Fighting to Lose (8 page)

In contrast to the British, where the various secret services were fragmented into separate organizations, each answering to the appropriate civilian or military department, the Abwehr dealt with most of the major security and intelligence tasks. It answered solely to the army high command — Oberkommando des Heeres or OKH — before the war, and then, after it started, to Hitler’s headquarters, the armed forces high command — Oberkommando der Wehrmacht or OKW. It consisted of three main departments: Abteilung I: Espionage; Abteilung II: Sabotage; and Abteilung III: Counter-espionage.

Smaller departments had specialized responsibilities — Abteilung Wirtschaft focused on economic intelligence, for example. These names were almost always abbreviated by the Germans themselves as Abt I, Abt II, Abt III, Abt Wi — or, if the reference was to the headquarters department in Berlin, Abwehr I, Abwehr II, Abwehr III, and so on.

The Abw/Ausland (Foreign Affairs) department collected open intelligence, largely obtained from the Abwehr-appointed military attachés posted to the German embassies abroad. The Zentrale — Abwehr Z — was the administration, finance, and records department, the latter an archive containing the names and personal files of thousands of spies, informers, enemy agents, and persons of interest. The equivalent in Britain was the Central Registry administered by MI5 but serving the same function for both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Zentrale was headed by Hans Oster, a dedicated foe of the Nazi regime.

Abw I was subdivided into Eins Heer (IH: Army Espionage), Eins Marine (IM: Naval Espionage) and Eins Luft (IL: Air Espionage).

Abw III also had a number of subdivisions, the most important being IIIF (Counter-espionage agents bureau). Its main task was to compromise and destroy enemy clandestine organizations by infiltrating them with its own spies and informers. The ultimate prize was to get an IIIF agent into the enemy’s intelligence service.17

The main departments were usually mirrored in the Abwehr’s sub-offices, called Abwehrstellen or “Asts” for short. Thus there was an Ast Hamburg, an Ast Wilhelmshaven, an Ast Weisbaden, and so on, each usually with IH, IM, and IL desks as well as an IIIF section. The pattern was repeated as Nazi Germany conquered its neighbours, with the establishment of Ast Brussels, Ast Dijon, Ast Bordeaux, and so forth. Abwehr offices in neutral countries were called Kriegsorganisationen, or KOs for short, the two most important being KO Portugal in Lisbon and KO Spain in Madrid. These Abwehr stations worked under the cover of the German embassies.

Each Ast or KO was encouraged to recruit and run its own secret agents, coordination being effected by keeping Berlin informed. Thus, Ast Hamburg and Ast Cologne both could have spies in Britain, France, or wherever. This had the advantage of insulating agent networks one from the other, so that if one was penetrated or blown, the others would not be. Also, since individuals with the right temperament and skills for espionage were hard to come by, the chances of finding persons suitable for specific tasks, in terms of language ability, background, and motivation were immensely increased if every Abwehr office and its sub-offices — called Nebenstellen, or “Nests” — were on the lookout. The really successful spies, the many that the British and the Americans did not catch, were obtained in this way.

Ast Hamburg and its satellite, Nest Bremen, were the two principal overseas intelligence-gathering centres, for both were great ports with a large number of companies engaged in shipping and overseas commercial enterprises. Businessmen travelling abroad were persuaded to informally share their observations with Abwehr representatives on their return, while seamen were recruited to act more directly by taking pictures, collecting postcards, and gathering information and documents on the harbours and railways at their ports of call. They were also useful as couriers for Abwehr spies resident in the target countries.18

Nest Bremen ended the war with some four hundred secret agents in its card index. It was the only Abwehr office whose files were recovered at the end of the war, so, counting the others, the number of spies and informers on file at Zentrale in Berlin must have run well into the thousands.19

The Nazi security and intelligence services were also fairly simply structured. Before the war they comprised: (1) the security service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) under Heydrich; and, separately under Himmler, (2) the security police (or Sipo); (3) the criminal investigation police (Krimminelpolizei, or Kripo); and (4) the Secret State Police (Geheimestaatspolizei, notoriously better known by its abbreviation, the Gestapo). The first was set up originally to gather intelligence on the Nazi party’s political rivals and expanded as time went on to surveillance of just about every aspect of German national life. The second and third had the normal police tasks, while the fourth was an organization deliberately designed for abduction, torture, and murder.

The Gestapo’s primary mandate was to arrest and eliminate the “internal enemies” identified by the SD. These typically included politicians, Jews, Freemasons, church leaders, and generally anyone critical of the regime. As time went on, the Gestapo increasingly acted on its own in defining and liquidating “undesirables.” When dealing with German citizens, there was some token deference to an individual’s legal rights, but in the occupied countries, no such rights were recognized.

The SD and the three police services were consolidated under Heydrich at the start of the war as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Head Office. It became a bureaucracy like any other government department, except that its mandate was the wholesale suppression of human rights, and murder.

The functions of the RSHA were grouped into numbered offices. Thus Amt IIIB was engaged in promulgating “public health,” which in Nazi parlance meant compulsory abortions on female slave-labourers, denying education to children in conquered territories, and the “resettlement” of ethnic minorities. Amt IIIC was charged with controlling education and undermining organized religion. It named university professors and manipulated scientific research while promoting neo-pagan festivals and cultural events as alternatives to Christian festivals. Amt IV was the Gestapo, with Amt IVA being responsible for suppressing every form of political dissent, Amt IVB for the persecution of Jews and other minorities, and Amt IVC for the administration of concentration camps. Amt VI collected foreign political intelligence.20

What made all this madness possible was Amt I, the personnel office. It undertook to find the right people for the various departments and tasks: psychopaths and sadists for the Gestapo and for the murder squads of the Einsatzkommandos in Russia, bigots and criminals for Amt III, and others with a wide range of character flaws and emotional defects that could be put to good use bullying their fellow human beings. As one RSHA insider described it, the model Gestapo man was “without any moral scruple, even without any conception of moral values, cunning to the point of brilliance, with sadistic leanings and definite pathological tendencies.”21 It was Amt I’s task to obtain such “raw material.”

At the top of this pyramid of terror was Heydrich, now thirty-five and now with the title “Chief of the Security Police and SD.” He was unusual for an ardent Nazi in that he was an intellectual, cultured, and a gifted musician, playing the violin with skill and sensitivity. Yet with a pen stroke he routinely ordered the deportation, even the murder, of hundreds, thousands, or millions of individuals. He was one of the prime architects of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of European Jews that formally began in 1942. It was as though his mind and his conscience were separated by a pane of frosted glass; what he did not see, he could not feel, and what he could not feel, he did not care about.

There were normal human feelings in Heydrich, however. Canaris quickly befriended him and even bought a house in the same street when he and his family moved to Berlin in 1935. The two families socialized, playing croquet in the afternoons and having dinners together. Heydrich often expressed his suspicion of Canaris to his subordinates, but he could never shake the deference felt by a former cadet for his former commander.22

Canaris was Germany’s spymaster-in-chief. His fundamental business was deceit. He well appreciated the ancient axiom: The most dangerous enemy is he who poses as your friend. He was just such a friend to Heydrich.

Canaris was to use this, and use it well.

Like old wine cellared too long, Britain’s secret services, MI5 and MI6, had become somewhat musty over the economically parched years of the 1920s and ’30s. There were no fresh brooms to sweep their porches of entrenched ideas firmly rooted in past experiences.

The double agent, for instance, was still a novel concept to Britain’s handful of counter-espionage officers in the late 1930s. During the First World War, it was government policy that spies captured in the United Kingdom were invariably to be either imprisoned or executed; there was little incentive for Vernon Kell’s Security Service — first MO5g and then MI5 — to experiment with having them continue to report back to their spymasters as if still free, and so be used to feed the enemy disinformation. Twenty years later, little had changed.

In 1938, however, following talks with the French Deuxième Bureau, MI5 decided to give it a try. A Major Sinclair was assigned the task, but progress was modest, given that before the Second World War the resources for finding spies in the first place were meagre. Britain in peacetime largely respected the customary rules for freedom of movement and individual privacy.23

The predecessor of the Secret Intelligence Service, on the other hand — Mansfield Cumming’s MI1(c) and then afterward MI6 — had used double agents extensively during the First World War, especially against the German secret service operating in France and neutral Holland.24 MI6 continued to use them in the interwar years against a new adversary, the intelligence services of Soviet Russia operating in the countries of Western Europe. MI6 officers were posted as passport control officers (PCOs) in the embassies abroad, where they screened for possible spies using the simple but ingenious principle that it would be necessary for all foreigners heading for British territory to check in first with British passport control.

Not much is known of the codes and ciphers used by the PCOs and their sub-agents during the 1930s, but apparently they were not of a very high order. For the most part, intelligence collected from spies in foreign lands could be sent back to England by diplomatic bag or mailed, and it was assumed that other countries did the same. As for MI5, it relegated “ciphers” to its female support staff, so it can be safely assumed that when the war began in 1939, MI5 officers were largely ignorant on the subject.25

MI6 had had an advantage. Unlike the United States, which dismantled its wartime code- and cipher-breaking agency in the late 1920s, Britain’s Foreign Office saw to it that the Admiralty’s similar and spectacularly successful “Room 40,” and the code-breaking unit of the War Office, MI1(b), were retained with their original staffs largely intact. Reorganized as the Government Code & Cipher School — a cover implying only oversight of government ciphers — its real mission was peacetime espionage, the primary target being the intercepted enciphered telegrams of foreign diplomats. This properly put its twenty-five cryptographers under MI6 and its chief (after 1923), Admiral Hugh Sinclair.26

British intelligence — the term encompassing all government organizations with an active or potential role in foreign intelligence gathering — extended its reach to all international communications. By 1939, through government carrot-and-stick policies toward private corporations, all but a handful of the world’s undersea telegraph cables passed at some point through British or Commonwealth territory. It was the same with the international mails. Most letters posted from one continent to another had to go through a British choke point. This enabled MI6 to have almost anyone’s overseas letter or telegram intercepted and looked at. It was a remarkable achievement.27

MI5, of course, could have letters and cables intercepted at home, but, with the onset of war, its requirements took firm second place to those of MI6 and the intelligence departments of the armed forces. MC1 (Military Censorship 1) was under the War Office and headquartered along with MC4 (Telegraph Censorship) in the former Wormwood Scrubs Prison along with the MI5’s archive and library, the Registry. The chief military censor was rebuked at the beginning of 1940 for MC1 spending too much effort examining letters and telegrams for security reasons rather than for intelligence gathering.28 The fact was, MI5 was the weak sister of Britain’s secret services. From the 1917 Russian Revolution on, it had focused mainly on domestic labour discontent, first in the armament industries during the war, and then, afterward, more broadly in the working classes. The Bolsheviks in Russia had seized estates, destroyed the nobility, and had executed the British king’s cousin, Czar Nicolas II. Visions of similar phalanxes of grimy workers spilling out of the industrial ghettos of England armed with shovels and coal rakes haunted the Establishment in Britain. This led Vernon Kell, MI5’s director from its pre–First World War beginnings, to sideline the task of countering foreign espionage in favour of deploying most of his resources in the 1920s and ’30s against communist subversion in Britain’s labour movement.29