THIS STUDY IS BASED primarily on previously unpublished source material from the Swiss Federal Archives and other Swiss and foreign archives.1 However, intelligence is a field that is extremely secretive and is therefore not very well documented. Almost all official documents are classified as secret, and even private papers are very confidential.
No intelligence agency that has any sense of responsibility records for outsiders how it sets up its networks, who takes part in them, and who supplies what information. (The exception proves the rule.) Whenever possible it does not establish any files or it destroys them before they can get into the wrong hands. In addition, in the case under study, by being forced to keep up with the rapidly changing events of the war, intelligence had to focus on its most urgent tasks.2 Systematically retrieving and evaluating organizational and tactical details had to be neglected in favor of keeping a close eye on the overall situation because it was “comparatively unimportant,”3 or, as Alfred Ernst put it in fall 1940 for Army Intelligence as a whole, “primum vivere, deinde philosophari” (first we must live, then we can philosophize).4
For these reasons, some of the official documents do not yield much information. Nevertheless, as David Kahn has correctly stated:5 “Although many records were destroyed, both accidentally and deliberately,6 enormous quantities survive.7 Repetition and corroboration within led me to believe that they accurately outline the whole topic, despite inevitable losses of detail.”8 Unpublished private papers frequently complement these official records, and in the case under study, the two most significant collections of private papers have been evaluated for the first time.9 In fact, private source documents are indispensable for recovering some of the losses of detail that Kahn deplores, and they are sometimes decisive for being able to assess certain events. By comparing the official documents with the personal records of involved persons and supplementing or correcting the information provided therein,10 one is offered a new perspective with subtle nuances of the connection that made Colonel-Brigadier Masson stumble and fall after the war.
In the United States, it is far more common than in Europe to hand over private records of public figures to easily accessible archives. While doing research, the American historian and diplomat George F. Kennan noted:
[In Europe, private papers of persons who have played roles of distinction or of special interest in public life] are apt to remain either indefinitely or for very long periods in the hands of the family and subject to all the vicissitudes that such custody involves…. The heirs tend to be little interested, to leave the papers unordered and uncatalogued, to forget where they put them, and to bequeath them in turn to secondary heirs whose knowledge and interest is even smaller and who are often not even aware of their existence. In the end either there is a fire, or else some descendant cleans out the attic, discovers the papers, confronts them with total incomprehension and heaves them out…. There can be little doubt of the resulting loss to scholarship.11
Research that is based on source material is made significantly easier when such papers are kept at suitable archives, where they can be easily and rapidly consulted. In Switzerland, the credit for finding out in time about private document collections and for managing to preserve them for the public by using the necessary tact and diplomatic skills mostly goes to diligent archivists.12 Scholars often obtain the most conclusive source material from people who remained largely unknown to the general public during their lifetime but who gained valuable insight into events through their position or contacts. This was the case for both Captain Meyer and State Attorney Lützelschwab.
The Unpublished Papers of Paul Meyer, aka Wolf Schwertenbach
Captain Paul Meyer was the man who acted in the background, pulling the strings between Masson and Schellenberg and taking an active part in the connection as Masson’s close aide.13
Meyer-Schwertenbach’s unpublished papers that are now at the Swiss Federal Archives14 mainly include private written documents. In addition, there are a number of official documents from the time that Captain Meyer headed the Special Service of Army Intelligence and Security. The diary entries that he made between 1941 and 1945 are particularly valuable. They consist of a collection of minutes that he recorded from memory, notes, draft letters, and accounts of events; some are longer and more detailed than others.
When the troops were called up at the beginning of the war, the army forbade the soldiers to write diaries.15 According to Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Tschudi of the General Staff service group, Captain Meyer made his entries in agreement with the Commander-in-Chief.16 These entries served to keep a record of encounters, connections, and events. The notes include information not only about tensions among the officers’ corps (the entourage of Wille and Däniker versus officers working closely with the General)17 but also about the lack of trust among the officers of the Intelligence and Security service.18 Moreover, the recordings indicate that the intelligence activities of Hans Hausamann and his Bureau Ha were criticized by other Intelligence staff.
Meyer’s recordings about the meetings with Eggen and Schellenberg are of course particularly important for this study. The papers show how the Masson-Schellenberg connection was established, how it worked, what obstacles were put in its way, who took part in it, what ideas these people had, and what their (apparent) intentions were. This information has been a determining factor for making an assessment of the connection.
As a rule, the entries were written in pencil; some were annotated, mostly with explanations written in pen, at a later date by Captain Meyer, which could be an indication that these documents had to serve as evidence for third parties (in connection with a number of legal proceedings after the war). Notes are attached to some pages that were written later on by his widow Verena Meyer in which she gives explanations or makes comments.19 Meyer’s pocket-size agendas include the dates of meetings with General Schellenberg, his intermediary Eggen, Meyer’s Swiss aide Holzach, and other persons. In addition, Captain Meyer used his agendas to write down his impressions about intelligence officers such as Masson and Hausamann.
Meyer’s papers also include a large, apparently quite complete collection of newspaper clippings and publications on Switzerland’s Intelligence Service, many of which he annotated by hand. After her husband’s death in 1966, Verena Meyer supplemented the clippings with additional Argus news reports. The photo albums and books commemorating wartime duty are also interesting. The correspondence, which Eduard Tschabold meticulously arranged for easy reference, offers a glimpse of Captain Meyer’s trusting personal relationships with General Guisan and Colonel-Brigadier Masson, among other things.
Quoting Meyer-Schwertenbach’s recordings is difficult insofar as he sometimes seemed to be in a great hurry to write down his observations and therefore shortened numerous words, failing to use declinations, using dashes instead of periods and commas, and singular instead of plural endings. The quotes are therefore slightly modified from Meyer’s jotted-down original text. The grammatical inconsistencies indicate that Captain Meyer took the diarylike notes for his own perusal without having any outside readers in mind. These unfiltered recordings make Meyer’s papers all the more valuable as reference material.
Meyer meets the basic requirements20 that make him a reliable source of information. He obviously had the necessary intellectual capabilities, expertise, and writing skills21 to report the truth. He was qualified to do so also because he was directly involved in the events; he was not simply an outsider observing them from a distance. It is more difficult to determine whether in addition to being capable of registering and reflecting the truth due to his social status, he was also willing to do so out of personal ambition or for other reasons. However, since Captain Meyer was convinced until the end of his life that his activity was important and valuable, he had no reason to falsify his private recordings, which were apparently supposed to serve as a memory aid for himself. On the other hand, once fellow intelligence officers and the Federal Council began to make their opposition to the contacts with Schellenberg and Eggen felt, we cannot exclude that in some notes Meyer may have had an unconscious tendency to justify his own actions.
There is yet another reason for being cautious about Meyer’s source material; not all of his recordings throughout the war were equally detailed. On one hand, this fact is one of the criteria that determines the selection of the focal points for this study, but on the other hand it raises the question of whether all notes have actually been preserved. However, Captain Meyer probably had no reason to destroy certain parts of his diary22 because he was proud of the connection that he had initiated, considering it to have been very useful to Switzerland during times of great peril; he believed that his diary-like entries precisely proved his point.23 Meyer’s wife had no reason either to destroy parts of the diary. Moreover, one must not overlook the fact that, even though in this study Captain Meyer’s critics are quoted extensively, in addition to General Guisan and Colonel-Brigadier Masson other people on the Intelligence and Security service supported Meyer. The dividing-line between the two camps was actually blurred.
What makes Captain Meyer’s private papers and personal records valuable and at the same time shows their limits is precisely the fact that Meyer was a very directly involved witness of the things that he recorded on paper. By analyzing his unpublished papers, one gets an idea of how one of the principal involved persons experienced and assessed the events at the time. In instances where, objectively speaking, the perceived truth did not correspond to the facts, as appears to have been the case in the event of the alert of March 1943, one should keep in mind that action taken on the basis of wrong assumptions is not less decisive for the course of history than action taken on the basis of correct assumptions. Generally speaking, wrong assumptions do not necessarily lead to wrong results. This is an argument that some critics overlooked who accused Masson and Meyer of having been taken in by the Germans.
The Unpublished Papers of Wilhelm Lützelschwab
Wilhelm Lützelschwab played a special role among the critics of the Masson-Schellenberg connection. After the war, he explained, “I was the one who took the initiative. I did not plot against Masson, Meyer, Eggen, etc. but tried to curb their influence in what I think was a decent and honest manner.”24 In order to do so, he was in direct contact with Federal Councillor Kobelt25 and General Guisan.26
Wilhelm Lützelschwab was born on January 30, 1905 in Riga, Latvia. His father was from Chénens, canton Fribourg, and his mother was Russian. He moved to Switzerland when he was 14 and studied law at the University of Basel, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1932. The same year he became a civil servant and in 1939 a state attorney. He got involved in public affairs already before the war, actively fighting the “Front” movement as of 1933 when he was a member of the Young Liberals. Lützelschwab stated: “There I was considered a ‘Nazi-hater’ and a man of the left. At the beginning of 1940, I became a member of the Basel-Stadt cantonal parliament, and during the entire ten years that I served there I was again considered as having a ‘leftist’ outlook, even though I was a member of the [conservative] Radical Democratic party.”27 As he believed that he had better chances of doing constructive work in the private sector than as a crime fighter,28 Lützelschwab gave up his career as a civil servant to join the management of the “Pax” life insurance company, where he rose from the post of vice director to that of a member of the board of directors and general manager. He died in May 1981.
Between April 1941 and November 1943, Wilhelm Lützelschwab headed the political branch of Basel-Stadt’s police department; this cantonal Intelligence Service was a large organization, with up to 100 employees. When he was appointed senior state attorney in August 1943, Lützelschwab became head of the entire state attorney’s office of Basel-Stadt. Even though after October 1943 he was no longer directly involved in the work of the political police, he was considered an expert in matters relating to the political police and continued to be consulted on anti-subversive matters,29 heading the investigation30 and acting as prosecutor in the Leonhardt case in July and August 1944.31
Lützelschwab’s unpublished papers that are filed at the Federal Archives in Bern32 include mainly the correspondence, messages, and notes for the file that he received or wrote while he was in public office. The documents deal primarily with Colonel-Brigadier Masson’s, Captain Meyer’s, and Captain Holzach’s33 relations with Eggen and Schellenberg as well as with Colonel Guisan Jr.’s relations with the Extroc S.A. company, which indirectly played an important part in establishing the connection between the Swiss and German Intelligence Services. Most documents written after 1946 are part of Lützelschwab’s correspondence with Hans Hausamann in connection with the latter’s lawsuits against the Die Tat and Freies Volk newspapers. These legal battles in which Hausamann accused the newspapers of slandering him concerned events that had occurred in Switzerland’s Intelligence Service, making the exchange of letters between Lützelschwab and Hausamann useful for this study. Considering Lützelschwab’s importance between 1940 and 1945 as a staff member of Army Intelligence and Security, the collection of documents that he left to posterity appears to be incomplete. Nevertheless, it offers valuable information on how connections were organized and operated during wartime duty.
Research Material from Archives in the United States
In the United States, the National Archives in Washington, DC, the Princeton University Manuscript Library, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Archives in Hyde Park, NY, contain a particularly rich amount of useful research material. The National Archives in Washington, DC and, since 1994, their extension, the huge Archives II complex in College Park, Maryland, are unimaginable treasure troves even for historians who have done extensive research in archives, boasting more than three billion written documents, two million maps and plans, five million photographs, nine million aerial photographs, 28,000 kilometers of film, and 122,000 video and audio recordings. This wealth of documents includes an unsurpassable amount of intelligence material documenting virtually every aspect of the United States’ intelligence activities since World War I. The most significant group of intelligence-related documents from World War II consists of the collection of the Office of Strategic Services, the United States foreign intelligence branch. The documents are filed in Washington, DC or College Park, Maryland, according to Record Groups (RG).34
The most significant documents that are being used in this study are from the Office of Strategic Services (RG 226), the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department General Staff (RG 165), the Army Staff (RG 319), the Chief Counsel for War Crimes (RG 238), the U.S. State Department (RG 59), and United States missions abroad (RG 84), whose reports also include a sizable number of interesting intelligence-related details that had been put together by members of the diplomatic corps or that the State Department had received from other intelligence sources.
The OSS documents primarily include a massive amount of research and analysis (R&A) reports and materials from Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counterintelligence (X-2). Among the documents that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) declassified shortly before this study was undertaken and that are filed according to entries, this author focused in particular on the papers from the Office of Strategic Services in Bern; its telegrams for example are filed under entry number 134, which contains the wires from the foreign outposts of the OSS.
The files of the Nuremberg Tribunal were also very interesting for this study. In addition to numerous special reports on subjects such as the Reich Security Central Office in Berlin, counterintelligence activities in neutral countries, etc., the documents of the Chief Counsel for War Crimes include probably the most complete collection of the interrogation records of German officials, officers, and members of the Intelligence Services. Among these documents, this author came across the evidence that was used to defend SS Brigadier General Walter Schellenberg, including Masson’s statement in favor of the German officer that is followed by a handwritten declaration by General Guisan, declarations by Meyer-Schwertenbach, former Federal Councillor Jean-Marie Musy, and French General Henri Giraud, as well as the interrogation records of SS Major Eggen.
This short list of some of the major records may be an indication for experts that the abundant source material that is available at the National Archives in Washington, DC is quite a challenge for scholars trying to dig up the intelligence gold35 that is buried there. It is remarkable that in all instances that this author asked to see documents that were classified as secret or confidential, he immediately received permission to do so.
The personal papers of Allen W. Dulles are filed at Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library in Princeton, New Jersey and are part of the collection of 20th-century papers in public affairs, which included the unpublished records of close to 150 persons at the time this study was undertaken. The papers were meticulously filed by Nancy Bressler and Jean Holliday in a total of 310 filing boxes covering the period from 1845 to 1971.36 The papers form part of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections and comprise correspondence, speeches, writings, and photographs as well as audio tapes and phonograph records documenting the life of the lawyer, diplomat, businessman, and spy. A large number of them deal with Dulles’ activity as a member of the U.S. delegation at the 1919 Versailles peace negotiations, his leading role at the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, his time at the CIA from 1950 to 1961, the last years of which he was its director, and his contribution, between 1963 and 1964, to the President’s Commission to Investigate the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy that had been appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson. The Allen W. Dulles Papers collection is useful for understanding the role of both a private citizen and a public servant in shaping U.S. foreign policy, even if those seeking information about the time during his tenure at the helm of the CIA will be disappointed that CIA officials screened the collection before it was transferred to Princeton.37
Series 1, Correspondence, 1891–1969, documents Dulles’ professional and personal activities from his early years at the State Department until his death in 1969. These generally handwritten letters are quite candid summaries of events in the countries where Dulles and people he knew were stationed. Although his activities at the OSS during World War II are not particularly well documented in his correspondence, Dulles’ discussion of past activities with the contacts he established at the time provide some insight. Correspondence with Gero von Gaevernitz, William J. Donovan, Mary Bancroft, and others sheds light not only on their wartime activities but also on the sense of responsibility and kinship that Allen Dulles shared with these colleagues. Significant correspondents also include Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Thomas E. Dewey, Hugh Gibson, Joseph C. Grew, John C. Hughes, Hugh R. Wilson, and Karl Wolff.
Subseries 2, Books, 1902–1969, of Series 2, Writings, 1915–1969, includes drafts, galleys, articles, reviews, notes, and correspondence pertaining to Dulles’ books and articles. Starting with his 1902 monograph on the Boer War, that subseries documents the composition and publication of Germany’s Underground, The Craft of Intelligence, and The Secret Surrender.
Series 3, Speeches, 1926–1968, includes outlines, notes, clippings and some background material. Dulles used notes or outlines when speaking; consequently there are very few full copies of his addresses.
Series 5, Subject Files, 1915–1969, is arranged alphabetically by topic and comprises clippings, articles, reports, memoranda, interviews, correspondence, and speeches that Dulles compiled for reference purposes. The subjects range from Abwehr and the German Intelligence Service to visa regulations.
The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in Hide Park, NY, was the first of seven presidential libraries to collect and make available to researchers the private papers of a United States president and the official files of his administration. The well-arranged documents and manuscripts include 15 million pages. This author focused on the documents concerning Switzerland from the Official File and above all the President’s Secretary’s file, which includes the incoming and outgoing correspondence and memoranda that were considered as highly important and confidential at the time and that were therefore monitored by Roosevelt’s personal secretary. The papers, which are filed alphabetically, are subdivided into five groups, the Safe Files, the Confidential Files, the Diplomatic Correspondence, the Departmental Correspondence, and the Subject File. The Subject File includes the OSS File comprising approximately 7,500 pages of documents, which consist primarily of reports that General William J. Donovan, Chief of the Office of Strategic Services, submitted to the White House once or several times daily to provide a synopsis of the information received by the field agents. The reports that landed on Roosevelt’s desk through that channel frequently included reports from Bern by Allen Dulles. The files at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library show, among other things, how important Bern was for U.S. intelligence during World War II.
Additional Source Material
Alfred Ernst,38 a future lieutenant general, headed the German Bureau of Swiss Intelligence from September 1939, the time when the army was mobilized, to summer 1943, when he asked to be transferred to the operational section. As has been shown in this study, this transfer was due in large part to Masson’s connection with Schellenberg.39 Most documents of Ernst’s “Intelligence” file are therefore from the period between October 1939 and summer 1943; above all, they include drafts and carbon copies of reports and letters submitted to, and received from, Masson. Some of the reports make an assessment of the military and political situation, analyze Germany’s options for an attack on Switzerland, and make suggestions on how Switzerland should defend itself against a potential attack. The letters in which Ernst gives his political opinion about Nazi Germany and warns Masson about the connection with SS General Schellenberg are particularly interesting. Moreover, the Ernst files contain information about the structure and operations of the Intelligence Service; they demonstrate how the procurement of intelligence was organized and include information about the tensions between the Department of Foreign Affairs and Army Intelligence.
After his election as Commander-in-Chief, Guisan created a “General’s Bureau,” which consisted of four officers and one non-commissioned officer and was located at the Bellevue Palace hotel in Bern, immediately adjacent to the offices of the Department of Military Affairs.40 As early as October 9, 1939, this “Bureau” was renamed “General’s Personal Staff.”41 Guisan created the new body in order to have some influence on everything that had to do with preparations for a war (operations, training, materials, spirit of the troops, and contacts with civilians) as well as to circumvent the tensions that existed with the Chief of the General Staff at the time, Lieutenant General Jakob Labhart. Even though Labhart’s successor, Jakob Huber, also repeatedly protested against the new body,42 the General kept it in place. (He must have had an incentive to do so not least for practical reasons, as he could work much more effectively with this small staff than with the very large, bureaucratic structure of the army staff.)
The “General’s Personal Staff” worked on all issues that had anything to do with the Army Command; they included four main areas of activities:
The structure of the Personal Staff was relatively simple; on average, it consisted of eight officers. Its first head was Samuel Gonard, a future corps commander, who was replaced by Major Bernard Barbey on June 11, 1940, when he took over the command of the operational section on the army staff.43 The Chief of the Personal Staff supervised one or two General Staff officers, including Denys van Berchem, who were in charge of preparing requests and decisions on behalf of the military command. Two adjutants were in charge of the internal organization at the command post (sentries and chancellery). Two aides were available to the Commander-in-Chief and Barbey for special tasks. Mario Marguth was both the officer in charge of legal matters relating to the military and, as of fall 1942, General Guisan’s 1st aide. These permanent staff members were joined by temporary heads of the secretariat and of chancellery as well as by a varying number of NCOs, soldiers, and members of the auxiliary service.
Due to the military situation, the General’s Personal Staff moved its headquarters on several occasions. From Bern it was first transferred to Spiez, on October 18, 1939 to Gümligen castle, on April 1, 1941 to Interlaken, and on October 6, 1944 to Jegenstorf castle, where it remained stationed until the end of the war.
The files of the “General’s Personal Staff”44 include several ten thousand documents illustrating all of the General’s activities during wartime duty. They comprise the originals of the letters, reports, requests, and memoranda that were addressed to the Commander-in-Chief, copies of the correspondence written at his command post, as well as the Commander-in-Chief’s and his Personal Staff’s personal working documents, drafts, minutes, and annotations. Many of these documents make it possible to backtrack how the supreme command made its decisions. Obviously the papers concern primarily military matters, such as issues relating to strategies, armament, supplies, and personnel, but they frequently also touch upon political aspects, thereby shedding light on how the Federal Council and the Commander-in-Chief mutually influenced each other’s decisions and actions.
This study focuses mainly on the numerous files from the Intelligence and Security sector, in particular the documents dealing with Guisan’s encounters and contacts with Schellenberg.45
Even though the legal action that was undertaken was a very unpleasant experience at the time for the involved persons,46 from a historian‘s perspective one must be grateful that a number of investigations, hearings of evidence, and trials were held by military and civilian courts after the war. During these proceedings, materials were filed that would not be documented otherwise. Incidentally, the disputes before the military courts show that intelligence faces a probably inevitable dilemma in a state governed by the rule of law: it cannot limit itself to methods that are perfectly legal and may therefore be used by anyone. However, by having to use, and becoming accustomed to using, means and methods that under certain circumstances are forbidden to other people, one’s sense of justice may become blurred and one may gradually lose the ability to distinguish between what is permitted and what is not permitted. On the other hand, the civilian authorities must feel uneasy about Intelligence being allowed to use means that they are not permitted to use or that make it more difficult or impossible for them to do their job.47 The touchy feelings that this dilemma created resulted in some grotesque situations during the war and seriously distracted from the success of some of the operations.
The private archives of Professor Dr. Hans Rudolf Kurz include documents compiled during four decades of research in the field of military and neutrality history; they complement the documents available at the Federal Archives in Bern. The main material that this author consulted from these private archives were the “Masson/intelligence files” and the “Schellenberg” and “Hans Hausamann” files. Colonel-Brigadier Masson and H.R. Kurz were in frequent contact by mail; this was due not only to their friendship after the war but also to the influential position that Kurz held as a close aide and advisor to the Head of the Military Department; on some occasions, Masson may have hoped to indirectly reach the Federal Councillor through his friend.48 For Kurz on the other hand, the contact with Masson was useful for his own research in the field of intelligence; a number of his files consequently include precise information concerning Masson that is not available in any other archives. Masson also regularly sent Kurz updates on his account of Army Intelligence during World War II.
Hans Hausamann usually sent Kurz carbon copies or photocopies of his extensive correspondence for his information and answered any questions that Kurz had during his research. The “Schellenberg” file included, among other documents, report No. 52 to the Führer dated January 1943, in which Schellenberg stated that Switzerland allegedly planned to call up its entire armed forces again.
Before he died in 1990, Prof. Kurz offered this author a number of documents from his archives. His sons handed over the remaining material to the Swiss Federal Archives, where it is now available to researchers in the form of personal unpublished papers.49
Studies on the Subject
Not much has been written about the Masson-Schellenberg connection so far, which is due in part to the fact that this is a complicated case and probably also to the fact that until recently the most conclusive documents were not available for research.
Apart from the polemics in the press following Masson’s “interview,” the first, albeit somewhat concealed, treatment of the subject was given in the Commander-in-Chief’s report on wartime duty.50 In his diary, which was published in 1948, Barbey also made a few isolated allusions to the connection.51 After 1948, everything was quiet for some time. Masson had to keep silent,52 and in Schellenberg’s memoirs, which were published posthumously in the 1950s,53 Schellenberg contented himself with stating that through his relations with Masson he had tried to enter into contact with the Allies; he implied that for that reason he had successfully attempted to have Switzerland’s neutrality respected.
It was not until the 1960s that three books were published that focused on Masson’s contacts with the Reich Security Central Office. Spying for Peace by Jon Kimche, a dual British and Swiss national who was a foreign correspondent for the Observer, was published in 1961 in London; shortly afterward the German and French versions of the book were preprinted in the Weltwoche and the Journal de Genève, respectively, making the book very well known in Switzerland. Some former staff members of Army Intelligence as well as some experts massively criticized the successful but controversial book, accusing Kimche of reaching wrong conclusions by making conjectures and false assumptions. However, at least he deserves to be credited for bringing Masson out of his shell, so to speak. As he was indignant about what he considered to be Kimche’s distorted interpretation of the events,54 Masson finally agreed to present materials for an account of the matter from an entirely different perspective. This account was published in several Swiss French and Swiss German newspapers as a conversation that Hugo Faesi, a former press officer on the Army Command, had recorded with the former Chief of Intelligence.55
Five years later, Pierre Accoce and Pierre Quet, two French journalists, described Masson’s encounter with Schellenberg in a fairly sensational and captivating, yet in many instances incorrect, fashion.56 The Neue Zürcher Zeitung ironically described the authors as the two James Bonds from Paris and called their work “a lively mixture of bold allegations and established facts, [adding] in their 300-page book, the two authors jumbled so many things together and put so many inconsistencies on paper that it is actually surprising that they were able to at least spell Hitler’s name correctly.”57 Based on a recommendation that the Swiss Embassy in Paris had issued to them, the two journalists had been received by Colonel-Brigadier Masson for an interview. However, the results that they presented in their book58 forced the former Chief of Intelligence to once again break the silence that the Federal Council had imposed on him.59
Allen Dulles had been approached by the two French journalists as well. However, as he was working on his own account of “Operation Sunrise”60 at that time, he only agreed to take a look at their manuscript. What he read reinforced him in his conviction that it was better not to get involved in their endeavor. He wrote to one of the authors, “I read with some amusement your Galley 36 describing the anonymous house in the Herrengasse, Zürich (this should have read Berne), and on my alleged methods of operation. On the whole, I found these observations more picturesque than accurate.”61
In 1969, another journalist took a far more matter-of-fact approach on the same subject. In his account of Bureau Ha that was based on Hans Hausamann’s extensive files, Alphons Matt briefly talked about the relations between Masson, Meyer-Schwertenbach, and Schellenberg.62 Certain distortions in the book are explainable by the fact that Hausamann had been a resolute opponent of the connection.63
Edgar Bonjour looked at the Masson-Schellenberg connection in more detail than Matt. In volume 5 of his history of Switzerland’s neutrality, he dedicated more than 20 pages to Guisan’s meeting with Schellenberg.64 His findings are based in part on a study by Hans Rudolf Kurz that was published in 1972. At the request of the Federal Council, Kurz had written a synopsis of Switzerland and World War II intelligence.65 His account of the Masson-Schellenberg connection was based largely on the detailed government communiqué of 1946,66 which he had helped to draft at the time. Two years later, in his look back at Switzerland during the war, Werner Rings explained that “some of the circumstances of the clandestine contacts and relations [had] yet to be cleared up.”67 Daniel Bourgeois, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the complex topic of the Third Reich’s policy toward Switzerland68 and made an extensive excursus69 on Masson’s connection with Schellenberg, came to the same conclusion as Rings, stating: “[Was this] childish loyalty to an old curiosity? No, it was more than that. This affair, or rather the inquiry about Switzerland’s neutrality, made sense because it highlighted one of the fundamental aspects of the relations between the Reich and Switzerland… that is, the dual policy of the Reich, which was interested, on the level of its global strategy, in Switzerland being neutral and at the same time, on the level of its ideology, in conquering the country.”70
In 1982, in his systematic analysis of the German intelligence agencies that operated against Switzerland between 1939 and 1945,71 Hans Rudolf Fuhrer presented some new findings. In his analysis, he also talked about Schellenberg’s “special connection” with Meyer-Schwertenbach and Masson. Even though, for the Swiss side of the story, Fuhrer basically only examined the results of the investigation by Couchepin—making it possible to complement or correct some of his statements in this work—his study is valuable, as he included numerous diagrams representing the complicated structure of the German bodies that dealt with Switzerland on the intelligence level at the time. Fuhrer thereby not only explained some confusing aspects of the context but also covered the German side of the subject of this study.