Charles Whiting - Hitlers Secret War: The Nazi Espionage Campaign Against the Allies

This was a secret war whose battles were lost or won unknown to the public No such battle has ever been waged by mortal man.

Winston Churchill

I met my first spy when I was seventeen. He stood out in that echoing Belgian barrackroom, heavy with the stink of the piss-buckets, amid a couple of hundred men waiting to be sent to the front as reinforcements. Most of us were green teenagers, though the word had hardly been invented in those days. A few were veterans, twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-olds who had been wounded in the fighting in Normandy and were returning for their second bash, as the phrase had it.

The spy was different. He was an old man, perhaps all of thirty. He was strong-looking and surly and hed obviously been an officer until quite recently. You could see the lighter marks where his pips had once been. Otherwise his battledress blouse was devoid of all unit insignia or medal ribbons, save for one thing left from his, to us, unknown past. They were upturned white-and-blue wings on his chest, complete with a parachute. Id never seen the device before, but I recognised it for what it was. It indicated that he had jumped behind enemy lines three times.

He kept himself to himself. He smoked a pipe much of the time, clenched tightly between his teeth, as if somehow by this means he was forcibly restraining himself from talking. Why and about what I could only guess. Once, however, before the big flap when we all disappeared to our various dates with destiny, he got drunk.

Perhaps it was pay day. Perhaps hed taken up with one of the women who haunted the cafes-cum-brothels around that Belgian cavalry barracks and had conned her into buying him drinks. Tough they were, but soft-hearted in a way, if your face and attitude were right. At all events, he staggered in, helped to fill the giant piss bucket near the door it took three men to lift it and took up an aggressive stance at the sagging wooden bunk, still adorned with the eagle stamp of the Wehrmacht who had occupied this same barracks a couple of months earlier, leaving behind their bedbugs as souvenirs.

There he shot off his mouth: Why us fer Chrissake? I wasnt particularly sensitive in those days, but I guessed that he wasnt really addressing us, but his former masters and an unjust world that had dumped him here, from whence he would probably go to his death sooner or later.

He had been in the SOE or the SAS: the initials meant nothing to me in those days. Hed worked with the Dutch underground. Finally hed been parachuted behind the lines to the Dutch, taking with him a small fortune in gold coins for the Resistance. But he hadnt delivered. Like others of his kind I was to meet later, he felt he was beyond the normal laws of military discipline and accountability. Perhaps he felt he deserved a reward for the dangers he had incurred. Anyway hed gone on the run, holed up in some big city, right under the Moppens noses (hed used the slang Dutch word for the Germans) and spent the money on wine, women and song before the authorities caught up with him. They always do.

When the big flap came a couple of weeks later he disappeared. Naturally I never saw him again, but over the next half-century or so to come, whenever I met others of his kind, it seemed to me that that vaguely remembered spy was somehow typical of them all.

Spies, at least the ones Ive met, always seemed to believe that they were in control of the situation, when, manifestly, they were not. It led to a sense of grievance that their admittedly dangerous activities were never properly rewarded. Fred Winterbotham, the guardian of the Ultra Secret, complained: Not even a good gong. Even as an 80-year-old, who was soon to become more famous than ever he had been as a spy, Group-Captain Winterbotham was bitter and resentful.

Spies appear always to think that their acts of espionage resulted in earth-shaking changes. When I was told to defect by the CIA contact, I smuggled out 400 key documents, welded into the chassis of my Skoda, Major Frolik, of the Czech Secret Service, proclaimed proudly. That opened Washingtons eyes! Two or three years later nobody cared. Major Frolik had served his purpose.

Colonel Giskes and Major Ritter, Germanys wartime spy-masters who directed espionage operations against Britain and America, were cast in the same mould. Thirty years on, when this author had dealings with them, they were still boasting about how they had hoodwinked the Allies and how they had had spies, perhaps even assassins, in close proximity to Churchill and Roosevelt. Little did they understand that they had already been relegated to the status of minor footnotes in the history of the Second World War. The real threats to the security of those leaders during the war were still alive, kicking and unmasked, thanks to the machinations of the KGB.

With a finger on the trigger of his special and a beautiful, nearly naked, blonde on his other arm, Ian Flemings creation, James Bond, looks like these real spies might have imagined themselves in that sleazy underworld of betrayal and counter-betrayal. In fact, they were nothing like that, never were since they first made their appearance in Chinese accounts five centuries before the birth of Christ. As Montesquieu remarked in the 18th century: Spying might perhaps be tolerable if it were done by men of honour.

But the real spies werent men of honour. Neither were they gentlemen in the older English sense of the word. The real James Bond, if he ever lived outside of the novels of John Buchan, is dead.

But what of the man who controlled the destinies of those Second World War spies, Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, who led the campaign against Britain and America and whose agents ranged the world from Afghanistan to Arkansas? Father Christmas his enemies called him. High C was another mocking name given to him by some of his more malicious agents, such as Giskes. But for most of those who knew him when he had 3,000 full-time agents, and thrice that number of part-time ones, under his control Admiral Canaris remained an enigma. As William Shirer, who knew him, remarked in his book The Third Reich: He was so shadowy a figure that no two writers agree as to what kind of man he was, or believed in, if anything much.

He always tried to maintain his distance, Colonel Ritter, the virtual US citizen who returned to his homeland to spy against his new country, told the author, when he came to visit our branch in Hamburg. When he invited us all to dinner after his inspection, the Admiral was always close, unlike those Germans who tell you their life story within five minutes of meeting them, we never got anything out of him!

American writer Ladislas Farago met Canaris, or so he said, in 1935. As he wrote in his Game of Foxes: I could not believe that this rumpled, tongue-tied, absent-minded little man was the new chief of the Abwehr I had anticipated eager curiosity that sparkled in the eyes [Instead] he impressed me as an honest dullard.

So he remained a mystery not only to his most intimate colleagues but also to the huge Nazi police apparat led by sharp young men out to get him. As hatchet-faced Dr Kaltenbrunner, the last head of the Nazi police organisation, wrote after the Nazis arrested him in late 1944: [Canaris] managed to throw sand in all their eyes Heydrich, Himmler, Keitel, Ribbentrop, even the Fuhrer.