Fighting to Lose (13 page)

To Robertson, at least according to his many notes to file, the real aim was to use Owens to catch other German spies. The two agents besides Owens so far identified through contact with DR. RANTZAU did not count. Eschborn had given himself up beforehand, and the other, Mathilde Krafft, was nothing more than a middle-aged woman with German sympathies who had been asked by Hamburg to mail Owens small sums of money. This was a thin return on running Owens as a double agent, and Robertson accused him of falling down on the job since no other spies in England had contacted him.27 Ritter must have been surprised by this complaint when Owens told him of it, for it is a basic principle of good spycraft that agents sent into enemy territory are not to know each other, so that one arrest does not lead to others. But by now there had been many examples of MI5 not knowing the basics.28

MI5’s perceived ineptitude was a valuable item of intelligence in its own right. The way MI5 handled Owens showed that its counter-espionage expertise was very, very slight. Only absolute neophytes would let a freelance pre-war agent like Owens, whose background was unauthenticated, roam the countryside unsupervised in wartime. Robertson was to write this to file:

I taxed him [Owens] on the subject of getting information for himself and not relying on us to give it to him. I naturally made the proviso that any information he obtained should be immediately sent to us. He has apparently started getting around a bit because he told me he paid a visit to Croydon Aerodrome and to Kenley. He said he was glad he had been to Kenley because the place had changed considerably since he was last there. He saw no machines out on the field and was proposing at a later date to make a good story and send it over.29

And again, incredibly:

On Monday he went to Harrogate and thence to Grantham…. The following day he went to Newcastle and thence to West Hartlepool…. On that day he paid a visit to Wattisham aerodrome…. He said he had been able to obtain a little information about an aerodrome at Dishford, near Thirsk, Grantham and Wallisham aerodromes…. He did not find out anything about the 13th Fighter Group at Newcastle….30

It seems never to have occurred to Robertson that Owens might be giving him less than a full account of what he was seeing, that he might have another transmitter hidden away, that he might be in contact with an undiscovered spy, or he might be sending secret letters to a cover address outside the country that MI6 was unaware of. These possible scenarios seem never to have occurred to Liddell, Robertson’s direct boss, either.

On the other hand, Owens had little need of these devices so long as he was able to take what he saw personally back to his German controllers across the Channel.31 This recklessness, plus the infantile codenames — CHARLIE for Charles Eschborn and GW for Gwyllem Williams — could only have led the Germans, and Major Ritter in particular, to seriously doubt MI5’s competence.

5

February–April 1940

One of the reasons why Admiral Canaris had been so opposed to Hitler’s military adventures and sabre-rattling in the 1930s was fear that Great Britain would be drawn into any war he started, with the United States inevitably following. He did not think Germany could win if that happened because the U.S. economy was the biggest in the world, giving it enormous military capacity. Hitler being Hitler, however, a confrontation with the Anglo-Americans was likely sooner or later. Canaris’s task was to figure out how to deal with it.

The “sooner” arrived in the spring of 1940. A twenty-nine-year-old cipher clerk in the U.S. embassy in London, Tyler Kent, outraged by what he saw as Roosevelt’s disregard for the will of Congress, took to stealing copies of the secret correspondence between the president and Winston Churchill, then head of the Admiralty. These messages were of the most sensitive nature, for they showed the president was keen to help Britain, under the table if necessary, despite America’s official policy of neutrality. Kent amassed some 1,500 documents with the vague idea of someday releasing them to the public as proof of the president’s perfidy. He kept them in his apartment.

Nothing much would have happened except that Kent divulged his secret to a White Russian named Anna Wolkoff who had strong fascist sympathies. The information and documents she pried out of him she passed to the Italian embassy — Italy was then still neutral — which passed them in turn on to Berlin, where they inevitably reached Canaris. It was one of the top espionage successes of the war in that the security shields of the United States and Britain were breached at the highest level.1 Canaris now could be sure that Roosevelt was on side with Britain and would go to war against Germany if the opportunity presented itself.

MI5, it should be said, did catch on to Kent through some exceptional counter-espionage work by Maxwell Knight’s B2 section, but too late. Kent and Wolkoff were arrested, but the intelligence bird had flown. Canaris had gained valuable knowledge that he probably shared with Hitler in the hope of dampening his ambitions. More important to the war, however, was what he himself eventually did with the information.

That was in the future. His current and ongoing problem was how to contain the Nazis in the face of Hitler’s determination to expand Germany’s frontiers in Europe, by war if necessary. Something of the Abwehr chief’s thinking is evident from how he organized and staffed the outlying Abwehr offices, especially those in Spain and Portugal — the usual espionage battleground when Britain was at odds with a European power. His main consideration appears to have been to make sure the key positions were filled by anti-Nazi officers who were personally loyal to him.

The head of KO Portugal (Lisbon) was Kremer von Aünrode, alias Albrecht von Karsthof, a former intelligence officer with the Austrian General Staff. He was from Trieste, a city that was lopped off from Austria and given to Italy with the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War. This made him definitely not a Nazi, and likely no friend of Italy either. He was especially close to Canaris.

KO Spain (Madrid) was the largest and unquestionably the most important of the Abwehr branches in neutral countries and its chief was an old naval comrade from Canaris’s First World War days, Captain Wilhelm Leissner, alias Gustav Lenz. Canaris brought Leissner out of retirement in 1935 to help manage the Abwehr’s covert assistance to the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War and kept him on as Germany slid to war itself. On Leissner’s staff was Canaris’s nephew, Joachim Canaris, responsible for evaluating espionage reports from Britain, and a little later, Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal, who had worked for Canaris during the Spanish Civil War and whose father had been military attaché to Paris and Rome before being dismissed by the Nazis.2

It can be safely assumed that all the key officers at KO Spain and KO Portugal were Canaris loyalists, and the same held true for Holland, where Traugott (Richard) Protze, another friend from his naval days, ran a separate intelligence office in The Hague that reported directly to Berlin. Alexander Waag, leader of KO Switzerland until July 1940, was connected to Canaris through his wife.3

These postings in countries where the English-speaking secret services would mount most of their operations ensured that Canaris could deal with them as he saw fit, and perhaps in ways that would never be accepted by the Nazis. It made possible informal talks with enemy opposite-numbers with less fear of being discovered by the Nazis, and quid pro quo exchanges of favours and information in order to satisfy political bosses impatient for results. The espionage struggle in Spain and Portugal was a polite game of billiards in comparison to the slashing and hacking that had gone on between the Soviets and the White Russians in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s.

Add the KOs in Norway, Sweden, and Greece to the aforementioned and Canaris had Germany surrounded by an anti-Nazi espionage and intelligence-gathering network that could control the flow of overseas intelligence being fed to Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, and through it to the client intelligence agencies of the army, navy, and air force, the army high command (the Oberkommando des Heeres [OKH]), and Hitler’s headquarters (the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht [OKW]).

This was a necessary tactic, so long as the intelligence chief of the army, with the misleading title Oberquartiermeister IV, remained outside the circle of general staff officers opposed to Hitler. The chief, General Kurt von Tippelskirch, was a no-nonsense officer of the old school who had spent four years of the First World War in a French prisoner-of-war camp. He was not a Nazi, but he could not be relied upon to work against the regime.

Similarly, there was the delicate problem that while the heads of the main departments of the Abwehr were all loyal to Canaris and committed anti-Nazis, this was not necessarily the case with the Berlin section heads. For instance, the officer in charge of Abw I Luft/E (E = England), Major Friedrich Busch, was a fervent Nazi,4 and the German air force, the Luftwaffe, was generally pro-Hitler. Once Major Busch, who was no fool, received an intelligence report of genuine value, Canaris could try stopping him from forwarding it only at his own peril. This was especially awkward in that air intelligence was at a premium.

It was the development of the bomber that had made the difference. It had seen only limited use during the First World War, but its effect in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, on the town of Guernica was enough to make those in the 1930s concerned about such things think that it might more quickly and cheaply subdue an enemy country than victories on the battlefield; it appeared to be the perfect terror weapon.

The raid on Guernica was conducted by an assortment of German and Italian bombers on loan to the Nationalist forces and was intended to assist a ground attack. The bombers missed their proper targets and destroyed three quarters of the town of five thousand instead. Resistance collapsed and the world was horrified. Guernica, thanks to the brush of Pablo Picasso, became the subject of one of the most powerful and famous war paintings of the twentieth century. All the experts agreed. In the next war, cities and civilians would be the primary targets.

Indeed, such was the alarm that the League of Nations followed up by unanimously passing a resolution declaring the “intentional bombing of civilian populations” to be illegal, and that, in time of war, the targets of air attacks “must be legitimate military targets and identifiable.” The European powers, plus Japan and the United States, urgently looked to develop their own air defences and bombing capability. This created a huge market for espionage, particularly in the areas of bomb aiming, aircraft detection, armament, fighter aircraft, and ground-to-air defence. The Abwehr’s response was to switch its military intelligence-gathering emphasis from naval to air, beginning with the establishment in 1937 of an AbtI/Luft (air espionage) section at Ast Hamburg manned by Nikolaus Ritter. His first spy was Arthur Owens, turned over to him from the naval section, and in July he received orders directly from Canaris to expand his espionage effort to the United States, with particular emphasis on stealing plans for the bombsight being developed by the Norden Company. Apparently, the Luftwaffe wanted to improve its aim.5

In 1939, Ritter received as his deputy a civilian lawyer, Dr. Karl-Heinz Kramer, who was to do seemingly good work for Ast Hamburg by developing spies in England through then neutral Hungary. These spies may never have existed, however, because later in the war Kramer became spymaster in Stockholm to the JOSEPHINE and HEKTOR networks in England, which supplied much intelligence to Hitler’s headquarters, most of it misleading since the networks did not exist. Kramer’s spies were his own invention and he wrote their messages himself. Kramer was to become very much a part of the “counter-activity” that was the mark of the anti-Nazi conspiracy in the Abwehr.6

One can see Canaris’s reasoning. Air intelligence could be key to winning or losing the next war. He had to be the best-informed in Germany of advances in military aviation and air defence by Germany’s neighbours, both to better assess the foreign danger but also to keep control over the flow of this intelligence to the Luftwaffe and to Hitler’s headquarters should it become necessary to choke it off occasionally. To ensure he could do the latter if the time came, he needed like-minded anti-Nazis in charge at Abt1/Luft at Ast Hamburg. In Ritter and Kramer he had them.

Preparing for a ground war was more straightforward. France was the traditional enemy, and Hitler’s foreign policy promised a clash sooner or later. The likelihood was that the initial battleground would again include Belgium and Holland, so Canaris flooded the three countries with spies well before the war, with more to come after it started. Some of them had the most ingenious covers.

Georges Delfanne — to give an example — was a twenty-seven-year-old former Belgian soldier who had knocked about in various odd jobs until recruited by the Abwehr. He was given the task of discovering what he could about the deployment of the Belgian army and set about it in classic spy style. Posing as a travelling salesman for special ink blotters, he toured Belgium on his bicycle, systematically visiting all military installations and encampments. His blotters were of a design especially useful to the military; sales were brisk and numerous, with Delfanne jotting down in his invoice book the names of the buyers and the location of their units. Before long, he was able to build up a complete picture of the Belgian army’s order of battle, which was supplemented by pencil sketches of fortifications, bridges, ditches, gun emplacements, and anything else of military interest. On the eve of Hitler’s invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940, the defences of Belgium had been laid bare.