Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (7 page)

On July 11, 1941,
with war looming
, President Roosevelt created the first civilian-run agency tasked with gathering foreign diplomatic and military intelligence worldwide. The first director of this Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) was one of Roosevelt’s old classmates from Columbia Law School, William J. Donovan. A recipient of the Medal of Honor in World War I, “Wild Bill” Donovan was a successful Wall Street lawyer who had traveled extensively in Europe during the interwar years, meeting several foreign leaders, including Adolf Hitler. On a mission from Roosevelt in July 1940, he had been given extraordinary access to Britain’s leaders and security agencies, including the secret code-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park.

After America’s entry into World War II, there was a thorough reappraisal of the U.S. armed forces and particularly the intelligence services that had failed to forewarn of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Accordingly, the COI was split. Its propaganda wing, the Foreign Information Service, passed to the new Office of War Information, while the remainder became the Office of Strategic Services, coming directly under the control of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—a group of high command staff newly formed of necessity but not formally established until 1947. The OSS was created, under Donovan’s directorship, by a military order of June 13, 1942. Now with greater access to military support and resources, the OSS was given equal status to the other armed services. Its principal roles were to gather military, diplomatic, and commercial intelligence, to conduct psychological warfare, to support friendly resistance and partisan movements in Axis-occupied countries, and to launch covert operations, both in Europe and in the China-Burma-India theater.

Donovan immediately set about obtaining new recruits for the OSS. As happens so often with elite organizations, among the many highly motivated men and women attracted by the prospect of adventure were a significant number drawn from the higher echelons of society. These volunteers included Morgans, Mellons, Du Ponts, Roosevelts, and Vanderbilts—indeed, the OSS soon achieved such a cachet that it was dubbed “
Oh So Social
, Oh So Secret.” The service also attracted several left-wing sympathizers, such as the German immigrant and Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. When challenged, however, Donovan responded forcefully, “I’d put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would help defeat Hitler.” One of the first recruits was Donovan’s old friend and collaborator Allen Dulles, who had formerly been his head of operations in the COI.

ON OCTOBER 30
,
1942
, a week before Allen Dulles arrived in Bern, the badly damaged German submarine
U-559
(Lt. Cdr. Hans Heidtmann) was abandoned by its crew under the guns of the Royal Navy destroyer HMS
Petard
off the coast of Egypt. A British officer and two seamen swam across and risked their lives to clamber down inside. Two of them were dragged down to their deaths when the U-boat sank, but a sixteen-year-old canteen assistant named Tommy Brown survived—and with him, vital operating manuals for the latest four-rotor Enigma machine. This act of sacrificial courage won for Bletchley Park the means to begin breaking, on December 13, 1942, the Shark codes that had defied the cryptanalysts since February. Their success was far from immediate and for months they could only decrypt U-boat signals after long delays, but by September 1943 they would be producing Ultra intelligence at their former speed. At the outset, the British were reluctant to share such sensitive information with their American counterparts in the OSS, but in time their cooperation gave birth to a massive signals intelligence-gathering organization that became one of the great Anglo-American achievements of the war.

Chapter 2

T
HE
T
URNING
T
IDE

ALLEN DULLES ONCE WROTE, in a letter to his mother, “Bern is the diplomatic and spy center.… I now hobnob with
all sorts of outlandish people
—Czechs, Yugoslavs, Albanians, Montenegrins, Ukrainians.… There is a chance to do as much here as if one were shooting personally a whole regiment of Bosche [sic].” That letter was dated Christmas 1917, when Dulles was twenty-four. A quarter of a century later Dulles was once again in Bern at Christmas, back in the business of cultivating “all sorts of outlandish people.”

He had reached Switzerland just in time. On November 11, 1942, the Germans retaliated for the halfhearted French resistance to the Allied landings in North Africa by occupying the remainder of France, previously ruled by Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government. Thereafter, all France’s borders were sealed. Switzerland was now a vulnerable island, surrounded by Nazi and Italian Fascist territory. This made the task of communicating with London or Washington much more difficult. All diplomatic mail ceased, all telephone lines and radio communications were monitored, and Dulles lacked the staff for efficient encryption of messages.

Originally, “Wild Bill” Donovan had asked Dulles to go to London to coordinate between the OSS and British intelligence. Dulles had demurred and instead suggested that he set up a Special Intelligence station for the OSS in Switzerland. His motives were mixed. Obviously, he knew the city and the country well and he spoke very passable German. On a personal level, Bern held much more attraction than blitzed London for a bon vivant who enjoyed fine food and wines and the company of young women. Furthermore, Switzerland was the nexus of clandestine business and banking activities in occupied Europe. As a successful lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell, Dulles was well qualified to monitor such activities both for the U.S. government and for his corporate clients. But above all, Bern was the ideal location to conduct espionage. It provided Dulles with what he later described as his “
big window
” into the Nazi world.

Dulles was often to be found taking lunch at the Theater Café or dining at the Hotel Bellevue Palace, where foreign diplomats and Swiss officials liked to congregate and exchange gossip or intelligence. At the age of fifty, he had the air of a college professor, with his tweed jackets, bow ties, and briar pipes, and his easy charm made him congenial company. He had time for everyone, whatever the time of day. In his own words, his open attitude had the result of “
bringing to my door purveyors of information
, volunteers and adventurers of every sort, professional and amateur spies, good and bad.” At night, he held court in the book-lined study of his comfortable residence at Herrengasse 23, offering a discreet welcome to any furtive visitor wishing anonymity.

Despite his talent for being all things to all men, however, Dulles did have considerable antipathy toward the British. After leaving Princeton in 1914, he had briefly worked as a teacher in India, where he had acquired a visceral loathing for the British Empire—a sentiment shared by many in the American establishment. The British intelligence community, for its part, was somewhat suspicious of his casual manner and lavish lifestyle, but, as professionals, both parties were willing to cooperate when their interests coincided. Even so, as Dulles later recalled, he was never averse to “
putting one over the Brits
.”

DULLES SOON ACHIEVED
some notable successes. After the occupation of Vichy France, all the local agents of the Deuxième Bureau (French secret service) agreed to work with him provided that they were financed by the OSS. Dulles thus enjoyed a constant flow of intelligence from occupied France that would be much prized by Allied planners during the preparations for the Normandy landings and the subsequent liberation of Western Europe. He learned of the existence of Hitler’s program to produce “Vengeance Weapons”—the V-1 and V-2 missiles—and when this information was combined with intelligence from Polish and Scandinavian sources and the RAF Photographic Interpretation Unit, it allowed the RAF to bomb the German research and testing facility at Peenemünde in August 1943 (see
Chapter 8
).

Allen Dulles was a master at cultivating people as potential spies across all sectors of society and nationalities. His sources included diplomats, financiers, clergymen, journalists, and intelligence agents from around the world. At one end of the spectrum, he gained information from the bargemen plying the River Rhine through Germany and Switzerland. At the other, he met regularly with Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist who provided psychological profiles of the Nazi leadership and applied his innovative concept of the “collective unconscious” to an analysis of the German people. However, it was Dulles’s contacts with disaffected Germans that proved the most profitable.

Not the least of these was Fritz Kolbe, a senior diplomat in the Reich Foreign Ministry who was code-named “
George Wood
” by the OSS. Kolbe was rejected by the British as an obvious plant. Dulles cultivated him assiduously and, over time, obtained some 1,600 Foreign Ministry policy documents that gave invaluable insights into Hitler’s war plans and the Third Reich’s international relationships. Among the intelligence provided by Kolbe was a highly detailed sketch of Hitler’s field headquarters in a forest near Rastenburg, East Prussia (present-day K
trzyn, Poland)—the Wolfschanze or Wolf’s Lair—including the exact locations of the antiaircraft defenses and the buildings used by Göring and Goebbels. Although Hitler spent a large proportion of his time at the Wolfschanze during the war, the Allies did not bomb it once.

On January 15, 1943, Dulles was visited by an old acquaintance, Prince Maximilian Egon zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg, whose Liechtenstein passport allowed him to travel the world unimpeded. The prince had innumerable contacts with high officials across Europe, especially in Berlin, and most notably with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, who orchestrated the prince’s meeting with Dulles. The proposition that the prince wished to float before Dulles was simple, if startling: in the name of civilization, Himmler’s SS would eliminate Hitler, after which Germany would join forces with the Western democracies in a global war against Soviet communism. True to his methods, Dulles allowed himself to appear interested but made no commitment, keeping his options open for future dialogue with the SS and the Nazi hierarchy.

Among his other SS contacts was an Austrian aristocrat, SS Capt. Reinhard Spitzy, who was SS adjutant to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Spitzy subsequently served with the Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Foreign Affairs/ Supreme Command of the Armed Forces or OKW), or Abwehr—the German military intelligence organization, headed until February 1944 by the formidable Adm.
Wilhelm Canaris
. However, it was through the German vice-consul in Zurich, Hans Bernd Gisevius, that Dulles gained a channel to the Abwehr. Canaris, known as the “Old Fox,” had been the head of the Abwehr since 1935 and was one of the most enigmatic figures of the Third Reich. Fluent in several languages, he had been involved in intelligence work throughout his long naval career. He was a brilliant spymaster but he also ensured that his closest colleagues were not members of the Nazi Party. Since before the outbreak of war, Canaris had been active in the resistance movement of Germans attempting at first to frustrate and then to overthrow Hitler—a group known to the Gestapo as the Schwarze Kappelle (Black Orchestra) and to the OSS as “Breakers.”

Canaris, like Heinrich Himmler, sought to discover the probable attitude of the Western Allies if and when Hitler was removed or killed. Canaris needed to know what support might be forthcoming for the conspiracy itself or in the political aftermath once the deed was done. Mindful of Dulles’s proclivities, he directed one of his resident agents in Switzerland, Halina Szyma
ska, the widow of a Polish officer, to develop a relationship with the American. Providentially, she was Canaris’s close companion during his visits to Switzerland, so
pillow talk
proved beneficial to both sides. Szyma
ska was also Canaris’s liaison with British intelligence—it was through her that Canaris had informed the British in late 1940 of Hitler’s plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union. However, Canaris’s attempts to sound out Washington and London about a possible future for a Germany without the Führer came to nothing. Neither leadership was willing to support any resistance movement inside Germany or any plot to kill Hitler and neither had any sympathy for conspirators whom President Roosevelt dismissed as “
these east German Junkers
.”