Codebreakers Victory (28 page)

The foremost source of intelligence reports delivered to the Moscow Central Bureau, which directed agents and volunteer informants, was a trio of transmitting groups in Switzerland that the Germans called
Die Rote Drei,
"the Red Three." While fierce debate still rages as to where the Red Three obtained their information, there is no argument that they supplied Moscow's bureau with staggering amounts of advantageous information drawn from within the highest circles of German society. The Red Three were prolific, their reports were most often accurate and their revelations pierced to the heart of the Nazis' military decisions.

Who were the individuals who made up this transmitting triumvirate? Heading up the first Switzerland-based group was a Hungarian, Sandor Rado, anagrammatically code-named Dora. A fervent Communist married to a fervent Communist, he was a paid Soviet agent. In Geneva he set up pro-USSR news agencies and then a successful mapmaking business that provided good cover for his covert operations. One of the uses he made of his cartographic skills was to prepare for his Russian masters a map showing the locations of all the munitions and armaments factories in Germany and Italy.

Rado combined forces with Otto Punter, a Swiss Communist who had organized a network of informants in Italy and Germany. His code name was Pakbo, an acronym of the principal places where he met with his confederates.

For a while Rado and Punter delivered their findings via courier, but in 1939, when the war came and Switzerland closed its borders, another devoted Communist, Ruth Kuczynski, a German woman code-named Sonia, arrived in Geneva. She had orders from Moscow to change Rado's modus operandi from couriers to radio. She subsequently recruited the owners of a radio repair shop to supply transmitters and leam Morse code.

Their teacher was an Englishman, Alexander Foote, a member of Sonia's group of agents. The second leg of the Red Three was formed when Foote was equipped with a newly built transmitter and moved to Lausanne to begin sending from there.

Unknown to Rado, another small network of Communist informants was also based in Geneva. Its head was a Polish Jew, Rachel Dubendorfer, code-named Sissy. She worked as a secretary in the International Labor Office of the League of Nations. In May 1941 Rado was ordered to meet with her and absorb this third leg of the clandestine groups serving the Soviets.

Into this web ventured the individual who became the most important informant of all. This was Rudolf Roessler, a German ruled not by Communist sympathies but by a strong Catholic faith and a consuming hatred of Hitler and the Nazis. The information he delivered to Moscow was of such importance that the Russians showered him with praise, medals and money.

What were the sources of the information transmitted by the Red Three? Rado and Punter depended on networks of agents and informants, as did Sonia. Sissy used her job in the International Labor Office to winnow out economic insights that were useful to the Soviets.

As for Roessler, he died in 1958 without ever revealing where his information came from or how he received it. His secrecy has left the door open for guesses, theories, myths and, in some cases, complete fabrication.

This much seems inarguable: during his life in Berlin, Roessler belonged to and was highly active in the Herren Klub, an exclusive circle of prominent Germans. The group included German officers who formed a conspiracy to dispose of Hitler and oust the Nazis, a cabal that became known as
Die Schwarze Kapelle,
"the Black Orchestra," picking up on the German secret service's shorthand for the clandestine organizations that kept the airwaves humming with the tunes of their illegal transmissions.

Roessler's antipathy toward the Nazis derived partly from having the successful and profitable theater business he had developed taken over by one of Hitler's henchmen. Roessler emigrated from Berlin to Lucerne, Switzerland, and established himself there as a publisher, primarily of anti-Fascist literature and of books banned by the Nazis. He began supplying the Soviets with bits of information that seemed to come from sources high up in German society, especially in the military. At first he followed a roundabout route, delivering his reports to an agent in Swiss intelligence who passed them on to the Soviets. Needing a proofreader for his business, Roessler hired Christian Schneider, not knowing that he was one of Sissy's band of informants. When Roessler and Schneider found they were two of a kind, they developed a new procedure. Roessler secured the information while Schneider acted as the go-between, carrying it to Sissy for wireless transmission to Moscow. It was agreed that Schneider would never reveal to his confederates in Switzerland that his material came from Roessler. All that Sissy, Rado and the others knew was that Schneider, who had been a minor informant, suddenly began delivering reports of great value and amazing timeliness. Even when Roessler's Moscow directors tried to order him to name his sources, he never responded. The Roessler-Schneider duo was given the code name
Lucy
because of their Lucerne location.

As to the identity of Roessler's sources, claims have been advanced for as varied a cast as top Nazi generals and even Hitler's close confidant, Martin Bormann. The CIA produced a paper advancing its theory. What matters is that Roessler's information was of decisive importance. Alexander Foote has written of it: "In fact, in the end Moscow very largely fought the war on 'Lucy's' messages—as indeed any high command would who had access to genuine information emanating in a steady flow from the high command of their enemies."

 

 

A Host of Other Informants

 

Lucy, Dora and others of the Red Three were far from the only sources dispatching secret information to the Soviets. One highly idealistic but only marginally effective source centered on two other members of the Herren Klub, Arvid Hamack and Harro Schulze-Boysen.

Hamack was a senior civil servant in the Reich Ministry of Economics. As told in Shareen Brysac's recent book
Resisting Hitler,
in his youth he studied at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Mildred Fish. When they married, she came to live with him in Germany and served as one of his anti-Nazi conspirators. While Hamack was pro-Marxist in his sympathies, he chose his dangerous course as much to alert Britain and the U.S. to the evils of Nazism as to help the Soviets.

Schulze-Boysen was a Luftwaffe lieutenant in the Reich Ministry of Aviation. A rebellious youth, he joined a revolutionary society and became editor of its newssheet,
Gegner (Opponent).
When the Nazis came to power, he made the journal more and more an anti-Nazi organ. He was seized by the secret police, thrown into an early concentration camp and tortured. His mother, from a high-placed family, got him released. He sought revenge by going underground and gathering around him a group of fellow dissidents. His job at the Aviation Ministry enabled him to obtain military information of value to the Soviets. He and his wife, Libertas, joined the Hamacks as conspirators in
Die Rote Kapelle,
"the Red Orchestra."

Until Germany went to war against the Soviets, the Harnack-Schulze-Boysen group turned their information over to Soviet runner-agents in Berlin. When the war began, they had to shift to the use of radio. Here they ran into troubles. The first transmitter the Russians delivered to them was defective; the second their inexperienced operator wrecked by connecting it to direct rather than alternating current. After early successes as informants, Hamack and Schulze-Boysen were largely reduced to aiding the cause by spreading anti-Nazi propaganda within Germany and trying to stir German factory workers to revolt.

A more effective section of the Red Orchestra was the network of informants led by Leopold Trepper, the code name for Leiba Domb, a Polish Jew who became a dedicated Communist. Trepper had served the Soviets in Palestine and France before being appointed resident director of the Russian secret service in Western Europe. Settling in Brussels, he took over a small nucleus of agents, developed his cover as a businessman marketing a line of raincoats and, as the
Grand Chef,
or "Big Chief," began building an espionage web. Moscow sent agents skilled in radio and code work to back him up. After the Germans overran Belgium in 1940, Trepper made Paris the center of his network. The successful raincoat business gave him the wealth to develop many useful friendships, including those with German officers. He kept a broad flow of information directed toward Moscow.

Still another Soviet informant was based in Tokyo. He was Richard Sorge, ostensibly working there as a German journalist but secretly a pro-Soviet agent heading up a spy ring that drew invaluable information from unsuspecting high officials in the Japanese government and the German embassy.

Add the British to the Soviet sources. As previously shown, Bletchley Park began deciphering messages of special import to the Soviets well before they became Britain's allies, and Winston Churchill overcame his personal distaste of Communism to convey the information to Stalin, always in a disguised form to protect Ultra's security. Bradley Smith, in his book
Sharing Secrets with Stalin,
has reported the on-again, off-again efforts by the British military mission in Moscow, and later by the American mission, to develop a useful exchange of intelligence with the Russians. The efforts were hampered throughout the war by mutual suspicion and distrust. The U.S. military in particular showed a penchant for assigning officers to Moscow who had a knee-jerk reaction against anything Communist. Even with these hindrances, a good deal of information of value did flow back and forth.

Another British group determined to aid the Soviets was the so-called Cambridge ring, or the "Cambridge Comintern," secret Soviet sympathizers impelled by their beliefs in Marxism. The ring's members burrowed into the heart of British intelligence and high government posts to winnow out information of use to the Soviets. It has been charged that men such as Kim Philby went so far as to reveal the names of British agents in the USSR, leading to their torture and execution.

Anthony Blunt was the kingpin, having recruited Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean. Others included John Cairncross, Leo Long and James Klugman. Although known to have been enamored of Communism in their student days, they evaded detection until well after the war. Partly this was because they took pains to disguise and seemingly to reject their true beliefs. Philby, as an example, worked as a journalist covering the Spanish civil war on the Fascist side and actually received a decoration from the victorious dictator, Francisco Franco.

At first the Cambridge ring had to overcome the same Russian mistrust encountered by Churchill and the British missions. In
The Crown Jewels,
Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev have documented from Russian archives that Moscow suspected that the entire Cambridge group were double agents under British control, assigned to pass disinformation to the Soviets. But in time the sheer volume and value of the documents the ring delivered to their contacts in London swept away doubts.

Philby progressed to the top ranks of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, a position that empowered him to receive many Bletchley Park decrypts and to read the SIS sourcebooks, which included the names of British spies in Russia. Blunt wormed his way into the counterespionage branch, a rich source of information about the personnel and working methods of British intelligence, and revealed Bletchley Park's successes in breaking the Enigma. He also gave the Russians advance notice of the time and place of the Allies' D-Day landings in France. MacLean mined the Foreign Office for another load of vital data for the Soviets. Burgess was a charmer who developed a wide range of influential friends from whom he extracted information to be passed on to his control. Cairncross actually worked for a time at Bletchley Park, and on weekend trips to London in the automobile his control had supplied him, he conveyed thick sheaves of notes on traffic of interest to Moscow as well as actual copies of decrypts filched from disposal boxes. He also turned over BP training manuals on deciphering, and details of Turing bombes. Similarly, Leo Long did duty at BP, and while his scruples constrained him from delivering actual decrypted material, he did submit, as he admitted long after, "intelligence assessments based on it."

 

 

For the Secret Informants, Initial Defeats

 

What came of the varied efforts to warn Moscow that the invasion was coming, that Hitler had entered into the 1939 nonaggression pact only to lull the Russians while he subdued the West? At first the informants encountered nothing but bitter frustration.

Stalin's rejection of Churchill's warnings was only one in a series of rebuffs. The Cambridge Comintern fared no better. Nor did Sorge, reporting from Tokyo. Through links with the Lucy ring, the German conspirators in Berlin signaled the precise date and the exact hour the offensive would begin. The information supplied by Alexander Foote was so compendious that it took him four days to transmit the whole of it. As far as the effect their warnings had on Stalin, though, the informants might as well have stayed in bed.

Why did the Russian dictator act as he did? Since he left no known record of his thinking, his motives can only be guessed at.

One explanation is that he thought of himself as a man of his word. He had sanctioned the signing of the pact with Germany and he meant to stick by it, even going so far in his pledge to supply the Wehrmacht's material needs as to buy copper from the U.S. and transship it to Germany.

Also, he discounted the reports of German buildups on Russia's borders as merely Hitler's maneuvers to mask his real intent, which was to invade Britain.

The most charitable explanation is that Stalin was simply buying time. He knew the pact would not hold and Hitler would attack, but believed the evil day could be postponed by a demonstrable policy of nonprovocation. He was aware that the Red Army was woefully unprepared, and each day that passed helped it get ready. He may also have hoped to delay the German offensive until winter set in. He ordered his generals to do absolutely nothing that could be construed by the Germans as a justification for invasion.