Burn After Reading (17 page)

On June 20, 1940, Churchill's foresight paid enormous dividends. Lindemann came into his office to say, “We have found the secret of
Knickebein.”

Churchill's elation turned to shock when Lindemann told him what it was.
Knickebein
appeared to be the cover name of a new German device that was supposed to enable their bombers to attack day or night, irrespective of weather conditions. This was the deduction of a certain Richard V. Jones, Deputy Director of Intelligence Research in the Air Ministry.

Dr. Jones was summoned to a meeting with Churchill the next day. He spoke for twenty minutes in quiet tones, “unrolling,” as Churchill put it afterwards, “his chain of evidence, the like of which, for its convincing fascination, was never surpassed by tales of Sherlock Holmes or Monsieur Lecoq.”

Jones was, for all practical purposes, a spy on the grand scale, sitting behind a desk, and yet procuring data about the innermost secrets of the enemy with a sure hand. His raw material was varied. He was fed transcripts of prisoner interrogations, captured documents, radio cable and telephonic intercepts, censorship reports, all the mass of papers produced by a war's secret service.

A German bomber had been shot down, and in its wreckage R.A.F. intelligence officers found a far more complicated apparatus than seemed to be needed for night landing by the beam. The apparatus was shown to Dr. Jones and appeared to be a step toward a new system of beams by which the Germans expected to navigate and bomb. Jones tried to envisage the new system and perceived it in the form of an invisible searchlight whose beam would guide the bombers to their targets.

Jones then combed the interrogation centers for a
Luftwaffe
prisoner who might know something about this projected system. A few days later, he found the man he sought. Cross-examining him along the lines of his own reasoning, Jones received
confirmation. The German broke down and conceded that the
Luftwaffe
was, indeed, experimenting with this new system and that it was expected to be ready for practical use by the start of the great air attack on England.

Jones' report started a chain reaction, with much of Air Intelligence and several secret agents devoting all their efforts to the procurement of additional data about
Knickebein
. Before long, several
Knickebein
stations were located near Dieppe and Cherbourg, and stone by stone, the entire frightening mosaic of the new system was brought together.

No sooner had Jones left the Cabinet Room than Churchill ordered Lindemann to develop a counter-weapon.
Knickebein
was put to work for the first time on August 23, when the Dieppe and Cherbourg stations trained the beam on Birmingham. As soon as the German stations opened up, the British started up their counter-stations. The supposedly infallible
Knickebein
beam was twisted and jammed. The
Luftwaffe
flew in, confident that nothing could go wrong this time, and was startled to find that well-nigh everything was going wrong again. This
Knickebein
phase of the air war was not much different from the bad old “meacon” days.

For two whole months, nobody dared to tell Goering that his beams were being twisted and jammed. When General Martini summoned the courage and told him at last, Goering refused to believe it and told his scientific chief, “That is impossible!” By then it was October, 1940. It was past the Q-hour by which the R.A.F. had to be defeated to win the Battle of Britain.

In June, 1940, Hitler celebrated the fall of France with his little jog at Compiègne and then retired to his mountain retreat, the Berghof, where he could brood best. It was there, less than a month later, on July 19, that he invited General Alfred Jodl to lunch. Jodl was chief of Hitler's personal operations staff which was headquartered aboard a special train, “Atlas,” so that it could follow the Fuehrer wherever he went and always be on hand.

Almost casually, between luncheon courses, Hitler instructed Jodl to begin drafting plans for an invasion of Russia. Back aboard “Atlas,” which lay on a siding at Reichenhall, a nearby spa, Jodl called in his planning chiefs, Colonels Warlimont and von Lossberg, Commander Junge and Major Baron von Falkenstein, and issued the necessary orders.

Within a few days a preliminary plan was sketched out, but of necessity it had to be based on what intelligence was then available, and that intelligence was skimpy. Even cursory study of the plan showed that far more information was essential.

On September 7, 1940, the Battle of Britain was all but won by the
Luftwaffe
, had the Germans only known it. Crippled and nearly smashed, her only real weapon, the R.A.F., in splinters, Britain had her back to the wall. She and the rest of the West were preoccupied with the apparently impending Sea Lion which might signal the final end of the war in the West.

And on that day an officer arrived at the
Fuchsbau
with a message which he said he would deliver only into the hands of
Admiral Canaris himself. It was a document numbered 150231/ 40, signed by Jodl, instructing the
Abwehr
to open operations against the Soviet Union, Hitler's unsuspecting ally. Jodl urged extreme caution: “These moves,” he wrote, “must not create the impression in Russia that we are preparing an offensive in the East.”

Canaris was caught by surprise. Relations with Russia had been friendly; the intelligence organs of the two countries had even exchanged information on occasion. And after the 1939 treaty, the
Abwehr
had been specifically told to drop espionage efforts against the Soviet.

Canaris had received that earlier order with relief; he had never been able to establish an effective network inside Russia. That incredible Iron Curtain stretched for thousands of miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. First came a barbed wire fence, spotted at close intervals with watchtowers. Behind that lay fifteen yards of bare earth, ploughed and raked to show the lightest footprint. And behind that was twenty miles of deserted countryside, inhabited only by the frontier guards of the N.K.V.D.

The only way to get an agent into Russia was through a legitimate port of entry, where travelers were closely scrutinized and thence watched throughout their stay. Moreover, the Russians used a system of infiltration inherited from the days of the Czar. Prospective spies against Russia were recruited all over Europe and smuggled into the Soviet Union, where they immediately fell into the arms of the secret police. The recruiters were
agents provocateurs.

In the face of such barriers, Canaris did not relish his new assignment. Such information as the Abwehr had was being obtained from four sources: from study of the few clues that appeared in Soviet publications, from legitimate returning travelers, from various exiles, and from Herr Klatt.

This inscrutable man (whose real name and true identity were never established) was
the
Secret Agent Extraordinary of the
Abwehr
against the Soviet Union. Who he was, how he
looked, and what made him work for the
Abwehr,
aside from purely mercenary considerations, I do not know. He was one of those wayward adventurers one encounters everywhere in the Balkans, making an obscure but lucrative living from all sorts of deals, some legitimate—most of them shady. Klatt lived in Sofia in the 1930's. There he was engaged in business that apparently had nothing to do with systematic espionage until suddenly he blossomed out as a secret agent on a massive scale. He gained access to Soviet secrets and looked around for some organization on which he could unload them for the greatest profit. A survey quickly revealed to him that nobody but the Germans would be his customers; all others, interested as they were in his material, had no substantial funds to pay for it.

At that time, in 1938, the
Abwehr
was not yet in residence in Bulgaria, so Klatt had to go all the way to Austria to make the initial contact. Shortly after the
Anschluss,
the Munich branch of the
Abwehr
was moved to Vienna and given expanded jurisdiction over the whole of southeastern Europe. It operated under a General Staff officer, Colonel Marogna-Radwitz, a devoutly Catholic, dignified and decent, Bavarian nobleman.

In August, 1938, Klatt arrived in Vienna and was taken by a mutual friend to the colonel. He impressed Count Marogna, not so much with his personality (colorful but obnoxious), as with the material he had brought along and with his
bona fides.
He came to the first meeting with a startling amount of intelligence, especially about the innards of the Soviet Air Force. He claimed to have a link to the Soviet Legation in Sofia and said he was receiving the bulk of his information from the Soviet Union via short-wave radio. Although he was extremely accommodating, he steadfastly refused to reveal anything more about his sources, but he did volunteer to leave his material with the
Abwehr
so that it might be examined closely before a deal was made. Marogna promptly forwarded the
dossiers
to Berlin where they created a sensation. This was exceptional material and Klatt was greeted as the first gusher in an otherwise barren field.

His material stood the test of the most painstaking
checking. The discovery of this remarkable agent was considered so important that it was reported directly to the Chief of the General Staff, an unusual step, and, from then on, the Klatt material was handled with top priority by special officers in Berlin. His data became the basis of German planning against the U.S.S.R. on the highest echelon, something few spies in history could claim.

When the deal was made (and it was fantastic in terms of money; Klatt was extremely expensive), the new master spy returned to Sofia to become the top ranking secret agent—and virtually the only direct-action spy—the
Abwehr
had working full-time in this important sector of the secret war. This phenomenal spy never disappointed his employers. And he never ceased to intrigue them. Marogna tried everything, as did Section III of the
Abwehr
, to penetrate this man's secret. All efforts over a period of years to disclose anything at all about Klatt personally, and about his sources, proved in vain, and so in due course the usual suspicion arose that he was probably a Soviet intelligence officer planted with authentic information so that he could palm off misleading intelligence on the Germans when it really mattered.

The suspicions seemed confirmed when several of Klatt's claims were proven false. A day-and-night surveillance showed that, contrary to his statements, he had absolutely no contact with the Soviet diplomatic mission. Whenever he claimed he had received material from the Soviet Union by short-wave, the
Abwehr
monitors could find no trace whatsoever of such traffic. And yet, the intelligence was there and it proved authentic in all instances.

A special effort was made to infiltrate the Soviet secret police for the sole purpose of finding out something about the suspected double agent. It was a complicated and costly affair, but all it revealed was that the Russians had some inkling of a monumental leak somewhere, but knew nothing about Klatt or his activities.

Had the Germans searched for Klatt's secret in Bucharest instead of Sofia, they would have read at least part of the riddle. The spy's actual source was neither the Soviet Legation in Sofia nor some mysterious informants in the Red Army General Staff, but solely the obscure correspondent of a Tokyo newspaper, Isono Kiyosho by name, who had his headquarters in the Rumanian capital. From the correspondent the lines led straight to a house in a Toyko suburb, to the residence of Dr. Richard Sorge, the Soviet's own master spy. Not that Sorge acted as a double agent, working also for the Germans, not directly, that is. Yet indirectly, without his own knowledge, he was doing exactly that. His network extended all the way from Tokyo to New York, with many way-stations along the route, including one in Bucharest. In the Rumanian capital, Kiyosho was his agent, receiving information for Sorge and relaying it to Tokyo, and sometimes even directly to Moscow.

And, Kiyosho
-san
had still another assignment from Sorge. In Bucharest was located one of the major European outposts of the Japanese Intelligence Service specializing in Soviet matters, and so, Kiyosho's assignment was to infiltrate that outpost, establish himself within it as a confidential informant, to find out what the Japanese were getting on Russia and from whom.

Kiyosho did a thorough job. He told Sorge some of what he found out, but most of it he sold to Klatt. It was in this roundabout manner that Klatt could function so phenomenally; he received the intelligence about the Soviet Union from the files of the Japanese secret service through a Japanese newspaperman working for the Soviet Union via a German Communist, and sold it to Germans in the end. Klatt's success was a testimonial to the superb cunning of that remarkable man, but also to the efficiency of the Japanese secret service, and especially to the utter baseness of the espionage game.

Klatt served the Germans to the bitter end, because his sources never dried up. Even when Sorge fell down in 1941, Kiyosho continued to function, and, in 1943, Klatt moved to
Bucharest on some pretext to be closer to his source. He never succeeded in gaining the unqualified trust of the Germans and was frequently on the verge of being unceremoniously sacked, not because his material was not satisfactory (it was uniformly excellent) but because his mystery continued to disturb his employers. Once, in 1945, only the personal intervention of General Heinz Guderian, then chief of the General Staff, saved his life; the Germans, totally exasperated by Klatt's impregnable secret, decided to get rid of him for good by sending him to a concentration camp. Guderian was scandalized; the information the man was supplying was so invaluable that the General Staff Chief gave orders to leave Klatt alone, or else, he said, the best source of information about the U.S.S.R. would be lost.