feet high and 155 feet wide. Then they nailed four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood, lengthwise, to the framework. Then they painted the plywood in diagonal black and yellow two-foot-wide stripes to make it visible, and then draped camouflage netting over whatever the hell it was to make it invisible.
Then, leaving behind an officer and eight men in a truck to make sure whatever the hell it was didn’t get blown down by the wind, the platoon returned to its base in England, where they were again admonished not to discuss with anyone what they had done in Scotland.
Canidy’s delight with the western shore of Little Ross Bay had also caused the U.S. Navy Auxiliary Vessel Atmore [YD-1823] to steam the previous evening across the very unpleasant Irish Sea from Liverpool to Little Ross Bay, where it now rode at anchor. Everyone from the skipper down was either seasick or saying unkind things about the idiocy of the Naval Service in general and whichever fucking idiot had dreamed this up. Or both.
"This” was their orders, classified Secret. These, in addition to giving the location of Little Ross Bay and telling them where precisely they were to drop anchor in Little Ross Bay, informed them that they were to be “prepared to take aboard certain U.S. Military personnel who may be parachuted into the bay, or onto the western shore thereof.”
Since the engineers had done a good job with the camouflage netting, the structure the engineers had built was not visible to the skipper or the lookouts of the Atmore, who consequently believed themselves to be sitting all by their lonesomes in the middle of fucking nowhere.
And then, suddenly, a B-17 appeared.
“Battle stations, battle stations,” the loudspeakers boomed. “Boat crews, man your boats. Davit crews, stand by to launch rescue boats.”
The B-17 came right over the Atmore, so low they could see the engine exhausts, and so close that some of the crew swore that there had been no machine-gun turrets on it, or gun positions in the fuselage.
Soldier Spies Page 36