A WALK-IN IS THE OUTCAST OF the spy trade, the uninvited guest bearing gifts whom no intelligence officer wants to welcome. The resentment is born out of a myriad of suspicions: Why did he knock on the door, offering his tempting presents, in the first place? Is he seeking money? Is it patriotism? Is it ego, the urge to be front and center on the world stage? Or has his arrival been instigated by the enemy, part of a carefully conceived plot to get a foot inside your house? And then, are his glittering offerings nothing but fool’s gold, disinformation dished out by a mischievous adversary? Yet what truly keeps spymasters tossing and turning through the night is the nagging fear that they’ve made a terrible mistake: they’ve either taken a double agent into their midst, or they’ve slammed the door on an intelligence windfall.
This was the unsettled terrain, doubts and suspicions scattered all about, that Schellenberg found himself carefully maneuvering through in the aftermath of his receiving a phone call just moments after sitting down at his office desk on October 28, 1943. The caller was Legationstrat Wagner, Ribbentrop’s generally unflappable autocratic aide, only that morning he was bursting with a very uncharacteristic urgency. He asked if he could see the Section 6 head “at once.” “On an extremely urgent matter,” he added, but that was as far as he’d go toward offering an explanation. The details, he mysteriously persisted, “could not be discussed on the phone.”
The story Wagner breathlessly recounted about an hour later was only a preliminary report; the situation was still developing, and the details culled from the initial cable sent by Franz von Papen, the German ambassador in Ankara, Turkey, remained scant. Nevertheless, even at this early stage, Schellenberg grasped with a prescient clarity, the implications were “quite staggering.”
A man claiming to be the valet of the British ambassador in Ankara had turned up on the doorstep of Albert Jenke, the German counselor, proposing a deal. In return for 20,000 pounds sterling (about $100,000 in wartime dollars, or more than five times the average annual US income at the time) the walk-in would hand over “photographs of the most secret documents of the British Embassy.” And it wasn’t just a one-time offer. Regular deliveries of photographed classified material were promised at the price of 15,000 pounds per roll of film. But the clock was ticking. The valet had set a deadline of three days, and he’d made it snidely clear that if he didn’t have the cash in his hand by then, well, he knew the address of the Russian embassy.
Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, wanted the spy chief’s counsel: Should we play along? Send the money? Or would we be rushing in with our eyes wide shut and our wallets open?
Schellenberg started to give the matter some thought, but he quickly realized there were discouragingly few hard facts for him to consider. Still, he did his best to tally up what he had.
On the one hand, the SD station chief in Ankara who worked under diplomatic cover, Ludwig Moyzisch, was old Abwehr, a capable and trusted spy. He could monitor things on the ground, get a sense of the seller, and certainly make an informed inspection of the film before the money was handed over. The prospect of an experienced professional overseeing the exchange in Turkey brought a measure of reassurance.
Added to this, even if the material proved to be deceptions cooked up by the Allies, this would have some intelligence value, too. Time after time Schellenberg had preached that “it is important to know by what means your enemy tries to mislead you.” If the valet’s products were counterfeits, then they were also road maps showing the false trails the Allies wanted Germany to go down. The SD’s backbeaters could go to work extrapolating what the Allies were trying to protect, and then come away with a better sense of what they were planning.
On the other hand, evaluating the documents would tie up considerable intelligence resources, analysts, and deskmen who could be deployed in other, more fruitful operations. Time, too, would be squandered, and he knew as all the leaders of the Reich had come to know that opportunities were dwindling for Germany. Then there was the cost: 20,000 pounds. “A tremendous sum,” Schellenberg complained, especially when there was no guarantee of what it would be buying.
Walking away would be easy, he acknowledged. In his job, he spent most of his time deciding not to get involved, finding the resolve not to chase after phantoms, however seductive. Accepting the offer would take nerve. Or would it be foolishness? he worried.
Photographs of the most secret documents of the British embassy. In the end, he reasoned, that was what it was all about. Either he wanted the product, or not.
Schellenberg decided the offer should be accepted.
The next day, an SD courier boarded a special flight to Ankara. He carried a briefcase crammed with 20,000 British pounds. And whatever misgivings Schellenberg still harbored were assuaged by the fact that the currency was counterfeit, the skillful handiwork of the Operation Bernhard forgers.
THE PRODUCT, SCHELLENBERG REJOICED, “was quite breathtaking.” Yet in the weeks that followed, as a steady flow of “highly secret correspondence between the British Embassy in Ankara and the Foreign Office in London” continued to make its way to Section 6, Schellenberg chose not to celebrate. An exuberant Papen had quickly dubbed the valet “Cicero” because his stolen papers spoke so eloquently. Schellenberg, however, lived instead with the throbbing suspicion that when something is too good to be true, it often means that it is not. The valet had delivered precisely what Germany was looking for, and in Schellenberg’s cynical world that was reason enough to have second thoughts. With doubts swirling through his mind, he set out to determine if he was being deceived.
He began by trying to get a sense of Elyesa Bazna, as the spy code-named Cicero was known in the overt world. Moyzisch, the case officer in direct contact with Bazna, conceded that the valet “looked like a clown without make-up,” a grubby little man from Yugoslavia who had joined a French military unit only to wind up in a penal camp for stealing cars and weapons. But Bazna did indeed now work for Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the old Etonian British ambassador to Turkey who thought it was a hoot to dress his diminutive valet in elaborate embroidered brocade, slippers with upturned toes, a fez with a jaunty tassel, and a ferocious scimitar dangling from the sash around his waist as though he were a character in an Arabian Nights tale. Further, the ambassador, Moyzisch confirmed, gave Bazna free rein to roam unrestricted through his sprawling residence above the capital in the lush hills of Cancaya. In fact, such was his convivial relationship with his manservant that Sir Hughe turned an indulgently blind eye when he discovered the valet’s affair with his secretary’s teenage nanny. If anybody could get away with covertly photographing the ambassador’s secret papers, the SD fieldman reported to Schellenberg in Berlin, Bazna fit the bill. He had the access and the guile. And when Moyzisch questioned him, probing for signs that the valet was perpetrating a hoax, Bazna’s responses were reassuringly “definite and precise.” “A ruthless and very able man,” Moyzisch judged, which Schellenberg had to admit were the appropriate qualifications for any spy.
Yet Schellenberg, meticulous, constantly wary, still refused to put aside his suspicions. Instead he struggled on, now trying to get a handle on “Cicero’s possible motives.” Money, of course, was one, and since he was demanding a fortune, a very convincing one. Yet when Moyzisch, on Schellenberg’s insistence, pressed the spy, Cicero provided an additional reason. He said his father had been shot by an Englishman while hunting in Albania, and he’d hated the English ever since. The account neatly reinforced the valet’s decision to run to Germany with his bounty of British secrets. Perhaps too neatly. On a previous occasion Bazna had told Moyzisch that his father had been living in Constantinople during the First World War and had gotten enmeshed in an “unpleasant quarrel” over the spy’s sister that had ended with his poor father’s being shot. “The discrepancy between these two stories,” Schellenberg fretted, “gave rise to some doubts about Cicero’s truthfulness.”
These concerns were further exacerbated by new questions about Cicero’s tradecraft. The way he described his covert workings, he’d grab documents from the upstairs safe while the ambassador rapturously played Beethoven on the grand piano in the downstairs salon during the long afternoons. Or at bedtime when Sir Hughe took his sleeping pill and swiftly fell into a deep slumber, the valet would remain in the bedroom ostensibly to clean and press his master’s suit. But the moment he heard the ambassador snoring away, Bazna would grab the keys off the nightstand and open the safe, and then the dispatch box. In Cicero’s telling, both the day- and nighttime pilferings had a common operational component: it was a one-man job. He’d photograph the documents with his trusty Leica and, still without any assistance, return them to the safe before the ambassador was any wiser.
Except Schellenberg had noticed something. On the recent rolls of film the SD had developed, two of Cicero’s fingers appeared in several of the photographs. Was it possible, Schellenberg wondered, for one person to both hold the documents steady while at the same tense time he worked the camera? He consulted the Section 6 photographic experts, and, after trying to reconstruct Cicero’s actions, their verdict was unanimous: it was impossible. Which meant that the spy had an accomplice. But who? And why was he lying about this?
Still, Schellenberg had spent enough time in the company of secret agents to have come to the conclusion that spies by nature and breeding were a deceitful lot; it was part of what had attracted them to their duplicitous trade in the first place. If Cicero wasn’t telling the whole story, well, he reminded himself, what fieldman ever shared everything with his handler? In the end, he decided with a deadly practicality, only one thing mattered.
“The documents spoke for themselves,” he said firmly. They were, Schellenberg came to deduce after periods of long and informed concentration, pieces that fit seamlessly into “the general picture of the political situation as I saw it.”
He was done vacillating. He no longer had any doubts: the Cicero material was genuine.
IT WAS ONE OF SCHELLENBERG’S precepts, a knowledge acquired through hard experience, that an intelligence service’s value was measured by its tangible actions rather than the stash of private treasures locked in its vaults. Therefore, ignoring the personal risks, he boldly went to war with Ribbentrop, who still had frosty reservations about the Cicero material (or perhaps, as Schellenberg would contend, the foreign minister was simply reluctant to support a success that wasn’t his). With a focused purposefulness, he moved on to, as he put it, “the utilization of the information.” “The seriousness of Germany’s position,” he stated with an emphatic resolve, “required it.”
Driven by this sense of urgency, he attacked on many fronts. Without delay he made sure Hitler and Himmler had summary reports on the Cicero papers. And, further proof of the shrewdness he brought to the internal battles he knew lay ahead, he had the SD experts compile a list of questions that the Führer would undoubtedly ask. This way there’d be no hemming and hawing; he’d have the answers ready. It was a precaution, he had the foresight to realize, that “was of the greatest importance for on it would depend whether the material could be used for decisions of policy.”
Yet even as the pages of questions were being prepared, he charged ahead, bold and unrestrained, into other arenas. He asked General Fritz Thiele, chief of the Wehrmacht’s wireless security and decoding section, to be so kind as to come to his office “at once.” Then he handed over to the general Cicero’s photographs of the ambassador’s diplomatic communiqués to London before they’d been encoded by the embassy’s cipher clerk. Thiele’s wranglers, he had little doubt, could compare the plaintexts, as they were known to cryptologists, to the encoded communications the wireless security section had already intercepted. They’d have a tremendous head start in breaking the “unbreakable” British diplomatic code. If this worked, they’d soon be able to read the encrypted cables being sent to and from every British embassy across the globe.
But what had his attention riveted from the start—although he made sure there was nothing in his manner to convey the intensity of his interest to either Moyzisch, Ribbentrop, or Thiele—was a single document in Cicero’s original trove. It was a report by Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, on the Moscow Conference he attended at the tail end of October with Cordell Hull, the US secretary of state, and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet minister of foreign affairs.
It made clear that the meeting among the Big Three was off.
“There was no possibility of being able to move Stalin,” Eden had written with a very undiplomatic firmness.
With that revelation, Schellenberg understood that Operation Long Jump was also no longer a possibility. His anger welled as he considered the dire implications its stillborn death would have for Germany. At the same time, he forced himself to read on.
“It is very awkward waiting around for an answer from Uncle Joe. It is urgent to get dates settled and preparations made,” the British prime minister had cabled the American president with an obvious frustration after reading Eden’s report.
Roosevelt agreed. He, too, was tired of trying to reach an agreement with the stubborn Russian marshal. In his pique, he decided that the two of them, the elected democratic leaders of the most powerful Allied nations, should meet anyway. He could go to Cairo in November.
“I will meet you in Cairo on the 20th as you suggest,” Churchill swiftly agreed.
And just like that, Schellenberg’s grand plan was brought back to operational life. The assassination of two of the Allied leaders rather than all three would have to suffice. Still, the deaths of Churchill and Roosevelt, he assured himself, would mean that the Allies’ insistence on Germany’s unconditional surrender would die its death, too.
With a clarifying sense of the operation, Schellenberg hurried to Oranienburg. He had done it! He had discovered the answers to the two questions that had assailed him for so long, his two perplexing ifs. There is no record of his thoughts as he made the short drive north from Berlin. Nevertheless, it was no doubt apparent to him, the promise of the chase so suddenly revitalized, how variable were the winds of war. One moment all was lost. The next, a British diplomat in Ankara takes a sleeping pill, carelessly leaves his keys on the nightstand, and the course of the war, Germany’s very future, could be changed forever. For he now knew where and when the Allied meeting would take place.
He briefed Skorzeny. It was agreed that Long Jump could begin its countdown to launch. The commando teams would be parachuting into Egypt within three weeks.
Then he found Winifred Oberg in the dormitory. When the two men were alone, after taking care that no one would overhear the conversation, Schellenberg confided in his special agent. Prepare to leave for Cairo, he ordered.