UNLIKE MIKE REILLY, WHO PROTECTED great men, Walter Schellenberg, the SS general who headed Section 6 of the RSHA, hunted them. But despite this defining difference in their duties—one the bodyguard, the other focused on cloak-and-dagger intrigues—the two professionals shared many similar qualities. They were both would-be lawyers and, at the identical age of thirty-three, young for their jobs. Each was guided by a strong sense of duty. And, not least, they both shared the experienced fieldman’s adversity to risk. For Schellenberg, this restraining caution had taken permanent operational hold after his ill-conceived part in Operation Willi—the Nazi plot to kidnap the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
THE IDEA WAS HITLER’S, but the summons on that July morning in 1940 came in an urgent telephone call from Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister. “Tell me, my dear fellow, could you come over to my office at once?” he asked in his typically florid way. Schellenberg, who keenly understood his underling’s role, immediately agreed to the powerful Reichsminister’s request, but when he tried to ascertain the agenda, if there were papers he might need to bring, Ribbentrop, full of authority and mystery, cut him off. “Come at once,” he ordered. “It’s not a matter I can discuss over the telephone.”
Ribbentrop stood in front of his massive marble-topped desk, arms folded across his chest like a headmaster preparing to upbraid an errant student. The stern look on his face, the hard stare in his blue eyes, only added to Schellenberg’s concern. The Reich was an adder’s nest, strivers vying for power and Hitler’s blessing, and the vain, old Ribbentrop, he had discovered, was among the most ruthless. A further concern: Schellenberg had long held the belief that the foreign minister, although lauded by Hitler as the greatest German statesman since Bismarck, was a profoundly stupid man, and that made his plodding machinations even more dangerous. His mind racing, Schellenberg feared some new contrived charge—he already had to defend himself against the accusations that he’d been having an affair with the attractive ash-blond wife of Reinhard Heydrich, his superior in the Reich Security Office—was about to be leveled.
Instead, the foreign minister began to hurl a series of questions at the intelligence officer about the Duke of Windsor. Had Schellenberg met the duke during his last visit to Germany? And—now affecting a deliberately conspiratorial tone—did he understand the real reasons behind the abdication?
Schellenberg had no idea where the interrogation was going, but he was immediately relieved: his head wasn’t on the chopping block. Dutifully, he quickly started to share what he’d read in the newspapers: the duke had decided to abdicate his throne to marry Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee he loved.
Ribbentrop cut him short. “My dear Schellenberg,” he said acidly, “you have a completely wrong view of these things—also of the real reason behind the Duke’s abdication.” The marriage issue had been a pretext to remove an “honest and faithful friend” of Germany from the British throne, he declared definitively.
Then Ribbentrop announced that he had a new mission for Schellenberg. It had come directly from the Führer. He was to offer the duke 50 million Swiss francs, the fortune (the equivalent of about $200 million in 1940) to be deposited in Switzerland, if the former king of England would make “some official gesture” disassociating himself from the royal family and the British government. Hitler would prefer the couple to take up residence in Switzerland, but, in a spirit of accommodation, the Führer had agreed that any neutral country would suffice as long as it was not beyond the Reich’s territorial reach. As for any attempts by the British Secret Intelligence Service to prevent the flight of the duke, it was up to Schellenberg to deal with them—“Even at the risk of your own life, and if need be, by the use of force.”
The lawyer in Schellenberg could not help but point out the apparent contradiction in his orders. Was he simply to offer the duke a bribe? Or was he, in fact, to kidnap him?
With a diplomat’s skill, the foreign minister parried the question: “The Führer feels that force should be used primarily against the British secret service. Against the Duke only insofar as his hesitation might be based on fear-psychosis, which forceful action on our part would help him overcome.”
It was a response that Schellenberg tried to unravel, and when he did he came to only one conclusion: one way or another, he was to get the duke under Germany’s physical control. If an ex-king’s ransom wouldn’t suffice, then the former monarch must be bundled up and carried off. Sensing Schellenberg’s dismay, Ribbentrop added knowingly, “Once he’s a free man again, he’ll be grateful to us.”
Ribbentrop explained the rest of the plan with a similar confidence, and a similar sparseness of detail. The duke, it had been learned, would soon be hunting in Spain with some friends. Schellenberg should make contact with him then. The rest would be up to Schellenberg; “All the necessary means will be at your disposal and we have agreed to give you a completely free hand.”
To seal the deal, Ribbentrop, with a showman’s flourish, telephoned Hitler as Schellenberg rose to leave. He handed the young general an earpiece so he could listen to the conversation. “Schellenberg will fly by special plane to Madrid as quickly as possible,” the foreign minister reported. “Good,” Hitler replied, in a voice that struck the eavesdropper as strangely hollow. “Tell him from me that I am relying on him.”
As for the actual mission, things initially proceeded with a reassuring operational swiftness. A meeting with the German ambassador in Madrid confirmed for Schellenberg that the duke and duchess would soon be coming to Spain for a hunting holiday, although the specific date had not yet been set. The country hacienda where they’d be staying was near the Spain-Portugal border; it would be easy enough to confront, and if necessary abduct, the duke as he meandered through the forest. And the top Spanish police and customs officials made it clear to Schellenberg that he could count on their full support. They’d even actively intervene if additional force was required.
But once all the pieces were seemingly in place, the plot began to unravel. Despite the firm report that had initiated the mission, the duke and duchess apparently were in no great hurry to go hunting in Spain. They were having too good a time living the high life in Estoril on the Portuguese Riviera. Undeterred, Schellenberg went to Estoril to see for himself. With a fieldman’s careful eye, he reconnoitered their borrowed home in all its palatial splendor, and then had his local agents gather up more detailed intelligence—the number of entrances, the location of the duke and duchess’s bedroom, the number of servants, and the size and deployment of the British security detail. In anticipation of the abduction, he arranged for a car with an engine souped up by the automotive wizards in the SD (as the Reich Security Service was commonly known) to be shipped to Estoril.
But Schellenberg found himself still hesitating. His informants’ latest reports were one reason for pause: while the duke was disappointed by His Majesty’s government’s recent decision to ship him off to the backwaters of Bermuda to serve as governor (“a third-rate colony,” the duke pouted), he had even less desire to live out the war in either a neutral or an enemy country. And as for the hunting trip to the Spanish forest, that was a whim that had passed—which meant Schellenberg would need to fight his way past the British security guards protecting the Estoril house, grab the duke and the duchess, and then figure on a running battle all the way to the safety of Spain. What would Hitler do, Schellenberg could not help but worry, if the mission ended with the duke, or perhaps the duchess, being killed in the cross fire? The likelihood of success, Schellenberg had come to realize, had dwindled from small to none.
Still, an order was an order. On the night before the mission was to be launched, Schellenberg, feeling “tired and beaten,” met in a quiet restaurant with a well-placed Portuguese asset to work out the final operational details. Reconciled, he announced, “Tomorrow I have to bring the Duke of Windsor across the Spanish frontier by force. The plan has to be worked out tonight.” But when the two men launched into the specifics, they both came to the conclusion that it would end in disgrace. Not only would it undoubtedly fail, but the Reich would be ridiculed for the madcap scheme. In the unsatisfying aftermath, the search for blame would begin. Schellenberg had little doubt that the admonitory fingers would all be pointed directly at him. Nor did he wonder about the punishment Hitler would inflict on the man responsible for the death of either the duke or the duchess; a firing squad would be the kindest end he could wish for.
In their shared desperation, the two men came up with a plan to circumvent Hitler’s order. They set it in motion that night. On Schellenberg’s command, his local assets began to circulate the rumor that a Nazi plan was afoot to whisk the duke and duchess off to Germany before they sailed to Bermuda. As Schellenberg had anticipated, this “secret” quickly reached the ears of the army of Allied agents camping out in Portugal. In quick response, the British security detail, already impressive, was fortified by an additional twenty men, all now on high alert.
Schellenberg sent a flash cable to Berlin reporting the increased security surrounding the couple. He had no choice but to call the mission off. Two days later the duke and duchess sailed to Bermuda, and Schellenberg, quaking with fear, returned to Berlin to find out his fate.
Ribbentrop delivered the news. But first he let Schellenberg stand in his office at mute attention as the foreign minister made a big show of going about other tasks. When he finally got around to speaking, he made no attempt to disguise his regret over the verdict. “The Führer,” he announced with a cool disdain, “asks me to tell you that in spite of his disappointment at the outcome of the whole affair, he agrees with your decisions and expresses his approval of the manner in which you proceeded.”
For the first time since he had left Portugal, Schellenberg’s heart stopped racing. He had outsmarted both Hitler and Ribbentrop. The mission had come to nothing, but he had survived.
THEN THREE HECTIC YEARS LATER—in wartime, the years an instant—he found himself wondering if he’d soon be pressured by his masters into another fanciful version of Operation Willi—and whether he’d need to conjure up another scheme to escape from an even more consequential disaster.
Schellenberg’s concerns were prompted by the identical intelligence that had caused Mike Reilly’s recent fears (though of course neither man knew of the other’s apprehension). A transcript of the August 31, 1943, radio address Winston Churchill had made at the conclusion of the Quebec Conference had crossed his desk. He had started reading with only small interest. It rambled on with a full-throated optimism predicting the Allied victory that he found particularly painful since he, too, had become increasingly convinced of the same inevitability. But midway through the pages, he was suddenly caught short. “Nothing is nearer to the wishes of President Roosevelt and myself,” he read with a new alertness, “than to have a three-fold meeting with Marshal Stalin.”
A meeting of the Big Three!
Schellenberg recognized at once that this would offer a tempting trio of targets that the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (the German armed forces high command) would find hard to resist. True, only the most ardent Nazis—Hitler or Goebbels, he imagined—would dare to believe that these deaths could affect the final outcome of the war; Germany’s defeat was a grim certainty. But with Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin out of the picture, there might very well be a different peace. It would be possible to negotiate an end to the war before the Allies launched their invasion of Europe, before the armies of this second front marched into Berlin. And it could be a reasonable peace, not one that vindictively insisted on an unconditional surrender. In all the recorded history of war, Schellenberg realized, only the Romans had made such a brutal demand on an enemy—and in the end Carthage had been leveled. He understood the desperate logic that would be calling for a mission to eliminate the Big Three.
But just as abruptly, he realized his musings were absurd. With a veteran intelligence agent’s careful perspective restored, he saw things with a sobering clarity. There was no chance of launching such a historic mission. Other than the fact that Churchill and Roosevelt were urging Stalin to meet with them, he had no hard facts. He did not know when the meeting would occur, or, for that matter, where it would take place. In the absence of those two essential pieces of intelligence, drafting as much as a preliminary action plan would be impossible. He had even less to go on than when he’d set off on his hapless attempt to kidnap the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
And he was certain: the location and date of the conference was an intelligence treasure that would be forever beyond the Reich’s grasp. It would be one of the most closely held Allied secrets of the entire war. There was no point in giving the assassinations further thought. Besides, he chided himself, the security surrounding the duke and duchess had been sufficient to scare him off. The precautions the Allies would take to protect their leaders would be more intense, a different category altogether. It would be a suicide mission, one without even the slightest chance of success.
Resigned, Schellenberg instead turned his attention to finalizing his plans for a more feasible stealth operation. He went back to completing the arrangements for a series of covert parachute drops into Iran. These sabotage missions were, he fully acknowledged, targeted at a distant and unimportant corner of the war, a sideshow, and a small one at that, to the major battles that would soon be fought. They would play no part in shaping the peace. Nevertheless, full of a soldier’s sense of duty, he told himself he would make the best use of the dwindling resources he still could muster. He would fight on as best he could.