Storming the Eagle's Nest (14 page)

Switzerland being Switzerland and George Warner being George Warner, it was necessary that a number of Z personnel were designated to cover the republic. The official MI6 station was tactfully located in Geneva under the usual cover of Passport Control Officer. When the outbreak of war in September 1939 finally caused Warner to relax his stance on spies, Organisation Z was able to slip into the shadow of MI6. Dansey himself and his principal staff at once decamped to the Peterhof hotel in Zurich. Here Dansey was styled consul. At the end of the year his promotion to assistant chief of MI6 dictated a return to the London headquarters at 54 Broadway, a quarter of a mile from the House of Commons. Now, despite the presence of Organisation Z, the British tended to rely on the French for Allied clandestine presence in Europe. In the spring of 1940 this was a policy that unravelled disastrously with the fall of Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, France and the loss of almost all Allied agent networks across northern, eastern and western Europe. No one had foreseen the sudden collapse of these countries. The inability of MI6 to identify the lack of political will in France to fight the good fight was later regarded as its greatest wartime failure. In June 1940, minds were concentrated in London. The consequence was that ‘Overnight Switzerland was transformed … into the centrepiece of Britain’s intelligence effort against
Nazi Germany.’
7
When Warner was replaced shortly before the Fall of France by Sir David Kelly – a First World War intelligence officer – Thunstrasse became Britain’s most important base for secret operations on the Continent.

Its operatives were a colourful crew. Following Dansey’s departure, the MI6 station head in Zurich was Count Frederich ‘Fanny’ Vanden Heuvel. Son of a papal count, he had excellent connections with the Vatican, had been brought up in Berne, spoke Schweizerdeutsch to perfection. Tall, dressy, languid and famously courteous, he was the caricature not of a spy but of a diplomat. He was a figure out of P. G. Wodehouse who liked to sport lavender spats with his morning suit: a Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Gussie Fink-Nottle or Bingo Little. His number two was Andrew King, later exposed as a communist and homosexual at a time at which Bolshevism was beyond the pale and intercourse between those of the same sex illegal. King had been a couple of years below the spies Kim Philby and Donald Maclean at Cambridge. The agent, who knew nothing of film-making or films, worked under the commercial cover of Alexander Korda’s famous London Films company. It was said that Korda, a Hungarian by birth and Englishman by choice, supplied agents in the form of refugees while Dansey supplied the cash. The military attaché was Colonel Cartwright, a veteran of the Kaiser’s POW camps. The air attaché, Group Captain Freddie West, was a First World War Royal Flying Corps ace and VC to boot. Losing a leg in the conflict had not deprived him of his
joie de vivre
. Transferred from Rome to Berne after the outbreak of war, his nocturnal swimming parties in the summer of 1940 scandalised the upright citizens of the sleepy Swiss capital. Well informed about the Regia Aeronautica (the Italian air force), West discovered the existence of its Swiss counterpart only after his arrival in the capital. It was said that the legation’s standing with General Guisan’s representatives was much compromised by the lamentable standard of the Allied military attachés’ skiing. An exception was presumably made in the case of the one-legged West.

After the Fall of France, Dansey’s Swiss section was under pressure to deliver. Deliver it did. From the earliest days of the Axis, the Foreign Office in London had doubted Mussolini’s commitment to an alliance with Hitler. After the disastrous Alpine campaign of June 1940, the similarly disappointing adventure in Greece the following autumn, and the beginnings of the RAF bombing campaign of Italian cities, the British Foreign Office deemed intelligence on the country’s morale vital. Replete with his old contacts in Rome, West excelled himself. Between the end of summer and the end of the year he delivered more than seventy reports. These covered every aspect of Italy’s domestic, political, social and economic situation. This was gold dust. In the view of the Foreign Office it confirmed the importance of Switzerland as ‘the easiest and most natural channel leading into Italy … [for] establishing contact with dissident and revolutionary elements’.
8
As a consequence, the consulate in Lugano in Canton Ticino (adjoining Italy) was expanded to provide a base for more MI6 operatives in Italy. By this time, to the human intelligence of agents worldwide had been added the signals intelligence derived from the rapidly developing science of cryptanalysis, later epitomised by the work of the
code-breaking
centre at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. This was of immense value in its own right, did much to turn the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943, and conceivably turned the course of the war. However, it did not replace but rather complemented human intelligence. For human intelligence (HUMINT) dealt with different issues from those of signals intelligence (SIGINT). It trafficked things like morale, industrial production levels, domestic shortages, issues in the Axis leadership and so on. By the middle of 1942, the Joint Intelligence Committee was rating the Swiss human product as ‘the most valuable and amongst the best reports received from any quarter’.
9
Nine months later in the spring of 1943, Dansey reported that MI6 was running agents from Switzerland in Germany itself, Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

So by the time Dulles had got his feet underneath his desk in his apartment in Herrengasse 23, Dansey was cock o’ the walk and not necessarily particularly welcoming to what might be regarded as competition. Competition, too, that had the funds to compete for the services of agents, the stock-in-trade of intelligence services. The Americans quickly won a reputation for free spending. One of Dansey’s ‘attachés’ recalled their arrival as ‘like a man with a loud hand-bell which he rang as loud as he could in the town square while shouting for wares and calling his customers’.
10
An MI6 agent in Geneva was horrified when a newly arrived American operative threw open his suitcase and revealed that it was literally packed with currency. Cash, the American helpfully explained, to buy agents and information. Dansey knew Dulles from the intelligence community in Berne in the First World War but from the first regarded him as a trespasser on his own territory. He instructed Vanden Heuvel to be uncooperative; ‘above all’, Vanden Heuvel was told, ‘keep his nose away from our files’.
11
Shortly after Dulles’s arrival in Berne in November 1942, a note appeared in the
Journal de Genève
flagging his arrival as ‘a personal representative of President Roosevelt’ for ‘special duties’.
12
This barefaced advertisement was the antithesis of Dansey’s approach to his profession and confirmed his worst suspicions. Dulles was an opportunistic rival, not a colleague. Duly and dutifully lunched by Vanden Heuvel, the return match in which Dulles outdid the Briton on the quality of wine and food did perhaps not endear him to his new colleagues. It was a relationship whose ambiguities would soon be compounded by the Kolbe affair.

Dulles himself knew Switzerland from his days as a junior diplomat in the First World War. Born in 1893, his maternal grandfather was secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison. His elder brother John Foster Dulles would do the same job for Dwight Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. Graduating from Princeton in 1916, the younger Dulles joined the diplomatic service and was attached to the US legation in Berne. Here he
distinguished himself one quiet spring afternoon in April 1917. He was duty officer at the legation when the phone rang. The caller announced himself as Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Here was an informant known to the legation as an authority on the rapidly unravelling situation in Russia. Tsar Nicholas had abdicated on 15 March 1917 and there was revolution in the air. Lenin said he was en route to Berne and must speak to a member of the legation staff on a matter of utmost urgency. Dulles, tall,
good-looking
, with a well-developed interest in women, had a date. He firmly declined the opportunity and told Lenin that no one else would be available to see him until ten o’clock the following morning. ‘Tomorrow’, Lenin told Dulles, ‘will be too late. I must talk to someone this afternoon. It is most important. I must see someone.’ As far as Dulles was concerned there couldn’t be much that would not wait till the following morning. ‘Ten o’clock tomorrow,’ he countered.
13
By then, though, Lenin was already returning to Russia on the famous ‘sealed train’, rather like, as Churchill put it, ‘a plague bacillus’.
14
Arriving at Petrograd station on 17 April 1917, he at once instigated the mischief that would lead to the October Revolution. It was this that he wished to disclose to Dulles, forewarning of Russia’s exit from the First World War.

Dulles’s career survived this embarrassment, not least because he turned out to be the right man at the right time with
connections
in the right place. Given the isolationist stance of the United States in the 1930s, the country had given little thought and fewer resources to intelligence-gathering in Europe. After Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and – more significantly – the Arcadia Conference later that month in Washington, all changed. At the White House Roosevelt and Churchill had made the key strategic decision of placing the war in Europe as a priority above that in the Far East. The powerhouse that was the USA accordingly turned its energies to the matter of
intelligence-gathering
on the Continent. This meant Switzerland. Formed on 11 July 1941, the nascent US foreign intelligence-gathering organisation was given the snappy name of the Office of the
Coordinator of Information (COI). It was headed by another old friend of Claude Dansey, a maverick millionaire lawyer called ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. Of Irish extraction, Donovan’s nickname was acquired on the football field and followed him to the US 165th Regiment. He led the regiment’s 1st Battalion on the French Western Front in the autumn of 1918 and won the coveted Medal of Honor. His subsequent career as a lawyer showed all the gusto that he had hitherto displayed. He made things happen. ‘Switzerland’, he wrote to President Roosevelt, ‘is now, as it was in the last war, the one most advantageous place for the obtaining of information concerning the European Axis powers … information from Switzerland is far more important than from any other post.’
15
What was needed was a station there and the right man at its head: ‘we need badly a man’, Donovan continued, ‘… to tap the constant and enormous flow of
information
that comes from Germany and Italy’. In Donovan’s opinion, the forty-nine-year-old Dulles was just that man. A lawyer like Donovan, Dulles spoke French and German, knew the intelligence ropes, was a hands-on spymaster, and familiar with Berne. Roosevelt was persuaded and in the autumn of 1942 Dulles was asked to set up a secret service office that would cover all the occupied territories and the Third Reich itself. For this purpose the COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). It comprised a secret intelligence service, the equivalent of MI6, and a secret operations service, a counterpart to the SOE. After the war, it would evolve into the CIA. Dulles would be its first civilian director.

On 7 November 1942, Dulles caught the last train up through the Vichy border town of Annemasse before Operation Anton closed the Swiss frontier. He carried on his person a large sum of ready cash, reputedly as much as $1 million. In the winter of 1942–3, as Paulus’s army collapsed in Stalingrad, Dulles settled into his apartment in Herrengasse 23, a fourteenth-century house in the cathedral quarter in Berne. One of the OSS staff, Cordelia Hood, recalled that it was ‘a beautiful apartment with a big terrace in the back that overlooked the Aare, then you
looked up and saw the whole Bern Oberland mountain range, the Eiger, and the rest of the mountains. It was almost kitschy it was so postcard perfect.’
16
It was also practical. As Dulles himself wrote, ‘Between my apartment and the river below grew vineyards which afforded an ideal covered approach for visitors who did not wish to be seen entering my front door on the Herrengasse.’
17
This was sensible, for the Gestapo were soon watching the premises day in, day out. Here Dulles set about reviving old contacts and cultivating new ones. Almost the first of these efforts got him into a tangle with the British.

In February 1943, Dulles was approached by a gangling German Abwehr officer called Hans Bernd Gisevius. Formerly of the Gestapo, Gisevius was an able bureaucrat who had risen to work for the head of the military intelligence service, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Born in 1887, Canaris himself had joined the Kriegsmarine as a seventeen-year-old. He had seen action against the British in the Falkland Islands in the light cruiser
Dresden
. Subsequently he was trained as a submariner, commanded a U-boat, and by 1932 was commanding officer of the battleship
Schlesien
. On his forty-eighth birthday in 1935 he was appointed head of the Abwehr. Never a member of the Nazi Party, it was later said that Canaris – a wiry little intellectual – hated not merely Himmler and Hitler, but the whole Nazi political system. He certainly surrounded himself with those of a similar bent, Gisevius included. Moreover, his position was an excellent one for turning his beliefs into practice, into plots. As Dulles was later to put it,