Burn After Reading (3 page)

Then, suddenly and inexplicably, on January 1, 1935, he succeeded Captain Konrad Patzig as the head of the Abwehr, the military intelligence service. Canaris was forty-eight, but he seemed far older. He was small, soft boned and slender, had a quiet voice and leisurely gestures, his shallow skin furrowed by wrinkles, his hair snow-white. His subordinates called him
der Alte—”
the Old Man.”

Canaris was continually pulled to and fro between the amorality of his job and his innate moralism, between a mystic belief in chance and a meticulous dedication to purpose. He was a good man and a weak one, an opportunist and a compromiser, forever vacillating between firmness and procrastination. His character was mirrored in everything he did, even in his pursuit of his favorite sport, sailing. “He always keeps close to the wind,” a friend once said, “and sails forever with sloppy sails.”

He was sensitive to a degree which, as someone remarked, was “incompatible with his choice of the career of an officer and which caused him to regard force and any expression of force with horror.” Perhaps because he was himself so unsoldierly in appearance, he looked with aversion upon dashing officers. The mere sight of a decoration on a soldier's chest provoked him to sardonic outbursts and sufficed to bar the man from his entourage. He preferred to wear civilian clothes and he surrounded himself with officers who were as non-military as possible.

His inner sanctum on the top floor of the
Abwehr
building, called by insiders
Fuchsbau
or “Fox Lair,” reflected the hodgepodge of this strange man's character. Its furnishings had no style or taste. On his desk stood a little piece of bric-a-brac which Canaris had chosen as the symbol of the
Abwehr
: the familiar little statue of three monkeys who hear, see and speak no evil. One wall was covered with a big map of the world. On the other walls hung three pictures: an autographed photograph of Generalissimo Franco (reflecting his consuming love of Spain, his adopted country, whose civil war in 1937 he helped to ignite) ; a Japanese painting of the devil; and a picture of his favorite dachshund, Seppl.

This strange man had neither friends nor confidants, but he was inordinately fond of dogs. His concern for his canine companions once threw his adversaries into confusion. Traveling with an assumed name on a fake passport, Canaris visited Spain in 1936 to plot the coming rebellion. The Republican police spotted him and tapped his telephone, for Canaris occasionally committed the apparent indiscretion of calling Berlin longdistance.

The Spanish monitor heard him talking about an ailing dog, and receiving from someone in Berlin a detailed report on the pet's bowel movement. The police were positive this was a clever code and cryptoanalysts burned the midnight oil trying to decipher it. They couldn't. Canaris really was talking about a sick dachshund.

Canaris personified the secret service at its worst. He was a politician, therein violating the very first rule of the secret service by using the information his agency procured as a weapon for his own plots. He came into the
Abwehr
a convinced Nazi, then drifted away from Hitler and wound up in a conspiracy against him. He is now frequently described as one of the top leaders of the anti-Nazi plot, but his real contribution consisted of omissions rather than commissions. He let the Nazis plant their spies within the
Abwehr
and permitted the anti-Nazis to plot behind his back. And he tried, with a good deal of success, to use both groups for his own ends.

In the end the Nazis hanged him on a specially constructed gallows with thin piano wire to deepen and prolong the agony of his death. Hanging may be, as Wotton remarked, the worst use a man can be put to, but it seems reasonable that he deserved his savage death.

But on September 1, 1939, he was still years from this mildly elevated terminal point of his career. In fact, he was at the pinnacle of his power and fame—because, strangely enough for a man of mystery, Canaris was internationally famous. The
Abwehr
was Hitler's greatest prop and Canaris was one of his most valuable accomplices.

In a semi-official history of the
Abwehr,
Paul Leverkuehn, a Hamburg lawyer who served as an intelligence officer throughout the war, wrote of Canaris: “He was more than the titular head of the
Abwehr
. It was very largely his creation, and when he was removed it began rapidly to disintegrate. In fact it would not be a great exaggeration to say that the
Abwehr
was Canaris, and Canaris was the
Abwehr.”

On the eve of war Canaris had a permanent staff of eighteen thousand men and women, with additional thousands in the field serving as confidential informants.

Canaris himself stood alone at the apex of this hierarchy. Under him were five major sections. There was the Central Section, headed by that courageous and determined anti-Nazi, Colonel Hans Oster, the executive officer of this labyrinthine
web. The Foreign Section, under Captain Buerkner, maintained liaison with foreign powers. Section II, under Colonel von Lahousen, was responsible for sabotage and other underhanded secret operations. Section III was charged with
Abwehr
in the true sense of the term—security, counter-espionage, and counter-sabotage.

Secret intelligence (including espionage) was the responsibility of Section I, also called
Geheimer Meldedienst
, or Secret Information Service. It was organized in three “subsections” (one each for the army, navy and air force) and five groups. Among these, Group I-G developed ingeniously concealed weapons, extraordinary methods of microphotography, invulnerable secret inks; it forged passports and manufactured all the sinister paraphernalia indispensable to the efficient functioning of a secret service. Group I-I was in charge of wireless communications, including the design of clandestine radio equipment for agents in the field (the so-called Afus) and the organization of secret (black) radio networks.

Section I had a relatively small staff at headquarters in Berlin, in a five-story stucco building on the Tirpitzufer. In the field, it maintained an enormous network of so-called V-men (the “V” standing for
“Vertrauen,”
or confidential, in this context). Many were permanent resident agents; still more worked on a temporary, hit-and-run basis. The majority of the V-men were volunteers whose chief motive in aiding the Nazis was their sympathy for Hitler's New Order. A handful were mercenary spies, but they were not paid well, on the sound theory that the best intelligence cannot be bought.

But no matter how firmly entrenched Canaris seemed at the apex of this hierarchy, he knew that his lonely place was perilous. He would have been indeed a negligent spymaster had he not known of a danger that threatened both himself and the
Abwehr:
Reinhard Heydrich, the young boss of the Gestapo whose
Sicherheitsdienot
(security service) was a vulgar imitation of Canaris'
Abwehr.

The
Abwehr's
chief function was to defend Germany from
foreign opponents by aggressive espionage and defensive counter-espionage. Heydrich's SD, designed to defend the Reich from the “inner foe,” was supposed to perform largely police intelligence functions. But this demarcation could not be maintained. Beneath a veneer of collaboration, and even personal friendship, Canaris and Heydrich battled for control.

Heydrich was determined to dismantle the
Abwehr
until it was confined to military intelligence. Although this plan was based primarily on professional ambition, he also had a personal reason for disliking Canaris. Heydrich was Canaris' junior by seventeen years, but both men were products of the German navy. There was one difference: Canaris had risen to the rank of rear admiral and left the navy with honors and dignity; Heydrich made the grade of a junior lieutenant, then foundered and was kicked out.

Though he was now in a position of enormous power, Heydrich's hurt pride still made him self-conscious with Canaris, in whom he saw the navy personified.

For his part, Canaris went to considerable lengths to carry out his instructions and make Heydrich happy. He encouraged Heydrich to visit him at his home, persuaded him to become his neighbor in a Berlin suburb, and cultivated an apparently warm social relationship. But he was thoroughly contemptuous of the young Nazi, and Canaris had a trump card, as secret services usually do. He had evidence in the little safe he kept in his private office in the
Fuchsbau
that this fanatical, Jew-baiting Nazi bloodhound, Heydrich himself, was partly Jewish in origin.

The Nazi espionage service pitted against the
Abwehr
was a catch-all organization, called
Reichs Sicherheits Haupt-Amt,
or RSHA for short, the Main Department of Reichs Security.

Headed by Heinrich Himmler, it was organized in major branches whose functions and duties ranged from the selection and training of personnel to weird medical experiments using inmates of concentration camps as human guinea pigs. Its Sections IV and V performed police functions. Section IV was the dreaded Gestapo, headed by Heinrich Mueller, set up to combat
opposition to the regime, to persecute the churches and the Jews and also to carry out the usual police supervision of all ports of egress and ingress. Section V was the
Kriminalpolizei,
or Kripo of Arthur Nebbe, the Reich's orthodox criminal police.

Intelligence and espionage were concentrated in the SD Sections III (Inland) and VI (Foreign), over which Reinhard Heydrich ruled supreme. The Nazis' aggressive espionage was a job reserved for his Section VI, the notorious
Amt Sechs,
where he was aided by a shrewd, opportunistic intellectual named Walther Schellenberg, a pinch-faced little busybody whose cold efficiency and penchant for methodical intrigue well supplemented Heydrich's broader approach to the activity.

Section VI was developed step by step, until it became the Nazi counterpart of the
Wehrmacht's
cloistered
Abwehr,
a secret service in all but name, complete to functional and regional sub-sections patterned after the
Abwehr's
structure. Though considerably smaller than the
Abwehr
, Heydrich's agency actually duplicated its functions, frequently arrogating to itself prerogatives which should have been exclusive to the Canaris organization.

Heydrich's ideas ran along unorthodox lines. To him, the direct approach was contemptible because it was too simple. His secret service was constantly teeming with weird plans for savage enterprises. Even those few he succeeded in translating into practice sufficed to establish Heydrich as one of the most insidious, but undeniably one of the most brilliant, spymasters of this nefarious age.

In a sense, Heydrich is the most misunderstood and underrated figure in the espionage history of World War II. Although it is Canaris' picture that is etched on the imagination of the world as Germany's master spy, Heydrich certainly gave him a run for first place. Some even think Heydrich surpassed Canaris in the efficiency and effectiveness of his operations, although this remains, in the nature of these things, a moot question.

Everything about this man was obscure or mysterious, including his origin. He was born in Halle in 1904 to the director
of the Music Academy, whose name was listed in a contemporary directory as “Bruno Richard Heydrich (properly called Suess).” It was this parenthetical addendum in the old directory that made Heydrich reticent about his birth and youth. “Suess” was a common Jewish name in Germany.

Too young for war in 1914–18, he joined a terrorist youth organization after the peace and at the age of fifteen already had a reputation as a proficient assassin. He joined the navy as a cadet, advanced to the rank of lieutenant, but was then abruptly cashiered. He had several love affairs running simultaneously, including one with the daughter of a naval architect. When the young lady became pregnant, her father demanded that Heydrich marry her. The lieutenant refused in righteous indignation. He would never marry a woman, he said, who succumbed so easily to a seducer. The naval architect took the case to Admiral Raeder and Heydrich was discharged.

He entered the Nazi movement and found a place inside the Party's intelligence organization and an opportunity to rise through blackmail. He learned that a high-ranking Prussian official was secretly corresponding with Hitler's arch rival within the Nazi Party, the ill-fated party theoretician Gregor Strasser. Heydrich courted the official's wife and became her lover. Between amorous embraces in the lady's apartment, he discovered the hiding place of the incriminating letters and stole the correspondence.

Armed with these letters, he extorted a place for himself with the Munich Elite Guard. After that, his rise was rapid. He was not yet twenty-seven years old in 1931 when he was made chief of the Party's special intelligence division and commandant of its goons, raw-boned giants of blonde Nordic appearance and of ruthless, sadistic disposition.

Young as Heydrich was, he looked still younger; powerful as he was, he thirsted for still more power. He was tall, lean, with an excellent figure which made him look extremely well in the sleek, black SS uniform. His beardless face gave him a somewhat effeminate appearance, but that impression was quickly
destroyed by his eyes, which were frigid and mirrored a truly cynical soul. Wilhelm Hoettl, who served under him in the SD, compared Heydrich with Cesare Borgia. “Both men”, he said, “were imbued with the same complete disregard for all ethical values, both possessed the same passion for power, the same cold intelligence, the same frigidity of heart, the same systematically calculated ambition and even the same physical beauty of a fallen angel.”