Burn After Reading (9 page)

At New Scotland Yard, Sir Norman Kendal and Commissioner Ronald Howe, stern-faced, fish-eyed, thin-lipped bosses of the Criminal Investigation Department, were General Kell's opposite numbers. Out in the field, the real nemesis of foreign spies was Cooke, along with Assistant Commissioner Albert Canning, who headed Scotland Yard's Special Branch, the organization that comes closest to the British idea of a secret political police. Addicted to striped suits and polka dot ties, and to an oversized Homburg pulled down over his brow, Canning could have been mistaken for a barrister.

When Hitler attacked Poland, both MI.5 and the Special Branch were alerted to stand by. On September 3, shortly before the expiration of the British ultimatum, the code word was flashed to the War Office and Scotland Yard. The great spy hunt was on. The job was superhuman. The suspect lists had grown to almost seventy-five thousand entries. Not all of these were spies, by any means, but the spies were in that crowd.

During the night from September 3 to 4, inspectors and special agents of Scotland Yard, with some two thousand detectives and uniformed policemen, made thousands of calls. Before the night was out, four hundred and thirty-five persons received polite invitations to accompany the officers to various centers prepared for their reception. In subsequent days, weeks and months, the cases of seventy-three thousand two hundred and thirty-five secondary suspects were scrutinized and five hundred and sixty-nine additional foreign agents were spotted.

With regard to some six thousand individuals, MI.5 and the C.I.D. were not quite sure, but these were not the times to give such people the benefit of the doubt.
Habeas corpus
was suspended for the duration. These suspected enemy agents had their movements strictly curtailed.

And the number of spies Canaris had sent to Britain was not much greater than the number of German spies Kell and
Canning managed to catch. Colonel Busch's two phenomenal spy rings were unceremoniously smashed, just when they were needed most. It was Canaris' first major defeat.

Back in Germany, there was a man who looked exactly like a Hollywood actor playing the role of a German intelligence officer, Captain Herbert Wichmann. He was big and bluff, with a Prussian cropped head and dueling scars, heavy-set but agile, heavy-handed but alert, not exceptionally brilliant but industrious and efficient; the very prototype of the competent, hard-working, self-effacing German staff officer. He was chief of the British desk at the
Abwehr
. Within a few moments after the outbreak of war, Wichmann was sitting in a guarded communication room of the Hamburg wireless center, breathing down the neck of the radiomen who flashed prearranged signals to agents in Britain and France. The code word, repeated again and again at intervals, alerted his men to go into action at once, and to operate henceforth to the best of their abilities and according to their instructions, for better or for worse.

Captain Wichmann could not imagine, and had no reason to suspect, that virtually his whole British network was sitting, not at their wireless sets, but behind the bars of Wormwood Scrubs, the famous prison that MI.5 had taken over for the duration. So he was not surprised when answers began to come from their transmitters operated by radiomen of the British Secret Service. In long hours of meticulous practice, these Englishmen had learned to imitate the highly individualistic touch of each German on the Morse key. This characteristic touch is the basic identification mark of agents who operate transmitters. So perfect was the mimicry of the British substitutes that the
Abwehr's
radio operators never found out the ruse.

The continued operation of a fallen spy's radio is one of the favorite tricks of espionage, a ruse that is both old and common and yet hardly ever fails to be effective. The Germans coined the word
Funkspiel
for it; literally this means, “radio game.” That translation, however, does not express the picturesque
quality of the German term. The word implies a mysterious carillon that rings out in the ether, sounding a Lorelei tune to mislead or entrap men who listen to it.

The great carillon resounded at the hands of British bell-ringers. The English continued this game for fifteen months, during which time Canaris felt safe and smug. He even boasted to Count Ciano of Italy of his formidable network in England and mentioned with particular pride a certain agent who was making up to twenty-five transmissions a day. As far as the Germans knew, only one of their key agents had been lost and even that, they thought, was due to an unfortunate accident.

During the great round-up in early September, a broker who lived in a London suburb tuned in his radio to listen to BBC's 9 o'clock news and was irked by some strange interference that came and went on schedule, lasting exactly seven minutes, from 9:02 to 9:09, four nights in a row. He called the police, and Scotland Yard sent a detector van to the suburb. It did not take long to locate a lonely house on a sideroad from which, it seemed, someone was sending faint Morse signals on an unlicensed transmitter.

The owner of the house was a meek little Government clerk, “a very 'umble person,” as Dickens would have said. When detectives searched his house, they found that the source of those crackling sounds was a wireless transmitter of a type that they had never seen. It had but a single tube and operated on three small batteries. The whole set, including its tiny Morse tapper, weighed only four pounds. It was the famous Afu, a little “whispering box,” sending out the faintest of signals. They were virtually inaudible in England but could be picked up by a special
Abwehr
station near Hamburg.

The clerk was soon salted away in Wormwood Scrubs, but his set was left undisturbed. A Secret Service signaler continued to send messages in his code. One day, in great excitement, the substitute agent radioed Wichmann that he had succeeded in procuring information of the utmost urgency, so important, indeed, that he was most reluctant to put it on the air. He
asked the captain's permission to come to Germany so that he could bring the message in person.

This was an unusual request and required high level consideration. Transportation was not a simple matter. The best means of getting an agent out of England was by submarine, but Doenitz's boats were badly needed elsewhere. Nevertheless, Canaris coaxed from Hitler an order to place a U-boat at the
Abwehr's
disposal.

Early in October, the agent was radioed his instructions; he would be picked up on the next totally moonless night in a lonely, rock-encrusted bay on the Welsh coast.

At 2:00 a.m. on the night fixed for the operation, the vague flickers of a flashlight's staccato signals sent thin ribbons of light from the shore out to the black water. At intervals of ten minutes each, those vague lights flickered. An hour later came the answering light. The submarine had arrived.

Abruptly a bright light flashed. A moment later the air was filled with the din of battle. British destroyers had been lying in ambush for the U-boat and they sank it in a matter of minutes.

Captain Wichmann never found out what had happened. When nothing more was heard from either the sub or the agent, it was presumed that both had been lost after the boat had succeeded in the pick-up. It was a long time before Doenitz again consented to loan one of his U-boats to the confounded
Abwehr.

In the book of traitors, Major Vidkun Quisling occupies a page to himself, partly because his treachery was so enormous and partly because his motives were so puzzling. Quisling
was
a traitor on a staggering scale, but he himself never conceded it. He regarded himself as a reincarnation of Harald the Conqueror, destined by Divine resolve to lead his people into some kind of promised land. What that land would be exactly, and how he would get there, Quisling did not quite know.

He was born in 1887 in Tyrdesdal, Norway, the son of a village preacher. It was still a wild region; bears roamed the countryside. Quisling abandoned the valley quite early, but the impact of his “barbarian birthplace” left him with feelings of inferiority and delusions of superiority. He was imbued with broad humanitarian impulses: “As a young boy,” he once said, “I wanted to preach on Sundays and heal on weekdays.” He became a professional soldier instead.

At the military academy, he was a superbly industrious and brilliant student, but he was stubborn, taciturn, and he secluded himself in an impenetrable shell. Before he was thirty, he was a captain in the Norwegian Army's General Staff; then he became a military attaché at St. Petersburg and Helsingfors. The Russian revolution caused an upheaval within him, and in 1922, he turned his back on the army, became an assistant of Fridtjof Nansen, the great humanitarian, ministering to the needs of Russian refugees. In 1927, he was back in the Norwegian
Legation in Russia and, during the break of Anglo-Soviet relations, he represented British interests in the U.S.S.R.

Despite the admitted brilliance of his work, Quisling never ceased to puzzle even those who seemed to be closest to him. When asked about his assistant, Nansen remarked, “I don't know Quisling, because I cannot fathom him.”

In the late Twenties, Quisling's career slowed to a standstill. Gradually he came to feel he was the victim of a conspiracy. From his morose, truculent, self-imposed isolation, he groped his way to others like himself and formed a clandestine fraternity of disgruntled patriots. One of them was a certain Hagelin, a prominent Oslo merchant; another was a colonel named Konrad Sunlo, commandant of the Narvik garrison, a dreamer of totalitarian dreams at his Arctic outpost.

Quisling became obsessed with a hatred of Bolshevism, which he viewed as a Jewish conspiracy, and he formed the National Unity Party. In 1931, he was made Minister of War in a hodge-podge coalition government, and promptly moved to bend the office to his personal ambition. He became involved in all sorts of nebulous conspiracies until his schemes proved too much for the tolerant Norwegians and he was kicked out.

It was at this loneliest stage in his career that the Nazis, looking for allies abroad, spotted him. Quisling was discovered by Alfred Rosenberg, the intellectual
condottieri
, who was always on the lookout for unemployed plotters.

In 1938, Rosenberg's secretary, Thilo von Trotha, visited Oslo, ostensibly as a tourist, and called on Quisling. The self-styled Norwegian Colossus impressed von Trotha as a lone wolf, difficult to handle, so nothing developed then. But the situation changed abruptly; in 1939, Quisling decided to revive contact with Rosenberg. Upon Rosenberg's invitation, Quisling made a trip to Berlin and met him in his house in Dahlem where the major was driven in a curtained car amidst theatrical secrecy.

His tongue loosened by generous portions of aquavit, Quisling treated his host to a dissertation he was never to forget.
The Norwegian candidly censured Germany for her lack of interest in his homeland. “He pointed out,” Rosenberg later reported to Hitler, “the decisive geopolitical advantage of Norway in the Scandinavian region and the advantages gained by the Power in control of the Norwegian coast….” Quisling also requested support for his party and press in Norway, basing his request on the “Pan-Germanic” ideology. Rosenberg agreed to lend him this support.

In August, twenty-five members of Quisling's
Nasjonal Samling
were secretly brought to Germany for a fourteen-day course, to learn the methodology of Nazi activism. At the same time, Rosenberg tried to peddle Quisling's services to various German agencies. He tried to interest Hitler's confidential secretariat in the Norwegian, and also Goering, the latter with the bait of Norwegian real estate as possible landing fields for
Luftwaffe
aircraft. For a while, there were no takers. Rosenberg was embarrassed because he had promised Quisling money and his own Bureau had no appreciable funds.

At last, in the fall of 1939, he found a customer for his client: Admiral Schniewind, Grand Admiral Raeder's chief of staff. Raeder had long been yearning for an outlet to the North Sea and eyed Norway as an ideal base. As early as October 10, 1939, the Grand Admiral tried to coax Hitler into an invasion of western Scandinavia, but Hitler was too busy with other plans. The admiral then detoured into a conspiratorial side alley and was most receptive when Schniewind told him of Quisling's availability. Rosenberg bolstered the case with a memo in which he spoke of Quisling in glowing terms and outlined what the fellow could do for the German navy.

“According to this plan,” he wrote, “a number of picked Norwegians will be given training in Germany for this particular task. They will be told exactly what to do, and will be assisted by seasoned National Socialists who are experienced in such matters. These trained men are then to be sent back to Norway as quickly as possible, where details will be discussed. Several focal points in Oslo will have to be occupied with lightning
speed, and simultaneously the German Navy with contingents of the German Army will have to put in an appearance at a prearranged bay outside Oslo in answer to a special summons from the new Norwegian Government [presumably that of Quisling]. Quisling has no doubt,” Rosenberg added, “that such a
coup,
achieved instantaneously, would at once meet with the approval of those sections of the Army with which he now has connections.”

Raeder asked Rosenberg to produce Quisling. Rosenberg took Quisling and Hagelin, the Oslo merchant and Quisling's co-conspirator, to see Raeder on December 11. Quisling urged his German partners to act quickly lest the British move in ahead of them.