Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

‘And what then?’ demanded Swift. ‘How did she help the war effort? Did she start bumping off people in the middle of the night?’

‘Hardly,’ answered Hansard. ‘Remember, she could speak German, and we had known all along that the occupation government would need people who were fluent in that language as well as in French. She volunteered and, sure enough, they put her to work.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Nothing too onerous. Typing out translations of public notices. Things like that.’

‘Doesn’t sound like much of a return on our investment.’

‘The thing about being a translator is that, sooner or later, an important document is going to end up on your desk. The people who give it to you might not think it contains any vital information, but even the smallest fragment of intelligence can be built up into something useful over time. Before leaving Beaulieu, she had been given a wireless set which she used for transmitting the information back to England.’

‘And how did we manage to get her to Berlin?’

‘We didn’t,’ said Hansard. ‘The Germans did that by themselves, and we have one man in particular to thank for that. His name is Hermann Fegelein. Before the war, his family managed a riding school down in Bavaria. In the early 1930s, Fegelein joined the Nazi Party and went on to command an SS Cavalry Division on the Eastern Front. In early 1944, he got assigned to Himmler’s private staff as a liaison officer. One of the first places Himmler sent him was Paris. When Fegelein got there, he demanded a secretary who was fluent in German and French from the occupation government.’

‘And they gave her Simonova?’

‘Not right away,’ said Hansard. ‘He sacked the first two people he was offered, probably because he didn’t like the look of them. The thing about Fegelein is that he considers himself a real ladies’ man and it wasn’t until they sent him Simonova that he was finally satisfied. When Fegelein left Paris a couple of months later, she went with him.’

‘As his mistress?’

Hansard shook his head. ‘Only as his private secretary, although I dare say he might have other plans for her in the future. In the meantime, Fegelein has become a go-between for Hitler and Himmler; the two most powerful men in the Third Reich. He was, and still is, present at Hitler’s daily meetings with his High Command. Whatever’s going on, he knows about it.’

‘And so does Simonova, by the sound of it.’

‘Fegelein is no fool. Even if he did trust Simonova, he would not knowingly have given her access to secrets of national importance. More likely, he just gossiped with her about all the various goings-on in Hitler’s entourage. But even gossip has its value and we started broadcasting it back to the Germans, as soon as we had set up the Black Boomerang operation.’

‘You mean the radio station? The one that was supposed to be coming out of Calais?’

‘Yes,’ said Hansard, ‘and after that out of Paris and now they’re broadcasting as Sender Station Elbe or something. Of course, their location never actually changed. They’re in some manor house in Hampshire, I believe, although the operation is so secret that even I’m not sure of the exact location. Thousands of German soldiers and civilians tune into that station every day. It’s the most reliable network they’ve got, and if somebody told them it was run by us, they probably wouldn’t believe it. By airing all those bits of gossip from Hitler’s inner circle, we not only dishearten the listeners, we intrigue them. Everybody likes gossip, especially the kind we’re serving up. But there’s an even greater value to this information,’ Hansard went on. ‘Even if the High Command denies the stories, they know perfectly well it’s the truth. And that means they know we have a source’ – with his thumb and index finger, Hansard measured out a tiny space in front of him – ‘this close to Hitler himself.’

‘I understand all this,’ said Swift, ‘but what I can’t quite grasp is why we are going to such lengths to rescue an agent who, for all intents and purposes, is running a Berlin society page! At my meeting with Stalin and Pekkala I said what you told me to say – that we value the lives of all our agents in the field. But you and I both know that we have cut our losses before, and with agents more valuable than this one.’

‘And I suspect we would have done the same with Simonova if it wasn’t for the fact that HQ back in England seems to think that she can get her hands on something extremely important.’

‘And what is that?’

Hansard sighed and shook his head. ‘Damned if I know, but it must be bloody important for us to go down on bended knee in front of Stalin and beg for the Russians to help us.’ With that, he fished a pocket watch out of his waistcoat pocket.

Swift correctly understood this as a sign that he should take his leave. He stood up and buttoned his jacket. ‘I’ll let you know if we hear anything from Pekkala.’

Hansard nodded. ‘Fingers crossed.’

After sending his message to the Reichschancellery, General Hagemann immediately began organising a trip to Berlin. Once there, he planned to personally deliver all the details of his latest triumph to Adolf Hitler.

But even before he could locate any transport, a plane arrived at the Peenemunde landing strip, with orders to take him immediately to Hitler’s headquarters, where he had been ordered to explain the disappearance of his test rocket.

Hagemann was stunned. It appeared that whatever good news he had hoped to bring about the success of the Diamond Stream device had already been trumped by the missing V-2. God help me, thought Hagemann, if that rocket is anywhere except the bottom of the sea.

Within an hour of receiving the message, the general was on his way to Berlin. There had not even been time to pack an overnight bag. The only thing he had managed to grab from his office, located in a requisitioned farmhouse not far from the ruins of the Peenemunde test facility, was a large leather tube containing schematics of the V-2’s guidance system. These diagrams, painstakingly laid out by draughtsmen assigned to the programme, were a vital part of any presentation Hagemann gave to the High Command. To the untrained eye, they represented an indecipherable scaffolding of blue-veined lines, criss-crossed with arterial red pointers, indicating the names and specification numbers of the system’s multitude of parts.

This was not the first time Hagemann had faced the wrath of the German High Command and he had come to rely upon the indecipherability of his blueprints to baffle and intimidate his fellow generals. The less they understood, the more they would be forced to rely upon Hagemann’s optimistic predictions, and it was these which had kept the V-2 programme alive.

Hitler, on the other hand, seemed to love the labyrinthine complexity of the diagrams. With the schematics laid out in front of him, he would sweep his hands almost lovingly across the skeletal lines of the rocket, demanding explanations for the smallest details, which Hagemann was happy to provide.

The extraordinary cost of the V-2 programme, not to mention the delays caused by Allied bombing and the failure of so many experiments, had earned Hagemann many opponents. As he had been reminded many times by sceptical members of the General Staff, for the cost of every V-2 rocket, the German armaments industry could produce over five hundred Panzerfausts, the single-shot anti-tank weapons so simple and effective that they were now being issued to teams of teenage boys recruited from the Hitler Youth, whose orders were to pedal after Russian tanks on bicycles and engage the 20-ton machines in single combat.

Without Hitler’s approval, the whole endeavour would probably have been shelved years ago, but just as easily as he had kept the programme running, he could also destroy it, with nothing more than a stroke of his pen.