The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. Max Hastings

Hôtel Russie, he divided his time between tourism, nightclub visits to support his cover, and a cautious reconnaissance of 113, Rue de Lausanne, the address Centre had given him for Radó. He called the Hungarian’s number from a telephone box, then went to a cinema and left in the middle of the film, to walk to Radó’s house. He was welcomed warmly, but with surprise, according to Gourevitch. The visitor later claimed that he had been bemused by Radó’s ‘careless air’, and by the agent’s claim that, despite the depredations inflicted by war, he still had some money because his map business was not doing badly. Radó introduced his wife Lena, then the two men closeted themselves in his study. Gourevitch handed over a French novel which provided the new key for coding messages. Over the course of the next few hours they practised the routine repeatedly, until both were satisfied that Radó had mastered it. Then they parted, agreeing to meet again in Lausanne, which was conveniently near Montreux, where the ‘Uruguayan tourist’ had booked a stay of several days. Following this second meeting they lunched together in a restaurant, then wandered the streets.

      Most Russians abroad suffered severely from homesickness. When Soviet agents met and had leisure enough to gossip, the first question to a man or woman fresh from Moscow was almost always ‘What news from “the village”?’, as they called their country’s capital. Though Radó was Hungarian, according to Gourevitch they talked indiscreetly about each other’s experiences of Centre. Radó allegedly begged his contact to emphasise to Moscow the lofty nature of his sources in Berlin. The Geneva agent also told him the Germans were planning to attack the Soviet Union. Yet it is implausible that in April 1940 Radó should have said Germany was preparing to invade Russia, because at that time Hitler had made no such decision, nor even come near to it. What seems certain, however, is that Centre was rash in sending Gourevitch to Geneva, and that its spies told each other things they should not have done, dangerous to both networks.

      At the end of December 1940 Ursula Hamburger left Switzerland for England, where her German communist brother was already living in exile. She was soon followed by her husband Len Brewer. Her set – a ‘musical box’ in their jargon, just as a forger was a ‘cobbler’ and police ‘the doctor’ – was taken to Geneva. Alexander Foote moved back to Lausanne with his own transmitter. It was too dangerous to install an external aerial on his apartment building. Instead, he persuaded a nearby wireless shop to supply the deficiency, saying that he wanted to listen to the BBC. For months, however, he proved unable to raise Moscow. Despite passing countless hours hunched over a Morse key in the kitchen, his urgent pulses vanished into a void. Then on 12 March 1941 came an electrifying moment: into his earphones flickered a response ‘NDA, NDA, OK, QRK5.’ He was in touch with Centre.

      Swiss intelligence must have been aware of the Radó group’s transmissions, but at that stage they made no attempt to interfere, even when the Gestapo protested fiercely to Bern about the flood of signals its operators monitored from across the border. The spies now boasted a third transmitter: Radó had met a young woman named Margrit Bolli, daughter of strongly socialistic parents, who said that she was eager to help the communist cause. The Ring trained the twenty-three-year-old girl in Morse technique. Initially she transmitted from the family home in Basle, but when her parents not unreasonably baulked, she moved to Geneva. The Gestapo, listening in frustration to the signals – still unintelligible to them – flooding across the ether from Bolli, Foote and the Hamels christened them ‘Die Rote Drei’ – ‘The Red Trio’.

      Who was giving Radó the information from Germany which was forwarded to Moscow in an average of five messages a day? The activities of ‘Cissie’, Rachel Dübendorfer, had now been merged into those of his group. Colleagues described her as a charmless woman of Balkan origins. She lived with Paul Böttcher, a former German communist illegally resident in Switzerland: Dübendorfer more than once used her nominal Swiss husband’s identity documents to preserve Böttcher’s neck. It is alleged that one of her sources provided an explicit warning of ‘Barbarossa’. Meanwhile one of Radó’s messages, dated 21 February 1941, quoted a Swiss intelligence officer, Mayr von Baldegg or ‘Luise’, predicting a German invasion at the end of May, a forecast perhaps secured by the Swiss Viking intelligence network inside Germany, and endorsed by a prominent Japanese diplomat. The network also became a conduit through which some Czech intelligence was passed to Moscow, most of it ultimately derived from the Abwehr’s Paul Thummel. At the end of May Radó cited a French diplomat, Louis Suss, predicting an invasion on 22 June – this message provoked an icy response from Moscow. So did another report to the same effect from Rudolf Rössler, who would henceforward become the foremost source for the Radó network. His codename ‘Lucy’ has passed into history, since the GRU’s Swiss operation became familiarly known as the ‘Lucy’ Ring.

      Rössler, a small, grey, bespectacled German émigré born in 1897, was an impregnably enigmatic figure, of a kind that populates many spy sagas. A socialist journalist, he fled from the Nazis in 1935 and set up a little publishing business in Lucerne – the city that prompted his codename. He began writing under the name of R.A. Hermes, describing the Nazi persecution of Jews and warning that the Nazis would reoccupy the Rhineland. Berlin identified ‘Hermes’, and in 1937 deprived Rössler of his German citizenship. He nonetheless retained many connections in his homeland, especially within the Wehrmacht. Short of both friends and cash in Switzerland, he began to provide information to a private intelligence agency called Buro Ha, based at the Villa Stutz south of Lucerne, and run by an ardent anti-Nazi named Captain Hans Hausamann. Buro Ha had informal links to Swiss intelligence, which for a season thereafter provided some protection for Rössler.

      He secured a steady flow of information from Germany, and apportioned varying quotas to Swiss, British, Czech and Soviet purchasers. Though his anti-Nazi credentials were not in doubt, he was principally and of necessity a mercenary – all his customers had to pay cash. By 1942 he had become by far the GRU’s most important Swiss source, the key figure in the Radó network. Moscow Centre, mistrustful of this shadowy figure, insistently demanded that Radó should make Rössler identify his sources, and the journalist equally stubbornly refused to do so. For all his later importance, it remains unclear how much intelligence he provided in 1941. Rössler went to his post-war grave still silent about the identity of the Germans who had provided him with useful, even sensational material. Subsequent speculation has focused on Col. Hans Oster, deputy head of the Abwehr; Hans Gisevius; former Leipzig mayor Gördeler; and two unnamed Wehrmacht generals.

      Uncertainty also persists about the timing and wording of some of the Swiss Ring’s messages and their supposed warnings to Moscow, both before and after ‘Barbarossa’. All that can confidently be said is that the GRU received a stream of messages from Switzerland in the spring of 1941, some of which strongly indicated that Hitler intended to attack Russia. Equally significant for the strategic debate in Moscow, Centre learned that Rudolf Rössler had been, and probably continued to be, an informant of MI6’s Bern station. It was only one step from this knowledge to a belief inside the Kremlin that the ‘Lucy’ Ring had become an instrument of Churchill, peddling false information to drag Russia into the war.

2 SORGE’S WARNINGS

      Stalin’s Japanese sources told much the same story as his Swiss ones, though since the outbreak of war in Europe the strain of sustaining twin lives, occupying a much higher profile than the ‘Lucy’ spies, had exacted an ever worsening toll on its principal agent. Richard Sorge strove to use his influence to dissuade the Germans from war with Russia. He told the Tokyo embassy that Nomonhan – the summer 1939 Russo–Japanese border clashes – had been a disaster for the Japanese, and that Berlin should notice the effectiveness of the Red Army and of Zhukov, its local commander. Then came the huge shock of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which stunned the Japanese government.

      And Sorge. The spy reported on 12 August 1939 the movement of twelve Japanese divisions to Korea and Manchuria – the real total was twenty – in case the government decided on war, but he expressed his own conviction that Japan would hold back, and indeed on 4 September Tokyo formally announced a policy of non-intervention. Sorge told Moscow, on Hotsumi Ozaki’s authority, that the country would enter the war only when it was confident that it had identified the winner. He added that the German embassy expected the Japanese to remain neutral, and