Hitler's Lost Spy (4 page)

These were the primary espionage considerations existing when Annette Wagner arrived in Australia in March 1938.

The Harbour Lights Guild

Prior to World War II, international communications were
very
different to those of today. Amongst those whose lives were constantly affected by this were merchant seamen. Long voyages, little or no family contact while at sea and uncomfortable working conditions gave rise to the creation of organisations working towards providing various facilities for merchant ship crews.

In Australia, the Harbour Lights Guild offered a range of services to seamen including the provision of books and magazines, hospital visits, banking assistance, inward and outward mail, and aiding authorities in tracing missing crew members.

Nazi operatives in Australia took a special interest in the Guild, targeting the organisation as an important maritime information source. Through its doors travelled facts and figures of merchant ships and their cargoes, routes and destinations – just what the German raiders and U-Boats would need to know when the war started.

The Nazis also formed a branch of the Party with a special interest in shipping – the Harbour Port Service. 
In Melbourne, this was conveniently headed by a ship's provedore, Hans Renz, who dutifully recorded shipping information for southern Australia, including ‘wayward behaviour' by German crew members. Reports would be passed on to Gestapo contacts in Australia and then to Berlin. With a similar intent, the Guild was infiltrated by the Nazi Party and in the late 1930s was effectively controlled by two German agents, Rudolph Durkop and Helene Franze, both of whom were known to Annette Wagner.

From Peace to War – the Spying Transition

There is a significant difference between spying in peacetime to that in wartime. In democratic nations the prosecution of foreign espionage activity undertaken in peacetime requires adherence to the law. Photographing harbour installations in peacetime may be suspicious, but it is not illegal. When war is declared, it all changes. 
Arrests and internment may be initiated on security assessments, not on proven facts. Enemy spies go underground, communications become more secretive, all movements are carefully calculated and contingency plans are put into effect. The Geneva Convention may have offered some protection to prisoners of war, but it did not provide anything to captured spies. If caught, a spy in wartime is on his or her own, and not subject to the ‘humane treatment' the Convention stipulated for prisoners of war.

The degree to which a spy must ‘adjust' to wartime conditions depends on how well assimilated he or she is prior to the war commencing. In the above examples of Walter Ladendorff and Arnold von Skerst, their prominent level of public exposure meant that the extent of their community assimilation, i.e. the supportive level they may have expected from the community, was close to zero. It was hardly a secret as to who they were and which side they were backing. The choice for such people was to leave prior to hostilities commencing, go into hiding or be interned. Annette Wagner, on the other hand, required little or no assimilation adjustment after the war commenced. Had suspicions of her activities not been raised previously, and given the opportunity, she probably would have continued her work without disruption. She was, in fact, close to being a perfect 
‘sleeper'.

Every Good Spy has a Good Story

The departure or confinement of ‘known' military or civilian spies from a country of interest is likely to occur when the agents are most needed – when war commences and the collection of strategic information becomes vital. A spy agency with foresight would have regard to this contingency and plan accordingly e.g. the 
‘sleepers'. In addition, new agents would need to be brought in, with the difference that ideally their origin, family and work history, and personal presentation would be unlikely to arouse suspicion. Added to this would be a legitimate reason for living in the country of interest. In late 1930s Australia, a female, born, raised and married outside of Germany or Austria, with a 
‘justified' background and a reasonable purpose for her presence in the country should tick all of the boxes. On these considerations alone, suspicion of being a German agent would not exist. In 1938 many people entered Australia with convincing credentials, and amongst them was Annette Wagner.

For a prospective enemy spy working in Australia in 1938 and 1939, being female (usually an advantage), Swiss born, raised from age seven in England, married to a French national and travelling to Australia to reside with relatives who had lived in England, is about as unsuspecting as it gets. Further, the ability to provide a British/French family and employment history would result in a difficulty for authorities to check any queries 
– untarnished features are more likely to offer a cover for anything else. In addition, an official checking process conducted in foreign countries presented a timing problem. International communications were expensive and, following a declaration of war, the complexity in obtaining personal data would be increased several-fold.

Protracted delays in international exchanges prior to or during the war would have been compounded by a surge in the number of requests between Allied countries searching for advice on personal information offered by suspected spies. A letter addressed to The War Office in London requesting confirmation of Annette Wagner's details while in England appears in her file. A copy of the letter is marked ‘not sent'. It is probable that British intelligence at that time was overworked with requests to examine suspected spies and their possible networks within Britain, and assisting requests similar to that for Annette received a lower priority.

An allied nation's request to neutral countries for personal histories on suspects may be stalled, or simply ignored. This was often the result for requests to those neutral countries ‘friendly' to Germany at the beginning of the war – Spain, Switzerland and Sweden. Even Allied nations, without an urgency attachment, would provide such information on a low importance basis. A war is being fought and military intelligence resources have higher urgencies than researching the activities of suspected overseas spies – many of whom could eventually be determined as harmless, and with others ending inconclusively. There may be thousands of such cases and it is likely that most requests for an individual's background details would not receive the attention hoped for by those soliciting the request.

There would be exceptions, of course, but these would only be cases producing a high-grade risk profile. 
Annette Wagner's security risk profile, when she arrived in Australia in March 1938, had nothing in it to be suspicious about.

Spying for the Emperor

The commencement of World War I nominally brought Japan to the Allied side, and while world attention was focused on Europe, the German island possessions in the Southwest Pacific were occupied by the Japanese navy. The Versailles Conference cautiously initialled Japan's occupation of the Mariana, Caroline and Marshal island groups. The League of Nations formally granted a conditional mandate over the territories to Japan, but the binding rules were effectively ignored and the Japanese proceeded during the 1920s to develop the islands for both commercial and military purposes.

At the Versailles Conference, Japan also claimed the former German territory of New Guinea. Had this been agreed to, the Japanese Empire would have reached virtually to Australia's front door by sharing a border with Papua, a short distance from the Australian continent. A very apprehensive Australian government successfully argued that Japanese control of former German colonies in the Pacific should not extend south of the equator.

The escalation of Japanese sabre-rattling in Asia and the country's military preparations in the Pacific revealed the classification difficulty incurred by most intelligence organisations. This derives from the question ‘What is the tangible differentiation between information gathered by foreign nationals of a general, and harmless nature, and strategic information relevant to the host nation's security?' This strategic information could be military, geographic, commercial or scientific. Australia's increasing uneasiness with the growth of Japanese militarism in Asia and the Pacific during the 1930s resulted in an urgency within Australian Military Intelligence in determining precisely what information the Japanese were acquiring.

The serious interest in collecting Australian information began in the 1890s when Japanese expeditions travelled extensively to Western countries, observing and recording with an unlimited resolve. It would appear that this was no more than the Japanese endeavours at the time to amass comprehensive country information that would have little, if any, military significance.

Following World War I, uneasiness in Australia increased as Japanese research and information gathering moved from compiling data on ‘general' issues to appraisals of the coastline, harbours, shipping and soundings taken in a number of waterways. The lack of association between the information collected, compared to what may have been reasonably expected for activities by a friendly nation, became increasingly difficult to ignore.

During the 1930s, security concerns around Japanese intentions increased in Australia. This was attributed to both Japan's aggressive foreign policy and an increase in suspicious behaviour by both Japanese individuals and organisations. Australian maps, books and charts were copiously purchased by consular officials, tourists and businessmen employed by the large Japanese merchant houses that controlled 95 per cent of the trade between Australia and Japan. In 1931, Japanese visitors purchased 75 per cent of the marine charts sold in Fremantle, Australia's shipping gateway to the Indian Ocean. 
Tourist interest in these charts barely existed.

To Australia's north, the commercial activities of a Japanese company, Nanyo Kohatsu Kabushiki Kaisha (South Seas Development Company), aroused intense misgivings – and for a very good reason. The company received Japanese government funds to assist in its covert political activities conducted in the shadow of its trading operations. In 1935, there was concern in Canberra following the opening of a company office in New Guinea. Dutch authorities in the Netherlands East Indies were similarly worried about the company's operations. Nanyo Kohatsu was later confirmed as a focal point in the expanding network of Japanese espionage operations being entrenched across the main islands of what is now Indonesia.

In 1935 a spy network operating out of the Japanese consulate in Sydney was confirmed. The monitoring of the network and its manoeuvres was difficult as information did not pass between individuals, but through the protection of the consulate. Further, payments arranged by the consulate for undercover work were in cash, so tracing those individuals who acted within the network was problematic.

Japan's Transparent Spy Mission – The Intrigues of
Major Sei Hashida

Major Sei Hashida was attached to the general staff of the Japanese army in Tokyo and also assigned to the War Department in the Japanese government. His responsibilities were organising the processes necessary in the acquisition of commodities required by the army. 
In December 1940 he received permission to travel to Australia for two months to recuperate from his recent 
‘poor health'. His health status permitting, he would also examine trade and industry opportunities.

Major Hashida spent his time in Australia doing his best to spy on anything militarily worthwhile, and in complete contradiction to his stated travel plan. Under suspicion from the time of his arrival in Brisbane in January 1941, he had been closely monitored but he smugly ignored wherever possible the restrictions authorities had placed on his movements.

Australian Security regarded Hashida as devious and highly suspect, and briefly considered arresting him for espionage – an extreme measure for that time. When Hashida stopped over in the Netherlands East Indies on his return to Japan, the Dutch authorities had been requested by Australian Security to find a way to detain him, which they did at his hotel in Batavia. A search of his baggage yielded a detailed diary Hashida had compiled on the data collected in his wide-ranging travels in Australia. The diary contents were translated and delivered to Canberra, with the details confirming the Security alarm in the growth of overt Japanese espionage in Australia. The true intention of Hashida's visit was now confirmed, but the offhanded and blatant manner in which he accumulated vital information placed a new and disturbing dimension on possible Japanese intentions for Australia.

Also found by the Dutch was a small book listing the spying objectives for Hashida while in Australia. These included the strength of army, air force and naval bases, the topographical and other geographical features in the immediate vicinity of these bases, conditions of land and sea communications and the capacity for military support to the Netherlands East Indies and Singapore. 
Suggestions to assist in his health recovery while in Australia did not receive a mention.

Major Hashida's travels in Australia had a clear purpose. Emperor Hirohito had previously concluded the debate on the direction of Japan's future aggression. 
The nation's titanic military offensive would be an Asian-Pacific affair, and not in the immense spaces of resource-rich Siberia preferred by many army generals. In Hirohito-style political manipulation, the generals and admirals knew what was coming, but the Emperor had barely said a word. The Pearl Harbor decree had been made, and Hitler's war had conveniently focused American attention on Europe. Now was the time for a concerted re-evaluation of the data collected in Australia by Japanese agents – to confirm what they had, fill in some gaps and collate the information into a comprehensive manual for quick reference when the Pacific war commenced. This included the undertaking passed to Major Hashida.