I gathered the declassified CIA material that was available on Karl Hass. It was voluminous, far greater than that for Lauterbacher, one hundred and twenty-eight files, starting from 1944 and continuing up to the 1960s. They offered a long, slow and fascinating read.
Karl Hass was born in October 1912, in Kiel, northern Germany. He studied at the University of Berlin, and was awarded a doctorate in political science. By then, 1934, he had joined the SS, and that year, Hitler’s first as chancellor, he started work at SD headquarters in Berlin. He began in the department of press affairs, known as Office I, then moved to the department for science and research, Office VII, finally ending up in Office VI, which ran intelligence. In 1937, one of his colleagues at the SD was Otto Wächter, although I could not ascertain if they worked together, or knew each other. What was known was that they worked in the same building and walked the same corridors.
In 1940 Hass was posted to Holland, to work for the SD under the direction of Arthur Seyss-Inquart. In 1943 he was transferred to Rome. By then he was an SS Sturmbannführer, or, in its Anglo-American equivalent, a major. In March 1944, when German soldiers sang the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ as they marched down Rome’s Via Rasella, he was chief assistant to Herbert Kappler, head of the German police and security service in the city, working as head of SS intelligence.
Major Hass’s work included the recruitment of secret agents to work for the Germans, against partisans and communists. His front was as a press attaché to the German embassy, which offered cover and allowed him to attend many functions. In the summer of 1944 he came under surveillance by the Americans and British, and a CIA file from that year had a photograph of Major Hass seated with Colonel Kappler – who would later be convicted for the killings in the Fosse Ardeatine. It shows a large man in a dark suit and tie, enjoying a glass of red wine.
A CIC file described him as nearly six feet tall, a man of ‘robust build’ with ‘black hair, short, square type face, pallid complexion’. He was ‘dynamic’ and liked to present himself to Italians as a German officer with ‘pro-Allied sympathies’. The CIC considered him to have an original mind, with a good sense of humour, and to be kind-hearted. He liked a drink and drove a Fiat 1100.
Major Hass left Rome on 4 June 1944, the day before American troops occupied the city. He went to Parma, to train agents to penetrate Allied-occupied territory in southern Italy. He worked closely with Italians who supported the Republic of Salò, and the German occupying forces. His network of colleagues included General Wolff, Walter Rauff, Wilhelm Höttl, and Otto.
In April 1945, as the US Army approached, he fled Parma for Bolzano. There, on 15 July, he married Anna Maria Fiorini, who was later known as Angela, an Italian he met in Parma. One file noted his failure to declare a previous marriage, to Ingeborg, in Germany. In due course a news story reported that his first wife took steps to have him pronounced dead.
In November 1945 he was caught by the CIC, with a false name. The Americans handed him over to the British, who interrogated him in Milan. A photograph was taken, placed in the files, grainy and indistinct, frequently copied and recopied. In January 1946 Major Hass escaped. Four months later he was caught in Rome. He escaped again, was caught again. So it went on, at least five times over the space of a year. By June 1947 he was reported to be teaching Italian at a Catholic institute for boys in Ferme, a small town south of Rome. One sixteen-page file, marked confidential, was titled ‘Personal Information’. Both sides had tired of the cycle of arrest and escape, so ‘a peace pact’ was made, by which Major Hass committed to ‘devote his talents and energies to the benefit of CIC’. An agreement was approved by the commanding officer of the CIC’s 430th Detachment, Thomas A. Lucid, the man who caught Frau Himmler and recruited Wilhelm Höttl.
Major Hass was taken to Austria, where, on 11 November 1947, he was placed under the custody of Thomas Lucid. He was given a reference number, 10/6369. A meeting was held at CIC headquarters in Gmunden, attended by Hass, Lucid and Joseph Luongo. He was judged to be methodical, analytical, logical and conclusive, a man who did not deviate from tasks to which he was assigned. With twelve years of intelligence experience for the SD, he had access to the ‘first families’ of Rome, Paris, Rotterdam and Berlin, and was said to be adaptable to any group of people or setting.
The CIC recruited Major Hass. He would run a new project, a network of agents codenamed ‘Los Angeles’. Based in Rome, he was paid a basic salary of 150 ‘green dollars’ a month, in cash. The CIC gave him a new identity, Giustini, with an Italian identity card, issued in Trieste, in the name of ‘Mario Giustini’, although he was also known as ‘Rodolfo Giustini’ and, with an Austrian passport, as ‘Rudolf Steiner’. Other documents he carried had the names ‘Hans Popp’, ‘Carlo Ferrari’ and ‘Carlo Mantelli’. His codename with the CIC was ‘Gruesome 201’.
A first operational meeting was held in May 1948, at the Café Mille Luci in Rome, a location where Hass and Luongo would not be recognised. This was around the time that trials of his former colleagues Herbert Kappler and Erich Priebke took place, before an Italian military tribunal, for the reprisal killings in the Ardeatine Caves (in July, Kappler was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment; Priebke was acquitted).
Hass arrived at the rendezvous with a list of thirteen names, individuals who were willing to work for the Americans. The names included fascists, journalists, Nazis and a Vatican official, although it did not include Walter Rauff, with whom Hass was in contact and who lived at the Vigna Pia monastery. The thirteen agreed to provide Hass with ‘raw information’ on the activities of the Italian Communist Party and Soviet and other foreign intelligence agencies, as well as other matters of interest to the CIC. The information would be passed directly to Joseph Luongo.
Several of the names that Hass gave Luongo appeared on Otto’s list of contacts. Unwittingly, Otto had entered a nest of spies. Several of his contacts in Rome were secret agents, working for the Americans, for something that came to be known as Project Los Angeles.
The CIC document on ‘Net Project – Los Angeles’ was declassified in 2001. The project was activated on 15 December 1947, after Major Hass was hired. It operated for four years, until 1951.
Its goal was to penetrate the Italian Communist Party, engage in counterintelligence against communist threats, and monitor threatening activities in the South Tyrol, including ‘partisan formations’. The project was directed by Joseph Luongo, codename ‘Gruesome 4’, who was based in Gmunden. He reported to Thomas A. Lucid.
The ‘chief source’ for Project Los Angeles was ‘former SD major Karl Hass’. He was considered reliable because of his ‘Teutonic rearing’ and experience as a ‘main cog’ in Office VI of the SD, the SS intelligence service. Based in Rome, Hass collected information from seven named sub-sources, each of whom was paid fifty US dollars a month, in cash. Hass was left with extra dollars each month, for expenses and to ‘dine with prospective informants’.
The seven sub-sources had a range of backgrounds. Two of them – Ulderico Caputo and Alberto Barletta – were established members of the Italian intelligence service, the Office of Classified Matters.
The five others were identified as ‘former Abwehr colleagues, Vatican dignitaries, and the neo-fascist underground movement “Bands of Revolutionary Action”.’
Albert Griezzar, a German, lived in Bolzano. Like Hass, he served in Office VI of the SD, for which he gathered intelligence for the Third Reich.
Pino Romualdi, an Italian, was the former secretary general of the Fascist Party in the Republic of Salò. The CIC described him as ‘forceful and strong-willed, idealist, extremely intelligent, good tactician’. He was retained as an agent even as he was being held in a prison in Rome.
Ali Hussain, an Arab of unspecified nationality, was the former chief of the Arabian Youth Movement. He worked closely with General Rommel, and was ‘wanted by the French’, as a German collaborator. The CIC described him as a loyal, crafty opportunist, ‘still deeply attached to Nazi philosophy and doctrine’.
Monsignor Federico Fioretti, an Italian, was chief of the Vatican press bureau. He worked directly for Pope Pius XII, and was considered to be ‘astute, tactful, charming and gracious’.
The seventh agent who worked for Karl Hass was Bishop Hudal. Described by the CIC as ‘Chief of the German Catholics in Italy’, Alois Hudal was paid fifty dollars a month, in cash, by the Americans for his services as an informer. The arrangement was in effect when he met Otto on 29 April 1949, and lasted at least until 1950.
Hunted by the Americans for ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’, when Otto arrived in Rome he walked straight into the arms of a ‘religious gentleman’ who was, secretly, an American agent working for Project Los Angeles.