Agent 110

An American Spymaster and the German Resistance in WWII

Scott Jeffrey Miller

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781451693409
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The "lively and engrossing" ( The Wall Street Journal ) story of how OSS spymaster Allen Dulles built an underground network determined to take down Hitler and destroy the Third Reich. Agent 110 is Allen Dulles, a newly minted spy from an eminent family. From his townhouse in Bern, Switzerland, and in clandestine meetings in restaurants, back roads, and lovers' bedrooms, Dulles met with and facilitated the plots of Germans during World War II who were trying to destroy the country's leadership. Their underground network exposed Dulles to the political maneuverings of the Soviets, who were already competing for domination of Germany, and all of Europe, in the post-war period.Scott Miller's "absorbing and bracing" ( The Seattle Times ) Agent 110 explains how leaders of the German Underground wanted assurances from Germany's enemies that they would treat the country humanely after the war. If President Roosevelt backed the resistance, they would overthrow Hitler and shorten the war. But Miller shows how Dulles's negotiations fell short. Eventually he was placed in charge of the CIA in the 1950s, where he helped set the stage for US foreign policy. With his belief that the ends justified the means, Dulles had no qualms about consorting with Nazi leadership or working with resistance groups within other countries to topple governments. Agent 110 is "a doozy of a dossier on Allen Dulles and his early days spying during World War II" ( Kirkus Reviews ). "Miller skillfully weaves a double narrative of Dulles' machinations and those of the German resistance" ( Booklist ) to bring to life this exhilarating, and pivotal, period of world history—of desperate renegades in a dark and dangerous world where spies, idealists, and traitors match wits and blows to ensure their vision of a perfect future.

CHAPTER

1

Portal on the Reich

At movie houses across America in 1942, newsreels depicted maps of Europe that showed territory occupied by Germany and its allies. Stretching across the screen, from the English Channel to the Soviet Union, the Nazi reach and terror seemed unstoppable. One small pocket, though, was carefully illustrated to show an area that did not belong to the Germans. Pointing through the projector’s flickering light, parents might have noted to their children that the missing piece of the Third Reich was Switzerland, that country of soaring peaks, fields of cows, and alpine meadows, just as they may have seen in Shirley Temple’s 1937 movie Heidi.

What few American parents knew was that Switzerland was home to a thriving community of spies. Secret agents—German, Hungarian, Japanese, British, American, Italian, Chinese, Polish, and Soviet—had been drawn to the country for years for its long-standing policy of neutrality and its geographic position at the heart of Europe. By day, secret agents plotted one another’s political destruction. By night, at the Hotel Bellevue Palace, they laughed and drank at tables within easy earshot of each other. At the golf course, intelligence agents politely allowed their faster counterparts from enemy nations to play through. At fragrant bakeries, they patiently stood in the same lines for the morning’s croissants.

Where so many spies congregated, so did their camp followers, scoundrels hoping to make a quick franc peddling information of suspect quality, resistance fighters, and women willing to trade their bodies to advance their cause. Everyone, or so it seemed, was a double agent trying to keep all the stories straight.

On a chilly Sunday in January 1943, an American with the physique of a lifelong tennis player strode through the quiet streets of the nation’s financial capital, Zurich. Allen Dulles, a portrait of confidence, had been in Switzerland only a couple of months in the employ of the US government. To anyone who would ask, he would say he served as a special assistant to the American head of mission, Leland Harrison. The claim made sense for someone like him, a suitable way for a former diplomat to do his part for the war effort. Yet aiding the American minister was not the reason he had come to Switzerland. William Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the fledgling American intelligence service, had assigned him to get a Swiss station up and running to spy on Nazi Germany.

At age forty-nine, Dulles was one of those rare individuals whose vintage only improved with the years. His hair, though slightly thinning, was still sufficient for a respectable part, and his mustache was full. A Wall Street lawyer and a member of a family that ranked among America’s ruling class—two relatives had served as secretaries of state—he projected a worldliness that was unusual for an American. Maybe it was the blue eyes that twinkled behind round rimless glasses or the disarming pipe perched between his teeth, but Dulles could, when he wished, assume an engaging personality that made others take an instant liking.

Dulles was in Zurich to meet a man he had been warned to avoid, a German named Hans Bernd Gisevius. Like Dulles, Gisevius lived in Switzerland under false pretenses. Officially he carried the title of vice consul attached to the German mission in Zurich. Espionage circles knew that he was really an agent of the Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the German military. As a newcomer, Dulles was an obvious target for Germans like Gisevius who feasted on inexperienced spies. Yet exactly because he was new to town and eager to establish an intelligence network as quickly as possible, Dulles had kept an open mind. “Our countries were at war. A meeting between us was hardly according to protocol,” Dulles later wrote. Checking with what few contacts he had been able to develop, Dulles concluded that if he kept his guard up, meeting the German spy was worth the risk.

Greeting Gisevius at an undisclosed location, Dulles was confronted with a solidly built, handsome man who was more than a little imposing. Standing some six feet four inches, he was known to his friends as “Der Lange” or “the tall one.” At first blush, Gisevius exuded the air of an academic. With his round thick glasses, he had the look of a “learned professor of Latin or Greek.” Yet he had spent virtually his entire career in German security and police services, including the Prussian Gestapo, and he bore the imprints of the profession. His manner was stiff, formal, and guarded, and he frequently came across as arrogant. One who knew him well attributed a “brutal” aspect to his appearance.

Gisevius had come to Dulles with a clear agenda. He explained that there were many brave souls in Germany who wanted to rid their country of Adolf Hitler and were ready to take action. All they needed was help from the Americans, which they hoped Dulles could arrange. They could kill or depose the Führer, but Gisevius and his friends needed to know whether Washington would negotiate a peace treaty with a new German government. Overthrowing their Fascist dictator without such assurances, he said, could lead to revolution and chaos.

Dulles dismissed Gisevius that night without any record that he offered the slightest encouragement. Gisevius would soon travel to Berlin to join fellow conspirators in a bold plot, while Dulles dove into what he considered more important projects.

•  •  •

Though Dulles didn’t take Gisevius seriously that evening, much of what the German said rang true. Allied intelligence services knew there were pockets of resistance within Germany. In company canteens, noisy local beer halls, and even closed-door meeting rooms at the German army headquarters in Berlin, groups of men and women had gathered to plot against Hitler since the first of the eerie torchlight parades in 1933 that signaled the Nazis’ rise to power. Their motivations were varied—religious leaders detested the Führer’s merciless attacks on Jews; politicians, especially those on the left, hated his attitude toward the Communists; and army officers were terrified he would ruin the Wehrmacht. All feared that Hitler was leading their beloved country to ruin.

Some resistance members had been making their way to the West to issue warnings. In the late 1930s, several had traveled to Switzerland to open lines of communication with the British government. Others had turned to contacts in the British aristocracy. One, a Munich lawyer, Josef Müller, made contact with the British using Pope Pius XII as an intermediary. Still another, the German politician Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, had turned to Jakob Wallenberg, a member of the Swedish banking family, to reach out to Western capitals.

Yet Dulles had reason to be wary about Gisevius. In November 1939, the Abwehr had captured two British spies near the Dutch town of Venlo, after German agents had similarly approached them to work together. Although it was unlikely the Germans would try to kidnap Dulles himself—the Swiss took a dim view of such lawlessness—it was possible, even likely, that Gisevius’s purpose was to worm his way into Dulles’s confidence to gain information that could be used to break American codes or discover the identity of Allied agents.

Another reason for caution was the nature of Dulles’s assignment. His superiors had made it clear before he left Washington that he was to lead psychological campaigns to demoralize the German people and troops, to learn what he could about Nazi secret weapons, and to deliver order of battle intelligence such as enemy troop strengths. Dulles also hoped to work with members of resistance movements, and he had access to money to help fund their operations. But engaging in high-level political negotiations exceeded his brief.

CHAPTER

2

“I Have Never Believed in Turning Back”

Dulles’s journey to Switzerland had begun a little over a year before his meeting with Gisevius. On the afternoon of December 7, 1941, he was lounging at his town house on tree-lined East Sixty-First Street in New York City. He and his wife, Clover, had hosted a debutante ball for their daughter Joan at the Hampshire House on Central Park South the previous evening and were starting the day slowly. He looked forward to listening to a football game between the New York Giants and the rival Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds. At about three in the afternoon, Dulles heard a report that the Japanese had just attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Around the same time, the public-address system in the stadium crackled with an announcement that William Donovan was to report to a telephone for an important call from Washington. President Roosevelt wanted Donovan, the head of a recently established espionage unit called the office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), in Washington immediately.

Donovan and Dulles were well acquainted. Once competing Wall Street lawyers, they shared an interest in international affairs and public service, played tennis together, and were members of the same clubs. Donovan had occasionally turned to Dulles for advice about getting his fledgling American spy agency up and running. When the United States formally entered the war a few days after Pearl Harbor, he persuaded Dulles to join the group.

For several months Dulles ran a COI station in New York, operating out of the former offices of a diamond merchant on the thirty-sixth floor of the International Building at Rockefeller Center. There he assembled a staff of men and women charged with learning all they could about Nazi Germany. Relations with important Germans living in the United States were established. Agents greeted ships arriving in New York from Europe to interview people who may have recently been in the Third Reich. Used clothing of German fashion was purchased to supply prospective American agents. A special maritime office was established at 42 Broadway, where foreign sailors were forced to submit to interviews to obtain information about ports such as Genoa, Marseilles, and Naples. In one report, Dulles’s team collected information and maps about the latest conditions around the Sahara desert from a French engineer.

It was a period of learning on the job for Donovan’s entire enterprise. Though George Washington had promoted covert operations during the Revolutionary War, intelligence gathering had become a lost art for Americans in the twentieth century. Protected from much of the rest of the world by two oceans, Americans were not supposed to care about the secrets of other countries. Spying was considered a dirty business—Henry Stimson, the secretary of state in the Hoover administration, famously remarked that “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” Even in the late 1930s, though the United States was cracking enemy codes, human sources of intelligence were limited to a few dozen ambassadors and military attachés. Pearl Harbor, where the US Navy had been caught asleep by the Japanese sneak attack, was a testament to how low American intelligence had sunk. The coming of war finally awakened the United States to the need for better intelligence gathering. In June 1942, the president broke up the COI and created the OSS. American espionage entered a new age of excitement and at times mind-boggling confusion.

With mild blue eyes, a “rather dumpy, corpulent figure,” a soft voice, and ill-fitting clothes, Donovan ran the OSS with little thought to such basic tools as organizational charts or a chain of command. Ambitious staffers soon learned that the best way to land an assignment was simply to walk past Donovan’s open office door when he looked up. Some training manuals were hastily published, prepared with help from the British, but staffers understood they would have to live by their wits and even came to embrace their reputation as “enthusiastic amateurs.”

Donovan made good use of a secret budget to assemble a staff of academics, lawyers, journalists, movie directors, business leaders, and counterfeiters. The actor Sterling Hayden, dubbed “the Most Beautiful Man in the Movies,” joined Donovan’s team, as did a Major League Baseball player, the multilingual Moe Berg. Long before she would become a famous chef, Julia Child signed on with the OSS as a researcher.

Donovan established the OSS headquarters in a three-story granite building at Twenty-Fifth and E Streets atop Washington’s Navy Hill, a structure the OSS shared for a time with caged animals the Public Health Service used for syphilis research. For a few weeks, Donovan and members of his team were subjected to noxious odors as the dead creatures were disposed of in a nearby incinerator.

Yet the OSS was a thrilling place to work. Agents were deployed to exotic locations around the world with generous bank accounts and little direct supervision. Thanks to the work of OSS inventors, many packed fascinating toys to help carry out their missions. Deep in the basement of OSS headquarters, a New England commercial chemist and inventor, Stanley Lovell, crafted gadgets for Donovan’s field agents that were the stuff of James Bond. From his laboratories emerged miniature cameras tucked into matchbooks, explosives shaped like lumps of coal, and bombs made with combustible powder that looked like flour and could be kneaded and baked into bread.

Soon Donovan began to set up stations abroad, and few locales looked as promising as Switzerland. “Switzerland is now, as it was in the last war, the one most advantageous place for the obtaining of information concerning the European Axis powers,” Donovan wrote. As an initial step, he dispatched a former Treasury Department official, Charles Dyar, to Bern in early 1942, his cover that of financial attaché to the US mission. Dyar did a good job, but Donovan soon concluded that “we need badly a man of a different type.” What the post really demanded was someone who could “mingle freely with intellectual and business circles in Switzerland in order to tap the constant and enormous flow of information that comes from Germany and Italy to these people.”

Dulles didn’t speak German well and likely would have heartily agreed with Mark Twain’s assessment of “the Awful German Language,” but he had many qualities that made him a solid candidate for the post. For starters, he was well acquainted with Bern, widely considered the best city in which to establish an OSS station. There he had first tasted life as a spy in 1918, when he had been a young diplomat in the State Department. Settling into his post, Dulles listened intently as the first secretary of the legation outlined his duties: “I guess the best thing for you to do is take charge of intelligence. Keep your ears open. This place is swarming with spies.” Given a helping hand by friends in the Swiss secret service, Dulles quickly established communication links into Central Europe and the Balkans, tried to launch talks between the White House and the Austrian emperor, and weeded out German agents who applied at the mission for visas to the United States. “I cannot tell you much about what I do,” he wrote his father one night, “except that it has to do with intelligence.”

Dulles had also demonstrated that he possessed the right emotional makeup for his stealth profession when he met and struck up a relationship with a pretty young Czech woman who worked at the US mission. After he was seen out with her a couple of times, he was approached by a British agent who told him that his friend was not what she seemed. She had been passing secret information to the Austrians, and her betrayal had led to the arrest and execution of two Czech agents. That she was coerced to provide intelligence—the Austrians had threatened to harm her family back home—mattered not to the British.

A few evenings later, Dulles took the woman out to dinner and, as arranged, walked her home through the Old City. At a corner near the Nydegg Church, two men approached the couple and, as Dulles watched, silently bundled her away. “I never heard what happened to her,” he said. “It was my first lesson in intelligence. Never be certain that someone is not betraying you, just because you like and trust them.”

After his stint in Switzerland during World War I, Dulles had dabbled in espionage while stationed with the State Department in Constantinople, now Istanbul, in 1921. There he learned that an American naval vessel anchored in the Sea of Marmara could intercept shortwave radio traffic between Moscow and Communist outposts around the world, so he set up a system for eavesdropping on the communications. He collected so much information that he had to hire two Russian translators, running up a bill that made government bean counters back in Washington fume.

A few years later, practicing law in New York, Dulles occasionally attended a secretive group of leading Americans who had developed their own private espionage center, which they called “the ROOM.” Founded by Vincent Astor and other New York elites in 1927, the society included bankers, a naturalist, an aviation expert, a national tennis champion, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Known only to a small number of people, the group met at an apartment at 34 East Sixty-Second Street, which had an unlisted telephone number and a mail drop. Though the primary purpose of the gatherings was for members to trade information that might be useful in their various business enterprises, many simply wanted to rub elbows with adventurers. The ROOM often invited such guest speakers as the British author and former intelligence agent W. Somerset Maugham and the arctic explorer and naval commander Richard Byrd.

All this experience wasn’t the only reason Dulles may have won the Swiss posting—Donovan also likely wanted to get him out of his hair. Though the two enjoyed a good working relationship, Dulles never seemed to fully accept Donovan as his superior. The product of an established American Protestant family, compared with Donovan and his bootstrapping clan of Irish Catholic immigrants, Dulles hungered to be the on...