Burn After Reading (20 page)

Yet Rado managed to muddle through to greatness in this fantastic business. He performed better, and produced more valuable material than any of his colleagues or opposite numbers in any one of the secret services. Rado tapped the anti-Nazi underground inside Germany and soon had agents inside the
Wehrmacht
High Command itself and in virtually every war-essential agency of the Nazi government. Even today, long after the whole ring has been blown to bits, only a handful of his contacts have been identified. By late 1938, Rado was getting vast quantities of information and was the busiest man in Switzerland. He devoted a full day's work to his Geopress in downtown Geneva and every minute of what was left to the management of his clandestine pastime. The latter required enormous attention to detail with plenty of paper work, because at this stage Rado had no “music boxes,” no secret radio transmitters, at his disposal. He was getting so many documents in their original form, or as transcripts, that he could not have encoded them all and put them on the air even if he had wanted to.

He would photograph these documents on 35mm film and send them by courier to the military attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Paris. From there they were either sent on to Moscow by other couriers or radioed to the “Center” over a transmitter operated by the French branch office of the Fourth Bureau.

Until 1939, the pattern which emerged from these documents was not clear. But then suddenly the evidence Rado was waiting for started to pour in. On April 6 or 7, he received on microfilm a German order dated only three or four days earlier. A couple of weeks later, he sent a courier to Paris with another batch of film clips on which was reduced a lengthier document, a variation on the same theme. These two papers were copies of Hitler's orders to start translating “Case White” (the operations plan against Poland) into practice.

What was made of these reports in the Kremlin nobody at
this end can tell. But was it sheer coincidence that on April 17, 1939, a few days after Rado's information had reached Moscow, the Soviet Ambassador to Berlin spoke of the possibility of a Russo-German
rapprochement
during a routine meeting with Baron von Weizsaecker, Under-Secretary in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs? Was there no connection between Rado's information and Stalin's decision to conclude a pact with Hitler?

Thanks to Rado's scoop, the Kremlin knew exactly in what direction the wind was blowing and set its sails accordingly. The signing of the Russo-German pact in August, 1939, had its grotesque aftermath in Rado's private underworld. On August 26, 1939, he received orders from the “Director” in Moscow to dismantle his German ring and stop spying on Germany. Stalin was taking the pact rather seriously.

Rado must have thought this was a senseless order and that it was a pity to destroy such a well-oiled ring. He disobeyed his instructions, as he had many times before, and kept his German ring going. As we shall see, his insubordination made all the difference between victory and defeat for the Soviet Union. The fat little spy in his landlocked Swiss hideout could see more clearly than the supreme dictator in the Kremlin. It was, therefore, simple for him to return to full operations when in October, 1940, he received instructions from Moscow to resume speed.

Rado had about fifty agents working for him, going by all sorts of cover names, living all kinds of double lives. Two of them—Sissy and Taylor—loomed up at this critical moment. Sissy was Rachel Duebendorfer, a woman of obscure Balkan origin but Swiss by a marriage of convenience; she was working in the International Labor Office, an agency of the League of Nations. Taylor was Christian Schneider, a German by birth. He was Rachel's colleague at the I.L.O. until he gave up his legitimate job and became a full-time cut-out for Rado.

Rado was using three aliases: Albert and Kulicher, and then, throughout the war, Dora. He kept in touch with Moscow through three clandestine radio stations. One was operated by
Jim, the wayward British expatriate; the second was managed by a French couple, Edmond (Eduard) and Olga (Maud) Hamel, from the back room of their legitimate radio shop; the third was operated by Rosie, Rado's twenty-one-year-old paramour, a pretty Swiss girl named Margaret Balli.

It was not too difficult to operate such a network in Switzerland. The country was the ideal, traditional locale of wartime espionage, facilitated by Swiss democracy with its scrupulous regard for civil rights; Switzerland's geographical location in the heart of Europe; its role in high finance as the banker of the belligerents; and the fact that the Swiss themselves had a very real stake in espionage, which they regarded as their country's first line of defense. Most anxious to keep a constant check on German intentions insofar as their own country was concerned, the Swiss Army Intelligence Service (the world famous
Nachrichtendienst)
utilized all sources of information, their own as well as the agents of others. The N.D. was frequently willing and even eager to make deals and barters with foreign agents as long as their activities were not directed against Switzerland.

It was from Switzerland that the Fourth Bureau received its most explicit warning,
“from Dora to Director.”

It was June 10, 1941, a cloudless, beautiful near-Summer day in Geneva. Rado was just getting up when his home telephone rang. It was Taylor, violating the most elementary rule of good espionage. Rado himself would violate the rules wholesale, but he disliked it when his cut-outs got in touch with him in this direct manner.

“Yes … What do you want?” he barked.

“I have to see you at once,” Taylor said. “I'll come to your house right away!”

“That's impossible,” Rado replied. “We'll have to meet somewhere,” but Taylor broke into his sentence:

“This matter cannot wait,” and hung up. Fifteen minutes later, a cab drove up in front of a restaurant and out of it stepped Taylor, making his way in stages to Rado's house. His boss waited for him in his study.

Taylor, a stolid, somewhat slow-witted German of extreme reserve, was almost breathless.

“Sissy has put me in touch with the most phenomenal source we ever had,” he blurted. “She refused to tell me who he is and how she got hold of him, but he is as real as life, has direct lines to the German High Command and has his own lines of communications. And he's safe ! He's working for the
Nachrichtendienst
. They vouch for him and protect him!”

He gave Rado the first piece of information he had received that morning from the mysterious contact and left. Rado spent an hour, writing a concise message, enciphering it (something he rarely did himself), then pondering whether to send it. It was monumental news, if it was true. But if it was not, he would make a fool of himself and bring down upon his head the wrath of the Director.

At last, when it was almost eleven o'clock, he called Jim from a booth and asked his chief radioman to meet him at a street corner. Rado was still worried when they met, almost shaking with fear, but Jim calmed him down. He simply took the piece of paper with the cipher on it from Rado's trembling hand and left the shaking spymaster at the street corner.

That night, two officers of the German radio monitoring station at Cranz in East Prussia, combing the air waves for other people's secrets, picked up a message. It attracted their attention because it was repeated again and again, on wave lengths 18.9 and 21.3, for hours every half hour, always the same monotonous signals, identical five-figure groups. The Germans had monitored the station before, but they never succeeded in breaking its cipher. It was, of course, Jim in Geneva:

“From Dora to Director,
source : Taylor. Hitler's attack on Soviet Union definitively scheduled for June 22. This is new date representing postponement from original June 15. Hitler reached decision only two days ago. Report from absolutely reliable new source, received by Swiss General Staff via special diplomatic courier. More to follow.”

The message reached Moscow that night, but it was not
deciphered until the next morning. It was immediately sent to General Kuznetsov, the Director, who was in the Kremlin, attending a military discussion in Stalin's office. The general was called out of the meeting and was handed the message. He returned to the conference and read it out loud.

Stalin still remained skeptical, but the others around the table no longer shared his doubts. The conceited dictator who alone could have given the order to meet the onslaught still preferred not to give it.

Who was the source of the message that Stalin so rashly disregarded?

Not far from the discreetly cloaked headquarters of the Swiss Military Intelligence Service in Lucerne was the modest office of a small, esoteric publishing house, Vita Nova by name, the publisher of books with a liberal Catholic philosophical slant. It was run by a short, owlish, ascetic-looking man. He called himself Rudolf Roessler, and it may be that it was his real name.

It happens but rarely that a single individual spy can exert decisive influence on the main course of history, but Rudolf Roessler was such a person. According to Alex Foote, it was mainly his contribution that enabled the Red Army to beat Hitler.

Roessler was born on November 22, 1897, in Kaufbeuren, Germany, the son of a Swabian forestry official. He worked as a journalist in Augsburg and later became the manager of a theatrical association in Berlin. When the Nazis came into power Roessler had to flee. He found a haven in Switzerland, and, from then on, his life was devoted to anti-Nazi activities. He settled in Lucerne with the aid of a young friend, Dr. Xavier Schnieper. Throughout his subsequent espionage activities, Schnieper remained his sole confidant and associate. He became the representative of an enormously powerful German conspiratorial group that extended into the highest echelons of the High Command and the Foreign Office.

Schnieper was friendly with a major of the Swiss
Intelligence Service in whose house also lived a certain Uncle Tom, apparently a relative or a friend of the family. In fact, Uncle Tom was Colonel Svoboda, Military Attaché of the Czechoslovak Government-in-exile. Roessler placed his information at the disposal of the Swiss and also gave it to Uncle Tom for the Czech secret service in London. At the same time, he tried to establish a working relationship with General West, the British Military Attaché in Berne, ex officio resident chief of the Secret Service. But West turned him down, probably because his sources happened to be the same German dissidents with whom the British, after the shock of the Venlo incident, refused to cooperate.

With no other place to go, and realizing that the Swiss and the Czechs could never defeat the Nazis by their own efforts, Roessler groped for a link to the Russians. Schnieper introduced him to Sissy and she brought him to Taylor. Until then, Taylor had never amounted to much as a secret agent, but his association with Roessler was so highly valued in Moscow that he was taken into the Fourth Bureau's fraternity as a charter member with a monthly stipend of eight hundred Swiss francs.

Sissy and Taylor were the only members of Rado's ring who ever met Roessler in person. All the deals were made through Taylor. They were substantial even financially because Roessler insisted that he be paid well for his services. It was Taylor who picked up Roessler's information and forwarded it to Rado; and it was he again who took the money back to Roessler. Roessler agreed to work for Rado, but only on his own terms. He was never to reveal the sources of his information, and, in all those years of co-operation, he merely hinted that his chief contact in Germany was a senior officer in Hitler's High Command for whom he coined the name Werther. Even today, it is not known who Werther was.

When Roessler's first message arrived in Moscow, the one heralding the imminent outbreak of the Russo-German war, this new source of information was received with skepticism. Kuznetsov asked Rado to tell him more about his new contact,
but there was little Rado could tell. Kuznetsov was amazed by the quality of Roessler's information and impressed by the promptness with which it was obtained and transmitted, but he suspected a plant and for some time refused to accept the material as genuine. The suspicion was not to last long. According to Foote, this was the only time Moscow was willing to cooperate with an “unvetted source,” a man who remained as mysterious to his employers as he was to the Germans against whom he worked.

To the end, Roessler remained outside the Rado ring. Foote was assigned to transmit most of his information, but the two never met and even years later the Englishman thought Roessler was a certain Czech named Selzinger.

Roessler was to be paid seven thousand Swiss francs a month and special bonuses for scoops. He made it clear from the outset that he would not accept orders from the Center in Moscow or from Rado in Geneva. Roessler subsequently earned what is regarded as an astronomical sum in espionage. Between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1944, he was paid a total of three hundred and thirty-six thousand francs in monthly stipends and about two hundred and fifty thousand francs in bonuses. He was given a cover name, Lucy, after the city of Lucerne, where he lived; and Taylor resigned his job at the I.L.O. to be available as a full-time go-between.

Roessler was a gusher. He furnished to the Fourth Bureau the order of battle of the
Wehrmacht
on a day-to-day basis, including the exact location and mission even of single battalions; operations plans and orders well in advance of their execution; diplomatic information of the utmost importance.