Lucas Delattre - A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich

Fritz asked the Americans if they could give him a revolver, but Dulles and Mayer thought that a firearm would only worsen his case if he were caught. Fritz was disappointed, but in any case he had what he needed in Berlin—in a drawer at home he kept a little revolver that he had brought back from South Africa, and he counted on using it on the day when the Gestapo came to arrest him.

The return train trip from Bern to Berlin went off without incident or air raids. He left on Thursday afternoon and arrived in Berlin the following morning. Among the diplomatic cables he was carrying in his briefcase was one from the chief of the German legation in Switzerland, Otto Köcher, telling Ribbentrop that Swiss neutrality would be preserved at all costs. “Switzerland cannot join the Allied cause,” he wrote in this cable of October 7, 1943. It was known in Berlin that the Americans were putting pressure on Switzerland, whose airfields they wanted to use for raids on Germany. Otto Köcher was well informed: The leaders in Bern had no intention of quarreling with Germany.

London, November 1943

Colonel David K. E. Bruce, head of the OSS in London, was a multimillionaire, a Democrat, and the son of a senator and son-in-law of Andrew Mellon, the American steel magnate and former secretary of the treasury. All information coming from Europe passed through him and his services before being communicated to OSS headquarters in Washington. In late November 1943, David Bruce received a note from Norman Holmes Pearson, his colleague in charge of counterespionage (X-2) in London. This eight-page note concerned Fritz Kolbe (“Subject: Wood case”). This was a synthesis of everything that had been written by the Americans and the English since early August about “George Wood.”

The document was full of mistakes, including in the presentation of facts: “On 16.8.43 an individual known as Wood appeared in Geneva carrying a diplomatic bag from the German FO…. His first approach was through a German Jew named Kochenthaler.” In this note, Fritz Kolbe was presented as a “somewhat naïve and romantic idealist” who “made no special effort to find out which of the cables were of special interest,” but who “made no attempt to lead the conversation into any particular channels.”

Dansey’s theory, according to which Kolbe was a navy officer who had been a double agent in the 1920s, was reiterated as a plausible hypothesis. What could be concealed behind “George Wood”? A German attempt to decipher the OSS Bern messages? To avoid this risk, everything had been done to confuse matters: none of the cables transmitted by “Wood” had been transcribed and “sent in the German text or even a literal English translation summary of the original cable,” in communications between Bern and London. Every proper name had been changed, whether of people or places. “We are keeping close watch on cipher security in re-wording,” Dulles wrote in one of his secret messages to Washington. In accordance with these elementary precautions, the word Grand meant the German foreign minister, Porto designated a German foreign embassy or legation, Grimm was used for Germany or German, Zulu was the equivalent of the United Kingdom, Red was France, Storm designated the German legation in Bern, Vinta was Ribbentrop, Apple was Otto Abetz, Fat Boy was Göring… Hitler had no alias.

Another hypothesis: “Wood” was working for a sophisticated operation aimed at drawing the Americans into a trap. He came to Bern only to awaken their interest in order to be in a better position to deceive them a little later on. That could not be ruled out. But an analysis of Wood’s messages did not provide anything, for the moment, to support that hypothesis. “To the contrary, a certain amount of interesting material from an X-2 [counterespionage] point of view has been revealed.”

In particular, Fritz Kolbe had provided material to help identify “Josephine,” a mysterious mole well placed in London who was providing high-class information to the Germans. Thanks to “Wood” and the Ultra machine, the British identified the spy, about whom they knew that he was supervised at a distance by the Abwehr office in Stockholm. The British secret services discovered that “Josephine” was the Swedish naval attaché in London, Johann Gabriel Oxenstierna, a diplomat who was particularly well informed about the movements and preparations of the Royal Navy.

Count Oxenstierna was not himself an agent of the Reich, but his professional mail was read at the defense ministry in Stockholm by a secretary who was working for the Germans. The Abwehr’s liaison agent in Stockholm was Karl-Heinz Krämer, known as “Hektor” in the secret German documents. In September 1943, London demanded that the Swedish authorities recall the naval attaché. They reacted sharply and took several months to accede to the demand. Finally, Count Oxenstierna was expelled in the spring of 1944. A certain number of high British officials, who had been particularly talkative in their discussions with “Josephine,” were disciplined.

Fritz Kolbe’s credibility was no doubt increased by the discovery of “Josephine.” However, in early November, the number-two of the British secret services, Claude Dansey, asserted that “there is nothing in them [Wood’s cables] which could affect the course of the war.” Others, beginning with Allen Dulles, were less categorical. Fritz Kolbe had enabled the Americans to put pressure on Ireland to put an end to German espionage activities in that country. The Dublin authorities had been urged to confiscate a clandestine radio transmitter, the existence of which Kolbe had revealed. Moreover, Kolbe made it possible to verify the impact of some of the Allied bombing of major German cities. For example, he provided the official Nazi report of bombings on October 2 and 3, 1943: “EMDEN: 20 bombs struck the Nordsee Werfte. MUNICH: IG Farben has been severely hit, also Dynamit AG, Allgemeine Transport Gesellschaft, Metzeler Gummi Werke… Slaughterhouse and main railway station were also hit. KASSEL: damage was done to Panzer locomotives and howitzers at the Herschel Werke. Junkers factory was not hit.”

In order to determine whether “Wood” was trustworthy, each document that he provided was closely scrutinized by the OSS in London. The files were transmitted to Washington with long commentaries. Paragraph by paragraph, word by word, everything was gone over with a fine-tooth comb and weighed against information derived from other sources. “Paragraph 1 is probable but hard to verify,” “paragraph 2 had been verified, its content is accurate,” “paragraph 3 is correct,” and so on. While the Allies had still not ruled out the possibility of a trap, they nevertheless thought it less and less likely. Nothing in “Wood’s” attitude led them to detect suspect behavior. If this was a game of deception, “it will have been far and away the most elaborate deceptive strategy so far known either to British or American counterespionage services,” wrote Norman Pearson in his November 23, 1943 memorandum.

“Wood’s” motivations seemed to be purely individual. “On the whole,” Pearson went on, “it seems likely that whether or not Wood is acting as he does from the ideological motives he professes, and despite the fact that he is unwilling to receive any money for his services, he is at the same time not unaware that after the Defeat some special consideration might be accorded to him.” The conclusion was chilling: “The habits of rats on sinking ships are well known.”

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.