At that point a plane headed directly for the train. It was a light English bomber, a Mosquito, an isolated plane flying low. The plane fired a few salvos at the locomotive. There was no answering fire: a passenger train like this one had no antiaircraft guns. The plane soon disappeared. But a few moments later, a huge explosion was heard a few hundred meters in front of the train. The plane had dropped a bomb on a trestle. Although not completely destroying it, the bomb had seriously damaged the track, making it impossible to continue the trip. There was a long wait before another train could replace the first one, on the other side of the trestle. Night passed, morning, and afternoon. Finally the journey could continue. The passengers had to cross the trestle over a precipice on foot, which took a long time. Fritz was irritated that he had lost an entire day from his schedule.
Going through customs in Basel was nerve-wracking. As much as, if not more than the first time, Fritz had violent stomach pains and was perspiring so profusely that he was afraid of attracting the attention of the customs agents. He knew that in the event of a thorough search, he would have no hope of escape. Nothing was worse than this precise moment. A German customs agent was looking at him with a particularly suspicious air. Did he suspect? Fritz tried to maintain all the composure at his command. He looked directly into the eyes of the man in uniform, attempting to keep his gaze as cold as possible, keeping his pouch in plain sight under his arm (“above all, appear to have nothing to hide,” he said to himself). The official motioned him through.
Even though he was still in the “German station” of Basel, Fritz was now in Switzerland. He headed for the men’s room and locked himself in a toilet. He tore open the outer envelope and removed the documents not intended for the German legation in Bern and put them in his coat. The official envelope was replaced in his briefcase. He burned the now superfluous envelope and flushed the ashes down the bowl. He went out and took a taxi across the Rhine to the Swiss station of Basel (Basel SBB), where he caught the train to Bern. Before getting on the train, he found a telephone booth from which he called 146 at Adelboden, Ernst Kocherthaler’s number. The Americans were immediately informed that “Wood” had arrived.
It was Thursday, October 7, late at night, when Fritz arrived in Bern. His friend Ernst was already in town. The next morning, after delivering the diplomatic mail to the German legation, he and Fritz met at a café, as they had the first time. Ernst informed Fritz that the Americans had impatiently been waiting for his return and that they wanted to see him that very evening. “At 11:30 tonight, Gerald Mayer will pick you up in his car on Kirchenfeld bridge. It’s a Triumph sportscar. You will wait in the shadows at the southern end of the bridge. To identify himself, he’ll switch on his headlights once he’s in the middle of the bridge. They are blue because of the curfew.”
That evening the meeting took place as planned. At 11:30, Fritz jumped into Gerry Mayer’s car. “Glad to see that you made it back again,” he said in a friendly voice, adding that they were going to see Mr. Douglas. Fritz admired Gerry Mayer’s handsome Triumph, wanted to talk to him about the Horch that he had had to give up because of the war, but unfortunately the trip was very short. After taking a few narrow cobblestone streets in the old city, Mayer steered his car onto a road along the River Aare. The Triumph was going very slowly, with no lights. Soon it reached a point below the Kirchenfeld bridge whose metal outline could be seen forty meters above. The height seemed dizzying. Mayer turned off the engine. At this very dark spot, there were few passersby and it was easy to pass unseen. Mayer asked Fritz to get out alone and explained how to get to Dulles’s house through the garden in back, up a steep path through dense shrubbery. “Go on alone. I’ll rejoin you up there in a little while. You’re expected.”
A few minutes later, Fritz Kolbe was in Herrengasse 23. Glass in hand, he savored this moment of stolen freedom and appreciated the very “old England” comfort of the ground floor living room. The principal lighting in the room came from a large fire in the fireplace. Allen Dulles—a poker in one hand, his pipe in the other—frequently stirred the fire and added logs when necessary. Gerald Mayer arrived a few minutes later. Dulles contemplated the sheaf of documents that Fritz had just deposited on a coffee table. There were two hundred pages of documents, half copies of cables, half Fritz’s handwritten notes in German, in a cramped handwriting that only Ernst Kocherthaler was able to decipher. Dulles did not have time to read the documents in detail that night. Out of curiosity, he skimmed through the “delivery.”
The ambassador of the Reich in Paris, Otto Abetz, gave a list of the French whom he suspected of sympathizing with the Allies and whom he recommended should be arrested. From Spain, there was a message that the Falangist authorities had agreed to make new deliveries of “oranges” to Germany. The “oranges,” as Fritz was to explain a short time later, designated tungsten, a strategic material that the German armaments industry desperately needed. From Latin America came information that a particular Allied sea lane was threatened by U-boats in the Atlantic. Was Dulles interested? He let nothing show.
The conversation continued late into the night. Even more than the documents he had brought from Berlin, Fritz’s opinions seemed to intrigue the Americans. They asked him even more questions than in August. He indicated on a map of Berlin some sites that, according to him, were worth bombing. “This particular Telefunken plant produces precision instruments for the Luftwaffe…. There in the Lichterfelde district is the enlarged SS barracks, housing the Leibstandarte SS, Hitler’s personal guard.”
Fritz had time to dwell at some length on his motivations, his family, his opinions. The Americans wanted to gather information, but they also wanted to determine whether Fritz contradicted himself and whether his explanations were plausible. They spoke again of the Wandervogel, and at length about Madrid and Cape Town. Fritz was made to understand that no detail was superfluous. Dulles and Mayer were interested in everything, including details that might seem useless. “Where are the principal shoe factories in Germany?” they asked him in the course of the conversation.
Life in Berlin and the general atmosphere of the capital of the Reich seemed to interest them just as much as revelations of a political or military nature. Fritz was asked to speak of his friends and contacts in Berlin. He naturally mentioned his friend Karl Dumont in the ministry, but also Count Waldersee, the Wehrmacht officer whom he had met in Professor Sauerbruch’s circle, with whom he had hit it off in the summer of 1943.
Between Friday, October 8 and Tuesday, October 12, the date of his departure for Berlin, Fritz came to see Dulles several times, using all possible tricks to avoid being followed. He slipped furtively through the arcades of the old city, plunged into shops that had back doors, and multiplied zigzag movements, always arriving at the back door of Herrengasse 23. Most of the time, meetings took place late at night. In his nocturnal movements through Bern, Fritz wore his hat pulled low on his forehead and used a different coat from the one he wore during the day. To avoid attracting the slightest suspicion, he accepted all dinner invitations from his colleagues in the legation. Dulles and Mayer never saw him arrive before eleven at night and did not let him leave before two or three in the morning. He came to see Dulles in company with Ernst Kocherthaler. The two friends had stopped meeting during the day, because they thought that their connection might attract suspicion.