Burn After Reading (22 page)

Lieutenant Schulze-Boysen was a devout Communist, but he succeeded in concealing his political orientation and was able to hold down a post inside one of the
Luftwaffe's
intelligence organizations. There he had access to some of Germany's most closely-guarded secrets.

His group was as remarkable as he was. The Red Orchestra operated in cells that in turn combined to form two separate rings—a small, inner ring of the organization's one hundred and eighteen leaders and sub-leaders; and a large, outer ring of rank-and-file secret agents and propagandists. It was an enormous organization; it had branches as far away as Brussels and Marseilles. Although the Red Orchestra was avowedly Communist, it had only a handful of proletarians among its members. Most of them were middle-class intellectuals, professionals and artists.

The group maintained its own elaborate communications network, and constantly changed the location of its transmitters. One night they would be sending messages from the X-ray room of a woman physician's office in Berlin's best residential district. On another night, in the guise of repairmen, they would drive up in a van to a manhole on Moritzplatz, a drab working-class
neighborhood, open the manhole and place a tent over it. While passers-by thought a cable was being repaired or the sewer cleaned, radio specialists of the Red Orchestra were putting Schulze-Boysen's latest messages on the air.

In the summer of 1939, the Red Orchestra merged with a newer group, led by a man known as Caro. He was Mildred Harnack's husband, Arvid, a high-ranking government official. Like Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack was a dedicated man. Up to the date of the merger, his organization had confined its activities to propaganda, plastering the walls of Berlin with little posters printed on their concealed hand-presses, but under Schulze-Boysen's impatient, energetic leadership, the new, enlarged organization began to broaden its activities. While Hitler was at war only with the West, their efforts were half-hearted and groping, not because their pro-Soviet orientation had dampened their anti-Nazi ardor, but because they could not establish a working liaison with Western intelligence organs. But when Hitler's honeymoon with Stalin was drawing to a close, the group undertook a series of groping free-lance operations even before Moscow's emissaries called for their services. That happened in June, 1941.

On a balmy morning of that month, a short, broad-shouldered man went for a stroll in the Tiergarten. At a secluded spot off the beaten path, he sat down on a bench, took out the morning's
Voelkische Beobachter
and read.

A few minutes later, a solemn-faced, hard-eyed man walked by. The little man got up, followed the passerby and then, behind a cluster of low trees, he joined him. For several hours, they strolled together.

This was an emergency conference of the utmost importance, one Soviet spy winding up his business and handing over his affairs to another. Even in the murky underworld of spies, the little bullet-headed fellow was a mystery man. He was known only as Alexander Erdberg, his
nom d'espion
, but he was a highly-trained, full-time professional operative of the Fourth Bureau.

Erdberg belonged to a relatively small ring of resident agents operating behind the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, actually out of the private apartment of Counselor Bogdan Kobulov. Kobulov's ring, and another directed by the more orthodox official spy, General Tupikov, the Military Attaché, was well-nigh all that the Soviet Union had in Germany, except the organization of Erdberg's staid companion on this morning's stroll. He was Arvid Harnack, Caro of the
Rote Kapelle.

In spite of Stalin's blind complacency, Kobulov saw the war approaching and knew that his diplomatic group could not stay long in Germany. Kobulov searched far and wide for a band of trustworthy native Germans in whose hands he could entrust the conspiracy. He picked the Red Orchestra.

Harnack accepted the invitation with alacrity. In subsequent meetings he introduced Erdberg to Schulze-Boysen and others he had selected to act as his radio operators. One was a metal worker named Hans Coppi, a member of the underground Communist Party in Germany; the other was a prominent author and theatrical producer, probably not a Communist at all, Adam Kluckhoff by name. At 56, he was one of the oldest members of the group.

In Kobulov's apartment Harnack and Schulze-Boysen received their instructions from Kobulov and the two military attachés, Tupikov and Skornyakov. Erdberg taught Schulze-Boysen, Coppi and Kluckhoff the operation of clandestine radio sets. Harnack was handed the code books and given lessons in the difficult art of cryptography. He was also appointed treasurer and received thirteen thousand five hundred marks from Kobulov.

The glaring shortcomings of this network of amateurs became evident at once. Harnack and his associates were not short on enthusiasm, and they did not lack excellent intelligence material. One of the very first dispatches they sent to the Fourth Bureau was a comprehensive report on the
Luftwaffe
. They followed it up with a warning of an imminent German offensive along the Dnieper. But because of Harnack's inexperience as a
cryptographer, these important reports were so badly enciphered that the Fourth Bureau could not make head nor tail of them. Coppi and Kluckhoff constantly neglected even to call Moscow on their radios and remained silent most of the time while the Fourth Bureau's operators tried frantically to raise them. Something had to be done at once.

In August, therefore, Erdberg ordered his best agent in the West, Captain Victor Sukulov, to go to Berlin. Sukulov was stationed in Brussels where he was the
Petit Chef
of a Soviet network covering the Low Countries and France. His importance was attested by his string of code and cover names: Dupuis, Lebrun, Fritz, Cirin, Arthur, Alamo, Charles, and, most frequently, Kent. In Brussels, he was Vincente Antonio Sierra, a wealthy merchant from Uruguay, who lived in an elegant villa on Avenue Sieghers with his mistress, Margarete Barcza, the widow of a Hungarian.

His group had its headquarters in a villa on rue des Attrebates, rented from an elderly Belgian lady who thought her tenants were important international businessmen. In actual fact, they were. Señor Sierra did business with the Nazis on an impressive scale and even recruited labor for German factories.

Following his instructions from Moscow, Sierra went to Germany on an official permit issued to him through his influential German contacts, on a train that also carried a contingent of his slave laborers. He met Harnack and Schulze-Boysen in the Tiergarten, following the pattern established by Erdberg; and Harnack took him to Coppi and Kluckhoff.

The Señor was now Kent again, and he went to work at once. He built new radios and repaired old ones; he gave postgraduate courses in operative technique to Coppi and Kluckhoff ; he brushed up Harnack on his cryptography; and he tightened the administration of the group. He recruited a number of other agents, whose names were supplied to him by the Fourth Bureau from the roster of trustworthy Communists. He also looked up Herr von Scheliha, the old-fashioned gentleman in the Foreign
Ministry, who was still doing some spotty espionage work, although it was much inferior to his previous contributions.

His presence in Berlin, brief as it was, fulfilled Erdberg's fondest expectations. After that, the Caro group functioned with clock-like precision, the value of its messages second only to the intelligence from Roessler via Rado. Among the
Rote Kapelle
'
s
material were the strategic plans of the German High Command in the fall of 1941; the times and places of scheduled German parachute raids and planned attacks on British convoys en route to Murmansk; and an enormous amount of information enabling the Fourth Bureau to keep the order of battle of the
Wehrmacht
always up to date. Once, the
Rote Kapelle
even saved the Russians from the disastrous consequences of a lost Russian code. The book was captured by the Germans at Petsamo in Finland and was used in the familiar carillon game. Schulze-Boysen discovered the trick and warned the Russians who could then turn the carillon against the bell ringers.

In this formidable network, even Sukulov represented only the second echelon. Sukulov was called the
Petit Chef
—the Little Boss. Over him, conducting the whole complex orchestra, was the Maestro, the
Grand Chef
—the Big Boss, forming, with Sorge in Tokyo, and Rado in Geneva, the legendary
troika
, or Big Three of Soviet espionage in World War II. He was also known as the General, an elusive master of espionage, who had appeared virtually everywhere between Moscow and Shanghai, Madrid and Buenos Aires.

He was a Pole. Leopold (Poldi) Trepper was his real name; he was born in 1904 in the ghetto of Cracow. Poldi used his real name for the last time in 1932 when, after a frantic chase of rainbows, he arrived in Moscow to throw in his lot with the Bolsheviks. He was twenty-eight years old, a married man, and a total failure in life. He thought he might try his hand at espionage.

The Polish branch of the Comintern obtained for him an appointment with a talent scout of the Fourth Bureau, who
recognized in Poldi an exceptional talent. His new bosses put him through a five-year-long educational training period that took him through Moscow University, the Moscow College of Diplomacy, and the Fourth Bureau School.

When Poldi emerged from this wringer, he was a different man: a suave operator who spoke Polish, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, French, English, and Spanish with equal fluency. He was sent to Paris as Monsieur Jean Gilbert to establish himself behind a front: the Simex Corporation of exporters and importers, with plush offices on the Champs Elysées and a Hollywood-type executive suite for Monsieur Gilbert.

In the back of Gilbert's swank office was a hidden room, where he became Poldi Trepper again. It housed his radio, the safe with the codes and ciphers, his little black books with innumerable useful addresses, the roster of his sub-agents. A hidden door led from his big office into this small one and a staircase went from the hidden office into the backyard of another building.

The hidden room was secured with a special radio transmitter attached to a clock that had to be wound once a day. When all was well, the little transmitter emitted signals at regular intervals to the security guard in the front office. When the signals stopped, something was wrong. In an acute emergency, a warning could be sent out without waiting for the clock to do the job.

From that office in Paris, Gilbert's tentacles reached to every German government office, not only in Berlin and Paris, but also in Brussels, The Hague, Copenhagen, everywhere in occupied Western Europe. Working for him were the outstanding agents of the Fourth Bureau. Contact with Moscow was chiefly by radio. Trepper had transmitting and receiving sets in Brussels and The Hague, three in Switzerland, the new stations in Berlin, and two in France: one in Paris operated by a Polish refugee, another in Pecq near Paris, in the hands of Robert and Lucie, a French Communist couple.

The net's chief signal officer was the Professor, so called because his knowledge of radio techniques and transmissions was unique in the underground. He was also called Hans, Hermann, and Bergmann. His real name was Johann Wenzel and he hailed from somewhere in East Prussia. An aging man who spent his life in the Comintern, the Professor was getting tired, terribly tired of it all.

Until June, 1941, his station in the villa in Brussels was well oiled, ready for instant use, but silent.

Then the Professor suddenly became operational, as did his scattered colleagues in France and Holland, and even inside Germany.

The monitors of Canaris' signal corps, the
Funk-Abwehr,
pricked up their ears at their station in Cranz, East Prussia. The monitors jotted down the signals and rushed them to Berlin, but no matter how the
Abwehr's
best cryptoanalysts tried, they could not break the code.

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.