This was not all. For the first time, Fritz provided information about Japan (Scarlet in the Kappa cables) on the basis of facts collected by the German embassy in Tokyo. He revealed in particular that Tokyo was secretly encouraging its Berlin ally to make peace with Moscow. He also transmitted information on certain Japanese positions in the Pacific (Burma and New Guinea).
Early in March, a postcard from Fritz arrived at OSS Bern through the usual diplomatic circuit. It pictured a bouquet of narcissus along with a few spring buds. At first sight, it was a warm birthday greeting addressed to Walter Schuepp, but he was born on April 28 and the card had been written on February 22—so it would seem that Fritz had been particularly early with his card. In fact, the greeting contained a hidden message. An assemblage of apparently incoherent letters had been typed on the right side of the card: D xzrfgx aqh ADX Thfokf tlhjlnlva hcy Htvkpz Alml Gsyfji Oxsuch Wkmybdcebzp. Was this simply bad typing? Fritz apologized. “A child was playing at typing just as the card was about to be sent,” and Fritz added that “unfortunately [he] had no other card available.”
This strange message was deciphered by the Americans through the code to which Fritz had given them the key during one of his previous visits to Bern. It said: “Yolland of OWI in Ankara is discussing defection to Germany with Consul Wolff in Ankara.” Fritz had not even taken the trouble to put the card in an envelope. He was confident in the indecipherability of his personal secret code. He was right. The card arrived at its destination without provoking the slightest suspicion. It had been mailed in Bern, as usual, by Willy Pohle or another of Fritz’s colleagues on a mission to the German legation in Switzerland.
Fritz’s mail was now arriving regularly in Bern. His correspondence might be hidden in a pair of shoes or in clothing, but mailings always arrived for Ernst Kocherthaler’s brother-in-law in the diplomatic pouch. Another letter soon arrived for Walter Schuepp (it had been written on March 6, 1944), with, once again, dozens of excerpts from confidential cables. “Poor fellow who has to read all that! I had real good opportunities, and I didn’t waste any of them!” Fritz wrote. Among the several “pearls” of this springtime delivery, the Americans found the summary of a conversation between the German envoy in Bern, Otto Köcher, and Marcel Pilet-Golaz, the chief of the Swiss diplomatic corps. The latter considered probable, in case of a failure of the Allied invasion, an “Anglo-German agreement” aimed at preventing the installation of a Soviet regime in Germany. Numan Menemencioglu, the Turkish foreign minister, expressed exactly the same opinion (according to a cable sent from Ankara on February 12, 1944).
Fritz Kolbe relayed certain rumors reporting tensions between the Allies. In a letter received in February, he had revealed that the German diplomatic service was interested in the anti-Soviet attitude of a certain “Dallas,” the key man in the American legation in Bern. This was, of course, Allen Dulles, whose remarks about the “excess of Soviet power” had reached the ears of Otto Abetz through Jean Jardin, former cabinet secretary to Pierre Laval who had been posted to Bern since the fall of 1943. In addition, in his letter of March 6, Fritz thought that he could say, on the basis of a recent cable from von Papen, that Roosevelt had been extremely critical of Stalin during the Teheran conference (November 28 to December 1, the first summit meeting among Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin). German diplomatic circles seemed not to exclude the possibility of a break between the Americans and the Russians, a prelude to a “compromise peace” between the Germans and the Anglo-American forces.
In relaying this kind of information, was Fritz expressing political intentions, and was he acting on behalf of a high Berlin official who wished to remain anonymous? The OSS people naturally asked themselves this kind of question. Some cables communicated by Fritz could pass for disguised political messages, such as one from January 2, 1944, written by the German envoy in Bucharest, Manfred Freiherr von Killinger. He said that, according to a Rumanian source working in Rome, “the Pope was highly perturbed and had told him that the British and Americans were paving the way for Bolshevism in Italy.”
However, the letter of March 6 helped reassure the American’s about “Wood’s” good faith. Fritz had put a second envelope inside the first, labeled “confidential/for Ernesto.” It contained four pages written in very small script. Reading with a magnifying glass, the Americans discovered a complete list of the German counterespionage service (the Abwehr) in Switzerland. Already fairly well informed on this subject, they could put this very valuable information together with what they knew from other sources and work out a nearly complete organization chart of enemy agents operating in their immediate vicinity. The most interesting was probably the information gleaned by Fritz that the Germans were unaware of the existence of the OSS office in Bern. In Berlin it was thought that the headquarters of American intelligence in Switzerland was located in Zurich.
To please Fritz and thank him for his help, the Americans answered in a code that he had himself devised. They sent to Berlin a postcard with a mountain scene, mailed from the ski resort of Parsenn, near Davos. The message was the following: “I managed to make three ski jumps. As you know, I am not a beginner. The weather is fine.” The “three successful jumps” meant that the Americans had in fact received the last three letters from Fritz. “I am not a beginner” meant that they had managed to decipher his postcard of February 22. “The weather is fine”: the information was useful. This was the best postcard Fritz had ever received.
10
ONE MISUNDERSTANDING AFTER ANOTHER
Washington, January–March 1944
Although President Roosevelt had received in January 1944 some of the cables sent by Fritz, the Berlin spy continued to be subject to strong suspicion in American intelligence circles. “All the messages are probably authentic…. Although our investigation reveals no evidence to substantiate the suspicion, colleagues here still suspect that the whole thing may be a buildup to a sensational plant,” was still the finding of the experts of the Secret Intelligence department of the OSS on January 22, 1944. If this way of seeing persisted so long in Washington, this was because the Allies themselves frequently used subterfuge and deception in their war against Germany.
On January 28, 1944, OSS headquarters in Washington decided to test the knowledge of the mysterious Berlin agent. It sent to its Bern office a strange message in the form of a guessing game. “What are the present relations between Himmler and Ribbentrop?… Is political intelligence collected by Himmler’s outfit? If so, what agencies are instrumental in collecting it?… Are the intelligence functions of the Auswärtiges Amt and the Sicherheitsdienst coordinated?… What distinction can be made between the Geheimstaatspolizei and the Sicherheitsdienst?… Please try to get Wood to reply to these questions the next chance you get. They are preliminary test queries to which we know the answers.”
Allen Dulles paid no attention to this odd questionnaire and immediately threw the grotesque document into the wastebasket. He was gradually growing weary of all this suspicion and was impatient with the skepticism of his Washington colleagues, but minds barely changed at OSS headquarters; on the contrary, obstacles to the dissemination of Fritz Kolbe’s material proliferated. As time went on, the agency headed by General Donovan became an increasingly less flexible organization, and espionage experts expanded their power, sometimes bureaucratic and nitpicking, over most ongoing operations. Beginning in late 1943, the OSS systematically asked for the opinion of the Military Intelligence Service before authorizing the dissemination of the Kappa/Boston papers to Washington decision makers. And the professionals of military intelligence were even more circumspect than their OSS colleagues. They turned the file over to the Special Branch, the department specializing in deciphering enemy messages, under the authority of Colonel Alfred McCormack, a former Chicago lawyer. Colonel McCormack’s men had the means to cross-check huge quantities of German communications intercepted around the world and had privileged access to the very valuable information gleaned by the British from the “Ultra” system. For several months, Colonel McCormack and his assistants worked with the seriousness and precision of entomologists on the Kappa material. They read and reread, paragraph by paragraph, all the cables given to them by the OSS. Hundreds of documents were studied and dissected. As a result, the dissemination of the documents was considerably slowed.