However late such information was received from such a source, it was obviously of immense value. What increased the value was the speed with which the information reached us. One would normally think that a source producing information of this quality would take time to obtain it. No such delay occurred in the receipt of Lucy's information. On most occasions it was received within twenty-four hours of its being known at the appropriate headquarters in Berlin. In fact, barely enough time to encipher and decipher the messages concerned. There was no question of any courier or safe hand route. The information must have been received by Lucy over the air, and his sources, whoever they were, must have gone almost hotfoot from the service teleprinters to their wireless transmitters in order to send the information off. This speed was one of the factors that made the Centre distrust this source, and only after bitter experience did they accept it at its face value.
Who was the source and how did he come into the network? As always in espionage, the end is dealt with first.
Lucy was introduced by Taylor, alias Schneider, sometime early in 1941. Taylor was apparently an old friend of Lucy's and introduced him to the Centre on one condition only- that he, Taylor, and only he should know the true identity of the source and that Moscow would not be told. The Centre was extremely suspicious and at first advised Rado to have nothing to do with it. Even after Lucy had disclosed the date of the German attack on Russia some two weeks in advance, and check-backs had shown that the information was correct, the Centre still refused to accept the information and insisted that it must be some kind of plant. Despite the Centre's attitude we continued to "plug" Lucy's information over to Moscow. Rado, in one of his few independent gestures of the war, was paying Lucy without prior sanction from Moscow and insisting that this information was valuable, and indeed vital, to the Russian cause. "Dripping water wears away the hardest stone," and in the end we managed to convince Moscow that this information was, to say the least, extremely valuable to them. Once they were convinced, they went for it in a really big way. Lucy was given seven thousand Swiss francs a month as a retaining fee plus special bonuses, and his information, at least all that which passed over my transmitter, had a suffix of one code group meaning "Urgent decipher at once." In fact in the end Moscow very largely fought the war on Lucy's messages- as indeed any high command would who had access to genuine information emanating in a steady flow from the high command of their enemies.
Moscow accepted Taylor's conditions and Lucy was to them a source of unknown origin - as indeed he was to all of us till some time after the dissolution of the network. As far as I know this was the only time Moscow ever accepted an unvetted source; in this case they were amply justified for their unorthodox action.
So much for how Lucy came into the net. As far as the Centre was concerned we forced the source upon them. To the best of my knowledge no one received any thanks for doing so.
Who was Lucy? The answer to that is simple - Selzinger. Who was Selzinger? The answer to that is not so easy. Before Hitler came to power Selzinger had been connected with the theatre in Germany, probably as a producer, and gained quite a reputation in his profession in Berlin. He was not a German himself, but a Czech. After the establishment of the Third Reich he fled to Switzerland. On arrival there he did his best to make his stay as permanent as possible and to this end used his sources in Germany to ingratiate himself with the Swiss. In a short time the Swiss General Staff realised his value and used him as their main source of information regarding the German Army's disposition against Switzerland. In return for his information, Selzinger was given permission to reside in Switzerland. Until the rape of Czechoslovakia Lucy worked for the Czech General Staff, so the secret of his sources may have lain in Prague.
The Swiss General Staff regarded him so highly that they not only used him as a source of information regarding German intentions towards Switzerland- which of course his incomparable sources could provide- but also used him as an "evaluater." That is, they asked him to evaluate the information they received from other sources on the German armed strength and acted on his decision. He ended up, in fact, as the assessor for the
Swiss Director of Military Intelligence on all military information emanating from Germany.
Selzinger had apparently wanted to contact the network and had been introduced to Taylor by one of the latter's minor sources. He was certainly a source of Taylor's in 1941 and quite consciously provided the Centre with his information- even though the Centre did not believe it. He was of course simultaneously providing the Swiss General Staff with such information as he could obtain regarding German intentions against Switzerland and his dual role must be remembered in assessing his actions. Selzinger was a refugee in a neutral country and as such was obviously out to ingratiate himself with as many authorities as he could find- especially the authorities which gave him a safe lodgement. To this end he remained loyal to his Swiss masters- as loyal as he did to his Russian ones. Luckily for him, their interests never clashed.
I never met Selzinger until after my imprisonment when, through a cut-out, he expressed a desire to see me. He was, throughout my active career as a spy in Switzerland, merely a cover name whose sources were equally veiled in jargon. For example "Werther" was his name for the O.K.W. and "Olga" for the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe. Similarly, the Marine Amt and other government departments had their cover names.
Selzinger lived in Lucerne where he was known as a "publicist," the easy phrase that covers anything from a writer of pamphlets to a best seller.
What was the source of his information? Here I must enter into the field of pure speculation. I do not know; the Centre did not know; Taylor did not know; and the only person who did know was Selzinger himself, and he is not telling. Whoever his sources were, they were obviously high up in the Nazi hierarchy and the information reached Selzinger by wireless. Since the war there have been various books produced by various leaders of the so-called German "resistance" and in them there has been mention of a Communist cell within the German Air Ministry which was broken up sometime in 1942. It is possible that Selzinger's sources included this particular spy ring and that this was the only one that the Germans managed to discover, leaving his Wehrmacht and other sources inviolate. This is not a wholly satisfactory explanation as Selzinger's sources continued uninterruptedly long after this alleged spy ring in the Luftwaffe was eliminated. It would be logical to assume that there might have been a slight hiatus at the time of the Luftwaffe arrests in 1942- but no such hiatus occurred and the information continued to stream in.
A really suspicious-minded person might think that the whole thing was a gigantic double-cross by the Germans, who could have supplied Selzinger with a vast amount of authentic information in the hope that the occasional piece of false information would be accepted as well. There is one scrap of intelligence to support this thesis, and one scrap only. At the time of Timoshenko's Kharkov offensive in 1942 the Russians based this offensive almost entirely on the information that Lucy supplied. In this case the Russians found themselves in a trap and heavy losses ensued. If this had been one of many incidents resulting from Lucy's intelligence, the thesis that the whole thing was a German strategic double- cross would be more tenable. However, this was the only occasion that his information turned out not to be genuine. It is almost inconceivable that the Germans- if they had controlled the source of Lucy's original intelligence - would not have attempted to cash in on it to a greater extent. This did not happen and I think that this excludes the double-cross hypothesis. It is of course possible that Selzinger's intimate contact with the Swiss General Staff may have helped to supplement his information. Selzinger may not have been above peddling to the Russians such information as he obtained in his capacity as an "evaluater" of Swiss intelligence- his own sources in Germany having failed him.