9
Ankara, October 1943
“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson had said in 1929. This deep disdain for espionage was very widespread in English and American diplomatic circles. Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen, British ambassador to Turkey since 1939, and a diplomat of the old school, shared that way of thinking. Intelligence was outside the scope of his work and he did not want to hear it talked about. This indifference was close to negligence—he had an Albanian servant named Elyeza Bazna, of whom he had no thorough investigation made, though the man came to him out of the blue, and the ambassador never suspected that he had hired a dangerous spy in the pay of Germany.
In late October 1943, Bazna decided to contact the Germans to offer them secret documents from the British embassy. He had managed to steal the key to the personal safe of Ambassador Knatchbull-Hugessen while the ambassador was sleeping. He had had a copy made and was thus able to get his hands on confidential documents of the greatest importance. He immediately thought of making them available to the enemies of England in exchange for hard cash. On the evening of October 26 he went to the German embassy on Atatürk Boulevard, where he met Ludwig Moyzisch, a former journalist from Vienna with the official title of commercial attaché, who was in fact a permanent agent of the intelligence services. In their conversation, Bazna spoke French and claimed that his name was Pierre. He said that he hated the English, who had “killed his father.” He offered documents of “exceptional quality” in exchange for money, although he had nothing to show for the moment. He was asking for fabulous amounts (twenty thousand pounds for two rolls of undeveloped film). “Pierre” gave Moyzisch two days to think about it, letting him know that he would not hesitate to look for a better client—for example, the Soviets—in the event of a German refusal.
Moyzisch, somewhat skeptical, informed the ambassador, Franz von Papen, of this astonishing offer. Von Papen was very fond of all kinds of intrigue and believed in the virtues of combining diplomacy with espionage. Because of the scope of the affair, von Papen referred it directly to Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in Berlin, who turned the file over to his assistant, Horst Wagner, liaison officer between the ministry and the SS. The file was soon turned over to Walter Schellenberg, head of foreign espionage. He decided to pay the twenty thousand pounds “to see,” and was not disappointed by the result. The first “delivery” from the Albanian servant contained many details about conversations at the highest level between British and Turkish leaders. These negotiations dealt with a highly strategic question: Was Turkey finally going to abandon its de facto neutrality? Would it shift into the Allied camp, and if so, at what price? Its strategic interest was to remain outside the war, even though it secretly dreamed of a dual defeat: first of the Soviets and then of Nazi Germany.
Ambassador von Papen could use the documents photographed by the Albanian valet to attempt to thwart the maneuvers of the Allies. Always one step ahead thanks to the information provided by his spy, he was in a position to put very targeted pressure on the Turkish authorities in order to force them to maintain their neutrality. He decided to name this exceptional spy “Cicero,” because of the particularly eloquent nature of the material supplied. In Berlin, Walter Schellenberg hoped to use Cicero to decipher the English secret codes. On November 4, 1943, a plane from Berlin landed in Ankara with the sum of two hundred thousand pounds sterling on board. This treasure was to pay the spy for several months. It turned out much later that these were counterfeit bills expertly produced by a secret agency of the Reich’s espionage services.
In the course of the fall of 1943 and the following winter, Cicero turned over large quantities of invaluable information to the Germans. Ambassador von Papen considered him a first-rate source and used him daily to supply material for his diplomatic cables to Berlin. He informed Hitler in person of the existence of the Cicero file when they met in November 1943. But Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who detested von Papen, whom he saw as a rival, had every interest in minimizing the importance of the affair. “Too good to be true,” he told Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the German secret services. A trap could not be ruled out. It is thus not certain that Berlin drew all the benefit possible from the information provided by the spy in Ankara.
However, Cicero had enough to feed the curiosity of the leaders of the Reich. In particular, he provided rather detailed reports of the major summit conferences of the Allied camp in Cairo and Teheran in November and December 1943, about which Turkish leaders knew a good deal because of their close contacts with the British. Thanks to Cicero, the Germans were able to grasp the broad outlines of their enemies’ diplomatic strategy: Churchill wanted to open a front in southeastern Europe by trying (without success) to include Turkey in a vast Mediterranean offensive against Germany. The Americans did not share this view. Roosevelt was relatively uninterested in Turkey and was concentrating on an invasion of the European continent from Great Britain. Despite some not insignificant differences of opinion, the Allies’ determination to crush the Axis forces was absolute. Those German leaders who paid attention to Cicero’s revelations could have no illusions on that subject. “Cicero’s documents described with clarity the fate that awaited Germany,” Franz von Papen wrote in his memoirs after the war. “I trembled with emotion before the spectacle of the vast historical prospects opened to me by those stolen documents,” Ludwig Moyzisch wrote many years after the events.
Bern, December 1943
The Allies learned of the existence of the spy in Ankara thanks to “George Wood.” The first mention of Cicero in an Allied document followed another visit to Bern by Fritz Kolbe, which took place over the Christmas holiday. Kolbe brought to the Americans from Berlin a series of cables, some of which came from the German embassy in Ankara. Among the documents that Allen Dulles transmitted to Washington, several mentioned the existence of Cicero.
On December 29, OSS Bern sent to Washington headquarters a coded message mentioning the name of Cicero, with no explanation of the nature of this mysterious source. A few days later, in a cable sent on New Year’s Day 1944, Allen Dulles provided details for his Washington colleagues, referring to a series of documents “on which Milit [Ambassador von Papen] clearly placed great value and which, seemingly, were taken from the Zulu [British] Embassy through a source designated as Cicero.” These details, Dulles added, had been immediately turned over to the British intelligence services based in Switzerland (designated as 521 in OSS language), for transmission to London.
On learning of the content of the information provided by Cicero, the leadership of the Allied intelligence services felt a chill: the spy had given his German contacts a list of documents prepared by the “Zulu ambassador” (Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen) in preparation for the second Cairo conference of early December 1943, a conference that had unsuccessfully considered Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of the Allies. Also included in the “deliveries” by the Ankara spy was a Foreign Office memorandum dated October 7, 1943 with the title “A Long-Range View of Turkish-British Policy.” All the steps taken by the English to encourage Turkey’s entry into the war were set out in detail. These ultraconfidential materials had been transmitted by von Papen to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin (Grand), between November 3 and 5, 1943.
The identity of Cicero, and what exactly the Germans knew through him, were questions that reached the highest levels of the Allied command during the first weeks of 1944. But the British were slow to react. They waited until the end of January before asking Dulles to ask his Berlin agent for “additional available messages from the Cicero sources.” Almost a month later, they asked for more details about the exact time of the November cables. On January 10, 1944, OSS Bern informed London and Washington that “Wood is ignorant of the identity of Cicero.” Several weeks later, in late February 1944, Dulles wrote: “We are informed by Wood that there is no way of finding out who Cicero is or where the information about Cairo and Teheran originated. He suggests, in connection with this, that the leak might have come from an Albanian-born private secretary of Inönü whom the President took with him to Cairo.” Although fairly close to reality, these details were not sufficient to identify the spy.
Feeling the vise tighten around him, Elyeza Bazna left his position in March 1944. Since mid-January 1944, the British had been actively looking for the source of the leak. At the very moment that Allen Dulles had informed Washington and London of the existence of a mole in the British embassy in Ankara—at the very beginning of January 1944—Ambassador Knatchbull-Hugessen had learned from his Turkish interlocutors that von Papen “knew too much to be honest.” Two British counterespionage agents were sent to Ankara to carry out an investigation in his entourage. In Bern, Allen Dulles had asked them to be discreet and to behave as though the visit were a routine inspection. His concern was to protect his source, Fritz Kolbe, who might be identified by the Germans in case the network were dismantled. The two British agents also had to deal tactfully with the extreme sensitivity of the British ambassador, who could not understand how his embassy could be under suspicion. The detectives questioned Elyeza Bazna but found him too stupid and too ill at ease in English to consider him a suspect.
The Cicero affair could have been a disaster if the leak had not been discovered in time thanks to “George Wood.” “Nothing indicates that the Germans got from Cicero the slightest detail about the plan for a landing in Europe, except perhaps the code name of the operation: Overlord,” Dulles wrote after the war.
Berlin, December 1943
After his October visit to Bern, Fritz thought that it would be a long time before he would be able to come back. Nor did Allen Dulles expect to see him again. It had been agreed that Fritz would thenceforth send what he knew through his friend Albert Bur, the surgeon from Alsace. This complicated means of transmission was probably never used.
Berlin was in a state of chaos. The bombing was more and more terrible. Late November was particularly hard, with thousands of dead, more than two hundred thousand people made homeless, and tens of thousands of buildings destroyed. The central neighborhoods of Alexanderplatz and Charlottenburg (Fritz’s neighborhood) were the most heavily damaged. Railroad stations were one of the favorite targets of the flying fortresses. Even the zoo was hit. A bomb landed directly on the crocodile house during the night of November 23. There were rumors of wild animals roaming through the streets of the city.
The Foreign Ministry was the target of several destructive raids. Only the offices on the second floor could still be used. That winter some of the chandeliers in the ministry began to resemble fountains. The carpets were saturated with water. Pieces of cardboard were hung in the windows in place of glass. It was cold. The diplomats worked with their coats on. Some of the ministry’s departments were evacuated to Silesia. But most heads of departments remained in Berlin, and Fritz Kolbe, as a result, also stayed in the capital of the Reich.
The Charité hospital, where Maria Fritsch lived, had not emerged unharmed from the rain of fire. “All the windows were broken,” wrote the surgeon Adolphe Jung in his notes for December 1943. “Most of the window frames and doors were torn out. Curtains and camouflage cloths for the windows, torn out as well. Cabinets opened and overturned. Plaster fallen from ceilings and walls. A strong wind full of smoke and soot blew through the corridors and the rooms open on all sides…. All the patients were in the cellars. The laundry and storage rooms were emptied out and the patients’ beds set out in them. Long rows of beds were in the corridors, men, women, and soldiers all mixed together.”
Basic goods and services were growing increasingly scarce. Life was constantly punctuated by collections for the community: cloth, old paper, shoes, materials of all kinds, including animals (particularly dogs, requisitioned for the army). Coal was in short supply. It was forbidden to run water during air raids; it had to be kept in reserve to fight fires. But this was not always enough: “Here and there a fire hose, handled by soldiers or firemen, threw jets of water on the houses,” wrote Adolphe Jung. “The water came from the Spree through long pipes in the depths of the river, because, of course, the usual pipes, less than an hour after the bombing, had no more pressure. Even in cellars, you could barely get a small quantity of water.”
Half the time, Fritz Kolbe and his close friends were in the shelters. “Life in a bunker,” he said himself of the winter nights of 1943 spent in underground shelters with stale air. You could never be without your civil defense kit, the content of which was strictly determined by the administration: a suitcase containing clothing, extra linen, shoe care products, a sewing kit, a bar of soap and a package of crackers for each person, a container of milk, sugar, oatmeal, a bottle of water, a small saucepan, plates and utensils, and matches. A pitiful set of provisions. In any event, the shelters provided only relative safety: “Cases of violent death were reported when the outside of a shelter was hit by a bomb with no damage to the interior. Some people are said to have fallen, bleeding from the nose and the mouth, dying from a fractured skull. This was caused by the impact transmitted directly to a head leaning against the bunker wall,” according to Adolphe Jung.
Berliners thus lived from day to day, in the expectation of imminent death. But life continued nevertheless. Professor Sauerbruch and his friends in the Wednesday Club continued to meet to discuss various subjects once or twice a month. In addition to a noteworthy presentation by the physicist Werner Heisenberg on “The Evolution of the Concept of Reality in Physics” (June 30, 1943), the year was marked by a presentation by the former ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, on “The Personality of King Alexander of Yugoslavia” (December 15, 1943). The members of the club appreciated more than ever the friendly atmosphere of their meetings. One evening at Sauerbruch’s, the austere Ulrich von Hassell even stood unsteadily on a table and started singing old student songs.
A distinct relaxation of social constraints began to be noticed almost everywhere. After the summer of 1943, with the massive movement of families to the countryside, Berlin had become a city of bachelors. From boozy evenings to passing flirtations, men had decided to take advantage of life. “If their wives only knew!” wrote the journalist Ursula von Kardorff. Money no longer had much importance; tips had never been so generous in the cafés and restaurants that were still open. The center of this slightly decadent social life was the Adlon Hotel, near the Brandenburg Gate. In addition, a large foreign population had given the capital of the Reich a new face. Forced labor had brought people from around Europe to replace the Germans who were at the front. From workers to doctors, all professions were represented. Berlin was in the process of becoming a kind of involuntary melting pot.
The leaders of the Reich no longer knew what to come up with to mobilize the population for a “fanatical” drive toward “final victory.” In December, a directive from Goebbels required journalists to banish the word “catastrophe” from their vocabulary.
Bern, late December 1943
Meanwhile in Washington and London, “George Wood” began to be of real interest. Some secret service figures wanted to ask the Berlin agent questions on precise points. But Dulles informed his OSS colleagues in Washington: “Impossible now to ask 805 more questions without incurring risk, unless he comes back, which is not likely.” For his part, Fritz was furious at not being able to transmit regularly to Bern everything that passed through his hands.
Suddenly, a letter written on December 18, 1943 informed the Americans of the imminent arrival of their friend from Berlin. As had been agreed in October, the message was sent in the form of an innocuous letter to Walter Schuepp, Ernst Kocherthaler’s brother-in-law. “Dear Walter, I wanted to tell you that we are still alive despite the latest bombing. Apart from a few broken windows, nothing happened to us. I take the opportunity to tell you that I will probably be at your house on 27 December. So, save a piece of the Christmas goose for me! Say hello to Ernesto and his family. Merry Christmas!” Fritz had written this letter, signed “Georges” (sic), in Berlin but had given it to a diplomatic courier on assignment to Bern, and it bore a Swiss postmark of 21 December. As soon as he received it, Walter Schuepp passed it on to Ernst Kocherthaler, who immediately sent a telegram to Gerald Mayer: “I have heard from a friend abroad that he will probably be in Bern on the 27th… Since I should by no means miss him, I’m going to be there then, at 13:09. If you could be there too we could talk over our pending business.”
Fritz had managed to secure an assignment to Switzerland. This was his third visit to Bern since August. Because of the holidays at the end of the year, there was no other candidate for the trip. By going, he was doing a service for Fräulein von Heimerdinger, to whom he confessed that he was going “to talk to German émigré circles in Switzerland,” no longer attempting to justify his trip by the formalities of his divorce. The only difficulty was to provide a motive for this new absence to his boss, Karl Ritter, who finally signed his orders and asked Fritz to bring back a box of good cigars from Brazil, which he paid for, as usual, in advance. It took Fritz two days to travel from Berlin to Bern. The Anhalter Bahnhof had been bombed: the building was still standing but all the tracks had been destroyed. He had to go to Potsdam to take the train.
Fritz stayed in Bern over the holidays. Every night, he saw the Americans for many hours. It was on the occasion of this trip that he gave Allen Dulles von Papen’s cables alluding to Cicero, along with many other things. Allen Dulles and Gerald Mayer had never had to absorb so much information all at once. Fritz had brought more than two hundred documents, not only copies of cables but also handwritten notes that only Ernst Kocherthaler was able to decipher.
In the course of this third meeting with Kolbe, the Americans gathered information of all kinds. Night after night, Fritz unleashed a torrent of information. Revelations of a military nature were particularly interesting. Kolbe indicated the location of a Junkers factory where engines for the new Messerschmitt 262 were assembled, the first jet plane in the Luftwaffe (in Dessau, south of Berlin). He also provided one of the places where the new secret German rockets were stored. Fritz Kolbe did not know the name of these weapons, but Professor Sauerbruch had spoken to him of a site where he had seen launching pads aimed at England when he was traveling in Belgium. This was probably Helfaut-Wizernes, near Saint-Omer in the northern part of France that had been annexed to Belgium. The position was bombed some weeks later (from March 11 to September 1, 1944), although it is not known whether the information provided by Fritz had helped to identify the target.
Fritz Kolbe was well informed about the results of the most recent Allied bombing in Germany and the rest of Europe. He spoke at length about the ruins of Berlin and described daily life in the capital of the Reich. He revealed that the oil fields of Ploesti in Rumania had resumed production after being heavily bombed in August 1943. He also spoke of atrocities committed in the occupied countries. A cable from Athens dated January 2, 1944 revealed, for example, that as reprisal against the resistance, all the male inhabitants of the village of Kalavrita in the Peloponnese had been massacred, including young boys.
The most substantial information provided by Kolbe concerned the international relations of the Reich, particularly its links with the members of the Axis and with neutral countries close to Germany, such as Spain and Portugal. It was clear from reading the dispatches from Berlin that that Europe was beginning to fall apart and was now held together only by force. Even fear of the Soviets was no longer a sufficient adhesive force.
With reference to Italy, the cables brought by Fritz sketched an image of a defeated country, torn in two, under the iron grip of the Nazis (the north and the capital had been occupied by the Wehrmacht since September 1943). One dispatch reported recent discussions in Belluno, in the Italian Alps, between Mussolini and the German ambassador to Rome, Rudolf Rahn. “Mussolini attacked the German scorched-earth policy in a recent discussion with Rahn. The former said that this policy would make the Italian people so angry that it would result in preventing any effective Italian cooperation in fighting alongside the Nazis.”
On Spain, one dispatch described in a few words the state of relations between the two countries: “Conti [Franco] still wants Germans to win…. Unfavorable news from battlefront bothers Conti who wants news of military developments from HQ.” To be sure, Spain was continuing to supply strategic materials to Germany—one dispatch provided the tonnage of tungsten delivered by Spain to Germany between January and September 1943 (more than seven hundred tons). These exports were disguised as “shipments of sardines,” sometimes as “shipments of oranges,” and a little later as “shipments of lead.” But Franco’s ministers were not all in agreement about continuing these exports and some were beginning to think that it was time to shift to the side of the Allies. At the same time, Baron Oswald von Hoyningen-Huene, the Reich’s envoy to Lisbon, was warning Berlin that Portugal intended to increase the prices for its raw materials (tungsten, especially) shipped to Germany.
The Americans were probably a little disappointed that Fritz had brought so little material coming from Japan. But there was an interesting cable from Tokyo, dated December 20, 1943, in which the German ambassador reported that he had heard that “Stalin has recently been a victim of ‘Herzasthma’ and his physicians have urged that he take a rest.”
The hesitations of central European countries that were allied with Berlin appeared openly. All of a sudden, thanks to Kolbe, it was possible to see the gradual crumbling of Hitler’s alliances, prelude to a direct assumption of power by the Reich authorities. Bulgaria and Rumania seemed to be the first to want to change sides. Sofia, October 29, 1943: “The state of mind of the Bulgarian population is growing much worse.” Bucharest, November 1943: “The situation in Rumania is becoming serious. The arms supplied by Germany remain in the country and are not used in the fight against Russia.” Indications of gradual detachment by each of these allied countries proliferated in the press (there were no more attacks on Stalin, war propaganda grew weaker, and there was better treatment of the Jews, according to the documents provided by Kolbe). With reference to Hungary, Fritz delivered more ambiguous reports. “Hungary remains firmly on the side of the Reich. What can the Americans offer us? Guarantee our borders?” explained Otto Hatz, a high official in the Hungarian intelligence services in mid-December.
Many documents had to do with France. Fritz Kolbe allowed them to see, almost day by day, the serious crisis of confidence in the fall of 1943 between Vichy and the Reich, which would lead to increased control by Berlin over the regime and the gradual establishment of a “militia state.” In late October 1943, the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, revealed to Ribbentrop that Pétain was trying to make contact with the Allies. The marshal’s immediate entourage was subject to intensified suspicion on the part of the Germans. Conversely, Pierre Laval enjoyed the confidence of the German authorities and was constantly seeking Berlin’s support in his struggle for influence against Pétain. In addition, in a conversation with Roland Krug von Nidda, Otto Abetz’s representative at Vichy, on October 27, 1943, “he requested that he be allowed to undertake the job of cleaning up Pétain’s group of associates.” Another cable signed by Otto Abetz on December 3 considered the possibility of forcing Pétain to resign without directly offending French public opinion. “For French consumption,” Abetz wrote, “it is essential to show that Pétain failed in an historic mission and led the country almost to ruin…. Inside France, the Pétain regime produced national stagnation and reaction.”
Abetz wrote again on December 14, 1943: “The increasing poverty of the French laboring masses has created the fear of a gradual shift toward communism.” And on December 16: “Doriot’s headquarters imply that they do not wish to participate in the government unless the Cabinet is selected by Doriot himself.” And on December 19, a dispatch provided a statistical summary of attacks committed by the French Resistance. The figures gave evidence of a continuous increase.
And then there was an astonishing document dated December 24, 1943: a list of thirty-five prominent French personalities that the Gestapo proposed to have arrested, although it had not been able to reach its goal, “the various German authorities not having succeeded in coming to an agreement” on those arrests. As a consequence, Otto Abetz decided to send the list to Berlin in order to get definitive instructions from his ministry. The list, presented in alphabetical order, contained no names of political figures, except for that of a former minister, Lucien Lamoureux, characterized as an “active radical-socialist” but defended by the German military authorities against the Gestapo. Principally targeted were the mayors of a certain number of French towns characterized as “opponents of collaboration,” “pro-Jewish Gaullists,” “Freemasons,” or even “members of the Rotary Club.” The mayors of Caen, Rennes, Rouen, Poitiers, Abbeville, Lunéville, Versailles, Fontainebleau, Chartres, Pontivy, and even Vichy were suspected. There were also some prefects (Alpes-Maritimes, Hérault, Calvados). But in every case Ambassador Abetz or the military occupation authorities pointed out that there was no evidence of an offense and refused to authorize the arrests. There were also important figures from the world of finance, such as Henri Ardant, the influential president of the Société Générale (the Gestapo denounced his “anti-German attitude,” but the military authorities defended him) and Yves Bréart de Boisanger, governor of the Bank of France (called “disloyal” by the Gestapo, but Hans-Richard Hemmen, the Reich’s delegate for economic and financial questions to the French authorities, opposed his arrest. There were also several actors: Jean-Louis Barrault, Marie Bell, Béatrice Bretty (“the embassy expresses reservations, because they are politically insignificant; very much appreciated as artists”), and personalities of the intellectual world like the publisher Jean Fayard, whom the embassy defended because he had “published books favorable to National Socialism before the war.” In the end, the composition of this “blacklist” had no consequences. The weakness of the accusations, the competition among the different occupation authorities, and the complexity of the protective networks were stronger than the Gestapo.
Bern/Berlin, early January 1944
Because of the holiday at the end of the year, Fritz had stayed an entire week in Bern. He returned to Berlin on Sunday, January 2. Later, speaking of this trip, he remembered that he had returned home in a state of advanced fatigue, “not at all rested or rejuvenated, but pale with exhaustion, having gone without sleep for several nights, and always a little nervous.” The last adjective is a euphemism: Every time he returned to Germany, Fritz was terrified at the idea of being picked up by the Gestapo when he got off the train. But this time again, he could return home as though nothing had happened.
In Bern, the Americans were staggering under the workload. Every night between Christmas and New Year’s Day had been spent talking with Kolbe. During the day, Allen Dulles and Gerald Mayer wrote summaries that they immediately turned over to their technical staff for coding. Dulles made several reports to Washington after each of his conversations with “Wood.” He used some general elements of analysis to supply material for his telephone conversations with Washington headquarters, which took place every evening in the form of news flashes. Cables went off day and night. On the basis of the “secret cables of the Reich” (geheime Reichssachen) brought by Fritz, the Kappa messages were developed for London and Washington. Once there, they would be reworked and summarized under the name of “Boston series.” As usual, the OSS Bern experts had to be particularly careful to disguise all proper names. Von Papen became Milit and Sükrü Saracoglu, the Turkish prime minister, Harem. Numan Menemencioglu, the foreign minister, was Penni. Otto Köcher, the German envoy to Bern, was called Lomax, and Switzerland was designated as Rasho.In the period from Christmas to the middle of January, OSS Bern was working at top speed. It took at least two weeks after every visit from Kolbe to digest all the documents that he had brought.
To get the materials from “George Wood” to London and Washington, the Americans had had access to a new means of communication since the fall of 1943. Of course, the telegraph remained the favored means of transmission—there was nothing faster or more secure. But since the liberation of Corsica in October, Allied troops were no longer very far from Switzerland, and OSS contacts in the Resistance made it possible to transmit documents through Geneva, Lyon, and Marseille to Calvi or Bastia. This system was useful for conveying copies of original documents or maps. Files were first microfilmed. Then the precious little package was given to a locomotive engineer on the train between Geneva and Lyon. The railroad man placed the package in a little hatch above the boiler, ready to destroy it quickly in case of an untimely visit from the Gestapo. In Lyon, a “friend” received the envelope and carried it to Marseille by bicycle. From there, a fishing boat took it to Corsica, where it was put on board a plane for Algiers, then on to London and Washington. Between the departure and the arrival of the package, ten to twelve days went by.
The quantity and quality of documents supplied by “George Wood” in the course of this Christmas visit considerably increased his credibility. Even before Fritz’s departure for Berlin, Allen Dulles had taken up his pen to sum up their third encounter: “I now firmly believe in his good faith and am ready to stake my reputation that they are genuine. I base my conclusion on internal evidence and on the nature of the documents themselves,” he wrote on December 29, 1943 to his usual correspondents in the OSS. In Washington as well, they were beginning to become convinced of the good faith of the Berlin agent. “Seemingly authentic and vastly more interesting,” was now the word in General Donovan’s entourage (telegram from Washington headquarters to the OSS London office, 7 January 1944).
On January 10, the head of the OSS decided to present the first fourteen Kappa/Boston cables to President Roosevelt. The file was extremely confidential, and its distribution correspondingly restricted: There was a copy for the White House, another for the State Department, one for the War Department, and one for the Navy. And then a few selected items were given to one or another department of the OSS, especially counterespionage (X-2), but also the research and analysis department. A few fragments were communicated to the army intelligence services (G2). In all, no more than about ten people were kept informed of the revelations from “George Wood.”
Berlin/Bern, February–March 1944
It was impossible for Fritz to return to Switzerland after his long stay at Christmas. Too many absences would have been noticed. To get around the difficulty, he approached a colleague who had had the good fortune, in early 1944, to be placed on a list of regular couriers for Bern. A member of the Nazi Party, Willy Pohle had all the requisite qualities for the position. But Fritz trusted him, knowing that he could give him his personal correspondence with no fear. Fritz even dared to tell him, as he had already confided in Fräulein von Heimerdinger, that he wished to inform certain “German émigré circles in Switzerland” about what was really going on in Germany. Willy Pohle willingly agreed to be of service to him. After all, this kind of small gesture was common in the ministry. Fritz was able to show his gratitude. He asked his colleague to go to see Walter Schuepp in person in Bern (Gryphenhübeliweg 19), to withdraw the sum of fifty Swiss francs “due from a friend” (not telling him, of course, that this was left over from the two hundred francs given to him by Dulles). Fritz suggested to Pohle that he use some of that money for his personal expenses and that he buy cigars with the rest, in order to be able to offer some to Karl Ritter.
Professor Sauerbruch also had occasion to go to Switzerland from time to time for conferences or surgical operations. Most of the time he went to Zurich. When the opportunity arose—as it did, for example, in mid-February 1944—Fritz asked him to mail a letter to Walter Schuepp. The explanation that he gave to the surgeon was the same one he had given to Pohle: He said that he had regular connections with “German émigré circles.” Fritz would never have dared to tell the surgeon the truth.
“Sauerbruch doesn’t know what’s in the letter. If you should be in contact with him don’t give me away. He would be deeply hurt,” Fritz wrote in a letter that he passed to the Americans through Ernst Kocherthaler toward the middle of February 1944. This was a letter of eight crowded pages, seven in tight script and one typed single-spaced. Once again, Kocherthaler had to be enlisted to transcribe the script. It was cast in the form of a dialogue between two fictional figures who agreed that the outcome of the war was already decided, and it supported this thesis by a sort of survey of the world situation in which the evidence was drawn from diplomatic cables supplied by Fritz and other sources of inside information. Fritz had no doubt wanted to amuse himself by using a fictional register. Had the purpose been to conceal the nature of his message, the device was not very prudent: If a letter like this one had been opened, it would have led him to the gallows. “I passed many sleepless nights when the ‘material’ was on its way,” Fritz confessed after the war. The letter ended hurriedly: “I have to stop. Too bad. What good are these air raids?”
In Bern, this letter troubled and confused Allen Dulles: “It is hard to decipher all the cases as well as to differentiate… Foreign Office documents or policy from Wood’s own opinions,” he cabled to his Washington colleagues on February 21. A few days later, Dulles explained that “this letter was written in a hurry and part of it was apparently composed during an air raid. These facts may explain the inconsistencies.”
Despite a few false notes, Allen Dulles managed to draw out of Fritz’s letter a series of interesting indications on certain very sensitive matters. German agents stationed in Ireland were providing a series of precise observations about military sites in England (air bases, arms factories, munitions dumps). Other passages reported a reinforcement of the Atlantic Wall in France. It clearly appeared that the preparations for a vast invasion of the continent, “between April and June 1944,” were known to the Germans. But the leaders of the Reich were ignorant of the location of the future landing (“there is talk of Holland,” reported the spies based in Ireland), and nothing indicated that they knew its date.
This was not all. For the first time, Fritz provided information about Japan (Scarlet in the Kappa cables) on the basis of facts collected by the German embassy in Tokyo. He revealed in particular that Tokyo was secretly encouraging its Berlin ally to make peace with Moscow. He also transmitted information on certain Japanese positions in the Pacific (Burma and New Guinea).
Early in March, a postcard from Fritz arrived at OSS Bern through the usual diplomatic circuit. It pictured a bouquet of narcissus along with a few spring buds. At first sight, it was a warm birthday greeting addressed to Walter Schuepp, but he was born on April 28 and the card had been written on February 22—so it would seem that Fritz had been particularly early with his card. In fact, the greeting contained a hidden message. An assemblage of apparently incoherent letters had been typed on the right side of the card: D xzrfgx aqh ADX Thfokf tlhjlnlva hcy Htvkpz Alml Gsyfji Oxsuch Wkmybdcebzp. Was this simply bad typing? Fritz apologized. “A child was playing at typing just as the card was about to be sent,” and Fritz added that “unfortunately [he] had no other card available.”
This strange message was deciphered by the Americans through the code to which Fritz had given them the key during one of his previous visits to Bern. It said: “Yolland of OWI in Ankara is discussing defection to Germany with Consul Wolff in Ankara.” Fritz had not even taken the trouble to put the card in an envelope. He was confident in the indecipherability of his personal secret code. He was right. The card arrived at its destination without provoking the slightest suspicion. It had been mailed in Bern, as usual, by Willy Pohle or another of Fritz’s colleagues on a mission to the German legation in Switzerland.
Fritz’s mail was now arriving regularly in Bern. His correspondence might be hidden in a pair of shoes or in clothing, but mailings always arrived for Ernst Kocherthaler’s brother-in-law in the diplomatic pouch. Another letter soon arrived for Walter Schuepp (it had been written on March 6, 1944), with, once again, dozens of excerpts from confidential cables. “Poor fellow who has to read all that! I had real good opportunities, and I didn’t waste any of them!” Fritz wrote. Among the several “pearls” of this springtime delivery, the Americans found the summary of a conversation between the German envoy in Bern, Otto Köcher, and Marcel Pilet-Golaz, the chief of the Swiss diplomatic corps. The latter considered probable, in case of a failure of the Allied invasion, an “Anglo-German agreement” aimed at preventing the installation of a Soviet regime in Germany. Numan Menemencioglu, the Turkish foreign minister, expressed exactly the same opinion (according to a cable sent from Ankara on February 12, 1944).
Fritz Kolbe relayed certain rumors reporting tensions between the Allies. In a letter received in February, he had revealed that the German diplomatic service was interested in the anti-Soviet attitude of a certain “Dallas,” the key man in the American legation in Bern. This was, of course, Allen Dulles, whose remarks about the “excess of Soviet power” had reached the ears of Otto Abetz through Jean Jardin, former cabinet secretary to Pierre Laval who had been posted to Bern since the fall of 1943. In addition, in his letter of March 6, Fritz thought that he could say, on the basis of a recent cable from von Papen, that Roosevelt had been extremely critical of Stalin during the Teheran conference (November 28 to December 1, the first summit meeting among Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin). German diplomatic circles seemed not to exclude the possibility of a break between the Americans and the Russians, a prelude to a “compromise peace” between the Germans and the Anglo-American forces.
In relaying this kind of information, was Fritz expressing political intentions, and was he acting on behalf of a high Berlin official who wished to remain anonymous? The OSS people naturally asked themselves this kind of question. Some cables communicated by Fritz could pass for disguised political messages, such as one from January 2, 1944, written by the German envoy in Bucharest, Manfred Freiherr von Killinger. He said that, according to a Rumanian source working in Rome, “the Pope was highly perturbed and had told him that the British and Americans were paving the way for Bolshevism in Italy.”
However, the letter of March 6 helped reassure the American’s about “Wood’s” good faith. Fritz had put a second envelope inside the first, labeled “confidential/for Ernesto.” It contained four pages written in very small script. Reading with a magnifying glass, the Americans discovered a complete list of the German counterespionage service (the Abwehr) in Switzerland. Already fairly well informed on this subject, they could put this very valuable information together with what they knew from other sources and work out a nearly complete organization chart of enemy agents operating in their immediate vicinity. The most interesting was probably the information gleaned by Fritz that the Germans were unaware of the existence of the OSS office in Bern. In Berlin it was thought that the headquarters of American intelligence in Switzerland was located in Zurich.
To please Fritz and thank him for his help, the Americans answered in a code that he had himself devised. They sent to Berlin a postcard with a mountain scene, mailed from the ski resort of Parsenn, near Davos. The message was the following: “I managed to make three ski jumps. As you know, I am not a beginner. The weather is fine.” The “three successful jumps” meant that the Americans had in fact received the last three letters from Fritz. “I am not a beginner” meant that they had managed to decipher his postcard of February 22. “The weather is fine”: the information was useful. This was the best postcard Fritz had ever received.