Hitler's Spy Chief (3 page)

It is perhaps not completely a coincidence that along with the late Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, the second of the two SIS officers detailed to evaluate information from Canaris was Kim Philby, the KGB's man in SIS whose priority would have been not only to gather all sensitive material on Anglo-German peace-feelers but also to do his best to derail them.

Both men played down the significance of the intelligence they received and Trevor-Roper appears to have found the Abwehr curiously disappointing. He was seemingly far more impressed by the violence and terrorism of Schellenberg's SS organisation. In an article published in
the
Cornhill Magazine
,
15
shortly after the war, Trevor-Roper attempted a less than generous critique of Canaris and the Abwehr. He described the former as a ‘Catholic mystic', (a phrase skilfully chosen to appeal to two fashionable prejudices of the British establishment) and accused the latter of being little more than a ‘pretty incompetent outfit', even though by 1941 the Germans had penetrated so many British and American ciphers that Goebbels could record in his confidential diary: ‘If the British know in detail about us everything we know about them it will have grave consequences.'
16

Moreover, as is now widely archived, Philby regarded his crowning achievement as the disruption of attempts at a rapprochement between Germany and Britain through the Abwehr: a disruption which culminated in the defection of the relatively junior, but not insignificant, Erich Vermehren from the Abwehr's Istanbul station. Philby, though an unreliable source to be treated with extreme reserve, later noted in 1988, shortly before his death: ‘I had a personal interest in this work. I was directly responsible for the deaths of a considerable number of Germans.'
17
After the Vermehrens had been spirited away to safety in London they had been billeted in Philby's mother's flat. Charmed as many were by Philby's charismatic intellect, the Vermehrens gave Philby a list of all their contacts in the Catholic underground in Germany, and the role they could play in a post-war democratic and Christian Germany. When Allied officers tried to link up with them at the end of the war, it was found that they all had been deported or liquidated.

Vermehren's defection with his wife, Countess Plettenberg, had other more immediate effects. It was ruthlessly exploited by Himmler to provoke Hitler into closing the Abwehr down and retiring Canaris.
18
At a stroke, the ‘instrument' described by Canaris to Soltikow was at an end.

Yet if Philby and others worked hard to undermine Canaris from the British side, there is also some evidence to suggest that earlier, when Canaris was in danger of being outmanoeuvred by his rivals in the
snakepit of competing intelligence agencies that characterized the Third Reich, others in England were prepared to resort to drastic measures to protect his authority. To this day the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RHSA – Canaris' deadliest rival in the intelligence world of Nazi Germany – on the outskirts of Prague in May 1942, barely days after he had more or less bullied Canaris into surrendering some of the Abwehr's authority, is a mystery. Bitterly opposed, as we shall see, by the Czech underground both in Prague and London, the assassination was carried out in February 1942 by SOE agents acting with the knowledge and support of ‘C', despite the sure conviction that reprisals would be brutal. Indeed they were: the village of Lidice was razed to the ground and the entire adult male population executed.

Yet ‘C', by liquidating Heydrich, had preserved Canaris' pre-eminence in the German intelligence world for a few more months to come. Long enough, it would seem, for renewed peace-feelers to have been advanced in the early months of the following year.
19
These feelers took many forms, but there can be little doubt that beneath the surface a great deal of clandestine diplomatic and intelligence activity was being directed to this end. In some cases they were often quite public. As the later executed diplomat von Hassell would note in his diaries in March 1943: ‘Yesterday, an outright offer was made to England to join with Germany in guaranteeing the freedom and security of the “West”.'
20

The story of Canaris, therefore, deserves a wider audience. His organisation and officers were not only part of the machinery of war, they were at the centre of clandestine wartime Anglo-German relations and the many attempts between what Hitler's interpreter, Paul Schmidt, called men of ‘
bon volont
é
[good intentions]'
21
to reach an understanding against the background of increasing violence and the dynamics of global conflict.

At the same time the organisation was legitimately and, until well into the war, successfully waging the intelligence war against the Allies: sowing considerable disinformation and confusion among the British, especially
in the run-up to the attack on France, but most devastatingly against Moscow in the run-up to Barbarossa. Hitler would gleefully recount that his attack on Russia in 1941 was so effective in its initial phases partly because the High Command knew every detail of the entire order of battle of the Soviet forces by the day Barbarossa was launched. This was entirely due to the Abwehr.

If this were not enough, the Abwehr also took on the role of protecting anti-Nazi conspirators and, as an organisation which was, uniquely, exempt from the crude restraint of the Aryanisation laws of the Third Reich, saved many Jews. Moreover, as will be seen, Canaris also intervened to save many others from the SS execution squads following the front line, and elsewhere.

However, the temptation to beatify the admiral must be resisted. He was, in his own way, a ruthless exponent of all the techniques of deception, disinformation and other patterns of subterfuge without which no successful secret intelligence agency can exist. He was also for far too long a ‘believer'. It took Canaris slightly longer than many others to see the Nazis for what they really were. But once he became convinced that they were leading his country to ruin, both physical and moral, he never wavered from a policy of systematically undermining the regime from within, and seeking an understanding with the West. To do this, he inevitably pursued a course of engagement with Hitler, believing that his influence and power could only be sustained by the avoidance of open conflict with his Nazi masters.

Only a man of formidable courage and nerve could have played such a hand in the face of so many dangers and so many disappointments. Unlike his opposite number, ‘C', on whom opinion is more or less consistent, Canaris is unsurprisingly a more controversial figure with a fair share of detractors as well as devotees. Even those who knew him well were cautious in their assessments of him. Like every competent spy chief he was quick to read other personalities, while being slow in revealing his
own. That he was a born leader is beyond doubt, as the organisation he assembled in the Abwehr was both effective by its own standards and even until the very end a hundred per cent loyal to the values he had instilled into it. Unlike other services both in and outside of Germany, political assassination was not tolerated in the Abwehr.

Whether Canaris was the deeply spiritual officer of almost pathological sensitivity, as some maintain, is less clear, but of one thing we can be sure: he was, to the tips of his fingers, the embodiment of the old naval intelligence tradition, a tradition where intellect, discipline, strong ethics and a knowledge of the world were inseparable.

As General Reinhard Gehlen, a former German intelligence officer who later created the German Federal intelligence service, noted, Canaris had that rare gift among intelligence officers of following historical trends and projecting them into the future:

Blessed with broad intellectual interests far in excess of those normally expected in senior officers, he was endowed with traits not seen in officers since the first half of the nineteenth century - traits which had led officers like Roon, von der Goltz, Yorck von Wartenburg as well as Clausewitz and Moltke, to spectacular achievements in knowledge other than the purely military … Canaris knew how to think in global terms: this was how he was often able to predict the future course of world affairs with uncanny accuracy.
22

Nothing could have been more distant from the world of the Prussian generals, with their monocles and boots and their relatively limited horizons, restricted to the battlefields of Europe.

For Canaris, like every naval officer of his generation irrespective of his country, the navy was the supreme calling of armed service. Only the navy offered its officers the greatest of martial challenges against the backdrop of the ever physical threat of the elements.
23
He himself was a veteran of two out of the three major naval engagements of the 1914-18 war.
It is therefore impossible to understand Canaris without exploring his naval career, and in this respect he is akin to that legendary chief of naval intelligence in the First World War, Admiral ‘Blinker' Hall, whom Canaris admired and almost certainly met, albeit briefly, as a naval cadet at Kiel in 1908.
24
Both men enjoyed fierce loyalty from their subordinates. Both men built their departments more or less from scratch and both men displayed a subtlety in their game not usually encountered among more straightforward military officers.

For the young Canaris, as for all naval officers of the world, the Royal Navy, undefeated in its five-hundred-year history, was the textbook model, setting the tone for behaviour, dress and of course aggressive engagement. As one English expert on the German navy wrote before the war: ‘As is only right and proper we in this country have set the fashion for naval service for the rest of the world and Germany like everyone else has followed our lead.'
25

Such a service was never for the faint-hearted. ‘The purest test of any officer's courage, skill and discipline',
26
naval service presented to an officer the greatest challenge and the greatest rewards, uncomplicated by the civilian casualties of military campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, it would be the Royal Navy before any other organ of the British state which would first register Canaris' intelligence skills. Moreover, no less a person than Winston Churchill would be the recipient of the first reports.

CHAPTER ONE

A NAVAL TRADITION

I wish to record my admiration of the very gallant and determined manner in which the Imperial German Navy fought. The courage and discipline of officers and men who put up such a good fight is unquestionable
.

CAPTAIN J.D. ALLEN, HMS
KENT
, REPORT ON THE

BATTLE OF THE FALKLAND ISLANDS 1914
1

The guns of the British cruiser opened fire. With the cool, almost nonchalant, delivery of a battle-hardened veteran, the fire control officer gave the range and watched for the fall of shot as the grey projectiles hurtled through the air towards their prey.

The German ship, lying icily calm in the sharp cold light, showed no sign of movement. Its profile cast a shadow on the rocks of the Chilean inlet that had afforded a welcome, if temporary, refuge from the vengeful determination of the most powerful navy in the world.

On the morning of 14 March 1915, the captain of HMS
Glasgow
could be forgiven for allowing himself a grim smile. As the precipitous bleak cliffs of Más-a-Tierra came into view, Captain Luce could make out the four funnels of the German light cruiser
Dresden
which he and many others had wasted months searching for, since the Battle of the Falkland Islands the previous December had sealed the fate of the rest of the German battle squadron in the South Atlantic.

As
Glasgow's
fire straddled the
Dresden
, the fact that the ship was in neutral Chilean waters offered no refuge; such legal niceties could, in Luce's memorable phrase, be ‘left to the diplomats'. Here was, if not the closing of an important chapter in British naval history, at least a very long overdue removal of an irksome footnote.

And yet here, half a world away from the life-and-death struggle between Germany's and England's armies, this footnote had inflamed the tempers of politicians and admirals, including Winston Churchill. This drama, involving as it did a disproportionate amount of senior naval officer and political time, had, like a large stone cast into a calm pond, ripple effects that went far beyond events in the South Atlantic.

The
Dresden
had eluded the Royal Navy thanks to the brilliance of its intelligence officer. It was he who outfoxed his ship's pursuers and it was he who would, that crisp March day, deprive Luce of his prize. Lieutenant Wilhelm Canaris, later head of Hitler's intelligence organisation, young and fair-haired but otherwise untypically German, was about to make his debut as a formidable opponent of British interests.

But to understand how such a seemingly insignificant event could be invested with such resonant echoes, it is important to delve a little more deeply into Canaris' background and the tradition that nurtured him – the Imperial German navy – and above all that force's duel with the Royal Navy in the South Atlantic.

It is one of the great ironies of the beginning of the twentieth century that the Anglo-German naval race, so often correctly described as one of the celebrated ‘causes' of the First World War, actually contributed, at one level, to a tremendous mutual esteem between the two countries.

Notwithstanding the huge difference in traditions, pitting one service with five hundred years of virtually unbroken victory against a parvenu arm of barely a generation, the formal relationship between veteran and upstart was always cordial and respectful.

Nevertheless, elements of both sides saw a showdown as inevitable,
especially after 1903 when plans drawn up in secret for the German navy to bombard Manhattan and land forces in New York failed to tempt London into any close alliance.
*
London chose to develop ties with Russia and France and to encircle Germany, preferring to deal with the nearer threat to her imperial interests. As an American officer remarked to a Royal Naval officer at the time: ‘Make no mistake, we shall be fighting Germany in the next war.'
2
But even those officers who were convinced that the next war would be between England and Germany found themselves united by the brotherhood of the sea and naval tradition. The Royal Navy set the
ton
for all navies of the world but especially for a service as ambitious as the new Imperial German navy.