Lilly Stein. Her Manhattan apartment served as a letter drop for Nazi spies to send reports to Germany.
Although the United States public was eager to keep out of the war raging in Europe, when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill suggested that Great Britain be permitted to establish in the United States a center for clandestine operations throughout the Western Hemisphere, President Roosevelt agreed. The whole affair was kept so hush-hush that not even the U.S. State Department was let in on the secret.
Adopting the innocuous title British Security Coordination (BSC), the agency’s head, William Stephenson, quickly set up his command post at a most unlikely place: the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth floors of the International Building in Rockefeller Center in New York City in mid-1940.
Stephenson, a wealthy Canadian industrialist, possessed a stout heart, enormous drive, and a keen and devious mind. His organization mushroomed rapidly to major proportions, and the headquarters staff alone would eventually number more than one thousand persons.
A year after Stephenson launched the covert operation, both U.S. and British intelligence agencies became increasingly concerned about widespread German infiltration of Brazil, where the government had become dangerously generous in helping Nazi operations against the United States. Stephenson and his key aides decided that the best solution to the problem would be to plant fake documents to cause the president of Brazil to withdraw from his cozy relationship with Adolf Hitler.
The fraudulent letter would have to be a flawless masterpiece, both in its written words, the typewriter involved, and the paper stock. Brazilian experts could be counted on to inspect the document with a microscope—literally—to assess its authenticity.
Stephenson flashed a coded message to the British secret intelligence chief in Brazil:
We propose to convey to the Brazilian government a letter purporting to be written by someone in authority in Italy to an executive in Brazil. Purpose is to compromise the Italian transatlantic air services which provide safe passage for enemy agents, intelligence documents and strategic materials. We would welcome details and specimen Head Office letter of the LATI airline.
Now the BSC secret agents sprang into action. In Italy, a letter was stolen from Aurelio Liotta, president of the airline. It provided a specimen of his handwriting. Twenty-four hours later, a courier delivered the precious item to Stephenson in New York.
A follow-up radio message from Rio de Janeiro suggested to Stephenson that the forged letter should be addressed to Commandante Vicenzo Coppola, the airline’s regional manager in Brazil (and also a top agent for the Italian secret service).
Within a few weeks, the fake letter was in production. The paper stock was that normally found only in Europe (stolen there by BSC operatives). The engraved letterhead of the Linea Aereo Transcontineali Italiane (LATI airline) was reproduced by the BSC’s expert counterfeiters. An Italian typewriter with type imperfections that precisely duplicated the old one used in Rome by the head of LATI had been painstakingly constructed.
The fraudulent letter to Coppola was “signed” by LATFs president. It said, in part:
Thank you for your letter and the report enclosed. ... I discussed your report immediately with our friends. ... It made me feel proud. . . . There can be no doubt the “little fat man” is falling into the pocket of the Americans, and that only violent action on the part of the “green gentlemen” can save [Brazil]. I understand such action has been arranged for by our respected collaborators in Berlin.
The clever forgery conveyed the impression that an Italian and German plot was under way against Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas, the “little fat man.” The “green gentlemen” referred to a notorious gang that had been trying to oust the Vargas regime.
A final insult was cunningly created in the last line of the fake letter:
The Brazilians may be, as you said, a “nation of monkeys,” but they are monkeys who will dance for anyone who can pull a string!
Microfilm copies of the letter were smuggled into Rio and blowups leaked to members of Vargas’s clique. The president was furious. He promptly canceled LATFs landing rights and ordered the arrest of Commandante Vicenzo Coppola, who was caught on his way to Argentina with the equivalent of a million dollars that he had just embezzled from LATI bank accounts.
Bill Stephenson’s machination had paid off handsomely. President Vargas was so enraged at the Italians (and their partners the Germans) that Brazil moved silently into the Allied camp.1
In France, England, and elsewhere in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Nazi spies often had to risk their lives or freedom and pay thousands of dollars to acquire specifications of new military airplanes for a Germany preparing for war. But most data of this type could be acquired in the United States for the expenditure of a few cents, merely by buying a newspaper or a trade magazine.
There also was convenient over-the-counter espionage in the United States. A trip to the U.S. Government Printing Office in Washington could yield confidential information at a cost of less than a dollar. Many of the U.S. Army’s and Navy’s training, equipment, and weapons manuals were offered for sale —no questions asked.
Often a Nazi spy in America did not even have to leave his home or office. For the cost of a three-cent postage stamp, he could usually obtain highly important technical information. One Nazi agent who relied on the U.S. postal system to generate a flow of classified American industrial data was Edmund Carl Heine, a thirty-thousand-dollar-per year (a hefty sum at the time) executive with the Ford Motor Company.
Highly educated, well bred, and a flashy dresser, Heine had been an executive with Ford since 1920, in Spain, South America, and Germany. At the latter job, he became friends with Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, an automotive designer who had developed the Volkswagen (People’s Car) and who was a freelance agent for the Abwehr, Germany’s secret service.
Porsche and Heine became good friends, and they held numerous conversations at plush cocktail lounges in Berlin. The German, appealing to Heine’s “patriotism” (he had been born in Germany), convinced the Ford executive that he should find an excuse to return to the United States, arrange to be given a post in Detroit, and collect information “not normally available” about the American automobile and aviation industries.
Soon Heine was taking training at Klopstock Pension, the Abwehr’s secret espionage school in a multistory building near police headquarters in Hamburg. He had no way of knowing that the führer always called this facility the Academy, or that the German dictator checked regularly on the number of spies and saboteurs produced there.
Indeed, it was operated much like an academy. The place to which Heine was sent to learn the tricks of the spy business was much like a college classroom. The instructors, who used aliases, sat at a desk on a raised platform, and there were blackboards behind them.
Heine glanced around and saw that there were about thirty recruits in his class, mainly males over thirty years of age, with a sprinkling of women. He and the other students were taught the use of the Leica camera and how to make microfilm, a piece of celluloid about half the size of a postage stamp and used in a camera equipped with a special lens.
When a sheet of ordinary paper measuring eight by ten inches was photographed on microfilm, the tiny piece of film could easily be concealed, even under the tongue. In emergencies the film could even be swallowed and, with luck, retrieved several hours later. At its destination, enlargement equipment could restore the document to its original size. Microfilm was an incredible technological advancement for that era.
Heine and his classmates were taught the time-honored use of invisible inks for sending reports to Germany and to other spies. The most common of these secret liquids was made by dissolving a headache remedy called Pyrami-don in alcohol. Each ingredient could be purchased routinely over the counter at drugstores almost anywhere in the developed world.
The academy students learned how to use codes (simple ones, in most cases), and sophisticated techniques for using explosives and deadly poisons. Instructors explained how to operate a special radio transmitter-receiver, the Agenten-Funk (Afu, for short). Compact and lightweight (thirty pounds), the Afu fitted easily in a small suitcase, and spies could readily carry it about without arousing suspicion.
Heine breezed through the espionage course and was told that he was to receive a captain’s commission in the Luftwaffe Reserve. Returning to the United States in early 1940, he was unable to coerce Ford management to assign him to Detroit, so he resigned, accepted a high-paying job with Chrysler, and launched his career as a spy.
Although Heine had absorbed the clever techniques of a modern-day spy in Hamburg, he chose to do his work without leaving his upscale Detroit home at 4447 Baldwin Avenue. For ten cents he purchased a copy of Popular Aviation magazine and spotted an advertisement of the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation in San Diego. A huge defense contractor, Consolidated boasted in its ad that it had taken only nine months to conceive and fly a new airplane. It did not identify the aircraft, presumably because such information was kept secret by the U.S. military.
Searching his fertile mind, Heine concocted a scheme to obtain the missing ingredient—the type of airplane involved. On July 22, 1940, he wrote a letter to Consolidated, using the official letterhead and envelope of Chrysler Corporation. He gave his home address for a reply. His letter said:
In order to settle a few disputes among a number of friends, would you kindly answer the following question: Was it the B-24 [a four-engine bomber] that was conceived and made its first flight in only nine months?
In San Diego, it was clear that Norman Davidson, the public relations chief at Consolidated, and other executives were quite proud of their company’s exceptional achievement. Davidson fired back a reply to the inquisitive Chrysler executive: Yes, indeed, it was the B-24.
Like most other defense contractors in the United States, Consolidated’s security was virtually nonexistent. Although a war was raging in Europe and the United States was steadily being sucked into the conflict, most federal government leaders, army and navy generals and admirals, and executives running huge defense plants virtually ignored the quite real possibility that scores of German and Japanese spies were roaming about the nation unmolested, as indeed was the case.
Airplane plants, mostly on the West Coast, were especially vulnerable to enemy espionage. To test the security of Consolidated Aircraft, in San Diego, a captain in U.S. Naval Intelligence dressed two of his German-speaking officers in civilian clothes and sent them to Consolidated. Much to their surprise, the two sleuths got inside easily by merely strolling past a bored watchman.
Lilly Stein. Her Manhattan apartment served as a letter drop for Nazi spies to send reports to Germany.
For nearly three hours, the two navy officers wandered around the plant without being stopped or questioned. From time to time, they would halt, point to a new-design warplane being assembled or to a crucial piece of sophisticated machinery, and confer animatedly—in German.
Hearing of his disguised sleuths’ adventure, their boss, the navy captain, went personally to call on Ruben Fleet, head of Consolidated Aircraft, urging him to beef up his guard force and issue identification tags with facial photographs to everyone in the plant—including Fleet.
Fleet was unimpressed. “But Captain, we have no spy problem at Consolidated,” he declared. At the time, Fleet had no inkling that the Abwehr, a year earlier, had planted two agents in the factory, and that the firm’s secrets had been flowing to Hamburg and Berlin almost weekly.
In the meantime, back in Detroit, Edmund Heine was euphoric to receive the highly confidential letter from Norman Davidson, the PR man at Consolidated. Within days, the information on the new U.S. Army bomber (which would be a mainstay workhorse in the coming war) was in the hands of Lilly Stein, a dark-haired young woman who described herself as a “model.”
Stein, an Austrian by birth, also had “graduated” from the Abwehr academy at Hamburg, and she was sent to New York City in the spring of 1939. In her pocketbook were a few hundred dollars, a secret code designed just for her, and a microfilm of instructions concealed in the bottom of a box of face powder.
Lilly was awed by New York, its hustle and bustle, towering buildings, and innate hostility. As instructed in Hamburg, she rented an apartment at 232 East 79th Street, which served as a letter drop for Nazi spies. When she received secret information, such as that from Edmund Heine in Detroit, Lilly mailed it to an innocent-sounding address in Hamburg, one that had been provided to her by Abwehr controllers.
Meanwhile, Heine was still digging out data that would be of value to his mentors in the Third Reich. Again, his business was conducted from his home. He placed an advertisement in Popular Aviation, stating that he was an airplane enthusiast and would pay twenty dollars for information on the latest developments in the industry.
Perhaps Heine himself was surprised by the results. A flood of replies poured in, some of them providing significant data from knowledgeable sources. The Nazi agent spent another three cents to thank the contributors by mail and to send each a twenty-dollar bill.
Abwehr officers in Hamburg were delighted with the results of their Detroit agent’s espionage efforts. Clearly he must be dashing relentlessly around the United States, at considerable risk, to collect such a wealth of intelligence.2
At the same time as the Battle of Britain was raging and the outcome remained in doubt, Henry Tizard, scientific adviser to the British chief of air staff, slipped quietly into Washington. Known as Tizard the Wizard in the Royal Air Force, he had been sent to the United States on a secret mission by Prime Minister Winston Churchill after the British had learned through Ultra of Hitler’s plan to invade England.
On August 10, 1940, the Wizard checked into the Shoreham Hotel, and bellhops made several trips to lug upstairs his many suitcases, cardboard boxes, crates, and a black metal box. Inside these containers were many of Britain’s most secret scientific documents, including countless papers created by the British Uranium Committee while developing a theory for a revolutionary device that would be known as an atomic bomb.
There were research documents, blueprints, and models of amazing new accoutrements of war that either had been developed by the British or that were being researched: radar, jet engines, chemical weapons. The “magic black box” was a cavity magnetron, which generated shortwave-length electronic beams that made possible the cenimetric radar that was small enough to fit into destroyers and airplanes. The device was eventually manufactured in the United States in large numbers and was instrumental in turning the tide in the U-boat war in the Atlantic.
Soon after the Wizard had settled into his Shoreham suite, he telephoned William Stephenson, the multimillionaire Canadian World War I fighter-pilot ace, former amateur boxing champion, and now the “director of British security coordination in the United States.” His job was to coordinate antisubversive efforts with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Stephenson hurried to the Shoreham and was flabbergasted by the huge amounts of assorted containers, piled to the ceiling. He was shocked to hear the Wizard remark in an offhand tone, “An officer of the FBI has just telephoned and said he wants to see me to make arrangements to place my cargo in secure hands.”
The Wizard, a brilliant scientist, was a novice in the world of espionage. Stephenson suspected immediately that the caller was a fake, probably an Abwehr agent working under a fictitious diplomatic title out of the German embassy, a hotbed of intrigue.
Stephenson promptly telephoned J. Edgar Hoover, who said he knew nothing about any call to the Wizard, adding that he would drive to the Shoreham immediately. From the hotel suite, Hoover placed a series of telephone calls to FBI officials, and none knew about the situation.
As a security measure, Stephenson obtained a number of men of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to protect the Wizard and his priceless cargo.
Back in his office in the Department of Justice Building the next morning, Hoover had his technicians check the tapes of the routinely monitored telephone calls going out of the German embassy. As the sleuth suspected, the call to the Wizard had been made by someone in the embassy who spoke with a decided American accent.3
In their barracks, command posts, and buildings in northern France, men of the triumphant Wehrmacht, waiting for the signal to cross the English Channel and invade Great Britain, idled away the time by tuning their radio dials to London’s BBC to hear a German-speaking voice broadcast the latest war news. Unbeknownst to the Feldgrau (field gray, the average German soldier), the voice was that of thirty-five-year-old Sefton Delmer, who had spent several years in Germany, where his Australian father had lectured at the University of Berlin.
Delmer also played popular German ballads, including “Lili Marlene,” and threw in tidbits of gossip and the latest rumors from the Third Reich. Portraying himself as a German who had become disillusioned with the Nazi regime, he sought to taunt and subvert the Feldgrau, to weaken their morale.
Delmer’s broadcasts were a component of the “black propaganda” campaign conceived and orchestrated by Britain’s Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a clandestine group that operated out of Bush House in London and at Woburn Abbey in the English countryside. PWE’s mission was to “approach the German mind . . . and throw it off guard by appealing to the selfish motives in the [soldier and civilian].”
Sefton Delmer’s scripts were carefully created to make certain that the subtle mix of true events, fiction, and rumor was credible to the German listeners.
Before the war, Delmer had been head of the Berlin bureau of the London Daily Express, and he had interviewed such Nazi giants as Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels.
Speaking as fluently as any Berliner, his chats on BBC were designed to make the German soldiers fearful of taking part in the looming invasion of England. “The barbaric British have developed a fiendish apparatus with which they are going to set the English Channel ablaze as soon as your assault boats near the beaches,” Delmer said.
To a degree, that disclosure was true. British scientists had created an anti-invasion defense whereby oil would be piped to large containers offshore. When ignited, a thick barrier of fire and smoke would rise from the water. However, this ingenious apparatus would not halt an all-out amphibious assault, because it was installed on only a few potential landing beaches.
A closely guarded secret If Germans tried to invade England in 1940, the British would unleash a wall of flame just offshore. Above is a postwar demonstration. (National Archives)
Then Delmer informed the Germans in France that he would teach them a few useful English phrases.
“For your first lesson,” he said, “We will take Kanalüberfahrt—the Channel crossing . . . the Channel crossing.
“Now, repeat after me: Das Boot sinkt. . . Das Boot sinkt. . . the boat is sinking . . . the boat is sinking.
“Das Wasser ist sehr halt . . . the water is very cold.
“Here is a verb that will be most useful. Please repeat after me: Ich brenne ... I burn . . . Du brennst . . . you burn . . . wir brennen ... we burn.
“And now I suggest that you learn another important phrase: Der SS Sturmführer brennst auch ganz schoen ... the SS captain is also burning quite nicely.”
The theme of the Germans burning to a crisp on the English Channel was tied in with information planted by British deception services, using turned spies and whispers in neutral embassies in London, Madrid, Stockholm, and Geneva.4
Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, the most pompous of the Nazi bigwigs, anticipated with great relish the crucial task handed to him by Adolf Hitler: Wipe out the Royal Air Force Fighter Command before German armies deployed along the English Channel invaded Great Britain in a massive operation code-named Sea Lion.
Goering had long planned for this mission. His own intelligence service, Abteilung, had collected a mountain of photographs and detailed data on nearly every city and major target in the British Isles. This information was obtained covertly during the previous three years, 1937 to 1939, when German “civilian” planes had crisscrossed Britain, purportedly gaining weather reports for the Third Reich’s civilian airline, Lufthansa. Actually, the scout planes had been on photographic missions for the Target Data Unit Information Department of the Air Ministry in Berlin.
August 13, 1940, was Adler Tag (Eagle Day). At dawn, thousands of airmen began climbing into Junkers, Dorniers, Heinkels, Stukas, and Messerschmitts—3,358 warplanes in all—at scores of airfields in France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway. Soon the craft were speeding down runways and heading for designated targets on the far side of the Channel.
All across southern England, RAF pilots leaped into their Spitfires and Hurricanes and soared skyward to meet the challenge against heavy odds. These fighter pilots were a breed apart—brash, scrappy, courageous —the elite. The stakes were heavy: survival of the British Empire.
By mid-September the Battle of Britain (as Winston Churchill labeled it) had been raging for a month. Ultra had provided the Royal Air Force Fighter Command headquarters in Middlesex with the Luftwaffe targets, permitting tactical officers to gather their fighter squadrons at the right places, at the right times, and at the right altitudes.
Despite this colossal tactical advantage, the RAF lost 461 fighter planes, 103 pilots were killed, and 128 were seriously wounded. In one ten-night period, the Luftwaffe lost 214 fighters and 138 bombers, but could more easily absorb those losses, being much larger than the RAF.
The scales had turned against the RAF Fighter Command, whose remaining pilots were near exhaustion from a seemingly endless series of fierce, murderous clashes that raged over southern England and the Channel ports. There was deep anxiety in official British circles. A few more weeks of this carnage in the sky and Goering might make good on his boast of bringing Britain to her knees with airpower alone.
In this hour of peril, the British turned to a ploy as old as warfare: decoy targets. The task of rapidly creating dummy facilities to draw off at least a portion of the bombs was handed to Colonel John F. Turner, an officer of exceptional ingenuity.
Turner first focused on RAF airfields that were being bombed at night. He had two rows of parallel flares set in open country about two miles from each airfield. The flares were to simulate emergency airstrips. German airmen, it was hoped, would conclude that the British planes were using these improved fields because their regular bases nearby had been knocked out by heavy bombings.
It was a desperation measure. Would it work? Few in the RAF held out much hope. But German night bombers were attracted to the flames of the flares as moths to candles. As ground antiaircraft shells exploded around them, the Heinkels and Dorniers plastered the fake strips with bombs.
In the days and nights ahead, while countless dogfights were raging in the sky, Colonel Turner and his men raced about southern England, expanding their Trojan horse hoax. The flares on dummy emergency landing strips were replaced by dim electric bulbs called Q lights.
Near major airfields, the decoy strips were provided with taxi aprons and phony recognition beacons. At night, when the Luftwaffe was overhead, salvaged automobile headlights mounted on wheels were dragged up and down the fake airfields, conveying the impression that RAF planes had turned on their lights to land.
Within a few weeks there were scores of these dummy airfields scattered throughout southern England, causing Luftwaffe bombardiers to drop thousands of bombs on open fields, explosives that otherwise could have wreaked havoc on genuine RAF bases.
The camouflage, or ruse de guerre, was expected to be unmasked eventually. But the important thing was to cause delay, confusion, and a waste of German bombs.
A camouflage-in-reverse project was successful on occasion. Dim lights were placed on a fake strip, and the nearby real airfield was lighted to where its glow could be seen for many miles. The Germans took the bait—and plastered the dummy field with bombs.
A novel creation of British camoufleurs and royal engineers was fake bomb damage on genuine airports. This scheme was intended to discourage a second Luftwaffe attack. The day after a night bombing, the Germans sent reconnaissance planes to take photographs. When the photos were developed, they disclosed that large numbers of bombs had hit the runways and hangars.
Actually, in many instances, the RAF fields had suffered little or no damage. So as soon as the night raiders had departed, camouflage crews began distributing around the targeted field large piles of debris that had been collected for that purpose. On occasion, old rubber tires were placed about the airfield and set on fire the morning after the raid. German reconnaissance pilots would report that the airfield was still burning from the night’s bombing.
Adding to the “carnage” that greeted the eyes of Luftwaffe photo interpreters were the blackened skeletons of Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes, ones that had crashed in southern England, were beyond repair, and had been collected by camouflage teams. After an airfield had been attacked at night, the hulks were rushed to the site and placed about the runways.
If a British airfield had suffered the heavy damage camoufleurs wished to convey to the Germans, it would have bomb craters. So artists and designers, many from Britain’s movie colony, painted crater likenesses on hundreds of large pieces of canvas. After the Luftwaffe had paid a night visit to a real RAF field, a number of these painted craters would be fastened to runways. From the air and in photos, they looked so realistic that on occasion a passing British pilot would report to his base intelligence that a certain field had been bombed so heavily that it was useless.
In a few days, German recon photos would show that the craters had been repaired —meaning the camoufleurs had removed the pieces of canvas.
Goering failed in his all-out effort to crush the RAF, forcing Hitler to cancel Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England.5
In the autumn of 1940, Great Britain alone stood between the United States and Adolf Hitler’s seemingly invincible war juggernaut, the mightiest that history had known. Highly alarmed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the army and the navy to beef up their forces, and he declared America to be the “arsenal of democracy.”
Using heavy arm-twisting, the president ramrodded through Congress a program known as Lend-Lease—a technique for providing the accoutrements of war to Great Britain for only token payment. The United States was now “neutral” against Nazi Germany.
In March 1941, airplanes, tanks, trucks, small arms, and munitions began flowing in large ship convoys across the North Atlantic to Great Britain, an action that deeply concerned Adolf Hitler and his advisers in Berlin. The führer was furious. He ordered the Kriegsmarine to launch a massive submarine offensive in the Atlantic to cut off Great Britain from her main source of supply.
Soon the U-boats were taking a colossal toll on British and neutral-country ships. Prime Minister Winston Churchill recognized this ominous threat to Britain’s survival. To focus attention on the death struggle, he proclaimed to the world that “the Battle of the Atlantic has begun.”
Ever since Great Britain had gone to war against Germany on September 3, 1939, the lords of the Admiralty had been hoping to capture intact a U-boat and collect its supersecret Enigma, an encoding machine twenty-four inches square and eighteen inches high, enclosed in a wooden box. It had been adopted for use throughout the Wehrmacht, even on U-boats and small ships.
The führer was not concerned about an Enigma falling into British hands because it could produce an almost infinite number of ciphers merely by changing the keying procedure. So the possession of an Enigma would not permit an enemy to read encoded wireless traffic—or so the Nazi High Command thought.
Unknown to German intelligence, the British had created an ingenious device (code-named Ultra) that intercepted and decoded Enigma messages. However, for some mysterious reason, Ultra failed to function adequately against the German Navy’s Enigma.
On May 7, 1941, Kapitänleutnant Fritz Lemp, skipper of the U-110, picked up the signals of a British convoy of thirty-eight vessels carrying a wide variety of goods to the United States. Like a shark smelling blood, the U-110, one of the newest and most technologically advanced submarines, attacked the convoy and claimed two sinkings.
Lemp, a bold skipper, continued to stalk the convoy. Two days later, off the coast of the large island of Greenland, U-110 torpedoes scored two more hits.
Lemp’s curiosity would be his undoing. Instead of diving and racing out of harm’s way, he kept the submarine at periscope depth to watch the two British ships go down. His scope was sighted by lookouts on the warship Escort, which launched a pattern of ten depth charges into the area.
In less than a minute the U-110 rose to the surface, and destroyers and corvettes began raking it with shellfire. Aboard his destroyer Bulldog, Commander John Baker-Cresswell was preparing to ram the U-boat when he was startled by the sight that greeted his eyes: the German crew began leaping into the ocean.
Thunderstruck by the potential for striking a damaging blow against the deadly U-boat campaign, Baker-Cresswell sent a party to board the U-110, whose officers and crewmen were being fished out of the water by other ships. The boarders were amazed to find that Lemp had made no effort to destroy the Enigma, nor its operating instructions, manuals, keying tables, and a large stack of messages that had been sent and received.
Using the Royal Navy’s highest-grade code, Commander Baker-Cresswell informed the Admiralty that the Bulldog had pulled off a seemingly impossible task—capturing a U-boat intact. He was ordered to take the submarine in tow and head for Iceland, the large, bleak island some two hundred miles east of Greenland.
Three days after its capture, the U-110 began taking on water fast, and it became clear to Baker-Cresswell that it would not make an Icelandic port. A few hours later, at dusk, the sleek vessel, pride of the Kriegsmarine, reared its bow high into the air, slipped the towline, and sank.
The Bulldog’s crew were dejected: their prize was resting on the bottom of the Atlantic. However, Baker-Cresswell, with the knowledge of only a handful of trusted officers pledged to secrecy, had safely hidden on the Bulldog the Enigma and its secret papers.
A deception plan was hatched to keep Adolf Hitler and his commanders from knowing about the Enigma seizure. When the Bulldog returned to her base at Scapa Flow, the vast anchorage of the Home Fleet in the Orkney Islands of northeastern Scotland, her battle pennant was flying to trumpet the fact that she had sunk—not captured—a U-boat. Code experts and intelligence officers were on hand to take charge of the priceless booty—the Enigma and its papers.
John Baker-Cresswell and several of his officers and crew received decorations for their ship’s sinking a German submarine. But tight security kept word of the capture from leaking out. It would be twenty-six years before the British government allowed the public to learn of the Bulldog’s feat.
Enormous operational advantages for the Royal Navy began to accrue almost immediately. Because of the Enigma and secret papers seized in the U-110, when combined with intelligence gained earlier from other sources by Ultra, the Admiralty was able to locate the cruising areas of nearly all sea elements of the Etappendienst. A supersecret organization, the Etappendienst had a number of large, fast, and modern supply ships to sustain the warships, surface raiders, and submarines that were marauding the oceans in search of merchantmen carrying materials to Britain.
Armed with the crucial intelligence, Royal Navy cruisers and destroyers were dispatched to the designated locales and gained dramatic results. Between June 4 and 23, 1941, British warships sank, captured, or caused the crews to scuttle ten Etappendienst supply vessels.
Although the Battle of the Atlantic was far from over, the destruction of the Etappendienst fleet was a major turning point in the ocean war.6
Al D. Blake was hardly Hollywood’s version of an espionage agent. Prior to World War I, he had spent four years in the U.S. Navy, and on his release, he obtained a tiny role in Charlie Chaplin’s movie Shoulder Arms. While engaged with the production of the film, Blake became friends with Chaplin’s chauffeur, Toraichi Kono.
When the filming was concluded, Blake and Kono went their separate ways. Blake became a vaudeville performer with a unique act. Known as Keeno, King of the Robots, he had been credited with setting a world record by standing motionless for one hour and twenty-seven minutes. Curiously, perhaps, people paid money to see the act involving absolutely nothing.
Early in 1941, the King of the Robots was out of work, flat broke, desperate, and in Los Angeles. By chance, he met up with his old friend from twenty-one years earlier, Toraichi Kono, who introduced Blake to his boss, a man in his early thirties named Yamato.
Yamato operated a string of whorehouses in southern California and presumably had a hefty bank account. So, trying to impress the entrepreneur, Blake boasted that he had a good friend in the U.S. Navy who could provide him with secret information.
Yamato was impressed. Much to Blake’s surprise, Yamato offered Blake the fabulous sum (at the time) of five thousand dollars if he could obtain secret information on the U.S. Navy at the Los Angeles and San Diego bases.
Actually, Yamato was an alias. He was Lieutenant Commander Itaru Tachibana, and the brothel chain was a front for his true mission: spying for Japanese intelligence in Tokyo.
Blake soon realized that his boasting about his connections in the U.S. Navy had triggered Tachibana’s cash offer, which would be larger than the combined income of the King of the Robots during the previous three years. However, Tachibana demanded a sample of the type of intelligence that Blake could provide before handing over the five thousand dollars.
Knowing that he had plunged into deep water, Blake went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation office in Los Angeles and told of “Yamato’s” heavy cash offer. Moreover, he admitted that he had no friend in the navy, and he agreed to cooperate in any investigation of Tachibana. The FBI then notified the Los Angeles office of naval intelligence, which cabled the headquarters of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief in the Pacific, at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Promoted to his present post ahead of thirty-two admirals in February 1941, Kimmel was deeply concerned about the Hawaii command setup, and he so informed the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold R. Stark, in Washington. A divided command in which the army was responsible for defense of the island of Oahu and the navy with the defense of the Pearl Harbor naval base could lead to a disaster, Kimmel declared.
On learning of the “Yamato” incident, Lieutenant Commander Edwin T. Layton, Kimmel’s chief intelligence officer, urged the admiral to permit him to launch a widespread undercover operation to trap “Yamato” and other spies and, at the same time, to mislead the Japanese high command. Kimmel was enthused and gave Layton the go sign.
Ed Layton had a broad background in intelligence work, spoke Japanese fluently, and had been the officer in charge of the Japanese translation section of the cryptoanalytic unit of navy communications, the secret group charged with cracking Japanese codes.
Plunging into the new challenge with typical alacrity, Layton created a ruse that featured Al Blake as the centerpiece. It was arranged for Blake to write a nonexistent “pal,” who was given the phony name of “Paul Mitchell” and who was supposed to be stationed on the battleship Pennsylvania.
“We can make a heap of dough if you cooperate,” Blake stated in his contrived letter, mailed from Los Angeles.
In Honolulu, one of Layton’s operatives posed as “Mitchell,” and he wrote back on Pennsylvania stationery, telling how fed up he was with the navy. Moreover, “Mitchell” complained, he was desperately in need of money, adding that he was eager to see his old pal Al and hear the details about how he could make “a heap of dough.”
Back in Los Angeles, Blake rushed to see Commander Tachibana, who was so impressed with the “Mitchell” letter that he gave the American a good-sized amount of cash and booked passage for him on the President Garfield, which sailed for Honolulu on April 25, 1941.
In the meantime, Commander Layton and his intelligence officers prepared for Blake’s arrival. When Blake strolled down the gangplank and hailed a taxi, it was driven by a naval agent. The driver went to the Alexander Young Hotel, where the clerk seemed to be assigning a guest room at random. Actually, the room had been reserved and the premises bugged.
Layton also had a cover for Blake and a cover for the cover. If Japanese agents tailed him, U.S. naval intelligence would have a tail on the tail. Knowing that the Japanese would be watching Blake’s every move, he and his phony pal “Paul Mitchell” (a navy agent) made the rounds of Honolulu nightclubs and scenic locales for ten days; then the onetime “motionless man” climbed aboard another liner and headed back to the United States. In his possession was a large batch of secret documents on the Pacific Fleet, all conceived in the fertile mind of Willard A. “Bill” Kitts Jr., the staff gunnery officer. The data and drawings were close enough to the truth to seem to be accurate, but they would be useless to Japanese intelligence.
Within hours after Blake reached the mainland, he turned over the “purloined” documents to Commander Tachibana, who was delighted. Within twenty-four hours he boarded a train and carried the precious data to the Japanese embassy in Washington. There the military attaché was so happy with the documents that he ordered Tachibana to send Blake back to Hawaii on a second secret mission.
Meanwhile, Bill Kitts and others doctored more bait for Blake. Twenty-four hours after Blake’s arrival in Honolulu, Layton received a telephone call from the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) informing Layton that Blake had blown his cover. By happenstance, he had met an old girlfriend from his vaudeville days, and after wining and dining her, the couple went to his room.
Between amorous sessions, Blake bragged about being a spy for the United States. Bugs recorded the entire episode.
Ed Layton was furious. He sent an aide into Honolulu to bring Blake to the naval base at once. There Layton scolded him with every choice word in his vocabulary, informing Blake that his Hawaiian vacation was finished and that he was going to be sent back home immediately. The intelligence chief made it quite clear that if Blake caused any further difficulties, Layton was going to have the woman’s husband notified.
At the same time, one of Layton’s officers called on her at her home outside of Honolulu. If she didn’t remain stone silent about what Blake had told her in the hotel, her husband would be given a recording of the activities in the bedroom.
Despite his indiscretions and blabbing to his old girlfriend, Blake was given a second bundle of doctored documents, which he took back to Los Angeles and handed over to Itaru Tachibana, who had just added another whorehouse to his chain. Tachibana presumably gave the phony papers to his immediate boss, Commander Hideki Nagasawa, the Los Angeles representative of the naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington.
Within hours, FBI agents, who had long been surveilling Tachibana, swooped down and arrested him and seized all his belongings, including thousands of documents. Three of the navy’s crack Japanese translators were rushed to Los Angeles to study the papers.
Tachibana’s arrest apparently created an enormous flap within the Japanese espionage network scattered throughout the United States. That fact came to light when code breakers in Washington intercepted an urgent message from the Japanese consul in Los Angeles, asking for the princely sum (at that time) of twenty-five thousand dollars to “subsidize” (i.e., bribe) Al Blake “in view of the fact that he might give evidence unsatisfactory to Tachibana.”
Presumably the Japanese spymasters had not deduced that Blake had been a double agent.
Among Tachibana’s effects was a bulging suitcase that was the property of another Japanese spy working on the West Coast, Lieutenant Commander Sadatomo Okada, whom U.S. naval intelligence and the FBI had long suspected was engaged in espionage activities.
Okada’s suitcase held a gold mine of data relating to national defense in the Pacific Northwest, including antiaircraft batteries, production at the huge Boeing airplane plant in Seattle, extensive information on ships being built and others to be constructed, timetables for the arrival and departure of warships, identity and size of troop units, and aerial views of army and navy bases.
The FBI and U.S. naval intelligence had scored a coup. The abundant espionage data would have been of such enormous value to the Japanese war machine that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox insisted that Tachibana, Okada, and a third Japanese agent, named Yamada, be charged with conspiracy to violate U.S. espionage laws.
Incredibly, diplomats in the State Department in Washington got into the act, and they succeeded in having the serious charges against the three master spies reduced to the equivalent of misdemeanors. Smiling and affable, Itaru Tachibana left the United States in style: a squad of FBI agents escorted him to the gangplank of the liner Nitta Maru, which was bound for Tokyo.
Arriving in Tokyo on or about July 1, 1941, Tachibana was promptly assigned to the Third Section (intelligence), where his experience and unique talents supervised and analyzed the flood of information pouring in from spies in the Pearl Harbor region. When the Japanese sneak attack wiped out much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet five months later, Commander Itaru Tachibana had played an important role in pinpointing targets.7
The weather was bitterly cold on the morning of January 24, 1941, when a train carrying several hundred German prisoners of war was chugging through Ontario to a camp on the Canadian shore of Lake Superior. Suddenly, a Luftwaffe fighter pilot, Oberleutnant Franz von Werra, leaped out a window he had managed to open, struck the ground hard, but was able to reach a nearby wood.
After watching the train disappear around a bend, Baron von Werra worked his way southward for twenty-five miles to the broad, icy St. Lawrence River, where he found a rowboat along the bank and paddled across to Ogdensburg, New York.
Werra felt a flash of exultation. No doubt the government of the neutral United States would provide him with passage back to Germany. Instead, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested him, charging illegal entry. Werra was handed over to the Ogdensburg police, who pitched him into a cold jail cell.
Undaunted by his predicament, the extroverted Luftwaffe pilot called in American reporters and news photographers and held a unique press conference from his cell. He regaled the journalists with fanciful tales of his exploits in the air war in Europe. As one cynical reporter would write: “He gave the impression that he had single-handedly shot down the entire British Air Force—twice.”
Werra’s boastful recitations achieved the desired results: the fact that he was behind bars in Ogdensburg was plastered on front pages across the United States. A day later, a member of the German consulate in New York City came running, put up a five-thousand-dollar cash bond, and spirited away the escapee.
In New York City, Baron von Werra became an instant celebrity: a dashing Luftwaffe ace, an aristocrat with a title, and the perpetrator of an amazing escape. Reporters sought interviews. He was wined and dined royally by the society elite at such plush nightclubs as Sardi’s, El Morocco, and the Diamond Horseshoe.
Later, in March, Werra’s celebrity bubble burst. The German consul advised him that the U.S. government was going to hand him over to Canadian authorities on a criminal charge—stealing the twenty-five-dollar rowboat in which he had crossed the St. Lawrence River. Werra was outraged, claiming he did not steal the boat. He had merely borrowed it and left it on the far side.
Moving rapidly, the Luftwaffe pilot, wearing civilian clothes, sneaked aboard a train at New York’s Grand Central Station and rode it all the way to the Mexican border at El Paso, Texas. No one had even been suspicious of him. Disguising himself as a Mexican laborer, the pilot slipped across the border and reached Mexico City, where the German embassy arranged transportation for him back to the Third Reich.
In Berlin, the beaming Oberleutnant received a conquering hero’s welcome. Adolf Hitler awarded him the Knight’s Cross, and Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, promoted him to Hauptmann (captain) and gave him command of a crack fighter squadron.
Franz von Werra had made history of sorts. During the war, some 480,000 German and Italian prisoners would be brought to the United States. Almost every day, one or more of them would manage to flee their camps, but all were recaptured. Only Werra was able to escape and make his way back to Germany.8
Seated at a desk in his cabin aboard the battleship Nagato anchored in Hiroshima Bay in late January 1941, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto took pen in hand and began outlining a plan to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. As the commander of Japan’s Combined Fleet, he was convinced that a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would be but the first step in defeating America. Powerful Japanese forces would have to invade California, push across the deserts, mountains, and plains, fighting every foot of the way, and finally capture Washington, D.C., after a bloody battle.
Admiral Yamamoto was the most Westernized of Japanese military leaders. In the early 1920s, as a promising young officer, he was sent to Harvard University, where he learned to speak English fluently, became a poker addict, and amused his American friends with his impromptu acrobatics, such as standing on his head on a chair for nearly a half hour.
After his Harvard graduation, Commander Yamamoto was assigned to Washington as naval attaché (sort of a “legal spy”), and he studied U.S. defenses and ship-building programs. Back in Tokyo in 1934, Yamamoto was promoted to vice admiral, and soon he was recognized as Japan’s most brilliant and visionary naval officer.
Now on the Nagato in early 1941, Yamamoto envisioned an assault on the U.S. warships with only torpedo planes. However, he was informed by Commander Kosei Maeda, an expert on aerial torpedo warfare, that “unless a technical miracle can be achieved, this type of attack would be altogether impractical.”
Maeda explained that the water where the ships would be anchored at Pearl Harbor would be too shallow. A solution might be to fasten parachutes to the torpedoes to keep them from sinking too deeply into the water and lodging in the soft mud below.
Yamamoto frowned. Who ever heard of an aerial torpedo attack by parachute?
Then Yamamoto’s concept turned to the more conventional design: attacking Pearl Harbor with carrier-based aircraft. Because he felt that wiping out the U.S. fleet in one fell swoop was crucial to an invasion of California, the admiral toyed with the idea of knowingly sacrificing perhaps 350 of Japan’s best pilots to assure success of the surprise attack. This concept was called katamichi kogeki (one-way attack).
Yamamoto’s idea was to launch the planes off their carrier decks some six hundred miles from Pearl Harbor. Such a long distance from the target would permit the carriers to immediately head for home and be out of harm’s way before the Americans could recuperate from the bombing raid.
In the meantime, the Japanese warplanes would knock out the U.S. fleet, then turn back to sea in the direction of the carriers. But the aircraft would run out of fuel and have to crash into the ocean. Theoretically, destroyers and submarines would fish the pilots out of the water; but Japan did not have the huge number of these vessels that would be required—if indeed they could even locate a downed pilot in the immense Pacific.
What Yamamoto was proposing would later in the war be known as a kamikaze attack, in which the pilots voluntarily went to their deaths for the greater glory of the Japanese emperor. The admiral would be willing to wipe out the cream of the Imperial Navy pilots in the first few hours of a war with the United States to achieve his goal of eventually capturing Washington, D.C.
Other Japanese Navy officers managed to scuttle Yamamoto’s kamikaze plan by pointing out that the carriers must get as close as possible to Pearl Harbor and recover their planes to allow for a follow-up onslaught if necessary to wipe out the remainder of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.9
For many years, Richard Eichenlaub and his wife had placidly drawn beer and served wiener schnitzel to customers at the Little Casino Bar at 206 East 85th Street in New York City. This bar had long been the hangout for members of the largest Nazi spy ring in the United States—and in the past year, it had been a haunt for Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in disguise.
Suddenly, on the morning of Saturday, June 29, 1941, Eichenlaub and his wife vanished. Elsewhere in the teeming city and its suburbs, other men and women, most of whom had been Eichenlaub’s customers, also disappeared. Seventy-two hours later, J. Edgar Hoover, the dynamic director of the FBI, who could barely conceal his deep satisfaction, told the world that thirty-three Nazi spies had been swept up in a dragnet.
The coordinated sweep by the FBI had been the “greatest spy roundup in U.S. history,” Hoover declared. “This is one of the most active and vicious gangs we have ever had to deal with.”
All of those arrested—mostly German nationals, some homegrown—were charged with conspiracy to violate U.S. espionage laws. In one fell swoop, Hoover and his G-men had virtually wiped out Adolf Hitler’s spy apparatus in the United States.
Hard on the heels of the FBI’s massive roundup, President Franklin D. Roosevelt struck another telling blow against Nazi skulduggery in the United States. He ordered German consulates (which had been little more than Abwehr branches) to be closed and their staffs to board the first ship for the Third Reich. Roosevelt declared: “The [Nazi] consuls general have been engaging in activities wholly outside the scope of their legitimate duties.”
In Berlin, the FBI demolition of the Nazi spy network, built up over many years, created an enormous flap. Soon, however, Abwehr Chief Wilhelm Canaris got over his initial shock and began making arrangements to create a vast espionage network in Mexico, from where secret shortwave radio stations could send and receive messages from the United States and Germany.
With bribery of Mexicans, Canaris was able to rapidly build a Nazi undercover operation centering on a major Aussenstelle (outpost) in Mexico City.
Using a middle-level diplomatic job in the German legation as a cover, an energetic young German, Joachim A. Hertslet, with a forged passport and identity papers, roamed far and wide to smuggle thousands of tons of fuel out of Mexico on Italian and Japanese ships for the thirsty German war machine.
Hertslet and his vivacious wife gained a wide circle of influential friends by throwing lavish parties in their home in suburban Mexico City. These key contacts were most beneficial in helping Hertslet to establish a string of secret bases in remote regions along the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean at which long-range U-boats could refuel and rearm for attacks on U.S. shipping.
Another high-powered German operative, Heinrich Norte, laid the groundwork for what would become the widespread “Bolivar network” of clandestine shortwave transmitters relaying from Mexico to Germany such perishable intelligence (most obtained from the United States) as convoy routings. This crucial information permitted U-boat wolf packs to ambush convoys.
Presiding over the formidable array of Nazi spies, saboteurs, and couriers in Mexico was Colonel Friedrich Karl von Schleebruegge, an able soldier but a novice in the cloak-and-dagger trade. He had been sent to the significant Mexico City post because he was a relative of Franz von Papen, the German ambassador to Turkey, whose goodwill Wilhelm Canaris cultivated.
Schleebruegge soon established himself as a first-class bungler, but his key agents performed brilliantly because they knew their business and ignored their boss’s ideas and instructions.
The outpost in Mexico City was among the costliest the Abwehr operated. Schleebruegge needed much money to pay hundreds of agents in the United States and in Central and South America. When it appeared that the entire Mexican-based apparatus would go out of business because of bankruptcy, Berlin finally moved to help.
Wilhelm Canaris knew that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had established a slush fund of nearly $4 million (equivalent to some $40 million in 1999) in U.S. banks under the names of fake corporations to finance espionage and propaganda in the nation. Because the Italian secret service had done virtually nothing in the United States, Canaris rushed to Rome and coerced Mussolini into “lending” the money to the Abwehr to fund covert operations in Mexico.
A scheme was hatched to get the money to the Aussenstelle in Mexico City. Two Italian consuls and an embassy secretary withdrew the funds and put the currency in sacrosanct diplomatic pouches. Two of the Italians would carry about $2.5 million to Rio de Janeiro, from where it would be smuggled into Mexico. The remaining $1.5 million would be taken by train directly to Mexico City.
Unbeknownst to the three Italians, suspicious bank executives, noting the large lump sum that had been withdrawn, reported the episode to J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief. He was powerless to interfere legally because Italy and the United States had a “correct” relationship.
Any action Hoover took, such as putting a tail on the Italian diplomats who had picked up the money, would have to be done “unofficially,” on the grounds that the funds might be used for subversive activities.
President Roosevelt was advised of the Italians’ actions, and he turned a blind eye to whatever countermeasures might be taken. However, his legal adviser informed Hoover that if the Italians moved the funds physically into Mexico, they could be confiscated once they crossed the border.
Consequently, the FBI boss contacted William Stephenson, head of British Security Coordination (BSC), the New York City post whose mission was collecting information on German activities in the Western Hemisphere and taking appropriate countermeasures. Stephenson promptly got in touch with one of his top agents in Mexico who had a close relationship with an important Mexican police official. A reception was arranged for the Italian courier as soon as he reached Mexican soil with the money.
Tailed by two FBI agents, the three Italians took a train to Brownsville, Texas. There they separated. The two consuls headed for New Orleans to board a ship for Brazil. The embassy secretary continued on into Mexico, where he was approached by a stranger.
Flashing a badge, the man identified himself as an agent of the Mexican secret service. He grabbed the diplomatic pouch, then spun on his heel and disappeared, leaving the young secretary badly shaken.
The furious German ambassador in Mexico City rushed to protest the “hijacking” to the foreign minister, who was sympathetic and apologized profusely. He explained that it had been “the inexcusable act of an inexperienced clerk who was trying to make a name for himself.”
The Mexican foreign minister assured the German that he would try to locate the money. But neither the Nazis nor the Italians would ever see it again. Reportedly, Mexican officials placed the funds in a secret bank account under a fictitious name.
One-third of the Mussolini funds earmarked for German espionage activities against the United States thus vanished. The Nazi network based in Mexico City soon collapsed.
Meanwhile, Bill Stephenson’s operatives in Rio de Janeiro drew from the Brazilian foreign minister a pledge that the $2.5 million the two Italian consuls were bringing into the country would be given “special protection”—that is, confiscated by Brazilian authorities.
At the same time, two BSC agents went to the port of Pernambuco (Recife) in Brazil, where the ship carrying the Italian consuls was to dock. The BSC men planned to sneak aboard the vessel, steal the diplomatic pouch with the funds, and race away.
The scheme was thwarted. In a poor country where a police chief could be “bought” for a couple of hundred dollars, the Brazilian foreign minister pulled a double cross. He arranged to have the ship’s route altered, so that it docked at Rio, not at Pernambuco. An armed squad met the vessel and escorted the two consuls and their money to the Italian embassy.
Although $2.5 million had slipped through the fingers of the BSC, the money never reached Mexico City. Rather, it was sent to Rome.10
Louis de Wohl had been touring U.S. cities as “the famous Hungarian astrologer,” and an ever-growing audience was becoming convinced that he had supernatural powers. He had been built up in the press through stories of his amazingly accurate predictions on the course of the war in Europe.
A pudgy, middle-aged man with a high forehead, de Wohl was actually a captain in the British Army, and he had been brought to the United States in August 1941 as the centerpiece of an elaborate scheme by British Security Coordination (BSC) to help demolish the widespread public viewpoint that Adolf Hitler was invincible.
In New York, de Wohl’s reputation as a prognosticator of events that were to happen in the European war drew a large crowd of reporters. Actually, the BSC had been feeding him enough accurate secret war information in advance so that his predictions were validated.
A consummate actor, de Wohl told the New York journalists that Adolf Hitler’s horoscope showed the planet Neptune in a house of death and that the führer was involved.
A month later, the Associated Press flashed a story around the world about the annual convention in Cleveland, Ohio, of the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers. Its headliner was the “distinguished Hungarian astro-philosopher Louis de Wohl.” The astrologers agreed that Hitler’s days were numbered, the AP report stated. If they had said anything else, it would have been strange indeed: the federation was a BSC brainchild.
In an interview with a Cleveland newspaper, de Wohl complained that astrology had “too many quacks.”
De Wohl was ensconced in a modest Manhattan hotel. On a certain night of the week, a BSC agent would sneak up the fire escape and hand de Wohl his salary in untraceable dollars through an open back window. At the same time, the emissary would hand over any anti-Hitler information that de Wohl could use in his now widely read newspaper column, “Stars Foretell.”
Before creating each column, the Briton had to scrounge astrology information from textbooks to make certain he knew what he was talking about. Then the doomsday predictions about Adolf Hitler obtained from the BSC agent were woven into the narrative.
Meanwhile, British propaganda warfare experts were generating prophecies that would confirm Louis de WohFs seemingly matchless superiority. A few days after the phony Cleveland astrology conference, a “friendly” Cairo, Egypt, newspaper carried a fascinating article that quoted a highly regarded soothsayer, Sheikh Youssef Afifi: “Four months hence a red planet will appear in the eastern sky. A dangerous evildoer who has drenched the world in blood will die.” BSC saw to it that the prediction gained global circulation.
A Nigerian priest conveniently saw a vision: “A group of three men on a rock. One with black hair [Hitler], one fat little breadfruit [Goering], and third monkey-faced and lame [Goebbels].” Newspaper readers everywhere easily recognized the unnamed Nazi bigwigs. The priest predicted a sudden plunge from the rock of the one with the black hair.
Such planted stories were echoed around the world—in Malaya, in Sweden, in China, in Spain, in Hong Kong. BSC milked the ploy for all it was worth.11
War clouds were drifting from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean toward the United States. Although Franklin Roosevelt had taken to the airwaves in his trademark “fireside chats” to assure the American people that their sons would never get involved in a “foreign war,” the president knew that the nation was most likely going to be drawn into the conflict.
Roosevelt decided it was time to meet and confer with British prime minister Winston Churchill. Each leader sailed to Argentia Bay, Newfoundland, where they exchanged visits aboard the cruisers USS Augusta and HMS Prince of Wales. It was August 9 to 12, 1941.
The conferences were remarkable, as they produced a joint statement by the leader of a belligerent nation, Churchill, and the head of a nonbelligerent country, Roosevelt, outlining the reasons why the war was being fought. The statement would be known as the Atlantic Charter.
Five days after his return to Washington, Roosevelt called in his cabinet and gave its members a detailed briefing on what had transpired at the Argentia Bay talks. Only a few hours later, Admiral Canaris, the Nazi spymaster in Berlin, was seated in his office in the five-story gray-stone building at 72–76 Tirpitz Ufer that was the Abwehr headquarters and reading an account of the historic conference between Churchill and Roosevelt that had produced the Atlantic Charter.
Canaris had obtained this high-grade intelligence from an agent (code-named Habakuk) whom the Abwehr chief had planted a year earlier in the Swiss Foreign Ministry in Bern. Habakuk had pilfered a copy of a top-secret telegram that the Swiss consul in Washington, Charles Bruggmann, had sent to his home office.
In a letter to Canaris accompanying the stolen telegram, the military attaché in the German embassy in Switzerland stressed that the information was “precise and reliable” because Bruggmann had obtained the details “in strictest confidence from Vice President [Henry A.] Wallace.”
Bruggmann was a fifty-two-year-old career diplomat who had met Mary, the sister of Henry Wallace, when Bruggmann had been assigned to Washington in the 1920s. The couple was married the next year in Paris.
Bruggmann had established a close family bond with Wallace long before the Swiss’s second assignment in Washington, in 1940. Because of their geographic proximity, Wallace and his brother-in-law met in person often and talked on the telephone almost daily. A native of Iowa, where he had once been editor of the family’s magazine Wallace’s Farmer, the vice president trusted his Swiss brother-in-law to be discreet about the confidential, even secret, information Wallace had confided in him.
An almost daily flow of intelligence from the cagey Habakuk in Bern reached Berlin. No doubt his most important theft was a copy of a telegram sent by Bruggmann to Bern three days after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that plunged the United States into the global conflict.
Bruggmann’s telegram described in detail two conferences President Roosevelt had held in his office early in the afternoon of December 7, 1941, a few hours after much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet had become a twisted, smoking mass. The first solemn session was with his cabinet and the other was held to brief congressional leaders.
Roosevelt pulled no punches, the telegram disclosed. He told his audiences that the United States had suffered an almost mortal blow at Pearl Harbor, giving precise details of the colossal destruction and loss of American lives. There had been only one person other than Roosevelt who had been present at both White House meetings—Vice President Wallace.12
Darkness had gathered over German-occupied Athens, Greece, on October 10, 1941, as the sleek Mercedes sedan carrying two passengers in the backseat sped toward the municipal airport. One of the men was Hans Müller, an Abwehr officer, and the other was Paul Ernst Fackenheim, who had received several decorations for valor as a German Army officer in World War I and who later became a prosperous hardware dealer in Berlin.
At the Athens airport, Fackenheim boarded a black-bodied German transport plane, which took off and set a course for a pasture outside Haifa, one of the chief ports of Palestine (later Israel). Soon the former businessman bailed out of the aircraft and floated toward the ground in a parachute. He was the Nazis’ most unlikely secret agent of the war: a Jew.
Fackenheim’s weird odyssey into the murky world of espionage had begun a few weeks earlier, when Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Korps had been stalled by British forces in the Germans’ drive to reach Egypt. In Berlin, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr, had been given the task of recruiting an agent to report on the strength of British reinforcements being collected in the Middle East for a counteroffensive against Rommel.
Canaris’s aides concluded that the spy would have to be Jewish so he would be warmly received by Zionists when he arrived in Palestine. So an Abwehr officer went to the Dachau concentration camp and interviewed Paul Fackenheim, an inmate. The Jew was flabbergasted to be taken off a rigorous work detail, escorted to a room in the administration building, and interviewed by a courteous Abwehr officer. His amazement increased when the Abwehr agent called him Herr (Mister), a courtesy never accorded to Jews in Germany.
Soon the interviewer was convinced that Fackenheim was the ideal man for the espionage job. He was highly intelligent, had been known for his great energy, and spoke several languages fluently, including Hebrew. In fewer than twenty-four hours, Fackenheim was given a haircut, and his tattered prisoner garb was replaced by a new civilian suit, shirt, tie, and shoes.
The espionage recruit was escorted to Berlin, then flown to Athens, where he was given a brief course in spying techniques, operating a suitcase-size radio set, writing with secret ink, and identifying British tanks, airplanes, and unit insignias. Then he took a practice parachute jump and was assigned the code name Paul Koch.
As he rode through the night toward the Athens airport, Fackenheim had no way of knowing that he would be a pawn in the lethal rivalry between the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence arm of the elite Schutzstaffel (SS), the black-uniformed private army led by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. An SD agent tipped off the British to the time and place of Fackenheim’s arrival outside Haifa. However, the British were told that the parachutist would be a prominent SS general, Obergruppenführer Erich Koch.
The purpose of the SD machination was to discredit Admiral Wilhelm Canaris in the eyes of Adolf Hitler by arranging for the secret espionage mission to be botched. Then, the SD leader Reinhard Heydrich hoped, the Abwehr would be absorbed into the SD and he would become chief of a single German intelligence agency. As such, Heydrich would become the Reich’s second most powerful figure after Hitler.
Above the dark countryside outside Haifa a green light flashed on in the German transport plane, and Paul Fackenheim bailed out. Hardly had he parachuted to earth than he became aware of the headlights of numerous vehicles parked on an adjacent road. He could discern dim figures dashing about, and hear orders being shouted in English.
As envisioned by Heydrich, the British had concluded that a high-ranking SS general would be parachuting secretly into Palestine to orchestrate a huge sabotage operation or to instigate a massive Arab uprising. Consequently, the British High Command in the Middle East was eager to capture this dangerous German general.
Fackenheim managed to slip out of the British trap. At dawn, he lined up with residents at a bus stop, then took the conveyance into Haifa, where he melted into the crowds. Soon he became aware that British military police were posted at almost every corner, checking identity papers in an effort to nab the presumed SS general.
Finally, Fackenheim entered a British headquarters and told the officer in charge that he was a Jewish refugee from Germany who had landed in a boat on a Haifa beach the previous night. As soon as his interrogators saw that his forged identity papers listed him as Paul Koch, they arrested him.
Fackenheim was taken to a jail outside Cairo and grilled intently by British intelligence officers. They refused to believe his story that he was but a small-time spy who had agreed to his mission only to escape death at the Dachau concentration camp.
Some of the British officers clung to the notion that Fackenheim was indeed the SS general Erich Koch, who would be tried for espionage and possible execution because he had been wearing civilian clothes.
The trial was rapidly concluded, and it appeared that Fackenheim would be shot. Then, at almost the last moment, the Irish lawyer who had been appointed to defend him somehow located an elderly Jewish woman living in Haifa. She testified that she had known Paul Fackenheim and his parents many years earlier in Germany.
Consequently, the charges were dismissed, and Fackenheim survived the war in a British internment camp.13
