Burn After Reading (18 page)

What happened to Klatt is a matter of conjecture. In March, 1945, when the collapse of Germany was imminent, he arrived in Vienna and appeared at the German secret service office there. He pleaded frantically for aid, trying desperately to escape from the onrushing Russians. He also asked protection for someone else who, however, never showed up: Kiyosho-
san
. The day after Klatt sought the help of the Germans, he vanished and was never seen again.

Unlike the Germans who had to put virtually all their Russian eggs into Herr Klatt's basket, the Poles worked massively on. the Soviet Union and were generally regarded as best informed about the Red Army. It was, therefore, with considerable anticipation that Admiral Canaris followed the
Wehrmacht
into Poland in 1939. He was keenly interested in a house on Pilsud-skego Square: headquarters of the Polish Intelligence Service.

On October 1, 1939, the
Abwehr
occupied the house and found it to be in relatively good condition, with a hundred or more large safes intact.
Abwehr
locksmiths were flown in from Berlin and they went to work with everything from hairpins to blow torches, only to find that most of the safes were empty. Nothing of value was found about Russia, not even the names of individual Polish spies whom the
Abwehr
could have taken over.

Shortly afterwards, a German officer on a daily constitutional near the ancient Polish fortress Leigonov noticed that the door to one of the old fort's casements was wide open, and he entered to inspect the inside of the crumbling relic. He was surprised to find that the place was a vault and contained a number of steel cabinets. It was a part of the archives of Polish Military Intelligence. A hungry crowd of
Abwehr
specialists descended upon the find, but it also proved disappointing. Much of the data they found about Russia was stale; more of it was glaringly inaccurate; what good there was, the Germans had better.

Efforts were made nevertheless to locate Polish agents who specialized in the Russians; soon enough, several of them volunteered their services. A special
Abwehr-Kommando
was set up to organize and direct these people, but their management became too much of a job and disgusted even the
Abwehr
officers. Most of these volunteers were ordinary scoundrels—unscrupulous, depraved and irresponsible individuals—whose low personal qualities inevitably showed up in their work. Many of them were mainly interested in revenge. They abused their privileged position under the Nazis to settle old accounts, murdering their enemies and especially venting their wrath on helpless Jewk

More promising agents were imported from Finland and the Baltic states; the
Abwehr
desired to utilize the surviving intelligence officers of the armies of these countries destroyed by the Russians. Some of these men and women proved valuable recruits, but most of them were also disappointing.

So the best the
Abwehr
could do was to smuggle agents across the new demarcation line in Poland and to find out whatever they could about the Red Army occupying the country.

Most of the Russian equipment the
Abwehr
spies managed to identify was antiquated stuff in a badly neglected condition. From this, the
Abwehr
concluded that the Red Army's armament was generally poor.

Aside from these
Abwehr
efforts in the field of tactical intelligence (a low-level activity, whose preoccupation with humdrum
technical detail never appealed to Canaris and which, therefore, was woefully neglected in the
Fuchsbau
), there was an agency within the General Staff that specialized in technical information with emphasis on the Red Army. It was called
Fremde Heere Ost
( Foreign Armies East, with a sister agency called Foreign Armies West, concentrating on the French Army). It was headed by a gaunt, stone-faced ascetic intelligence perfectionist, Reinhold Gehlen by name.

Gehlen was an authentic genius at the game, potentially capable of great things in intelligence, but he was badly hampered at this stage by the usual impediments to intelligence work within General Staffs: low budget, inadequate personnel, limitations of jurisdiction, and incompetence. The strictly restricted authority of his agency was reflected even in Gehlen's rank. The head of this potentially all-important branch was a mere major.

On the eve of Barbarossa, and in preparation for it, Gehlen and his specialists had to work solely with the tools available to desk-bound intelligence officers, the reports of military attachés, sources such as newspaper clippings and the oral reports of returning travelers.

While later in the campaign, Gehlen succeeded in building his organization into an important cog in the German war machine, at this stage, his Foreign Armies East was performing just a little better than the
Abwehr
and much of the intelligence it succeeded in developing proved as inadequate as that of the Canaris organization. Moreover, his reports rarely reached echelons higher than Gehlen's own. It never reached the level of Hitler, who urgently needed whatever information he could get.

This led to a strangely inaccurate assessment of the Russian forces. Most of the Red Army equipment the
Abwehr
spies and Gehlen's chair-borne analysts managed to identify in Poland was antiquated stuff in a badly-neglected condition. From this, German Intelligence drew the conclusion that in general, Soviet equipment was inadequate. Later, when the Germans found much high-quality material in the hands of the Red soldiers,
Hitler thought the concentration of the old equipment in Poland had been a deliberate Russian ruse to mislead the
Abwehr.
Whether or not this was true cannot be determined, but after that, Hitler refused to believe virtually anything Canaris or his representatives told him about the Russians.
Abwehr
agents correctly identified seventy-seven Red Army divisions in Poland, but Hitler's own intelligence officers questioned that, too. Still later, when he was deep in the Soviet Union, during one of his inconclusive offensives, Hitler was heard to remark ruefully:

“Look at those Russian Panzers! How good they are, and how little we knew about them beforehand! If the Russians are ahead of us in anything,” he said with scorn, “it is espionage!” These few words reveal his contempt for what he called the
Abwehr-Kram
, the “hodgepodge rubbish” supplied by his own military intelligence service.

Where mass was so important, and strategy decisive—in the historic onslaught on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941—intelligence and espionage necessarily played subordinate roles. For once, the Germans embarked upon a campaign with inadequate information about the enemy, but, for the time being, the effects of that inadequacy did not become evident. The situation was different in the Soviet camp, where good intelligence and espionage were a vital weapon, and at first, a sadly-neglected one.

There was in Berlin in those days a rather obscure American, a forty-eight-year-old Texan named Sam E. (for Edison) Woods, an amazing many-sided man, educational expert, engineer, businessman, diplomat, a self-effacing cosmopolitan with a knack for making friends with men in the know. He had been serving since 1934 as commercial attaché-at-large to the United States Embassy, and he had proved extremely effective as a collector of secret intelligence, with his unassuming ways and his passion for anonymity. In fact, the Germans, who watched several members of the Embassy with eagle eyes, never paid the slightest attention to this “unimportant Mr. Woods.”

In August, 1940, Woods received in his morning mail a
single ticket for a reserved seat in a Berlin movie house, although he had ordered none. He went to the movie house and found in the next seat an acquaintance of his, a prominent German with close links to the High Command via Dr. Hjalmar Schact's Reichsbank. Woods knew the man as a confirmed anti-Nazi who, however, understood how to conceal his real sentiments.

They gave no signs of recognition, just sat next to one another, apparently engrossed in the screenplay. The two men went their separate ways when the show was over. At home Woods removed from his pocket a piece of paper that had not been there when he went to the movie house. It informed him that “conferences were then taking place at Hitler's headquarters concerning preparations for war against Russia.”

Woods forwarded the information to the State Department, where it was received with considerable skepticism, if only because, as Cordell Hull put it, the intelligence “was in marked contrast to the considerable evidence that Hitler was planning an invasion of Britain.” Woods was instructed, however, to follow up his lead, and several clandestine meetings followed in various movie houses in Berlin. The German assured the American commercial attaché that his information was absolutely reliable; it had come to him from someone in the inner sanctum of the
Wehrmacht
High Command. “In fact,” he advised Woods, “the air raids on England served as a blind for Hitler's real and well-calculated plans and preparations for a sudden, devastating attack on Russia.”

His friend gave Woods details of the rapidly developing “Build-Up East.” Among other things, he advised the American attaché that “an organization of the
Wehrmacht
had been formed for the old twenty-one Russian Czarist regional governments, and that the economic staffs for these territories had been appointed.” He tipped him off, too, when the Germans began to print bales of Russian banknotes.

On December 18, Hitler issued his historic Directive No. 21, cloaked under the code name Barbarossa. Even this was
distributed only to a small circle of officers, who had to know about it. It contained instructions for elaborate camouflage and deception, with misleading maneuvers going by separate code names—Shark and Harpoon—to give the impression that the build-up was for intensified operations against England from Scandinavian bases.

No amount of deception could keep the secret from Sam Woods. No sooner was Barbarossa issued than he was given its explicit details by his German friend : the German strategic plan was to drive simultaneously three savage wedges into Russia, the decisive one being in the center, stabbing at Moscow. He was also advised that Hitler had ordered all preparations to be concluded not later than the spring of 1941.

This was January, 1941. By then, Secretary Hull had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the intelligence. Woods cabled that his information could be corroborated by a prominent German exile in the United States. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long was sent to interview the refugee, who confirmed the information. In January, Hull placed the reports before President Roosevelt.

The State Department was then holding a series of confidential conferences with Russia in an effort to loosen the tie between Stalin and Hitler. At the conclusion of one of these meetings, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles revealed to Ambassador Konstantin Oumansky the information the Department had about Hitler's intentions. This was the very first warning the U.S.S.R. had received, but Stalin simply refused to believe it. He regarded it as a clumsy British plant, smuggled to him via America, to muddy the waters of his relations with Hitler. There is reason to believe that he actually resented Oumansky's decision to forward the report and censured the ambassador for his naïveté.

Churchill was, of course, given full access to the Woods reports, but until March, 1941, the Prime Minister, too, refused to accept the momentous information at face value. He probably
rejected it for some psychological reason, because it sounded too good to be true; and he certainly rejected it on apparently sound intelligence grounds, because his own Joint Intelligence Committee advised him without qualification not to indulge in any delusions about a life-saving Russo-German war.

By then, the British Secret Service was functioning well on the Continent. Its newly-established agents reported in pinpoint detail the movement of German troops, but nothing much could be made of that scattered tactical intelligence. Hitler's war was extremely fluid. His conflicting ideas necessitated constant redeployments. The conclusions that could be drawn from those disconnected reports, covering usually only small areas with no direct relationship to the whole, were hazy at best.

In addition, the German system of deception was working extremely well. The
Wehrmacht
remained in force all along the Channel, went through all sorts of landing exercises and leaked voluminous information about Sea Lion, as if that dead beast were still robust and kicking. In Moscow, General Koestring, the German Military Attaché, received instructions to befuddle the Soviet General Staff with a plausible tale of his own. Koestring told the Russians that “inasmuch as the operations in the West had been concluded, the Germans intended to replace the older men in the East with younger men so that the former could be employed in German production.” Another reason, he said, was that training and supply conditions were better in the East and there was no danger of air attacks. The Soviet General Staff was not wholly inclined to believe his tales, but it was discouraged in its skepticism by Stalin who explicitly forbade any doubts in Hitler's best intentions.

On April 7, 1941, the Joint Intelligence Committee presented Churchill with an estimate of the situation. They conceded that Germany had huge forces in the East, and that the Germans would fight Russia sooner or later, but concluded nevertheless that a war at that time appeared unlikely. And on May 23, they reported that “rumors of impending attack on Russia had died down.”

The Prime Minister already knew much better. Late in March, he had instructed Major Morton to procure for him the originals of the more significant raw reports. He came upon a report that suddenly revealed the whole complex story.