Storming the Eagle's Nest (13 page)

With King Peter’s government in exile in London, Churchill’s sympathies, British policy, and the parsimonious delivery of war materiel by the RAF lay with the Chetniks. Goaded by the SOE in Baker Street, the RAF eventually began dropping more arms to Mihailović. Then, in the course of 1942 the question arose in London as to which of the two resistance groups was doing most on behalf of the Allied war effort to pin down the Axis. In 1941 SOE had set up a station in Cairo, where the British still maintained bases in the former protectorate, to co-ordinate its activities in the Balkans and Middle East. In the autumn of 1942 – the autumn of Operation Torch and its consequence, Operation Anton – word reached Cairo that the partisans were greedier of Axis resources than the Chetniks. Cairo was also told of fighting in places amounting to civil war between the Chetniks and the partisans. Was Mihailović really the best man to set the Alps of Yugoslavia ablaze? To answer this question, on Christmas Day 1942, an SOE colonel, S. W. (‘Bill’) Bailey,
was parachuted into Italian-occupied Montenegro to make an assessment of Mihailović.

Colonel Bailey was somewhat surprised to encounter a man who set himself above the sartorial and tonsorial standards of
Sandhurst
. There was a tradition in the Serbian Orthodox Church of its adherents neither shaving nor cutting their hair until the country had been rid of its current invaders. This Mihailović followed: his long hair, beard and thin wire spectacles made him look like an elderly cleric. He and his staff also dispensed with uniform in favour of a homespun outfit that included slippers. They did not dispense with plum brandy, or rather they dispensed the local
eau de vie
so liberally that Mihailović – in Bailey’s presence – roundly denounced the British for failing to supply him with sufficient arms. The Colonel was a formidable figure: a metallurgist, gifted linguist, excellent at handling explosives. He reported to Cairo that there was little prospect of prodding Mihailović into action against the Axis and less of him co-operating with Tito.

A bitter war now broke out in London and Cairo over whether support should be withdrawn from the right-wing Mihailović and extended to the left-wing – nay, communist – Tito. Basil Davidson was a peacetime journalist on the
Economist
who had joined MI6 at the outbreak of war. By late 1942 he was heading SOE’s Yugoslavia station. He wrote: ‘Something like battle lines were drawn … and soon the opposing sides began to face each other with all the passion that set the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness. Fighting alliances were made, recruits were sought, morality wavered, truth lowered her head. Paper came into its own again. Squadrons of memoranda were loaded up and launched.’
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In short, there was a fine old row. One of the supporters of the partisans was Davidson’s number two, Captain William Deakin. An Oxford don who before the war worked as Churchill’s research assistant on his life of Marlborough, he naturally had the Prime Minister’s ear. The upshot was that Churchill ordered Lord Selborne – now leading SOE – to find out
exactly what Tito’s partisans were up to. In the end, on 28 June 1943, Deakin himself was parachuted into Tito’s headquarters; or, as it so turned out, into a maelstrom.

From the very beginning of the resistance movement in
Yugoslavia
in 1941, the Axis had mounted major operations against both Tito’s partisans and Mihailović’s Chetniks. These had begun in the autumn of 1941 with an attack on Užice, a territory in western Serbia liberated by Mihailović. There followed major offensives in January 1942, in spring 1942, and in the first four months of 1943 – the Battle of Neretva. This segued into the Battle of Sutjeska, into which Deakin plunged. This was the fifth of the major Axis offensives, otherwise called Fall Schwarz.

Here, in the Alpine area close to the Sutjeska river in
south-eastern
Bosnia, were encamped 22,000 of Tito’s forces. Though numerous, they were poorly trained, poorly armed, and incapable of holding off a major assault. Against them, under
Generaloberst
Alexander Löhr and Generalleutnant Rudolf Lüters, were ranged almost 130,000 Axis troops.

The Axis offensive began on 15 May 1943. Tito’s forces soon found themselves largely encircled on the Durmitor massif, an Alpine eruption with forty-eight peaks over 6,000 feet. This lent itself well enough to defence, but entailed a month’s long battle in the mountain terrain. Two days after Deakin’s arrival the Germans were on the cusp of descending from the mountains above Mratinje and cutting off the partisans’ last exit. ‘[O]ur lives’, remembered Vladimir Dedijer – Tito’s biographer – ‘hung by a thread’.
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The drama culminated on 9 June 1943. The weather cleared and Tito’s party was located by a Luftwaffe spotter plane and bombed in the Sutjeska gorge. Tito was injured, his
bodyguard
and dog were killed. (The latter was credited with saving Tito’s life.) Deakin’s radio operator, Captain William Stuart, also died, and Deakin himself was hit in the foot. Yet the partisans then managed to break out across the Sutjeska river through the lines of the German 118th and 104th Jäger Divisions, and 369th Croatian Infantry Division. The leading partisan units were trailed by three brigades and 2,000 wounded. In the tradition
of the vicious Balkan engagements, Löhr ordered that all should be killed, including unarmed medical orderlies. Yet although this left more than a third of the partisans dead or wounded, the main force had escaped to fight another day. The German field commander Lüters described his opponents as ‘well organized, skilfully led and with combat morale unbelievably high’.
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The Axis failure here marked the turning point in the war in Yugoslavia. In the first half of 1943 the two major campaigns in Neretva and Sutjeska to eliminate the heart of the partisan forces had failed. There would be further offensives, but none so ambitious. In the Alps of Yugoslavia the resistance – in a sense the whole notion of guerrilla warfare – had come of age.

The episode was also the crux of British policy in the Balkans. Deakin, despite his narrow escape, was as fulsome as Lüters about the virtues of the partisans. On 23 June 1943 Churchill met with his chiefs of staff in London to discuss the Balkan question. Henceforth, the British could not doubt the wisdom of the SOE supplying materiel to Tito; they did not as yet decide to stop supporting the Chetniks. It would take another mission to Tito in the autumn of 1943 to achieve this turnabout. This was an adventure that made the name of Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean and spawned his best-selling account,
Eastern Approaches.
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Meanwhile there was more trouble brewing for Hitler further west in the Alps, in Italy.

Within hours of the Axis opening its Fall Schwarz offensive on Tito’s forces in Sutjeska, its troops in North Africa were laying down their arms. In Tunisia, on 13 May 1943, the final surrender of Axis forces to the British Eighth Army yielded 275,000 prisoners of war. No sooner had this operation been completed than – on 10 July – Anglo-American forces led by General Eisenhower invaded Sicily. The island was defended by a force of 200,000 Italians and 62,000 German troops and Luftwaffe. In the Berghof, reports soon reached Hitler of the collapse of
morale of the Italian army. Mussolini was once again summoned to see the Führer. This time the meeting was to be on Italian soil, in the Alpine garrison town of Feltre in the Dolomites. It was set for 19 July 1943.

The Duce proved to be in despair, scarcely capable of words, and the Führer as usual was left to do the talking. Once again he did his best to rally his demoralised ally. ‘If anyone tells me that our tasks can be left to another generation, I reply that this is not the case. No one can say that the future generation will be a generation of giants. Germany took thirty years to recover; Rome never rose again. This is the voice of history.’
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It was no use. Mussolini’s mood was blackened further when the news came through of the first heavy Allied bombing raid on Rome. A force of more than 500 Allied aircraft had caused extensive damage and thousands of casualties. The Duce could not steel himself to tell the Führer that Italy would – could – fight no longer. The tonic that the Führer had given him with such apparent success in Salzburg three months previously now failed utterly.

On his return to Rome from the Alps, Mussolini found his fate sealed. The Fascist Grand Council had not convened since December 1939. It met on the night of 24–5 July 1943. The Council demanded the restoration of power to the monarchy, the return of parliamentary democracy, and the reversion of the leadership of the armed forces from the Duce to the King himself: Victor Emmanuel III. On the following evening Mussolini was summoned to the royal palace, dismissed by the King, arrested and carted off to a police station to spend the night in a cell. The King asked General Pietro Badoglio to step in as Prime Minister.

News of the Council’s deliberations first trickled through to Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters on the afternoon of 25 July 1943. ‘The Duce has resigned,’ Hitler tactfully told his astonished staff at the 9.30 p.m. war conference. ‘Badoglio, our most bitter enemy, has taken over the government.’
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Italy, Hitler assumed, would at once switch sides. Badoglio, in the glory days the Duce’s Chief of Staff, was indeed negotiating with the Allies. Hitler’s response was immediate, for he knew
how vulnerable this made the German forces engaging
Eisenhower
’s invaders in Sicily. If the Italians blew the Alpine bridges and tunnels, the Wehrmacht lines of communication would be severed, the forces trapped. This was the contingency that Hitler had foreseen and on which he had briefed Rommel. Operation Achse needed no dusting off. Generalfeldmarschall Rommel stood at the shortest of notice to put it into effect. The only word he needed was ‘Achse’.

On the afternoon of Tuesday 17 August 1943, three weeks after the fall of Mussolini, a short, balding man with big ears could be seen walking circumspectly up to the front door of the British legation in Thunstrasse, Berne. He rang the bell, and was duly admitted. Soon he found himself being shown into the office of the military attaché, Colonel Henry Cartwright VC. The Colonel was a veteran of the First World War, a former POW, author of numerous escape attempts. He thought himself a good judge of men. Cartwright’s visitor was clutching a briefcase and seemed nervous. Well he might be. He was a German diplomatic official about to declare his willingness to share state secrets with the Allies.

Fritz Kolbe was a forty-three-year-old official at the Foreign Office in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse. His job as an assistant to Ambassador Karl Ritter entailed screening and distributing
top-secret
messages between the ambassador’s office and various diplomatic posts abroad. As Ritter was himself Joachim von Ribbentrop’s right-hand man, Kolbe was exposed to a great deal of highly sensitive intelligence. Deploring the activities of the Nazis – he was a fervent Roman Catholic – he determined to use this information to help the Allies win the war. In the summer of 1943, Kolbe wangled the job of taking some sensitive documents to the German embassy in Berne, the Reich’s window
on freedom. He filled a briefcase with samples of his wares. These were mimeographs of signals intelligence. Some were from western Europe, some from the Eastern Front, some from the Far East. On reaching Berne, he arranged an introduction to Cartwright through a friend, a German Jew called Dr Ernst Kocherthaler. Once in the attaché’s presence in Thunstrasse, Kolbe steeled himself to say his piece. The risks were very high and the consequences were likely to be momentous. Failure would mean the Gestapo, torture and the concentration camps. Success would mean defeat for Germany, the Fatherland. The choice was stark and Kolbe was a man of tremendous courage. He explained to Cartwright who he was, what he wanted to do, why he wanted to do it, and – by way of a climax – plucked a handful of the copies from his case and thrust them in front of the attaché.

From the start of the interview, Cartwright had been unimpressed. This was Switzerland. The intersection of Europe was the one place where the agents of the Allies and the Axis could live with relative impunity in close proximity to their counterparts, subsisting on the currency of information. This information might be available anywhere, but Switzerland was by far the best place to barter and exchange such goods – preferably for ready Swiss francs. This was nothing new. Since the ‘discovery’ of Switzerland in the nineteenth century, her great peaks had drawn the well-heeled and well-informed from all over Europe and beyond. What could be more natural than the exchange of gossip, information, ideas that would later be dignified by the term ‘intelligence’? The Swiss cities and resorts became hotbeds of spying. Indeed the profession came of age in Switzerland during the First World War when the country acted as the neutral ground where all parties to the war met, talked and struck deals. In 1920 the establishment of Geneva as the League of Nations headquarters put the finishing touches to the country’s status as a bring-and-buy stall for international secrets. In 1928, Somerset Maugham, one of the most popular novelists of his day, published a highly influential spy novel.
Ashenden
proved a prototype for Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and John le Carré. The book was based on Maugham’s own experiences of working for MI6 and was naturally set in Switzerland.

If this was Switzerland, this was also the summer of 1943. No sooner had Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Manstein’s brilliant initiative seen the retaking by the Wehrmacht of Kharkov than a counteroffensive from the Soviets had culminated in the Battle of Kursk. Operation Citadel had ended in the middle of July with the Wehrmacht losing 550 tanks and more than half a million men killed, wounded or missing. The Allies had just invaded Sicily, and Italy was clearly on the cusp of abandoning the Axis. With the war on a knife-edge, the Allies and the Reich were both desperate for intelligence that might turn its course. What could be more valuable than to know what the enemy intended to do and how he intended to do it?

Intelligence gleaned in Switzerland about German preparations for the Kursk offensive was the crown jewels of a network known as the Lucy Ring. The information was arguably decisive in the Wehrmacht’s defeat. The Abwehr – the German army secret service – had been alive to the prospect of an Allied landing on the vulnerable shores of Italy. A brilliant British deception plan involving fake papers suggested the landings would take place in Greece and Sardinia. Operation Mincemeat (wonderfully set out in Ewen Montagu’s
The Man Who Never Was
and Ben Macintyre’s
Operation Mincemeat
) had fooled the Abwehr and the assault had already come in Sicily. Now the Allies had got wind of a rocket research centre somewhere on the Baltic. Here, what Goebbels would later christen the revenge weapons – Vergeltungswaffen – were being developed. What more could be discovered in Switzerland? The battleship
Tirpitz
was lying low in a Norwegian fjord. A British plan was developed to attack her using midget submarines. By what underwater defences was she protected? Hundreds of such questions puzzled the minds of military planners on both sides of the war. Switzerland was the place where such intelligence could be bought. The place was awash with spies, saboteurs, turncoats, chancers, agents and
every sort of agent provocateur. It was once said that the whole of Switzerland was one clandestine conversation.

The Swiss themselves could hardly be excluded from the dialogue. They were anxious, though, not to be seen to promote spying lest it compromise their neutrality. Hitler regarded Switzerland as a fire hydrant through which gushed the secrets of the Reich. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop thought this alone sufficient reason to invade the republic. The Swiss secret service – Nachrichtendienst – accordingly had to be seen to keep a strict and impartial eye on all foreign agents irrespective of their hue: French, Italian, British, German, American, Soviet and indeed Chinese and Japanese. In early 1940 this even-handedness went as far as penetrating the Zurich station of the British secret service, MI6. Still, the head of the Nachrichtendienst, Brigadier General Roger Masson, judiciously maintained friendly relations with his Allied counterparts and selectively exchanged intelligence.

Meanwhile the warring parties maintained counter-intelligence operations to hamstring their enemies’ clandestine activities. The Gestapo trailed Allied agents, earmarked some for
possible
assassination – including Cartwright himself – and kept a twenty-four-hour watch on Allied premises. The Allied stations reciprocated. Missions of all nationalities had to be very sensitive to counter-intelligence operations both by the Swiss and their enemies. Agents provocateurs were aplenty. Several attempts had already been made to foist them on Cartwright.

This was precisely what Kolbe was taken for by the Colonel. The attaché was in any case under strict orders to turn away anyone purporting to be an anti-Nazi volunteer. He refused even to look at the papers Kolbe had strewn over his desk. ‘Sir,’ declared Cartwright, ‘you take me for an utter fool. I am not an utter fool. I know that you are sent as a plant to get me into trouble but in the remote possibility that you are not a plant, then, sir, you are a cad. And I do not deal with cads.’ With that Kolbe was dismissed and shown the door.
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Nevertheless he persisted. The German presented himself at
the private residence of the legation’s head of chancery. Again he was given a very British cold shoulder. Only at this point did Dr Kocherthaler suggest to Kolbe that he might try the Americans. After all, the Allies were allies. The US legation in Berne was long established and had its own military attaché in the form of Brigadier General Barnwell Legge – a robust and rubicund figure who just happened to be on excellent terms with his opposite number, Cartwright. Moreover, shortly before the Swiss borders were entirely closed by Operation Anton, a specialist in security matters had arrived in Berne via Spain and France. His name was Allen Welsh Dulles, his cover name the very British ‘Mr Bull’. A meeting was set for 19 August at which Dulles would be able to form his own opinions of Cartwright’s reject.

From the point of view of the British spymasters in Berne, the Americans had come rather late to the party and overdressed.

Although intelligence-gathering is the world’s second-oldest profession and proverbially just as respectable as the first, states had not set up professional organisations for such purposes until the First World War. Britain’s Secret Service Bureau was founded in 1909 and is ‘the oldest continuously surviving foreign intelligence-gathering organisation in the world’.
2
It developed into a number of separate sections. Of these, MI6 – also known as the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS – concentrated on
espionage
overseas. It established itself under Sir George Mansfield Cumming (‘C’) during the First World War, and employed agents as diverse as the MP and novelist John Buchan, the celebrated cricketer Colonel Freddie Browning, and the future children’s writer Arthur Ransome. It achieved just enough to avoid
disbandment
at the end of hostilities. Only just: ‘In the 1920s the British Secret Service, with a worldwide remit, had a total complement of fewer than two hundred people, sixty-odd at home and approximately twice that number abroad.’
3

With the re-emergence of the threat of Germany in the thirties, attention was focused by its new chief Sir Hugh Sinclair on the Nazi
threat. The logistics of the organisation meant it was natural that it should work hand in hand with the Foreign Office. This liaison took the form of the establishment of a Passport Control Officer within embassies, a function that provided a degree of cover – and diplomatic immunity – for clandestine activity. Such a system depended on the good will of the ambassadors concerned, and in this respect Berne proved problematic. Despite the proximity of Switzerland to Germany and her familiar advantages as a market for intelligence, the head of the British legation was intransigent. This was Sir George Warner, appointed to the Berne mission in 1935. Born in 1879, educated at Eton and Balliol, Sir George was a punctilious gentleman of the traditional diplomatic persuasion who regarded intelligence-gathering with distaste. Tampering with mail and tapping phones he thought a violation of Swiss neutrality and an abuse of its hospitality. It compromised his stance with his hosts and he shunned the presence of the grubby mackintoshed men from the intelligence service in his legation in Thunstrasse. Soon he was to be outshone by his colleagues in MI6.

Claude Dansey was one of the few people who justified the moniker of a legend in his own lifetime. Born in 1876, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey sprang from a family of country squires. He had been educated at Wellington and subsequently seduced by Oscar Wilde’s lover ‘Robbie’ Ross. After the sort of experiences that England could offer her children in the heyday of her empire – the Matabele Rebellion in 1896, an insurgency in Borneo, a lieutenancy in the Boer War – he joined MI6 at Cumming’s personal request in August 1917. Twenty years later one of his recruits, Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Cohen, described him as a ‘“copybook” secret service man. Dapper, establishment, Boodles, poker-playing expression, bitterly cynical, but with unlimited and illogical charm available, particularly for women’.
4

Dansey became increasingly critical of his employers. He once described his chief, Admiral Sinclair, as ‘a half-mad paranoid who preferred to communicate with his people exclusively via
messages left in a locked box – to which only his equally
half-mad
sister had the combination’.
5
He felt that as the MI6
workforce
was virtually unpaid, it lacked the incentive to excel. He observed that all the taxi drivers in any given city in the world knew the address of the head of MI6 operations as the Passport Control Office. It was an open secret. And he believed – correctly as it turned out – that MI6 knew precious little about what was going on in the armed camp of thirties Europe. Nevertheless, it was with Sinclair’s blessing – or at least agreement – that in 1936 Dansey was tasked with setting up a shadow or tandem operation to MI6. This worked on rather different principles and was – amongst other things – an insurance policy against the exposure of its parent. Dansey’s Organisation Z specialised in gathering intelligence in Germany and Italy (where Dansey was stationed to keep an eye on Mussolini). It employed industrialists and businessmen as agents. It paid them for their trouble. Cover was commercial rather than diplomatic. The HQ in Bush House on the Aldwych in central London appeared in the guise of Geoffrey Duveen & Co – export department. Another façade was an export–import company called Menoline, its offices a mile north at 24 Maple Street, off Tottenham Court Road. Very Ian Fleming, very Claude Dansey. The spy Kim Philby described Z very simply as ‘designed to penetrate Germany from bases in Switzerland’.
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Conrad O’Brien-ffrench was Dansey’s Agent Z3. Born in 1893 as the second son of the Marquis de Castelthomond, he had joined the Canadian Mounties as a seventeen-year-old, fought in the Battle of Mons, joined the secret service, become a highly distinguished mountaineer, then turned professional painter. In the early thirties he had been asked by Dansey to rejoin the secret service as Agent Z3. His mission was to set up a travel agency in Kitzbühel, offering tours of the Tyrol. This enabled him to develop a network of anti-fascists in the Tyrol itself, Bavaria and the northern Italian Alps. A friend of Ian Fleming – also resident in Kitzbühel – the handsome, dashing, multilingual
womaniser was one of the inspirations for James Bond. On 11 March 1938 Conrad was alerted by one of his agents to
Wehrmacht
troops heading south from Bad Tölz and Rossenheim in Bavaria towards the Austrian border. This heralded Anschluss. Realising the potency of the intelligence, Conrad broke cover by phoning the news from Kitzbühel directly to the Foreign Office in Whitehall. He then warned all his local contacts: ‘I met Louis de Rothschild … hastening towards the station.’ The following day, Conrad made his escape to Switzerland. He was just in time. ‘I caught the train that night and by next morning fanatical Austrian Gestapo officials were ripping the soles off passengers’ shoes in the search for money and incriminating documents.’