Codebreakers Victory (30 page)

Although badly bloodied by the defeat at Stalingrad, the Germans on the eastern front were by no means finished. The Red Army found this out when once again Stalin overreached, hoping that one last blow would produce a German collapse. Instead, a brilliant counterstroke, directed by Army Group South's Field Marshal Heinrich von Vietinghoff, met the Soviet forces and hurled them back.

One climactic battle remained to decide who would be the masters of western Russia. The attacks and counterattacks during the winter of 1942-43 had left, around the city of Kursk, a prominent Russian-held salient thrusting into the German lines. In March 1943, Hitler decided the salient must be eliminated. First word of the operation code-named Citadel came from an April 13 Luftwaffe decrypt. Hitler initially set the date for the offensive in mid-April but then delayed its start in order to bring into action more of his new Tiger "miracle" tanks now rolling off the assembly lines. Finally he ordered Citadel to began on July 4 and sent a personal message to the soldiers around the salient: "This day you are to take part in an offensive of such importance that the whole future of the war may depend on its outcome." The füihrer was right, but not in the way he had hoped.

David Glantz, in his book
The Role of Intelligence in Soviet Military Strategy in World War II,
has detailed how adroitly the Soviets used
razvedka
to identify targets. From their many sources, they knew, in advance of the battles, the locations of German artillery and mortar batteries, separate guns and mortars, pillboxes, observation posts and machine gun nests. Now they were set to apply this superior reconnaissance in the battles at Kursk.

Hitler had hoped to keep Citadel a secret, but the informants were zeroing in on the operation even as it was being hatched. From Bletchley Park's Fish analysts came the warning that the Germans' planned pincer movement would begin with an attack from the north and another from Kharkiv in the south, together with a frontal assault on Kursk itself. These official signals from BP were, of course, sanitized for security reasons. Much more believable to Moscow were the materials supplied by Cairncross. Not only were the messages in their original German; they also came via the Soviets' KGB intelligence service. "The Russians were convinced," Cairncross later wrote, "that in its German version the Ultra I supplied was genuine, giving the full details of German units and locations, thus enabling the Russians to pinpoint their targets and to take the enemy by surprise."

On July 1, when Hitler drew his generals together at his East Prussian headquarters to impress on them the importance of the operation, at least one of the conspirators had to be among those present. Details of the conference were in Stalin's hands the next day.

Stalin argued that the best response was a preemptive strike. Zhukov counseled otherwise. "It would be better," he told Stalin, "for us to wear down the enemy on our defenses, knock out his tanks, bring in fresh reserves, and finish off his main grouping with a general offensive." He won Stalin's approval of his plan. The Soviet defenders laid a miles-deep series of traps for the German attackers. Some three hundred thousand civilians in the Kursk area, many of them women, joined the troops in constructing defensive positions. In the forward zone the lines of antitank ditches and World War I-type trenches extended for three miles. Seven miles to the rear lay another defensive zone similar to the first. Twenty miles still farther back, other tank traps and trenches were dug. The front area was heavily mined, antitank strongpoints were set up and masses of the Russians' best tanks, artillery pieces and tank-destroying guns were assembled. Advised by Cairncross, the Red Air Force had already swooped down on seventeen German airfields and destroyed more than five hundred aircraft caught on the ground.

In the early hours of July 5, as the Germans waited to launch their attack, they were suddenly subjected to an intense artillery bombardment. They went forward knowing the surprise was blown. The Red Army was waiting for them.

This, the greatest tank battle of the war, with armor in the thousands hurling themselves against each other, went on for a week. The Germans were stopped after making only minor advances, and on July 12 the Russians loosed their counterattack. The gigantic battle went on for seven more days. When, finally, on the nineteenth, Hitler called off the offensive, seventy thousand Germans lay dead and the steppes were littered with the smoking remains of Nazi armor. As V. E. Tarrant expresses it in his book
The Red Orchestra,
"Before Kursk a German victory was still a possibility; after Kursk defeat was inevitable."

After the war, German field marshal Paul von Kleist bemoaned to Lid-dell Hart that somehow "the Russians got word of our preparations." His rueful remark came well before the senders of that word were revealed.

 

 

Conspirators' End: Paying the Price

 

Churchill, his Bletchley Park colleagues and the military missions to Moscow could, after the war, recall the intelligence given to the Soviets with a large degree of satisfaction. So could the Cambridge ring, whose members kept on betraying their country well into the Cold War, until they were at last unmasked. Philby and others defected to the Soviet Union and lived to ripe old ages.

Most of those manning the information posts on the continent were not so fortunate. The Germans learned that encoded messages were flowing to the Russians from within their own realm. Incensed, Hitler ordered the Abwehr secret service and the Gestapo secret police to join forces in tracking down and destroying these traitors.

The Red Orchestra played a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with the counterintelligence agents. Early in the war the orchestra's units frustrated the agents' direction-finding equipment by changing their transmission sites and by broadcasting only in short bursts. As the war continued, however, and as the intelligence directors in Moscow realized the value of what they were receiving and became ever more demanding in their questions, the informants could no longer be so cautious. Their longer stints on the air enabled the Abwehr to narrow in on their areas, their streets and eventually their dwelling places. Sudden raids conducted by police with sound-deadening socks drawn over their jackboots caught many of the informants at their transmitters, with stacks of messages beside them still waiting to be sent.

The Abwehr achieved its first success in December 1941. Its agents raided an apartment in Brussels and seized several Red Orchestra operatives, only just missing the capture of the
Grand Chef,
Trepper.

Arrest by the Germans presented the Red Orchestra members with the same dilemma posed by the British to German spies: die as heroes or live as turncoats. Three of those arrested in Brussels remained tight-lipped even during the sessions of torture the Gestapo termed "intensified interrogation," and died proudly. The fourth, the mistress of one of the men, told the agents all she knew. For this she escaped torture, but in the end she, too, was condemned to death.

Liquidation of the Brussels unit proved to be a short-lived triumph. By mid-June 1942, a new unit began transmitting from the Belgian capital. Again, the Nazis' direction-finding task was eased by the senders' long hours on the air nearly every night of the week. The agents tracked down devoted Communist Johann Wenzel and so broke him through torture that he agreed to transmit misinformation dictated by his captors. Wenzel was brave enough to include in his messages a tip-off that they were false. Eventually he escaped from prison and remained in hiding for the rest of the war.

One of Wenzel's unenciphered messages seized when he was captured gave the Germans a stunning insight. It set forth in precise detail the plans for the Germans' summer offensive and clearly showed that the information came from somewhere in the top ranks of the Reich military. The Abwehr and the Gestapo redoubled their efforts to wipe out the Red Orchestra.

They soon trapped the units in Holland and Paris. In Paris they captured Trepper himself, who chose nonheroism, immediately declared he would cooperate and proved it by betraying one of his chief assistants. His cooperation led to the capture, torture and deaths of numerous others. Trepper's own fate was determined by the Germans' desire to use him in a
Funkspiel,
a turnabout series of transmissions meant to mislead Moscow. His captors treated him well and guarded him so loosely that he escaped and, with further sacrifices of those who tried to provide him with hideouts, remained free until Paris was liberated. He then flew to Moscow. He received no hero's welcome, however. Instead, his
Funkspiel
time was remembered and he spent nearly ten years in Soviet prisons.

In Berlin, the Abwehr was aided by an unforgivable blunder on the part of the Moscow Central Bureau. Managing to break some old intercepts, the German counterespionage team found one sent from the bureau that gave away the addresses of three agents in Berlin, Arvid Hamack's among them. The decrypts also incriminated Schulze-Boysen. Although he and the other three remained heroic to the end, the Abwehr found a weak link: Schulze-Boysen's wife, Libertas. Her information enabled the German agents to round up 117 members of the Berlin conspiracy.

In all, the Gestapo arrested 217 Red Orchestra members. Of these, 143 were executed or murdered during "intensified interrogation," while the rest died in concentration camps. Gaining nothing from her collaboration, Libertas herself was guillotined, as was Arvid Hamack's American wife, Mildred—the only American woman executed on direct orders from Hitler.

In Japan, Sorge was arrested by the Japanese two days after sending the message convincing Stalin he could release Far East divisions for the defense of Moscow. After being held in prison for two years, he was hanged by the Japanese on November 7, 1944. Others of his spy ring were rounded up and died on the gallows or in prison. His tombstone in a Tokyo cemetery bears the epitaph, in Russian, HERO OF THE SOVIET UNION.

The Germans were unable to get directly at the Red Three in Switzerland, but they had other ways. By making the threat of invasion seem imminent, they panicked the Swiss authorities into an agreement to shut down the illegal transmitters.

While the principals of the Red Three could look back with pride at their wartime exploits, postwar life was far from easy for Rado, Foote and Roessler. Rado and Foote took the same plane that bore Trepper to Moscow. Rado found himself under suspicion because he had, when his network was being broken up by the Swiss, suggested using British agents as conduits for Lucy's messages. The Russians also thought he had lived too well on the funds supplied him. He was tried and sentenced to ten years in Soviet prisons, after which he became until his death a minor Communist functionary in his native Hungary.

Disturbed by the treatment given Rado and by his close-up exposure to the Soviet system, Foote defected from Communism, first intellectually and then actually by surrendering to British security forces. He died a few years later.

Roessler was brought to trial by the Swiss not just once but twice. The first time he was charged for his wartime activities associated with a foreign power's illegal intelligence service. He was found guilty but then set free because the court decided that he had acted in the best interests of the Swiss state. Hard up for money, he then became an agent for Czech intelligence, was again arrested by the Swiss and was sentenced to a year's imprisonment. He died in Lucerne at the age of sixty-one.

Although the Nazis rid themselves of the scourge of undercover activist dissenters, their deliverance came too late. The informants had done their job: they had told the Soviets what to expect from the Nazis and how to plan their countermeasures so as to turn the war on the eastern front from near defeat to certain victory.

 

 

 

12

 

Smiting the Axis's Soft UnderbellY

 

 

Although the Allies did not control the North African coast until mid-May 1943, the decision about where to strike next had been made back in January when Churchill, FDR and their staffs had met at Casablanca. The decrypts of Allied codebreakers had contributed strongly to the decision. Their decrypts had verified that a cross-Channel landing in France that summer, so strongly favored by General Marshall, would face too many German divisions. Nazi power must be reduced before an invasion became feasible. The Allies' choice of a target was what Churchill liked to call "the soft underbelly of the Axis": they would invade Sicily, the triangular island off the toe of Italy's boot. The new front would tie up and decimate German troops who would otherwise be available to fight the Russians or man the defenses on the French coast. Sicily's capture could provide other benefits as well: helping to clear the Mediterranean for Allied shipping, providing a base for invading the mainland "and persuading the Italians to drop out of the war.

Axis commanders thought an attack on Sicily the most likely new venture for the Allies, but without codebreakers' coups to back up their theories, they could not be sure: they could only guess.

It was a situation ripe for deception, for convincing the Axis the blow would fall anywhere but Sicily. Among Bletchley Park decrypts was a Luftwaffe Enigma message that disclosed what the Germans considered to be the most threatened areas. While Sicily was first, Crete, Corsica and Sardinia were also viewed as highly possible invasion sites. As Ewen Montagu's book
The Man Who Never Was
told, the decision was made to play to this Axis confusion.

The planning committee gave their scheme the grim code name of Operation Mincemeat. The idea was to float ashore on the coast of Spain the body of a supposed military courier drowned when his plane had crashed in the Mediterranean. He would be carrying a briefcase full of official-looking papers contrived to make the Axis think of targets other than Sicily.

Fantastic fakers, the Brits anticipated every possible question, covered every finicky detail. Where, for instance, should the body come ashore? Answer: the town of Huelva, where there was known to be a very active German agent in cahoots with the supposedly neutral local Spaniards. What could the Spanish authorities be expected to do? They would turn the body over to the British vice-consul at Huelva for burial, but only after the contents of his briefcase had been copied and passed on to the agent. When would be the best time to pull off this stunt? In April, when navy hydro-graphs confirmed that the winds would be right to push the body ashore at Huelva.