Paddy Ashdown - Nein!

So began the career of one of World War II’s most remarkable spies.

It is often possible to gauge the importance of a spy by the number of his or her aliases. Over the next seven years this man would be known as ‘R.V.’, ‘F.M.’, ‘Agent A54’, ‘Voral’, ‘Josef Koehler’, ‘François’, ‘René’, ‘Dr Holm’, ‘Dr Steinberg’, both ‘Eva’ and ‘Peter’ ‘Teman’, ‘Jochen Breitner’, ‘Emil Schwarz’, ‘Karl’, ‘Petr Tooman’ and ‘Traitor X’. Indeed, so elusive was he that his true identity was only established beyond doubt after the war. We now know him as Paul Thümmel, one-time master baker, founder member of the Nazi Party, holder of the party’s golden badge, friend of Himmler, and in 1936 a member of Wilhelm Canaris’s Abwehr station in Dresden, which was charged with spying on Czechoslovakia.

Two days after Thümmel posted his letter, an unmarked blue envelope arrived in the office of Major Josef Bartik of the Czechoslovak intelligence service in Victory Square, Prague. It was postmarked ‘Brück’, and hand-addressed in German to the Ministry of National Defence, Intelligence Section.

When Bartik opened the envelope he found the kind of offer a spy chief can only dream of:

The author of this letter offers his services to the Czech Intelligence Service …

After this greeting, the writer, who wrote in badly-spelt German and signed himself ‘F.M.’, listed the kind of intelligence to which he had access: German intelligence requirements for 1935 and 1936; details of German infantry, armour, air force, police, Gestapo and customs units; the new organisation table of all German intelligence and security structures; the names and addresses of all the senior personnel in the Gestapo, Abwehr and civil service; and the names and codenames of German intelligence officers working on Czechoslovakia, together with their agents, wireless networks and codes. Bartik concluded from this list that the would-be spy clearly had access to information well beyond the reach of a normal junior member of the Abwehr.

Having laid out his wares, ‘F.M.’ set his terms:

1. You shall never know my name

2. I will never meet you on Czech territory

3. If measures have to be taken as a result of the information I give you must use it with extreme care and avoid making the Germans suspicious of me

4. I want 15,000 marks in German currency in old notes, 4,000 marks of which should reach me within three weeks, as I have a debt to pay off.

He ended his letter in a way which left no doubt that he was a professional in the business of spying:

I shall await your reply, poste restante, each time in a different town of Saxony and Bavaria. Your reply to this letter will determine whether I pass my information to you, or offer it to French Intelligence. I also expect to receive, with your reply, an advance to buy a camera and settle other expenses. My offer is genuine and you need have no fear that your money will be wasted. I ask you to reply … by 14 February at the latest. This does not give you much time, but I am at present in Saxony, near the frontier.

On the face of it, this was a sensational offer – almost too good to be true. And that was the problem. ‘F.M.’ was what is known in the spying trade as a ‘walk in’, and they are often used as bait for a trap.

Major Bartik was a cautious man – and he had good reason to be. He had already used just such a ploy to fool Canaris into paying huge sums for totally worthless intelligence. This coup resulted in the Abwehr chief christening his Czech opponent, not without a degree of admiration, ‘the limping devil’ because of his effectiveness and a rolling gait caused by a First World War leg wound. Not long previously, moreover, one of Bartik’s officers had been kidnapped by the Germans at a meeting with an agent close to the Czech–German border. By the time Bartik finally got his man back, he had been so badly tortured by the Gestapo that he had to be confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life.

Bartik’s reply to F.M. was guarded:

Sir, Your communication interests me. Although you give no guarantees, I enclose the advance you asked for. The money is yours even if you fail to supply the information promised in your letter. The total sum will be paid within three weeks if you permit us to examine the material. Please reply to the following address: Karl Schimek, Prague XIX Dostalova 16.

Thus began the cautious minuet played out between spy-master and potential spy, as each tries to assess the balance of advantage and risk involved in a relationship. Finally, after much to-ing and fro-ing, Bartik agreed to meet F.M. at 8.30 on the evening of Saturday, 4 April at a deserted steam mill set amongst trees, fifty metres on the Czech side of the frontier with Germany and close to the village of Vejprty.

It was a cold night, with low cloud and misty rain blown along on a boisterous breeze. The wind buffeted a loose flap on the corrugated-iron roof of the mill, making it bang loudly. The street lamps hanging on wires in the middle of the village roads swung in wild circles, sending strange shadows lurching out in all directions. Two of Bartik’s men, armed with pistols, stood in a deep pool of blackness on one side of the mill, and a little way back, tucked discreetly in a copse of trees, were three cars containing Bartik and half a dozen of his men armed with automatics. The Vejprty church clock struck 8.30. Somewhere a dog barked, and very shortly afterwards a shape emerged from the trees and started up the road. He was sturdily built, walked with the gait of a young man, but cautiously, wore dark clothes and a beret, and carried a haversack.

Bartik’s two watchers left the shadows, and in a few paces had joined the man on the road.

‘ Grüss Gott ,’ said the stranger in a low voice.

‘Give the password,’ was the sharp retort.

‘ Altvater .’

Bartik’s men escorted their charge to the Czech intelligence chief sitting in his car, its engine purring quietly amongst the trees. Safely ensconced in the back seat, the night traveller took several documents from his haversack and handed them to Bartik to examine under the feeble illumination of the car’s roof-light. The papers mostly dealt with the organisational structure of the Abwehr offices in Dresden, Munich and Breslau. But they also included some interesting local Gestapo reports. Bartik sent one of the waiting cars with the documents to the police station in Louny, seventy kilometres distant, where they were carefully photographed. Meanwhile, Bartik himself drove his new charge to an army barracks twenty kilometres away at Komotau for further debriefing. Over the next three hours Thümmel was closely questioned about his background, identity and motives. On the face of it, his story sounded convincing. He claimed to be ‘Jochen Breitner’, a former draughtsman and photographer who worked as a civilian in the Dresden Abwehr office, and said he was offering his services as a spy because he needed the money to marry a girl working as a clerk in the same office. It was his girl, he added, who had access to documents of interest because of her work in the Abwehr registry. His interrogators were impressed by ‘Breitner’s’ quick-wittedness, and swiftly concluded that they were dealing with the genuine article, a trained intelligence agent, not an agent provocateur. Bartik assigned his new agent the codename by which he would be known – ‘A54’. As the first streaks of dawn began to lighten the sky, the Czech spy chief dropped his new recruit back at the old steam mill and watched as he vanished into the trees in the direction of the German frontier.

Bartik’s haul from his new recruit that night was not high-grade. But it was interesting, for it indicated not just Thümmel’s seriousness, but also his access. Over the next months Thümmel proved himself a reliable, professional and productive source. One piece of information he gave Bartik in this period was of special value to the Czechs – full details of the network of spies, secret radios and codes which Canaris’s men were setting up amongst the German-speaking population of Czech Sudetenland. Thanks to deciphered messages from this source, Bartik was able to warn the Czech government a week or so before the Anschluss that SS regiments were gathering on the Austrian border, preparing to march on Vienna. Apart from this, Thümmel’s ‘intelligence product’ for the next year was in the main low-level, low-grade and local, consistent with his apparent position as a medium-level officer in one of Canaris’s many Abwehr outstations across Germany.