The Best of Our Spies (13 page)

His first project came in May. He had arrived in the office one morning and was called straight in by Archibald, sitting behind his desk.

‘Arctic convoys.’

For a moment, Archibald said no more. Quinn wondered whether he was being sent on an Arctic convoy. A shudder of fear followed by excitement went through him.

‘What the convoys are carrying into Murmansk and Archangel is keeping the Soviet Union in the war. But as the weather improves, they are sailing into waters where night never falls. It makes attacks on them too easy. The Luftwaffe and the U-Boats are sinking too many ships.

‘We need the Soviets to tie the Germans up on the Eastern Front. They can only do that if we can ensure that they are properly supplied. If the supplies don’t get through, the Red Army could collapse. And if that happens ...’

Archibald was spreading out a large map of the Soviet Union on the chart table as he spoke.

‘... then the war’s over on the Eastern Front. That will make life somewhat tricky for us. Can’t let it happen. Molotov is coming to London in the next week or two. He needs to be assured that we have all of this in hand. We’re losing too many ships at the moment.’

Archibald had been indicating the depth of the German advance into the Soviet Union. His pencil was perilously close to Moscow. As he continued, he was straightening out a chart of the Barents Sea, placing it over the map of the Soviet Union.

‘So this is what you need to concentrate on, Quinn. Best route for getting the convoys safely into these ports.’ He was pointing at Murmansk and Archangel just below it.

‘Best routes, how much sunlight there’s going to be on any given day, sandbanks, any other ports we could nip into. That type of thing. Beauty of our little outfit is that we have time to think, come up with options if you like. Good luck. Remember that Riley is here to help you.’

Quinn immersed himself in the Arctic routes. He researched the weather, the amount of daylight, possible new routes, ports that some of the ships with smaller draughts may be able to dart into if they had to. Porter was forever bringing in new charts and maps and stacking used ones and rearranging the ones on the table, English Rose typed patriotically and Riley read everything he wrote. Captain Archibald seemed pleased. Quinn found the work interesting without being taxing.

At the beginning of August, Owen and Nathalie Quinn had a week’s holiday. They stayed with his parents in Surrey for two days and then borrowed his father’s car and – thanks to more petrol coupons obtained by his uncle – drove to Devon for their first holiday together.He was back at work on Monday, 10 August. He was the first to arrive in the office, apart from Archibald, whose presence in the office seemed to be ubiquitous. He was standing at the chart table when Quinn came in.

‘Morning Quinn. I hope you are refreshed after your holiday. You are going to need to be.’

He indicated for Quinn to join him at the table. On it was a map of the English Channel, showing the southern coast of England and part of the northern coast of France.

‘Here is our next project, Quinn.’

Archibald was bouncing his pencil up and down on a point on the map between Le Havre and Calais.

‘Dieppe.’

ooo000ooo

CHAPTER NINE

Berlin
November 1942

The man in the German Navy uniform pausing at the top of the steps of the SS headquarters looked much older than his fifty years. He rubbed his hands and buttoned his greatcoat before removing a black leather glove from each of the pockets. It was late in the afternoon of the last Monday in November and the arms of a true Prussian winter had started to wrap themselves around Berlin a few weeks previously, their grip tightening by the day. This had been one of those days when it felt as if the sun had not appeared at all. He had heard stories about the conditions on the Eastern Front which made him shiver in more ways than one. At least in the city you had some refuge from the cold.

He was not pleased. He had arrived back in Berlin that morning after a weekend in Rome arguing with incompetent Italians and he had spent the past hour here in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse arguing with the SS. In truth, he was not so much arguing with the SS as being shouted at by them.
You don’t share your intelligence with us
, they told him.
We never know what you lot are up to. You have people working for you that we don’t trust. What’s this about a Jew working for you in Madrid? If only the Führer knew, he would take a most dim view
. And so on. He had heard it all before. It is how the SS operate. They shout, they scream and intimidate you and eventually you give in, or at least appear to. Give me the Italians any day, he thought. As stupid as they are, at least they are not Nazis.

If he had been able to see Himmler, that would not have been too bad. He did listen, sometimes. But the Reichsführer-SS was with Hitler in Berchtesgaden, as usual. He never liked to leave him on his own in Bavaria for too long. So he had spent the afternoon with idiots, who he knew hated him and who he knew had designs on his organisation.

He finished buttoning his greatcoat. As he climbed down the steps of the SS headquarters, he felt a sense of relief. The irony was that the former school of Industrial Arts and Crafts was one of the most handsome buildings in the city. But he knew what went on in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse now. It was not exactly a state secret. The SS wanted people to know how they tortured their prisoners and the sense of terror seemed to radiate from the building like radio waves. He had always told his men not to forget that they were an
intelligence
organisation.
There is nothing especially clever or intelligent
, he would say,
about using electrodes — as long as you get the wiring right. People would say anything just to get you to stop. But if you want quality intelligence, you use your brain.

He paused on the pavement and straightened his Navy cap. At least he would be able to go home now and have a proper rest. His wife was away and he could enjoy the solitude. One of the joys of living by the Wansee was the silence that lay across the surface of the lake like a shroud. You could cloak yourself in it.

Jürgen came out of the car and walked round to him. He smiled. He had worked hard to surround himself with men he trusted and Jürgen was one of those. They were hard to find now. Most young officers had joined the Nazi Party and once they did that, whatever their motives, you could not trust them.

‘Sir. I’m afraid you need to return to Tirpitz Ufer. Colonel Preuss insists that it is most urgent. He wanted me to come and tell you in person. He did not want a message sent while you were in there.’ There was a noticeable distrust in the younger man’s nod at the building. He nodded. If Preuss said it was urgent, then it was urgent.

The car turned right into Wilhelm Strasse and then right again into Anhalter Strasse.

The man in the back of the car stared out at a Berlin that was at the same time so familiar and yet so strange. At the end of the third full year of the war the city was a cauldron of contradictions. This once liberal city was now at the heart of the German Reich. The majority of the population had happily gone along with this, but there were days when some of the four million Berliners thought they could still detect a whiff of pre-war decadence in the air. Most would shake their heads and dismiss it as an illusion. A very few would dare to see it as a sign of hope. But like everyone else, they kept quiet. It did not pay to even think too much.

They were now driving along the north bank of the Landwehr Kanal and into Tirpitz Ufer. It was like that in the regime too, the man in the back of the car thought. Contradictions and paranoia seeped into every ministry and organisation in the city, fuelled by the Führer himself. Adolf Hitler trusted no one. He would not allow any organisation to become a centre of power and therefore a threat to him. So at every level and for every function, more than one organisation would exist and inevitably they would be in conflict at worst or an uneasy alliance at best with a rival body. Hitler’s thinking was simple and over the years it had proven to be highly effective: you don’t need to worry about an organisation if someone else is doing that for you.

The car drove past the Bendlerblock, the headquarters of the Wehrmacht and pulled up outside number 76–78. It was the headquarters of the Abwehr.

The Abwehr was one of the complex patchwork of organisations operating in the area of intelligence and security. As Hitler intended, they each kept a check on the other. The
Schutzstaffel
– the SS – was perhaps the best known and most feared, although that was honour closely contested by the secret police, the
Geheime Staatpolizei
, better known as the
Gestapo
. Then there was the
Sicherheitsdienst
– the security service, known as the SD.

The
Abwehr
was the military intelligence arm of the German Army, the Wehrmacht. The head of the Abwehr reported to the OKW, the High Command of the Wehrmacht. The man climbing out of the back of the car, going into the four storey building and returning the eager salutes of the guards had been the head of the Abwehr since 1935. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.

Canaris headed for the lift and his office on the fourth floor, but Jürgen touched his elbow and steered him away from it. ‘Preuss thinks that we should meet in the Map Room.’

They headed down the stairs into the basement, past the rooms where the cipher clerks and radio monitors were sat in serried ranks, past the small armoury and then to a door on their right. Canaris used a key on his chain to unlock one of the locks; Jürgen did likewise with the other.

They were now in a narrow, dimly lit corridor that reminded Canaris of the submarines he had commanded in the Great War. It was only possible to walk in single file and there was a subtle but discernible sense of walking down an incline.

The corridor twisted slowly to the left and the gap between floor and ceiling narrowed. Both men removed their caps. The echo of the two men’s boots reverberated around them, giving the illusion that there were people marching ahead of them. The corridor came to a dead end. A small flight of three metal steps, the width of the corridor, was in front of them. At the foot of the steps were two armed SS soldiers.

They parted to allow the two men up the steps. As they approached the top, a heavy door swung open. It was half a yard thick and heavily padded. No sooner had they entered than the door swung shut. It had taken the effort of two men to close it. The room was brightly lit and circular, with padded walls and ceiling. There were maps around the walls, but the room was dominated by a small circular table, around which were arranged around six chairs.

Four of them had been occupied by the men who stood up as Canaris and Jürgen entered the room. Canaris knew three of them very well and acknowledged them by their first names and a nod of the head.

‘
Hans
’ was Generalmajor Hans Oster. Canaris had appointed him as his deputy and Oster also headed the Abwehr’s
Abteilung Z
, or Central Division, which had overall control of all the other parts of the Abwehr.

The other ‘
Hans
’ was Colonel Hans Preuss, who headed Abwehr I, which was responsible for Foreign Intelligence.

‘
Reinhard
’ was Major Reinhard Schmidt, one of Preuss’s senior officers.

Like the other two, Canaris trusted him implicitly and like the other two — as with Canaris himself and Jürgen — he was not a member of the Nazi Party.

The fourth man he did not know, but he imagined that he must be the reason they had gathered in the Map Room. The very name of the room was euphemistic. It was a room that very few people in Tirpitz Ufer headquarters even knew existed. The room was completely soundproof and surrounded by enough gadgets to ensure that nothing said it in could be picked up, electronically or otherwise. For an outsider to be brought to the room was most unusual and a measure of the gravity of what would be about to transpire.

All six men sat down and Preuss began talking. ‘Admiral Canaris, I am sorry to bring you here at such short notice. This is Georg Lange. He works for us in Paris and is responsible for the recruitment and the running of a number of agents.’

Canaris nodded at him.

‘I have seen your name in reports, Lange. Good work,’ he acknowledged.

Lange was short, but well built, giving the impression that he kept fit. His thick fair hair was slicked back and he was wearing a smart suit, which Canaris guessed was French. He was playing nervously with his watch strap.

‘You can trust Georg, sir.’ As in most of the corridors and offices of Berlin, as throughout Germany, people had learned to speak in code. A conversation could take four or five times longer than it needed to, because of the necessity to ensure that the person you were speaking to shared your own point of view. You wouldn’t ask a friend whether they were experiencing any food shortages, which would be far too direct. But you might ask them whether they had a family lunch on Sundays, their reply might be along the lines ‘
not every week
’ and eventually both parties would feel able to admit that they did not have enough food.

So Preuss’s ‘You can trust Georg, sir’ was his way of saying that the man was not a Party member.

The colonel continued.

‘Georg was already working in our Embassy well before June 1940, sir. He recruited a number of agents and as you are aware, sir, we have had mixed fortunes with them. I will let Georg take up the story.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Georg sounded unusually confident, in the circumstances. Canaris placed his accent from the Frankfurt area.

‘We recruited an agent in 1938, sir. We had very high hopes for her. We gave her the code name Magpie ...
Elster
. She was very committed to the German cause and is a most beautiful woman. Very intelligent, very quick to learn and a good temperament. The story of how I found her is very interesting. In fact, she ...’