Hitler's Spy Chief (38 page)

In London, Osborne received new instructions, however, on several
fronts and on his return to Rome immediately began exploring the possibility of an Italian surrender. By 28 June, Osborne supplied a formal document in English, which compromised the unconditional surrender declaration by stating that it did ‘not portend any ill-treatment of the Italian people after surrender or any ill-will towards a future non-Fascist government and state.'
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This was an important qualification. In fact it was a notable concession. The reader can probably by now imagine the effect a similar ‘easement' might have had on Canaris and the German conspirators. Unfortunately for them, and some would say for many others, no such mercy was to be granted.

The pressure on the Abwehr and Canaris was now being applied from all sides. The Allies who, after the summer, seemed to back-pedal on chances of an agreement; the SD ever- anxious to encroach on the Abwehr's activities; and, most ominously of all, the Gestapo, who were beginning to uncover evidence of Canaris' links with the Allies through the Vatican. In April 1943, the Gestapo searched the anti-Nazi lawyer Dohnanyi's office at Abwehr headquarters. Colonel Oster, the head of section Z, was removed from his position and Dohnanyi was arrested together with the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had been exempted from military service by the Abwehr on account of his valuable foreign contacts which included the Bishop of Chichester, whom he had met in Stockholm.
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Kaltenbrunner, the Gestapo chief, began to interrogate Canaris, especially about his contacts with Rome and his links with the Hungarian secret service, several of whom were in close contact with London.
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The Hungarian intelligence community, then as now, was philo-British. Indeed, the intelligence and diplomatic officers among the Hungarians were so close to the British that they actually signed articles of surrender on board Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen's yacht off Istanbul in October 1943, eighteen months before surrender was actually possible.
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As the Italian forces reeled under the invasion of Sicily in early July, the
pressure on Mussolini grew. Canaris, by this time, according to contemporary accounts, was becoming more and more disillusioned and nervous. His confidence was visibly declining and his apparent failure to predict the timing of the Sicily landings again gave fuel to his enemies.

The success of those landings has been attributed to the brilliant deception operation involving ‘Major Martin'. The ingenious Operation Mincemeat, described so vividly by Ewen Montague in his book
The Man Who Never Was
, remains a tour-de-force of imaginative deception. What is less widely known is that the British knew that by dumping the body, with its staff plans of invasion off the coast of the Iberian peninsula, it would inevitably reach Canaris for assessment. The Iberian peninsula had become Canaris' fiefdom. If he suspected the ‘plant', SIS had good reason to imagine he just might not pass his suspicions on.
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The ‘ally' of the British, now so keen to bring the war to an end, was acting almost as effectively on London's behalf as if he were to all intents and purposes an ‘agent' of the British.

Canaris knew from his contacts with the Vatican that Italy was about to defect to the Allied side. When Mussolini was arrested on 25 July, it was a delicate matter for Hitler to decide whether to believe Marshal Badoglio's and King Vittorio Emanuel's professions of loyalty, or suspect treachery. His Austrian instincts, of course, which saw Italians as untrustworthy at all times of chaos made him suspicious. He began to contemplate not only rescuing the recently imprisoned Mussolini but also kidnapping the King and Pope.

The admiral travelled to Venice early in August, officially on a factfinding mission but, according to Lahousen, in reality to warn his Italian counterpart, Cesare Amé, of his fears of a German occupation and Hitler's intentions towards the Pope. At a large, formal breakfast in the Hotel Danieli attended by Amé and his staff, Canaris, flanked by Lahousen and Freytag-Loringhoven, discussed Italo–German relations at length. He then took Amé by the arm and the two men went to the Lido where they walked
together for an hour, Canaris warning Amé of the kidnapping plans.

According to Amé's later testimony, Canaris insisted that Italy was so fortunate to have got rid of her dictator and that now it would be only a question of time before Germany was similarly ‘liberated'. As the general recalled: ‘He told me to watch the northern frontier of Italy and avoid allowing German troops transit rights.'
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Amé's rapport with Canaris was enriched by a present he had prepared for the admiral: ‘I told him that we had researched his family tree and that we had proved that his forefathers had been Italians in Lombardy. He seemed moved to tears when I told him this.'
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Back at the Danieli the formal party broke up with loud declarations of undying fealty from the Italians. In a long speech, which Canaris heard out with ‘great seriousness', Amé assured Canaris that Italy held its ‘brotherhood of arms' with Germany as a ‘sacred duty'. Canaris duly instructed a member of his staff to take down a note of the proceedings and a memorandum was drawn up emphasising Italy's determination to remain allied to Germany.

Such a move was, of course, unequivocal treason. Amé recalled, ‘He loved Germany deeply and seemed convinced after the events of 1943 and his failure to get the Allies to negotiate a peace that every event that could hasten the downfall of the Nazi regime would be of benefit to his country in tending to avoid a total catastrophe.'
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Canaris had now stepped irrevocably beyond the frontiers of seeking an understanding with the enemy to actively helping him. The regime had to be undermined as rapidly as possible. Returning to Zossen, he regaled Kaltenbrunner with stories of Amé's undying loyalty to Germany. Unfortunately Schellenberg had an agent who was well placed with regard to Amé's servants and he began to piece together the truth of the Venice conference. Perhaps Canaris was losing his touch. Perhaps he did not care. But it is hard to imagine him normally taking such risks even two months earlier.

However, when Schellenberg presented the dossier to Himmler, the Reichsführer told him to drop his investigations and leave ‘the old man in peace'.
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By this time of course, Himmler too was searching for some way out of the war and needed Canaris' contacts with the West.

In any event, Italy's intentions were to be betrayed by the West. Careless talk by Roosevelt on the scrambler to Churchill about ‘arming our prisoners' was intercepted by the Abwehr station in Pas de Calais and as the SD had a man standing behind the Abwehr officer taking down the intercept word for word, the intelligence reached the correct destination with unerring accuracy.

This telephone conversation was beamed by wireless and therefore vulnerable to a variable unscrambling instrument which could be quickly attuned to the same frequency as the PE sets. The presence of an SD official shows how increasingly fragile confidence in the Abwehr was becoming as the failure to negotiate a settlement with the West became more and more apparent.

From this one intercept, it was clear that Italy was about to change sides. Within forty-eight hours the Germans moved divisions rapidly into the peninsula and Operation Alarich proceeded with alarming smoothness to break any optimistic expectations that with Italy knocked out of the war peace might be imminent.

Meanwhile, SIS and Menzies had by September apparently, if not abandoned the lines of communication with ‘the enemy', reduced their contacts to the cause of achieving the logical and straightforward war aim of disrupting the Abwehr as decisively as possible in the run up to the Allied invasion of mainland Europe. By this time, the target was indeed a vulnerable one.

In war, the major shifting tide of the conflict has perhaps a more decisive effect on an intelligence organisation than any of the other forces committed. As the fact that Germany could not win the war became daily clearer, the effects were everywhere apparent. Agents recruited from
neutral states inevitably began drifting away. Sources once enthusiastic became wary and taciturn. The Abwehr lost its best agents as the protection bought by fear of a German victory was replaced by the expectation of a German defeat.

An opportunity for SIS to disrupt the service spectacularly soon presented itself in Istanbul. This dazzling coup was, however, to be played out largely with both sides engaged superficially at least with the best of intentions.

Early in the summer of 1943, Adam von Trott had asked Leverkuen to help a friend, and opponent of the regime, Erich Vermehren, get a posting in Istanbul. Vermehren was a young lawyer with an impeccable anti-Nazi background who had been prevented from taking up his Rhodes scholarship to Oxford on account of his failure to embrace the Nazi youth movement while at school and his trenchant anti-Hitler views.

He was married to one of the most remarkable and courageous women of his day. Countess Elizabeth Plettenberg was a devout Catholic who had risked imprisonment countless times distributing anti-Nazi leaflets through the Catholic Church and disseminating the banned encyclical of Pius XI ‘mit Brennenden Sorge', with its criticism of the pagan Nazis, through the Catholic underground during the years before the war. Vermehren's family was linked by a cousinhood of anti-Nazi lawyers and journalists to many influential figures in the opposition. He was also, through his marriage, a convert to the Catholic faith, therefore linked to the Catholic underground, which was beginning to attract the attention of SIS. He was, moreover, through his marriage to a Plettenberg, a cousin of von Papen's. Already, in 1943, Vermehren had made an attempt to defect to the British in Lisbon.

After a brief course on secret inks and codes at the Abwehr training school, his arrival in Istanbul had been duly noted by SIS's Section V (Counter-Espionage) representative in Istanbul, Nicholas Elliott. Section V had in fact built up quite a file on Vermehren since his first approaches
in Lisbon. Indeed the XX Committee had hoped to exploit him as a double agent.
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Vermehren's wife had been forbidden to leave Germany by the Gestapo and for several months Vermehren pursued his duties alone. These were very modest and consisted of occasional evaluation reports on British shipping movements in the near East. Later, British propaganda would play his role up but he was barely more than a glorified secretary. He was consumed only by the thought of saving his wife from the Gestapo and their both escaping somehow to the West. In December 1943, Vermehren renewed his contact with the British; contacting an officer by name of Cribb, ‘a dead ringer for Colonel Blimp'.
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Cribb, under his bluster, carried out the standard procedure for such cases: ‘Ah, you, er, want to defect do you? Well why don't we meet in the Parc Hotel for a drink?' Vermehren thought he was mad suggesting a location swarming with SD agents. The Parc Hotel was a well known haunt of almost every spy in town and was consequently closely monitored by Vermehren's ‘colleagues'. In fact, Cribb was only following official guidance in testing Vermehren. After Vermehren had told Cribb that he should choose somewhere else, Cribb came back to him with another address, a much more discreet one, which he said was his flat in Pera.

On the appointed evening, Vermehren turned up, to be greeted by Cribb. But after a few moments of questioning, a concealed door opened to reveal a smiling Nicholas Elliot who said, again in strict accordance with procedure to show that he knew with whom he was dealing, ‘Erich Vermehren? You were coming up to Oxford I believe?'

At that moment, as Vermehren later recalled, ‘I had a sense of tremendous relief. I felt almost as if my feet rested already on English soil.'

Vermehren broke his plan for escape to his wife in late December 1943 and then in the greatest of secrecy, with help in the foreign ministry, secured papers with the assistance of his friend, Adam von Trott, allowing his wife to join him in Istanbul. No one in Istanbul had the faintest idea
that, after a short leave in Germany, Vermehren would return with his wife, as it was widely known she was on the Gestapo black list.

It is not the least remarkable event of this escape that the train which took the Vermehrens to Istanbul contained several SD officers, one of whom was in the neighbouring sleeping compartment. This figure maintained his reserve for the first part of the journey. However, when the train reached the Bulgarian frontier, Vermehren's wife was taken off and told her papers were not in order and that she should report to the German embassy in Sofia. Again, friends in the German diplomatic corps helped her avoid the Gestapo and, within a few days, she could join her husband in Turkey thanks to the twice weekly diplomatic courier flight from Berlin to Istanbul which touched down in Sofia.
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Within weeks Elliott had, with London's permission, arranged the Vermehrens' defection. It is not clear that London imagined the defection would have quite the spectacular impact it did but it was a vital priority at that time to disrupt the enemy's intelligence machine in the run-up to D-Day. SIS, Philby included, was playing a major role in operations which had the specific aim of disrupting ‘the fundamental reasoning power of the German supreme command.'

In the event, the Vermehrens' defection gave the SD the ammunition it needed to finally liquidate its rival the Abwehr. Himmler, Bormann and many others played on Hitler's frayed temper and the scene was set for the personal exchange that would seal the Abwehr's fate. As news of the Vermehren's defection was played up by the Allies, who falsely claimed, not only that Vermehren was the lynchpin of the Abwehr in Istanbul, but also that he had brought code-books with him, Hitler's fury knew no bounds. He summoned Canaris to his final meeting with him. Hitler's anger was no doubt also fuelled by the fact that part of him appeared still to have entertained the thought of some possible deal through von Papen and the Abwehr with the West. If this indeed was the case, the Vermehrens' defection illuminated more vividly than a flash of lightning on a dark
night that the Abwehr was no longer thinking of the chance of any rapprochement and that on the contrary the crew was abandoning ship.