The Secret Agent (5 page)

Erickson traveled to Germany month after month, ferreting out more plants and passing their coordinates to the OSS. Evenings, in his Ostermälm apartment, he would tune his radio to the BBC for the world news bulletin and listen all the way through. In the morning, over coffee, he would scan the pages of the
Ordinari Post Tijdender
, the Stockholm newspaper, looking for reports of bombing raids on the targets he'd discovered. But as 1943 wore on, there were few, if any, attacks on oil targets. Instead, the BBC announcers listed the latest cities to be targeted: Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Berlin (he thought inevitably of Anne-Maria). When he returned to Germany, he visited the same refineries whose locations he'd passed to Bomber Command, and found them unmarked, running smoothly, producing oil and gas for the Wehrmacht.

Erickson grew increasingly frustrated. He'd infiltrated the small circle of industrialists that owned the oil refineries and plants, even visiting some of the secret locations, always with an escort. (Foreigners were not allowed to travel alone through Nazi Germany; an SS guard had to accompany the American at all times.) But Erickson wanted to see and report on every plant in Central Europe. And no one was being granted that kind of access.

The situation inside Germany was tense; Erickson could sense it in the strained faces he passed on the streets and in the bitter gossip of his Nazi friends. He read story after story about the capture of saboteurs, lethal suspicions between the intelligence agents of the SD and their rivals at the Abwehr. Arrests were made en masse. Dozens of Allied spies were put to death at the Bavarian concentration camp known as Flossenbürg, which specialized in espionage cases. Between 1943 and 1945, the People's Court sentenced 7,000 people to death on one of the twenty gallows that the Reich had built across Germany, or at the Berlin guillotines, where one execution could be carried out every three minutes. That fall, Berlin's Plötzensee prison was hit by an Allied bombing raid, which damaged the prison walls and destroyed the jail's only guillotine. To prevent escapes, on the nights of September 7th and 8th, 186 prisoners were hurried to the gallows in groups of eight and hanged.

Berlin had the air of a city under psychological siege. Erickson, too, felt his thoughts turning increasingly paranoid. The Gestapo was hunting its enemies in the streets of Berlin, and his exposure to arrest increased with every trip. Stockholm offered little relief. Erickson continued to be a social leper there; the cheery, close-knit life of dinner parties and Christmas gatherings that he and Elsa had known was over. Perhaps Erickson's almost frantic work schedule–he would make between 30 and 40 trips to the Reich in the war years–was dictated not only by his hatred of Hitler, but a bitterly sad home life. He suffered from ulcers. He could never relax completely, not with his wife's deteriorating mental condition a constant reminder of what he was putting her through. At times, Erickson felt he was falling apart himself. “Next time I take a job like this,” he joked to the prince, “I'll take some psychoanalytic treatments first.” He also worried constantly about Anna-Marie.

Erickson would later portray himself to interviewers and journalists as a smiling automaton that experienced no fear. But in reality, he was constantly tensed for disaster. Berlin was crawling with the black-uniformed officers of the Gestapo; as he passed them on the street, Erickson would flinch a bit inside, wondering if this was the man who would arrest him. He'd built an ever-expanding network of Germans willing to feed him information, but his success also meant there were more and more people who could betray him.

Even as Erickson grew depressed about the lack of raids on his targets, the Germans were showing increased confidence in him. He was called to Berlin, where the officials expressed their gratitude for the work he'd done and rewarded him with a contract for one-third of the lubricating oils delivered to Sweden. But the Reich was still keeping him far away from its most prized assets. It was time to try a new approach.

In 1943, the war was beginning to turn toward the Allies and Erickson had a rare view of what the German people were thinking and feeling. His reports contain fascinating details on the mood inside Germany and the mindset of its rulers. In one, he noted a crackdown on thought crimes:

About 10 days before he left for Sweden, Goebbels gave a talk over the radio in which he mentioned that it would not only be the people that did not take part in the war but also the ones that did not believe in the ultimate victory for the German government that would be sentenced to death.

Another:

No one is allowed to quote any of Hitler's earlier statements which showed him to be wrong, especially his quotation from 1940 that Russia was definitely finished … Any such quotation can end with a death sentence. …

Erickson witnessed the effects of the war on ordinary Germans. He saw them dressed in grimy rags lining up for bread; he listened sympathetically to fathers and mothers in railroad stations talk about their dead sons. He was invited into many Nazi homes, where he comforted the wives and played with the children. He liked some of these people, and they trusted him. Many of them were kind to him, and deceiving these people made Erickson feel “like a skunk.” One day, while traveling on a train from Berlin to Ulm, a German city situated on the River Danube which had been strafed by Allied fighters, Erickson watched five civilians die. After returning to Sweden, Erickson begged Allied Bomber Command to target only supply trains. “Bomb the railroad tracks and stations and bridges as much as possible but not the civilians in the trains … I personally do not believe this is worth the hatred that is arising from such methods.”

Close observation led to tactical refinements. One key insight came after talking with countless Germans in the course of his travels:

The common people … due to propaganda believe that some miracle at the last moment will save Germany. The masses believe what Goebbels says about Germany being a country of slaves if they lose … [But] the business people and the bankers are quite convinced that Germany has lost the war, and might just as well give up before the country is ruined.

If Germany's elite knew that they were going to lose the war, couldn't the Allies offer them a deal? Erickson consulted with his OSS handlers, who agreed to his idea. He would take Prince Carl to Germany (“it felt good to have him along”) and begin a new phase of the operation. Erickson would begin to reveal to the Germans he trusted that he was working for the Allies. He would then offer them immunity if they would reveal the locations of the synthetic plants.

On their next trip, Erickson parted ways with the prince and headed to Hamburg to meet with oil executives he was hoping to bring over to the Allied side. He spent the night in the northern city and returned to Berlin the following day. Upon his return, Erickson stopped at Gestapo headquarters at 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse. His papers were checked and he headed up to the office of his friend and contact, Baron van Löw. The officer's face was grave.

“Prince Carl has been arrested,” he said.

Erickson had to steady himself. It felt as though the marble floor had disappeared beneath him.

“What the devil for?” he said.

“For listening to the BBC.”

On September 3, 1939, the day England declared war on Germany, the Reich had declared that listening to the British service a crime punishable by death. Unfortunately for the prince, while visiting some friends in Berlin, one of them had turned on a radio tuned to the station. Now Erickson's co-conspirator was in Moabit prison, where many resistance figures were held and executed by the Gestapo. (In 1945, the Christian martyr, Klaus Bonhoeffer, would die there.) Though some considered Moabit to be one of Berlin's more pleasant jails–the food was edible and there was even a thinly-stocked library–for political prisoners and those suspected of undermining the Nazi state, the place was notorious.

Erickson protested. Surely, laws meant for Germans didn't apply to foreign dignitaries! Perhaps Prince Carl was unaware that listening to the BBC was a crime? The service was highly popular in Sweden, and he probably thought nothing when it was turned on. Wasn't there a way to get him out?

Erickson knew he had to get Carl released before he was interrogated. The prince was a socialite who'd grown up in castles and expensive restaurants; he was hardly the type to withstand serious questioning by the SD. He begged von Löw to intervene, but the Gestapo officer refused. It was an SD matter now, and in Berlin's treacherous world of competing state agencies, a game that could quickly become lethal, von Löw wasn't prepared to risk his own safety. Prince Carl would stay in Moabit until the BBC matter was thoroughly investigated.

The words sent tremors of panic through Erickson. He asked to use the telephone and called one of Prince Carl's friends, a distant relative of Hermann Göring. Erickson explained the situation and asked the friend to call the Reichsmarschall immediately.

Erickson hung up and waited. He could hear footsteps in the halls, soft voices from other offices, the distant
clack-clack-clack
of typewriters, but no screams or sounds of petroleum-soaked whips. The torture at 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse was carried out floors below, in the basement.

Finally, the phone jangled. Good news: his contact had managed to get hold of Göring and the Luftwaffe chief had instantly seen the diplomatic implications of arresting a nephew of the Swedish royal family. A call had been made to Moabit and Prince Carl was to be released. On hearing the news, Erickson felt a wave of relief wash through him.

The prince had made a simple mistake, and yet it had nearly cost them everything.

At business meetings and parties, Erickson and Prince Carl now put their new plan into motion. They began to take the wives of oil executives aside and chat casually about the state of Germany. “I was very careful with who I dealt with,” Erickson said. “I [had to be] sure that they hated Hitler and Himmler and the rest, and I found these things out through their wives.” If their husbands cooperated, Erickson would give the owners signed letters attesting to their good works, which would guarantee them better treatment in a post-Hitler Germany. “They had nothing to lose,” Erickson said. “If Hitler won, they could destroy the guarantee. If Hitler lost, they could produce the document and show that they'd helped.”

Erickson did many dangerous things during the war, but this might have been the riskiest. If one of his sub-agents contacted the Gestapo, he would have been arrested immediately.

Erickson began and ended his trips to Berlin with Anne-Maria, stolen moments of pleasure and intimacy within an increasingly grim city. Allied air forces were turning the capitol into rubble. In rooms rented under fake names they talked and held each other and made love. They discussed their fears, but were hopeful about their future together. When there was nothing left to say, Erickson would turn on the radio and they would listen to music until night fell. In Berlin their affair would have to remain a secret. They were never to be seen together in public. In this way, in self-imposed reclusion, the two spies lingered for a day or two at a time until Erickson left for a refinery in Ruhland or a synthetic plant in Magdeburg, or Zeitz, or Politz or Merseburg-Leuna. When they were apart, they sent letters in which they could only hint at their true feelings.

“I've received your love letters of the 12th and 14th,,” Anne-Maria wrote in her elegant, backward-sloping hand. “Thank you. If I have not written to you a long time, I still think of you often. Dearest Eric, I have great troubles and much suffering at the moment. How I would like to write you all about it, but I cannot. The thought that strangers are reading these lines is terrible for me. If you come back to Germany, I'll tell you everything. Signed, your Anne-Maria.”

Even though she never put down in ink her deepest worries, and only hinted at the things she didn't want the censors to know, the letters were mistakes. Not only was Anne-Maria revealing her intimate relationship with Eric, she was admitting she had things to hide, which could only arouse the SD's suspicions.

Another: “My dear Eric! To my great joy and surprise I received on Friday, your gifts of love with coffee and chocolate. It is touching, and sweet that you thought of me again.”

The letters lay in the archives for years after Erickson's death. In them, the war and Anne-Marie's mysterious “suffering” seem claustrophobically near. Her fingers had touched the heavy stock, folded it. Something of her personality, or some part of who she was as a person, was traced in the script. She'd dropped these letters in a Berlin mailbox seventy years ago and walked away. Each letter would have been read by an SD analyst. The functionary would a one or two line report of the letter's content before resealing the envelope and authorizing its delivery to Stockholm. All of it—the love affair, the carelessness, the famous efficiency of the German clerk—would play a part in Anne-Maria's endgame.

The final letter in the archives dates to the latter part of 1944. Anne-Maria wrote: “My love! May all your wishes come true in 1945. I always think of the beautiful and happy hours we spent here in Berlin. When will you come again?”

By 1943, Hitler's quest for an oil empire had been dealt two paralyzing blows: the defeat at Stalingrad that stopped his push to the enormous fields at Baku, and the collapse of Africa Korps, which closed off the vast reserves under the Middle Eastern deserts. Germany was thrown back on her own resources. The only significant supplies of fuel they could count on were the amounts they extracted from coal. “Synthetic fuels would be at the heart of the frantic effort to sustain the machines of war,” writes the oil historian Daniel Yergin. The German field marshal Erhard Milch summed up the situation this way: “The hydrogenation plants are our most vulnerable spots; with them stands and falls our entire ability to wage war. Not only will planes no longer fly, but tanks and submarines also will stop running if the plants should actually be attacked.”

As early as 1940, in “Western Air plan 5(c),” the British had identified German oil plants as a major target. Many analysts believed that the facilities should be the top priority. But the head of Bomber Command, the ever-controversial Sir Arthur Harris, wasn't one of them. Instead, Harris and Churchill's war cabinet pushed for the bombing of major German cities in order to devastate the Reich's industrial centers and strike at German resolve. The British Air Staff wrote:

The ultimate aim of an attack on a town area is to break the morale of the population which occupies it. To ensure this, we must achieve two things: first, we must make the town physically uninhabitable and, secondly, we must make the people conscious of constant personal danger. The immediate aim, is therefore, twofold, namely, to produce (i) destruction and (ii) fear of death. The city-first policy was also revenge for the blitz that had ravaged London in the early days of the war.

“They sowed the wind,” Harris remarked. “And now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

Meanwhile, German scientists were making huge strides in perfecting the Bergius process that transformed coal into oil. Between 1940 and 1943, production of synthetic fuel doubled. By the early months of 1944, the plants were supplying the Wehrmacht with 57 percent of its oil, and a startling 92 percent of aviation fuel. German oil conglomerates, such as I. G. Farben, banished all Jews from their boardrooms; they imported slave workers ghettoes and concentration camps in the East (with the help of the SS) and ramped up production. To get the most out of the new workforce, Farben built a synthetic fuel plants next to the crematoria at Auschwitz. By 1944, a third of the workers at the synthetic plants were slave laborers.

With the exception of a few sporadic raids, the Allies' bombing strategy had left Nazi oil plants largely unscathed. “Oil, which was Germany's weakest point,” wrote the British historian Basil Liddel Hart, “was scarcely touched.” Erickson was risking his life to get targets for the American B-17 bombers and the British Lancasters, but the planes were being diverted elsewhere.

Germany was winning the oil war. Even when an Allied plane found its target, the Reich had a vast army of forced-labor conscripts—starving, diseased, dressed in rags, but desperate to survive—who would rush to fix the damage once the bombers had disappeared. One factory had at its disposal 30,000 Jews, political prisoners and other enemies of the Reich on call for emergency repairs.

It was General Carl Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Force in Europe, who forced a change in Allied bombing strategy. After concluding that the focus on cities, communications and industrial sites had been largely ineffective, on March 5, 1944 Spaatz wrote a memo to his commanding officer, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, proposing that the synthetic oil industry become the first-line target of the American bombers. The British immediately objected. They wanted the French railroad system attacked, in preparation for D-Day three months later. But Spaatz argued forcefully that synthetic fuel production could be reduced by fifty percent within six months, and that to protect the facilities the Luftwaffe would be forced into the air, where their planes could be destroyed.

Eisenhower sided with Spaatz. On May 12, 1944, 935 bombers and their fighter escorts flew over Germany and dropped their payloads on a series of synthetic plants, among them the enormous I.G. Farben facility located at Leuna. Hearing the initial reports of the bombings, Albert Speer requisitioned a plane and flew to Leuna, where he walked among the shattered oil tanks and melted pipes. “I shall never forget May 12th,” he wrote after the war. “On that day the technological war was decided.” He then boarded the plane and flew to Hitler's headquarters to deliver the bad news. “The enemy has struck us at one of our weakest points. If they persist at it this time, we will soon no longer have any fuel production worth mentioning.”

Allied aviators pounded railroad tracks, storage tanks, pipelines and oilfields. Saboteurs mined the Danube, where most of Romania's oil was shipped through on its way to Germany. By the middle of May 1944, weeks before D-Day, the bombing had reduced Romanian oil exports by 44 percent. Germany was being slowly starved of foreign fuel and was forced to improvise. The Wehrmacht began converting its trucks to burn wood alcohol instead of gas, but by mid-1944 had managed to change over only one-fifth of its vehicles. Increasingly, the synthetic plants were Germany's last, best hope.

By 1944, Erickson had become irreplaceable to the Allies. His reports began to seriously affect not only the course of the conflict but its outcome. The war on Hitler's oil would come down to two things: bombers and spies. Erickson was the only OSS agent who had any real chance of finding the hidden refineries.

His access to the refineries was still severely restricted. He, Prince Carl and the men from the embassy spent many nights in Stockholm's Club 49, sipping brandy and pitching ideas on how to get into the remaining plants. In one plan, Erickson would volunteer as a consultant to the German oil industry and travel the country offering advice to plant managers struggling to increase output. In another, Erickson would go to one of his German oil-magnate friends and ask to freelance. That way he'd avoid the national bureaucracy. He could visit factories all over central Europe, in the service of friends. But Erickson's contacts in Germany controlled specific sections of the oil market. If he became an adviser to one company, he could visit only their plants. What he needed was unfettered access to every synthetic plant.

During one break in the conversation, Prince Carl offered, rather endearingly, to embark on a national tour of oil facilities. His “royal presence,” he claimed, would boost the morale of the workers. It sounded farcical: Carl in his royal blue tunic nodding as a German slave laborer explained how a compressor worked. But the idea had potential: Germans were still in awe of the Swedish prince.

After a few minutes, Erickson shot the plan down. Himmler had recently turned against aristocrats. He wanted to found a new race of nobles, a
Herrenvolk,
or “master race,” that was loyal to the Waffen SS and would become the new imperial core of the Reich and administer Germany for a thousand years. With aristocrats in disfavor, sending Carl to Germany was simply too risky.

Finally, late one night, Surrey and Tikander came up with an idea. At first, Erickson thought the plan was so outrageous that he doubled up with laughter on hearing it. “It sounded so fantastic that both the Prince and I took it more or less as a joke.” But, after a few minutes, and once the laughter had died down, Erickson was able to see how brilliant—albeit dangerous—the plan actually was. The spy would be responsible for selling it to the Germans, and so he examined it from every side, trying to find a fatal flaw. But gradually he became convinced it could work. He even gave it a name. The boy from the boroughs of New York City would dedicate his mission to city that made him.

He called it “Selling the Brooklyn Bridge.”

The intended target would be Heinrich Himmler. The men toasted, drained the last fingers of whiskey, and parted ways into the starlit night.