At nine o’clock on the dot, the telephone rang in Mayer’s office. A few minutes later Kocherthaler was in front of Gerald Mayer and set before him a sheaf of diplomatic cables from Berlin (accounts vary on how many documents: three, sixteen, twenty-nine?). He offered him a meeting with a diplomat friend from the foreign ministry, “a devoted anti-Nazi, prepared to work for the Allies by providing information.” This meeting would have to take place “before noon on Friday.”
Kocherthaler did not know Gerry Mayer, an elegant man (thin mustache, twinkling gaze, half-smile) who, like Allen Dulles, bore the title of “special assistant” to the American envoy in Bern, Leland Harrison. In fact, Mayer was the local specialist for American propaganda, employed by the Office of War Information (OWI). In that capacity, he worked in close collaboration with Allen Dulles and the OSS, whose offices were in the same building as his, Dufourstrasse 26. Dulles was very appreciative of his young colleague at the OWI, particularly for his extensive knowledge of Germany.
Not knowing that his interlocutor spoke German, Kocherthaler spoke to Gerry Mayer in English. The conversation was not long. It remained vague enough so that nothing confidential came out. The name of Fritz Kolbe was not mentioned, nor his position—Kocherthaler merely said that he was a “rare bird”—but the purpose of the offer was clear. There was something concrete on the table: a pile of copies of German cables stamped “top secret” (geheime Reichssache). Gerry Mayer leafed through them distractedly. He adopted a cool attitude, as though he had seen others like them, but he was beginning to find this very interesting. He asked his mysterious visitor to wait a moment in the anteroom.
Now everything would move very quickly. Mayer rushed to Allen Dulles’s office on the floor above and told him of the surprising offer from his “German visitor,” a “man with the air of a Prussian general, clean-shaven, as straight as an I.” Dulles listened attentively, his pipe in his mouth. He asked Gerry Mayer to give him an hour or two, mindful that the day before, he had heard of Kocherthaler purely by accident from Colonel Cartwright. Before going back down to the ground floor, Mayer put the cables from Berlin on Dulles’s desk. It was a series of exceptional documents. Each one of them was signed by a German ambassador and personally addressed to Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. In one of them, Otto Abetz, ambassador of the Reich in Paris, spoke of the Vichy regime setting up a network of pro-German agents behind the Allied lines in North Africa. In another, the former minister Constantin von Neurath, now plenipotentiary in Prague, described the rise of anti-Nazi resistance in the Czech population. From Ankara, the German ambassador, Franz von Papen, sent an alarm signal about British agents, more and more of whom were entering Turkey through Istanbul. Based on these documents, Allen Dulles asked Gerald Mayer to maintain contact with Kocherthaler and to let him know that they would call him back later that day.
Once Mayer had left his office, Dulles picked up the phone and called Colonel Cartwright at the British legation. “Can I come to see you right away?” The colonel could see him in half an hour. It was 11:30. Dulles went to see the British military attaché, who offered him a whiskey and told him about the interview of the day before with Kocherthaler, encouraging him not to take the offer seriously.
When he got back to his office, Dulles weighed the pros and cons. With his pipe in his mouth, he looked distractedly out the window, entirely lost in thought. Was Kocherthaler an agent provocateur? Were the Swiss laying a trap for the Americans, so that if they were caught they could be expelled from the country? That would show the Germans that the Swiss were as harsh with Allied as with Axis intelligence agents. In that case, Dulles would be taking a big risk: Espionage was illegal in Switzerland and he could not fall back on diplomatic immunity. It could also be a trap set by the Germans themselves, handing him information without importance so they could decipher American code when he sent it to Washington. A classic trick. It was all too good to be true, Dulles concluded.
But Dulles remembered an experience that had shaped his professional life. When he was posted to Bern the first time in early 1917, he had been sought out by an obscure Russian revolutionary who wanted to meet him. It was a Sunday. Dulles hadn’t even taken the trouble to talk to him, preferring not to cancel the tennis game he had scheduled that morning with a beautiful woman. A few weeks later, he had realized that the man who had wanted to see him was none other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin. From that day on, Allen Dulles had promised himself that he would never again turn down any meeting with an unknown. Without going that far back in his memories, he thought of a pronouncement made a few months earlier by General Donovan, the head of the OSS: “Every man or woman who can hurt the Hun is okay with me.”
He had to agree to see this diplomat from Berlin. It was a risk that had to be taken as a professional duty. Back in his office, Dulles let Gerry Mayer know that he wanted to meet the German and his intermediary, Dr. Kocherthaler, as soon as possible. “Between now and then,” Dulles added, “do a little investigation of this Kocherthaler.”
Bern, Thursday, August 19, 1943
There are contradictory versions of subsequent events. According to the most common, “a meeting was set for midnight in the apartment of Dulles’s assistant [Gerry Mayer] in the Kirchenfeld district. Dulles, in disguise, was to meet them at half past twelve. When he arrived, Dr. O. [Kocherthaler] and the secret courier, a man in a black leather jacket, were already there. Dulles was introduced as a Mr. Douglas, Mayer’s assistant.”
Fritz Kolbe and, very likely, Ernst Kocherthaler (although his presence is not absolutely certain) arrived at Gerald Mayer’s apartment. Fritz Kolbe was wearing a black leather jacket, probably a little warm for the season. The two men were wearing hats. The atmosphere at the beginning was rather tense. They were evaluating, “sniffing” one another. No one had shaken hands in greeting. For an hour or a little more, Ernst and Fritz conversed with Gerry Mayer in German. After a while, Allen Dulles entered the room. The mood became a bit more relaxed. Even though everyone remained wary, Dulles’s presence tended to create a pleasant atmosphere around him. The man seemed benevolent and his words were often punctuated with a strong, infectious laugh.
“Mr. Douglas” looked like a giant next to Gerald Mayer and Fritz, who was charmed by this man with the air of a gentleman. He saw some traits in common with Ernst Kocherthaler: same class, same warm ease, and same imposing height. But Dulles spoke very bad German, his accent was deplorable. He had Gerald Mayer translate some of Fritz’s statements. Before anything else, he looked at this small man from Berlin and silently analyzed Fritz Kolbe’s face. “He was short, stocky, and bald. He looked more like an ex-prizefighter than a diplomat. His eyes were sharp and searching, with a look that Dulles considered honest determination.” Dulles, who for the moment followed his intuition, did not make an initially negative judgment on the unknown man.
At that moment, Fritz took a large brown envelope from his inside jacket pocket, with a red wax seal stamped with a swastika. The envelope was open, the seal already broken. Fritz took a sheaf of documents out of the envelope. He set the stack on the table.
A stunned silence greeted this unexpected gesture. Dulles began to look through some of the cables. Some of them were carbon copies of original documents (or at least presented as such by this unknown man whom he still greatly mistrusted); others were almost illegible handwritten notes. Fritz Kolbe’s handwriting was particularly difficult to decipher. One of the cables dealt with the morale of German troops on the Russian front, another drew up a provisional summary of sabotage actions by the anti-German resistance in France, yet another dealt with a secret conversation between Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and the Japanese ambassador in Berlin.