Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
Elliott’s principal adversary in the Istanbul spy battle was a tall, bald, bespectacled, urbane and probably homosexual lawyer named Paul Leverkühn. Plucked from his comfortable legal practice in Lübeck to be the Abwehr chief in Turkey, Leverkühn was an unlikely spymaster. He had studied law at Edinburgh University, and worked in New York and Washington. ‘Moody and nervous’, he disliked Turkey and, like many Abwehr officers, had little time for the brutality and vulgarity of Nazism. He looked more like an academic than a spy. But he was a first-class espionage operative and, as Elliott was discovering, a worthy enemy with a formidable spy network, employing German expatriates and Turkish informants, as well as Russian thugs, Persian hitmen, Arab informants and even an Egyptian prince. ‘The city is riddled with their agents,’ warned an OSS report. Germany had broken Turkey’s diplomatic codes early in the war. Leverkühn’s spies, tipsters and honey traps could be found wherever secrets might be gleaned. Hildegard Reilly, the attractive German widow of an American officer, haunted Taksim’s, where she ‘specialised in making Britons and Americans more talkative’. Wilhelmina Vargasy, a blonde, blue-eyed Hungarian, prowled Ellie’s bar, and was said to have seduced no less than six Allied soldiers. Leverkühn ran agents into the Middle East, gathering information on Allied military forces in Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, and infiltrated spies into the Soviet Union to foment revolution against Moscow – just as the CIA and MI6 would seek to do after the war.
Elliott’s work frequently took him to Ankara where he stayed in the ambassador’s residence as a guest of the Knatchbull-Hugessens. On these occasions, the obliging British ambassador even lent Elliott his personal valet, an Albanian named Elyesa Bazna, to help him dress for dinner. ‘I remembered him vividly,’ wrote Elliott, a ‘small roundish man with a high forehead, thick black hair and a large drooping moustache’. Before joining the domestic staff of the British embassy, Bazna had been a low-level criminal, a servant in the Yugoslav embassy, and valet to a German diplomatic official, who had caught him reading his letters, and fired him. Bazna was also a spy for the Germans.
Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen had developed the unsafe habit of bringing official papers home to the ambassador’s residence in his dispatch box, and reading them in bed before turning in for the night. Elliott liked the ambassador, but later conceded that he should have been ‘instantly dismissed’ for this flagrant breach of security. Bazna identified the nature of his boss’s bedtime reading, and spotted a money-making opportunity. In October 1943 (at about the time that Elliott first encountered Bazna laying out his dinner jacket) the Albanian valet made contact with German intelligence and offered to hand over photographs of the documents in exchange for cash, lots of it. Over the next two months, Bazna made some ten deliveries of documents and was paid a fortune in cash, which he carefully stashed away, unaware that the Germans had taken the precaution of paying him in forged notes. Since he spoke almost no English, Bazna was ignorant of precisely what secrets he was spilling, but he knew what the word ‘Secret’ meant: reports on British diplomatic efforts to bring Turkey into the war against the Germans, infiltration of Allied personnel into Turkey, and US military aid to the USSR. The Albanian spy – codenamed ‘Cicero’ by the Germans – even furnished accounts of decisions taken by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Tehran conference, and the codename of the impending D-Day invasion: ‘Overlord’. The impact of these revelations was limited by German scepticism: having been badly misled by the deception plans covering the Sicily invasion (most famously ‘Operation Mincemeat’, in which a dead body carrying false papers was put ashore in Spain) there were some in the German High Command who suspected that Cicero might be another fiendish British ruse to mislead them at a crucial juncture in the war. The Bletchley Park intercepts, and a spy in the German Foreign Office, eventually alerted the British to the leakage at the British embassy in Ankara. Suspicion swiftly focused on Bazna who, sensing the danger, shut down his espionage operations. He survived the war, and later tried to sue the West German government when he discovered that he had been paid in worthless notes. He gave singing lessons, sold used cars and ended his life working as a doorman at one of Istanbul’s seedier hotels. The Cicero affair was an embarrassing debacle, and further evidence of Germany’s proficient spy network in Turkey. British propaganda later tried to claim that Bazna had been a double agent, but Elliott was under no illusions. ‘The information obtained by Cicero was completely genuine,’ he wrote, and ‘the plain truth is that the Cicero case was probably the most serious diplomatic security leak in British history.’
British intelligence fought back, reinforced in 1943 by the arrival of the OSS. The head of Turkish operations for American intelligence was Lanning ‘Packy’ Macfarland, an extrovert Chicago banker with a taste for trouble and a spy’s wardrobe, including a trench coat and slouch hat: ‘If he had not been a spy, dressed like that he would have had to become one,’ remarked a fellow officer. Aided by British intelligence, Macfarland began setting up his own agent network, starting with a Czech businessman named Alfred Schwartz, codenamed ‘Dogwood’, who claimed to have access to anti-Nazi resistance groups inside Germany, Austria and Hungary. Elliott liked Macfarland, despite his ‘penchant for involving himself in unfortunate escapades’, and established an effective working relationship with the Americans. Together, they successfully introduced a Turkish informant into one of Leverkühn’s sabotage cells. ‘The names of the Azerbaijanis, Persians and Caucasians who work for German intelligence are now known,’ reported OSS officer Cedric Seager, ‘where they congregate of an evening, where they work and what they look like.’
Iraq was a particular focus of Abwehr interest. In 1941, British forces had invaded the country, fearing that a pro-Axis government in Baghdad might cut off oil supplies. Elliott discovered that Leverkühn was attempting to foment anti-British rebellion among Iraq’s Kurdish tribes, while encouraging and financing the revolutionary underground. Three German agents were parachuted into Iraq, and intercepted soon after they landed. Next, Elliott planted a double agent within the revolutionary cell, codenamed ‘Zulu’. On 3 September 1943, Leverkühn picked up Zulu in his Mercedes at a pre-arranged rendezvous in Istanbul. As they drove around the city, Leverkühn delivered a propaganda lecture, insisting that ‘the Arab cause depended on German victory’, before instructing the agent on how to identify British military units in Iraq and handing over a radio code along with $2,000 in cash. The British authorities in Baghdad duly rounded up the entire revolutionary ring.
The duel between Nicholas Elliott and Paul Leverkühn was ferocious and unrelenting, but it was also oddly gentlemanly. If Elliott spotted his rival dining in Taksim’s, he would always send over a bottle with his compliments. Each side wanted the other to know who was on top, and sometimes made the point in ways that were deeply silly. When Leverkühn discovered that Britain’s secret wireless code for Germany was ‘1200’, he immediately informed his colleagues: henceforth, whenever Elliott or another British intelligence officer walked into an Istanbul bar where German officers were drinking, they faced a humiliating chorus of ‘
Twelve-land
,
Twelve-land
,
über alles
’. The tit-for-tat battle raged, without a clear winner. But as 1943 drew to a close, Elliott pulled off a feat of espionage so remarkable that it rocked the Third Reich, tipped Hitler into a towering rage, crippled the Abwehr and sent Elliott’s stock soaring at MI6. The first hint that such a spectacular coup might be in the offing came from Kim Philby.
6
In the spring of 1943, Kim Philby learned that a young German named Erich Vermehren had turned up in Lisbon, where his mother was working as a journalist, and made a tentative approach to British intelligence. The Vermehrens were a prominent family of Lübeck lawyers with known anti-Nazi leanings, and Erich Vermehren hinted that he was thinking of defecting to the British. This first contact went no further. Vermehren had little of intelligence value to offer, his wife was still in Berlin, and he soon returned there. But the approach was intriguing, and Philby filed it away for future use.
Erich Vermehren was one of those rare people whose conscience expands and strengthens under stress. In body he was fragile, the result of a gunshot injury suffered as a youth; but his soul was made of some tensile, almost impossibly resilient, material that never broke or even bent in its certainty. Patriotic and pious, Vermehren was convinced of his own moral rectitude. In 1938, at the age of nineteen, he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, but was prevented from taking it up because his repeated refusal to join the Hitler Youth had rendered him, in Nazi eyes, ‘unfit to represent German youth’. Hitler himself is said to have ordered that his name be struck off the list of scholars. Unfit to serve in the army on account of his injury, he worked in a prisoner of war camp. In 1939 he converted to Catholicism and married the aristocratic Countess Elisabeth von Plettenburg, a devout Catholic thirteen years his senior whose loathing for Nazism was as staunch as his own. Elisabeth had come to Gestapo attention before the war for distributing religious tracts critical of the pagan Nazis. The Plettenburgs were deeply implicated in the anti-Nazi resistance, as were the Vermehrens. Adam von Trott zu Solz, a German foreign office official who would become a key player in the plot to oust Hitler, was Vermehren’s cousin. The marriage of Erich and Elisabeth thus brought together two wings of the secret anti-Nazi resistance – which was, in part, a family affair. In this small band of German resisters, religious and moral outrage fused with politics. These were not liberals: they were deeply conservative, often wealthy, fiercely anti-communist, old-fashioned German families, fearful that Hitler was leading Germany into a calamity that would usher in rule by the godless Bolsheviks. The plotters dreamed of ousting Hitler, making peace with Britain and the US, and then defeating the Red menace from the East, to create a new German state that was democratic, anti-communist and Christian. Erich and Elisabeth Vermehren decided, along with a handful of like-minded conspirators, that Hitler must be destroyed, before he destroyed Germany.
In late 1943, with the help of von Trott, Erich Vermehren was assigned to the Abwehr, given two weeks’ training in the use of wireless codes and secret inks, and then deployed to Istanbul as personal assistant to Paul Leverkühn, a friend and legal colleague of his father from Lübeck. Officially, wives were not allowed to accompany their husbands on diplomatic postings, to discourage any possibility of defection. Elisabeth, already a marked woman, remained in Berlin, in effect held hostage. Vermehren arrived in Istanbul in early December, and began work at the Abwehr office under Leverkühn. Two weeks later, he again made contact with British intelligence; Harold Gibson of MI6 passed his name on to Section V; Kim Philby’s Iberian section flagged up his earlier approach in Lisbon; the Vermehren file was forwarded to Elliott in Istanbul, and the wheels began to turn.
On 27 December 1943, at seven in the evening, Erich Vermehren made his way to an address in the İstiklal Caddesi, the main street of Pera. A servant with a strong Russian accent answered the door to the apartment, showed the young German into the sitting room, and handed him, unbidden, a large Scotch. A few moments later, a lanky, bespectacled man emerged from behind a sliding door, and stuck out his hand with a friendly grin. ‘Erich Vermehren?’ he said. ‘Why, I believe you were coming up to Oxford.’ Nicholas Elliott had done his homework.
Vermehren vividly recalled that moment, and Elliott’s unmistakable, reassuring Englishness. ‘I had a sense of tremendous relief. I felt almost as if my feet rested already on English soil.’
The two men talked while Elizabeth Elliott served dinner, and they continued talking through the night. Vermehren explained that he was anxious to strike a blow against Hitler, but agonised at the thought that he might be betraying his country. He insisted he could not leave without his wife, who would certainly be arrested and probably killed if he defected. Elliott detected ‘signs of instability’ in the young man: he coaxed and cajoled him; he summoned Elizabeth to stress the moral responsibility incumbent on Vermehren through his Catholic faith; he explained that it would take some time to arrange the false paperwork, but when the moment was right he would spirit the Vermehrens out of Turkey, and bring them safely to Britain. Vermehren’s defection, Elliott promised, would strike a devastating blow to Nazism. When the German still hesitated, Elliott’s voice took on a harder edge. Vermehren was in too deep to back out now. As dawn broke over Istanbul, Vermehren rose to his feet, and shook Elliott’s hand. He would do what Elliott, and God, required of him.
In his report to MI6, Elliott described Vermehren as ‘a highly strung, cultivated, self-confident, extremely clever, logical-minded, slightly precious young German of good family’, who was ‘intensely anti-Nazi on religious grounds’. Elliott was ‘fully convinced’ of Vermehren’s sincerity.
Vermehren flew back to Berlin and told his wife to prepare for the moment they had long discussed. Von Trott had arranged a job for her at the German embassy in Istanbul, where her cousin, Franz von Papen, was the German ambassador. This might provide some protection if the Gestapo demanded to know how husband and wife had travelled abroad together in violation of the rules. Elisabeth divided her bank accounts among her siblings, and the Vermehrens set off by rail for Istanbul. But as the train trundled through Bulgaria they learned, to their horror, that the man occupying the wagon-lit compartment next door was a Gestapo officer. They were already under surveillance. Sure enough, at the Bulgarian border, Elisabeth was arrested and taken to the German embassy in Sofia. Erich had no choice but to continue on to Istanbul alone. After a wait of two weeks, again with the help of Adam von Trott, Elisabeth wangled her way onto a courier plane to Istanbul, and was finally reunited with her husband. Leverkühn knew Frau Vermehren was on the Gestapo blacklist, and he was distinctly alarmed to find her turning up, unannounced, in his city; he instructed Vermehren to write a memo to Berlin explaining exactly how, and why, his wife had come to Istanbul.