Fighting to Lose (2 page)

“The possibility exists,” the FBI memo continued, “that the British may have prompted this request on the part of G-2 and that this may be another move on the part of the British to gain as complete control as possible over the intelligence field. If the request is purely a G-2 request, to say the least it is naive.…”1

Such bad feeling was somewhat like that of a child rebelling against its parents. The two secret services of the British — MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, and MI5, the Security Service — tended to think that everything of value the FBI knew of counter-espionage it had learned from them, but that the FBI was not a good pupil. Unfortunately, the officers of both services had been a little too loose with their criticisms, and the FBI had caught on.

The fact was that the two British services had been in the business since the First World War, the “MI” in both standing for “military intelligence,” although both had evolved into essentially civilian agencies. MI6 was responsible for covert intelligence-gathering abroad and MI5 looked after counter-espionage and counter-subversion at home.

The FBI had been essentially a police investigative organization until war broke out in Europe in 1939 and it found itself suddenly having to deal with German spies on U.S. territory. Informal co-operation with the British followed, with quite pleasant relations, until the United States entered the war at the end of 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Relations were not so rosy after that, for a variety of reasons. The Americans had too much money to spend on technology, for starters, and seemed to have a mania for arrests. The British were unnecessarily devious, and not nearly as smart as they seemed to think. By late 1944, neither side much liked the other.

The British were quick to act on General Strong’s generosity. In February, they proposed that SHAEF set up a special joint agency whose particular task would be to identify and interrogate German intelligence personnel as they were captured. The so-named CI (counter-intelligence) War Room came into being in March 1945. Its steering committee was comprised of representatives from MI5 and MI6 for the British, and a British chairman, Lieutenant-Colonel T. A. “TAR” Robertson, the MI5 officer who had been directly in charge of Britain’s double-agent program. The Americans were represented by individuals from U.S. Army G-2, and from X-2, the counter-intelligence division of the Office of Strategic Services,2 the American overseas espionage agency more familiarly known as the OSS, created by presidential order in 1942.

As feared, so it happened. The FBI was excluded from this new committee. It had no grounds for protest. Its wartime mandate had been confined to the Western Hemisphere, and even though it had maintained a “European desk” in London, the counter-espionage war in Europe was not formally within the FBI’s jurisdiction. Informally, however, the Bureau had tried to maintain close liaison with both MI5 and MI6, particularly where it had involved tracking and catching German agents operating in North and South America.

It did not matter. SHAEF went by the book. That meant putting the less-experienced OSS on the committee instead of the savvy FBI. The best the Bureau could do was persuade General Strong to direct that the FBI be informed when individuals on a list it provided were interrogated so the Bureau could suggest questions and receive a copy of the subsequent reports. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover himself wrote a letter outlining the topics he wanted covered.3

An internal memo of this period from Hoover’s office — marked
not
to be shown to any of the other Allied counter-intelligence agencies — gives a good idea of the FBI’s interests. It outlined what FBI personnel in Europe were to watch for as the Allied armies pressed the Germans back. Of top priority were enemy spies and their controllers, list attached. Next was any “cipher paraphernalia,” such as slide rules, grilles, mechanical devices, instruction manuals, and code books. And finally, anything new on padlocks, combination locks, foreign locks, and luggage locks, with particular emphasis on “special precautionary methods added to insure against the picking of the lock when the owner is away.”4

The War Room setup was simple enough. Based on a master list compiled by MI5, with contributions from the FBI, G-2, and the OSS, the British, American, and Canadian army units in Europe would screen prisoners of war and suspicious civilians for the particular individuals. Those so identified would first be interrogated in regional centres, then, if deemed important enough, passed on to Camp 020 in England for closer questioning.

Camp 020 was Latchmere House, a Victorian mansion near Richmond in south London that had served as a hospital in the First World War and had been converted into a high-security prison for the Second World War. Most of the spies so far captured by Britain had been interrogated there.

Camp 020 had a more formal title: the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, or CSDIC for short. The name captures the purpose. It was where suspected enemy spies were questioned in fine detail, where hidden microphones listened in on inmate conversations, where long periods of solitary confinement were used to soften up resolve. Short of using physical torture, it was a no-holds-barred institution whose sole aim was to pry secrets from those of the enemy especially enjoined to keep them.

The Americans forces fighting in Europe did as instructed. When German secret service individuals of interest were picked up during the fighting across France and into Germany, they were superficially questioned in the field and then forwarded with a preliminary report to Camp 020. A significant snag was volume. Both the German army’s secret intelligence service, usually referred to simply as the Abwehr, and its Nazi security service counterpart — the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) — had been headquartered in Berlin, with sub-offices in many of the major cities in Germany and in the countries Germany occupied. Both also had offices in the capitals of neutral nations like Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland. One contemporary British document calculated that the wartime strength of the Abwehr in staff alone amounted to about twenty thousand individuals.5 Add to that the personnel of the RSHA’s foreign espionage and counter-espionage agencies and the number increases by about five thousand.

All this created a surfeit of plenty, especially after Germany surrendered in early May 1945. Allied army counter-intelligence officers, with MI5’s list tucked under their elbows, still had to question everyone who was found to have had a connection with a German police or espionage service. Did they know this person or that person? How long? When was he last seen? Who did he report to? Who reported to him? These were the questions asked of the secretaries and chauffeurs, of the petty officials and hangers-on who had worked in the offices of the Abwehr and RSHA. For every fish caught, the Allied dragnet swept up innumerable small fry.

The immediate consequence was the overloading of Camp 020, plus the inconvenience of transporting prisoners to England. In September 1945, MI5 set up a satellite interrogation centre in the spa town of Bad Nenndorf in Germany. It became the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre for the Western Europe Area or CSDIC(WEA). The Americans did likewise with a centre at Oberursel, near Frankfurt. Prisoners flowed in and reports flowed out. The total number of German security and intelligence personnel processed is unknown. The CSDIC(WEA) alone handled more than 350 up to the end of 1946. Several hundred more would have been processed at Camp 020 in London and at its other subordinate establishments. The Americans separately dealt with at least as many.6

These interrogation reports were generally only available to historians by chance or deliberate leakage prior to 1999, at which time they were released as part of MI5’s ongoing program to transfer many of its wartime files to the Public Record Office, Britain’s national archives. Similar (and sometimes the same) files became available in the United States after 1998, following the passing of the Nazi Wartime Crimes Disclosure Act, which required the public release of OSS, CIA, FBI, and army G-2 files relevant to the Holocaust. In both countries, the responsible authorities took a fairly liberal view of what files should be opened, with the result that it became possible to derive a much better insight into the secret-services war between the Western Allies and Germany.

The FBI’s worry that SHAEF G-2 was giving too much opportunity to British intelligence proved well-founded. The CI War Room was conceived as a kind of clearing house for interrogation reports, each Allied intelligence service contributing those it collected in exchange for those of the others. In theory, it meant that participants would equally be able to build up a comprehensive picture of the German espionage and counter-espionage effort. It was not to be. At the February 1945 founding meeting, the British won agreement whereby the services would retain “ultimate control over their own sources of intelligence.”7 In other words, both the Americans and the British had the option of withholding information or entire reports. Given that the British were to have first choice on whom to interrogate, and be the first to receive captured Abwehr records, the Americans — G-2, the OSS, and, indirectly, the FBI — were put at an enormous disadvantage. Their understanding of the German secret services, the Abwehr and the RSHA, was in danger of only being as good as the British allowed it to be.

Trying to assess the German intelligence effort was going to be challenging in any case. The Abwehr’s chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris — he who had taken it over in 1935, built it up under Hitler, and guided it through the war years to early 1944 — was dead, supposedly killed in an Allied air attack after his arrest, according to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the former head of the RSHA. Some of Canaris’s closest aides and confidantes and his immediate successor, Georg Hansen, were gone also, executed for their parts in the 1944 attempt to kill Hitler. The Abwehr’s heads of espionage (Abteilung I) and counter-espionage (Abteilung III), Hans Pieckenbrock and Franz von Bentivegni, were prisoners of the Russians. The consequence of all this was that while most of the body, arms, and legs of the Abwehr had survived the war, its controlling minds in Berlin had not. As far as the British and American intelligence officers of the War Room knew, the Abwehr’s headquarters leadership had ceased to exist.

On the other hand, most of the top leaders of the Nazi security service had been captured. The RSHA — and its Nazi-party predecessor, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) — never did develop much of a foreign espionage operation. Before the war, they had been primarily focused on spying on Germans at home to safeguard the Nazi grip on political power and on identifying those elements of the population — Jews, Freemasons, and Communists — that should be persecuted in the interests of racial and social purity.8 There was also an agreement, made under Hitler’s eye, that the Abwehr would have sole responsibility for military and economic espionage abroad while Amt VI of the RSHA was to confine itself to gathering foreign political intelligence.

As for the second-tier senior Abwehr officers — the section heads in the various branch offices in Germany and throughout Europe — there was cogent reason for them to tell as little as possible. The Soviet Union had been given custody of the eastern third of Germany, and its secret services, the NKVD and GRU, were on the prowl for their former adversaries. Any Abwehr officer who had been in a position of responsibility risked being chloroformed and whisked away to the Russian zone if he hinted at the true extent of his knowledge. The Americans and British were receiving reports of kidnappings, which they must have assumed represented only a portion of the total.9

Many of the captured German intelligence officers were also looking beyond the present catastrophe. It was clear who Germany’s next major adversary would be — the Soviet Union. It was in anticipation of this that the German army intelligence agency for Eastern Europe, Fremde Heere Ost, disbanded on its own, its records going into caves and its staff into hiding to await the day when Britain and the United States woke up to the fact they had defeated one enemy only to be faced with another.10

There was also concern that what was revealed to the British or Americans might get back to the Soviets. In the middle of the war, in a tour-de-force of counter-espionage, the Abwehr had discovered and rooted out a ring of Soviet-controlled spies that had penetrated the German army and foreign service at the highest levels. Dubbed the “Red Orchestra,” these spies were mainly German idealists of good backgrounds who had been seduced by the noble promises of communism. It was only logical that senior Abwehr officers, aware of the Red Orchestra, would surmise that the Soviets had cultivated individuals of similar sentiment inside the British and American secret establishments. This fear was justified, as later events were to prove.

Possible war crime charges were a worry too. The Allies had advertised loudly and widely their intention to bring the perpetrators of the Second World War to justice. The Nuremberg War Crime Trials, which the Americans vigorously supported, advanced the principle that political and military leaders should be held accountable for atrocities committed in their names. The torture and execution of prisoners, the extermination of the Jews — these were crimes against humanity, and declaring that one was only “obeying orders” or that what was done was only done “by the leader’s decree” was to be neither justification nor acceptable defence. The trouble was, even officers of the Abwehr who had been under the strictest orders to fight a fair war could not be sure what the Allies would deem a crime. Until the definition of war crime was sorted out, senior Abwehr officers had to be cautious on certain topics.11

Last, and most important, was the desire to protect operational techniques for the sake of the new German secret services that would inevitably be restarted as the country rebuilt. If the British and Americans apparently did not realize that some of their double agents were deliberately planted on them, why tell them? If Allied deception schemes had been allowed to go ahead in order to deceive the deceivers, why reveal it? The tricks of counter-intelligence are the most precious articles in a secret service’s tool kit.