In particular, Fritz Kolbe had provided material to help identify “Josephine,” a mysterious mole well placed in London who was providing high-class information to the Germans. Thanks to “Wood” and the Ultra machine, the British identified the spy, about whom they knew that he was supervised at a distance by the Abwehr office in Stockholm. The British secret services discovered that “Josephine” was the Swedish naval attaché in London, Johann Gabriel Oxenstierna, a diplomat who was particularly well informed about the movements and preparations of the Royal Navy.
Count Oxenstierna was not himself an agent of the Reich, but his professional mail was read at the defense ministry in Stockholm by a secretary who was working for the Germans. The Abwehr’s liaison agent in Stockholm was Karl-Heinz Krämer, known as “Hektor” in the secret German documents. In September 1943, London demanded that the Swedish authorities recall the naval attaché. They reacted sharply and took several months to accede to the demand. Finally, Count Oxenstierna was expelled in the spring of 1944. A certain number of high British officials, who had been particularly talkative in their discussions with “Josephine,” were disciplined.
Fritz Kolbe’s credibility was no doubt increased by the discovery of “Josephine.” However, in early November, the number-two of the British secret services, Claude Dansey, asserted that “there is nothing in them [Wood’s cables] which could affect the course of the war.” Others, beginning with Allen Dulles, were less categorical. Fritz Kolbe had enabled the Americans to put pressure on Ireland to put an end to German espionage activities in that country. The Dublin authorities had been urged to confiscate a clandestine radio transmitter, the existence of which Kolbe had revealed. Moreover, Kolbe made it possible to verify the impact of some of the Allied bombing of major German cities. For example, he provided the official Nazi report of bombings on October 2 and 3, 1943: “EMDEN: 20 bombs struck the Nordsee Werfte. MUNICH: IG Farben has been severely hit, also Dynamit AG, Allgemeine Transport Gesellschaft, Metzeler Gummi Werke… Slaughterhouse and main railway station were also hit. KASSEL: damage was done to Panzer locomotives and howitzers at the Herschel Werke. Junkers factory was not hit.”
In order to determine whether “Wood” was trustworthy, each document that he provided was closely scrutinized by the OSS in London. The files were transmitted to Washington with long commentaries. Paragraph by paragraph, word by word, everything was gone over with a fine-tooth comb and weighed against information derived from other sources. “Paragraph 1 is probable but hard to verify,” “paragraph 2 had been verified, its content is accurate,” “paragraph 3 is correct,” and so on. While the Allies had still not ruled out the possibility of a trap, they nevertheless thought it less and less likely. Nothing in “Wood’s” attitude led them to detect suspect behavior. If this was a game of deception, “it will have been far and away the most elaborate deceptive strategy so far known either to British or American counterespionage services,” wrote Norman Pearson in his November 23, 1943 memorandum.
“Wood’s” motivations seemed to be purely individual. “On the whole,” Pearson went on, “it seems likely that whether or not Wood is acting as he does from the ideological motives he professes, and despite the fact that he is unwilling to receive any money for his services, he is at the same time not unaware that after the Defeat some special consideration might be accorded to him.” The conclusion was chilling: “The habits of rats on sinking ships are well known.”
9
THE “KAPPA FILES”
Ankara, October 1943
“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson had said in 1929. This deep disdain for espionage was very widespread in English and American diplomatic circles. Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen, British ambassador to Turkey since 1939, and a diplomat of the old school, shared that way of thinking. Intelligence was outside the scope of his work and he did not want to hear it talked about. This indifference was close to negligence—he had an Albanian servant named Elyeza Bazna, of whom he had no thorough investigation made, though the man came to him out of the blue, and the ambassador never suspected that he had hired a dangerous spy in the pay of Germany.
In late October 1943, Bazna decided to contact the Germans to offer them secret documents from the British embassy. He had managed to steal the key to the personal safe of Ambassador Knatchbull-Hugessen while the ambassador was sleeping. He had had a copy made and was thus able to get his hands on confidential documents of the greatest importance. He immediately thought of making them available to the enemies of England in exchange for hard cash. On the evening of October 26 he went to the German embassy on Atatürk Boulevard, where he met Ludwig Moyzisch, a former journalist from Vienna with the official title of commercial attaché, who was in fact a permanent agent of the intelligence services. In their conversation, Bazna spoke French and claimed that his name was Pierre. He said that he hated the English, who had “killed his father.” He offered documents of “exceptional quality” in exchange for money, although he had nothing to show for the moment. He was asking for fabulous amounts (twenty thousand pounds for two rolls of undeveloped film). “Pierre” gave Moyzisch two days to think about it, letting him know that he would not hesitate to look for a better client—for example, the Soviets—in the event of a German refusal.
Moyzisch, somewhat skeptical, informed the ambassador, Franz von Papen, of this astonishing offer. Von Papen was very fond of all kinds of intrigue and believed in the virtues of combining diplomacy with espionage. Because of the scope of the affair, von Papen referred it directly to Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in Berlin, who turned the file over to his assistant, Horst Wagner, liaison officer between the ministry and the SS. The file was soon turned over to Walter Schellenberg, head of foreign espionage. He decided to pay the twenty thousand pounds “to see,” and was not disappointed by the result. The first “delivery” from the Albanian servant contained many details about conversations at the highest level between British and Turkish leaders. These negotiations dealt with a highly strategic question: Was Turkey finally going to abandon its de facto neutrality? Would it shift into the Allied camp, and if so, at what price? Its strategic interest was to remain outside the war, even though it secretly dreamed of a dual defeat: first of the Soviets and then of Nazi Germany.
Ambassador von Papen could use the documents photographed by the Albanian valet to attempt to thwart the maneuvers of the Allies. Always one step ahead thanks to the information provided by his spy, he was in a position to put very targeted pressure on the Turkish authorities in order to force them to maintain their neutrality. He decided to name this exceptional spy “Cicero,” because of the particularly eloquent nature of the material supplied. In Berlin, Walter Schellenberg hoped to use Cicero to decipher the English secret codes. On November 4, 1943, a plane from Berlin landed in Ankara with the sum of two hundred thousand pounds sterling on board. This treasure was to pay the spy for several months. It turned out much later that these were counterfeit bills expertly produced by a secret agency of the Reich’s espionage services.
In the course of the fall of 1943 and the following winter, Cicero turned over large quantities of invaluable information to the Germans. Ambassador von Papen considered him a first-rate source and used him daily to supply material for his diplomatic cables to Berlin. He informed Hitler in person of the existence of the Cicero file when they met in November 1943. But Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who detested von Papen, whom he saw as a rival, had every interest in minimizing the importance of the affair. “Too good to be true,” he told Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the German secret services. A trap could not be ruled out. It is thus not certain that Berlin drew all the benefit possible from the information provided by the spy in Ankara.