Burn After Reading (34 page)

“The engineer had to go back to Germany,” he said. “We will put you up until he returns.” That same evening he drove the Mouse to a house in Neuilly where she was given the job of tutoring a little girl of nine. “We don't know how long it might take the man to return from Germany,” he explained. “You will be safer here.”

She waited two months, then a man came to drive her to Vaucresson. He deposited her in front of the post office, then drove away, and she walked to the engineer's house on the hill.
She scratched the lighted window, walked to the back door, went into the kitchen and picked up an envelope. At that moment a car drove up in front of the house. A man stepped out of it, while another stayed at the wheel. The man walked up to the main entrance and rang the bell. The Mouse made her way quietly to the end of the garden in the back of the house, scaled the low fence into another garden, then into a third, then a fourth. She walked out into the street and saw the car driving away from the engineer's house. She never found out what its mission was. She never saw the engineer again.

The Mouse was ready to return to England. From Vaucresson she took a train south and then came north again to Fleury-sur-Andelle. Two nights later she wets in the familiar field near Lyons-la-Forêt, waiting for the Lysander to pick her up. There was the buzzing sound in the air and two men came to light the torches. An hour later the Mouse was in Tangmere and the British had the blueprints of the V-1.

On her next mission she scratched the window pane of a window in a house in Chartres. It was a Gestapo man who opened the door. Her contact had been picked up an hour before and he talked when they were drowning him in his own bathtub filled with ice cold water. That was the last time the Mouse could scratch her signal on any pane anywhere.

This was the frightful flaw in the S.O.E. setup. The Germans knew far too much about it. Some of the best and most intrepid agents of conquered Europe fell into Nazi hands because, after a while, the Germans had planted their spies in virtually every one of the resistance groups.

In Slovakia, they captured a whole O.S.S. team flown in too late to aid a badly prepared and thoroughly corrupted rebellion actually led by a German
agent provocateur.
The members of the mission were later put to death, in violation of international law, in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

In Hungary, His Serene Highness, the Regent himself, was trapped when he started an anti-German plot with two Yugoslav
generals, who were in reality agents of the German secret service operating under a brilliant spy named Wilhelm Hoettl.

In France, the most brilliant leaders of the resistance movement were caught one after another: Jean Moulin, the heroic mayor of Chartres who was slated to become France's first Prime Minister after the liberation; General Delestraint; Larat; Bollaert, leaving the leadership of the movement in mediocre hands until the Communists got hold of it. Diana Hope Rowden, a twenty-eight-year-old beauty, was caught, tortured and killed, her limp body dropped into the incinerator at the Natzweiler concentration camp. Violette Szabo, courageous wife of a Free French officer, was put to death in the Ravensbrueck concentration camp when she refused to confess. Even those who survived had to go through hell before the Allies could liberate them. Christopher Burney, who was dubbed “the king of saboteurs” before he, too, was caught, spent eighteen horrible months in the Gestapo prison in Paris and fifteen months in Buchenwald. Scores of Norwegians were kept in the Nazi dungeons on Oslo's Victoria Terrace, as were Belgians and Poles, Italians and Hungarians elsewhere.

Even the imperishable French Commandant Pierre Brossolette, fell and so did the White Rabbit himself, Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas.

Some of the Allied agents fell because the Germans had scored a scoop of their own, the
Englandspiel,
or the Carillon of England. This carillon began to ring out its misleading theme in September, 1940, after the chance capture of a British agent near Leeuwarden in the Netherlands. The arrest of this pioneer agent was reported at once to Inspector Joseph Schreider, a quiet criminologist not addicted to the perverse methods of Nazi interrogations. It was the first definite proof he had that British agents were coming to Holland and that a Dutch underground war was in the making.

Schreider consulted a Major Giskes, head of the
Abwehr
'
s
counter-espionage in Holland. They decided to check this
network by infiltrating it, then turn the tables and gain control of it. They had a couple of “V-men”—informers who posed as Dutch patriots in contact with the budding underground. One was named Anton van der Waals, the other was George Ridderhof, called Sweat Brow because he always perspired profusely, even on the coldest winter nights. Schreider and Giskes used their decoys to bring in genuine members of the underground. Anton and George did their best, but for a full year none of the men they guided in fitted the bill.

At last Sweat Brow reported to Giskes that two agents had just arrived from England. One came as a saboteur, the other as his radioman. He even supplied their real names: the saboteur was Thijs Taconis, a Eurasian born in the Netherlands East Indies; the radioman was Hubertus Lauwers, a young spark of the Dutch merchant marine.

A few weeks later, the German Radio Control Station in Holland reported a clandestine sender going in The Hague and located the very house in which it operated. “Next transmission is scheduled for March 6, 1942,” Radio Control announced. That day, a delivery van rolled into the street where the radio operated. In the van was Inspector Schreider and a young lieutenant of Radio Control, listening in on the clandestine radio going full blast only a few yards from them. When it was finished, Schreider saw two men come out of the house. A few minutes later both were in the car, handcuffed, being driven at great speed through the icy streets to the Binnenhof, where Schreider had his office. The Germans searched the house and found the radio and the codes. Nobody in Britain knew anything of this misfortune.

Schreider had a method of his own in handling his prisoners. When Lauwers was brought to his office, Schreider got up and greeted him with a handshake. And when Lauwers revealed to him that he was a lieutenant in the British Army, he addressed his prisoner as Lieutenant Lauwers and seemed to be respecting his rank. But in the midst of this kindness, he turned suddenly to the agent:

“How about working for us?”

“What do you mean?” Lauwers shot back.

“You could get a lot of consideration for yourself,” Schreider said in a quiet voice, “and save your friend's life if you would agree to continue your radio work as if nothing had happened.”

He heard Lauwers say, “All right.” Schreider tried to climb into the skull of this young Dutchman. Was he on the level? Secret services prepare their radiomen for just such an eventuality. They provide them with a set of security checks, tricky code symbols within the basic code, and also with a number of apparently innocuous danger signals, which they can send out without being detected even when operating under duress.

Schreider hesitated to let Lauwers operate the
Englandspiel
but he had no German aide who could do it. And the next transmission was scheduled for March 12, 1942. Lauwers could not miss it, lest he alert the British by his silence.

So on March 12, Lauwers was sent to his place again, prepared by Schreider. London responded: “We are planning to send Arbor. Please make arrangements for his reception.” Lauwers paled; he had given the danger signal, and London had not recognized it. A hapless British agent, a major named Bingham who headed the Dutch section of S.O.E. in London, had made a blunder that delivered his whole organization to the Gestapo.

On March 27, 1942, “Arbor” dropped by parachute into the waiting arms of the Gestapo. And the carillon sang out: “Arbor arrived safely at 11:23 p.m. [2323] as planned.” The
Englandspiel
was bringing them in.

If in August, 1943, exactly a year and five months after the first transmission of the
Englandspiel,
Major Bingham had taken stock of his organization in the Netherlands, he must have been well satisfied with the way it was going. He had managed to get fifty-four agents across to Holland and he knew of only three casualties. He had eighteen senders going, sixteen of which were operating with gratifying regularity. A sabotage organization, organized by his agent George Jambroes in preparation for
D-Day, had one thousand and sixty-seven men and women. Substantial amounts of supplies had been flown in for them. An underground with at least one thousand one hundred men and women stood behind the Jambroes Group to aid it at Zero Hour.

Major Bingham seemed to have good reasons to be satisfied with this achievement, except for one thing. His organization existed only on paper. Of the fifty-four agents Bingham sent in, one was dead and the others were all in the hands of the Gestapo. Jambroes himself sat in a cell and his group didn't have a single man. The underground was but a figment of Inspector Schreider's imagination.

Then it seemed that the
Englandspiel
would come to an abrupt end. During the night of August 29, 1943, two of Schreider's prisoners, Johan Bernard Ubbink and Piet Dourlein, broke out of jail and made their way to Switzerland, where they reported to General van Tricht of Dutch Military Intelligence. But Schreider still did not despair. He used one of his eighteen radios to smear the two heroes. “Ubbink and Dourlein escaped with German aid,” he radioed to London, “to infiltrate the Dutch service. We urge appropriate measures against them.” So when the two agents reached London, they were returned to jail and kept there for months, even though they had the true story of the carillon.

On November 23, 1943, in the pitch darkness of a stormy autumn, three more agents broke out of jail. They made their way to England and reported to their headquarters in Chester Square with the precious secret of Inspector Schreider.

There was nothing more Schreider could do but to send a last message to Messrs. Blunt, Bingham & Co., the Old Firm on Baker Street.

“We have known for some time,” the message read, “that you have been doing business in the Netherlands without our help. Having been, as it were, your sole representative for quite some time, we regard this as a breach of confidence. Yet this will not prevent us, should you ever decide to visit us on a far greater
scale, from receiving your emissaries with the same hospitality that we have shown your agents in the recent past.”

After this message, the eighteen transmitters closed down for good. While it lasted, for two years and five months in all, this modern Lorelei lured more than fifty agents and saboteurs onto the rocks. It made arrangements for one hundred and ninety drops and actually received ninety-five of them. It received five hundred and seventy containers and one hundred and fifty parcels, with almost thirty thousand pounds of explosives, three thousand Sten guns, five thousand revolvers, three hundred Bren guns, two thousand hand grenades, seventy-five radio transmitters, one hundred special signal lamps, five hundred thousand cartridges, five hundred thousand Dutch guilders in cash and a substantial sum in other currencies.

It was the worst Allied defeat of the secret war.

A stinging blow that Eisenhower suffered in North Africa in 1943 became partly responsible for the remarkably smooth invasion of France in 1944. It brought Kenneth Strong into his staff and assured superb efficiency in the intelligence preparations of
Overlord.

In February, 1943, during the campaign for Tunisia, front line units sent back to Ike's headquarters reports about ominous stirrings of the enemy around Fandouk, Faïd, and Gafsa. They had all the characteristics of an imminent and massive counterattack. The front-line observers expected the thrust to come from the direction of Faïd. However, Ike's own intelligence brass, after first dismissing the warnings as the pipedreams of green troops, finally decided that if and when a counter-attack came, it would come from the direction of Fandouk. The counterattack came from Faïd. The Germans gained enormous headway before the Allied high command could properly comprehend what was hitting them. The Germans moved through the Kas-serine Pass and pushed the Allies back some eighty miles at the point of the deepest German penetration on February 23.

“The G-2 error was serious,” Eisenhower later wrote. “After the battle I replaced the head of my intelligence organization at AFHQ.”

The replacement was Brigadier Kenneth William Dobson Strong of the Royal Scots Fusilliers. He was then forty-three years old, an ascetic-looking, wiry, intellectual soldier who had specialized in intelligence throughout his adult life. He was so utterly
devoted to his specialty that he had not married, in the belief that only a bachelor, unencumbered by wife and children, could do justice to the all-absorbing demands of his chosen profession.

The oldest son of a professor, the brigadier was a product of British public schools and Sandhurst. Except for a brief spell when he commanded a battalion of Fusilliers, his career was confined entirely to intelligence. He had spent time in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, learning the habits and languages of those countries. His first overt intelligence assignment was in Berlin on the eve of the war. By 1943 his reputation as the British Army's outstanding expert on Germany was established.

The coming of Strong to Eisenhower's side was a dramatic illustration of the importance Ike attributed, and the part he assigned, to intelligence. Eisenhower was what one might call the thinking man's soldier. He felt really safe only when he was satisfied that the best possible intelligence was available to him, procured and prepared for his eyes by the best possible chief of intelligence.