The Secret Agent (4 page)

On his departure date, Erickson packed his bags with the usual embargoed goodies, said goodbye to his wife and drove to the airport in Stockholm. He checked his luggage and proceeded to the gate. He showed his ticket and boarded a small propeller plane to Berlin. The other passengers on board were well-dressed, in suits and dresses, a business crowd in a time when flying was still an upper-class thing. Just before the plane taxied to the runway, two men in street clothes enter the cabin. They spoke briefly with the stewardess, their eyes scanning the rows of passengers.

“Which one of you is Eric Erickson?” one called out.

Erickson, startled, motioned them over. Was Elsa ill? Or was there a problem at Pennco?

“I'm Erickson,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“You'll have to come with us.”

“Come with you?” Erickson replied. “Who are you anyway?”

The men flashed their badges: Swedish police. Erickson protested that the plane was leaving in a few minutes. The undercover officers told him that they'd hold the plane for him, if they decided to let him back onboard.

“What?” said the hot-tempered Erickson. “What sort of damned idiocy is this?”

The men grabbed Erickson's luggage and escorted him down the aisle. The reason for such a public humiliation was clear to the spy: the Swedish government couldn't openly oppose Germany. It was simply too powerful. But the Swedes, who had no idea the American was in fact a secret agent for the Allies, could make it known how much they despised collaborators.

Erickson was taken to a border patrol office, where he was strip-searched and cross-examined. The police even took out some of the expensive cigars he was bringing as gifts for high-ranking Nazis, and broke them apart, perhaps to see if he was smuggling microfilm or other secret information.

Erickson was a powerfully built man, and in the tiny interrogation room, he nearly lost his composure. He demanded to know why he was being treated like a criminal, but the police refused to answer. The confrontation nearly became physical. Finally, after twenty minutes, Erickson was escorted back to the plane and allowed to fly to Germany.

After the war, the OSS confessed to Erickson that they'd set up the whole thing. Tikander and the Americans had called the Swedish police and reported that a suspicious character was betraying the state and should be searched thoroughly before being allowed to fly to Berlin. They didn't, however, inform Erickson. “You couldn't have reacted the way you did if we'd told you that you were going to be questioned,” Tikander said. “We had to do it, especially when we knew who was on the plane with you.” It turned out that the pilot on the flight was Count Carl-Gustaf von Rosen, nephew of Hermann Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe.

As the plane descended into Templehof airport in Berlin, Erickson gazed out his small window. Down below was something he'd never seen at Templehof: row after row of trees partially disguising the runways. Planes were hidden under the trees and the hangars roofs were painted to look like shrubbery.

The new look of Templehof wasn't for show. Berlin was protecting itself from Allied bombers.

Erickson hailed a taxi to a meeting with the German bureaucrats in charge of the Reich's oil contracts. Berlin looked dingier, more menacing. Buildings he remembered as being crisp and white on his last visit now turned a grimy face to the world. Baroque landmarks were draped in camouflage netting. Streets teemed with Gestapo men in their black uniforms, and Erickson saw Wehrmacht troops in light-green wool and steel helmets packed into the backs of transport trucks, one after the other streaming down the highway. Civilian traffic was light, which indicated to Erickson that wartime gas rationing was already in place. There were even signs that the early bombing raids were having an effect: Erickson caught quick glimpses of streets that had been roped off, with mounds of rubble and half-demolished buildings visible in the distance.

The meeting didn't go well. The officials were friendly enough, but dubious about the whole project. They were concerned with richer prospects, especially the synthetic oil facilities where German scientists were making huge strides in turning coal into fuel. He chatted up the functionaries, but they couldn't give Erickson what he truly wanted: access to the plants.

Discouraged and uneasy, Erickson returned to the Hotel Eden. A few minutes after he'd arrived, the black phone on the bedside table rang. It was the front desk. An officer of the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsfuhrers (SD), the intelligence arm of the SS, was waiting for him downstairs. Erickson told the clerk he'd be right down. His heart was pounding rapidly. If the SD had found out his secret, he was bound for one of the concentration camps, such as Oranienburg, which specialized in secret agents and saboteurs. Hitler, who despised spies (even his own), had directed that any secret agents be given a special distinction at the guillotine. They were turned face-upwards and forced to watch the blade descend toward their neck.

Erickson took the elevator down, spotted the SD officer in the lobby and was ushered into the back seat of a Mercedes. His escort sat beside him, with two more officers up front. The black Mercedes swung through the half-empty streets.
How do they know who I am?
Erickson asked himself. He thought back on his time in Stockholm. Had someone seen him with the American diplomats? Was he being watched in Sweden? The SD men said nothing. Erickson's throat grew dry as he watched the driver heading toward the city center.

The car pulled up in front of a gigantic, gray stone building, five stories high. 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse had been built as an extension of Berlin's Museum of Decorative Arts, but it now housed the offices of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, which controlled Auschwitz and the other camps. Another state agency was headquartered there as well: the Gestapo. Hundreds of suspected spies and saboteurs had disappeared into its interrogation rooms and prison cells. The Gestapo had built a bureaucracy at 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse that specialized in the extraction of usable information. First, the prisoner would undergo an interrogation under blazing white lights, where the SD officer would slap, kick and thrash them. If the information wasn't forthcoming, a torturer was brought in. Whipping was the preferred technique and the Gestapo employed guards who specialized in it. The guard sometimes used a whip dipped in water or petroleum jelly, as they bit deeper into the skin than a dry one. The prisoners were often tied to a table and beaten until they were unconscious. If the suspect still wouldn't talk, fingernails were torn out with pliers. If even that failed, truncheons, rifle butts and clubs embedded with rusty nails were brought in.

Erickson, who knew about No. 8, grew pale. He was hurried out of the Mercedes and up the stone stairs. As he waited, uncertain of what exactly was happening, his papers were checked carefully by SD guards, his briefcase searched. He was led up the interior stairwell and ushered into the office of Heinrich Himmler, the bespectacled chief of the Gestapo and one of the prime movers behind the Final Solution.

Himmler was the son of a middle-class teacher from Munich, raised in a devout Catholic household. He'd been radicalized in his early 20s as the hyper-inflation of the Weimar Republic ended his hopes for a university degree and tipped Germany into political and economic crisis. Himmler had been with Hitler since 1923, when the Nazi party numbered only a few thousand. He was the Führer's right hand man.

Himmler was also a brilliantly efficient purveyor of terror. It was from this building that orders for the rounding-up and execution of Jews, gypsies, Slavs and resisters of every stripe were sent out daily to the far corners of the Nationalist Socialist empire. Outside of the prisons of Moabit and Plötzensee, there was arguably no more dreaded space in Berlin than the one Erickson was entering.

The secret agent took in the scene. “It was incredible,” he remembered. “There were bodyguards everywhere.” The office itself was enormous. If you ignored the portrait of Hitler hanging behind the desk, just like the painting in Erickson's study back in Stockholm, the room was “just what you might expect to see in any American office of [an executive]–Oriental carpets, some photos of Himmler's friends.” The furniture was made of the heavy, dark, polished wood that upper-class Germans favored. Erickson had been in and out of suites like this for most of his life. It was all so eerily familiar.

Himmler sat behind his desk. The Gestapo chief was in profile, turned to face a well-coiffed woman sitting on a stool, holding the Reichsführer's hand in hers.

Himmler was getting a manicure.

Erickson was annoyed. Nothing irritated him more a man who treated himself to such pampering. The American walked purposefully toward the large mahogany desk. With his poor vision, receding hairline and weak chin, Himmler exuded the unthreatening manner of an American businessman—a member of the Indiana Rotary, perhaps. He was dressed smartly in a light-green Wehrmacht uniform and, to Erickson, looked “more like a small town teacher than the head of the SS.”

Erickson braced for a confrontation. But instead of accusing him of working for the Allies, Himmler stood and pumped his hand vigorously, telling the astonished spy, “I've just heard that you have many enemies in Sweden because you believe in us.” Himmler had heard of Erickson's trouble trying to get out of Sweden. Seated a few rows behind him on the plane, Himmler explained, were two SS officers returning from a business trip. They'd witnessed his humiliation at the hands of the Swedes. Only a true Nazi, the officers were convinced, would have been singled out for such abuse. Erickson couldn't believe his luck; the Gestapo boss was treating him like a celebrity. “They seemed to have faith in me.”

The OSS had known all along that the Nazi officers were going to be onboard that flight. They were the audience for the show the Americans had staged.

Erickson sat down in a leather chair and chatted easily with Himmler as the manicure continued. Finding the Gestapo chief “smart” and pleasant in person, he relaxed and made his pitch for oil contracts. Himmler demurred, saying he would consider the offer, but that there were hundreds of businessmen who wanted the contracts, and Erickson would have to compete with them. After thirty minutes, the secret agent left the meeting without a deal but encouraged by his reception.

The next day one of Himmler's assistants, Baron von Löw, asked Erickson to stop by his office for some question. Von Löw began to grill him about his whereabouts for the last twenty-five years. “I was asked where I was on a certain date in 1916, 1918, 1921 and so on.” Erickson's felt a cold chill zig-zagging up his spine, but managed to give the correct answers “with a laugh.”

(Later, when he'd gotten to know the Gestapo officer better, Erickson asked him the reason for those odd questions. It turned out that German intelligence knew he'd gone to Cornell and had written the alumni department in Ithaca, asking where their letters to the graduate had been sent in those particular years. Then they'd cross-checked those cities with the answers the American had given. “Only a German with their sense of tabulating every piece of information could have thought of that one.”)

Von Löw quickly changed the subject. “Why are you, an American so eager to do business with us, when …” He slid a newspaper, a copy of Joseph Goebbels' rabble-rousing newspaper,
Der Angriff
, across to Erickson. The headline read: “PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT WANTS GERMANY DESTROYED.” Erickson frowned. “This has nothing to do with me,” he said dismissively. He argued that he was a Swede, an Aryan by birth, and a businessman. He admired the Germans for rebuilding their country after the devastation of World War I. His American roots, Erickson argued, were irrelevant.

What about
Mein Kampf
, his interrogator asked. And the occupation of Norway? What if the Reich invaded Sweden, would Erickson approve of that? And would he be willing to go to back to America and lobby for German interests?

Von Löw switched topics quickly, looped back and approached from a new angle, trying to rattle Erickson. The American needed to tread carefully. His cover was a businessman eager to make money off the Reich, not a Jew-hating fanatic. Having rehearsed his answers for months in Stockholm restaurants, he now coolly parried the questions, answering yes to some, no to others (he didn't think going back to America as a known war collaborator would be a good idea). The spy maintained his poise, though his heart was pounding and he felt short of breath.

Von Löw finished the questioning without drawing blood. The Gestapo man nodded, and the American was dismissed.

Erickson left Berlin knowing he'd made progress. The Germans now believed he was a persecuted Nazi who wanted to do make money off the Reich. And he'd won the trust, at least for the moment, of the second most powerful man in Germany.

At the time of Erickson's visit, Himmler and the rest of the German leadership were acutely aware of Germany's oil problem. The country had few domestic deposits and, even in the pre-war years, relied heavily on exports. For example, in 1938, a typical peacetime year, Germany consumed a total of 44 million barrels of oil. Twenty-eight million barrels were imported from overseas, which meant that the Reich could produce domestically only 29.5 percent of the oil it needed, long before the panzer tank divisions and Luftwaffe air patrol created massive new demands for fuel. By 1944, Germany would more than quadruple its consumption to 209 million barrels per year.

The huge disparity in what Germany produced and what it consumed was a persistent worry for Hitler and the High Command. When it invaded Poland in 1939, Germany had only 15 million barrels in reserve. A May 1941 study estimated the country would run out of fuel by August of that year.

In an era before fuel-efficient engines, armies could go through a lake of gas in the blink of an eye. Take the medium-sized German Panther tank, used from the middle of 1943 to the end of the war. The Panther sported a Maybach V-12 engine that got about a third of a mile per gallon on good roads, and even less than that when it was crashing through French hedgerows. That's one-third of a mile for every gallon in its 190-gallon tank. If you multiply that one statistic across the entirety of the far-flung German war machine, it's clear that the Third Reich was burning a staggering amount of fuel. It's no wonder that Hitler was obsessed with oil, and had been for years. The Führer understood that a mechanized army lived and died on the black stuff. Without it, his panzer divisions would be stuck in muddy Belgian fields away from the front lines, his fighter planes would be grounded in Berlin, and his vision of a thousand-year empire would be over before it began.

There were three ways Germany could obtain enough oil to run its armies: conquest, alliances or science. At the beginning of the war, Germany relied largely on the first two strategies. The invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941, was partially driven by Hitler's desire to capture the rich deposits in the Caucasus, and his 1940 pact with General Ian Antonescu gained him access to the highly productive Romanian fields. Hitler also plotted to tap the Middle East's reserves by sending General Rommel and his Afrika Korps to Egypt and Libya in February 1941. At the same time, satellite states were being starved of heating oil and gasoline. On July 23, 1942, Göring wrote Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland, ordering him to slash supplies to the civilian population so that the Wehrmacht's needs could be met.

The third part of the strategy, which involved finding new ways to produce gas domestically, was left to Germany's scientists and petrochemical industry. Hitler had met with the executives at one chemical conglomerate, I.G. Farben (which later produced Zyklon-B, the lethal gas used in the extermination camps) as early as 1932, and demanded they increase the amount of synthetic oil the country produced. As coal and petroleum are both composed of hydrocarbons, the Germans had developed four different methods for extracting fuel from coal, which they had in abundance. The most promising, hydrogenation, produced gasoline with a high octane rating of up to 72, essential for delivering power to the internal combustion engine. The technique was first perfected by the German chemist Friedrich Bergius in 1913. In the Bergius process, bituminous coal is ground down and dried before a catalyst – tungsten, nickel oleate or other substances – is mixed in. The substance is then pumped into a reactor and subjected to hydrogen and extreme heat, eventually producing a mixture of heavy oils, medium-weight oils and gasoline. Once the scientists had perfected the Bergius process, industrialists built synthetic plants in the Ruhr, central Germany and Silesia, which began producing thousands of gallons of fuel a week. No country, even today, has been able to match Germany's wartime production of synthetic fuel.

The Bergius process offered the Third Reich the promise of a permanent supply of oil and gas. Hitler and his lieutenants believed that, if they could protect the synthetic plants, they would be able to wage war on the Allies for as long as they chose. But the opposite was also true: if the synthetic plants were put out of commission, Germany would quickly run out of fuel, a fact well known to Albert Speer, the Minister of War Production. “Speer lived in mortal fear that the Allied air chiefs would target Germany's perilously grouped synthetic plants,” writes aviation historian Donald Miller. Speer later confirmed this. “The planned assault …,” he wrote, “caused the greatest anxieties about the future conduct of the war.”

If Speer had known about Eric Erickson, his anxiety would have increased considerably.

Shortly after the Himmler meeting, Erickson received some good news. The incident at the airport had given the American an edge on his competition. The Germans were offering him a contract for 500 tons of oil. He accepted immediately.

Erickson began working Berlin as a second-story-man would work a posh Monaco hotel. He got in touch with his contacts in the oil business and toured their facilities, noting every new compressor and extra storage tank. He endeavored to be seen at all the right places in the capital, in the company of the right people. Evenings found him at parties or lavish dinners, his eyes twinkling, hoisting champagne flutes with the German elite. He danced with the wives of Nazis, swinging through dance floors crowded with officers in crisply tailored uniforms and women wearing their best pre-war French frocks, along with gems from the boutique of Emil Lettre, famous Berlin goldsmith and jeweler. During the parties, silk stockings and bottles of gin emerged from Erickson's bags and were handed to the doyennes of Berlin society with a sly quip.

The OSS had other agents, German ones, inside enemy lines passing information to their handlers. Erickson encountered one fellow spy at a high-society party where he fished for new contacts among the black-clad Gestapo and the brown-shirts of the SD. The elegantly-dressed woman was accompanied by none other than Lenshoek, the Dane who'd infuriated Erickson's friend Max Gumpel months earlier. Lenshoek introduced his companion as Anne-Maria Freudenreich. Erickson bowed slightly and studied the German woman as he chatted with the couple. From the way the Dane stuck close to Anne-Maria, Erickson was sure that Lenshoek was trying to maneuver her into bed. Erickson could see why. Anne-Maria was a dark-haired German beauty, elegant and a bit haughty. She intrigued the American. Her conversation sparkled; she radiated waves of “energy and vivacity.” Though he he'd been married for fifteen years, Erickson fell in love almost immediately. “I was infatuated with her. She was a dream of a woman.”

Anne-Maria was engaged in an even more dangerous game than Erickson. Born in Germany to a land-owning family, she'd been educated in Britain and France and counted the rich and powerful among her friends. She was a confirmed monarchist who made it clear to Erickson that she harbored “a very firm hatred toward the Nazi party.” Like the American, Anne-Maria was playing a part: her background gave her entree to parties where Germany's most powerful men drank and gossiped. She made friends with Hitler's officers, asked seemingly innocuous questions, then passed on the information to the OSS. “She told me she couldn't stand Hitler and his excesses,” Erickson said. “She insisted that he was destroying the German nation, that he had brought shame and hate upon her people.”

Erickson and Anne-Maria became lovers. Whenever Erickson went to Germany, he would meet her in rented room, bringing “love gifts” chosen specially for her in Stockholm. Anne-Maria sent him photographs, including one informal shot of her in a floral dressing gown where she's leaning back, smiling happily, as she brushes a spray of flowers away from her face. Along with photos, the couple exchanged love letters through the heavily censored German mail system. This came at a time when the SD, the internal German intelligence agency, had thousands of workers checking mail and tapping phone lines in search of traitors and saboteurs.

For the most part, Erickson was a scrupulous agent. He took risks, but only the ones he needed to. He'd been especially patient in building his cover story in the early years of the war and had deftly brushed aside the Gestapo's questions on his background. But when it came to Anne-Maria, the American seemed to abandon everything he'd learned about tradecraft. The CIA and most other spy agencies forbid their field agents from getting involved with each other or with their sources (unless they're trying to blackmail them). Intelligence handlers even frown on their agents being seen together in public. That's the point of dead drops and other secret methods of communication. If two assets have any kind of relationship and one of them is caught, the other is in immediate danger. By falling in love with each other in Berlin, Erickson and Anne-Maria were doubling their chances of dying in a concentration camp.

On his return from Germany, Erickson rushed home to his apartment in Ostermälm and wrote up a report of everything he'd learned, relying almost completely on memory. (It was too dangerous to carry notes within Germany.) His reports were terse and included details on tank and airplane factories as well as oil plants. From one of his communiques:

Böhln:
Refinery outside of Leipzig in operation, with new gas wells.

Korn-Neubruk:
A few miles outside Wien. This is a small new plant for the new Vienna Basin. Intact on October 18th. There are other plants in this area finished and one under construction.

Berchersgrend:
This place is apparently not to be found on any map, since it's in a new suburb between Berlin and Jüterbog. The plant is manufacturing turbines for the new plane. Plant is a tremendous size, and is very well concealed in the woods. Around it there is double-wire fencing about 2.5 meters. About 8000 workers in three shifts. Estimated capacity by the end of the year, about 2400 turbines. The new plane has no propellor, speed 720km/hour. Witnessed trial flights as both Ludwigshafen and Friedrichshafen.

It was risky for Erickson to be seen entering the American embassy or passing the report to Surrey and Johnson at a Stockholm restaurant. There were too many German spies lurking in the city. Posters that Erickson often passed on his way to his apartment showed a tiger painted in pinstripes of yellow and blue (the national colors of Sweden since 1275) and the slogan
En svensk tiger
, which meant either “A Swedish tiger,” or “A Swede stays silent.” The poster was a warning to Stockholmers to avoid talking to foreigners, who could be serving enemy governments. Instead of using public spaces, Erickson arranged to meet his handlers in one of the Stockholm apartments the Americans rented for the purpose, with codenames like “Club 49.” There he passed on his notes and sketches of the plants. Soon the reports were being couriered to Washington, with copies to Allied Bomber Command in London.