Burn After Reading (21 page)

He supplied the German operation order for what became the decisive Battle of Rostov, where Marshal Timoshenko succeeded for the first time in stemming the tide of the
Wehrmacht's
advance. He delivered the operation order for the Battle of Moscow, which enabled Marshal Zhukov to make his own arrangements. He furnished the operation plan of the Battle of Stalingrad, including the disposition of all German forces,
the emergency plans for Goering's aborted air lift and voluminous data about logistics.

“Not only did he,” Foote wrote, “provide the day-to-day dispositions in the Eastern front, but also Lucy could, and did, provide answers to specific questions. It frequently happened that Moscow had lost sight of such-and-such a division. An inquiry was put through to Lucy and in a matter of days the answer would be provided, giving the composition, strength and location of the unit in question.” Sometimes Lucy's reports followed a unit all the way from its inception to its extinction. He would report that such and such a division was about to leave its sinecure in France for the Eastern front. He would follow with the date of departure, the route of transportation and the destination. He would wind up by reporting the arrival of the unit, its order of battle and its operations order, pinpointing the exact sector where it would be thrown into the struggle—and when.

“As far as Moscow was concerned,” Foote remarked, “this was obviously the most important function Lucy could perform. Russia, fighting with her back to the wall and scraping up her last resources, was obviously vitally interested in trustworthy information regarding the armed forces ranged against her—and this Lucy supplied.”

Roessler was not a spy in the usual sense of the word, for he had no direct access to the secret information he was peddling. He performed the function of a conveyor belt. He received his information from his mysterious source in Germany, and, to this day, nobody knows for certain how he obtained it, especially so swiftly. Some say he had access to the diplomatic pouch of the Swiss; others say he was on the Europe-wide clandestine radio network of the Red Orchestra, the other enormous espionage ring that flooded the Fourth Bureau with material straight from the safes and files of Hitler's diplomatic and military apparatus.

The Fourth Bureau is usually stingy with monetary rewards and it is even stingier with praise, but Lucy received the highest accolades from the Director. Among the intercepted communications of Rado's Dora period, there are scores that contain
nothing but thanks which Rado was to convey to Roessler. It is generally agreed today that Lucy's contribution to the Russian victory was of the greatest significance and “the effect of the information [he supplied] on the strategy of the Red Army and the ultimate defeat of the Wehrmacht [was] incalculable.”

Roessler continued to work for the Russians until June, 1944, but shrewdly covered his rear by also working for Swiss Intelligence.

At one point during the war, Hitler toyed with the idea of invading and occupying Switzerland. During those weeks and months, Roessler's importance to the
Nachrichtendienst
became crucial. He procured all the pertinent data, including private conversations Hitler had about Switzerland, and placed them at the disposal of the
Nachrichtendienst
. He received no remuneration whatever from Swiss Intelligence, except that he was allowed to function unmolested for others.

The chief of the Swiss Intelligence Service, Colonel Roger, insisted that Roessler's information of those critical weeks enabled the Swiss Federal authorities to forestall the projected German invasion by staging a timely counter-offensive of their own in the military and diplomatic fields. Colonel Roger gives Roessler full credit for averting war from Switzerland in 1939–45.

With Roessler's help and by their own remarkable efforts, Rado and his fifty agents managed something that was unprecedented in the whole history of espionage. No comparable network has ever succeeded in staying in business with such an elaborate apparatus for so long and with such feverish activity. By 1942, the total of outgoing messages averaged eight hundred per month. Rado had to use daily all three of his radio transmitters and he had to drive his operators as hard as he could. This was almost too good to be true or too good to last forever. An end was inevitable and when it came at last, in stages in 1943 and 1944, it was due to a combination of the carelessness that forever characterized Rado's operations, of the chaos that goes even with the best-managed war, and of the jealousies that are rampant in the secret service.

Rado persistently violated many rules of good espionage, but none of his trespasses was as serious as his amorous involvement with “Rosie,” the pretty Swiss demoiselle, Margaret Bolli. She was a native of Geneva, what the Germans call
ein Maedchen aus gutem Hause
, a young lady of good family. But behind her philistine façade, she was a Communist activist, member of the inner circle of Léon Nicole, the .bigtime Swiss Comintern agent, whose hatchery supplied the fish for the Soviet espionage nets in Switzerland.

Nicole introduced Mlle. Bolli to Rado, and the aging master spy, never before seized by this kind of passion, completely forgetful of his wife at home, was promptly smitten by the young woman's charm. As a prospective spy, the Bolli girl was a very rough little diamond at best, but Rado in his amorous bias saw in her a great operative and he had her learn radio telegraphy and cipher work from Foote.

Rado's love for Margaret never slackened, but she gradually cooled to the elderly man. Before long, she found herself yearning for the companionship of younger men and became involved with a handsome barber in Geneva, Hans Peters by name. Now she had to live still a third secret life, for she was anxious to conceal her faithlessness from Rado.

Young Peters had more than just romantic interest in Margaret. He was a German by birth and was in secret communication with the German consul in Geneva. The German counter-espionage organization, operating out of the consul's office, was fully aware of the existence of a Soviet network in Switzerland, but it was frustrated by its inability to locate its transmitters, break its ciphers or to find out anything concrete about it. All they had were a few scattered clues that showed Miss Bolli was a member of the ring and operated one of its radios.

Her private life was investigated and it became quickly evident that she was restive and frustrated in love. Young Peters was put to work and it did not take long for Gretel to fall head over heels in love with her Hansel. In her infatuation she could keep no secrets from him. In the end, she even delivered to him
the book on which her code was based, a German volume entitled
Es geschah in September—It Happened in September.

In October, 1943, Margaret was arrested, on evidence the Germans had slipped to the Swiss. She was trapped in Peters' arms during a tryst in his apartment, to which the ungallant suitor had also invited the police. From then on, the decline and fall was only a matter of time and before long, the phenomenal ring of Alexander Rado was smashed.

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.

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.”