Peculiar Liaisons in War, Espionage, and Terrorism in the Twentieth Century

PECULIAR LIAISONS

PECULIAR LIAISONS In War, Espionage, and Terrorism in the Twentieth Century

John S. Craig

Algora Publishing New York

© 2005 by Algora Publishing All Rights Reserved www.algora.com No portion of this book (beyond what is permitted by Sections 107 or 108 of the United States Copyright Act of 1976) may be reproduced by any process, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 0-87586-331-0 (softcover) ISBN: 0-87586-332-9 (hardcover) ISBN: 0-87586-333-7 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data —

Craig, John S., 1951Peculiar liaisons: in war, espionage, and terrorism of the twentieth century / by John S. Craig. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87586-331-0 (soft : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-87586-332-9 (hard : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-87586-333-7 (ebook) 1. History, Modern—20th century. I. Title. D421.C73 2004 909.82—dc22 2004024913

Front cover: Man with two heads, © CORBIS

Printed in the United States

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following for their help and advice in preparing the manuscript: William Beck, Sharon Marie Gossert, M. Douglas Hoye, Professor Kerry B. Plemmons (University of Denver), David W. Musick, Dr. David W. Stephen (University of Colorado at Denver), Clifford D. Yablon, and Jennifer Rowe.

Terrorism is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it; war is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it. — Sydney J. Harris, “Nations Should Submit to the Rule of Law,” Clearing the Grounds, 1986 As centuries go, the twentieth will be one of the easiest to describe. It was the century of the West’s great and bloody civil war. It began with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand. It ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a century when the notion of individual rights spread around the world. It was a century when the right of individuals was never more egregiously attacked. It was the century of a great war between those who worshipped the state and those who championed the individual in the face of state power. — David F. Forte, Professor of Law, in an address delivered to the City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, November 9, 2001 The filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts. — A.L. Rowse, British historian, Time, November 13, 1978 All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world. — Gore Vidal, writer, The Observer, December 31, 1989

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1

CHAPTER 1. THE BLACK HAND THAT IGNITED WORLD WAR I DRAGUTIN DIMITRIJEVIC AND GAVRILO PRINCIP THE BALKANS ZOROASTER, JUDAISM, CHRIST, AND MOHAMMED THE KARADJORDJE AND OBRENOVIC DYNASTIES THE BULL AND KING ALEXANDER OBRENOVIC THE BALKAN WARS THE OBSESSIONS OF THE YOUNG BOSNIANS THE ARCHDUKE, THE EMPEROR, AND THE COLONEL A PRINCE WAITING IN AMBUSH JUNE 28, 1914 — IN REVERENCE FOR SERBIAN ASSASSINS OF THE PAST INVESTIGATING THE ASSASSINATION THE TRIAL OF PRINCIP AND THE BLACK HAND CONSPIRATORS THE AUSTRIAN ULTIMATUM AND RUSSIAN TREACHERY THE DEMISE OF THE BULL UNPRECEDENTED WORLD CARNAGE PRINCIP, OBILICH, AND ZERAJIC — ASSASSINS PASSING THE TORCH THE IMRO, THE IRA, AND DADA A KARADJORDJE ASSASSINATED — VLADA THE CHAUFFEUR

3 3 4 7 10 11 13 15 18 19 22 25 26 28 30 31 33 35 38

CHAPTER 2. THE ACE AND QUEEN OF WORLD WAR I SPIES AGENT SIDNEY REILLY AND COURTESAN MATA HARI MURDER IN INDONESIA THE POOR DUTCH GIRL BECOMES A LIBERATED EUROPEAN STAR WAR FOR THE DANCER MATA HARI THE LEGEND — REVENGE ON THE COURTESAN MATA HARI AND HER SEARCH FOR THE ACE OF SPIES AND LT. CANARIS LOVE AND LADOUX MATA HARI AND THE SISTERHOOD OF SPIES

41 41 43 44 46 47 48 50 51

xi

Peculiar Liaisons THE TRIAL AND RUIN OF THE COSMOPOLITAN SPY THE MYSTERIES OF MATA HARI’S DAUGHTER REILLY’S RISE ST-1, ST-25, C, AND THE BIRTH OF THE BRITISH MASTER SPY THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE CAPITALISTS THE RISE OF THE BOLSHEVIKS AND LENIN’S RED TERROR REILLY, LENIN, AND THE LOCKHART PLOT REILLY, SAVINKOV, AND THE MASTER OF THE SPY BOOK TARGETING LENIN THE TRUST AND THE WINDOW THE LEGENDS AND LEGACIES OF THE ACE AND QUEEN OF SPIES

54 56 57 59 62 64 66 68 69 72 73

CHAPTER 3. TACTICAL DECEPTION — LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE HAVERSACK TRICK, AND OPERATION MINCEMEAT 77 MAJORS LAWRENCE, MEINERTZHAGEN, AND MARTIN 77 THOMAS LAWRENCE, JOHN HUME ROSS, AND T.E. SHAW 80 LAWRENCE, FEISAL, AND AUDA 81 AQABA AND THE LEGEND OF LAWRENCE 82 LAWRENCE’S NATURE AND THE QUEEN OF THE DESERT 86 LAWRENCE, PHILBY, REILLY, AND SAUD 89 LAWRENCE’S END 92 RICHARD MEINERTZHAGEN AND THE HAVERSACK TRICK 95 THE FRANKS DECEIT — A GREEK BEARING GIFTS 96 MEINERTZHAGEN AND LAWRENCE 97 DECEIVING THEMSELVES 99 THE BALFOUR DECLARATION DECEPTION 101 A DEAD MAN TELLS LIES — THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS 102 MAJOR MARTIN 104 MEINERTZHAGEN AND HITLER 107 CHAPTER 4. STRIKES AGAINST THE AXIS POWERS GENERAL JIMMY DOOLITTLE AND LT. GENERAL KNUT HAUKELID THE ATOMIC LETTERS AND A JAPANESE RUSSO BORDER WAR DOOLITTLE’S RAID ON TOKYO THE TOKYO RAID CHURCHILL AND ROOSEVELT’S TUBE ALLOYS AND GERMAN MISCALCULATIONS LEIF TRONSTAD OPERATION FRESHMAN OPERATION GUNNERSIDE AND HAUKELID’S FINAL BLOW THE ALSOS MISSION AGENT MOE BERG — SPY CATCHER

xii

111 111 112 113 114 117 119 120 123 125 126

Table of Contents IMPACT OF THE RAID ON VEMORK RESCUE IN PEKING THE REUNION DOOLITTLE RETIRED

128 130 132 132

CHAPTER 5. THE DIRGE OF THE BLACK ORCHESTRA COLONEL CLAUS VON STAUFFENBERG AND REICH CHANCELLOR ADOLF HITLER FROM THE KREISAU CIRCLE TO THE BLACK ORCHESTRA HITLER AND STAUFFENBERG’S ANCESTRY WITTGENSTEIN, HITLER, AND EARLY INFLUENCES VIENNA AND WORLD WAR I HITLER AND THE JEWISH PROSTITUTE MUNICH AND THE BEER HALL PUTSCH — HITLER’S FAILED REVOLT THE PROTOCOLS OF ZION — FICTION AS A TERROR TOOL HITLER AND HENRY FORD STAUFFENBERG AND THE MYSTICAL POET STEFAN GEORGE THE THIRD REICH’S PROPHET — THE JEWISH CLAIRVOYANT NAZIS, THE OCCULT, AND REVISIONIST ARCHAEOLOGY — ROSENBERG, ECKART, AND HIMMLER THE BALKAN HOLOCAUST — HITLER, STALIN, AND THE ROMANIAN DICTATORS STAUFFENBERG AND OLBRICHT SET THEIR RESOLVE SS COMMANDO OTTO SKORZENY, A SEARCH FOR HOLY RELICS, AND PLOTS OF EXECUTIVE ACTION WOLFSSCHANZE THE AFTERMATH CHAPTER 6. THE DARK SECRETS OF NAZI INTELLIGENCE ADMIRAL CANARIS AND GENERAL REINHARD HEYDRICH THE LITTLE ADMIRAL AND THE FOX’S LAIR THE IRON HAND’S INTRODUCTION TO THE SS THE BARBAROUS FANATIC SALON KITTY CANARIS AND OPERATION SCHULUNG KRISTALLNACHT AND THE JEWISH PROBLEM THE GLEIWITZ DECEPTION — ATTACK ON POLAND WANNSEE CONFERENCE AND INTERPOL HEYDRICH’S SECRET THE DACHAU SPY MAX THE SUPER SPY SABOTAGING THE SABOTEURS THE CZECHS STRIKE BACK

xiii

135 135 136 138 141 143 145 146 148 151 153 154 155 158 161 162 164 167 169 169 170 172 174 177 178 179 180 181 184 184 185 186 187

Peculiar Liaisons NAZI REPRISAL LIDICE THE END OF CANARIS’S ROLE IN THE ABWEHR CANARIS AND KIM PHILBY CANARIS AND THE BLACK ORCHESTRA THE END FOR CANARIS

189 190 191 192 194 195

CHAPTER 7. THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK LEE H. OSWALD AND DAVID FERRIE LINCOLN, FERDINAND, AND KENNEDY OSWALD’S CURIOUS ACQUAINTANCES FERRIE AND THE NEFARIOUS SERGIO ARCACHA SMITH, GUY BANISTER, AND THE CREATION OF LEGENDS CIVIL AIR PATROL JACK MARTIN’S ACCUSATIONS THE MANY FACES OF WILLIE O’KEEFE CLAY SHAW GENERAL WALKER, NIXON, AND COLONEL RIVERA FERRIE, CANCER, AND DR. SHERMAN MARCELLO, OSWALD, AND DEALEY PLAZA WHISPERS OF PLOTS FERRIE THE SUSPECT SHAW, FERRIE, AND OSWALD RIGHT-WING FOREKNOWLEDGE? RUBY AND FERRIE HYPNOSIS AND THE ASSASSIN OF THE SIXTIES THE FRENCH CONNECTIONS LOOKING BACK

208 211 212 215 217 220 222 223 225 228 230 233 234 236 238 240

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

243

xiv

197 197 199 201 205

INTRODUCTION The wars of the last century were numerous and devastating and the loss of lives of both soldiers and citizens totals in the tens of millions. During this remarkable century, despite triumphs over diseases such as smallpox and polio, mankind developed the machine gun, nerve gas, and the atomic bomb. In a span of one hundred years, scientific advancements provided the world a chance to end hunger, yet governments murdered over 90 million of their own people through state-sponsored famines. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” Examples of small groups and individual efforts that have changed the world for the better through their peaceful efforts are numerous, but there are also those small groups of people that have shaped the course of human history through violence. This is the story of some of those small groups that grew into more powerful organizations, becoming household names, like the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, and Al Qaeda; and, though shadowed and forgotten by time, no less profound in their actions were the Black Hand, the Croatian Ustasha, the Kreisau Circle, Black Orchestra, the Red Army Faction, the Japanese Red Army, the Tamil Tigers, and the Grey Wolves of Turkey. In the name of one cause or another, those small groups worked for what they may have thought was good but they also fought, assassinated, and spied against their own — whether to champion or to destroy socialism, communism, imperialism, and various forms of nationalism.

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Peculiar Liaisons These are stories of men and women in the twentieth century and their extraordinary relations: spies and dictators, masters of deception, assassins, military commandos and eccentrics. Many players have been hailed as heroes to one group and villains to another; they have been perceived as patriot and traitor, freedom fighter and terrorist. A hundred years from “the war to end all wars,” our young new century already knows an unprecedented new level of refinement of the art of war and terror.

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1. THE BLACK HAND THAT IGNITED WORLD WAR I DRAGUTIN DIMITRIJEVIC AND GAVRILO PRINCIP We go to gain a little patch of ground That hath in it no profit but the name — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act 3, scene 1 This war, like the next war, is a war to end wars. — British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, On World War I In the dark of early morning June 11, 1903, Captain Dragutin Dimitrijevic, a large, muscular, twenty-six-year-old man known to his associates as “The Bull,” or “Apis,”1 lay on the floor of King Alexander Obrenovic’s Belgrade palace. The palace guard had shot the Serbian Army captain three times, but not before Apis and his companions had slaughtered both the Serbian king and his queen. Apis eventually recovered from his wounds and a few years later would help form and guide a secret society of assassins: Crna Ruka (The Black Hand).2 The Black Hand, founded in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1911 with the aim of uniting all Serbs, would drastically change European history. Apis empowered the Black Hand by recruiting young men infected with tuberculosis. The disease was so debilitating 1. Apis is “Bee” in Greek and “Bull” in Egyptian. Most biographers cite Apis as meaning “Bull.” 2. “The Black Hand” is borrowed from an old terrorist organization in Italy of the same name, La Mano Negra, that specialized in extortion since 1750.

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Peculiar Liaisons that Apis was able to enlist the afflicted on the notion that their only genuine chance to leave their mark would be to change Serbian history through the assassination of Serbia’s enemies. One of these pathetic tuberculins was the Bosnia-born Gavrilo Princip, a teenager whose assassination of the Austria-Hungarian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would help trigger the nightmare of World War I, The Great War, the War to End all Wars.

THE BALKANS The “Balkans,” Turkish for “mountains,” refers to the people of the Balkan Peninsula, a portion of land in the southeast corner of Europe. The borders and names of the countries in this area have changed numerous times; it is a kaleidoscope of peoples of different racial and religious backgrounds at a critical juncture between the Muslims, Orthodox Christian and Catholic worlds. The Balkan Peninsula is home of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Macedonia, and Greece; 3 it is bounded by the lower Danube River and the Black, Aegean, Mediterranean, Ionian, and Adriatic seas. The Balkan Peninsula is militarily significant because it links Europe and Asia. Six empires — Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian — have gone to great lengths to control the region and all paid greatly. In the Balkans, wrote C. L. Sulzberger, lived “sprightly people who ate peppered foods, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily and had a splendid talent for starting wars...less imaginative westerners looked down on them with secret envy, sniffing at their royalty, scoffing at their pretensions, and fearing their savage terrorists.”4 Philosophical and literary brilliance associated with this land, the land of Homer, Socrates, Aristotle, Aeschylus and countless others, as well as the twentieth-century genius scientist, the Croatia-born Nikola Tesla.5 There are also 3. The term “Balkans” is sometimes understood to include Romania, as well, although in fact Romania lies to the north of the Balkan Peninsula. Speaking a Latin-based language, worshipping primarily according to the Orthodox Church, and having fought the Ottoman Turks for centuries, it encapsulates the region’s difficult history. 4. Kaplan, Robert. Balkan Ghosts, A Journey Through History, St. Martins, New York, 1933, p. xviii. 5. Nikola Tesla, a Serbian born July 9, 1856 in Croatia, became a US citizen and developed the alternating-current (AC) power system, the radio, fluorescent lights, and more than 100 US patents.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I many names legendary with mystery and might: the Pythia of the Oracle of Delphi,6 the priestesses of Apollo who passed on messages from the gods to the mortals for a thousand years; Philip of Macedon, the Macedonian king who conquered most of Greece; Philip’s son, Alexander the Great, the Macedonian who conquered the known world in his quest to spread the virtues of Hellenistic culture and take revenge for earlier Persian assaults; Spartacus, the leader of the Greek slave revolt against Rome;7 Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), the Romanian leader whose ruthless tactics in fighting off the Turks fueled the legends that gave rise to the fictional vampire Dracula; Gavrilo Princip, the nineteen-year-old Bosnian assassin whose alliance with a secret society helped tip Europe into a cataclysmic war; Josip Broz, the Croatian-Slovenian Communist known as Tito, who helped lead the anti-Nazi resistance and fended off Soviet dominance, becoming President of a sovereign Yugoslavia that was known for its highly liberal version of market socialism; Slobodan Milosevic, the pro-Serbian Yugoslavian president associated with the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. The Ancient Greeks considered their contemporary Macedonians to be barbaric northerners with a strange and mysterious culture. Even the Macedonian language is largely a mystery, today, though it may have been a Greek dialect; not a single sentence of the original language has been retained.8 As historian Eugene Borza put it, neither the Greeks nor the Macedonians considered the Macedonians to be Greeks. Although the Macedonians protected their southern neighbors from any possible invading Europeans, they were never accorded respect. However, Philip of Macedon’s victory at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC made the Macedons the true rulers of Greece and established the beginning of the Macedonian era. After Philip gained control of

6. The Oracle of Delphi dates back to 1400 BC and was the most important shrine in all Greece. It was considered the center of the earth and was built around a sacred spring. The Pythia, an elderly priestess who interpreted the will of Apollo, answered questions concerning the future, which could include everything from farming schedules to matters of war. The vapors from a spring would put the Pythia into a trance where she would hear the words of Apollo. The gases emanating from the spring have been described as giving the pythia a “narcotic” or “anaesthetic” effect. 7. Spartacus was a Thracian enslaved by the Romans. His slave uprising occured in 73-71 BC and was known as the “Third Servile War.” Thrace is an ancient area that covered northeastern Greece, southern Bulgaria, and parts of western Turkey, bordered by the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea, and the Sea of Marmara. 8. Shea, John. Macedonia and Greece — The Struggle to Define a New Balkan Nation, McFarland, Jefferson, N.C., 1997, p. 26.

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Peculiar Liaisons Greece, he turned his attention to conquering the Greek’s long-time nemesis, the Persians, but his plans were cut short when he was assassinated. Philip’s twenty-one-year-old son, Alexander III of Macedonia (also known as Alexander the Great, Alexander Magnus), claimed the throne. Whether Philip’s death was the result of a conspiracy or a lone assassin has been a matter of speculation for centuries. In some versions three men were part of the assassination. Athenians, Persians, or his ex-wife Olympia, so some say, commissioned the plot. Alexander executed his uncle, stepmother, and her immediate family, blaming them and others for his father’s murder. This act summarily completed any investigation into the assassination and surely discouraged any other possible conspirators from questioning Alexander’s claim to the throne.9 Alexander took his father’s conquest of Persia to heart and his sensational military victories spread Greek culture through northern Africa, southwestern Asia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other regions. Alexander’s military campaign created the Hellenistic era (323-BC to 31 BC, 300 years of dominance that ended only during the rule of Rome’s Augustus in 31 BC). Alexander’s campaign created Alexandria, Egypt, with its great library and museum,10 and marked the beginning of an international culture by actively exporting Greek achievements. Alexander was eventually revered by the Greeks as a conquering hero and is hated to this day by many of the ancestors of his victims; the source of his ambition has been the wonder of historians for centuries.11 Inspired by heroic tales of the ancient and legendary Greek-Trojan War, he attacked Persian armies in particular, fearing their expansion would eventually sweep into the Balkan Peninsula.

9. Numerous conspiracy theories surround the death of Philip. One popular version is that Philip’s homosexual lover, Pausanias, acted alone in stabbing Philip with a sword at the wedding ceremony of Philip’s daughter. 10. Dinocrates, Alexander’s personal architect, designed Alexandria, Egypt. Legend says Alexandria contained a library and museum that eventually held every great work of literature in the world. The library and museum flourished from roughly 300 BC to AD 300. Every great literary work of the Greeks was held there, as well as collections of Roman, Jewish, and Arabian scholarly works. 11. Alexander was motivated and influenced by a politically savvy father; an ambitious mother who was interested in revenge, cults, and oracles; and the great Aristotle, who was hired by Philip to be Alexander’s personal tutor. Alexander carried Aristotle’s annotated copy of Homer’s The Iliad on his conquests, believing that Homer’s heroes embodied the epitome of courage and virtue (“This is the one best omen, to fight in defense of one’s country...” The Iliad, Book 9).

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I Throughout the centuries Macedonia, which lies in the heart of the Balkan Peninsula, has been the claim of Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, and Turks, all of whom believe that their ancestors’ arrival in that land gives them the right to rule it. The Bulgars go so far as to claim there is no Macedonia — it is only Western Bulgaria, a claim they back with the fact that 80% of the population speaks Bulgarian. Macedonia’s fate is the fate of other Balkan nations: a struggle to exist as an autonomous nation but the victim of seemingly endless assaults by neighbors who believe the land to be rightfully theirs.

ZOROASTER, JUDAISM, CHRIST, AND MOHAMMED Zoroaster, a man born in the later part of the sixth century BC, in what is now Iran, claimed to be the spokesman of the one true God, Ahura Mazdah. Zoroastrianism is based on belief in a constant universal battle between good and bad spirits, the coming of the kingdom of God, a savior, and bodily resurrection, all concepts that have been recognized as a great influence on the framing of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Zoroastrianiasm was the principal religion in Persia for approximately one thousand years. In the early fourth century, Roman Emperor Constantine the Great expanded the Roman Empire and the Christian Church by founding “New Rome,” Constantinople. This expansion was an act that would have a profound impact on the future of the Balkans and subsequently the Western world. Constantine was inspired by a vision that assured him he would be successful in his conquests by employing the Greek monogram of Christ, the Chi-Rho. He marked the shields of his soldiers with the sign and was convinced of its divine power when he won a battle against his rival Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge crossing the Tiber.12 One of the most important battles in Roman history occurred on ancient Macedonian soil (known at the time as Thrace), when the barbarian Goths defeated a Constantinople-based Roman army at the Battle of Adrianople in AD 378. The battle, a mere 150 miles from Constantinople, was the precursor to the sacking of Rome in AD 410 by the Goths. The Goths’ victory created more chaos for the Balkan region. In 380 the Roman Emperor Theodosius, the first Roman 12. Constantine I (also known as Constantine the Great, Flavius Valerius Constantinus, Roman Emperor from 312-337) passed the Edict of Milan (AD 313) that granted religious toleration of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.

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Peculiar Liaisons emperor nurtured in a Christian home, decreed through the Theodosian Code that all of his subjects would be Christians. Under his rule pagan temples were destroyed and “heathens” were persecuted. With the death of Theodosius in 395, the empire was split13 with Rome centered in the West and Constantinople the East; the line of division in Europe ran south along the Drina River in the Balkans. Croatia and Bosnia lay to its west and modern Serbia14 and Macedonia to its east. As the ancestors of the modern Slavs moved into this region in the sixth century from northern Europe and the Ukraine, they adopted either what came to be known as the Roman Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox (Byzantine) Church. The birth of Mohammed15 in 570 in Mecca would lead to the creation of the religion of Islam. Islam replaced Zoroastrianism as the predominant religion in Persia and quickly spread into other parts of the world to become one of the most widely followed religions of all time. Though Christians and Jews were required to pay large taxes and wear identifying clothing when they came under the rule of conquering Muslims, they were allowed to keep their religions; and Islam spread quickly into the Balkans. The current three great religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have curious similarities and differences. All three share a linear view of time; recognize Abraham as a forefather of faith; believe in a messiah, resurrection of the body, the eventual destruction of the present world, a place of eternal torment for the wicked, levels of reward for the righteous, and the possibility through good works of eternal life. Some of the key differences of the religions that have caused so much tension are whether man is good, bad, or depraved; a place of purgatory; whether salvation is possible; whether the messiah has come or will come again; and how and when the world will be destroyed and reborn.16

13. Flavius Theodosius, Roman Emperor from 379-95, ensconced his sons in the two empires: Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West. 14. Serbia’s history as a Balkan nation began in the middle seventh century. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was formed in 1918. The name was changed to Yugoslavia in 1929. At the end of the twentieth century Serbia was one of two republics making up the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Montenegro being the other. 15. Muhammad’s full name is Abu al-Qasim Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Abd alMuttalib ibn Hashim. 16. Price, Randall. Unholy War, Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, 2001, pp. 319323.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I Two Salonika-born monks (Cyril and Methodius) are credited with introducing Christianity to the Slavs of the Balkans in the late eighth century. They developed a Slavic script, called Glagolithic; this form of writing eventually was called Cyrillic and in various forms is still used by Serbs, Bulgarians, and Russians. This created another basic difference between the two Christian camps: the West using Latin and the East using Cyrillic. The Croatians were subject to the influence of Latin missionaries between the sixth and eighth centuries, an effort that kept Western Catholicism strong for centuries in Croatia. With the final split of the Christian church in 1054 the seeds of dissent between the various ethnic groups were sown.17 Partly in an effort to unite the Christian empire fractured between a Rome-centered, Latin-based Catholicism and a Constantinople-centered, Cyrillic-based Eastern Orthodoxy, Pope Urban encouraged Christian crusaders to “recapture” the Holy Land, which resulted in decades of conflict (1096-1291) between Christian invaders and people who lay in their path to Jerusalem via Constantinople. The Crusaders entered Jerusalem in 1099 and slaughtered 40,000 Jewish and Muslim inhabitants, people who had lived together in peace for 460 years. The massacre was similar to the Roman invasion of Jerusalem in the first century. Subsequent waves of Crusaders succeeded in temporarily holding Jerusalem for Christianity. Violence was the rule, but Richard the Lionhearted tried European diplomacy when he suggested that his sister Joanna be married to the Sultan Saladin’s brother al-Adil, creating a Christian-Muslim alliance that could rule Jerusalem in peace.18 Everyone but Richard considered the offer to be utterly bizarre. Saladin took back Jerusalem for Islam in 1187. It has been said that the three religions have eyed each other with distrust ever since. 19

17. In 1054 the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Caerularius, refused to give an audience to a group of the pope’s delegates in Constantinople for three months. This affront eventually created mutual acts of ex-communication between the East and West that were not lifted until 1965. 18. Armstrong, Karen. Holy War, Anchor, New York, 2001, p. 267. 19. Ibid., pp. 271-274. In 1204, Crusaders sacked Constantinople without the permission of the Pope. The Children’s Crusade was undertaken in 1212 when a huge number of European children, with an average age of 12, were gathered up and sent on a march to the Holy Land. The Crusade ended within a year. Most of the young Crusaders died of hunger or were kidnapped and sold into slavery.

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Peculiar Liaisons THE KARADJORDJE AND OBRENOVIC DYNASTIES In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Turkish Muslim armies invaded the Balkans, conquering Turnovo, Bulgaria in 1393, Serbia in 1441, Constantinople in 1453, Bosnia in 1463, the Albanian fortress town of Kruje in 1478, and Moldavia and Walachia of Romania in 1501. By the sixteenth century the Balkan countries were a mélange of religions grounded in conflicting dogmas. The indigenous ethnic groups were at war with each other as well as with the despised invading Turks of the Ottoman Empire. In 1689, Arsenje Carnojevic, a spiritual leader whom Serbs considered their Patriarch, led the Serbs against the Turks and encouraged them to aid the Austrian army. On New Year’s Day, 1690, the Turks crushed the Austrians and the Serbs. Carnojevic, fearing reprisals from the vengeful Turks, led thousands of refugees away from the heart of old Serbia (which was the Kosovo area, at that time). Although he was leading his people away from their homeland, he was uniting Serbs, an act that would be remembered for centuries. 20 In 1804, the Serbs revolted against the Ottoman Empire that had ruled for four centuries. Civil disputes occurred between two Serbian houses, the Karadjordje and the Obrenovic. The rancor culminated in the 1903 assassination of Alexander Obrenovic. Both of these Serbian dynasties had been created by men of humble background: Djordje Petrovic (aka Karadjordje or Black George), who led the first Serbian uprising in 1804, and his rival Milos Obrenovic were illiterate, dirt-poor pig farmers. Black George and Obrenovic fought against foreign powers as well as against each other. Both men created family dynasties that would rule Serbia years after their deaths. Karadjordje’s political violence was legendary: he had his stepfather killed for failing to flee the Turkish invaders upon command; had his brother hung for rape — and invited Serbian leaders to his home for dinner while the body hung from the gate; and played great powers against each other while seeking their support.21 Obrenovic, like Karadjordje, fought the Turks by gaining concessions and then undermining Turkish power. After the Turks slaughtered and pillaged much of Serbia, Obrenovic sensed danger from Karadjordje when he returned from hiding. Karadjordje had been smuggled back into Serbia with the aid of a Greek revolutionary society, Philiki

20. Judah, Tim. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, New Haven, Yale University, 1998, p. 1. 21. Ibid., pp. 49-50.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I Etairia (Friendly Society). The Philiki Etairia, like Karadjordje and the Serbs, were enemies of Turkey and aimed at destabilizing the Ottoman Empire in preparation for their own armed rebellion. Obrenovic sent agents to kill Karadjordje, which they did by cutting his head off with an ax, stuffing it, and sending it to a Turkish sultan. The act exacerbated the feud between the two families. In the mid-1800s the Omaladina (Union of Serbia Youth), a secret society of terrorists, acted to spur the downfall of the Serbian government in hopes of creating a larger Serbian nation linked with other Balkan states and parts of Poland, Moravia, Silesia, and Romania.22 This union was to create a great, single Slavonic nation. During half a century the Omaladina committed a variety of outrageous acts including the assassination of Serbian Prince Michael in 1868, the kidnapping of Serbian Prince Alexander, and a rebellion that led to the abdication of Serbian King Milan and the murder of his successor, King Alexander Obrenovic and his wife, Queen Draga Masin, in 1903. The Omaladina’s proSerbian ideology served as an inspiration for future Serbian secret societies like the Black Hand.

THE BULL AND KING ALEXANDER OBRENOVIC In August 1876, Dragutin Dimitrijevic and Alexander Obrenovic were born in Belgrade at a time when Serbia and Montenegro were plotting against the Ottoman Empire and Belgrade was still paying tribute to the sultan of Constantinople. Dragutin was born in the humble home of an impoverished family; Alexander was born in a palace, the only son of King Milan Obrenovic, leader of the ancient royal Serbian family who won its position through murder and political intrigue. While Dimitrijevic would gain power through military promotion and stealthy dealings within secret societies, Obrenovic would shape Serbia by constitutional change that angered its citizenry. Dimitrijevic’s record at military school was so impressive that he was immediately installed in the Serbian army as an officer. Both men would meet violently 26 years after their birth, inside King Alexander Obrenovic’s palace. Queen Draga was ten years her husband’s senior and tricked Alexander into marriage with a false pregnancy, but Alexander seemed content with a

22. Glenny, Misha. The Balkans, Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999, Viking, New York, 2000, p. 126.

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Peculiar Liaisons woman who was notoriously devious. She convinced Alexander that his father was plotting to remove him from the throne and have him replaced with one of his half brothers born of his father’s Greek mistress. She infuriated the army by interfering with appointments and had any officer she suspected of opposing her denied promotion. She was unable to have children and her condition placed her two brothers next in line for the throne, both of whom were also hated by the Serbs. At 2 a.m. on June 11, 1903, forty military officers swarmed into the palace. Apis and Lt. Petar Zivkoc led them under the command of George Genchich, the former minister of the interior who was ousted from office after Alexander’s marriage to Draga. Some accounts say that before they entered the palace the conspirators were drinking in local bars; though it is unknown whether any were drunk, it is known that Apis never touched alcohol. A palace guardsman was bribed to allow the officers access to the palace’s rear entry. The royal couple hid in a closet of their bedchamber — an escape route cut into the floor of the bedchamber had been sealed in advance by Alexander. Dynamite was detonated in an effort to blast open the palace doors; at least, it blew all the fuses in the palace. With power cut, the officers searched for ninety minutes by candlelight for Alexander and Draga. Finally, they found the closet and shot the king thirty-six times and the queen fourteen, then mutilated their bodies with swords and threw them out a window. In the battle with the king’s bodyguards, several men were injured or killed. Queen Draga’s brothers were also slain, as was Serbia’s prime minister, the minister of war, and an assistant to King Alexander. Pesar Karadjordje was installed as king — the grandson of the pig farmer, Djordje Petrovic, the original Karadjordje (Black George). The feud between the two royal houses that was ignited by Karadjordje’s death one hundred years before was avenged, and the Obrenovic dynasty was over.23 Apis was spirited away from the palace and he recovered from his wounds. Most of the conspirators of Alexander’s assassination were army officers who felt Alexander’s regime had tainted Serbia’s international reputation by backing a new constitution in 1901 that allowed Alexander too much power. The conspirators gave Serbia’s rule to a more democratic union of political parties. The Serbian Parliament thanked Apis for his grisly deed and called him “the savior of the fatherland.” His reputation won him a position as Professor of Tactics at the 23. Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Royal Sunset, Doubleday and Co., Garden City, New York, 1987.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I Military Academy. Elections were held less than four months after the assassination. In 1911, Apis began plotting a new pro-Serbian secret society in Belgrade, Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (Union or Death), also known to its enemies as The Black Hand. The organization’s first goal was to incite rebellious activity against the Ottoman Empire in Macedonia.

THE BALKAN WARS In 1866, an alliance consisting of Serbia, Montenegro, Romania and Greece made up the first Balkan League. A compromise between Austria and Hungary in 1867 recast the Austrian (Hapsburg) Empire under the name of AustriaHungary, comprising numerous provinces ruled by a monarchy. 24 At the beginning of the twentieth century the countries of the Balkan Peninsula, the easternmost of Europe’s three great southern peninsulas, were shaped and reshaped by wars between the Balkan League countries, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the ever-present Turks. In the spring of 1912, the Russians helped re-establish the Balkan League with Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro. By 1914, Austria-Hungary and the countries of the Balkan Peninsula incorporated no fewer than eighteen different racial groups.25 After Obrenovic’s assassination, the Serbs constituted the most dynamic element in the Balkans and the greatest threat to the Austria-Hungarian monarchy. The tensions leading up to the assassination of the Austrian archduke, and the world war that followed in August 1914, were created by two sets of wars staged in the Balkans during 1912 and 1913. On the eve of the Balkan Wars the streets of Constantinople were full of chants, “We want war,” “Down with equality,” and “The Balkan dogs are trampling on Islam!” The Balkan Wars eerily foreshadowed the subsequent wars of the twentieth century. They were marked by wholesale cruelty and brutality. The First Balkan War was fought between Turkey and the Balkan League with the principal goal of liberating Macedonia from the seemingly eternal grip of the Ottoman Empire. On October 8, 1912,

24. Provinces in 1914 included Bohemia, Moravia, Bukovina, Transylvania, Carniola, Kustenland, Dalmatia, Croatia, Fiume, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Galicia. The western portion of Austria-Hungary was also called Cisleithana, since it contained the portion of that monarchy on the near (that is, western) side of the river Leitha. 25. Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Archduke of Sarajevo, Little Brown Co., Boston/Toronto, 1984, p. 127.

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Peculiar Liaisons Montenegro declared war on Turkey and the other members followed with declarations ten days later. By attacking Macedonia and taking it away from Turkey, Russia saw an opportunity to expand its land holdings and weaken Turkey by helping the Balkan states create their own sovereignty. The Greek navy played an important part of the war when they gained control of the Aegean. Turkey agreed to an armistice in December 1912. The sweeping and decisive nature of the victory left Europe stunned; Turkey found its military forces decimated and it was left with little more than Constantinople. “Turks” was a pejorative term for Muslims during this time, and ridding Serbia of Turks was considered a necessary step in creating an ethnically homogeneous Greater Serbia.26 Before the 1912 conflict, Apis entered Turkish-controlled Albania and convinced top Albanian officials to support the Serbian cause for the good of a free Albania. Apis was involved in a failed plot against the life of Austria-Hungary Emperor Franz Joseph in 1911. He was also involved with a Bulgarian revolutionary group that assassinated Ferdinand of Bulgaria in 1914 and during the subsequent world war he plotted against the King of Greece. A second Balkan War began when the Balkan League members of Serbia, Greece, and Romania disagreed with Bulgaria on how Macedonia would be split. During the summer of 1913 a war ensued and Bulgaria was defeated, a humiliation Bulgarians would remember when they sided with Austria-Hungary and the Germans during the Great War that would follow. Bulgarians, although excellent soldiers, were hated by all their neighbors and more than once they chose the wrong side in war. The Bulgarians suffered both in the second Balkan War and World War I because of their insistence that they were the rightful rulers of Macedonia. Macedonia’s plight led author John Reed to write, in 1916, “The Macedonian question has been the cause of every great European war for the last fifty years, and until that is settled there will be no more peace either in the Balkans or out of them.” Robert Kaplan followed in this vein by writing, “Macedonia is full of historical lessons, if only history were better learned or remembered.”27

26. Cohen, Philip J. Serbia’s Secret War, Texas A&M Press, College Station, Texas, 1996, p. 6. 27. Kaplan, Robert. Balkan Ghosts, A Journey Through History, St. Martins, 1933, New York, pp. 52, 65.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I THE OBSESSIONS OF THE YOUNG BOSNIANS To secretly fight Austrian imperialism, the Narodna Odbrana (National Defense) was established on October 8, 1908, during a meeting at City Hall in Belgrade after Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Among the members were numerous government officials including Prime Minister Nikola Paschitsch, the leader of the popular Radical Party. The public image of the organization was one of nationalist propaganda, but secretly the group recruited saboteurs to destroy railways and bridges. Agents were also trained in guerilla warfare. Within a month the Narodna Odbrana had recruited more than 5,000 volunteers prepared to cross the border into Bosnia and Herzegovina to fight Austria. But the Narodna Odbrana eventually softened into a “peaceful cultural society restricted to modest, unobtrusive individual efforts.”28 Apis and other radicals found that the Narodna Odbrana was not doing what it was intended to do: to fight the Austro-Hungarian government with violent means. A new secret organization was created to fight Austria: Crna Ruka, the Black Hand. Ten men, including Apis, met on May 9, 1911, to help create the Black Hand. They wrote a constitution that clearly outlined the organization’s purpose and designed a bizarre seal with an image of a powerful arm holding a flag, along with a skull with crossed bones, a knife, a bomb, and a phial of poison. The organization was established at the grassroots level in three to five-member cells with district committees comprising army officers, civil servants, and intellectuals. In a dark room each member was inducted over a crucifix, a dagger, and a revolver with the words, “By the Sun that warms me, by the Earth that nourishes me, by the blood of my ancestors, on my honor and on my life.”29 The organization was lent an air of credibility with Apis at its helm. He was broadly considered a man of unquestioned patriotism, charm, and selflessness. From Belgrade the Black Hand recruited government officials and army officers as commanders. The Black Hand’s purpose was similar to the Omaladina and the original intent of Narodna Odbrana: to create a single Serbian nation free of ruling hands from outside sovereignties. Apis steered clear of the political 28. Mackenzie, David. Apis: The Congenial Conspirator, The Life of Col. Dragutin Dimitrijevic, East European Monographs, Boulder, Colorado, Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1989, p. 66. 29. Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Archduke of Sarajevo, Little Brown Co., Boston/Toronto, 1984, p. 219.

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Peculiar Liaisons trappings of Omaladina. He wanted to eliminate enemies of Serbia through assassination, so he recruited young fanatics, many of whom were tuberculins with little to live for other than a brief, glorious moment — which they could, presumably, achieve as assassins for Serbia. Apis had a persuasive manner and a personal magnetism that drew other fanatics to him; two of his devotees described him as a “true man” and a “type of magician.”30 After 1918, the assassins of Ferdinand, who belonged to numerous secret societies consisting mostly of students of peasant origin from Croatia, Dalmatia, and Serbia, were known collectively as “Mlada Bosna” or “Young Bosnians.” Among the Black Hand were other secret revolutionary societies like Sloboda (Freedom) and Matica (Mainstream). Their intent was to destroy the Hapsburg Empire and to overcome the illiteracy and primitivism of their society. Between 1912 and 1914 the Young Bosnians were involved in a dozen terrorist plots of sabotage and assassination. Though the Black Hand was involved in social reform, it was much more inclined to violence than the other societies, which placed their emphasis on intellectual pursuits, especially studies of literature, ethics, politics, and the improvement of education. The Young Bosnians were so engaged in literary activity that they convinced many people that literature was their only passion. They were known to have translated Kierkegaard, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Edgar Allan Poe. Their strange mixture of interest in literature and revolution could be compared to the French anarchists of the 1880s and 1890s, who were known for their literary ability: Emile Henry, Stuart Merrill, and Paul Valery. Czech writers Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek were considered sympathizers of the libertarian literary movements in Prague.31 Danilo Ilic, an eventual conspirator against Ferdinand with Princip, found time to translate Oscar Wilde’s Thoughts About Art and Criticism. Ivo Andric, a Croat and Serbian sympathizer who became involved in Young Bosnian activities, was eventually arrested as a conspirator with Princip and Ilic in Ferdinand’s assassination and was sentenced to three years in prison; he spent the time becoming a devotee of Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard. In 1962, Andric won the Nobel Prize for literature, he was the only Yugoslavian to do so.32

30. Cassels, Lavender. The Archduke and the Assassin, Scarborough House, Briarcliff, New York, 1984. 31. Ibid., p. 229. 32. Ivo Andric won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature as author of The Bridge on the Drina and Bosnian Chronicle.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I In contrast to the Young Bosnians and just as fervent were the Young Turks, established in the 1860s. Their philosophy coalesced by 1902 around a fanatical desire to preserve the old Ottoman Empire as a Turkish nation-state. The Young Turks’ position created friction for non-Turks including Albanians, Arabs, and Armenians. Eventually, violence by the Turks in the form of wholesale massacres of Armenians led the Balkan states to ally themselves in what would become the Balkan Wars of 1912-13; this violence would change the face of Europe drastically over the next five to six years. In 1910, following a peasant revolt in a Croatian village, the Austrian army attacked the revolutionaries with raids throughout the region of Bosanka Krajina, Croatia. In retaliation against the Austrians, General Varesanin, the Austrian Governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was targeted for assassination while opening parliament in Sarajevo. Though Sarajevo was a Bosnian province ruled by Austro-Hungarian Empire, many Serbs lived there. Five shots either missed or only wounded Varesanin as he crossed the Kaiser’s bridge in Sarajevo. The failed assassin, Bogdan Zerajic, then turned the gun on himself — but not before uttering the legendary (and perhaps apocryphal) words, “I leave my revenge to Serbdom.” Zerajic had intended to kill Franz Joseph, initially, but had never been able to get close enough to him during his travels through Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1910. Zerajic was a member of the secret society, Sloboda, as well as a Serbian member of the Black Hand. One account suggests that Apis provided him with the pistol for the shooting and that Apis, disgusted with Zerajic’s failure, had his body unceremoniously dumped in an unmarked grave. Nevertheless, Zerajic’s act was heralded by members of the Black Hand as an inspiration for the “new people, new Serbs.” His body was eventually buried in a proper, marked site. Many of the members of the Black Hand vowed to avenge his death; Gavrilo Princip was a regular visitor to his grave as were his Black Hand confederates Danilo Ilic and Nedeljko Cabrinovic.33 Four years later Princip would return to Sarajevo for his revenge. Zerajic’s skull was removed from the burial spot and exhibited in the Criminal Museum in Sarajevo. The chief investigator of Ferdinand’s assassination Viktor Ivasjuk allegedly used the Zerajic skull as an inkpot in his office. The chief investigator told one of the conspirators in the assassination that if he didn’t admit to everything he knew about

33. Glenny, Misha. The Balkans, Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999, Viking, New York, 2000, p. 302.

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Peculiar Liaisons the conspiracy to kill Archduke Ferdinand, Ivasjuk would use all of the conspirators’ skulls as inkpots.34

THE ARCHDUKE, THE EMPEROR, AND THE COLONEL Archduke Franz Ferdinand von Sterreich-Este was the nephew of the reigning ruler of Austria-Hungary, Emperor Franz Joseph. As the heir to the empire, he had embodied the elegance that was typical of his aristocratic background; he was tall, corpulent, and often wore ceremonial green plumes from his helmet.35 His marriage to Sophie Chotek von Chtokowa und Wognin angered Franz Joseph, which in turn created friction with Ferdinand. Sophie was a daughter of a Czech nobleman but nevertheless was a commoner in the eyes of the Hapsburgs, who considered her the offspring of an impoverished, simple, and common Bohemian family. Many members of Ferdinand’s Vienna court viewed the marriage with Sophie as a scandal and thought that King Alexander’s 1903 assassination was due to his equally scandalous marriage to the unpopular Queen Draga. The archduke’s personality was paranoid and unpleasant; he quickly became unpopular among all the classes.36 He was well known for his bigotry and hatred for Jews, Socialists, Hungarians, Italians, and Serbs — a close friend went as far as saying that he was unbalanced in everything. His wife confided in more than one friendly ear that she feared her husband was on the verge of madness. Rumors that he would be “removed” hinted at not only the Balkan revolutionary groups but Austria as well.37 With a history of insanity running in his family, many Austrians wondered whether Ferdinand was mentally fit. It was also believed that he had contracted tuberculosis. Colonel Dimitrijevic acknowledged the archduke as a dynamic leader who would eventually attack the Serbs. He suspected a pre-emptive strike aimed at ending Serbia’s role as a leader in the Slavic movement. In fact, Ferdinand viewed the Serbs as an inferior race whose goal was to destroy the Hapsburg dynasty.38

34. Dedijer, Vladimir. The Road to Sarajevo, Simon Shuster, New York, 1966, p. 355. 35. Tuchman, Barbara, The Guns of August, Macmillan, New York, 1962, p. 3. 36. Glenny, Misha. The Balkans, Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999, Viking, New York, 2000, p. 284. 37. Whitehouse, Arch. Heroes and Legends of World War I, Doubleday, Garden City, 1964, p. 4.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I It is author Remak’s (Sarajevo) opinion that Apis sentenced Franz Ferdinand to death not because the Archduke was hostile to the Slavs, but because he planned reforms that might prove far too attractive to the Young Bosnians. The eighty-four-year-old Franz Joseph was deemed too old to seriously entertain the idea of invading any country, but Apis understood that Ferdinand was bold enough to undertake a military strike. By eliminating Ferdinand, Apis believed, peace could be assured, the Serbian armies could restore themselves after the devastating Balkan wars of recent years, and Russia would gladly join Serbia in an all-out war against Austria-Hungary — after all, the 1912 strike against the Turks had succeeded.39

A PRINCE WAITING IN AMBUSH Gavrilo Princip’s grandfather was a Slav who immigrated into the valley of Grahavo Polje in Western Bosnia from an unknown origin and occupied a house that had been vacated by Muslim Turks. Bosnian locals had recently chased the Turks out of the region. The grandfather’s name was Ceka, which meant “he who waits in ambush.” He wore a belted jacket that the locals found strange but fascinating, and so they gave the man the name “Princip,” meaning prince. This created an erroneous post-assassination legend that Princip’s father was the illegitimate son of a prince, though he was certainly only a peasant man who married a peasant Montenegrin woman. She bore nine children, of which six died, leaving three sons: a doctor, a tradesman who became a mayor of his town, and Gavrilo. When Princip was seventeen, he was expelled from his Sarajevo school for taking part in violent anti-Austrian demonstrations. He traveled to Belgrade and made contact with the Narodna Obrana in a coffee house. He volunteered for service in the Conitadjis, a fanatical group that was dedicated to fighting the Turks since long before the first Balkan War. Princip, never of robust health, made a poor impression on Major Vajislav Tankosic, leader of the Conitadjis and

38. Ferdinand intended on replacing the Dual Monarchy with a 3-part system, which would see the German and Czechs in the first part, Hungary the second, and the southern Slavs of Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina the third part. 39. Mackenzie, David. Apis: The Congenial Conspirator, The Life of Col. Dragutin Dimitrijevic, East European Monographs, Boulder, Colorado, Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1989, p. 124-5.

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Peculiar Liaisons a compatriot of Apis (the two had played important roles in the assassination of Alexander Obrenovic in 1903). Tankosic rejected Princip from the militia group, a humiliation Princip would not forget. On March 27, 1914 Princip shook hands with another revolutionary, Cabrinovic, and they both made a solemn pledge to kill the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand. Gavrilo Princip first learned of the Archduke’s plan to visit Sarajevo from a Croatian newspaper article that another Sarajevo Young Bosnian, Mihajlo Pusara, mailed to friend and fellow conspirator Nedeljko Cabrinovic in Belgrade in April of 1914. The envelope contained a single paragraph concerning the visit and nothing else. Borijove Jevtic said the Srobobran newspaper article was mailed from Zagreb, Croatia and when it “reached our meeting place, the café called Zeata Moruna [Green Garland] one night...[it] was the torch which set the world afire with war...That paper wrecked old, proud empires...At a small table in a very humble café, beneath a flickering gas jet we sat and read it...our decision was taken almost immediately. Death to the tyrant!”40 Jevtic was a personal friend of Princip, but apparently he did not become closely involved in the assassination. After the assassination he was arrested and held in a cell next to Princip’s, but told the court that Princip had never filled him in on the details and that if he had, he would have tried to dissuade him. However, Jevtic did know of the plot and said as much in his statement, after the fact: “To make his [Ferdinand’s] death certain 22 members of the organization were selected to carry out the sentence. At first we thought we would choose the men by lot. But here Gavrilo Princip intervened.” Jevtic was eventually dismissed on all charges. Princip saw his opportunity and immediately began preparing for the assassination by asking a fellow student, Djuro Sarac, to help him find weapons. Sarac organized another Young Bosnian group, which he named “Death or Life,” which comprised of Sarac, Princip, and five others. Princip and his group turned to Apis and the Black Hand for weapons and support. Sarac had fought in the Balkan wars under Major Tankosic, who became one Apis’s most trusted aides. Initially, Apis refused to help Sarac and Princip, but finally relented and arranged for Tankosic to supply the group with Serbian Army grenades, a map of Bosnia, 150 dinars, four Browning pistols, six bombs filled with nails and pieces of lead, and cyanide of potassium for suicide. Tankosic, to avoid direct contact with the future assassins, used Milan Ciganovic, the twenty-six-year-old 40. Wallechinsky, David and Wallace, Irving. The People’s Almanac, Doubleday, Garden City, N.J., p. 505.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I Bosnian, as a go-between. Princip and his Black Hand confederates prepared a single package of arms and had them sent directly from Belgrade to Sarajevo to Danilo Ilic, Princip’s best friend. Princip, Nedjelko Cabrinovic, and Trifko Grabez were smuggled into Sarajevo by a chain of Orthodox families who sympathized with the Black Hand. Before Princip and his confederates left Belgrade for their fateful journey to Sarajevo, Tankosic met with them. Princip remembered how Tankosic had rejected him from service in the military and refused to meet with him. He sent Grabez to meet him instead, though what was said at the meeting is unknown. Though warned not to travel into dangerous country, Ferdinand planned to exhibit his power on a day that was special to Serbian patriots. Numerous officials were apprehensive. Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pasic got wind of the plot and told the Serbian Minister in Vienna, Jotza Jovanovitch, that a Black Hand assassination attempt was imminent. It is also believed that the Crown Prince of Serbia went as far as rewarding some of the plotters.41 Anti-Ferdinand pamphlets had been circulated in Orthodox parishes in the Bosnia-Herzegovina countryside. The archduke was surely aware of the threat of violence when visiting Sarajevo. Terrorist acts were numerous at the beginning of the twentieth century. A rash of anarchist bombings and assassinations in the 1890s had made their mark: in 1894, an Italian anarchist assassinated French President Sadi Carnot; in 1897, anarchists assassinated Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Antonio Canovas, the Spanish prime minister; in 1900 the Italian King Umberto I was killed by an anarchist. Umberto’s murder inspired the assassination of American President William McKinley by self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz. (McKinley’s murder in September of 1901 ushered in the presidency of the inimitable American President Theodore Roosevelt.) From 1903 to 1913, 33 major political figures were assassinated throughout the world, three in the Balkans (1907, Prime Minister of Bulgaria Nikola Petkov; 1909, Albanian politician Fehmi Effendi; 1913, King George of Greece).

41. Barnes, Harry Elmer. The Genesis of the World War, An Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt, Howard Fertig, New York, 1970, p. 161.

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Peculiar Liaisons JUNE 28, 1914 — IN REVERENCE FOR SERBIAN ASSASSINS OF THE PAST The archduke visited Bosnia in order to view army maneuvers. Apis believed that the Austrian army’s presence in Bosnia was the prelude to an attack on Serbia, but it is quite probable that Ferdinand had no intention of attacking Serbia. He surely realized that an attack would bring Russia into a war that would be devastating. Ferdinand may have been more inclined to establish a separate prosperous, autonomous Slavic State within the Austria-Hungarian Empire — but Apis would have feared that just as much. The night before arriving in Sarajevo by train, the archduke and his wife slept in the resort town of Ilidza, Bosnia. The next day, June 28, 1914, they toured the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in the open, four-cylinder Austria-produced Graef und Stift touring car that would take them to Sarajevo city hall. The numerous Serbs living in Sarajevo were celebrating St. Vitus’s Day, also known as “Vidovdan.” June 28, 1914 was the 525th anniversary of the assassination of the Turkish Sultan Murad by a Serbian hero, Milosh Obilich, during the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje. Though the Turks won on the battlefield, the battle created a myriad of legends, myths, and Serbian heroes. The Serbs became increasingly defiant and unified against all perceived enemies.42 The Battle of Kosovo Polje pitted the Serbs, clad in cumbersome but ornate armor, against the lightly clad Turks mounted on swift Mongolian ponies. When defeat appeared imminent, the Serbian nobleman and soldier Milosh Obilich allegedly feigned desertion to the Turkish cause, or so one version of the story goes. When presented to the Turk commander, Sultan Murad, Obilich flung out a hidden dagger and killed the Turk. (Obilich’s real name was “Kobilich,” which meant “broodmare.” Serbs, who thought it shameful that one of their heroes would be called “broodmare,” dropped the “K.”) King Peter I created a bravery medal bearing Obilich’s name in 1912. Some Serbs believed that Obilich should not be honored since the assassination was accomplished through trickery but, as author Rebecca West reported, the patriots of Serbia believed that the deception was justifiable given it was intended to help destroy such a treacherous enemy. Obilich’s use of assassination in the name of Serbian independence would be celebrated and revered by many future assassins who proudly declared them42. Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Archduke of Sarajevo, Little Brown Co., Boston/Toronto, 1984, p. 244.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I selves Serbian patriots. As author Vladimir Dedijer (The Road to Sarajevo) writes, Obilich for the Serbs is the “incarnation of the cult of self-sacrifice.” Lavender Cassels (The Archduke and the Assassin) writes, “Milos Obilich became the epitome of the heroic warrior who sacrificed his life to kill the cruel oppressor; the defeat of Kosovo was portrayed as a national martyrdom, which would be followed by resurrection, and so as an inspiration for the overthrow of foreign tyrants.”43 Though Ferdinand was simply visiting Sarajevo with his wife on the battle’s anniversary, which coincided with his wedding anniversary, for any Young Bosnian revolutionary the archduke was the reincarnation of the hated Sultan. The Battle of Kosovo would later serve as a source of inspiration for Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic, who made a famous appearance in front of a crowd of Serbs at Kosovo Polje on the battle’s 600th anniversary in 1987. There he pointed at the legendary site of the disastrous Serbian defeat, saying, “Nobody, either now or in the future, has the right to beat you.” Five months later he was elected president. Milosevic’s declaration was a rallying cry for Serbs and a prelude to the 1990s wars in Albania and Bosnia that would cost the lives of 200,000. The imperial motorcade of six vehicles traveled along the quay of the Miljacka River, which runs through the heart of the city. Seven years earlier Franz Joseph had visited Sarajevo under extraordinary security that was not afforded his nephew. In order to protect Joseph, officials had evacuated all strangers from the town, confined all anti-Austrians in their homes, and had the streets lined with troops and detectives. For Ferdinand there were several aspiring young assassins lining the route. The seven members of “Young Bosnia” that waited in ambush were Nedjelko Cabrinovic, Vasco Cubrilovic, Trifko Grabez, Danilo Ilic, Mohammed Mehmedbasic, Cvijetko Popovic, and Gavrilo Princip. All were aged 19 to 27. Nedeljko Cabrinovic threw a grenade that bounced off the archduke’s car and rolled beneath the trailing car, exploding and injuring twenty people. Cabrinovic was also armed with cyanide. He swallowed the lethal pill and ran to the river to drown himself. The cyanide was old and only made him vomit. The river was only two feet deep due to the summer heat. He was pulled out the river only half wet and was asked who he was. “A Serbian hero,” he replied. The archduke’s car roared past the other assassins, who did nothing. Four of the conspirators abandoned their posts, leaving only Gavrilo Princip still in 43. Cassels, Lavender. The Archduke and the Assassin, Scarborough House, Briarcliff, New York, 1984, p. 66.

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Peculiar Liaisons the area; but he too had given up hope of seeing the archduke again, so he walked across the street from his post to Moritz Schiller’s café and delicatessen and ordered coffee. The car raced to the city hall where the Lord Mayor met the archduke. The archduke was outraged by the bomb but nevertheless read his speech — though the paper was soaked in the blood of his injured aide-de-camp. Then, the archduke wished to visit the hospital that was to treat the injured. Instead of having him wait for a proper escort of soldiers, the Lord Mayor suggested taking an alternate route, different from the route publicized in newspapers. The archduke’s procession started for the hospital but the Lord Mayor had forgotten to tell the driver of the change in the plan, so the driver continued on the same route as advertised. The Lord Mayor told the driver to stop and back up. The car halted five feet from the Moritz Schiller café, directly in front of Princip. Princip stood up from his seat and pulled a .38 Browning pistol from his pocket, intending to shoot the archduke and the Military Governor, General Oskar Potiorek. Just as he raised his gun, a detective noticed it and began to jump between Princip and the archduke. Incredibly, a bystander saw what Princip was trying to do and kicked the detective, stopping him long enough to allow Princip to continue raising his weapon. The bystander was another Young Bosnian, Mihajlo Pusara, a Sarajevo actor and singer. How much he knew of the plot has never been entirely clear but he was aware of Princip’s presence and his intention.44 It was Pusara who had forwarded the newspaper article concerning Ferdinand’s desire to visit Sarajevo, and his route. Princip shot twice: the deflected shot penetrated the car and Sophie’s chest; the second shot hit the archduke’s neck, severing a jugular vein. Both died minutes later, shortly before noon. Princip testified at his trial that he raised the pistol to his head but was unable to shoot himself; he also swallowed the cyanide but his, too, was impotent and failed to deliver him death. Onlookers pummeled him until he was arrested.45 What was Princip’s state of mind as he stalked the archduke? In the year 2000, Smithsonian writer David DeVoss interviewed Lubica Tuta, eleven years old at the time of the assassination. She said, “I knew his girlfriend, Jelena Milisic. Jelena and Borislav Mihacevic were Young Bosnia revolutionaries with Gavrilo. 44. Pusara escaped into the crowd and was arrested hours later as he sang in a choir celebrating the Vidovdan holiday. Princip tried to clear Pusara of any guilt in the assassination. Kaplan, Robert. Balkan Ghosts, A Journey Through History, St. Martins, 1933, New York, p. 323. 45. Dedijer, Vladimir. The Road to Sarajevo, Simon Shuster, New York, 1966, pp. 319-322.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I Boro used to tease Jelena about spending the night with Gavrilo in the park across the river from where the attack occurred. Gavrilo desperately wanted to make love, but Jelena said no. Even when he told her he probably would die the following morning, she wouldn’t relent...Gavrilo was so angry the morning of June 28 that he would have shot God himself.”46 Whether Apis ever physically met Princip is unclear but Apis’s desire to bring Princip and his radical brethren into the Black Hand as cheap and discardable tools was obvious. Apis biographer MacKenzie writes that Princip, Cabrinovic, and Grabez were too young to be allowed to join the Black Hand, which did not allow “minors.” It didn’t matter whether Apis ever met the Ferdinand assassins; his will was clearly guiding them. Princip may have only been part of the minor group “Death or Life,” but he and his confederates acted with the same calling as the Black Hand: to free the Slavs from the oppressive rule of the Hapsburgs. The Black Hand and the Young Bosnians sought to eliminate Ferdinand but for reasons that were different, if ever so slightly. The Young Bosnians detested the Dual Monarchy of Ferdinand’s Austria and Hungary and wished to live in the idyllic world of a Pan Slavic nation, a Yugoslavian federation. Apis and his Black Hand feared that Ferdinand would try to create a “Greater Serbia” by attacking Serbia and establishing Hapsburg rule over an ersatz federation of Slavs.

INVESTIGATING THE ASSASSINATION Ferdinand and Sophie’s death caused little concern to his uncle, the ruling monarch of Austria-Hungary. The elderly Franz Joseph must have thought it was just one more strange circumstance in his life, like the assassination of his wife and the murder or murder-suicide of his son. He commented optimistically that his nephew’s death would probably act as a pacifier in the ethnically troubled domain. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II responded to the assassination in an equally equable manner. Most Americans probably shared the opinion of a Grand Forks, North Dakota editorialist with the Daily Herald who mistakenly wrote, “To the world, or to a nation, an archduke more or less makes little difference.”47 Political assassination and unrest in the Balkans had become so com46. Devoss, David. “Searching for Gavrilo Princip,” Smithsonian, August 2000, p. 42. 47. Burg, David and Purcell, L. Edward. Almanac of World War I, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, 1998, p. 11.

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Peculiar Liaisons monplace that the archduke’s death was not mentioned in the London Times until July 21st. From the beginning of the new century a political assassination had occurred in the world on an average of once every four months. Initially, Princip and Cabrinovic kept quiet about the attack. Danilo Ilic was captured in a round up of subversives. He volunteered some information. On July 5, three other conspirators were arrested. The investigation was mismanaged, governed by a petty police judge in Sarajevo. They found weapons supplied by Milan Ciganovic and knew that Colonel Apis, the chief of Military Intelligence of the Serbian General Staff, had helped in passing along information and arms to the conspirators. On June 29, riots broke out in Sarajevo with Croats and Moslems attacking the Serbs. By July 5, all the conspirators had been rounded up and arrested. The Catholic Hapsburgs took their revenge on Orthodox Serb peasants, rounding up hundreds and slaughtering them.

THE TRIAL OF PRINCIP AND THE BLACK HAND CONSPIRATORS Princip and his Black Hand companions had initially planned on murdering high Austrian officials, especially in Bosnia; their hatred focused on General Oska Potiorek, the Military Governor of Bosnia. Apis convinced them that “one must strike the snake in the head,” by killing Ferdinand, not the replaceable governors or generals. Removing Ferdinand, Apis argued, would doom the monarchy’s regeneration and reorganization and would remove the main obstacle to Serbian unity. During the trial, after the short introductory passage of a pamphlet concerning the failed and martyred assassin Zerajic was read, Princip, when asked by the judge what he had to say about the text, shouted, “Hail to Zerajic! Hail, and nothing else!” The trial ended October 23, 1914. Of the twenty-five accused, three were hanged on February 3, 1915: Danilo Ilic, Veljko Cubrilovic, and Misko Jovanovic. Nine were set free and the rest were sentenced to long prison sentences. Princip was sentenced to twenty years at hard labor with the proviso that he spend each June 28 of his term without food or water in a darkened cell. He was spared execution due to his age: he was supposedly under the age of twenty on June 28 but no one was really sure of his birth date.48 Jovanovic had helped smuggle the weapons into Bosnia. Veljko Cubrilovic was a teacher who had helped smuggle the assassins into Bosnia. Ilic was one of the seven along the

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I quay and had visited the hero Zerajic’s grave along with Princip during the days when Ilic was translating Oscar Wilde. Six of the seven Young Bosnians who lined the quay, waiting for the archduke, were arrested and convicted. Princip told the police, “I recognized the heir apparent. But as I saw that a lady was sitting next to him, I reflected for a moment whether I should shoot or not. At the same moment I was filled with a peculiar feeling and I aimed at the heir apparent from the pavement — which was made easier because the car was proceeding slower at the moment. Where I aimed I do not know . . .” Mehmed Mehmedbasic, a Bosnian Muslim, alone escaped prosecution.49 Princip told the court that, if one were trying to find that “someone else had instigated the assassination, one strays from the truth. The idea arose in our own minds, and we ourselves executed it.” Princip died of tuberculosis in the hospital of Theresienstadt prison in April 28, 1918; the walls on his cell are marked with his poetry: “Our ghosts will walk through Vienna / And roam through the palace / Frightening the lords.” His body was secretly buried but later was found and moved to a grave built beneath a chapel at St. Mark’s Cemetery in Sarajevo with the remains of other conspirators; the site was marked as a burial place for the “heroes of Vidovdan [the murder of Sultan Murad, St. Vitus’s Day].” With the recent breakup of Yugoslavia, the burial site has been ignored and is unkempt. For years, a modest black tablet was set on the wall of a building overlooking the site of the assassination, “so high above the street level that the casual passer-by would not remark it.” It read, “Here in this historical place, Gavrilo Princip was the initiator of liberty, on the day of the St. Vitus, the 28th of June, 1914.” Princip, whose life has been the topic of a novel, remained a cult hero for years until Serbs attacked the people of Sarajevo in the 1990s.50

48. Princip, by one account, was born on June 13, 1884 but a mistake in the official entry of his birth date by the delivering doctor made his official date of July 13, 1884, which made him under twenty at the time of the shooting and too young for capital punishment. 49. Nedjelko Cabrinovic (who threw a bomb) was sentenced to 20 years and died of tuberculosis in prison in 1916. Vasco Cubrilovic (who was armed with a revolver, but was too afraid to shoot) was sentenced to 16 years and released by the Allies in 1918. Trifko Grabez was sentenced to 20 years. He died of tuberculosis in prison in 1916. Danilo Ilic was executed February 3, 1915. Mohammed Mehmedbasic returned to Sarajevo 1919 and was pardoned for his role in the assassination. Cvijetko Popovic (the motorcade lookout) was sentenced to 13 years. 50. Koning, Hans. Death of a School-Boy, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York, 1974.

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Peculiar Liaisons THE AUSTRIAN ULTIMATUM AND RUSSIAN TREACHERY On July 13 a secret report made by Austrian agents was dispatched to Vienna, claiming that the Serbian government had had no role in the assassination. At the same time a German ambassador to London wrote a letter to a Berlin colleague, blaming the Austrian authorities for sending Ferdinand to an “alley of bomb throwers” even though the Serbian Foreign Minister had warned Austria that a visit would be unwise.51 On paper it appeared there was little sentiment or reason for Austria to rationalize a war against Serbia. However, July 23, 1914 Austria issued an ultimatum to Serbia. Serbia was given until July 25th to accept the terms. Serbia was to immediately publish a declaration condemning terrorism, suppress and dissolve terrorist organizations, and arrest Serbian Milan Ciganovic, Major Vajislav Tankosic, and Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic. 52 The ultimatum was designed to be rejected, so that it would provide a reason for Austria to invade and subdue Serbia before wider repercussions developed. The Austrians were right about the rejection and disastrously wrong about the repercussions. The Serbian government did reject the ultimatum. In fact, many of its intelligence agents, including the head of military intelligence, Apis, had indeed been involved with the Black Hand and were instrumental in the planning and execution of the assassination. The Austrians mobilized their forces along the border, poised to strike at Serbia. On July 28, Austria declared war. Historian Martin Gilbert professes, “few documents have had such an impact on the twentieth century as the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia.” Only the Treaty of Versailles, wrote Gilbert, and Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf compare in their impact on history.53 The assassination of Ferdinand left the Russians in a predicament. Although technically an ally of Serbia, Russia was not unlike Austria-Hungary in its ambitions to subjugate and control the small country. Russia could remain passive, but then it would be perceived as an impotent European power that would remain ineffective, as was the case in the Balkan Wars; or it could stand 51. Gilbert, Martin. A History of the Twentieth Century, Harper Collins, 1977, New York, v. 1, pp. 316. 52. Milan Ciganovic provided six Serbian Army issue hand grenades, four Browning pistols, ammunition, and vials of poison to the assassins. 53. Gilbert, Martin. A History of the Twentieth Century, Harper Collins, 1977, New York, v. 1, p. 317.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I with Serbia and risk a challenge from the alliance of Germany, resulting in a major conflict. The Russians moved troops along the German border. Kaiser Wilhelm II protested the mobilization to his cousin Nicholas II, czar of Russia. The Czar’s war minister (Sukhomlinov) and chief of the general staff (Yanushkievich) told the czar that they not only had mobilized their forces along the German border but were planning to do the same along Austria’s borders. Nicholas ordered the troops be withdrawn from the German border immediately but Sukhomlinov and Yanushkievich kept the troops in place, while indicating to the czar that they had been moved. The czar telegraphed Wilhelm to say that the troops had been removed; when Wilhelm found out otherwise, he naturally assumed his cousin was lying to him. Wilhelm declared war on Russia. On August 1, 1914, the mayhem officially began. Germany declared war on Russia, and then on France on August 3. On August 4, Germany invaded Belgium and Britain declared war on Germany. For continental Europe, Germany and Austro-Hungary could mobilize seven-and-a-half million armed soldiers and the Russians and French ten million. France was a member of the “Triple Entente,” the three European super powers under alliance — Great Britain, Russia, France. France sought revenge for her 1870-1871 defeat at the hands of Germany; Russia likewise saw a way to reconcile her humiliation at the hands of the Japanese by siding with the Slavic people and expanding their boundaries at the expense of the Slavs’ enemy, the Turks. Britain sought a balanced Europe so it could continue to exploit her vast colonial empire. Alliances doomed Europe to war: Russia joined Serbia, Germany sided with Austria-Hungary, France with Russia, Great Britain with France, and eventually the US with Great Britain and France. If there were any doubt about the US’s neutrality concerning the war, it was dashed when the British allegedly intercepted a telegram from Berlin to Mexico in January of 1917. With both sides deadlocked, the Germans were seeking new allies: Japan and Mexico. The “Zimmermann” telegram urged Mexico and Japan to attack the US. Berlin promised Mexico that it would recover lost land in the form of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. What Japan would gain was not entirely clear. The sinking of the Lusitania gave Wilson the official impetus for entering the war as an act that would “make the world safer for democracy.” The US Congress voted to go to war with Germany on April 7, 1917, four days after Wilson addressed the Congress with a speech in which he said, “We enter this war only where we are clearly forced into it because there are no other means of defending our rights.” On December 7, 1917 the US declared war on Austria-Hungary. The Americans’ fervor was fanned by the

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Peculiar Liaisons great propaganda machine in Hollywood. Films like The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin, Pershing’s Crusaders, and To Hell With The Kaiser were wildly popular in 1917 and created angry mobs outside theaters when the overflow crowds were denied admission. While Hollywood refined the motion picture as an art form and propaganda tool, a German soldier, Erich Maria Remarque, was experiencing the real war and would later write the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, which would become renowned as an anti-war book and eventually an award-winning movie.54

THE DEMISE OF THE BULL Apis avoided apprehension and prosecution for Ferdinand’s murder, but he was not forgotten. Serbian Regent Prince Alexander and Prime Minister Pasic, both of whom believed Apis was plotting to assassinate them, feared him. They also accused him of negotiating secretly with the Germans for a separate peace treaty, but little evidence has been found to substantiate the charge.55 By 1916, it seemed credible that Germany and Austria would win the war and take over Serbia. Pasic feared that the Serbian government’s role in the plot to kill Ferdinand would be discovered; he conceived a scheme to kill Apis, under the direction of a General Zivkovitch and another secret society, aptly called White Hand. Zivkovitch hired a henchman to poison Apis but the hireling lost his nerve.56 Apis was arrested on December 15, 1916 with other leading members of the Black Hand and was charged with planning to assassinate Alexander and Pasic, secretly drafting a peace agreement with Germany, and inciting a mutiny in the army in order to switch to the German cause. His chief aide, Major Vajislav Tankosic, had recently been killed in military action defending Serbia. Apis was tried for treason in 1917 in Thessaloniki, Greece. Concerning Ferdinand’s death he testified that the Serbian “government was kept informed of the doings of the organization [Black Hand], that the foreign minister knew and approved.”

54. The novel and film presented a strong anti-war message. Initially rejected as unreadable, it became a phenomenal bestseller and was translated into 15 languages. 55. Dedijer, Vladimir. The Road to Sarajevo, Simon Shuster, New York, 1966, p. 396. 56. Mackenzie, David. Apis: The Congenial Conspirator, The Life of Col. Dragutin Dimitrijevic, East European Monographs, Boulder, Colorado, Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1989, p.178.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I Though he was accused of plotting to kill Alexander and Pasic, there was no evidence. Their investigators tortured several members of the Black Hand, including Mehmed Mehmedbasic, and all stubbornly refused to say that Apis had plotted against the prince or prime minister. Only Rade Malobabic (who had smuggled grenades into Sarajevo for the Ferdinand attack but escaped before being prosecuted) broke under torture and accused Apis of plotting against the prince and prime minister. Malobabic, arrested in the Ferdinand plot, was kept in chains until November, 1915. When the Serbian Army was forced to abandon the territory where Malobabic was being held, he was freed. Apis took pity on Malobabic, who had suffered considerably in prison, and kept him as an aide until their arrest. Apis was found guilty of treason and executed by firing squad on June 26, 1917, along with Rade Malobabic and Jamor Ljudomir Vulovic. The Bull shouted, “Long live Serbia! Long live Yugoslavia!” before he fell. Ferdinand’s and Dimitrijevic’s life were contrasted in a 1932 novel, Apis und Este.57

UNPRECEDENTED WORLD CARNAGE The First World War created the greatest carnage in world history up to that time and laid the foundation for the Second World War. With the war came colossal battles whose names will live for decades (if not centuries) to come: Verdun, Ypres, Gallipoli, Somme.58 Sixty-five million soldiers, sailors, and airmen were involved. Disease killed one-sixth of the soldiers.59 There were 8 million military deaths, 6 million civilian deaths, 21 million wounded at a cost in 57. Brehm, Bruno. They Call It Patriotism, trans. Goldsmith, Margaret (Apis und Este), Little Brown, and Co., Boston, Massachusetts, 1932. 58. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme, more than 100,000 British and French soldiers formed three lines fifteen miles long, jumped from their trenches and slowly marched in columns into German machine guns firing at one hundred rounds per minute, a technical horror no army had ever faced. By the end of the day the British Army alone had 57,470 casualties, the biggest loss ever suffered by any army in a single day. 59. Audoin-Rouzeau, Stephane, Becker, Annette. 14-18 Understanding the Great War, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2002, pp. 21-47. In March of 1918 the Spanish influenza spread from soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas to other miliatry installations throughout the country and the world. It killed 21.6 million worldwide, 12.5 million in India alone. Wallechinsky, David and Wallace, Irving. The People’s Almanac, Doubleday, Garden City, N.J., p. 547.

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Peculiar Liaisons early twentieth-century dollars of almost $282 billion.60 Another account puts the military dead at 10 million, with a cost of $337 billion.61 In August 1915, the Turks used the chaos of the war as a cover for attacking the Armenians. Though Turks and Armenians had lived as peaceful neighbors for centuries, the Turks dreamed of a Pan-Turkish empire while the Armenians longed for the ideal Christian-based autonomous state. The Turks “solved” the Armenian problem by killing as many of them as possible, mostly by “relocating” the Armenians in what amounted to a death march. More than 1.4 million Armenians were killed. When the Allies learned of the slaughter in 1915, they announced that the Turks would be held responsible for “crimes against humanity,” the first use of the term. Author Peter Balakian has said that no history of World War I can be understood without understanding what the Turks did to the Armenians.62 Ex-President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Theodore Roosevelt called the Armenian genocide “the greatest crime of the war.” Various Armenian militants struck back at the Turks throughout the following decades. One group, the Armenian Genocide, was created in 1975 and claimed responsibility for the murder of Turkish diplomats. “When the twentieth century began,” wrote historian Martin Gilbert, “assassination was regarded as one of the evils of the nineteenth century that would not be perpetuated in ‘modern times.’ The handiwork of a discredited ideology — anarchism — assassination was thought to have no place in the new century.”63 Though survivors of the “Great War” looked back in nostalgia at the felicitous time of a “Long Peace” during the beginning of the twentieth century, when the war started British citizens in their sixties had already seen 24 wars throughout the world, though they were brief and peripheral to the British citizenry.64 60. Axelrod, Alan. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World War I, Alpha Books, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2000, p. 3. 61. Stallings, Laurene. The First World War — A Photo History, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1933. The French lost nearly two million soldiers and the Germans a little over two million soldiers. Conservative estimates for deaths of Serbians were 775,000, which included soldiers and citizens that died due to disease and starvation — 15 percent of the Serbian population; the French lost 16% of their soldiers, the Germans 15.4 %, Serbia 37%, Turkey, 27%, Romania 25%, Bulgaria 22%. 62. Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Awakening to International Human Rights, Harper Collins, New York, 2003. 63. Gilbert, Martin. A History of the Twentieth Century, Harper Collins, 1977, New York, v. 1, p. 915. 64. Robson, Stuart. The First World War, Longman, London/New York, 1995, pp. 1-2.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I PRINCIP, OBILICH, AND ZERAJIC — ASSASSINS PASSING THE TORCH What were Princip’s real motives? Some historians have considered that it was the perfect political murder, and suggest it is impossible to know the true motives and truth; but Princip may have thought of himself as an avenging Serbian hero like the legendary Milosh Obilich, the Serbian assassin-hero of the Battle of Kosovo, and Bodgan Zerajic, the failed assassin whose grave was a regular visiting place for Princip before his act in Sarajevo. Like the hero-assassin Milosh Obilich, Princip has been memorialized with a name that was not originally his, and like Obilich he used a hidden weapon to assassinate an enemy of Serbia. Neither doubted his resolve nor reason in acting out his murders. A variety of countries and secret societies have been blamed for complicity in the archduke’s murder including the Bolsheviks, whom Alfred von Wegerer, a Sarajevo assassination expert, identified as instigators. He based the theory on the words of Bolshevik leader Karl Redek, who said in 1937 that Princip was an example of a political prisoner who kept his secret to the end. Though Leon Trotsky, the compatriot of the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, claimed he was opposed to individual terrorism, he had visited Serbia in 1914 and had been acquainted with members of the Black Hand. Czarist Russia has also been named as a possible conspirator with reports that the Czar’s secret police, Ochrana,65 infiltrated the Young Bosnians and encouraged violent acts against Austria and possibly aided Apis in the plot.66 A transcript of the trial reveals a possible connection between the Black Hand and the much-maligned society of Freemasons.67 In 1914, the British Foreign Secretary recognized that “the world will presumably never be told all that was behind the murders . . .”68 On May 12, 1916, a doctor asked Princip if he believed the assassination was a service. Dr. Pappenheim’s notes read, “Cannot believe that world war was a consequence of

65. Ochrana was the intelligence and secret service under the Russian czars from 1881 to 1917. 66. Dedijer, Vladimir. The Road to Sarajevo, Simon Shuster, New York, 1966, p. 20. 67. The Alexandria-Washington Lodge of Virginia defines Freemasonry as "the oldest and the largest fraternal order in the world. It is a universal brotherhood of men dedicated to serving God, family, fellowman and country. The heritage of modern Freemasonry is derived from the organized guilds or unions of stonemasons who constructed the beautiful cathedrals and other stately structures throughout Europe during the middle ages." 68. Dedijer, Vladimir. The Road to Sarajevo, Simon Shuster, New York, 1966, p. 18.

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Peculiar Liaisons the assassination; cannot feel himself responsible for the catastrophe; therefore cannot say if it was a service. But fears he did it in vain.” The Communist regime headed by Josip Broz (Tito) boosted Gavrilo Princip’s reputation as a hero. A Princip museum was opened in 1953 at the corner where he made his historical stand against Ferdinand and the Austrians. The Young Bosnian Museum was a shrine to Princip’s memory as well as other conspirators of his age. A bridge was named after him and impressions of his footprints were placed in the spot where he fired the shots. When the Serbs attacked Sarajevo in 1992, the citizens turned on the Young Bosnian Museum, stealing and smashing artifacts. The museum represented the former Yugoslavia. The surviving material of the museum was moved to another location but some items like the clothes Princip wore are still available for viewing. In April of 2003, the museum was refurbished with a city donation of $33,000 so that the shooting could be documented in the “context of Bosnia under Austrian rule at the turn of the century.”69 Ferdinand’s and his wife’s bodies were laid to rest in the “Franz Ferdinand Museum” in lower Austria within Artstetlen Castle. Otto von Bismarck, the heroic Chancellor of the Second Reich of Germany, feared assassination himself and carried a revolver. Bismarck was chairman of the June, 1878 Congress of Berlin, a month-long meeting of European powers that helped create alliances, for better or worse. With a recent Russian victory over the Turks, the Treaty of San Stefano awarded Macedonia to Bulgaria. Bismarck found this unacceptable, fearing too much Russian influence within the region. The Congress of Berlin delegated Macedonia back to Turkish rule. The borders of Montenegro and Serbia were considered irrelevant to the welfare of Europe. The agreement in Berlin allowed the Turks to stay in Macedonia, raping and torturing girls, it was said, “with boiling oil and hot irons. They stole cattle, broke into stores, and buried people in mud inside pigsties for not paying exorbitant taxes.”70 Macedonia, wrote Balkan Wars scholar Andre Gerolymatos, was a microcosm of the Balkans, a mosaic of Muslims, Christians and Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, Vlachs, and Gypsies, with all the past of war and genocidal atrocities so characteristic of the region.71 After essentially ignoring

69. Kampschror, Beth. “The Assassin’s Footsteps,” Transitions Online, March 17, 2003. 70. Kaplan, Robert. Balkan Ghosts, A Journey Through History, St. Martins, 1933, New York, pp. 54-5. 71. Gerolymatos, Andre. The Balkan Wars — Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twelfth Century and Beyond, Basic Books, New York, 2002, p. 207.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I the Balkans, Bismarck remarked that war would erupt some day because of “some damn silly thing in the Balkans.” The Great War did not end until November 11, 1918 with the Versailles Treaty, an agreement that helped set up bitterness in Germany and the necessary factors to start the second “Great War.” The Great War had become truly the first world war when non-European countries like Japan, China, and the US joined along with the colonial alliances of Britain: Indian, Kenya, Canada, and Australia. In 1919 French General Ferdinand Foch said of the Versailles Treaty that he helped draft, “This is not a peace treaty, it is an armistice for twenty years.”72 Twenty years later the Second World War began. “The First World War,” wrote John Keegan, “inaugurated the manufacture of mass death that the second brought to a pitiless consummation.”73

THE IMRO, THE IRA, AND DADA Historians Burg and Purcell wrote about the reason for starting the Great War: “In essence, the war had come about because a handful of politicians thought they could improve the lot of their nations by means of a short, decisive conflict.” 74 As authors Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker put it, the Great War became “a paradigm case for thinking about what is the very essence of history: the weight of the dead on the living.”75 The central paradox of the war, they wrote, was that it was waged by each side in the belief that it would “bring a new and radiant world in the future” and rid humanity of its most horrible flaw, war: thus it was the war to end all wars. The tremendous loss of life was unbearable and created a rise of spiritualism, especially in England. Celebrated writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lost his son, his brother, a brother-in-law from his first marriage and three brothers-in-law from his second marriage. Rudyard Kipling lost his son and devoted much of his time to a memorial dedicated to his son. Both writers tried to communicate with the dead through séances; Doyle 72. General Foch rose to command the French Ninth Army in the French counter-attack at Marne. Foch uttered his famous line in September 1914: “My center is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.” 73. Keegan, John. The First World War, Knopf, New York, 1999, p. 4. 74. Burg, David and Purcell, L. Edward. Almanac of World War I, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1998, p. 10. 75. Audoin-Rouzeau, Stephane and Becker, Annette. 14-18 Understanding the Great War, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2002, p. 1.

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Peculiar Liaisons devoted much of his time to the pursuit of understanding various aspects of the occult.76 Social changes caused by the war were profound: the war ended the ancient Hapsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman dynasties — empires that had ruled Europe for centuries. While the war raged in 1917, Russia’s political scheme was drastically altered by the Bolshevik Revolution. In November of 1917, the Balfour Declaration committed Britain to help establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, an act that has had profound impact on the world ever since. One of the first champions of a Jewish state was journalist Theodor Herzl, who tried to garner international support at the First Zionist congress in August, 1897. It seems ironic that Herzl came from Austria, considering the Hapsburgs of Austria’s impact on World War I and the influence another Austrian, Adolf Hitler, would have on the Second World War and the future of the Jewish people in Europe and Palestine. Another secret organization created in 1893 in Thessaloniki, Greece (also known as Salonika, named after Alexander the Great’s half-sister), the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), was devoted to “creating political, economic, and social chaos,” which would make the country unsafe for European investment and force the Ottoman Empire to grant the region autonomy. 77 Thessaloniki was the launching site for Alexander the Great’s famous conquests and, centuries later, Apis’s trial. The IMRO’s first enemy was the Ottoman Empire. Like that of the Black Hand, the chaos created by the IMRO failed to lead to an autonomous Macedonia. After the second Balkan War the IMRO switched its purpose to recovering lost lands of Macedonia. While secret societies like the Black Hand faded into obscurity, the IMRO flourished into the twentieth century with killers swearing allegiance over a gun and an Orthodox Bible and attacking, among others, Serbs, in some cases murdering entire staffs of schools in the 1920s and 1930s. A strong contingent of the IMRO worked in Bulgaria after World War I, dedicated to recapturing from the Yugoslavs and Greeks what they perceived as their part of Macedonia. In the 1930s an assassination could be ordered through the IMRO for $20. The most famous chieftain of the IMRO was Ivanco Mihailov. He agreed to marry his wife only if she killed his rival, which she did.78

76. Audoin-Rouzeau, Stephane, Becker, Annette. 14-18 Understanding the Great War, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2002, p. 159. 77. Gerolymatos, Andre. The Balkan Wars — Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twelfth Century and Beyond, Basic Books, New York, 2002, p. 192.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I While trench warfare raged on the European continent, Irish Catholic organizations started a rebellion during the Easter week of 1916. Taking advantage of Britain’s preoccupation with the war in France, armed Irish men occupied government buildings in Dublin. British troops eventually quelled the riot but not before killing 1300 people, an outrage that galvanized radicals into the Irish Volunteers and eventually the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1919. A significant figure in the Easter week uprising and the subsequent fight for independence was Michael Collins, an Irishman born in West Cork. He was second in command under Joseph Plunkett during the Easter Week uprising. In 1917, Collins became part of Sinn Fein, the so-called first political party of Ireland. Within the Sinn Fein network Collins helped create an intelligence network, a national loan to fund a rebellion, an assassination squad (“The Twelve Apostles”), and an arms-smuggling operation. The first recruits were warned that their “work would not be suitable for anyone who had scruples about taking a life.” The Twelve Apostles, also known as The Squad, targeted British agents and their sympathizers.79 The Squad was officially founded September 19, 1919. Like Dimitrijevic, Collins was an intelligence officer who created an assassination squad and had a fanatical devotion to the cause of nationalism. Both men died violently — Dimitrijevic by state execution and Collins by assassination, an act still shrouded in mystery. The Nazis made an effort to ally themselves with the IRA in 1940 by recruiting members for sabotage against the British.80 The IRA, and the IMRO that was established in the late nineteenth century, are among the oldest terror organizations in Europe, distinctive in their longevity and use of violence coupled with the use of legitimate political mechanisms.81 The need to express the horror and futility of the war gave rise to a unique body of expression in the form of Dadaism. George Grosz, a German artist, 78. Sulzberger, C.L. A Long Row of Candles — Memoirs and Diaries, 1934-54, MacMillan Co., 1969, p. 64. 79. Coogan, Tim Pat. The Man Who Made Ireland. Roberts Rinehart Publishing, Niwot, Colorado, 1992, p. 116. 80. As the Nazi party gained in power and influence in the 1930s in Germany, the Irish Republican Army was also gaining ground in Ireland. IRA man Frank Ryan was trained as a saboteur in Berlin in May of 1940, though he never returned to Ireland to use his knowledge. Abwehr agents Herman Goetz and Ernst W. Drohl failed to create an alliance with the IRA, though the two made it to the shores of Ireland. Moloney, Ed. A Secret History of the IRA, W.W. Norton, New York, 2002, pp. 3-10. 81. Currie, Stephen. Terrorists and Terrorism Groups, Lucent Books, San Diego, Ca., 2002, pp. 42-56.

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Peculiar Liaisons became swept up in the call for duty and enlisted in the German Army in 1914. Quickly he learned what all other soldiers learned. Instead of being bathed in the shining light of heroic deeds and easy victories, Grosz was engulfed in what he called the filth, idiocy, and deformity of the war. Grosz was medically discharged, recalled to service, seemingly went mad, was accused of being a deserter, and eventually was admitted to a mental hospital. He began drawing his hatred and disillusionment of the war: men cursing the moon, soldiers without noses, war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms, a skeleton dressed as a recruit. Grosz’ anti-war sentiment soon made him a target of the German government. In major European cities like Zurich and Paris, Grosz, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton and many others began working in the “Dada” movement, staging “demonstrations” that consisted of readings and drawing exhibitions as well as producing Dada magazines (Every Man His Own Football, The Bordello, Rose-Colored Glasses). Dadaism, once claimed by Tzara as the “ism of isms,” was first a reflection of the horrors war imposed on the human psyche, then it became anti-war, then anti-manifesto, then an inspiration for new abstract painters (Klee and Kandinsky), a voice for anarchism and pure nonsense, an inspiration for the surrealism art movement, and finally an “ism” declared dead and meaningless by its own inventors.82

A KARADJORDJE ASSASSINATED — VLADA THE CHAUFFEUR On October 9, 1934 the Serbian born King of Yugoslavia, Alexander Karadjordje, was assassinated in Marseille as he drove in an open touring car similar to the one Ferdinand had used in Sarajevo. This time the conspiracy was traced to a Bulgarian hit man, Vlada Cherozamsky,83 who was in league with the proCatholic Croatian nationalist terrorist group, Ustasha, headed by Ante Pavelic. 84 Like Princip’s killing of Ferdinand, the Ustasha and the IMRO 82. Huelsenbeck would declare in 1970 that the Dada movement was “against the war [and] all ideology, because the ideology based on Kant and Fichte and Hegel had become compatible with war...the culture of Goethe and Schiller had become compatible with war...we were not politicians, we were artists, painters and poets...we expressed ourselves in art, even though we were against art. That is the basic paradox of Dadaism, which has not been resolved to this day.” Friedrich, Otto. Before the Deluge — A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Harper and Row, New York, 1972, pp. 37, 51, 148-9. 83. Bulgarian assassin Vlada Cherozamsky (aka Georgiev) was on the run for a number of assassinations. He was hired by the IMRO and killed by French security guards immediately following the attack on Alexander.

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1. The Black Hand That Ignited World War I thought the assassination of Alexander would end Serbian rule over their beloved Croatia and Macedonia. The Ustasha would take an influential role in the genocide of Orthodox Serbs as it joined in a murderous coalition with the Nazis of the 1940s. From a hospital bed in England, British novelist and journalist Rebecca West listened to a radio news flash describing the death of Alexander. Wondering if Alexander’s death would trigger another European conflict, as soon as she was back on her feet she set out to investigate the Balkans. A six-week journey through the area in 1937 resulted in a remarkable work, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon — A Journey Through Yugoslavia. This half-million word book published in 1941 examined the Balkans more deeply than anyone had done to date. West, born Cicily Fairfield in 1892, was a prolific and forceful writer during her ninetyyear life, which was punctuated with a ten-year relationship with writer H.G. Wells and her acclaimed study of the Balkans. No serious study of the Balkans can omit Rebecca West’s work, which was immediately heralded as a literary masterpiece and described as a polemical pro-Serbian travel diary. West describes numerous aspects of the clash between the archduke and the Black Hand within her lengthy tome, and includes her meeting with Cabrinovic’s sister. The sister denied that Cabrinovic had tuberculosis at the time of the assassination, though he did die of the disease in prison. Some writers had written that Cabrinovic’s father was an Austrian spy though there seems, according to West, little to substantiate the claim. Inspired by West’s book, Robert D. Kaplan published Balkan Ghosts — A Journey Through History in 1990, just months before Yugoslavia broke out into another set of bloody conflicts. Balkan Ghosts is a combination of historical analysis, political reporting, and travel book. In 1993, President Clinton read the book when he was contemplating taking action in the Balkans. Kaplan’s description of the ethnic rivalry reportedly “encouraged the President’s pessimism about the region,” wrote Kaplan in the foreword of a later edition of the book, and was a “factor in his decision not to launch an overt military response in support of the Bosnian Moslems,” besieged by the Bosnian Serbs.

84. Pavelic and his hardliner Croatian nationalists, as well as the IMRO and Macedonian nationalists, were outraged over Alexander’s hard Serbian rule of their lands. Believing that Alexander’s suspension of the Yugoslavian constitution as well as his military dictator style of rule would keep Croatia from independence, Pavelic acted with the backing of Mussolini and the Hungarians in his quest to cripple the Serbian rule.

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2. THE ACE AND QUEEN OF WORLD WAR I SPIES AGENT SIDNEY REILLY AND COURTESAN MATA HARI Having watched the form of our traitors for a number of years, I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It’s a lout’s game. — Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason, Introduction I am a woman who enjoys herself very much; sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. — Mata Hari, Mata Hari, The True Story, Russell Howe Perhaps the single most important fact about Sidney Reilly is that he never truly existed at all. — Richard Spence, Trust No One — The Secret World of Sidney Reilly

Though the name Mata Hari is one of the most famous in all of espionage, she has been called the worst spy of the century, the most misunderstood and tragic espionage figure in history, and the “Spy Who Never Was.” Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was a poor Dutch girl who became a European celebrity and brilliantly marketed herself as a Malaysian exotic dancer. She was eventually accused by the French as a spy for the Germans, an accusation that has been questioned for decades. Her real role in French and German espionage has been the subject of numerous investigations, biographies, and scholarly studies. She said of herself that she was much better a harlot than a traitor.

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Peculiar Liaisons The name Sidney Reilly is associated with World War I, British intelligence, and the Bolshevik uprising in 1917. He has been called the “Ace of Spies”; the facts of his life are difficult to find and shrouded in mystery largely by his own design.85 Newspapers and biographical works have gushed superlatives concerning his efficiency as a British agent: “One of the bravest men of his time,” “The greatest spy in history,” “surely not only the master spy of this century but of all time,”86 “One of the most amazing men of his generation,”87 and “acted on a gigantic heroic scale as a maker and indeed breaker of governments.”88 He has also been portrayed as the first agent to infiltrate Western intelligence for the Kremlin and as a self-centered criminal who would do anything for money. To mask his true identity, he employed disguises and a variety of noms de guerre: Signor Massino, an Italian businessman; Mr. M. Constantine, a Greek businessman; and Comrade Relinksy, an officer of the Russian secret police. Sidney Reilly has been the subject of numerous biographical studies89 and a PBS miniseries. His disappearance in 1925 has remained a mystery though classified MI5 files released in May 2002 seemingly present the official description of his demise in Russia. A man with little formal education, he allegedly spoke seven languages fluently and used eleven passports. During certain periods of his life he accumulated impressive personal wealth, enjoyed the charms of many wives and other women, and occasionally acted as one of the most prized British intelligence agents in the empire’s history. During his life, which seems to have spanned a little over half a century, he gained the reputation of savvy businessman, incomparable collector of military intelligence, and unscrupulous, immoral scoundrel.

85. Spence, Richard B. “Sidney Reilly in America, 1914-17,” Intelligence and Security, v. 10, n. 1, January, 1995, p. 92. 86. Ainsworth, John. “Sidney Reilly’s Reports from Southern Russia, December 1918 — March 1919,” Europe-Asia Studies, December 1998, v. 50, i. 8, p. 1447. 87. Lockhart, Robin B. Reilly: Ace of Spies, Penguin, Harmondsworth, England, 1967, p. 7. 88. Kettle, Michael, The True Story of the World’s Greatest Spy, Sidney Reilly, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1983, p. 11. 89. Spence, Richard. Trust No One — The Secret World of Sidney Reilly, Feral House, Los Angeles, California, 2002, and Cook, Andrew. Ace of Spies — The True Story of Sidney Reilly, Tempus, Great Britain, 2002. Shepherd-Brooke, Gordon. Iron Maze — The Western Secret Services and the Bolsheviks, MacMillan, 1998, London.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies MURDER IN INDONESIA No one had heard an intruder but nevertheless there was one in the MacLeod home on June 27, 1899, in Medan, Sumatra. Someone had slipped into the house and poisoned the two MacLeod children, Norman and Juana Luisa. When their mother, Griet MacLeod, discovered the horror, a Dutch doctor was summoned but he could save the life only of Juana Luisa — Norman, just two and a half years old, was dead. Why would anyone poison two children? The MacLeods were a military family whose patriarch, John, bore the title of Chief Netherlands Military Officer, the garrison commander for the local Dutch Colonial Army. The MacLeods had left for the south Pacific in January 1897 and had lived in various cities of Java and Sumatra, known to Europeans as the Dutch East Indies. John MacLeod, a Scotsman serving in the Dutch Colonial Army, played the roles of father, husband, and military officer. However, MacLeod may have taken on more sinister roles as well. Two stories subsequently circulated through Medan. MacLeod was known to have displayed a short temper in his work and at home. It was known in the community that he had given a terrible beating to a native soldier who was in love with the MacLeod household nurse. The reason for the beating was never known. To seek revenge on MacLeod, it was believed, the soldier poisoned the children. The other version, and thought to be less likely, was that MacLeod had made successful advances to the nurse and the native lover discovered this and subsequently added poison to a sauce that was poured over the children’s rice. Griet, the mother, thought that the nurse had done it but did not know why. The source of the trouble always seemed to point to John MacLeod. No one ever was prosecuted and the real reason for the poisonings was never discovered. The tragedy weighed heavily on an already strained marriage. The family doctor noted to a writer that Mrs. MacLeod was always patient and well behaved despite insults John MacLeod directed toward her. He called MacLeod “unbalanced,” and Griet claimed that he had threatened her with a pistol. When MacLeod was transferred to Java, Griet and her daughter lived separately from John under a legal separation. Griet suffered an attack of typhoid fever. By 1902, the marriage seemed to be doomed. The MacLeods returned to the Netherlands. Realizing that her life with John MacLeod was over, Griet was desperate to find employment. Leaving Juana Luisa with her father, Griet sought work in Amsterdam and The Hague but was allured Paris. She had always been fasci-

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Peculiar Liaisons nated with the romance of Paris and finally decided she would go there. She arrived without a penny, and decided to pose as a model and worked in one of the popular equestrian circuses, where she performed a “temple dance” upon the back of a horse.90 In only a few weeks she created a new persona for herself that would become a European legend. She changed her name, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle MacLeod, to the exotic title Mata Hari (Malaysian for “Eye of the Dawn,” or Eye of Day) and became a colorful, veil-whirling Javanese dancer who would eventually attain notoriety throughout Europe as an erotic dancer and alleged espionage agent.

THE POOR DUTCH GIRL BECOMES A LIBERATED EUROPEAN STAR Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was the second child of Adam and Antje Zelle, born August 7, 1876, in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. Adam was a successful hat maker who provided a good home for his daughter and three sons until his business went bankrupt; his daughter soon learned the humiliation of poverty and the loss of social status. Not long after the financial disaster, her mother died. Margaretha briefly attended a teachers’ college but, according to one version of her life’s tale, was forced to leave for having relations with the headmaster. Facing hard financial times, the bright Margaretha answered a “lonely hearts” advertisement placed by John (sometimes known as Rudolf or Campbell) MacLeod (“Officer on home leave from Dutch East Indies would like to meet girl of pleasant character — object matrimony”); which resulted in a 1895 marriage. From 1897 to 1902, the MacLeods lived in Java and Sumatra where Margaretha, twenty years MacLeod’s junior, learned the exotic ways of Indonesia. Margaretha made her first appearance as an artistic dancer in early 1905 at the Paris salon of Mme. Kireevsky, a singer and social butterfly. Though she danced with an oriental flair, she was billed as Lady MacLeod, until the moniker Mata Hari was invented. As she made the rounds of Parisian salons, an English weekly, The King, wrote of a “woman from the Far East...laden with perfume and jewels,” who had come to Europe to “introduce some of the richness of the Oriental colour and life” by dancing and discarding veils with “suggestion of naugh-

90. Howe, Russell Warren. Mata Hari — The True Story, Dodd, Mead and Co., 1986, New York, p. 43.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies tiness.” The success in the private rooms led an industrialist turned art collector, Emile Guimet, to present her at his Museum of Oriental Art built on the Place d’Iena. It was for her first performance at the museum that she used her exotic name, Mata Hari, and though she billed herself initially as an Indian dancer, no one really cared, for Paris loved this new star whether she was Hindu, or Malaysian, or Javanese, or Indian; it was all the same — the far East. Mata Hari declared, “My dance is a sacred poem in which each movement is a word and whose every word is underlined by music. The temple in which I dance can be vague or faithfully reproduced, for I am the temple.” She performed in veils, jeweled breast plates, and a body stocking, to soft music that gradually approached a crescendo. Few people in Paris knew of the Dutch Indies, so she was able to spin fantastic tales including the notion that she was a Javanese princess, or the daughter of a British lord, and had learned her dance in a Buddhist temple. During her quick rise to fame and wealth, she met John and Juana Luisa at Arnhem rail station in the Netherlands. She rode in first class and wore beautiful clothes. She begged John to let her take the bewildered Juana Luisa to Paris but John refused, and only asked that she help with his expenses. Later, she would arrange to have one of her servants try to kidnap Juana Luisa, to no avail. Two and a half years later, angry that there were so many imitators throughout the Paris music halls, she made a speech that was printed in the British publication, The Era, claiming she was flattered but disappointed to note that the dances were inaccurate “from scientific and aesthetic points of view.” Ever the show-woman, Mata Hari told her audience that, “born in Java in the midst of a marvelous tropical vegetation, I have been taught from my earliest childhood the deepest meaning of these dances, which constitute a cult, a religion.” By some accounts she embellished her legend by claiming that her husband found her in a temple as a prisoner, helped her to escape, and eventually married her — then died from fever. By 1907, she was a wealthy woman with numerous admirers. John MacLeod used photos of her posing nude as Venus at the annual carnival in Nice to force a divorce after four years of separation. Her dancing was seen throughout Europe, Spain, Berlin, London, and Vienna. The beautiful Dutch girl had reinvented herself and succeeded. As biographer Sam Waagenaar wrote, “she found herself the center of a new world — a world that adored, admired, envied, and finally killed her.”91

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Peculiar Liaisons WAR FOR THE DANCER In August 1914, while she was a dancer in Berlin, war broke out and closed down the theater where she performed. By one account Berlin’s chief of police became a lover and convinced her that she could provide him information concerning the French. However, it is clear that she was not pro-Germany. She was unable to leave Germany and enter France because she didn’t have appropriate papers, and her situation became desperate — her luggage was lost in France, while she was still in Germany. When she was finally able to leave behind the troubles she experienced in Germany, she found new ones in her native Netherlands. Spending a few months in Amsterdam, which had established a status of neutrality in the war, Mata Hari was able to find more sympathetic men to pay her hotel bills. She danced in December of 1914 at The Hague’s Royal Theatre and performed her last dance in Arnhem. The world might have heard very little about Mata Hari if she had not insisted on leaving the safety and boredom of her native Netherlands and traveling back to Paris. On the way, her ship was stopped at Folkstone on the English Channel. Her appearance raised the suspicion of an immigration officer who wrote that the handsome and fashionably dressed woman bore an “appearance most unsatisfactory and should be refused permission to return to the U.K.” This report was sent to nine official British officers as well as Scotland Yard and would be a key element in her eventual personal disaster. How she became involved with German intelligence is not entirely clear. By one account Baron von Mirbach, a German intelligence officer, was the first to approach Mata Hari about spying for Germany; however, biographer Sam Waagenaar never mentions the officer. In another account she was given the code name H-21 and provided lodging in a hotel in Frankfurt-am-Main, where she was trained in making observations and writing reports as well as the use of invisible ink, though the image of Mata Hari studying to write detailed reports under the direction of espionage trainers challenges the imagination. What is known is that she found no dancing opportunities in wartime Paris and returned to The Hague after a month’s absence. In May 1916, she was surprised to have a visit from a German intelligence officer and consul to Germany based in Amsterdam, Karl Cramer. He offered her 20,000 francs to “undertake some small 91. Waagenaar, Sam. Mata Hari — A Biography, Appleton Century, New York, 1965, pp. 3741, 79.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies commissions in Paris that would be much appreciated by the people of Germany,” as she later testified. She accepted the money, agreed to be what was understood as a low-level informer, and promptly destroyed the invisible ink that Cramer gave her, on the way to Paris. Within 24 hours of her arrival in Paris she was under surveillance by France’s intelligence service, le Deuxieme Bureau, due to the strange report the British immigration officer had filed. Early in 1917, one of her reports was intercepted by the French, which led to her arrest. It was believed that she was providing bad information to both the French and the Germans, and eventually neither side trusted her. Many writers have questioned Mata Hari’s role as an espionage agent. Biographer Leon Shirmann wrote, “She was constantly creating a new past,” she was “not a particularly good dancer, she was good at undressing. And she was no great spy, either. She never delivered anything of value. It was just salon gossip. Tidbits learned at parties.” The celebrated French novelist and dancer Colette wrote that Mata Hari hardly danced at all but she “knew how to slowly remove her clothes revealing a long, slim, and proud body. She arrived at her recitals practically nude, danced vaguely with lowered eyes, and then disappeared, enveloped in veils.”92

MATA HARI THE LEGEND — REVENGE ON THE COURTESAN Major Thomas Coulson wrote a 1930 biography, Mata Hari — Courtesan and Spy, damning Mata Hari as an agent who cost thousands of French lives with her work. He was inspired to write his book when a fellow soldier named Hogg died in his arms cursing the name of Mata Hari. Investigating Hogg’s last words: “If we could only find that damned dancer . . .” Coulson allegedly made inquiries throughout Hogg’s company and claimed that Mata Hari had learned of the location of the soldier’s company when Hogg and a companion procured spectacles in Paris. Major Coulson wrote that the French caught Mata Hari as she passed a letter to a French official. The French official was to deliver the message to Mata Hari’s daughter. Coulson claims the letter was written in code and was evidence that she was a spy; however, biographer Howe points out that the letter was

92. Rubin, Daniel. “Mata Hari Was Unjustly Executed, Author Contends,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, Dec. 3, 2001.

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Peculiar Liaisons never used in her trial and most likely did not exist. Howe describes Coulson’s book on Mata Hari as a diatribe against the Dutch woman with more outright inventions than any other book about her, and says Coulson is wrong about her whereabouts and her acquaintances. Coulson claims she was in the war zone close to the battle of Chemin des Dames in 1915, though she was actually in The Hague, and broke. She has been accused of contributing information that cost the lives of thousands — but usually by biographers like Coulson who created entirely fictional episodes in her life. Coulson theorized that she “inherited her amber-tinted body not from her Hindu parents, but from Jewish progenitors.” Her parents were neither Hindu nor Jewish but Dutch and her skin was so white that if she became chilled during a performance her skin became purplish. Coulson also wrote that her prosperous father footed the bill to send her to Paris and that she later danced in London, which has been soundly proven false — her father was bankrupt when she went to Paris, and she never set foot on any stage in Britain. Another antiMata Hari book that helped create an improper legend was Charles Heyman’s La Vraie Mata Hari (The Real Mata Hari), published the same year as Coulson’s book. Howe declares that Heyman’s book accepts at face value numerous fictions and is based on John MacLeod’s version of her life. Numerous biographers (Monique St. Servan, Bernard Newman and Kurt Singer) created fictional scenes and acts concerning Mata Hari’s life, which included painting her as a Communist, aiding the Germans in their success with submarines against Allied shipping, playing a role as a personal bodyguard to Winston Churchill, and bearing some responsibility for the battle of Verdun.93 Many of these outlandish claims are documented and refuted by biographers Sam Waagenaar and Russell Warren Howe.94 Waagenaar notes that St. Servan admitted to him that she had written her “biography” in a fictional vein.

MATA HARI AND HER SEARCH FOR THE ACE OF SPIES AND LT. CANARIS Major Coulson, in his controversial biography, relates the story of a possible connection between the dancer and the ace of spies. Coulson writes that “the audacious exploits of an English agent” had defied the Germans’ best efforts

93. Bentley, Toni. Sisters of Salome, Yale University Press, London/NewHaven, 2002, p. 126. 94. Waagenaar, Sam. Mata Hari — A Biography, Appleton Century, New York, 1965, p. 112.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies at detection. The English agent in question was known as ST1, Sidney Reilly. After a “particularly impudent performance” by Reilly, the Germans decided to call in the expertise of Mata Hari, whom Reilly was believed to have known. Coulson claims that Reilly was known as “Mr. C,” and was an English Army captain who was the “Admiralty’s ‘ace’ in espionage.” Coulson correctly recounts that Reilly was talented with languages and was familiar with several European countries, but he mistakenly claims Reilly was an Irishman. Coulson writes of a meeting between Mata Hari and Reilly in a “Balkan town.” Instructed by her German handlers “to scrape up an acquaintance with the man who was believed to be in possession of some exceedingly valuable knowledge much envied by the Germans,” Mata Hari allegedly turned on her renowned charm and asked Reilly if they had not met before, possibly in India? Reilly is said to have replied, “More likely in Berlin.” This telling retort, according to Coulson, should have tipped off Mata Hari that Reilly knew of her German connections. Coulson does not describe what then transpired between the two. If the encounter ever took place (which seems unlikely, considering Coulson’s lack of corroboration and documentation or any mention of such an incident by Reilly or Mata Hari scholars), then in fact Mata Hari was unable to obtain any information on the ace of spies.95 Mata Hari’s liaison with Reilly ranks with another piece of legend: her romantic liaison with Lt. Wilhelm Canaris, of German intelligence, the man who would eventually head the Nazi military intelligence group, Abwehr. Writer Kurt Singer wrote in 1953 that while both Canaris and Mata Hari were in Spain during the war they established a relationship.96 Canaris, as the story goes, sent Mata Hari to France with a code book that he knew the French could decipher, which would lead to her capture and execution. Singer claimed that the Germans hoped to embarrass the French by having them execute an innocent woman, as the Germans had done with the British nurse Edith Cavell, causing an outrage in Britain. However, questions about the dates of their rendezvous and the absence of any kind of corroboration from witnesses cast serious doubt on any kind of relationship. Author Nigel West documents their whereabouts and shows that they were not in Spain at the same time, and he notes that there were no witnesses to document Singer’s claim.97

95. Coulson, Thomas. Mata Hari — Courtesan and Spy, Blue Ribbon, New York, 1930, pp. 160-164. 96. Singer, Kurt. Spies and Traitors of WWII, Singer Books, California, p. 4.

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Peculiar Liaisons LOVE AND LADOUX In France, Mata Hari met the man she claimed to her last day was her only true love — Russian officer Vadime de Masloff. Her acknowledged fascination for men in uniform seems to have been her downfall: first she married MacLeod; then she fell in love with the Russian Masloff who would indirectly lead her to another uniformed man who would destroy her, Capt. Georges Ladoux, head of the French intelligence agency, le Deuxieme Bureau. She was led into Ladoux’s fatal snare when Vadime was severely wounded in battle and lost sight in one eye. For Mata Hari to meet her beloved Vadime, who was in a hospital in the restricted French town of Vittel, she had to apply for a special permit through the Deuxieme Bureau. Ladoux was waiting for her with a thick file on her travels and accumulated instances of suspicious behavior, all started by the incident at Folkstone, England, when the British immigration officer had written up the woman with an “unsatisfactory appearance.” The ambitious Ladoux had found something that would certainly improve his career if he could assemble a few more bits of information concerning the celebrated dancer. Now, she was asking permission to travel to Vittel, a French town close to an airfield used to bomb German factories. Surely, Ladoux thought, she was seeking an opportunity to spy on the operations of the airfield for her German handlers; so he cast a lure and asked her to spy for France. She asked Ladoux for the hefty sum of one million francs for her services, an amount that surprised him. Nevertheless, he agreed to consider it and gave her a permit to travel. Mata Hari may have thought that she had been offered a chance to achieve financial security without engaging in the tiresome seduction of wealthy admirers, for she agreed to provide information for the Germans. But she never provided anything other than gossip; dedicated to art and romance, espionage was the farthest thing from her mind.

97. West, Nigel. A Thread of Deceit, Espionage Myths of World War II, Random House, New York, 1985, pp. 25-30. Mata Hari biographer Sam Waagenaar debunked Singer’s fictitious liaison between Mata Hari and Canaris. Waagenaar, Sam. Mata Hari — A Biography, Appleton Century, New York, 1965.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies MATA HARI AND THE SISTERHOOD OF SPIES While Mata Hari apparently accepted pay while pretending to be a spy — without ever seeking to obtain information — other women either were actively engaged in actual espionage or were falsely accused of doing so during the war. Sarah Aaronson fought against Turkish and German activity in Palestine during World War I. As a Jew, she helped her brother Aaron and others run the espionage group Nili. Known as the Joan of Arc of Israel, she executed numerous operations against the Turks. She abandoned a comfortable life with her family in Jaffa, Palestine when heavy fighting broke out between British troops and the Turks and Germans of the Central Powers. The Aaronsons were pro-British by family tradition and custom and became more so when they witnessed the German cruelty in Palestine. When German officers forced the Aaronsons to give them rooms in their house, Sarah and her brother eavesdropped on conversations and passed on the information to the British: Aaron would row a boat out beyond the horizon and eventually link up with British troops. During one of these “fishing trips,” Sarah was captured by the Turks and tortured for the names of her accomplices. She never revealed them. After several days of abuse, she was murdered. When Aaron learned of Sarah’s death and her courageous silence, which had protected him and his friends, he used a submachine gun borrowed from the British to seek revenge for his sister.98 A young Belgian woman, Marthe Cnockaert McKenna was recruited as a spy early in the war when the Germans over ran and destroyed her village of Westroosebeke, Belgium. In her memoirs, I Was a Spy, McKenna detailed her life; the foreword was written by Winston Churchill, who wrote, “Marthe McKenna, the heroine of this account, fulfilled in every respect the conditions which make the terrible profession of a spy dignified and honourable.”99 Working as a nurse, she was able to cajole secrets out of senior German officers while preserving her virtue and relating her intelligence to other spies. A large house in her neighborhood had been converted into a hospital where she worked with three nuns. At the time, she was awarded the German Iron Cross for her humanitarian service to the German wounded; and later she was honored by the French and Belgian Legions of Honor for her bravery in securing important military intelli-

98. Mahoney, M.H. Women in Espionage — A Biographical Dictionary, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California, 1993, pp. 3-4. 99. McKenna, Marthe, I Was a Spy, Robert McBride and Co., 1933, New York, p. 5.

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Peculiar Liaisons gence for the Alliance. For two years she worked for the British intelligence as “Laura,” using local churches to pass on her information to other agents. She spoke Flemish, French, German and English. She destroyed a telephone link between a priest and the Germans that was placed behind Allied lines; she arranged the murder of the German who tried to recruit her to spy on the British; and she found a forgotten sewer tunnel system that ran underneath a German ammo dump and helped place dynamite in a position that destroyed the dump. In her effort to dynamite the ammo dump she lost her watch, bearing her initials, a mistake that led to her capture. She was sentenced to death but because she had earned the German Iron Cross her sentence was commuted to life in prison. She was imprisoned for two years when she was saved by the declaration of armistice. Churchill, in his capacity of Secretary of State for War, decorated her “for gallant and distinguished service in the field,” in 1919, on behalf of Great Britain.100 Edith Cavell’s life showed certain similarities to Marthe McKenna’s and Mata Hari’s. She was from Swardeston, just south of Norwich, England. At the age of 30 she became a nurse and eventually served at the Berkendael Institute located outside of Brussels, Belgium. She became a teacher who passed on Florence Nightingale’s views to other nurses and she is considered the founder of modern-day nursing. With the onset of the war the Germans took control of the Berkendael Institute, which had become a military hospital. German soldiers allowed the British nurses to return home and replaced them with German nurses; but Edith was allowed to remain; The Institute became a Red Cross Hospital that served all nationalities. During a battle at Mons, Belgium some Allied soldiers were stranded behind enemy lines. Edith helped them return to their units, an act she repeated for 200 Allied soldiers. The underground operation was discovered and thirty-five people were arrested, including Edith. Only in 2002 were secret MI5 documents released that tell how Cavell was able to alert British authorities that her life was in danger, just days before her capture by the Germans. Told that, if she cooperated, the German military would not be so hard on the others who were arrested, she made a confession that was interpreted as the act of a spy. Of the thirty-five arrested, five were sentenced to death but only two sentences were carried out: a Belgian architect’s and Edith Cavell’s. She was

100. She married Jock McKenna and wrote spy novels over a period of twenty years as well as documenting her life as a spy in her autobiographical works of I Was a Spy and Spies I Knew. Deacon, Richard. Spyclopedia, Silver Arrow, London, 1987, p. 120.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies incarcerated for ten weeks and then shot by a German firing squad on October 12, 1915. When news spread to England of the nurse who helped get 200 Allied soldiers to freedom, voluntary enlistment of the English forces doubled in the next eight weeks.101 Capt. Vasily Gerson worked as an undercover Russian agent reporting on Austrian military maneuvers for five months. His unlikely disguise was that of a nun who worked in a medical unit at the front lines. He provided a large volume of valuable information to the Russians until the Austrians, suspecting a leak, had an Austrian officer investigate the medical unit. The officer was told the most beloved and hard-working nun was Sister St. Innocent. When it was discovered that the sister was actually a man, Capt. Gerson of the Russian army, Gerson met the same fate as Edith Cavell: execution in front of a firing squad. Mata Hari was once the neighbor of a French woman spy, when she took a room at the Palace Hotel on a visit to Madrid; the Frenchwoman was decorated for her service by the French government in 1933. Marthe Richard was very successful in penetrating German circles in Spain and became mistress to the German Naval Attaché and head of a German spy ring. In her book My Life as a Spy, she relates that she realized Mata Hari was in her hotel when a maid told her that the woman next door was an English dancer named Lady MacLeod. Marthe Richard, described as probably the greatest of the women spies in France during this time, learned that the maid herself was a German agent but never realized that Mata Hari was working for the Germans — probably because Mata Hari never did supply the Germans with any information. It was not until after the French arrested Mata Hari that Richard realized Mata Hari had any relationship with German espionage. She confronted the Naval Attaché, Herr von Krohn, and accused him of working with Mata Hari; but von Krohn was able to present photograph albums of all the German agents working in Spain and convinced Richard that Mata Hari was not an agent. As biographer Waagenaar notes, German denial of Mata Hari’s involvement as an agent may be taken at face value; Major General Gempp of the German army wrote eleven years after the war that Mata Hari accomplished nothing for the German espionage service.102 Mata Hari’s visit to Madrid did allow her to create both a military and sexual 101. When an English chaplain visited her hours before her death he found her without anxiety, “...she stood, her bright, gentle cheerful self, as always, quietly smiling, calm and collected.” The Belgian architect Phillipe Baucq, who was also found guilty of aiding Allied soldiers, was shot beside Cavell. Ryder, Rowland. Edith Cavell, Stein and Day, New York, 1975, pp. 213-223.

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Peculiar Liaisons liaison with the Military attaché to the German Embassy, Arnold Kalle. She met him several times in hopes of garnering information that would justify the million francs Ladoux had promised her. She only obtained some insignificant information about submarine fuelling at Spanish ports and plans to infiltrate Morocco with agents; she sent the information to Ladoux by letter. Kalle was manipulating Mata Hari because he knew she was a French spy and was angry that she had taken 20,000 francs from Karl Cramer six months earlier and delivered nothing. She was playing both the French and the Germans for fools. On December 13, 1916, Kalle sent a cable to Berlin concerning “agent H21,” which identified her as an agent belonging to the Central Information Bureau of Cologne, knowing that the cable would be intercepted by the French. Indeed, the French read the entire cable at Mata Hari’s trial. Irritated that Ladoux had not contacted her about the information she had provided and looking for the promised money, she returned to Paris, and met her love Vadime on January 13. She had told Ladoux at their first meeting, “I want to be rich enough not to have to deceive Vadime with others.” Ladoux arrested her on February 13 for “espionage, complicity, and intelligence with the enemy, in an effort to assist them in their operations.”

THE TRIAL AND RUIN OF THE COSMOPOLITAN SPY On July 24, 1917, Mata Hari faced seven judges. She wore a tri-corner hat and low-cut blue blouse. At first the trial was open to the public but it was eventually closed. Most biographers agree that her fate had been decided before the trial began. Kalle’s cables were supposedly rewritten to make her look even guiltier than she was. She could present few character witnesses because most of her acquaintances were men of public stature who could not publicly associate themselves with a known courtesan, and now an accused spy. Her old friend and lover Henri de Marguerie was courageous enough to testify in her behalf. The cruelest blow came when her lover Vadime refused to attend the trial. Instead, he wrote a statement that was read on the second and final day of the trial, saying that he had no intention of marrying her and that she never extracted

102. Waagenaar, Sam. Mata Hari — A Biography, Appleton Century, New York, 1965, pp. 171-172.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies information from him. If it had not been for her effort to visit Vadime when he was in need, she would have never met Ladoux. She sadly bowed her head at this betrayal and said she had nothing to say about Vadime’s words. She took the stand in her own defense and answered all the questions calmly. “I am not French,” she told the court. “I have the right to cultivate any relations that may please me. The war is not a sufficient reason to stop me from being a cosmopolitan.” An appeal from the Dutch government was denied. It appeared that the recent mutinies, French defeats, and revolts within the French Army would be taken out on the Dutch dancer. She would be made an example of what France would do with spies. The military jury deliberated for thirty minutes before finding her guilty and sentencing her to be executed. She faced a firing squad on October 15 at 5 a.m. at Vincennes, just outside Paris, and told an attending nun not to be afraid, because “I’ll know how to die.” In her final statement in French, she wrote, “if I must fall it will be with a smile of profound contempt. — Signed M.G. Zelle MacLeod.” She showed courage to the end. She was loosely tied to a tree and refused a blindfold. At 5:47 a.m., she was shot by a twelve-man firing squad. Of course legends grew around her death: that several men fainted; only a few soldiers hit their mark, the others intentionally missed; she blew a kiss at the soldiers. No one claimed the body; it was sent to a municipal hospital for dissection and eventually cremated. Captain Ladoux, Mata Hari’s chief accuser, got a taste of what it meant to be accused of espionage. Suspicion and even paranoia were raging in France. Only two days after Margaretha Geertruida Zelle-MacLeod was executed, Ladoux was in jail himself — accused of spying for the Germans. His accuser was a man as unscrupulous as himself: Pierre Lenoir, who had bought a Paris newspaper with funds supplied by the Germans and then sold it back to a group of anti-government Frenchmen. Ladoux was eventually freed and acquitted of all charges. His accuser, Lenoir, was later brought up on espionage charges and executed. In 1932 and 1933, Ladoux wrote books on Mata Hari and the French super spy Marthe Richard, books that have been cited as deliberately blurring “the lines between fact and fiction” and presenting Ladoux as a “spy master,” though he was only a mediocre intelligence officer.103

103. Porch, Douglas. The French Secret Services, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1995, p. 129.

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Peculiar Liaisons THE MYSTERIES OF MATA HARI’S DAUGHTER The most absurd story associated with Mata Hari, according to author Waagenaar, is Kurt Singer’s (Spies Who Changed History) assertion that Mata Hari’s daughter Juana Luisa (whose nickname was “Non” but Singer for some unknown reason calls her “Banda”) received a letter from her mother just before her execution that stated that Juana Luisa was an orphan. According to Singer, Banda developed into a Japanese spy before the Second World War and an Indonesian patriot during the war, and was shot as a spy by Chinese communists in Korea at 5:45 a.m., the same time her mother was shot. Waagenaar declares that not even the time is correct. Richard Deacon details the story in his Spyclopedia under the title “Mata Hari’s Daughter,” citing authors Bernard Newman, Singer, and Charles Franklin. Deacon reports that Banda never spoke of her mother, went to college and became a teacher, then went to the Dutch East Indies and passed on information she heard from the enemy Japanese to the Allies, and fell in love with a Malaysian guerilla who was killed by “communists” before Banda met her fate with the Chinese communists; but Deacon points out there is no proof of any of it. Author M.H. Mahoney writes of a spy named Gertrude Banda, born in 1905, a Eurasian woman whose father was Indonesian and whose mother had been white. He notes the similarity to the Mata Hari story but like most other writers believes that there was no relation between Mata Hari and Gertrude Banda, but says a woman named Banda did spy in Indonesia and was executed by the Chinese communists, citing Howe, McCormick, and Ostrovsky as the basis for the Banda story.104 What is known of Juana Luisa MacLeod, the undisputed daughter of Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, is that in September of 1914 Margaretha desperately wished to see her daughter again and wrote a letter to MacLeod requesting a meeting. Mata Hari’s fame had put her face on the packages of cigarettes as well as tins of Dutch biscuits. Juana Luisa, who had grown into a tall and beautiful young woman who resembled her mother, had graduated from teachers college in The Hague and spent a year as a kindergarten teacher in Velp, while she lived with her father in De Steeg and rode by streetcar to the school with her lunch stored in the Mata Hari biscuit tin. She had been trained as a kindergarten 104. Mahoney, M.H. Women in Espionage — A Biographical Dictionary, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California, 1993, pp. 15-16.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies teacher just as her mother had. John MacLeod was reluctant to speak of Juana Luisa’s mother. When a friend asked Juana Luisa what she thought of her mother, she replied, “I can’t talk about my mother the way I’d like to. I have heard so many rumors about her life in Paris, but every time I ask my father about what happened, he gets terribly vague.” Though the letter to MacLeod was met with a certain acceptance, no meeting ever occurred between Mata Hari and her daughter — even though at one time both were living in The Hague. Juana Luisa wrote to her stepmother to say that while she lived in The Hague she passed by the house where her mother lived and “there were no men around but lovely curtains in front of the windows.” In the end, there seemed to be no effort on Juana Luisa’s part or her mother’s to finally meet face to face. Nearly two years after her mother’s execution Juana Luisa decided to move to the Dutch East Indies and teach kindergarten children. On August 10, 1919, she went to bed planning to take a ship the next day. She never woke up. The cause of death was never fully understood but a cerebral hemorrhage seemed to be a likely explanation, according to biographer Howe. She was twenty-one years old.105

REILLY’S RISE Sidney Reilly, the ace of spies, was born in Russia in 1874 under the name of Sigmund Georgievch Rosenblum. Gordon Brook-Shepherd writes that as a boy he had a comfortable life but developed into a youth who, “though blessed with a remarkable talent for languages, was cursed with a violent temper” and a conviction that he was right about absolutely everything. “Megalomania seems to have set in early.” Later, he would find that he was not the son of Grigory J. Rosenblum, the wealthy owner of a Polish estate once owned by the Wittgenstein family, but the product of an illegitimate union between his Russian mother of Polish descent and a Jewish doctor from Vienna named Rosenblum. He lived in an anti-Semitic atmosphere as a boy and was raised as a Catholic. The fact that he was of illegitimate birth and half Jewish was a double blow that seems to have greatly troubled him and may have driven him to the many peculiar and daring episodes

105. Waagenaar, Sam. Mata Hari — A Biography, Appleton Century, New York, 1965, pp. 120-3, 190.

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Peculiar Liaisons in his life, not unlike the audacious British soldier and Reilly contemporary, T.E. Lawrence, who was also disturbed by his illegitimate birth. Rosenblum changed his name to Sidney Reilly106 and, as one legend has it, fled Russia as a stowaway in a British ship bound for South America; in Brazil, he saved the lives of two or three British officers connected with British intelligence. To show their gratitude, they gave the young Rosenblum a passport to England and sources with British intelligence. However, this story is one of several that Reilly seems to have told acquaintances throughout his life; he also claimed he was a railway engineer in India, but biographer Brook-Shepherd was not able to find anything in the official files in the late 1990s to confirm any of this part of Reilly’s early life.107 Reilly biographer Richard Spence has dismissed the Brazil story as a classic bit of fiction Reilly spun to hide his real identity and intentions. Reilly spent more than thirty years spying under different disguises and personas. From 1900 to 1914, he traveled through Europe and the Far East as a businessman but with extra work commissioned by British naval intelligence. From 1914 to mid-1925, he spent most of his time in the United States, especially New York City. Like Mata Hari, but to a greater extent, he demonstrated an allegiance to numerous intelligence agencies in hopes of gaining advantages in business adventures. He was a collector: he collected lovers, wives, and Napoleon-related paraphernalia. Napoleon fascinated Reilly and may have inspired his ambitious attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik government and replace it with his own ministers. He knew or was known by some of the biggest names in the world. One of the strangest links seems to be with the British occultist Aleister Crowley, who dabbled in black arts and espionage — one of several “sorcererspies,” as author W. Adam Mandelbaum calls them, who engaged in the secret world of espionage through the occult.108 Biographer Spence seems to believe that they may have had some kind of relationship in London in 1898-9. In 1898 an Englishman, Dr. Westcott, created the mysterious cult group, the Golden Dawn. 106. Even Reilly’s name is controversial. Some biographers spell his name “Sidney” (Kettle, Lockhart), others “Sydney” (Brook-Shepherd), and in one case both spellings in the same book (Deacon’s Spyclopedia). 107. Shepherd-Brooke, Gordon. Iron Maze — The Western Secret Services and the Bolsheviks, MacMillan, 1998, London, p. 16. 108. Mandelbaum, W. Adam. The Psychic Battlefield — A History of the Military-Occult Complex, Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 2000, pp. 89-95.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies Crowley became part of this group. Like Reilly, Crowley created a variety of personas, one being the Russian nobleman Count Svarov, during his bizarre career as secret agent, magician, anti-Christ, and drug addict.109 Though we may never know for sure, there is evidence that Reilly was an agent for Germany, Russia and Japan as well as Britain. Files from the American Office of Naval Intelligence and other American intelligence services indicated that American officials believed Reilly was an unscrupulous businessman working for German intelligence.110 Reilly’s first marriage was to a twenty-three-year-old Irish girl, Margaret, one of the five daughters of the celebrated mathematician and logistician George Boole, who developed ways of expressing logical processes using algebraic symbols and created a branch of mathematics known as symbolic logic. Reilly eventually abandoned Margaret and took several other wives; how many is unknown. He was attracted to several actresses and singers, which included a Polish-born opera singer, Ganna Walska. Walska, like Reilly, was ambitious, fascinated with Napoleon, and made an effort to disguise her Jewish ancestry. Their affair was brief; then each went his own way, collecting material wealth and companions who would aid them in their hunt for that wealth.111

ST-1, ST-25, C, AND THE BIRTH OF THE BRITISH MASTER SPY Sir Mansfield Cumming headed the British Secret Service when Reilly was active. In 1909, at the age of fifty, Cumming was a naval commander who suffered from the unlikely malady of seasickness. He began to direct a new secret service division of the navy, which would eventually become the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) of British intelligence. Cumming was an eccentric man who became known as “C,” a moniker that would continue to connote the head of the service no matter what name the 109. Boon, Michael. The Road of Excess — A History of Writers on Drugs, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002, pp. 186-7. Crowley was involved in the Freemasons and cults like the Golden Dawn. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a cult supposedly created by William Wynn Westcott, a Freemason who created the Golden Dawn in order to study and engage in ritual magic. 110. Spence, Richard B. “Sidney Reilly in America, 1914-17,” Intelligence and Security, v. 10, n. 1, January, 1995, p. 93. 111. Spence, Richard. Trust No One — The Secret World of Sidney Reilly, Feral House, Los Angeles, California, 2002, p. 87.

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Peculiar Liaisons director bore. It was C who used green ink exclusively for all his notes and correspondence and was known to be an effective and inspiring leader. Gordon Shepherd-Brooke noted that C wrote one of his diaries concerning his role in the service in a coded form that has remained undeciphered to this day.112 Due to the secrecy in which he shrouded his operations, his greatest successes would never be recorded.113 He worked with some of the greatest agents in British intelligence history: George Hill, Paul Dukes (ST-25), Augustus Agar (ST-34), and Sidney Reilly (ST-1). Dukes and Hill were skilled in penetrating Bolshevik organizations. Dukes used various aliases and was able (like Reilly) to join the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka. Both Dukes and Reilly were masters of disguise. Dukes actually joined the Red Army and with this connection was able to provide C with some of the most important intelligence ever produced concerning the Bolshevik regime. Hill was able to get himself appointed Inspector of Aviation by the head of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, himself. Hill had worked with the Russians in blowing up German ammunition dumps and bridges but quickly made an about face when the Bolsheviks took power; he was soon destroying Red Army trains. Dukes’s information concerning the Bolsheviks was so impressive that he was knighted and given accolades by his contemporaries as well as historians. Agar received the Victoria Cross and Distinguished Service Order citations for his heroism in his work against the Russian navy, in which he sank several Russian warships with information provided by Dukes. These agents, with the aid of C, created a special mythology concerning the British secret agent who was not only a seeker of classified information but a man of adventurous action; the kind of action hero that would become the inspiration for numerous spy novelists later in the century, like Ian Fleming and his post World War II agent James Bond.114 C recorded his first meeting with Reilly as taking place March 15, 1918. Reilly supposedly established his reputation as a master spy and impressed C with his exploits in Germany during World War I. His amazing resourcefulness in the midst of the enemy led C to send Reilly to Russia. C wrote in one of his diaries that he felt Reilly was very clever and had been everywhere and done 112. Shepherd-Brooke, Gordon. Iron Maze — The Western Secret Services and the Bolsheviks, MacMillan, 1998, London, p. 4. 113. Bennett, Richard M. Espionage — an Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets, Virgin Books, London, 2002, p. 61. 114. Judd, Alan. The Quest for C — Sir Mansfield Cumming and The Founding of the British Secret Service, Harper Collins, 1999, p. 431.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies everything — though why he felt this is not entirely clear. It was said that Reilly was dropped behind German lines disguised as a German peasant carrying papers that claimed he was wounded and on sick leave, and this allowed him to roam throughout Germany gathering intelligence. Among the legends surrounding Reilly was that he enlisted as a German private and was quickly promoted to a commissioned rank, and that he used his flawless German and Russian language skills to pass through the lines and report information from both camps. In that same month, March 1918, C wrote to his British agents in Russia that Reilly would arrive in the port city of Archangelsk to lend a hand in their work. C wrote a strange and unflattering description of the man who would become his most famous agent during both the war and the British secret services’ later efforts to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. C wrote that Reilly was a “Jewish-Jap type, brown eyes very protruding...may be bearded,” and carrying a code book and sixteen diamonds, which would provide his cover as a diamond merchant and also serve to fund the agents’ operations. When Reilly reached Moscow that May, he brazenly walked up to the sentries at the Kremlin and demanded an audience with the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Dressed in a British Army uniform, he informed the sentries that he was sent by Prime Minister David Lloyd George to inquire about the Bolsheviks’ intentions and views on the European situation, because the prime minister was not satisfied with Bruce Lockhart’s reports. Lenin would not speak with Reilly, but Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, head of the chancery of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, did. Bonch-Bruyevich was amazed by the audacity of the alleged British officer and later contacted Lockhart concerning Reilly’s bonafides. Lockhart was shocked by Reilly’s unorthodox entry into the Russian scene; he “blew up in a storm of indignation” over the unapproved interview, though later he would acknowledge that Reilly was one of the most daring and effective intelligence officers he would ever know.115

115. Van der Rhoer, Edward. Master Spy: A True Story of Allied Espionage in Bolshevik Russia, Scribner’s, New York, 1981, p. 3.

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Peculiar Liaisons THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE CAPITALISTS While Leon Trotsky was living in New York City in 1917 and supporting himself as a reporter for The New World, a communist newspaper, he discovered wealthy men who were willing to finance a revolution in Russia. Financial support from the United States was surprising because the German government had encouraged and financed the Bolsheviks (the “majority” — Lenin’s radical socialists) as early as 1915, hoping the chaos they created would turn to Germany’s advantage.116 Eventually, Wall Street bankers Jacob Schiff and Elihu Root contributed around 40 million dollars to Bolshevik activities along with Briton Lord Milner, who gave 21 million rubles. It has also been said that in 1915 the American International Corporation was formed to support the Bolsheviks, which coincidentally was housed at 120 Broadway in New York,117 a building shared by The Bankers Club, the headquarters of the No. 2 District of the Federal Reserve System, and the first Bolshevik “ambassador” to the United States and head of the Soviet Bureau, Ludwig Martens, the vice president of Weinberg and Posner. The American International Corporation directors represented the interests of men such as Percy Rockefeller (son of John D. Rockefeller), Pierre S. du Pont, J. Ogden Armour, and W. L. Saunders (Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York).118 There were twenty-two directors in 1917 and the corporation had ties with American financier J. P. Morgan, the Rothschilds of Europe, and numerous Federal Reserve representatives as well as George Herbert Walker, grandfather of President George H. W. Bush and great-grandfather of President George W. Bush. Why would capitalists support the ideology of the Bolsheviks? One theory proposes that the capitalists created a huge communist state so it could be perceived as the enemy of the democratic, capitalist system, which in turn would “produce huge markets for finance and armaments and...cycles of financial booms and busts, crises and revolutions, wars and threats of war, all of which maintained a balance of power.” 119 Antony Sutton (Wall Street and the Bolshevik 116. Freund, Gerald. Unholy Alliance, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1957, p. 1. 117. In a letter to a Dutchman who had helped him get to Helsinki, Reilly claimed he had an office in New York, 120 Broadway. Spence, Richard B. “Sidney Reilly in America, 1914-1917,” Intelligence and National Security, v. 10, n. 1, (January 1995), pp. 92-121. 118. Sutton, Antony. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York, 1974, chapter 8. 119. Marrs, Jim. Rule By Secrecy, Perrenial, New York, 2000, pp. 192-3.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies Revolution) proposes that the notion that capitalists are the bitter enemies of Marxists and socialists is “nonsense,” because there has been a constant but concealed alliance between the two camps. This odd alliance, Sutton writes, is not so strange when one considers that monopoly capitalists are “the bitter enemy of laissez-faire entrepreneurs,” and with the inherent financial weakness of socialism the “totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists.” Would not capitalists, Sutton asks, like J.P. Morgan, du Pont, and Rockefeller welcome a chance to create a “captive technical colony” from a planned socialist Russia where the likes of an “extension of the Morgan railroad monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century” could flourish? The Bolshevik Revolution was fueled by what Sutton describes “a partnership between international monopoly capitalists and international revolutionary socialism for their mutual benefit.”120 Equally strange, then, given that it is obvious that numerous American capitalists and at least one wealthy Briton funded the Bolsheviks — British intelligence went to great lengths in trying to destroy the Bolshevik revolution and did it with their prize agent, the Russian-born enigma, Sidney Reilly, as well as the other previously mentioned master spies. However, the American super financier J.P. Morgan, whose business dealings seem as enigmatic as Reilly’s behavior as an espionage agent, made numerous European business deals in Europe during 1914 and 1915 with Britain, France, and czarist Russia. Though Morgan had done business with Russia it appears he had a bad experience with a 1905 Russian loan and bore a dislike for Russian contractors in New York, as well as a variety of prejudices that included anti-Jewishness (believing that Russian Jews were anti-czar and thus anti-Allies) and anti-Catholic, especially Irish Catholic. He was aware of Reilly and believed that an Irish Jew should be avoided, though of course Reilly was actually more a Russian Jew (his father was Jewish) — but if Morgan had known that he would surely have disapproved of that genetic and cultural makeup as well. In July 1915, Erich Muenter, a German agent, failed in an assassination attempt on the American millionaire Morgan, an attempt that has been loosely associated with Reilly.121

120. Sutton, Antony. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York, 1974, chapter 1. 121. Spence, Richard. Trust No One — The Secret World of Sidney Reilly, Feral House, Los Angeles, California, 2002, pp.128-29.

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Peculiar Liaisons THE RISE OF THE BOLSHEVIKS AND LENIN’S RED TERROR While the war still raged, the strain of the Russian Czar Nicholas’s oppression and the hard times in general created a revolutionary mood. Czarist Russia had a reputation as the most repressive country in Europe; its rulers had almost unrestricted power, and many of its people lived in dire poverty with no political freedom or redress against injustice. Some of the first acts of terror against the czarist rule came as early as the 1870s. In March 1917, 150,000 soldiers joined with rebellious workers and took control of Petrograd. In September of 1917 the threat of a German attack on the capital, Petrograd, led to a coup wherein Lenin’s Red Guards seized key buildings in Petrograd. In October 1917, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who in 1903 was elected the head of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (the Bolsheviks), returned to Russia along with Leon Trotsky, who had been living in exile in the United States. Lenin entered Russia in a train that Churchill called a “bacillus in a tube,” a reference to the spread of the disease of communism. Lenin had experienced persecution under the Czar firsthand in the form of an arrest in 1895 and a subsequent one-year prison sentence in Siberia. His hatred for Czarist Russia was instilled in him earlier, when his brother was hanged in 1887 for participating in a plot to kill Czar Alexander III. The Bolsheviks rallied people under the slogan of “peace, land, and bread.” On October 26, Lenin declared a new government based on the “socialization” of land and an appeal for peace. Russia was in danger of being overtaken by the Germans; Lenin proposed a three-month armistice to discuss a peace agreement. By the end of 1917, most of the Russian army had simply walked away from the battles, disgusted with the entire affair. In 1915, a million Russian soldiers had become POWs, 750,000 simply giving up to the Germans. By the time Lenin proposed peace talks a staggering four million Russians were in the Central Powers’ hands.122 With the Germans holding most of the cards, peace talks began in the Polish town of Brest-Litovsk on December 3, 1917. Though their position in the east was good, the German army assessed its power and believed it could crush 122. As historian John Keegan notes, Russia’s prisoner losses “exceeded battlefield casualties by three to one,” with Russia’s battlefield deaths at 1.3 million. These staggering numbers look small compared to what happened in Europe a mere two and a half decades later, when three million of the five million Soviet soldiers captured by the Nazis died of starvation and maltreatment. Keegan, John. The First World War, Knopf, New York, 1999, p. 343.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies Russia or France but not both. The Germans wanted to separate Poland from Russia and remove their forces from the Eastern front and apply them on the Western front, where they could finally win the war. Lenin was not eager to negotiate a deal quickly; he feared that a quick peace would bring Germany and its enemies against the new Soviet government. This led Trotsky to lecture the Central Powers on George Hegel’s philosophy and other abstract subjects in order to stall for time. On March 3, the Soviets signed an agreement at BrestLitovsk that gave the Germans 750,000 square kilometers, which was three times the size of Germany and contained fully one quarter of the Russian population, 54 percent of its industry, and 89 percent of its coal mines. The treaty in effect drove Russia out of Europe and gave Germany the previously Russian-controlled Finland, the Baltic provinces, Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus. The Brest-Litovsk treaty, wrote historian John Wheeler-Bennett, was the “greatest diplomatic and military humiliation Russia had sustained,” and with “the exception of the Treaty of Versailles the Brest-Litovsk treaty had greater consequences and repercussions than any other peace settlement since the Congress of Vienna.”123 Though it was a humiliating agreement for Russia, Lenin was able to establish his Bolshevik government which made the Soviets a world power for decades to come. The city of Brest-Litovsk would later be the site of one of the first Jewish pogroms by the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa in 1942. Lenin sought to consolidate Bolshevik power by crushing his enemies through terror.124 With Germany moving its forces to the Western front, Lenin focused his red terror on domestic groups such as the anti-Communist White Russians (supported by the Allies), the Greens (anarchists strong in the Ukraine), and the moderate socialists, the Mensheviks, who believed Russia would have to pass through a capitalist phase before an appropriate socialist government could be installed. Lenin’s Red Bolsheviks, the radical socialists, wanted a quick transition to socialism. With the December 1917 development of the Cheka, the Bolsheviks’ equivalent to the Czar’s secret police Ochrana,125 Lenin was able to control dissidents with terror. Russians had a model for their secret police — the sixteenth century 123. Wheeler-Bennett. Brest-Litovsk — The Forgotten Peace, March 1918, Norton, New York, 1971, back cover notes. 124. The word “terror” comes from the Latin “terrer” — to cause to tremble. Author Don DeLillo defines terror as the “language of being noticed.” 125. Ochrana, also known as Okrana, was the intelligence and secret service, sometimes called secret police, of the Rusian czars from 1881-1917.

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Peculiar Liaisons Oprichnina of Ivan Groznyi, also known as Ivan the Terrible. The Oprichnina relished the application of terror and went after anyone who opposed Ivan, whether peasant or nobleman. Ivan used his agents to seek out traitors, or more simply put, enemies of Ivan. The Oprichnina’s saddles were adorned with a symbol of a broom (to sweep Russia clean of traitors) and a dog’s head (Ivan’s favorite way of dealing with traitors was to have them attacked by murderous hounds). In 1570, Ivan and his black-clad, Apocalypse-like horsemen attacked the citizens of Novgorod, whom Ivan suspected of allying themselves with Poland. The Oprichnina left thousands of dead in the city and a legacy that the Ochrana and subsequent policing agencies of Russia would remember. In 1571, enemies of Ivan burned Moscow; and in 1572 the Oprichnina was disbanded. Lenin appointed Felix Dzerzhinsky as Commissar for Internal Affairs. Dzerzhinsky was another victim of Czarist incarceration. He had been released from prison due to the February Revolution. Like Lenin, Dzerzhinsky believed in the power of terror. He wrote in the Moscow newspaper, Svoboda Rossii, June 9, 1918, “We stand for organized terror...terror being absolutely indispensable in current revolutionary conditions. We terrorize the enemies of the Soviet government in order to stifle crime at its inception. Terror serves as a ready deterrent.”126 Czar Nicholas II and his entire family were shot July 16, 1918 by the Bolsheviks. Leon Trotsky wrote in his book Diary in Exile that the execution of the Czar’s family “was needed not only to frighten, horrify and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our ranks, to show them that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin.”127 Grand Duke Michael, Nicholas’s brother, prudently refused the throne and ended 300 years of the Romanov dynasty, which had started with Michael III in 1613.

REILLY, LENIN, AND THE LOCKHART PLOT By early 1918, the British withdrew all diplomatic personnel from Russia so that all the world could see that they did not support the Bolsheviks, the regime that had left the Alliance by withdrawing their troops and engaging in truce 126. Gilbert, Martin. A History of the Twentieth Century, Harper Collins, 1977, New York, v. 1, pp. 509-510. 127. Amis, Martin. Koba the Dread — Laughter and the Twenty Million, Hyperion, New York, 2002, p. 55.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies talks with the Germans. However, the British realized they needed some kind of presence in Moscow. Prime Minister David Lloyd George selected Bruce Lockhart to secretly sabotage the Bolshevik-German talks. Lockhart was a young diplomat fluent in Russia and with five years’ experience at the British Consul in Moscow. He was dispatched to Moscow in January of 1918 but was unable to do anything about the Bolshevik-German treaty. By late summer 1918, there were rumors that the Allies were planning an invasion to overthrow the new Soviet government and install a new provisional government that would re-engage in the fight against the Central Powers. For decades after the events of August, September, and October of 1918 in Petrograd and Moscow, writers have wondered whether there really was a plan to overthrow the Soviets with an Allied invasion or if the rumors had been a Soviet fabrication designed to heighten awareness of Allied intervention into Russian affairs by British intelligence agents. Lockhart worked with Cmdr. Ernest Boyce, who coordinated British Secret Service operations in Russia. Lockhart had little faith in Boyce’s agents — with the exception of Capt. F.N.A. Cromie and Lt. Sidney Reilly, whom Lockhart described as “extremely able and the far cleverest of our agents in Russia.”128 C gave Reilly the code ST1; his exact duties as a British agent in Russia have never been clear. C likely directed him to assist Lockhart, Cromie, and other agents in anti-Bolshevik activities that would result in the destruction of the Soviet regime. Considering Reilly’s reputation as a maverick, what his real intentions toward Lenin were will never be known. One of the legends concerning Reilly states that his ambition was to capture Lenin and march him halfnaked to prison and shoot him. With the tyrant dead, Reilly would then become the new head of the country himself. He had planned to choose members of parliament before seizing Lenin. The ever-independent Reilly went underground and began creating his own plans for the destruction of the Bolsheviks. He established relations with Boris Savinkov of the Union for the Defense of the Fatherland and Freedom, an organization based on anti-Bolshevik officers. Savinkov was part of the original provisional government as the minister of war and was known as a ruthless

128. Long, John W. “Searching for Sidney Reilly: The Lockhart Plot in Revolutionary Russia, 1918,”Europe-Asia Studies, v. 47, n. 7 p. 1225, quotes p. 274 of the Diaries of Robert Lockhart, ed. K. Young, two volumes (New York, 1973, 1980).

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Peculiar Liaisons assassin who plotted against Nicholas II and participated in two assassinations of Czarist sympathizers. Reilly seemed to find Savinkov worthy of respect and considered Savinkov a potential prime minister in a new Russian government. As Reilly shuttled between Petrograd and Moscow creating a network of support, he was able to obtain a position with the criminal branch of the Petrograd Cheka. Reilly used his legendary charm with women to create several safe houses and headquarters for his work under the alias of Mr. Constantine, a Greek businessman in Moscow. When he was in Petrograd, he used the cover of Mr. Massino, an Italian merchant. During Reilly’s career he established numerous contacts with Soviet officials and workers that allowed him inside information on Lenin’s regime. At one time he posed as Konstantin Pavlovich Massino and apparently established relationships with numerous women, one of whom was Olga Starzhevskaia, a twenty-five-year-old member of the staff of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VtsIK). She worked inside the Kremlin and later confessed that she and Reilly had a love nest, one of Reilly’s safe houses in Moscow, but that she never passed on any sensitive information. He also befriended Maria Leonovskaia, a wireless operator in the Kremlin, who did pass on information to Reilly. There were numerous other contacts, men as well as women, from whom Reilly collected intelligence on the Lenin regime.129

REILLY, SAVINKOV, AND THE MASTER OF THE SPY BOOK A British agent had approached Savinkov in late 1917, a few months before Reilly entered the scene. The British agent, who had experience spying in Switzerland, was going by the name of Somerville, with the cover occupation of a journalist writing for the Daily Telegraph of London. Somerville was really the celebrated British writer W. Somerset Maugham, who would later write the acclaimed novels Of Human Bondage, The Razor’s Edge, and the stories of Ashenden, which were based on his experiences as a British intelligence agent in Petrograd. Maugham has been considered the first author of spy books to be written from the perspective of a former spy. Maugham wrote that Ashenden was “founded on my experiences in the Intelligence Department during” the first world war “but rearranged for the purpose of fiction.” For years, it was required reading for

129. Spence, Richard. Trust No One — The Secret World of Sidney Reilly, Feral House, Los Angeles, California, 2002, pp. 207-8.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies British agents. Maugham found Savinkov quiet, reserved, and modest as well as a fascinating talker. Maugham also met Kerensky and gathered intelligence concerning the Bolsheviks. He sent ciphered messages back home for weeks before returning to London to meet Prime Minister David Lloyd George and pass along Kerensky’s desperate plea for more arms and ammunition to keep his crumbling government afloat. George refused to help, and before Maugham could return the Bolsheviks had taken power in the fall of 1917. Maugham told colleagues that he thought he could have succeeded in helping the Mensheviks overthrow the Bolsheviks if he had started six months earlier. Maugham would later work with World War II espionage ace, William Stephenson.

TARGETING LENIN Reilly had his own plan for destroying the Bolsheviks: he worked closely with Captain Cromie to create a powerful anti-Bolshevik army. They would overthrow Lenin’s regime with the aid of the Latvian Rifle Division, which acted as a powerful Bolshevik army responsible for protection of officials and executions of dissidents, among other duties. In the summer of 1918, the Cheka sent two agents to Petrograd to penetrate the Lockhart organization. They were able to convince Cromie and Reilly to send them to Moscow with a letter of introduction for Lockhart. The two agents convinced Lockhart to speak with a Colonel Berzin, another disaffected Latvian soldier with more power than they had. Reilly provided Berzin, who was another Chekhist agent, with detailed information concerning the plan for two Latvian regiments to defect to a group of Anglo-French troops during the upcoming Allied intervention. The Latvian troops, whom Reilly planned to subvert through bribes, would remain in Moscow and assassinate Lenin and other members of his government. For the Latvian aid the officers would be awarded high positions in the Reilly-created government. The plot was more detailed by the end of August. Reilly planned on making the key move on August 28 when a session of the all-Russian Congress of Soviets was to take place at the Bolshoi Theatre. Reilly would instruct the Latvians to close all exits while he and other unknown agents would shoot Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Bolshevik leaders. All of this was duly noted by a French journalist and Bolshevik sympathizer, Rene Marchand, who passed on the information to the Chekhists and Lenin. At the same time, Berzin passed

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Peculiar Liaisons along a list of names and addresses of Allied agents in Moscow, which he had found at a flat Reilly used under the cover name of Massino. When Lockhart and other agents heard of the Reilly’s plan to assassinate the Bolshevik leadership they unanimously rejected it, Lockhart saying that he would have nothing to do with “so dangerous and doubtful a move.”130 The assassination of Moisei Uritsky, chief of the Petrograd Secret Police, on August 30, 1918 marked the start of a remarkable day for the Bolsheviks. A man completely unassociated with an Allied secret service killed Uritsky to avenge the execution of a friend by the Cheka. On the same day as Uritsky’s death, Lenin spoke at a meeting in Moscow. When he left the building a woman approached him and started asking him questions about how he was running the country. As Lenin reached his car, he turned, and the woman fired three bullets into Lenin. The woman was identified as Fanya “Dora” Kaplan. Kaplan had been born into a peasant family; her parents emigrated to the United States. Like Lenin, she had been imprisoned by the Czarist regime, but longer — eleven years. In 1906, she had been convicted of a plot to kill a Czarist official and was sentenced to life at hard labor in Siberia. It was Lenin’s February 1918 revolution that aided in her release. Lenin survived the attack. Kaplan explained she had tried to kill Lenin because she did not like the way he was running the country, called him a traitor to the revolution, and denounced the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Kaplan was following the example of another Russian woman terrorist, Vera Zasulich, who shot the governor of St. Petersburg in 1878.131 Kaplan was executed September 3, 1918, thinking she had killed Lenin and ended the Bolshevik regime. Though a connection from Kaplan to Reilly has never been fully established, biographer Spence insinuates that Reilly was the guiding hand in the attempted assassination.132 The day after the assassination attempt on Lenin, the Cheka raided the British Embassy in Petrograd, which resulted in the death of Capt. Cromie. The 130. Long, John W. “Searching for Sidney Reilly: The Lockhart Plot in Revolutionary Russia, 1918,” Europe-Asia Studies, v. 47, n. 7, p. 1225. Kettle, Michael. Sidney Reilly: The True Story, St. Martin’s, New York, 1983, p. 46. 131. Townshend, Charles. Terrorism — A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, New York, 2002. Zasulich learned that a friend had been badly beaten in a St. Petersburg prison. She sought revenge by shooting Dmitry Trepov at the prison. She was acquitted and continued her work in militant organizations. 132. Spence, Richard. Trust No One — The Secret World of Sidney Reilly, Feral House, Los Angeles, California, 2002, p. 228.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies Cheka began to hunt down Allied agents. Lockhart was arrested, as was Elizaveta Otten, one of the women who kept a safehouse for Reilly. Disguised as a workman, Reilly tried to contact Cromie in Petrograd, only to learn that the captain had resisted the Bolshevik raid on the embassy with a Browning pistol in each hand. He killed a commissar and wounded several other Cheka raiders before being killed in a hail of bullets. Reilly was able to return to Moscow with a Chekist pass, to find the newspapers were denouncing the “Anglo-French bandits” who had hatched what they called the “Lockhart Plot.” Already Lockhart was being pegged as the chief criminal, with Reilly his chief spy, though they had probably had nothing to do with Uritsky’s murder or Kaplan’s plot to kill Lenin. Along with the usual sort of arrests came eight more peculiar cases: women who all claimed to be Reilly’s wife. They were all placed in the same cell with thirty other women, resulting in mayhem. How Reilly was able to marry all of these women or whether he ever had, is not clear.133 A 100,000-ruble reward was placed on Reilly’s head with a stipulation to the Cheka to shoot him on sight. Lockhart was thrown in prison. Reilly found agent George Hill and suggested that he turn himself in, in exchange for the release of Lockhart. Hill realized that the Cheka might decide to shoot both of them and talked him out of it. Lockhart was exchanged for the Soviet representative M.M. Litvinov, who was detained in a retaliatory move by British intelligence. Reilly used a variety of disguises and a passport provided by Hill to escape Russia. A combination of Bolshevik price controls on crops and a drought created one of the greatest disasters of the twentieth century: the Russian famine of 1921. Anti-Bolsheviks, like Reilly, were certainly inspired to act against the Bolshevik regime during the famine. Estimates range from three million to ten million deaths, despite the foreign relief that was provided. As Bill Emmott writes, famines rarely happen because of a simple failure of crops; they are the result of a disruption of food caused by war or government action: central governments may create chaos in food production and distribution as a brutal political tactic. This tactic was used effectively by the Soviet Union from 1917 off and on through 1991 and in China at various times in the twentieth century, to bring about the deaths of 97 million people.134 133. Lockhart, Robin Bruce. Reilly: Ace of Spies, Penguin, Harmondsworth, England, 1967, p. 96. 134. Emmott, Bill. 20:21 Vision — Twentieth Century Lessons for the Twenty-first Century, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2003, p. 12.

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Peculiar Liaisons THE TRUST AND THE WINDOW What led to the downfall of Sidney Reilly was the Bolshevik intelligence network known as The Trust (also known as the Paris Trust), formerly known as the Monarchist Association of Central Russia. Created by Leon Trotsky and Felix Dzerzhinsky, its main concern was to pose as an anti-Bolshevik organization to lure counter-revolutionaries back to Russia where they would be exposed and eliminated. Reilly was well aware that The Trust might not be a group of anti-Bolsheviks but a trap precisely for people like him and Savinkov, but he was encouraged to take the risk by Boyce, who believed that The Trust was run by true anti-Bolsheviks. It appears that both Savinkov and Reilly decided Boyce was right and that it was worth the risk, if The Trust might be the key to the Bolsheviks’ downfall. Savinkov was the first to be taken in by The Trust; he was apprehended by the Cheka and eventually committed suicide, in May of 1925, according to Bolshevik reports (though according to Brook-Shepherd, “the possibility that Stalin — rather than Dzerzhinsky — took that life for him can certainly not be ruled out.”135 In June of 1925, not knowing of Savinkov’s fate, Reilly attempted to enter Russia again for the purpose of joining with Savinkov and The Trust in overthrowing the Bolsheviks; but how, precisely, no one was sure. He was to enter Russia through The Window, which was allegedly a safe means of entering Russia through Finland with the aid of anti-Bolsheviks. Reilly seems to have thought that The Trust only needed leadership from men like Savinkov and himself to finally rid Russia of the radical Bolsheviks and the Cheka. No official communication was ever received by British intelligence after Reilly entered The Window. In June of 1927, two years after Reilly’s disappearance, the Bolsheviks released an official communiqué in Moscow. It described an incident in the summer of 1925 when a man holding a Soviet passport with the name of Steinberg was wounded and arrested while illegally crossing the Finnish border. Steinberg confessed, said the communiqué, that he was in fact Sidney George Reilly, who “came to Russia for the special purpose of organizing terroristic acts,

135. As unlikely a source as Winston Churchill wrote a tribute to Savinkov in his book Great Contemporaries that documented his opinion of the 21 most influential men of the age.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies arson and revolts, and that when coming from America he had seen Mr. Churchill...who personally instructed him as to the reorganization of the terroristic and other acts calculated to create a diversion.” Strangely, the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Communist Party was announced the same day, which paved the way for the long Stalinist regime. In 1940, Stalin would send a special agent to Mexico to kill his rival Trotsky. Rumors flourished concerning Reilly. Some said he was dead, or that he had escaped from prison. MI5 feared he had made a deal with the Bolsheviks; after all, he was a Russian-born Ukrainian and a brilliant agent who could easily become an asset to the Bolsheviks — for the right price. There was a possibility that he was working in China as a Soviet agent; and maybe he had faked his own death. In 1931, a British official reported that a Russian sailor who said he had to desert the ship at all costs had approached him. The sailor claimed he was Reilly and had been held prisoner in Moscow, then moved to a prison in Odessa, where he had escaped. The British official, not knowing what Reilly looked like, helped him with money and clothes and the mystery man disappeared from the ship into the Middle East.

THE LEGENDS AND LEGACIES OF THE ACE AND QUEEN OF SPIES In 1930, the German government published an official work on Germany’s spying during World War I and pronounced Mata Hari innocent of any involvement. Dr. Schragmuller, the head of a German intelligence group in Antwerp, flatly stated, “all of H21’s information for Germany is false. She was never one of ours.” In 1932, Colonel Lecroix, head of military justice in France, read the sealed dossier on Mata Hari and announced that he could not find any “palpable, tangible...proofs of her guilt.” In 1985, biographer Russell Warren Howe reviewed the sealed dossier himself and confirmed Lecroix’ assessment. Over the years, there have been numerous efforts to win a pardon from France; in October of 2001, a set of lawyers from her birthplace in Leeuwarden tried to secure a new trial. 136 Mata Hari has been the inspiration for numerous novels and films. Greta Garbo starred with Ramon Novarro and Lionel Barrymore in the 1932 version of

136. Howe, Russell Warren. Mata Hari — The True Story, Dodd, Mead and Co., 1986, New York, pp. 284-5.

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Peculiar Liaisons Mata Hari, a film where Garbo (who became a spy for the Allies in World War II) portrays the Dutch dancer as a cigarette-smoking manipulator of men. Barrymore plays one of the lovers and Navarro is a Russian fighter pilot who sweeps Mata Hari off her feet just before her arrest. A 1964 French version, Mata Hari, Agent H21, placed Jeanne Moreau in the starring role. Marlene Dietrich played an Austrian spy femme fatale in the 1931 film Dishonored, which was undoubtedly inspired by the life and legend of Mata Hari. On May 8, 2002, London’s Associated Press announced the public disclosure of 212 top secret MI5 files, the ninth and largest MI5 release ever, that provided details and secrets concerning Reilly, World War II spy Dusko Popov, Stalin, and the British nurse Edith Cavell. The files seemed to confirm author Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s account of Reilly’s demise in the book Iron Maze. As Reilly made his way through Finland via The Window in order to negotiate with The Trust he was captured and taken to the Lyubyanka prison in Moscow. The Bolsheviks hoped he would provide more information about British agents. A six-page typed statement by an unidentified informant dated March 9, 1927 says that the informant had told Reilly he was in danger of being caught, which allowed Reilly to leave Russia — only to return and be captured. “The Bolsheviks,” wrote the informant “at first concealed his arrest but the English somehow or other found it out, and the Bolsheviks in order to escape the possible demands by the English for his release murdered him when he was taken out for exercise.” The informant claimed that Reilly was taken outside the jail into the hills and shot several times with a revolver, and then the Bolsheviks planted an article in the press that said Reilly died after being wounded when he tried to enter Russia through the Finnish border.137 The May 2002 records also suggest that Stalin may have ordered Reilly’s execution. Biographer Andrew Cook interviewed military intelligence officers of the time (OGPU) who claimed that Reilly was interrogated, not tortured, then shot in Sokolniki Park in Moscow soon after his apprehension in 1925.138 As for Mata Hari, John Quiggin of the Australian Financial Review notes, “In retrospect, she appears to have been guilty of little more than a taste for self-dramatization and indiscreet gossip,” where the Germans, “with the disastrous sense of PR they displayed throughout the Great War, chose to shoot a British

137. Wagner, Thomas, “Legendary spy executed by Russians in 1925, British documents show,” Associated Press, May 8, 2002. 138. Cook, Andrew. Ace of Spies — The True Story of Sidney Reilly, Tempus, Great Britain, 2002.

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2. The Ace and Queen of World War I Spies nurse, Edith Cavell, easily represented as a Madonna figure to contrast with the symbolic Whore, Mata Hari.” The Lockhart Plot can be seen as: “on the one hand a real, if pitiful, anti-Soviet conspiracy concocted (or perhaps deliberately provoked) by the megalomaniacal Sidney Reilly...and...a superb example of police provocation brilliantly conceived and expertly executed by the crafty agents of the Cheka.” And now, Quiggin reminds us, terrorists have replaced spies and their associated fears, which in some ways is a “reversion to the nineteenth century, when the bomb-throwing anarchist was a focus of popular fears and the subject of novels by such writers as Chesterton [The Man Who Was Thursday] and Conrad [The Secret Agent].”139 It is Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s contention that Reilly was never interested in espionage, apart from his ambition to make money. As Mata Hari used espionage as a means to free herself from the life of a courtesan, Reilly used espionage in an effort to advance his desire to take over the Bolshevik revolution and replace its leaders with his own government, making Russia in effect his ultimate business adventure. Both Mata Hari and Reilly were in fact, as Mata Hari claimed in her defense at her trial, “cosmopolitans” with very little interest in nationalism or a devotion to any cause — other than using people to improve their financial status while inflating their egos. Despite Reilly’s reputation as immoral and egotistical, there seems to be no clear indication that he was ever disloyal to the Allied cause, though Van der Rhoer advocates that Reilly’s amazing success in every aspect of his business and espionage life until his uncharacteristic string of failures in disposing the Bolsheviks suggests that he was a triple, quadruple, or quintuple agent who eventually provided the most important information to the Bolsheviks after playing the “intelligence field,” comprising the British, Germans, anti-Bolshevik Russians, Bolshevik Russians, Japanese, if not the Americans as well. Numerous stories suggest that Reilly survived past 1925. Eugeni Kozhernikov, a British double agent who deserted Russian intelligence in 1927, claimed that Reilly worked for Russian intelligence in 1926 in Afghanistan and Persia as well as along a narcotics pipeline in the Far East.140 Kettle hinted that Reilly may have worked with Israel’s Mossad. The theory that Reilly was a Soviet spy as early as 139. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, 1907, is considered the first political thriller of the twentieth century; its plot deals with Russians involved in anarchist bombings in London. The beginning of the century saw the rise to prominence of the spy novel. The final decade saw retired spymasters reach the pinnacle of power in the United States (George Bush Sr.) and Russia (Vladimir Putin).

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Peculiar Liaisons 1918 has also been entertained by Richard Spence and John Long, based on comments made to the British Ambassador in Oslo on September 30, 1918 by US Consul-General in Russia Dewitt C. Poole, who regarded Reilly as a Soviet agent. Robert Bruce Lockhart and George Hill, writes John Ainsworth, rejected the idea as preposterous and defended Reilly’s allegiance to the Allied cause.141 A strong case could be made that Reilly had a genuine hatred for the Soviet regime and worked diligently to save the world from what would become one of the most vicious totalitarian regimes in history. Whether he failed in a genuine attempt to oust the radical Bolsheviks from Russia or secretly helped them in an amazing act of double and triple cross, and then disappeared into his beloved Russia or the obscurity of some other part of the world where he felt equally comfortable, he remains, partially or completely by self-design, one of the great mysteries in all of twentieth-century European intelligence.

140. Spence, Richard. Trust No One — The Secret World of Sidney Reilly, Feral House, Los Angeles, California, 2002, pp. 468-496. 141. Ainsworth, John. “Sidney Reilly’s Reports from Southern Russia, December 1918 — March 1919,” Europe-Asia Studies, December 1998, v. 50, i. 8, p. 1447.

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3. TACTICAL DECEPTION — LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE HAVERSACK TRICK, AND OPERATION MINCEMEAT MAJORS LAWRENCE, MEINERTZHAGEN, AND MARTIN All men dream — but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. — T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom Man’s mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth. — Desiderius Erasmus, 1509, Praise of Folly No man lies so boldly as the man who is indignant. — Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886, German philosopher, Beyond Good and Evil

The art of military tactical deception is as old as war itself. The Chinese warrior Sun Tzu’s classic study on war written in 510 BC, Ping Fa (The Principles of War, or The Art of War), recognizes that all warfare is based upon deception. Make your way by unexpected routes, Sun Tzu writes, attacking unguarded spots.142 The Chinese have studied Tzu’s work carefully for centuries. The Japanese, wanting to learn more about their enemy, studied the work as well, as did the Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Tzu emphasized the importance of espionage for a successful military campaign, going as far as to define the various 142. Sun Tzu (c. 555 — 496 B.C) was a Chinese general and contemporary of Confucius.

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Peculiar Liaisons spies, two of them being important to the art of deception: converted spies (the double agent), and condemned spies (spies provided with false information so if they are captured they will unwittingly deceive the enemy). The Greeks attacked the Trojans, so Homer tells us, through deception involving a huge wooden horse. Virgil’s story of the Trojan Horse introduces the deceptive agent of Sinon, the ostensible defecting Greek captain who persuades the Trojans that the Greeks had mistreated him and had sailed away, leaving the wooden horse as an offering to the gods. Taken in by the ruse, the Trojans wheeled the magnificent offering into the city’s gates, only to have Greek soldiers spring from its stomach and start the battle that destroyed Troy and gave the Greeks victory. In 1294 BC, Pharaoh Ramses II led his Egyptian army against the Hittite city of Kadesh. Two Hittite soldiers, claiming that they were deserters, offered to lead the Pharoah directly to the enemy but instead led them into a Hittite ambush. Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) used speciallydesigned scrolls to convey messages that his enemies would not see: a scroll containing a report was wound around the staff in such a way that “the secret message could be deciphered from the characters that appeared in a straight line along the staff.”143 The Japanese Ninja were highly skilled agents of deception. The word Ninja derives from ninjitsu, defined as the art of making oneself invisible. In the twelfth century, the Ninja were employed by warlords to use their stealth techniques to obtain intelligence. The participants of the two world wars of the twentieth century used deception as a major weapon. The Germans concealed soldiers in merchant ships and captured the Norwegian cities of Narvik and Bergen in 1940. Nine Nazi military ships disguised as peaceful cargo ships under the flags of neutral or allied nations raided unsuspecting ships for months, with deadly consequences. The Germen seamen, using stealth and piracy as Britain and others had done during European wars centuries earlier, bombarded coastlines, sank ships, and supplied U-boats.144 The British, Americans, and Russians agreed at the Tehran Conference of 1943 to engage in a massive ruse de guerre in hopes of confusing the Nazis as to the real plan and date of the Allies’ invasion of Europe. Indeed a group of operations was launched in the next months to carry out, as Churchill put it, a “bodyguard of lies.” Plan Bodyguard included Operation Quicksilver, one of

143. Deacon, Richard. Spyclopedia, Silver Arrow, London, 1987, p. 78. 144. Duffy, James P. Hitler’s Secret Pirate Fleet — The Deadliest Ships of World War II, Praeger, Westport, Connecticut, 2001.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat the most ambitious Allied deceptions in the history of war was launched during World War II in an effort to lead the Germans to believe that the First United States Army Group would launch an attack at Pas de Calais in France from southeast England. Much of the deception was carried out by the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, a group of soldiers and designers trained to create a fake army, complete with mock Tomahawk fighters and Spitfires, inflatable three-ton trucks, dummy Sherman tanks built on a framework over a jeep, mock landing craft, and model armored cars, twenty-five-pounder guns and anti-tank guns. The imitation hardware was deployed throughout the European theater of war in hopes of deceiving the Germans through aerial reconnaissance and thus steering them in the wrong direction.145 The deception involved more than hardware; entire special headquarters, wireless units, and research units were created in a variety of organizations within MI6, OSS and various intelligence naval and army intelligence groups. The 23rd was created by US Navy command when the American film actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. convinced them that the Allied war effort could benefit from a unit of deceivers.146 The fiction became so elaborate that it confounded not only the Germans but also the Allied high command and had the potential of creating inconsistencies in actual operations. Through this kind of deception the Allies led the Germans to believe they had 80 divisions in Britain, though they had only 37. A Spaniard, the double agent Juan Pujol Garcia (aka Garbo), punctuated the deception by sending a wireless message to the Nazis on June 9, 1944 indicating that the Normandy invasion was simply “a diversionary maneuver designed to draw off enemy reserves in order then to make a decisive attack in another place.” This chapter focuses on the deceptions and legends surrounding T.E. Lawrence, his colleague in World War I deception Richard Meinertzhagen, and Major Martin of the celebrated World War II deception Operation Mincemeat, also known as “The Man Who Never Was.”

THOMAS LAWRENCE, JOHN HUME ROSS, AND T.E. SHAW In August of 1922, a thirty-four-year-old man named Thomas Lawrence enlisted in Britain’s Royal Air Force under the assumed name of John Hume

145. Brown, Anthony Cave. Bodyguard of Lies, Harper Row, New York, 1975, p. 461. 146. Gerard, Philip. Secret Soldiers. Dutton, New York, 2002.

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Peculiar Liaisons Ross. He took on the rank of aircraftsman, the lowest rank in the service. Ross was hiding his past but it was not because, having been engaged in some kind of nefarious activity, he was embarrassed to use his real name. He was hiding his real identity as a celebrity. The same day that Lawrence enlisted in the RAF, he had sent a letter to the Irish literary giant George Bernard Shaw, modestly requesting that Shaw evaluate his autobiography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Soon the British press became aware of his ruse; Ross was exposed as exLt. Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, an international celebrity since he was thirty-one-years old, the man known throughout the world as Lawrence of Arabia. An RAF officer had recognized Lawrence and tipped off the press for a fee of 30 pounds. Soon, rumors circled that the RAF was using Lawrence as a spy. Undaunted by his unmasking, two months later Lawrence enlisted again in the Tank Corps of the army using the alias of T.E. Shaw, a name he would legally adopt in 1927. He was able to stay in the Tank Corps without being bothered by his celebrity until he was granted a transfer back to the RAF in 1925, where he stayed until mandatory retirement on February 25, 1935. To say that “T.E. Shaw’s” reputation preceded him was an understatement; as Lord Berneis, a British composer and painter said of Lawrence: he had a “genius for backing into the limelight.”147 By the end of the century Lawrence would be the focus of over 40 biographies and the main character of one of the most celebrated motion pictures of the century. Yet, he told writer Percy Wyndham Lewis, “I was an Irish nobody. I did something. It was a failure. And I became an Irish nobody again.” Thomas Edward Lawrence was born 1888 in Tremadoc, Carnarvonshire, Wales. Known to his family as Ned, he was the second eldest of five sons of Thomas Chapman. Chapman’s wife Edith did not grant him a divorce and thus prevented him from remarrying; but she could not prevent him from moving from Ireland with his lover, Sarah Lawrence, to Tremadoc, North Wales and taking the name of Lawrence. Biographer Richard Aldington believed that Lawrence’s illegitimate birth explained his remarkable gifts, enigmatic behavior, and his questionable actions and traits. Lawrence became interested in the Middle East upon reading Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), studied Arabic, and in 1909, at the age of twenty-one, traveled 1,100 miles through Syria, Palestine, and parts of Turkey 147. Swainson, Bill (ed.), Encarta Book of Quotes, St Martin’s Press, New York, 2000, p. 550.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat gathering data for an Oxford thesis which was published posthumously (Crusader Castles, 1936). In 1911-14, he joined an expedition to excavate the Hittite site of Carchemish on the Euphrates, a stretch of time that may have been the happiest of his life. He made the digging amusing by turning it into a game and punctuating each discovery with a blast from his pistol, the more shots the more dramatic the find. The archeological study was undertaken on the pretext of spying to observe the Turkish influence in Palestine just before the outbreak of World War I.

LAWRENCE, FEISAL, AND AUDA T.E. Lawrence was somewhere between 5 feet 2 inches tall (according to journalist Lowell Thomas) and 5 feet 6 inches tall (Lawrence’s declaration in his book The Mint). Either way he was not a towering, physically charismatic man. It was with his wit, intelligence, and use of languages that he was able to win the confidence of his fellow British military men. He also won the unlikely admiration of the Arab field marshal King Feisal148 (alternatively spelled Faisal), the third son of the Arab spiritual leader, The Sherif and Emir of Mecca, Ali ibn Hussein. Along with Feisal he won the confidence of the leader of the Abu Tayi tribe, the gregarious and quick-tempered Auda. It was the unique relationship he established with these influential Arab leaders that would create the legend of T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. In October of 1916, Lawrence was transferred from his mundane duties as a map-maker in the Geographical Section of the General Staff in London to the Military Intelligence Department in Cairo, where he served as an intelligence liaison officer with the Arab Bureau. The Sherif and Emir of Mecca, Ali ibn Hussein, claimed an ancestral link to the Prophet Mohammed and was the most powerful man in the Middle East. He had established his son Feisal as a military leader in Hussein’s revolt against Turkish rule. Lawrence saw an opportunity to use the Arabs’ hatred for the Turks as a weapon against their German allies. However, it was soon clear to Lawrence that the Arabs had no more love for the British than they had for the Russians, French, or even the Turks. As an irresistible motivation, Lawrence challenged the Arabs’ courage and interest in

148. Feisal I ibn Hussein al Hashem (1885-1933), King of Iraq, 1921-33, third son of Hussein ibn Ali Hashem.

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Peculiar Liaisons becoming an independent nation. Feisal agreed to band his 8,000 Bedouin tribesmen into a force to fight the Turks with the help of Lawrence and the British. The Arabs in turn taunted Lawrence for his khaki dress, chiding him that it was the garb of a Turkish deserter; so Lawrence adopted the robes and headdress of an Arab Bedouin, which he found so comfortable that many of his fellow British officers followed suit. The Arabs called him “Aurans” or “Lurens,” with the nickname of Emir Dinimit (Prince Dynamite). Soon Lawrence would meet the head of the Abu Tayi tribesmen, Auda, the courageous leader whose reputation had preceded him as a renegade chief and the greatest living Arab fighter. Lawrence biographer Graves described Auda and Feisal as an unlikely pair, “Feisal the prophet, and Auda the warrior, each true to his type...[who conceived] an immediate understanding and liking” at their first meeting. Auda was over fifty years old but lively and vigorous, legendary in his own way: married 28 times, wounded 13 times, killed 75 men in battle (Turks, he did not count), generous to a fault, a desert pirate who attacked and raided other Arab tribes in the philosophy of survival of the fittest. Auda told Lawrence that all things were possible with dynamite and money. Lawrence recognized the eccentric Auda and Feisal as the kind of heroic figures he had idolized in his romantic readings of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur and Scott’s romances, like Ivanhoe, along with his studies of the medieval knights and Christian Crusaders. As Alexander had carried Aristotle’s copy of The Iliad as inspiration for his conquests, twentieth century adventurers would carry Lawrence’s own autobiography.149

AQABA AND THE LEGEND OF LAWRENCE In 1922, American journalist Lowell Thomas presented a lecture in London at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden entitled, “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence of Arabia.” The lecture was based on information personally provided by Lawrence in 1919. Hero-hungry audiences filled the opera house eager to hear a romantic action story concerning a British hero who rose from obscurity in the Arabian Desert and worked with the famous British General Edmund Allenby. Lawrence transcended the grim reality in which thousands of 149. Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny claimed he carried a copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence carried three books on his Arabic travels: the romances of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, the Greek comedies of Aristophanes, and the Oxford Book of English Verse.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat British men were being gassed, bayoneted, and shot on a daily basis. Lawrence attended several of the lectures, which eventually moved to the roomy confines of the Royal Albert Hall and ran until January of 1920, then moved to Madison Square Garden in New York. Thomas and Lawrence came from two worlds with very little in common — other than an interest in telling the world the incredible adventures of a British soldier in the alien world of Bedouin tribes, tribes who were fighting the Turks for their independence and helping the Allied Powers defeat the Central Powers. Thomas was born in Ohio and raised in the gold mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado. He worked in newspapers, attended a law school in Chicago, and was pursuing a doctorate in Constitutional Law at Princeton in 1916 when he was approached by Franklin K. Lane, the Secretary of the Interior, and asked to work with the Smithsonian Institute as a speaker on the American West (with the help of speech coach and positive-thinking guru Dale Carnegie, who helped Lawrence on the lectures). Lane hoped to use America’s neutrality in the war to boost European interest in touring America, especially the West. When America did enter the war in April 1917, Lane encouraged Thomas to visit Europe and report on the war. It was during his work in Europe that he began to see articles in The Times in London that carried news of Lawrence’s attacks on the Turkish railroad. “Fantastic yarns,” wrote Thomas, “were told in hushed tones about a certain young Englishman...sweeping the Turks out of Mecca, Medina, and all of Holy Arabia.”150 The thought of a British intelligence officer working with Bedouin tribes against the Turks fascinated Thomas, the English public, and the Turks and Germans who quickly put a bounty on his head — dead or alive. However, it was Thomas who was spinning fantastic yarns concerning Lawrence when he falsely claimed he was made a member of King Feisal’s staff and had witnessed Lawrence in military action, boasts that were declared untrue by Lawrence in a letter to novelist E.M. Forester, though Thomas was provided copies of official military reports documenting Lawrence’s maneuvers. Thomas also seems to have exaggerated his status in the academic world by claiming he was a Professor of Oratory at a Chicago law school and a lecturer in English at Princeton. And Lawrence has been credited with the quote, “On the whole I prefer lies to truth, particularly where they concern me.”151

150. Aldington, Richard. Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, Collins, London, 1955. 151. Fromkin, David. “The Charming Liar Who Was Lawrence of Arabia,” Newsday, February, 11, 1993, p. 74.

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Peculiar Liaisons It was Lawrence’s leadership in overrunning the Turkish-held gulf port of Aqaba152 that established him as a legend in the eyes of the British military and eventually the British and American public. By mid-1917, it was obvious to the British that if the Arab Revolt were to be extended to Damascas and beyond, Arab raiding parties would have to be executed in the deserts east of Palestine and Lebanon. The five thousand year old city of Damascas was the key to controlling the Middle East and making a final thrust into Turkey. Damascas was so important to the area that it had been controlled by the Assyrians and Persians in ancient times, then Alexander the Great, then the Romans. Now, the British desired to push out the old Ottoman Empire once and for all and make it the stepping-stone to a final control of all Turkey. Supplies would have to come through the Gulf of Aqaba, but the Turks held the city of Aqaba as well as the narrow pass that led from the city inland. Though the city might be captured from the sea, capturing the narrow pass called Wadi Itm was expected to be more challenging; downright daunting, in fact. It was this impossibility that drove Lawrence and Auda to attack Aqaba by land after traveling hundreds of miles through the desert. However, Lawrence’s interest in taking Aqaba was not only to give the British a military coup; he realized that an Arab presence in the city would give the Arabs credibility as a military and political force that would have to be recognized by the Allied powers. Lawrence set out with Auda from Al Wajh (currently Saudi Arabia), taking a 500-mile circuitous route before reaching Aqaba. The march was made more difficult by the fact that most of the wells in the tiny villages along the route (Arfaja, Nebk, Bair, Jefer) were destroyed or spoiled. During the spring of 1917 Lawrence had engaged in various raids on the Hejaz Railway, which was a vital supply line between Damascas and Medina. While resting and wondering what good the endless raids were doing in the greater scheme of things, Lawrence began to conceive plans of attacking Aqaba, but never made his intentions clear to his British superiors — undoubtedly fearing that the audacity of his plan would be rejected by cooler heads. However, the British command was quite willing to sacrifice both the Arabs and Lawrence. The British considered Lawrence’s raids on bridges and railroad track a vital deception that kept the Turks from perceiving that the British Army’s real aim was to sweep the Turks from Palestine. In March of 1917, the British had engaged in the First Battle of the Gaza against Turkish troops. General Murray, head of the British Army in the 152. Aqaba is currently in the country of Jordan.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat Middle East, contrived a report that made the outcome, which was a draw, look like a victory. When the report was digested by the British high command, another attack was ordered with disastrous results, which led to General Edmund Allenby replacing Murray. It was during the torturous June-July 1917 drive to Aqaba, which is the main focus of David Lean’s spectacular 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, that one of Auda’s men, Gasim, became separated from his camel and was lost in the desert. Though Lawrence was warned not to go back for the man, he did so, and found him, an act that ennobled him in the eyes of Auda’s men. Lawrence had often goaded Auda into action by questioning his courage and his men’s. When the 500 lightly-armed Arabs reached the outskirts of Aqaba and were trading harmless potshots with the Turks, the weary and dehydrated Lawrence traded barbs with Auda once again. Auda, seeing Lawrence parched and prostrate in front of a mudhole trying to suck up what little water he could, chided him with “all talk and no work?” “By God, indeed,” snapped the ill-tempered Lawrence, “they shoot a lot and hit a little.” This slight was focused toward Auda’s Abu Tayi tribesmen, which enraged Auda. “Get your camel if you want to see the old man’s work,” Auda spat at Lawrence. Down a slight incline the Arabs raced toward a group of rifle-firing Turks, with Lawrence’s camel, Naama, an animal he called a Sherari racer, soon running wildly ahead of all the others. The Turks exchanged fire but “the bullets they did send at us were not very harmful.” Firing a pistol at the Turks, Lawrence felt his camel suddenly collapse; it catapulted him a considerable distance, “which seemed to drive all the power and feeling out of me.” Stunned and helpless on the ground, in a swarm of Turks whom he expected would readily slay him, Lawrence awaited death by reciting a poem, “For Lord I was free of all Thy flowers, but I chose the world’s sad roses, and that is why my feet are torn and mine eyes are blind with sweat.” However, no Turks came — partially due to the fact that his camel’s body had “lain behind me like a rock and divided the charge into two streams.” During the mad rush into the Turks, Lawrence had accidentally shot his camel in the back of the head, an act that may have saved his life. Auda survived as well, though his mare had been killed beneath him. Lawrence noticed that Auda’s clothes had six bullet holes but somehow Auda was unscathed. Auda attributed this miracle to carrying a copy of the Qur’an that was reproduced in Glasgow, Scotland, a blessing from God that had protected him for thirteen years.

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Peculiar Liaisons The news of the raid’s success brought other Arab fighters in the area to join Auda and Lawrence’s band. They hoped to capitalize on a final raid of Aqaba. With the additional forces Aqaba was secured for the Arabs and the British, news that Lawrence brought himself to the British headquarters in Cairo, resplendent in his Arabian garb, an eccentric to the last. The victory was highlighted by the fact that Lawrence had led a group of only a few hundred men into Aqaba where he inflicted a loss of 1,200 Turks by death or capture, while losing only two of his own men. Just weeks after the stunning success at Aqaba, Lawrence was made aware of intelligence reports concerning Auda. It appeared that his wily accomplice, feeling that his raiders had not been given enough of the spoils of war, had been carrying on secret correspondence with the Turks. Lawrence confronted Auda with the accusation; Auda explained that he had indeed made a deal with the Turks, giving the appearance that he would side with them for a large sum of money — money which was, indeed, sent to him. Auda made it sound as if he were just playing a confidence game with the Turks, but Lawrence knew that Auda could side with the Turks for the right price. Nothing more was made of the incident; and Lawrence informed Auda that Feisal’s army was in route to Aqaba with supplies and arms. For his part in the Aqaba raid, Lawrence was recommended for the Victoria Cross but instead was awarded the Distinguished Service Order from England and the Croix de Guerre with palms by the French. However, the British government’s deception angered Lawrence more than the Turks. The British refusal to recognize any kind of Arab independence outraged him. In 1919, during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, he shocked the British public by refusing the military decorations that were to be pinned on him by King George V, citing Britain’s poor treatment of the Arabs.

LAWRENCE’S NATURE AND THE QUEEN OF THE DESERT In 1955, Richard Aldington published Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, asserting that Lawrence was at least “half a fraud.” Aldington said that Lawrence’s claim that he had been offered the post of High Commissioner for Egypt was false and could be proven so; and that most of the great deeds attributed to him were exaggerated. Aldington derided Lawrence as a homosexual: he never married, he tutored a fourteen-year-old water boy Dahoum153 at

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat the Hittite site, and favored the dramatic costume of the Bedouin (white robe, belt, curved dagger, silk and gold head-dress). The actuality of his homosexuality has never been established and has been seriously questioned by numerous friends as well as by Hodson, who claims that any evidence that Lawrence was sadistic or homosexual is “circumstantial at best.” However, John Mack’s psychological biography documents a variety of incidents that occurred while Lawrence was in the RAF that show he likely developed disturbing nightmares and severe masochistic tendencies. While acting as a spy in scouting the Turkish power in Der’a, Syria, Lawrence claimed he was captured, beaten, and sexually assaulted by Turks. However, numerous biographers, including James Lawrence, believe the incident did not happen and was simply another deception created by Lawrence to enhance his legendary persona.154 J.N. Lockman, who for the most part is considered a Lawrence defender, writes that although Lawrence never admits to homosexual conduct, numerous references in his works could be construed in the aggregate as evidence that Lawrence “did have a homosexual nature.” If the Der’a incident was fabricated to provide an excuse for Lawrence’s “nature” and masochistic tendencies, it casts his integrity into question. As Lockman puts it, this “would be an insult of the millions of soldiers who really were severely wounded in World War I.”155 If there ever was a female match for the likes of T.E. Lawrence, it was Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell. Bell, born in 1868, was raised in the privileged world of Victorian England and was the first woman to win a first class degree in Modern History at Oxford. She did this before she was twenty-one. She traveled extensively and was an avid mountain climber, even scaling the formidable Matterhorn, but it was her love of the Middle East that brought her extraordinary fame. She learned the Arabic language in Jerusalem in 1899 and 1900, and went to investigate Arab archaeological sites. Lawrence used the detailed reports she wrote in his campaigns against the Turks.

153. Dahoum’s plight as a poor Arabian was an inspiration to Lawrence’s dream of helping the Arabs create their own independent nation. Before the war’s end Dahoum died of typhus, which greatly depressed Lawrence. Lawrence dedicated The Seven Pillars of Wisdom to him. 154. Mack, John E. A Prince of Our Disorder — The Life of T.E. Lawrence, Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1976, pp. 432-33. Fromkin, David. “The Charming Liar Who Was Lawrence of Arabia,” Newsday, February, 11, 1993, p. 74. 155. Lockman, J.N. Scattered Tracks on the Lawrence Trail, Falcon, Whitmore Lake Michigan, 1996, pp. 137-8.

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Peculiar Liaisons She met Lawrence when he was on a Hittite dig. At first critical of the methods she saw Lawrence and his companions use, she was eventually tutored in various details that included Assyrian architecture, Mesopotamian ethnology, and other subjects pertaining to their scientific investigation of the site, many of these lessons coming from Lawrence himself. Though she was twenty years his senior, they became friends and companions in various political pursuits relating to the Middle East. Lawrence wrote of their meeting at the site, “She is pleasant...not beautiful except with a veil on, perhaps.”156 She joined the British intelligence division of the Arab Bureau in Cairo in November 1915, when she was recruited by the head of British naval intelligence, Captain Reginald “Blinker” Hall. Bell was the only woman to be honored with the position of political officer in World War I. Among her many other titles and accomplishments she was selected by Winston Churchill as one of forty British representatives and Middle East experts at the 1921 Cairo Conference. She was the only woman in the group, which included her friend T.E. Lawrence. A picture of Churchill, Bell, and Lawrence sitting side by side on camels with the pyramids in the background was taken during this conference. She was also part of the Paris Peace Conference that brought together some of the greatest leaders in the world from January to July 1919. She rubbed shoulders with President Woodrow Wilson, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and John Maynard Keynes. Even Ho Chi Minh, the future president of North Vietnam, who was a kitchen assistant at the Paris Ritz Hotel, became part of the historic effort to create a world peace when he submitted a petition to the conference for the independence of Vietnam. She was able to appreciate the complexity of Lawrence’s character. In one of the letters she wrote to him she called him an angel; and in another a man possessed by the devil. During the week-long debate at the Cairo conference, Lawrence had been on his best behavior but as Bell’s biographer Jane Wallach wrote, he “began to revert to his old ways. When he made an impudent remark no one knew what to say. Finally, Gertrude shot back at him a look with her piercing eyes, ‘You little imp!’ she jeered.” Lawrence turned red with embarrassment and “rarely if ever taken aback, retreated in silence.”157 She had established a reputation as intense, arrogant, and difficult, and hardly a voice for women’s rights. She pitied men who had to marry “such fools” as women. 156. Wallach, Jane. Desert Queen, Anchor, New York, 1991, p. 94. 157. Ibid., p. 299.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat Besides Lawrence, she found friendship with St. John “Jack” Philby, father of the notorious turncoat spy Kim. She wrote to her father that Philby “is not an enemy. In spite of his ability he suffers from an incurable confidence in his own opinions which leads him so wildly astray at times that he is not then difficult to tackle. Personally I like him very much.” Bell went on to write seven books and numerous articles on travel and history. Between 1923 and 1926 she established an archaeological museum in Baghdad and became Iraq’s Director of Antiquities. Like Lawrence, she never married, and facing ill health in 1926 took an overdose of sleeping pills to end her life at age 57.

LAWRENCE, PHILBY, REILLY, AND SAUD During the time that Lawrence was making his mark in the deserts of Arabia, and Sidney Reilly was gaining his reputation as the ace of spies in Europe and New York, another British intelligence agent was quietly making his mark in the Middle East. Harry St. John Bridger “Jack” Philby, the father of the infamous double agent “Kim” Philby, shared numerous traits of his British colleague T.E. Lawrence, Sidney Reilly, and even his famous turncoat son whose first job with the KGB was to spy on his own father. Like Bell and Lawrence, Philby became enamored with the Arabian culture while employed as a British Civil servant and MI6 agent. Like Reilly, Philby had a gift for languages and could speak several, including Persian and Hindustani. At Cambridge he earned a First in Languages and excelled as a thespian and in the study of Classics. This afforded him the luxury of communicating with the Arabs as well as and probably better than Lawrence. Philby was allegedly employed as an agent after he failed in a position in the Indian civil service. Philby’s bizarre career was marked by his hatred for Jews, his significant relationship with the terrorist Ibn Saud, and, like Reilly, his proclivity for womanizing. In December of 1915, a British agent was able to persuade Ibn Saud to sign an agreement swearing allegiance to Britain and refraining from entering into agreement with a foreign power. Saud received arms from Britain and a yearly payment of 5,000 pounds gold. This strategic agreement allowed Britain and America a foot in the door for control of Arab oil. Author Anthony Cave Brown writes that the “origin and fount of American power in the Middle East” came from the control of Arabian oil by the creation of Arabian American Oil

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Peculiar Liaisons (Aramco) through the aftermath of World War I and the relationships of Ibn Saud, St. John Philby, and John D. Rockefeller, an odd combination of Islamic extremism, British intelligence, and American money.158 One of Jack Philby’s first positions as an agent gave him access to secret MI6 financial information in Baghdad. This information gave him access to names of Arab informants, data that would be important in his relationship with Ibn Saud (who would eventually rule Saudi Arabia, the country named after him). To aid his work, Philby disguised himself as an Arab and learned much about the world of British intelligence from his first field controller, Gertrude Bell. In 1917, Philby was assigned to work with Ibn Saud, a leader of an extremely violent faction of the Wahhabis (a conservative Muslim sect that has been blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US). Philby’s relationship with Saud cemented his fanatical hatred for Jews and Israel, and led to his eventual betrayal of the British, a betrayal that may have been inspired by the 1917 Balfour Declaration. As author Anthony Cave Brown (Treason in the Blood) points out, the Philbys linked themselves with the most unlikely groups: Jack with the Wahhabis, “the most austere of the Muslim fundamentalist sects of Islam,” and Kim with Bolshevism, “the sternest of the socialist credos.” 159 In 1919, T.E. Lawrence and Jack Philby met each other on an airplane. At first, they respected each other, Philby noting and admiring Lawrence’s easy manner. In 1921, Philby’s fanatical interest in the Arabs led to his dismissal from British intelligence but Lawrence saved his career by having him transferred to a diplomatic role in Amman, Jordan (then Transjordan). Philby witnessed one of Lawrence’s idiosyncrasies first hand: his proclivity to test his physical endurance. On a freezing train ride through Jordan in 1921, Philby watched Lawrence stand outside the comfort of the passenger car braving the elements for over three hours. It was at this time that Philby disguised himself as an Arab and infiltrated the Bolshevik Communist International’s First Congress of the Asian People at Baku. It was also at this time Philby helped distribute anti-Jew propaganda in Palestine; both Philby and Lawrence agreed that Palestine must be an independent Arab country without Jews. Philby and Saud had a close relationship, as Lawrence had with Feisal. Why Saud and Philby were so close is unknown but their common hatred for the

158. Brown, Anthony Cave. Oil, God, and Gold — The Story of Aramco and the Saudi Kings, Houghton Mufflin Co., New York, 1999, pp. 9-15. 159. Brown, Anthony Cave. Treason in the Blood, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1994.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat Jews was at least one bond. Saud’s forces captured Mecca, the prophet Mohammed’s birthplace, and Medina, the prophet’s place of death, in the mid 1920s. In 1932, Saud proclaimed his rule of Saudi Arabia. For providing information that helped Saud to seize control of the country, Saud awarded Philby with a house in Mecca and a slave girl whom Philby eventually married. Loftus and Aarons (The Secret War Against the Jews) write that Standard Oil helped fuel the Nazi war machine from the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. It is their contention that a strange triad between Philby, Saud, and American intelligence agent and future CIA director Allen Dulles created an alliance that allowed American oil companies to get a foothold in the Middle East and eventually helped fund the early days of the Third Reich. KGB records alleged that Philby met Hitler and Mussolini in 1932. Also among Philby’s acquaintances were the Nazi military man Adolf Eichmann and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini. Eichmann became notorious as the right-hand man for Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Heydrich. Some scholars consider Heydrich the main force behind the Nazis’ “final solution.” Before the war Eichmann was considered an expert on Palestinian politics. Eichmann took a major role in appropriating Jewish property to enrich the Reich. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini, was a figurehead for the Arabian community and spent much of World War II in Germany conferring with the Third Reich on the best ways of disposing of the Jews. Husseini collaborated with the pro-Croatian terror group Ustasha during World War II in an effort to recruit a Bosnian Muslim SS division, the Hanjar. The group committed brutalities against the Jews and Serb resistance fighters. It is likely that Jack helped provide refuge for the Grand Mufti in Saudi Arabia when the British were hunting for him, in 1946, for leading a violent rebellion against British forces in Iraq in 1941.160 On March 8, 1920 the Arab Grand Committee at Damascas proclaimed Feisal King of Syria, a position that lasted until July 27, 1920, when the French deposed him. In March of 1921, in Cairo, Churchill, acting as colonial secretary, agreed to make Feisal king of an area that would eventually become Iraq in 1927. Gertude Bell acted as a friend and confidant to Feisal. She helped design Feisal’s Iraqi flag and worked closely with him during his coronation. In 1932, Iraq joined the League of Nations; the following year, Feisal died. Feisal’s son was his successor until he died in a car crash in 1939. Feisal’s grandson was killed in the 160. Ibid.

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Peculiar Liaisons coup of 1958, which ended the reign of the Hashemite family in Iraq and created the republic that was eventually ruled by Saddam Hussein. The Hashemite kingdom survived in Jordan through the descendants of Feisal’s older brother, Abdullah.

LAWRENCE’S END Aldington’s unflattering portrayal of Lawrence was part of the inspiration for the controversial and effete depiction of Lawrence in the Spiegel/Lawrence cinema production Lawrence of Arabia. O’Toole’s portrayal of Lawrence gave the viewer the impression that Lawrence was “at least ten incompatible men living under the same skin, and two or three women as well,” which in turn left the viewer with the impression of having “no idea whatever of what Lawrence was really like.”161 The filmmakers were aided in their production in the early 1960s by King Hussein of Jordan, a direct relative to the Sherif and Emir of Mecca, Ali ibn Hussein, father of King Feisal. In 1964, Lawrence’s youngest brother, Arnold, a professor of archaeology at Cambridge, told talk show host Jack Paar that the film was “pretentious and false,” and he told the New York Times that the film makers used a false psychological recipe. Lawrence, he told Paar, “was one of the nicest, kindest, and most exhilarating people I’ve known. He often appeared cheerful when he was unhappy.”162 It was this interview that inspired Dr. John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, to write the biography A Prince of Our Disorder, in 1976, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Capt L.H. Gilman, who commanded an armored car battery with Lawrence, said that Aldington’s work calling Lawrence a charlatan was “tantamount to an insinuation of the basest treachery on the part of Lawrence...Our faith in Lawrence is too great to be thus shaken, and we will not rest until the stigma of this foul indictment has been wiped from the slate.”163 General Allenby called Lawrence the mainspring of the Arab movement. Britain had deceived the

161. Hodson, Joel C. Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture — the Making of a Transatlantic Legend, Greenwood, Westport/London, 1995, pp. 122-3. 162. Belt, Annie and Don. “Lawrence of Arabia: A Hero’s Journey,” National Geographic, Jan. 1999, v. 195, p. 38. 163. Mack, John E. A Prince of Our Disorder — The Life of T.E. Lawrence, Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1976, p. 178.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat Arabs into thinking they would be granted some kind of international recognition; instead, General Allenby enforced the Sykes-Picot agreement that allowed France to govern Syria, a decision that deeply disappointed Lawrence and outraged Feisal. In a letter to John Mack, Gilman wrote that Lawrence excelled in courage, had a profound knowledge of the Arabian country, people, and language, and was a natural guerilla fighter: feelings that were echoed by numerous other officers who knew Lawrence and whose views are documented by Mack. Though Lawrence was disappointed that he was not able to do more, he is still revered as a hero who helped unite Arab tribes that had previously feuded with one another. He is considered to this day one of the main figures in the fight to remove the yoke of the Ottoman Empire from the Arab people.164 Franz von Papen, who would help bring Hitler to power and was vice chancellor in his cabinet, declared that Lawrence’s actions in the Islamic world were priceless in the political and economic realm. The Germans copied Lawrence’s tactics in World War II by attempting to pay tribesmen to infiltrate lands along the east coast of the Red Sea, but they were unsuccessful in bending the loyalty of the local population. After his retirement from the RAF, Lawrence settled in at Clouds Hill, Dorset where on May 12, 1935 he wrote that he was sitting in his cottage and getting used to an empty life. But, English writer Henry Williamson thought there was a role for Lawrence in shaping German-English relations. Williamson was a friend of the English Nazi sympathizer Oswald Mosley and had discussed the issue of Hitler’s regime and personality. Williamson was of the opinion that Hitler was mentally unstable but could be a positive force for Europe if someone would put him on the right track. He believed that Lawrence was the kind of man who could get Hitler on that track. On May 13, 1935, Lawrence set out to send a telegram to Williamson inviting him to his cottage. On his way back from sending the telegram, Lawrence was speeding along on his motorcycle (given to him by G.B. Shaw) at approximately 40 miles an hour and lost control when he tried to avoid two boys on a bicycle. The crash was fatal, and though some have claimed it was a suicide, the eyewitness accounts leave little doubt that it was a

164. Waters, Irene, “The Lawrence Trail,” Contemporary Review, April 1998, v. 272, n. 1587, p. 205.

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Peculiar Liaisons tragic accident.165 Churchill wept at his funeral and declared, “Whatever our need, we shall never see his like again.” In 1926, Lawrence had privately published his autobiography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom,166 which was later printed in an abridged version as Revolt in the Desert. Seven Pillars of Wisdom was rewritten from notes when Lawrence claimed he had lost the original manuscript on a train trip from London to Oxford. He cut the original book by about 80,000 words. George Bernard Shaw, who had read the unabridged Seven Pillars of Wisdom and praised it highly, criticized the cut. In 1997, the missing pages were found and authenticated by biographer Jeremy Wilson. The new material has raised questions of whether the original manuscript was actually lost or was burned by Lawrence. It also sheds more light on his relationship with Auda and Feisal as well as the Turks’ assault on him at Der’a.167 Like Lawrence, the autobiography has stirred strong emotions. Churchill praised it as one of the “greatest books ever written in the English language”; E.M. Forester proclaimed Lawrence a genius; G.B. Shaw declared Lawrence “one of the greatest descriptive writers in English literature.” Through all the praise of Lawrence the man and his additional literary works,168 Lawrence still publicly denigrated himself and his autobiography, which led biographer Harold Orlans to write, “He was an extraordinary mix of genius and meglomania with abasement and self-hatred.”169

RICHARD MEINERTZHAGEN AND THE HAVERSACK TRICK Richard Meinertzhagen wrote eight books, over fifty technical articles concerning ornithology, and a controversial 76-volume diary (published under 165. Furness, Peter. “Lawrence Was No Suicide,” The Australian, September 6, 1996, p. 10. 166. Lawrence gleaned the title of Seven Pillars of Wisdom from the Biblical verse, “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.” Proverbs, ch.3, v. 17. 167. Knightley, Phillip. “Found: Lawrence of Arabia’s Lost Text, Independent on Sunday,” April 13, 1997, p. 5. Knightly, Phillip. “The Full Lawrence — A Wise Endeavor,” The Australian, January 31, 1998, p. R26. 168. Lawrence also wrote letters to many literary figures, most of which have been published (over 7,000), as well as a book of poetry, an explication of his service in the RAF (The Mint), and a translation of Homer’s The Odyssey (1932). In 1936 his thesis for his Oxford degree, Crusader’s Castles, a two-volume set, was published with the assistance of his brother Arnold. 169. Orlans, Harold. “T.E. Lawrence, Writer,” Potpourri, Change, January/February, 2003, p. 6.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat different names)170 that has been the source for numerous biographies of Meinertzhagen as well as understandings and misunderstandings of his friend T. E. Lawrence. During Meinertzhagen’s long career as a British soldier, spy, and government liaison, his friends and acquaintances included General Allenby, T.E. Lawrence, and Adolf Hitler. Great Britain Prime Minister David Lloyd George wryly wrote of Meinertzhagen, “I met him during the Peace Conference and he struck me as being one of the ablest and most successful brains I had met in any army. That was quite sufficient to make him suspect and to hinder his promotion to the higher ranks of his profession.”171 Meinertzhagen did rise to the rank of colonel but his most famous endeavor with the military occurred as an intelligence operative during the Palestine campaign in October 1917, when he was a major. Meinertzhagen wrote a set of false papers and created a fictitious staff officer, a forgery that would be acknowledged as one of the most successful pieces of tactical military deception of the twentieth century: the Haversack Trick. He intended to get the papers into the right hands: the Turks and the Germans. The papers would lead them to believe that a British attack would be at Gaza and that the attack at Beersheba was only to be a minor assault designed to appear as the main assault. Attempts by two British and Australian officers to plan the false documents were unsuccessful, so Meinertzhagen took the responsibility of delivering the information himself. In 1916, the British defeated the Turks at Romani and pushed them into the Sinai desert into a defensive position at Beersheba. On October 10, 1917, Meinertzhagen mounted a horse and rode into a desolate area northwest of Beersheba. When he spotted a Turkish guard he turned and let him take chase. A small group of Turks took after him; he drew his pistol. When they had taken chase in earnest Meinertzhagen feigned that he’d been hit by a bullet and let loose his haversack, field glasses, water bottle, and a rifle he had smeared beforehand with horse’s blood to give an impression than he had been injured by the Turks’ fire. The Turks recovered the haversack and reviewed the faked documents: confirmation of a British offensive at Gaza, a telegram authorizing reconnaissance in the area where the haversack had been dropped, and letters from a staff officer criticizing a Beersheba attack. Meinertzhagen had added a letter from the imag170. The diaries have been published under the titles of Army Diaries, Diary of a Black Sheep, Middle East Diary. 171. Cocker, Mark. Richard Meinertzhagen, Soldier, Scientist and Spy, Mandarin Paperbacks, London, 1990, p. 268.

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Peculiar Liaisons inary wife (he had his sister Mary write it). The letter included twenty pounds cash for added verisimilitude. Placing false information in the proper hands was a ruse that Meinertzhagen had worked before. In the summer of 1917, he had set his mind on foiling an Arab spy in Beersheba. He did so by sending the spy a letter of “thanks” for information; he included a hefty sum of Turkish currency. The letter was transmitted in such a way that it would fall into the right hands and lead to the spy’s execution. T.E. Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “After the Meinertzhagen success, deceptions, which for the ordinary general were just witty hors d’oeuvres before battle, became for Allenby a main point of strategy.” Meinertzhagen wrote that the enemy’s resistance during the Gaza attack was feeble and that a captured document showed the “enemy believed our camouflage, and the dummy notebook was a great success, for the enemy had all his reserves in the wrong place.” Then Meinertzhagen, the modern-day Crusader, thought back to the medieval Crusaders who attacked the Holy Land in an effort to free it from heretics: “we enter on this the Seventh Crusade, once and for all to evict the Turk from the sacred places of Christianity.”172

THE FRANKS DECEIT — A GREEK BEARING GIFTS Meinertzhagen wrote of an “extraordinary and tragic experience” that personified his talent for military deception and use of misinformation in intelligence matters. In the spring of 1917, the British were being visited by a German “bogey agent” known only as “Franks,” who penetrated their lines under the disguise of an Australian. Meinertzhagen created a “dummy description” of Franks that was issued to the troops. The British troops became so vigilant in trying to find the agent that there were numerous arrests of suspicious men, one arrest being Meinertzhagen himself. On June 25, Meinertzhagen was asked to meet with a Greek prisoner in Alexandria who had deserted from the Turkish Army. During the interview Meinertzhagen learned about the desertion and was surprised to hear that the Greek had worked with Franks. The Greek promised to help Meinertzhagen capture Franks if he would arrange his release from the POW camp.

172. Gardner, Brian. Allenby of Arabia, Coward-McCann, New York, 1966, p. 150.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat A few days later a meeting with the Greek was arranged in a remote area when Franks was to be coming back from one of his behind-the-lines escapades. The Greek told Meinertzhagen to shoot Franks as soon as he saw him. Eventually, a horseman approached dressed in an Australian uniform. The Greek told Meinertzhagen that it was Franks’s orderly. The orderly met with the Greek as Meinertzhagen watched from a distance. The orderly spoke in German and passed along some papers to the Greek. The Greek came back to Meinertzhagen and told him the orderly was traveling alone and Franks was taking another route back to the Turkish lines. Meinertzhagen insisted that he arrest the orderly and the Greek agreed. Before he realized what had happened the Greek and the orderly were firing at Meinertzhagen with Meinertzhagen returning fire. The orderly was hit in the neck, the Greek escaped, and when Meinertzhagen looked closely he realized he had shot a woman. “I had been badly tricked,” wrote Meinertzhagen who was doubly shamed that he had killed a woman. Only in December of 1917 did Meinertzhagen learn the full truth of the mysterious Greek and phantom Franks when he located Franks’s house and found a photograph of him. “To my horror I then realized that my Greek was Franks himself, who must have been originally arrested as a Greek refugee.” His ruse to get released from the POW camp was clever and his intimate knowledge of Greece and the Greek language enabled him to act his part. “It fills me with dismay to think that I harboured that German agent in my office...I further discovered that the woman whom I had shot was Franks’s wife, to whom he was devoted.”173

MEINERTZHAGEN AND LAWRENCE Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom that Meinertzhagen was a “student of migrating birds [who] drifted into soldiering...whose hot immoral hatred of the enemy expressed itself as readily in trickery as in violence...he knew no half measures...he was logical, an idealist of the deepest; and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good...who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest.”174 Meinertzhagen was a “strategist, a geographer...instincts abetted

173. Meinertzhagen, Richard. Army Diary, 1899-1926, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1960, pp. 216-219.

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Peculiar Liaisons by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain . . .” Some biographers have noted that Meinertzhagen was appalled by Lawrence’s language, and requested that he remove it. But, Lawrence did not consider the comments pejorative; he was describing Meinertzhagen as he saw him. In a January 1928 letter to George Bernard Shaw’s wife, Charlotte, Lawrence wrote that Meinertzhagen had seen his description in the book and was amused by it and praised Meinertzhagen as having astonishing power. In his Middle East Diary, published in 1959, Meinertzhagen alternates between praise bordering on adoration and belittling descriptions of Lawrence’s behavior as a person and soldier. In sixteen pages there are twelve entries on Lawrence dating from 1917-55. He constantly describes Lawrence as a “little man” and a shy show-off with little to show but a very complex and interesting mind. Meinertzhagen refers to Lawrence’s Arabian compatriots as a “poor lot, splendid looters, and with miserable courage.” Meinertzhagen’s pro-Zionist attitudes may have played into his comment when he asserted that the exploits of Lawrence’s Arabs were exaggerated and that the Turk would “always be a tento-one better man than the Bedouin.” He called Lawrence’s alliance with the Arabs a “side-show (he did not like ‘side-show,’ though I eventually persuaded him that it was).” Meinertzhagen wrote that he liked “the little man” who had great charm, a pleasant voice, and an impish sense of humor. Lawrence was concerned about a book he was writing about his life, wrote Meinertzhagen on August 4, 1919, and “he has overdone it and is now terrified lest he is found out and deflated.” As the two men were attending the Paris Peace Conference, Meinertzhagen claims that Lawrence showed him parts of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Meinertzhagen wrote that he begged Lawrence to remove the material on him, claiming that Lawrence admitted that little of the book was strict truth but was based on fact. Lawrence’s authorized biographer, Jeremy Wilson, wrote, “Meinertzhagen’s diaries are demonstrably incorrect on many points...much of the comment is pure fantasy.”175 Meinertzhagen was, even by Lawrence’s admission, one of the few people who read any part of the first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The handwritten manuscript and notes were in a bank messenger’s bag when they were, 174. Lawrence, T. E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom — A Triumph, Random House, New York, 1991, p. 384. 175. Wilson, Jeremy. Lawrence of Arabia, Atheneum, New York, 1990, p. 1112. Wilson writes that the diaries were very extensively written up for publication years after the events concerned. The original diaries have been destroyed.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat according to Lawrence, lost. Lawrence went on to rewrite the book in 1921-22, in an apartment lent to him in the shadows of Parliament. Upon his death, Meinertzhagen wrote that he had lost an inspiration that would be impossible to replace. Not only does biographer Jeremy Wilson question the validity of Meinertzhagen’s comments concerning Lawrence, John Mack also wrote, “the validity of portions of Meinertzhagen’s diary as a contemporaneous record must...be questioned.” Author J.N. Lockman carefully studied Meinertzhagen’s diaries and in his study, Meinertzhagen’s Diary Ruse — False Entries on T.E. Lawrence,176 he contends that much of the Middle East Diary was rewritten after the fact for publication. Meinertzhagen’s entries concerning Lawrence, writes Lockman, “are almost complete fantasies.” Lockman contends that Meinertzhagen’s writings have led biographers, especially Aldington, to falsely believe that Lawrence exaggerated his exploits and was little more than a paper hero created by Lawrence’s own imagination and the hero-worshipping writings of Lowell Thomas.177

DECEIVING THEMSELVES World War I brought to light European distrust and hatred of Arabs and Jews. Karen Armstrong wrote that the clearest proof of this was Britain’s derailing of any move toward Arab independence, which was the goal of King Feisal and T.E. Lawrence. Armstrong notes that even Lawrence, though he championed the need for Arab recognition by the British, showed “a racist contempt for the Arabs throughout The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” 178 However, Lawrence was clearly disgusted when the British broke their agreement to press for Arab independence and took control of Damascas. A set of secret agreements (the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, Sykes Picot agreement, Balfour Declaration, Anglo-French Joint Statement of Aims in Syria and Mesopotamia)179 made contradictory promises to Arabs and Jews; but neither the French nor British ever intended to recognize these declarations and agreements.

176. For a review of Lockman’s study see Allen, M.D. “Meinertzhagen’s Diary Ruse: False Entries on T.E. Lawrence,” Arab Studies Quarterly, v. 18, June 1, 1996, p. 94. 177. Lockman, J. N. Meinertzhagen’s Diary Ruse — False Entries on T.E. Lawrence, Cornerstone Publications Inc., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1995. 178. Armstrong, Karen. Holy War, Anchor, New York, 2001, p. 510.

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Peculiar Liaisons The duplicity of the British and French foreign policy toward the Middle East lay in the basic beliefs of the men who made these agreements. Balfour’s Declaration establishing the concept of an individual Jewish state was designed to garner support for Britain from Jews around the world during the war. Arthur Balfour was also inspired, like many other British Zionists, by the Protestant idea that Jews deserved more than any other Middle East group to be the sole residents of Palestine. Like his fellow British Zionist Meinertzhagen, Balfour had utter contempt for the Palestinian Arab who, in their view, was unworthy of tending to the Holy Land because Zionism, as Balfour put it, “is rooted in agelong traditions...far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” In 1905, Balfour had introduced the Aliens Bill in Parliament designed to limit Jewish immigration into Britain. Even the Catholic Mark Sykes, co-author of the pre-Balfour Sykes-Picot agreement, had a strong “distaste for Jews” but became an ardent Zionist when he realized the Jew could be a British representative in the Middle East, and he thought it better to have the Jew in the Middle East than in Europe, a sentiment that was held by Balfour, Meinertzhagen, Lloyd, and other Zionists.180 What was the game plan? Even Balfour admitted that the string of agreements and declarations were vacant unless they were executed by action, when he said, “the [European Great] powers have made no statement of fact that is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy, which at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.” 181 Arab nationalists, for their part, argued that granting the Jews a state in Palestine could not be justified simply because Jews had suffered at the hands of racists and bigots in Europe.

179. McMahon-Hussein correspondence — promised Arabs independence for their support for the British against the Turks in 1915. Sykes-Picot agreement — a secret 1916 agreement between Britain and France that essentially divided the Middle East between themselves. In 1917, Britain awarded itself Palestine. Balfour Declaration 1917 — promise of a Jewish homeland. Anglo-French Joint Anglo-French Joint Statement of Aims in Syria and Mesopotamia — promised self-determination and independence to Syria and Iraq. 180. Along with Balfour, Prime Minister David Lloyd George embraced the philosophy of Zionism, though George was known to make anti-Semitic remarks. 181. Documents on British Foreign Policy (1919 — 1939), First Series, v. IV, p. 345.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat THE BALFOUR DECLARATION DECEPTION John Cornelius has suggested that the Balfour Declaration was issued not for something that Britain “hoped would happen in the future, but for something that had already happened in the past.” Cornelius offers the statements by Churchill and George that first led him to believe that the real reason for the Balfour Declaration was always hidden from the public. In 1922, Churchill declared in a Parliamentary speech that the Balfour Declaration should not be thought as something the British gave to the Jews for nothing in return. What had the Jews given the British? Churchill never elaborated. Prime Minister George rationalized the Balfour Declaration as gratitude to Zionists for contributions of acetone during the war. George’s explanation, Cornelius contends, was a deception to cover the more amazing reason for the magnanimous gesture that the Balfour Declaration proposed. Cornelius writes that the Balfour Declaration was a reward to Zionists for having brought the US into the war. In July of 1917, one million American troops were transported under a special naval convoy to engage in the war. The prevailing theory among scholars concerning the Zimmermann Telegram is that it was issued by German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann on January 16, 1917 and was intercepted on its way to Mexico City via Washington D.C., and was deciphered by the Allies. The original enciphered text of the telegram has never been found. The British, however, were able to obtain the verbatim text, though the telegram was written in a code that the Germans were certain could not be broken. In fact, there is no real evidence that the British or Americans deciphered the text but somehow the entire text did come into the hands of the British. Cornelius believes that the text of the Zimmermann Telegram was stolen in Berlin before it was sent to Washington. The agents were German Zionists who smuggled the message to the British. In 1917, there were several Jews in high places with the ability to pull off such a feat. With the exposure of the telegram, Britain assured itself of gaining the US as a war partner and the Balfour Declaration became the secret means of paying back the Zionists.182

182. Cornelius, John. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Special Report “The Balfour Declaration and the Zimmermann Note,” August/September, 1997, pp. 18-20.

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Peculiar Liaisons A DEAD MAN TELLS LIES — THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS In May of 1943, Hitler expressed to his Generals a new fear: the loss of the Balkans. At the time, all the Balkan States were either occupied by the Nazis or were part of the Axis Powers.183 Hitler believed that the countries could provide long-lasting raw materials for Germany: copper, bauxite, chrome, and most importantly, Romanian oil. Western Allied intelligence was aware that Hitler feared an allied attack through the Balkan Peninsula. However, by May of 1943, an attack through Italy had been planned. On June 11, 1943 the Allies captured the small island of Pantelleria. It would seem at this point that the Germans would conclude that Italy would be attacked and the Balkans were safe. The London Controlling Section (LCS — responsible for devising deceptive schemes)184 prepared to mislead Hitler into believing an attack on Sicily was too obvious. He would have to be led to think that the Allies would invade both Greece, for a thrust into the Balkans, and Sardinia as a stepping stone to the south of France. The deception (initially code-named Operation Trojan Horse and then Operation Mincemeat) would eventually be recognized as one of history’s greatest pieces of espionage. The idea was old: place false papers in the hands of the enemy in hopes they would believe the information and act on it. Like Meinertzhagen, Brigadier Archibald Wavell185 used the ruse during the British campaign against the Turks and Germany in World War I. Their success inspired Churchill to create the LCS. Finding papers on a dead man could work both ways. They could be real or faked. In July 1940, Operation Sealion, the Nazi plan to invade and conquer Great 183. The Triple Axis refers to the alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan, although by World War II the Axis Powers was a group of six, comprising Germany, Italy (October 25, 1936), Japan (September 27, 1940), Hungary (November 20, 1940), Romania (November 23, 1940), and Bulgaria (March 1, 1941). Germany and Italy created their first alliance October 25, 1936 through an agreement of Hitler and Mussolini; later they created the Pact of Steel in May 22, 1939, as a commitment to fight together in the early period of the war. 184. Col. John Bevan headed the LCS, created in 1941. It worked with MI5, SOE, and some Allied intelligence organizations. Its main objective was to spread disinformation concerning Allied war operations. It was disbanded at the end of 1945. 185. Wavell learned the art of deception while under General Allenby in the Third Battle of Gaza. In the Second World War Wavell teamed with Brigadier Dudley Wrangel Clarke where they marked up successful deceptions in the African desert campaign. Brown, Anthony Cave. Bodyguard of Lies, Harper Row, New York, 1975, p. 49.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat Britain appeared plausible to the British. The British Royal Air Force was greatly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe and the Royal Navy was over-extended in its task of opening vital supply routes between the US and England. 186 In August of 1940, Scotland Yard detectives investigated a possible murder in a deserted airraid shelter in Cambridge. A dead man was identified as Jan Villen Ter Braak. His suitcase contained an Abwehr187 (Nazi military intelligence) Aguf radio set, the kind that German spies used. The name Braak was fictitious, as were his papers — they were created by Abwehr technicians in Hamburg. Though the true identity of the man was never known, the codes found on his body allowed British intelligence agents to send false information to his Third Reich controllers that led them to believe that British armed forces were being rapidly rearmed with armaments from the US. The Nazi intelligence service had faked the identity of the agent but the codes and instructions on how to use the radio were real, which made all the difference in being able to send false information back to the Germans. The original idea for what would be called “The Man Who Never Was” came from Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, a member of a British naval intelligence department responsible for liaison between other deception agencies. He proposed that a body be disguised as a staff officer and have him carry high-level papers that would show the Allies’ intention of attacking somewhere other than Sicily. The proposal was presented to the “XX-Committee,” an MI5 organization responsible for double agents. After the plan was discussed, Churchill and Eisenhower approved it. A corpse would be set adrift from a submarine near Huelva, in Spain, where it was known that a German intelligence agent had good connections with the Spanish. The corpse would have a briefcase attached to it. The papers in the case would contain information that would lead the Germans to believe that the Allies were to attack Sardinia and Greece, not Sicily. Montagu, in his book The Man Who Never Was, insisted that to carry out the ruse authenticity was of paramount importance. If an autopsy were performed on the body of the victim, it must appear that the man had died of drowning. 186. Breuer, William. Unexplained Mysteries of World War II, “Dead Spy Put to Work,” J. Wiley, New York, 1974, p. 204 (Large Print Ed.). 187. With the replacement of the Reich War Ministry in 1938, the OKW, or Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, employed the Abwehr as its chief intelligence network, which became a larger more powerful organization during the Nazi administration with the expansion done by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.

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Peculiar Liaisons Montagu wrote that the corpse of a man who had died of pneumonia was sought and found. The man, in his early thirties, had been physically fit until his death. The parents of the dead man were approached and told that the body was needed for medical purposes. The parents agreed but made a condition that the identity of the body was never made public. However, it appears that the corpse that was used may not have been the victim of pneumonia. Documents declassified and made public in 1995 seem to show that Montagu had deceived the public for years concerning the real body used as Major Martin, and that having a body that appeared to have drowned was not of particular importance. Documents show that the body Montagu used was a Welshman, Glyndwr Michael, a thirty-four-year-old drifter who committed suicide by rat poison.188 Yet, Colin Gibbon’s 2003 film documentary Who Was the Man Who Never Was? argued that the body used was Tom Martin, a British naval seaman killed along with 379 fellow sailors on the British aircraft carrier Dasher. Fourteen years of research led Gibbon to believe that a body tainted with poison would have been unacceptable to the finely detailed plan. Gibbon noted that Tom Martin shared the surname of the corpse and that Montagu left clues to the real identity of the corpse in his book Top Secret.189 In the book Montagu referred to a Tom Martin as “a good friend.” Gibbon found there was only one Tom Martin in the navy and that was the same Martin who died of drowning on the Dasher. Gibbon learned from Martin’s sister that her brother had always carried a crucifix and a St. Christopher’s medal in his wallet. The corpse carried a wallet containing a crucifix and a St. Christopher’s medal, items that may have been placed on the body at the request of the family.

MAJOR MARTIN The XX-Committee gave the body a new identity: Captain (Acting Major) William Martin, 09560, Royal Marines, a staff officer at Combined Operations Headquarters. To give Major Martin an air of authenticity his briefcase, chained to his wrist, carried confidential papers. His wallet carried an overdraft from his bank, ticket stubs from a London play, a bill for the recent purchase of an 188. Secrets of the Century — WWII War in the Shadows, Time Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 2000, p. 163. 189. Montagu, Ewen. Beyond Top Secret Ultra, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc. New York, 1977.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat engagement ring, personal letters, and a photo of his fiance (a real woman secretary on Montagu’s staff, sometimes referred to as The Girl Who Never Was).190 The accompanying documents showed the Allies would invade Sicily only as a deceptive maneuver to conceal the more important invasions of Sardinia and Greece. One of the documents was a personal letter from General Archibald Nye, the Vide Chief of the Imperial General Staff, to General Sir Harold Alexander, the commander who would lead the Sicilian invasion code named Operation Husky. Husky was decided at the Casablanca conference in January 1943; its objective would be to capture Sicily with 160,000 men and 3,000 ships. The attack was initially planned for 1942 but at the last minute the British realized their resources were inadequate. To remove any possible doubts the Germans might have about an acting major carrying such important papers, Martin was given a letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten to Mediterranean Commander in Chief, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham. Mountbatten wrote that Martin was an expert in the employment of landing craft and had been “more accurate than some of us about the probable run of events at Dieppe and he has been well in on the experiments with the latest barges and equipment, which took place up in Scotland. Let me have him back, please as soon as the assault is over.” Mountbatten, a greatgrandson of Queen Victoria, had a distinguished military career and was assassinated by Irish Republican Army terrorists August 27, 1979.191 April 19, 1943, Martin was placed on the submarine HMS Seraph. On April 30, the Seraph surfaced off the coast of Spain near the fishing village of Huelva. The briefcase of papers was chained to Martin’s wrist and the body was set in the water along with a capsized rubber boat. As Martin floated toward the shore, the Seraph slipped into the sea and disappeared. A fisherman found the body the next day and took the corpse into port. The Spanish Armada took custody of the body and contacted the British viceconsul, who had not been told anything about the MI6 plot. The vice-consul called the British attaché at Madrid, Capt. J.H. Hillgarth, who knew of the plot. Hillgarth told the vice-consul to be sure the briefcase was retrieved, but the Spaniards told the vice-consul the case was being retained for judicial purposes.

190. Deacon, Richard. Spyclopedia, Silver Arrow, London, 1987, p. 188. 191. On August 27, 1979 Montbatten and three others were killed by a bomb planted in his boat in Donegal Bay. The Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the bomb.

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Peculiar Liaisons At the same time the Spanish had informed the Abwehr. As a doctor established the fact that the man had died of drowning after a plane crash, Spanish authorities were photo-copying the documents. Hillgarth continued to insist that the dead man’s papers be returned; a fact the Abwehr did not over look. At Huelva, Martin was buried with full military honors; his “fiance” sent a wreath with a card of remembrance. The Spanish meticulously extracted the documents without breaking the seals, photo-copied the documents, and gave the photos to the local German Abwehr. The Spanish Foreign Office returned the briefcase and its papers to the British. The photos were sent to Berlin for analysis and evaluation. The Germans in turn studied the material very closely. Eventually, they concluded that the documents were genuine. Now Hitler’s paranoia about the Balkans was becoming all the more real. He told his aides he was not concerned about a second front in the West in 1943; he was still worried about the possibility of an enemy landing in the Balkans backed by communist uprisings, which might lead to the exposing of the German southern flank. Montagu writes that the German Intelligence Service seemed to have “swallowed the deception” with the High Command accepting the view. The reason for this acceptance may have been Hitler himself. Montagu cites the diary of Admiral Doenitz’s conferences with the Fuhrer as a source that documents the fact that Hitler was convinced by May 14, 1943 that Martin’s documents were genuine.192 Italian troops were the Axis Powers’ main defense in the Balkans. However, Hitler had doubts about Italy’s dependability as an ally. As Hitler considered new information showing that there were plots in Rome to overthrow Mussolini, he also wondered how to make sure the Balkans were properly defended. At some time during the war Hitler undoubtedly feared another sting from the Balkans, the snake den that had dealt mighty Germany its humiliating loss in World War I and had ended the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the government that had ruled his homeland when he was born. A second corpse was found near Cagliari, Sardinia — a British commando who carried documents that again showed the Allies’ interest in the Balkans. The corpse was another deception by LCS. Doenitz met with Mussolini and reported to Hitler that Mus-

192. Montagu, Ewen. The Man Who Never Was, J.P. Lippincott, Philadelphia and New York, 1954, p. 142.

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat solini was convinced that the Allies would attack Sicily but Hitler seemed convinced that the main thrust would come in the Balkans, specifically Greece. On May 12, 1943, Hitler declared “measures regarding Sardinia and the Peloponnese take precedence over everything else.” On July 9, 1943, Sicily was attacked and occupied by the armies of Montgomery and General George Patton while Rommel continued to set up his headquarters in Greece. It appeared the German high command had taken Major Martin’s information seriously and the beaches of Sicily were only lightly defended. On July 23, almost two weeks after the Sicily invasions, Hitler still believed that the main invasion would come in Greece. Hitler’s fears had become a reality: the encirclement of his Third Reich; but this time the final thrust into “the soft underbelly of Europe” might not come from the Balkans but from Italy. How could Hitler be sure? He never was. Montagu was also involved in other deceptions; the most celebrated was related to his handling through MI5 of the Yugoslavian double agent Dusan “Dusko” Popov. Popov was able to convince the Germans that he could provide them with information while he passed it on to the Allies. Montagu writes in his book Beyond Top Secret that the Germans approached Popov, using the moniker “Tricycle,” because he had very high-level English contacts, once meeting “members of the Royal family when they were on holiday on the Dalmatian Coast.”193 Montagu directed Popov in creating a deception that the British George V class battleships were fitted with torpedo tubes when they were not. Popov was able to provide information concerning the postponement of Operation Sealion, the planned invasion of Britain. Popov would eventually be moved to the US to work with the FBI. He produced a document that showed German interest in Pearl Harbor intelligence before the attack on Pearl Harbor; there are many questions as to why American military intelligence was apparently not fully appraised of the seriousness of the information.

MEINERTZHAGEN AND HITLER Meinertzhagen wrote that he had three interviews with Hitler and Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop between 1934 and 1939. In October 1934, he was working in a Berlin museum when he was called upon by Joachim von

193. Montagu, Ewen. Beyond Top Secret Ultra, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc. New York, 1977, pp. 70-72.

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Peculiar Liaisons Ribbentrop to meet with Hitler. As the German ambassador to Britain, Ribbentrop had acquired a distaste for England. “So unpopular was this ill-mannered upstart,” wrote Meinertzhagen concerning Ribbentrop, “that the Governors of Eton refused to allow his son entry to the school...from then on he devoted himself to poisoning Hitler’s mind against Britain.” Author William Shirer wrote of Ribbentrop that he was vain, pompous, and stupid. Hitler met Meinertzhagen after a lunch with Ribbentrop. When the door to the Chancellor’s room opened, Meinertzhagen was shocked by the room’s huge size. As they walked toward each other Meinertzhagen noticed Hitler’s famous penetrating gaze. When they met, Hitler threw up his arm and exclaimed “Heil Hitler!” “I thought it rather odd that he should ‘heil’ himself, so I raised my hand and said ‘Heil Meinertzhagen,’” wrote Meinertzhagen. Neither of the Germans was amused. They sat at a table and Ribbentrop acted as an interpreter. Hitler spoke of his hatred of war and interest in returning Britain’s “colonies” — but only with her acceptance. Being a pro-Zionist, Meinertzhagen was unhappy to hear Hitler’s fanatical view toward Jews in Germany. He blamed Jews for organizing the German Communist Party, over-running government departments, and imposing their culture on seventy million Germans. Hitler told Meinertzhagen that “only Jews of communist tendencies have been shut up or expelled.” Meinertzhagen seemed to be enchanted with Hitler, a man he described “as a magnetic personality, very sincere and absolutely truthful. This latter character struck me most.” Eventually, Meinertzhagen would realize he had been hoodwinked. On June 28, 1939, while Meinertzhagen was visiting his cousin, he was called once again to visit Hitler. By now, Meinertzhagen had acquired a distaste for Herr Hitler and was not interested in seeing him. What followed was an incident that Meinertzhagen claimed he was “thoroughly ashamed of” and was unable to explain. Realizing Hitler was a danger to not only Zionism but to world peace, Meinertzhagen went to the Chancellery with a loaded automatic pistol in his pocket so he “could prove ‘opportunity’ to kill the man. Since I saw him last, my opinion of him had altered. He means to have his war; he means to kill millions to satisfy his lust for power; his war will involve the whole world and whoever wins will lose.” With Ribbentrop interpreting, Hitler launched into a forty-minute diatribe against Britain and “encirclement.” Finally, Meinertzhagen rose silently, held out his hand, and left the room without comment or knowing why he had been called to Hitler’s office. “I had ample opportunity to kill both Hitler and Ribbentrop,” Meinertzhagen wrote in his Middle East Diary,

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3. Tactical Deception — Lawrence of Arabia, The Haversack Trick, and Operation Mincemeat “and am seriously troubled about it. If this war breaks out, as I feel sure it will, then I shall feel very much to blame for not killing these two.”194 Meinertzhagen died in 1967 at the age of 89. He spent his last years as a scientist studying birds, a love he had fostered his entire life. In 1994, New Scientist reported that Meinertzhagen had apparently mislabelled some of the birds he had shot and altered the time and place of their death. He was also accused of stealing prize specimens from the world’s leading museums and relabelling them. The motive for this bizarre deception is unclear but New Scientist speculated that he might have turned to fraud to enhance the value of his collection or to shore up his pet theories.195

194. Meinertzhagen, Richard. Middle East Diary, Cresset Press, London, 1959, p. 150, 159-60. 195. “Bird World in a Flap About Species Fraud,” New Scientist, May 7, 1994, p. 10.

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4. STRIKES AGAINST THE AXIS POWERS GENERAL JIMMY DOOLITTLE AND LT. GENERAL KNUT HAUKELID Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in action the invisible thought of his mind. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, entry 1859 A coward turns away but a brave man’s choice is danger. — Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris

The years of 1942 and 1943 marked the middle point of the Second World War. Two Allied missions against Germany and Japan, led by the extraordinary efforts of Norway’s Knut Haukelid and the United State’s Jimmy Doolittle, changed the course of the war. Knut Haukelid was part of a Norwegian team of saboteurs trained by British Secret Intelligence Services to destroy a heavy water plant designed to aid the Nazis in their plan to create an atomic bomb. The United State’s Jimmy Doolittle led the first aerial mission against the Japanese mainland, a mission considered highly risky by all involved.

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Peculiar Liaisons THE ATOMIC LETTERS AND A JAPANESE RUSSO BORDER WAR In December of 1938, an experiment by German physicist Otto Hahn led to the discovery of atomic fission. In the following months, physicists around the world realized that Hahn’s discovery could lead to a successful chain-reacting uranium pile. The theoretical possibility of a super-explosive, an atomic bomb, was closer to becoming a reality. In April 1939, Professor Paul Harteck and Dr. Wilhelm Groth sent a letter to the German war office stating that the country that first exercised the use of atomic energy “has an unsurpassed advantage over the others.” Soon after receipt of the letter the Nazi Germany government began serious atomic energy research. In May of 1939, intensive fighting between Japanese and Russian troops developed along the Manchurian and Outer Mongolian border. The three-month long conflict foreshadowed the coming of another global conflict. In August of 1939, weeks before Hitler attacked Poland, Churchill understood the importance of the yet to be developed atomic bomb. In letters to colleagues he clearly demonstrated that he was aware of man’s ability to bring to the world “new explosives of devastating powers.” His intelligence sources were correct in reporting to him that the practical use of such a super explosive would not be put “into operation for several years.”196 However, six years before the atomic bombs that would shake Japan, he recognized that “the human race is crawling nearer to the point where it will be able to destroy itself completely.”197 Within the same month of 1939, Albert Einstein, with help from physicist Dr. Leo Szilard, sent his famous letter to President Roosevelt stating that a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium could create an extremely powerful bomb. Dr. Szilard, a Hungarian Jew who feared that the Germans might develop an atomic weapon, was one of the first physicists to understand the principles of atomic chain reaction and to appreciate what such power could do. Einstein’s letter helped impel Roosevelt to create a special committee to investigate the military implications of atomic power. He approved uranium research in October of 1939, one of many decisions that led to the creation of the Manhattan Project. The race for the atomic bomb was on.

196. Churchill, Winston. The Gathering Storm, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1948, pp. 386-7. 197. Hyde, Harford Montgomery. The Atom Bomb Spies, Atheneum, New York, 1980, p. 71-72.

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers DOOLITTLE’S RAID ON TOKYO While war raged in Europe in December of 1941, the Japanese planned a surprise attack on American naval forces stationed at Pearl Harbor on the Island of O’ahu in the United States territory of Hawaii. At approximately 8:00 a.m., Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor where approximately 100 ships of the US Navy were present. Commander Mitsui Fuchida commanded the striking force of 353 Japanese aircraft. Simultaneously, Japanese assaults against the Philippines and against British forces in Hong Kong and Malaya, as well as American bases on Guam and Wake Island, created a huge two-theater world war.198 The Japanese had in one single stroke made war against the two most powerful naval powers in the world, undoubtedly calculating that Great Britain and the United States would be unable to commit an effective war in two theaters. On April 18, 1942, just over a hundred days after the Pearl Harbor attack, Lt. Colonel James Doolittle led sixteen Mitchell B-25’s from the carrier Hornet. All eighty of the men aboard the B-25s were Army Air Corp volunteers who knew that they were going to attack Japan in some capacity, but the details were given to them only at the last minute. Mitchell B-25s were medium-sized bombers with little defensive power and a short range. Doolittle knew they would not have the fuel to return to the Hornet, so he planned on flying to China, knowing that most of his planes would be forced to crash land. What they had volunteered for was nothing less than a suicide mission. They were to exact retribution for the attack on Pearl Harbor and end Tojo’s regime. The escape route to China was about 1,250 miles, a long distance for the planes. A shorter route to Vladivostok, Russia was denied by the Soviets — strange behavior from a country that had allied itself with the US against the Axis Powers and had been in conflict with the Japanese in 1905 as well as in the spring and summer of 1939. The Soviets’ denial would cost many injuries and deaths to Doolittle’s airmen, as well as tens of thousands of Chinese deaths due to Japanese retaliation. Born in Alameda, California, on December 14, 1896, James Doolittle was a junior at the University of California when the United States entered World War I. He enlisted as a flying cadet in the Army Signal Corps, which gave him a 198. Kirkpatrick, Lyman. Captain Without Eyes — Intelligence Failure in World War II, Westview, Boulder, Colorado, 1987, p. 75.

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Peculiar Liaisons commission. He spent the war as a flying instructor in the United States. Remaining in the Army after the war, he earned a B.A. degree in 1922 and then studied aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he received both a Masters in aeronautics and a doctorate degree in aeronautics (the first ever given at MIT). He took a leave of absence from the Army in the period before World War II, but returned to active duty when the war began. During his flying career he was driven to find ways to improve airplanes. In that quest he scored numerous “firsts” in flying: along with winning racing trophies, he was the first to fly across the US by air in less than one day; the first to fly an outside loop; he set world speed records in 1925 and 1931 for a seaplane and the Gee Bee racer, respectively; and was the first to land an aircraft by instruments alone. He also was instrumental in making more powerful engines, with the development of high-octane aviation fuel.199 The use of a B-25 in the attack was risky. The B-25 was designed to take off from 5,000-foot runways at 90 mph. The volunteer airmen, eventually known as Doolittle’s Raiders, practiced until they could put the B-25’s in the air at 50 mph in only 500 feet. They practiced off the Virginia coast, only two weeks before the launch on the Hornet. However, the test planes hadn’t been armed with 2,000 pounds of bombs and an extra 1,000 pounds of fuel.

THE TOKYO RAID Doolittle sought to maneuver the Hornet within 400 miles of Japan, but the carrier was still 600 miles from its target when a small Japanese reconnaissance craft known as a “pilot ship” discovered it. One of the pilot ship’s crewmen told his captain about the carrier, but the captain did not believe him. Finally, when he was persuaded to see it for himself through binoculars, the captain returned to his cabin and shot himself. Fearing the pilot boat captains would radio Tokyo warning of a surprise air assault, Doolittle was forced to leave early. Ted Lawson, pilot of the Ruptured Duck, described Doolittle’s takeoff: “Doolittle picked up speed and held to his line, and just as the Hornet lifted itself up on the top of a wave and cut through it

199. Glines, Carroll V. Jimmy Doolittle, Master of the Calculated Risk, Von Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1972, p. 2.

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers at full speed, Doolittle’s plane took off. He had yards to spare. He hung his ship almost straight up on its props, until we could see the whole top of his B-25. Then he leveled off and watched him come around a tight circle and shoot low over our heads — straight down the line painted on the deck.”200 All sixteen planes took off with no problem. They were given nicknames, Green Hornet, Ruptured Duck (humorously describing the Mitchell’s peculiar twintailed design), Bat Out of Hell, Hari-Kari-er, Whirling Dervish, Whisky Pete, Fickle Finger of Fate. They went on to bomb Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokossuka, and Nagoya. One plane crash landed in China but the crew made it safely to Chunking. Two planes were captured by Japanese troops when they landed in Japaneseoccupied China. They were able to destroy targets like the Japanese Diesel Maintenance Co., Mitsubishi plants, army and naval depots. One plane was forced to drop bombs in the sea when a group of Japanese Zeroes attacked. Ninety buildings were destroyed. Chiang Kai-shek cabled US authorities, saying, “Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those areas, reproducing on a wholesale scale the horrors that the world had seen at Lidice . . .” Chiang referred to the Nazi destruction of the tiny Czech village of Lidice after Czech commandos killed the Nazis RSHA’s (Third Reich’s Security Central Office) number two man, Reinhard Heydrich. It is believed that the Japanese slaughtered 250,000 Chinese in the three-month revenge attack. The Japanese flew 600 raids against the Chinese coast where the American flyers found refuge. Japan’s retribution included throwing children down wells. After the war, the facts were uncovered in a war crimes trial held at Shanghai, which opened in February 1946 to try four Japanese officers for mistreatment of the eight POWs of the Tokyo Raid. On August 28, 1942, Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz were given a “trial” by Japanese officers, although they were never told the charges against them. On October 14, 1942, they were advised they were to be executed the next day. The three men wrote letters to their families, which were never sent but were found in 1946 amidst Japanese military records. Only after the war did the families see the letters. Spatz wrote to his father: “I want you to know that I died fighting for my country, like a soldier.” Hallmark: “I did everything that the Japanese have asked me to do and tried to cooperate with them because I knew that my part in the war was over.” Farrow wrote to 200. Counts, Stephen, ed. War in the Air — True Accounts of the 20th Century’s Most Dramatic Air Battles, Pocket Books New York, 1996.

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Peculiar Liaisons his fiance that “you are my life” and thanked her “for bringing to my life a deep, rich love for a fine girl...Please write and comfort Mom, because she will need you — she loves you, and thinks you are a fine girl...” At 4:30 p.m. on October 15, 1942 the three Americans were brought by truck to Public Cemetery No. 1 outside Shanghai. In accordance with proper ceremonial procedures of the Japanese military, they were each shot in the head. The remaining men stayed in prison until August, 1945. The American public did not learn of the executions until nearly a year later, when President Franklin Roosevelt broke the news. The executions, a war crime, outraged the president as it did the public. In later years, when the war had turned against Japan, Hirohito tried to gain a conditional surrender through secret negotiations with the Russians. Ostensibly with the memory of Spatz, Hallmark, and Farrow in mind, Roosevelt refused to acknowledge anything but an unconditional surrender, a decision that dramatically affected the length of the war and world history. Capt. Ed York’s plane was the only one to land safely. After dropping his bombs, York realized that he would not reach the Chinese coast. The plane’s carburetors had been reworked without Doolittle’s permission. The plane consumed too much gas, and York was forced to land in Russia. They hoped they could get fuel to fly to China; but the Russians were bemused by their uninvited guests and sent the crew to several internment camps in Russia. They eventually ended up at Ashkhabad, near the Persian border. They escaped into Iran, where they found the British consul, and finally returned to the US in May 1943, over a year after their liftoff from the Hornet. The trials of the plane called the Ruptured Duck and its crew were related in the book written by its captain, Ted Lawson. In 1944, the book was turned into a movie, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. In the same year the film The Purple Heart portrayed the difficulties of eight American fliers as they were tortured for information about their mission. The eight Americans, were based on the eight captured Doolittle airmen. The film portrays a military trial where the Americans refuse to provide information on where their mission began (The Hornet), and are all sentenced to execution. Doolittle ordered his men to bail out over China. Doolittle landed in a rice paddy at night — a night so dark that he was never sure when he would hit earth. He splashed into a paddy that had recently been filled with “night soil,” fertilizer of human excrement. He found a farmhouse, knocked on the door and announced in Chinese that he was an American. The lights went off and there

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers was silence. He left the farm and found a box on a sawhorse topped with planks. Hoping to find shelter from the cold night rain he jumped in the box only to find a dead man beneath him — he had jumped into a coffin. Finally, he found a Chinese military installation. A major, who spoke a little English, demanded Doolittle’s sidearm. The colonel refused to relinquish his pistol, declaring that he was an ally. The major was unconvinced and became more obstinate when they returned to the farm and the farmers refused to acknowledge any of Doolittle’s story. The major’s troops searched the premises and found Doolittle’s parachute, which verified his story. Eventually, the colonel was shipped to a friendly Chinese city by train, and President Roosevelt ordered him to Washington immediately. Of the eighty men aboard the 16 B-25s, the Japanese captured eight. The Japanese executed three (Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz), one died of malnutrition, and four remained in captivity. Lt. Meder, Lt. Robert Hite, Lt. George Barr, Lt. Chase Nielsen, Cpl. Jacob DeShazer were held captive, mostly in solitary confinement at Kiangwan Military Prison, Shanghai. Hornet co-pilot Robert Meder, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant from Cleveland, died from malnutrition on December 1, 1943. In April 1943, Hite, Barr, DeShazer, and Nielsen were moved to Nanking, the port city in eastern China on the Yangtze River. Three of the Raiders died when trying to escape their plane during emergency landings: Cpl. Leland Faktor died when bailing out of his plane; Sgt. William Dieter and Sgt. Donald Fitzmaurice died in a crash landing. From the Ruptured Duck four received serious wounds, including Lawson, who lost his leg.

CHURCHILL AND ROOSEVELT’S TUBE ALLOYS AND GERMAN MISCALCULATIONS In June of 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Washington D.C. to discuss, among other things, the issue of “Tube Alloys,” the code name for the atomic bomb. It was agreed that German nuclear research was probably ahead of the Western Allies by as much as two years. The Germans had stopped exporting uranium from Czechoslovakia and had been furthering their research with a substance called “heavy water.” Since the Nazis controlled Czechoslovakia, they were able to retrieve uranium at any time. The Belgian Congo, Canada, and Czechoslovakia were some of the very few places where uranium was mined.

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Peculiar Liaisons Heavy water, sometimes called deuterium oxide, is unique because it contains atoms of double atomic weight. This characteristic slows down neutrons in uranium 235 and facilitates a chain reaction of exploding atoms that produces plutonium, a fissionable element and the basis of the atomic bomb. Heavy water is not a component of the atom bomb, but it was essential in experiments with substances required for use in the manufacture of the bomb. 201 American chemist Dr. Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize recipient and discoverer of heavy water in 1932, was among other American scientists who worried about an additional threat of atomic power: contamination of American cities with radioactivity. The scientists’ concern led the American government to disperse Geiger counters to Manhattan project centers.202 Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to pool their countries’ efforts in nuclear research. However, neither country had developed a large enough supply of heavy water, so research would be done with a graphite-uranium pile instead of the uranium-heavy water pile used by the Germans. In case the graphite method proved fruitless, a heavy water plant was to be built in British Columbia. In 1941, German scientist Walther Bothe conducted experiments that led him to believe that heavy water was the best moderator in creating a nuclear reaction. It is now known that his conclusion was in error; or the Germans may have pursued, like the Americans, the use of graphite as a moderator. Enormous amounts of electrical power are required to produce heavy water. During the war there was only one hydroelectric plant in the world with the necessary capacity to create large amounts of the substance, and that was the hydroelectric plant at Vemork, Norway, a country that had been occupied by the Nazis since 1940. Vemork and its nearby sister village of Rjukan sat 75 miles west of Oslo. Professor Werner Heisenberg intensified the Germans’ problems of pursuing atomic power when he mistakenly told officials on June 4, 1942 that it would take years of research and billions of Deutsche marks to develop an atomic weapon. Whether he was exaggerating or misleading the Germans deliberately is unknown but his genius in the field was unquestioned (he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932). Danish nuclear physicist Niles Bohr believed that Heisenberg’s statements might have been intended to intimidate the Allies by implying that Hitler was in fact building an atomic bomb.203 Bohr had been

201. Hyde, Harford Montgomery. The Atom Bomb Spies, Atheneum, New York, 1980, p. 71. 202. Breuer, William B. Undercover Tales of World War II, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1999, p. 175.

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers experimenting on atomic energy in Copenhagen. British intelligence feared that Bohr would be captured by the Nazis. William Stephenson, a wealthy Canadian who eventually became head of the British Security Coordination, was sent to Sweden to try to investigate the Reich’s progress with heavy water and to arrange an escape route for Bohr. Though he was unable to arrange the escape, Bohr eventually made his way to the Allies with help from MI6 and from the Danish secret intelligence underground. British Secret Intelligence Service’s MI6 Director Stewart Menzies put Lt. Cmdr. Welsh, the chief of the Norwegian country section of MI6, in charge of a commando attack on the Vemork plant. Welsh was convinced he could find a way to destroy or cripple the plant.

LEIF TRONSTAD Though many scientists had fled Norway when the Nazis took control, Professor Leif Tronstad, designer and construction supervisor of the Vemork plant, stayed on. He sent to London a large amount of industrial information about Germany’s intention to increase production of heavy water at the Norsk plant. His activities were cut short in September of 1942 when a double agent informed Tronstad that the Nazis were aware of his illegal transmissions. Tronstad reluctantly left his family and country and fled to England. In October of 1941, the underground secret intelligence service in Denmark alarmed MI6 by sending a telegram outlining the details of a meeting between physicist Niels Bohr and the German scientist Werner Heisenberg. The conversation led the Danish physicist to believe that the Nazis were close to developing the ultimate weapon — the atomic bomb. Tronstad was made head of Section IV of the Norwegian High Command in London. He was in charge of intelligence espionage and sabotage, but none of his activities were as important as his communication with his friend and colleague Dr. Jomar Brun, the chief manager of production at the Vemork plant. The contact between Tronstad, in London, and Brun in Vemork, was made when six Norwegian natives were parachuted onto the cold, desolate Hardanger plateau near Vemork, March 29, 1942. Head of the mission was Einar Skin-

203. Kurzman, Dan, Blood and Water — Sabotaging Hitler’s Bomb, Henry Holt and Co. New York, 1997, p. 9.

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Peculiar Liaisons narland, an athletic skier who had excellent knowledge of the area. Skinnarland was successful in contacting Brun. Tronstad and Brun exchanged written messages through Stockholm. Tronstad inquired wither it might be possible to transport a large amount of heavy water to London by landing a British plane on a frozen lake near Vemork, but Brun did not think that would work. Brun began to sabotage the production of the heavy water by adding cod-liver oil to the water. This stopped production for several days at a time. Brun and Skinnarland collected photos, drawings of the countryside as well as specific details about the plant. They microfilmed this data, concealed it in toothpaste tubes, and had the tubes delivered to Tronstad via Sweden. MI6 studied the information. Menzies approached the Joint Intelligence Committee with a proposition that the Vemork plant be destroyed as soon as possible. Quickly plans were made to send a commando team of paratroopers into Norway. The plan was called Operation Freshman.

OPERATION FRESHMAN Thirty-four commandos of the First Airborne Division were to land in two Horsa gliders on the Hardanger plateau and then proceed by bicycle. They were to kill the German guards on the suspension bridge that led across a gorge to the plant. After they destroyed the machinery and stocks of heavy water, they were to split into groups of no more than three and make their way to Sweden. If possible, they were to bring back any of the 200-cubic-centimeter steel flasks of heavy water that they could manage. Tronstad cited many reasons why the mission might fail: Norway’s terrain was not suitable for glider landings, the weather was harsh and unpredictable, the folding bicycles would be worthless in the event of snowfall and the men were expected to travel 400 miles to the Swedish border. Bombing the plant was an option, but Tronstad opposed this also. If the plant’s liquid storage tanks were, hit the entire Rjukan population could be in grave danger and no one wanted to risk the lives of those Norwegians who were forced to work inside the plant. On October 18, 1942, four Norwegians led by Jens Poulsson were flown over Hardanger and dropped by parachute on a mountain plateau separated by peaks and glaciers from the Norsk plant. They were to provide weather reports, operate a navigational aid that would help guide the Operation Freshman aircraft,

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers light up the landing area with beacons, guide the troops to the Vemork plant, and make reports by a portable telegraph unit. Tronstad ordered Brun to leave Norway. Brun reluctantly agreed. He and his wife carried two kilos of heavy water and poison ampules in case the Nazis caught them. They traveled by train to Oslo and from there were safely flown to London. The day the Bruns took off for London, November 9, 1942, the Poulsson team made contact with Tronstad and London. After great hardship they had made their way to an abandoned cabin on the plateau and reported among other things that the navigational aid had been tested and was operating correctly. As the Norwegian telegraph operator made his report, however, the London operator grew suspicious. Every operator has an individual style of manipulating the sending key. These idiosyncrasies were known as the operator’s fingerprints and a record was made of them for security reasons. As the Norwegian operated his sending key, the London operator recognized an unfamiliar pattern and thought the Nazi secret state police, Gestapo, 204 had captured the sending station. The London operator made security checks, and the Norwegian replied satisfactorily. One final question had to be answered with a previously agreed upon response. “What did you see walking down the Strand in the early hours of January 1, 1941?” The Norwegian replied with the correct answer, “Three pink elephants.” MI6 in London knew all was well; only, the Norwegian’s fingers were numb with cold. November 19, 1942 the commandos of Operation Freshman, all volunteers in their early twenties, boarded two Horsa gliders at Wick Airfield in Scotland. Those at MI6 who had been skeptical saw their fears confirmed: due to numerous factors, including poor weather, both gliders and one of the bombers crashed. All men on board the first glider were either killed in the crash or shot by Nazis afterwards. Of the nine survivors of the second glider, five were sent to Grini concentration camp and were executed. Four severely injured commandos were taken to a Gestapo jail at Stavanger, Norway. What happened to these men is not entirely clear, but they may have been tortured for information. Growing tired of their moans, the Gestapo strangulated one, crushed the neck of another until he died, may have killed another with air bubbles injected into his veins by a German doctor, and shot the fourth in the back of the head while purportedly transferring him from the jail. A Luftwaffe doctor, Werner Fritz Seeling, was 204. Gestapo is a contraction for the German words secret state police (Geheime Staatspolizei).

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Peculiar Liaisons tried after the war and executed for killing at least one of the commandos.205 The people of Norway erected a monument at Stavanger to these four commandos in 1985.206 The glider disaster was a blow to MI6. Colonel Jack Wilson, the chief of Norwegian Section, had always been against the glider mission but felt that paratroopers would have a better chance. He assigned twenty-two-year-old Lt. Joachim Ronneberg to select five expert skiers from the Royal Norwegian Army’s volunteers for the next mission. He approached each candidate individually. His first choice was twenty-nine-year-old Lt. Knut Haukelid. His twin sister was the nationally famous actress Sigrid Gurie. Knut was born in the United States and traveled with his Norwegian parents to Norway when Knut and Sigrid were infants. He returned to the United States to attend Massachusetts State College and spent time in Germany at the Dresden School of Technology and the University of Berlin. Considered a highly intelligent man, Knut was working for his father’s engineering firm, Haukelid og Five, when the Germans invaded Norway in April of 1940. German tanks, in hard fighting outside the town of Hagsbygda in 1940, overwhelmed the Norwegian army. The Norwegian fighters were ordered to retire from any defense of their homeland and had to watch as Germans set fire to farms as they advanced. “It was a warning to us,” wrote Haukelid. Wherever they met resistance, everything would be burned. The civilians who refused to leave their homes were shot, and all livestock was burned to death. “We swore then that we would never give in — not even if the Germans won the war.”207 Haukelid was no stranger to fighting against the Nazis. He was involved in a plot to kidnap the Norwegian traitor Prime Minister Vidkum Quisling. Quisling, whose name now is synonymous with “traitor” in Norway, had been an intelligence officer in Russia during the First World War. He believed that the Jews and Freemasons were behind the Bolsheviks, and that only Hitler was capable of destroying Jewish Masonic Bolshevism. Haukelid’s plot to capture Quisling failed and he was arrested, but escaped and was smuggled out to the British. Along with Haukelid, Ronneberg selected Sgt. Fredrik Kayser, Sgt. Hans Storhaug, Lt. Kapser Idland, and Sgt. Birger Stromsheim. A new plan (Operation 205. Hyde, Harford Montgomery. The Atom Bomb Spies, Atheneum, New York, 1980, p. 72. 206. T.L. Master, J.D. Carincross, P. P. Farrell, E. J. Smith. 207. Haukelid, Knut. Skis Against the Atom, North American Heritage Press, Minot, N.D., 1989, p. 19.

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers Gunnerside) was hatched with the help of Tronstad’s knowledge of the area. He recommended that men land in the mountains close to the plant and make contact with four men (code-named the Swallows), Jens Poulsson, Knut Haugland, Sgt. Claus Helberg, and Sgt. Arne Kjelstrup, who would be parachuted onto the plateau. The Swallows would be on the north side of the valley near the village of Vaaer. There the men would cross Maana River halfway between Rjukan and Vemork, climb to the railway track and follow it to the plant. When they reached the plant they were to destroy the eighteen stainless steel cells of heavy water, leave by the same route, and make their way to Sweden on skis. Sweden was over two hundred miles away.

OPERATION GUNNERSIDE AND HAUKELID’S FINAL BLOW Now MI6 was in the hands of Dr. Brun, who built a model of the plant. He was able to answer most of the questions from the commandos about details of the plant. The commandos were trained at special schools and training centers run by Special Operations Executive (SOE)208, a special British intelligence agency, an organization established in June 1940 to execute operations against Nazi Germany. The “Operation Instructions for Gunnerside,” dated December 15, 1942, and marked “Most Secret” outlined the technical details, enemy strength, intention, and method of the operation. An enemy strength “now over 100, consisting largely of Gestapo...utilizing the power available at VEMORK 59 degrees 53 minutes N. 08 degrees 28 minutes E. for large scale experiments of a highly secret nature which it is judged essential to bearing to a standstill. This entails the destruction of the finishing stages of production.” The Gunnerside force “will attack the storage and producing plant...with high explosive...will be dropped by parachute in British uniform...advance to a forward base within each reach of the target.”209 On February 16, 1943, the men parachuted to within 28 miles of the Swallows’ hideout. After a week of searching, in deplorable weather, they

208. Special Operations Executive — The SOE came into being after the fall of France on July 16, 1940, when a British intelligence committee in London organized SOE to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage against the Nazis. 209. SOE document. Operation instruction No. 1 15th December, 1948, Most Secret, Gunnerside.

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Peculiar Liaisons sighted two of the Swallows. Everyone was in poor condition, especially the Swallows, who were weak from malnutrition and hobbled with frostbite. The Gunnerside party began planning the attack. The only way to get into the plant without alerting the guards would be a dangerous descent into a gorge in front of the plant. From the bottom of the gorge they would climb a 500-foot face of the outcrop where the plant sat. On the evening of February 27, the nine men skied to the location and descended into the gorge. They crossed the stream and began the difficult climb out of the gorge. They reached the top about midnight, crept through a minefield, and evaded the German guards. Two men entered the basement of the plant by crawling through a cable duct and then unlocked a door. There was only one workman in the plant, a Norwegian. The commandos, dressed in British uniforms, laid charges on the eighteen cells that produced the heavy water. They set the fuses and told the workman to take shelter on one of the upper floors. The nine commandos scrambled back down the gorge, and as they disappeared the explosives detonated, destroying the cells. The Germans never saw them until they were on the other side of the gorge. They all escaped by skiing through a fierce blizzard. Four of the commandos stayed on the Hardanger plateau and the other five skied 250 miles to Sweden. Skinnarland radioed this information to London in November: “High-concentration installation at Vemork completely destroyed on night of 27th-28th STOP Gunnerside has gone to Sweden STOP Greetings.”210 They had left a British Tommy gun in the plant in hopes that the Nazis would realize British saboteurs were responsible and not take reprisals on the local Norwegians. Each commando carried an “L” pill — a cyanide pill — in case he was captured. The danger and the hardship the commandos endured are detailed in Haukelid’s autobiographical account, Skis Against the Atom. The mission was a success. The five commandos that were ordered to Sweden covered the ground in fourteen days in British uniform. It took the Germans six months to get the plant in condition to produce heavy water again. But at the end of January 1944, Skinnarland found that the Germans were planning to transport approximately 14 tons of heavy water in various levels of concentration. The heavy water was stored in drums marked “Potlash Lye.” The Germans began to transport them to Germany by rail. Alf Larsen, the chief 210. Dahl, Per F. Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia, 1999, p. 205.

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers engineer at Vemork, had found that the Germans were to ferry the load across Lake Tinnsjo. Knut Haukelid took a test trip on the ferry and concluded that it could be sunk if explosives blew a hole in the bow about 45 minutes into the journey. He figured that a plastique charge of 18 pounds would sink the ferry but would harm the passengers as little as possible. On February 19, 1944, the night before the shipment was to arrive, Haukelid and two of his men set the charge with an electronic detonator and timed fuse. It was set for 10:45 a.m. The next morning SS guards helped transport the shipment onto the ferry and by 10 a.m. the ferry left, with 53 passengers. Forty-five minutes later an explosion rocked the ferry and in five minutes the ferry and the railway wagons went to the bottom of the lake. Twenty-six passengers were drowned. Only three canisters were salvaged.

THE ALSOS MISSION Throughout the early part of 1944, British intelligence agents had reported that a Swiss scientist working in the Black Forest of southern Germany was developing a super explosive, possibly an atomic bomb. United States intelligence agents representing the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Bern, Switzerland, reported that Werner Heisenberg was working in the small town of Hechingen in southern Germany. Though he was not an avid supporter of Hitler’s Nazi regime, he nevertheless was faithful to his home country of Germany. Though the Norwegian commandos had slowed the production of heavy water, the Allies were still concerned about reports of atomic research using uranium. French intelligence agents believed that atomic bombs might already be hidden in strategic spots along the Atlantic coast, just waiting for an Allied invasion. In an effort to find out exactly what the Germans did know about creating an atomic bomb, a secret mission called Alsos (Greek for grove) was developed by General Leslie Groves (head of the Manhattan Project). An early scheme, eventually scrapped by the head of the OSS William Donovan, was to kidnap Werner Heisenberg, take him to Switzerland, fly him to the Mediterranean, and parachute him to a place where a submarine would pick him up. A more practical solution was put forth when Dr. Samuel Goudsmit, a highly respected physicist, was asked to head an investigation to ascertain how much the Nazis knew about the atomic bomb. Goudsmit was a professor of physics at

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Peculiar Liaisons the University of Michigan and Northwestern University; he spoke Dutch, German, and English, worked on the development of radar, and knew many of Europe’s top scientists including Heisenberg. With the aid of Colonel Boris Pash, Goudsmit was to follow the invading Allied forces through Normandy and sometimes move ahead of them in the search for information. An early aim of the mission was to find Frederic Joliot-Curie, son-in-law of the celebrated 1911 Nobel Prize winner Madame Curie, who had been victimized when the Nazis moved into his laboratory in Paris. Pash and Goudsmit found Joliot-Curie and he told them that although the German scientists who used his laboratory were experimenting with nuclear physics, he did not believe they had the ability to construct an atomic weapon. It was not until the Allies entered Strasbourg, France, that the Alsos Mission began making headway. The Alsos team found the office of Professor Carl von Weizsacker, a physics instructor at the University of Strasbourg, which contained a large volume of papers left behind by the Germans; it contained information concerning the German physicists’ progress with the bomb and the address of Heisenberg’s office in Hechingen. Goudsmit and his men found a secret nuclear laboratory in a wing of a hospital, along with seven German physicists and chemists who were posing as physicians. Goudsmit spent hours reading through the papers in Weizsacker’s office and quickly came to the conclusion that the Germans had no atomic bomb and were unlikely to be able to develop one in the near future. This information was sent to General Groves — who remained skeptical.

AGENT MOE BERG — SPY CATCHER In order to continue to research German progress with the bomb, the OSS used an unlikely weapon: a professional baseball player, Moe Berg. Berg had played with the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox and graduated with honors from Princeton before he became an OSS agent. He had carried out several covert missions. Berg was part of a 1935 trip to Japan, where he played baseball in an exhibition. He filmed Tokyo harbor and military installations along the coast from the team plane. General Jimmy Doolittle may have viewed this film in preparation for his famous Tokyo raid. Berg was following the movements of the seventeen-year-old King of Yugoslavia, Paul, the son of King Alexander, who was assassinated in 1934. Paul

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers had fled his court for England in 1941 and studied at Cambridge. Berg monitored intelligence reports from the Balkans. He was also tasked with finding more information concerning the status of the Vemork heavy water plant after the Norwegian attack. In the spring of 1943, he was parachuted into Norway from a US military plane flying from England. In Norway he was met by resistance fighters who helped him get to Oslo. Berg questioned scientists in Oslo concerning activity at the plant. They told him that repairs had been made and the Nazis were starting to increase their production. Berg reported the disturbing information to OSS chief Donovan. Donovan relayed the information to General Groves, who ordered a bombing mission on the plant. On November 16, 1943, the American high command ordered the 8th Air Force to bomb it. Initially, the Air Force had considered a night bombing impossible, and that had forced MI6 to order the commando raids. But the night bombings were successful — successful enough to convince Goering, minister of the German atomic program, to move the heavy water production from Vemork to Germany.211 With his knowledge of numerous languages and his ability to speak German fluently, Berg was chosen to attend a Heisenberg lecture in Zurich. If Heisenberg said anything in the lecture that led Berg to believe the Germans were close to the atomic bomb, Berg was instructed by the OSS to shoot him on the spot. Berg attended the lecture, with a pistol and a cyanide pill in case he was to be captured. Though Berg was well versed in scientific studies he was not sure if Heisenberg’s lecture hinted at the Nazis’ abilities to create an atom bomb. Berg decided not to use the gun. As the Alsos Mission progressed it was clearer to Goudsmit and Groves that the Germans were far from developing the atomic bomb. Goudsmit and Berg were both honored with the Medal of Freedom after the war.212

211. Kaufman, Louis and Fitzgerald, Barbara. Moe Berg, — Athlete, Scholar, Spy, Little, Brown and Co., Boston, MA, 1974, pp. 165-66. 212. Goudsmit, Samuel A., Alsos, American Institute of Physics, Woodbury, New York, 1996. Breuer, William B. Undercover Tales of World War II, John Wiley and Sons, 1999, New York, pp. 208-11. The Medal of Freedom was established by President Truman in 1945 in recognition of notable service in the war. In 1963 the medal was reintroduced as an honor for distinguished civilians in peacetime.

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Peculiar Liaisons IMPACT OF THE RAID ON VEMORK SS Commando Otto Skorzeny, famous for a variety of daring missions including the miraculous “rescue” of the imprisoned Mussolini, wrote in his autobiography that Hitler refused to pursue the atomic bomb because of its inhumane potential. In October of 1944, Skorzeny claims he met the bed-ridden and ill Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair. Skorzeny paints a picture of a man who fully understood the destructive power of the atomic bomb and refused to use it. “Even if the radioactivity were controlled,” he says the Fuhrer told him, “and then nuclear fission used as a weapon, the effects would still be horrible!” Hitler told Skorzeny that scientists had clearly explained that the use of such a weapon was unthinkable; a single detonation would mean that “every form of life, not only human, but animal and plant life as well, would be totally extinguished for hundreds of years within a radius of forty kilometers. That would be the apocalypse...No country, no group of civilized men can consciously accept such a responsibility.” 213 Skorzeny also claimed that Hitler, due to his traumatic injuries during World War I with poisonous gas, refused to use the Nazi-developed nerve gas “Tanum.” There were also rumors that the Nazis had developed an anti-aircraft shell with the fantastic capability of creating a temperature of absolute zero (-273 C) within a large area around the detonation. In July of 1943, a group of Germans calling themselves Blitzableiter had researched the possibility of using biological weapons; these initiatives, too, were reportedly quashed by Hitler. The Allies did not fully realize until after the war how advanced German engineering had been during the war. Germans between 1936 and 1944 built and flew the first practical helicopter, the first turbo-jet aircraft, the first cruise missile, and the first extra-atmospheric rocket (respectively the Focke-Achgelis, FW-61; the Heinkel, He 178; the FZG-76 or V-1 rocket; and the A4 or V-2 rocket). The remarkable young scientist Wernher von Braun worked on rocketry from 1932 to 42. At the age of thirty, he made the first successful firing of the A-4 rocket, which was the forerunner to all subsequent rocketry. Von Braun had in effect invented the intercontinental strategic ballistic missile and the space rocket, engineering feats that have had incalculable ramifications. Eventually, he would turn his back on the Nazis — but only at the last minute, 213. Skorzeny, Otto. My Commando Operations — The Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Daring Commando, Schiffer Military History, Altgen, Pa., 1995, p. 161-2.

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers when American soldiers were about to capture the V-2 rocket complex he helped develop. Von Braun negotiated the surrender of 500 of his scientists before they could be captured. He eventually became a key figure in the US space program and was a chief designer in the development of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the rocket that sent Americans to the moon. 214 A Nazi submarine, U-234, left from Germany on March 25, 1945 for Japan. On board were weapons, drawings, an Me-262 fighter jet, jet engines, and 560 kilograms of uranium oxide. The uranium was to be sent to Dr. Yoshio Nishina at the Hungman, Korea nuclear research facility. The Nazis hoped that the Japanese would be able to pull together the super weapon. Nishina, Japan’s top nuclear physicist, had been a student of Niels Bohr. That April, according to William Casey, an OSS official and eventual CIA Director, a dismantled plant was found in Bavaria that contained uranium and heavy water on “the brink of going critical, lacking about 700 liters of additional heavy water.”215 On May 16, 1945, having heard of the ceasefire in Europe, the U-234 captain surrendered his ship at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Allies won the race for atomic power and thus the first atomic war was a one-sided affair; the Americans finished the war in August of 1945 with the detonation of two atomic bombs in Japan. Haukelid graduated from the Norwegian Military Academy in 1948 and was appointed Lieutenant General and head of the Homeguard of Greater Oslo. He was twice awarded Norway’s highest decoration, The War Cross with Sword and the Saint Olav’s Medal with Silver Palm, among numerous other international citations. 216 Possibly his last public appearance was during a Charles Kuralt television tribute to the Norwegian commandos during the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer, Norway in February of 1994. He died on March 8, 1994 at the age of 82.

214. Keegan, John. Intelligence in War — Knowledge of the Enemy From Napoleon to Al-Qaeda, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003, p. 286. 215. Kurzman, Dan, Blood and Water — Sabotaging Hitler’s Bomb, Henry Holt and Co. New York, 1997, p. 238. 216. England’s Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross; France’s Legion de Honneur and Croix de Guerre with Palm and Star; Sweden’s Commander of Kungliga Svardorden; the United State’s Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm.

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Peculiar Liaisons RESCUE IN PEKING During their captivity the Doolittle Raider survivors were bitten by insects, rats, and lice, which caused their faces and hands to swell. They were fed a half pint of rice, five ounces of bread and a half a cup of water a day. For the first 120 days of captivity they were not allowed to shave or bathe. They were continually beaten. Lt. Meder died of malnutrition on December 1, 1943. After that, the other four men began to receive slightly better treatment (although all were suffering from dysentery and beriberi). In December 1944, American planes bombed Nanking. The men’s spirits soared. They believed their rescue was imminent. However, weeks went by and there was no return of the planes. On June 15, 1945, they were moved by train from Nanking to Peking, where they were placed in a Japanese military prison and made to sit all day on wooden stools facing a wall. Jacob DeShazer’s skin was covered with huge boils. He was drifting toward death until a Japanese doctor revived him with vitamin shots. Six American paratroopers with the OSS were secretly dropped into the outskirts of Peking on August 17. Though the surrender had not been officially signed, the OSS agents worked with Japanese officers to locate Doolittle’s four remaining men. On August 20, they were located and released. “If they had waited another month,” declared Chase Nielsen, “we would have come out feet first.”217 They were flown back home where they learned that many of their Tokyo comrades had gone on to further combat duty in Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific. At the end of the war, 61 of the original 80 Raiders were still alive. DeShazer dedicated his life to Christianity and wrote a pamphlet, “I was a Prisoner of the Japanese,” the story of how he learned to forgive his torturers. American missionaries distributed thousands of translated copies throughout Japan. DeShazer’s capacity to forgive his captors impressed many people, including Mitsuo Fuchida, flight commander of the assault on Pearl Harbor. In 1948, Jacob DeShazer and his wife returned to Japan to preach and were visited by Fuchida. Inspired by DeShazer, Fuchida became a devout Christian and traveled the world teaching the message of forgiveness; he became an American citizen in 1966 and died in the United States in 1976. 217. Glines, Caroll V. Four Came Home, D. Van Norstrand Co., Princeton, New Jersey, 1966, p. 161.

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers Lieutenant George Barr, the twenty-five-year old, red-head native of Brooklyn, was the last of the Raiders to return to the US. The Kempei Tai (the Japanese Military Police noted for their brutality and special torture methods), believing him to be especially barbaric, mistreated Barr more than the others. When he was finally freed he was too weak to stand, or eat solid food, and doctors decided he was too ill to travel. He was hospitalized at the Grand Hotel de Peking. When he was able to return to the US, his mental condition was so delicate that he tried to escape hospitals, thinking he was still in captivity; eventually he tried to commit suicide. He was reported to be “a confused, blocked individual who seldom says more than two or three words at a time.”218 He seemed to be lost in the US Army’s bureaucracy until a family friend wrote an angry letter to Doolittle. Doolittle quickly found that George had been forgotten; he was without clothes, money, or real medical care. Doolittle immediately got Barr a new uniform, a retroactive promotion, $7,000 in back pay, and serious attention from a psychiatrist. He fully recovered and became a management analyst for the Armed Services, but died in 1967 at the age of 50. Four Japanese officers were tried for war crimes against the eight Tokyo Raiders. They were found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. Three were sentenced to five years and the fourth to a nine-year sentence. Caroll Glines, author of several books on the Doolittle Raid, noted that the Japanese in 1942 were confident that their isolated island was safe from aerial attack. No one, the Japanese leaders told their countrymen, had the technology or the nerve to attack Japan. The attack was “a supreme touché to the Japanese warlords,” wrote Glines.219 Doolittle said the raid was to “give the folks at home the first good news that we’d had in World War II. It caused the Japanese to question their warlords.” Doolittle was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and was promoted from Lt. Colonel to Brigadier General for leading the first carrier-based bomber attack on mainland Japan. He continued to lead air operations during the war, on the European, North African, and Pacific fronts, winning promotion to lieutenant general in 1944. He commanded the 12th Air Force in North Africa, the 15th in Italy and the 8th in Okinawa as well as England, where he commanded attacks on Germany during 1944-5.

218. Ibid., p. 200. 219. Television interview with Caroll V. Glines, April 2002, in reference to the April 2002 reunion of the Doolittle Raiders, CBS, Sunday Morning.

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Peculiar Liaisons THE REUNION Before the mission, Doolittle had promised to throw a huge party for his men when they returned. In 1946, he kept his promise with a party in a downtown Miami hotel. Each year since then, in April, the surviving Raiders have a reunion. In honor of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, the citizens of Tucson, Arizona presented General Doolittle a set of 80 sterling goblets in 1959. General Doolittle presented the goblets to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on behalf of the surviving members of the Raiders, for safekeeping and display between reunions. At each reunion, the Raiders hold a brief ceremony to honor those who have passed away. This emotional remembrance often marks the passing of additional Raiders during the year since the last reunion. The silver goblets are housed in a special glass-enclosed trophy case, which is under protection of the US Air Force Academy Airmen. In addition to the goblets, the case contains a bottle of 1896 brandy (the year of Doolittle’s birth) to be used by the last two remaining Raiders at the last reunion to toast their departed comrades. Many of the goblets are already turned upside down for the men who were killed in the raid or who have since died.220 Ten of the Raiders were killed in action in Europe, North Africa, and IndoChina and four were shot down and interned as German prisoners of war. Horace Crouch survived an attack of two Japanese Zeros; Tung Sheng Liu, an engineer from Kunming, China, helped hide Raiders from the Japanese and was eventually named an honorary Raider; Davey Jones, a squadron commander, was shot down in North Africa and became one of the tunnellers made famous in the movie The Great Escape; he went on to become a major general involved in the recovery of NASA-manned space capsules.

DOOLITTLE RETIRED After the war, Doolittle returned to Shell Oil and to advisory positions in the public and private sectors, remaining active in the aerospace industry after retiring in 1959. At one time he said, “There has never been a time when I’ve been

220. Each goblet is inscribed twice with a Raider name — both right side up and upsidedown — so that the names are always readable.

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4. Strikes Against the Axis Powers completely satisfied with myself.” However, his nation treated him as a hero. In 1985, President Reagan made Doolittle a four-star general, the stars pinned on his epaulets by President Reagan and Senator Goldwater. In 1989, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. General Doolittle died at the age of 96 in California on September 27, 1993 and was buried in Section 7-A of Arlington National Cemetery, with his high school sweetheart, Josephine Daniels Doolittle (May 24, 1895-December 24, 1988). Doolittle’s citations rank with some of America’s greatest military heroes.221 Should the particulars of this story be remembered and detailed? Let Jimmy Doolittle have the final word: “I think it deserves to be told not to open old wounds nor to condemn the Japanese. Rather, so that we will all remember what evils an uncontrolled militaristic government can bring to its people and to point up what the consequences can be of our own unpreparedness to meet aggression.”

221. Along with the Congressional Medal of Honor he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, with Oak Leaf Cluster; Silver Star; Distinguished Flying Cross, with Two Oak Leaf Clusters and eight other major citations.

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5. THE DIRGE OF THE BLACK ORCHESTRA COLONEL CLAUS VON STAUFFENBERG AND REICH CHANCELLOR ADOLF HITLER Nothing is less worthy of a civilized people than to let themselves be governed — without resistance — by an irresponsible and base clique. Is not every honest German today ashamed of his government? And who among us can guess the dimensions of the shame that will engulf our children, and us when the veil falls from our eyes one day and the most gruesome and immeasurable crimes come to light? — Excerpt from the first leaflet of the Nazi Resistance Group, the White Rose, Munich, 1942 Terror is the most effective political instrument. I shall not permit myself to be robbed of it simply because a lot of stupid, bourgeois mollycoddles choose to be offended by it. You know, Ribbentrop, if I made an agreement with Russia today, I’d still break it tomorrow — I just can’t help it. — Adolf Hitler Table Talk, 1933 and 1939

On September 1, 1939, Germany’s Reich Chancellor and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces Adolf Hitler attacked Poland. In the subsequent months the German armed forces swept through most of Europe, only to see the Grand Alliance led by Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and France fight back and regain much of the continent. By the middle of 1944, the Pacific and European theaters of the Second World War had produced the deaths and injuries of millions of soldiers and civilians. During Hitler’s reign as German

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Peculiar Liaisons warlord, no fewer than 46 attempts were made to assassinate him, and numerous other attacks were planned but never executed. None was successful, but the most dramatic attempt occurred on July 20, 1944, as the end result of a well-orchestrated coup d’etat, months in the planning, designed by rogue elements of the Nazi high command who hoped to end the war and save what was left of Germany. The coup would begin by killing Hitler with a bomb, and the man who would attempt the daring feat was an unlikely candidate: Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a highly decorated German war hero.

FROM THE KREISAU CIRCLE TO THE BLACK ORCHESTRA German-born conspiracies to overthrow Hitler began in the 1930s. Admiral Canaris, the head of Germany’s military intelligence, Abwehr222, had recognized the danger Hitler represented as early as 1934. A small group of conservative nationalist leaders formed a secret society which came to be called the Kreisau Circle. They met at the Kreisau estate of their leader Helmut James Graft von Moltke and at Countess Marion Yorck von Wartenberg’s apartment. The initial aim of the group was to create a union of Europe modeled after the United States. Claus von Stauffenberg was part of the group. The Kreisau Circle tried until the end of the war to garner support from the Allies. The group, especially during 1942 and 1943, discussed how Germany could be reconstructed after what they believed was the inevitable failure of Hitler’s National Socialism, which had brought spiritual decay and physical destruction to Germany. Many of the members argued that the only way to halt Hitler’s destruction of Germany was through a peaceful, ethical coup d’etat. However, the oaths military men had sworn to Hitler, coupled with the chaos the war had created, meant that there might be only one way to end the national and European disaster, and that was through the abrupt cessation of Hitler’s reign, in other words, by assassination. Stauffenberg, for security reasons, rarely attended meetings but he was kept informed of the discussions. Eventually, in June of 1944, the Kreisau Circle urged Colonel Stauffenberg, through Father Delp, a Jesuit member of the group, to take action. The Gestapo eventually called the anti-Hitler conspirators the Schwarze Kapelle (Black Orchestra).

222. German intelligence section of the German Ministry of Defense created shortly after World War I.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra By this time, it had become clear to the conspirators that only the German Army’s high command would have the power and the opportunity to stop Hitler. There were many men available. Chief players were General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the Army’s General Staff; Major General Tresckow, a member of Army Group North; and Major Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a lawyer who became a confident of Tresckow. There were also influential men in civilian life, like Ulrich von Hassell, the German ambassador to Rome; Johannes Propitz, Prussian Minister of Finance; and the former mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, who at one time was the prime choice for Hitler’s replacement. Throughout the 1930s, these men worked to break Hitler’s grip on Germany. When the war erupted, they became more determined. Resistance to the Nazi regime took many forms. In 1942, the “White Rose,” a group of German college students, audaciously distributed anti-Nazi leaflets throughout LudwigMaximilians University in Munich. When they later publicly criticized the Stalingrad assault, the group’s founders (brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl and friend Christoph Probst) were beheaded.223 A fellow Munich University student, Berndt Phillip Baader, sympathized with the Scholls and considered working with the White Rose; however, he was dissuaded by his wife. In 1945, he was captured by the Russians as a Wehrmacht soldier, and never saw Germany again. His infant son, Andreas Baader, would grow up to be part of one of the most destructive leftwing German political groups in the 1960s and 1970s, the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Equally unsuccessful in their efforts were Communist resistance groups like the Edelweiss Pirates, the national committee “Free Germany,” and the “Red Orchestra,” all of which were destroyed near the end of the war. These small secret societies designed to end the Nazi regime all started in a similar vein, as a tiny group of committed individuals interested in renewing the image of Germany that was so tarnished by the humiliation of the First World War. However, unlike them, the Nazi party was born under the influence of several bizarre societies based on hatred, racism, and belief in the occult.

223. Hans and Sophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst were tried February 22, 1943 for writing six sets of leaflets criticizing the Nazi regime and executed only hours after the four-hour trial. They were all in their early twenties. Axelrod, Toby. Hans and Sophie Scholl, German Resisters of the White Rose, Rosen, New York, 2001.

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Peculiar Liaisons HITLER AND STAUFFENBERG’S ANCESTRY Hitler is now widely recognized as one of the most troubling figures of the twentieth century. As German Chancellor of the 1930s and 1940s, he engaged in terror acts and crimes that are shocking in their scale and viciousness. He was born in 1889 in the small Austrian village of Braunau am Inn, one of two children out of six to survive infancy in a humble family. How a backward country boy rose to be the leader of Germany and conquered 1.37 million square miles of territory is a legend for all time. His climb to power was most unlikely. He never did well at school, had no family backing, lived the life of a vagrant in Vienna and post-war Munich, rose no higher than the rank of corporal within the Second Reich’s army, blatantly kidnapped three members of the Bavarian government at gun point, was jailed thirteen months for treason, and wrote a book that spewed racial hatred and presented a blue-print for how he intended to expand Germany’s “living space” by occupying neighboring countries. Like another European dictator, Napoleon, he hated intellectuals, used military might to conquer large parts of Europe, and met disaster during winter campaigns in Russia. Where Napoleon had arrogantly stated he would “bury the world beneath my ruin,” Hitler said, “We may be destroyed but if we are we’ll drag the world down with us — a world in flames.” Hitler’s father, Alois, and mother, Klara Poelzl, may have been niece and uncle, or second cousins, depending on who was Alois’s father; due to the lack of known documentation concerning that point, a true relationship will probably be never known. Alois was the son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, a peasant cook. It is not clear who was his father, but there has been speculation that it was either Johann Nepomuk Hiedler; his brother Johann Georg Hiedler (a wandering miller who married Maria five years after Alois’s birth); or a Jew from Graz named Frankenberger (or Frankenreither). It is possible that Maria worked as a domestic in a house with the name of Frankenberger. The consensus of serious opinion makes Johann Nepomuk, the man who raised Alois, the grandfather; though historian Fest writes that Johann Nepomuk eventually claimed his brother was the real father. As biographer Kershaw points out, the problem of family in-breeding becomes more serious if Johann Nepomuk was the grandfather, because that would make him the grandfather of both Adolf and his mother.224 Historians Toland and Fest think the chances are slim that a Fran224. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris. Norton, New York, 1998, p. 9.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra kenberger or Frankenreither was Alois’s father.225 Hitler asked Hans Frank, once Governor General of Poland and Hitler’s attorney, in the 1930s to investigate the possibility that his grandfather was the nineteen-year-old son of the Frankenberger family from Graz. Frank allegedly found letters from the Frankenbergers to Maria with payment, but no complete proof was ever established.226 In a written statement presented to a priest when Frank was on trial at Nuremberg (executed October 16, 1946 for his part in the transportation and liquidation of Polish Jews), and not released until 1953, Frank wrote, “towards the end of 1930, Hitler sent for me...he showed me a letter . . .blackmail on the part of one of his most loathsome relatives [his nephew William Hitler]227 who was gently hinting that ‘in view of certain allegations in the Press it might be better if certain family matters weren’t shouted from the roof-tops.’ The press reports in question suggested that Hitler had Jewish blood in his veins and hence was hardly qualified to be an anti-Semite.” Frank goes on in the document to say that “the Frankenbergers paid maintenance allowance” to Maria until Alois’s fourteenth year. Correspondence concerning the issue was kept secret by a Hitler relative living near Graz. He summarizes the statement by writing, “the possibility cannot be dismissed that Hitler’s father was half Jewish.” However, biographer Werner Maser found no demonstrable proof that Maria had been employed in Graz, that there was a Hitler relative in Wetzelsdorf, or that any Frankenbergers lived in Graz in 1836. Maser goes as far as to say that from the fifteenth century until well after Maria’s death no Jews could be found in Graz at all.228 Maria performed domestic duties at the home of Baron Rothschild of Vienna. A psychoanalysis of Hitler prepared by Dr. Walter C. Langer for the American Office of Strategic Services mentions a pre-war Austrian police report that proved Maria was employed in the Rothschild house during the time she conceived Alois. Langer wrote in his report that the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss had prepared a secret study on the Hitler family. Langer cites two

225. Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Fest, Joachim. Hitler; Toland, John, Adolf Hitler, Payne, Robert, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler; Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 18891936, Hubris. 226. Payne, Robert, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler. Dorsett, New York, 1973, p. 6. 227. Hitler’s father Alois had three wives and seven or eight children. William Patrick Hitler, son of Adolf’s elder half-brother Alois told acquaintances of his father telling him that Alois Sr. regularly beat his children, including Adolf. 228. Maser, Werner. Hitler, Legend, Myth and Reality, Harper Row, New York, 1971, p. 13.

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Peculiar Liaisons sources that say Hitler knew of the study and tried to obtain the document, in vain. The alleged Dollfuss document on Hitler’s ancestry led Hitler, at least in part, to order the assassination of Dollfuss on July 25, 1934. Hitler’s attorney may have known all along that a Rothschild was the real father of Alois but substituted the name of Frankenberger for Rothschild.229 It has been suggested that the real connection between Hitler and the Rothschilds was known throughout the war and was in part the reason for the significant support Hitler received from international banking throughout his political career. 230 Langer also reported that Hitler was a neurotic psychopath and had extreme masochistic tendencies. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS and the dossier keeper of National Socialists, compiled information on everyone within the party for political purposes, Hitler being no exception. The confidential “Fuhrer file” contained information that might be useful for blackmail in the future. He planned to use this file, undoubtedly with information concerning Hitler’s possible Jewish ancestry, when he arrested Hitler (with the help of the SS) if the war turned against Germany. He hoped that Hitler’s arrest would be enough to enable the German forces to join with the Allies and turn back the advancing Soviets.231 The ferocious nature of Nazi attacks on Jews may have been fanned by Hitler’s desire to prove to his party and his henchmen that there was no possibility that he had even a drop of Jewish ancestry. The actual identity of Hitler’s paternal grandfather is a minor issue, but the question was always on Hitler’s mind. He may have shared the same fate as one of his most admired aides, SS General Reinhard Heydrich — both wondering their entire lives if a question about their ancestry would pop up and destroy their reputations and careers. Though information on Hitler’s life is voluminous, biographical data on Stauffenberg is scarce, due to the Gestapo’s immediate confiscation of written materials during their searches of Stauffenberg’s home in Bamberg and his Berlin apartment following the attempted coup. We do know that Count Claus Philipp Maria Schenk von Stauffenberg was born in 1907 in Greifenstein Castle, Upper Franconia, to a distinguished Bavarian family; his great grandfather was a military hero in German’s liberation from Napoleon. His paternal great-grandfather 229. Marrs, Jim. Rule By Secrecy, Perrenial, New York, 200, p. 168. 230. Ibid., pp. 167-8. 231. Maser, Werner. Hitler, Legend, Myth and Reality, Harper Row, New York, 1971, p. 11. Maser also cites “unpublished entries in the diary of the German ambassador in Madrid. Bezymenski, Lew. The Death of Adolf Hitler, London and New York, 1968, p. 17.”

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra was a counselor to the King of Bavaria during the 1870s, and his maternal greatgrandfather was a Prussian general and hero of Germany’s war against Napoleon. Claus’s father served as an influential official in the senior court of the King of Wurttemberg in the early twentieth century. The family was devoutly Catholic. Claus decided on a career as a military officer when he joined the army in 1926 as a member of the Seventeenth Bamberg Cavalry Regiment.

WITTGENSTEIN, HITLER, AND EARLY INFLUENCES During the first years of Hitler’s life his father moved numerous times around the city of Linz. At the age of eleven, Hitler attended the Realschule of Linz. Though he had good grades in grammar school, he made poor marks at the Linz school and was forced to transfer to the state high school at Steyr, outside of Linz, and he left before graduating. He later claimed he had done poorly in school to show his father that he had no interest in following his footsteps as a civil servant. Curiously enough, the Linz school was also attended by another twentieth-century celebrity: Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889-1951, considered one of the most creative philosophers of the century. Though they were the same age, Hitler was two years behind Wittgenstein; according to Wittgenstein biographer Ray Monk, they had nothing to do with each other. According to Kimberley Cornish, Hitler may have conceived his hatred for Jews due to his school relationship with the brilliant Wittgenstein, who came from an affluent Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism. But no real link between Hitler and Wittgenstein has ever been found.232 Wittgenstein served in the trenches of World War I, where he wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921. Wittgenstein would later teach philosophy at Cambridge University and had as one of his pupils Alan Turing,233 the mathematician who was a principal figure in the team that succeeded in breaking the Nazis’ secret code machine, Enigma.234

232. Cornish, Kimberley. The Jew of Linz: Wittgenstein, Hitler and Their Secret Battle of the Mind, Century, London, 1998. For commentary of this book see The Economist (US, March 14, 1998 v. 346, n. 8059, p. 18 and French, Sean, New Statesman, March 13, 1998, v. 127, n. 4376, p. 18.) 233. Turing was a key figure in creating Colossus, the first programmed electronic digital computer used to decode the Nazi Enigma machine.

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Peculiar Liaisons One of Hitler’s favorite authors was Karl May (1848-1912), a German novelist who wrote young adult novels set in the American West or the Orient; he served two prison terms for fraud in 1865 and 1874. Though May had never visited the American West, he created a character called Old Shatterhand who had a passion for killing Indians, especially Ogallala. May cast Old Shatterhand as an admirable hero who exacted a deserved revenge upon what he regarded as an inferior race; May knew little of the real history of the American West. Old Shatterhand’s world teemed with bloodshed, violence, and cruelty. Hitler reread many of the seventy volumes of May novels during his early years as Chancellor, telling acquaintances throughout his life that May’s work gave him his first notions of geography and had opened his eyes to the world.235 “Karl May Clubs” were set up in Germany in the 1950s and were often covers for anti-communist clubs. Hitler took the film version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a realistic depiction of America as an impoverished and decaying nation. It is unlikely that Hitler knew of the English storywriter M. P. Shiel, but if he had he could have read Shiel’s prophetic 1896 story of a group of “super men” roaming Europe murdering people with physical and mental flaws. The story, entitled “The S.S.,” seemed to eerily predict the Nazi nightmare. When Hitler left his school in Steyr without a degree, he had only his mother and a single friend, August Kubicek, as companions. Kubicek relates two incidents that illustrate Hitler’s character. Finding that his lottery ticket was not a winner, Hitler flew into a rage and denounced “human credulity, the state lottery organization, and finally condemned the cheating government itself.”236 Reacting to a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi, which they both attended, Hitler began a long, impassioned oratory, “sketching for me his future and that of his people.” When they met three decades later, Hitler remarked, “It began there.”237 Hitler had a fascination for Wagnerian opera all his life. To Hitler, Wagner’s music immortalized the spirit of Teutonic gods and the ideal human: the “Nordic 234. The Enigma machine, a Nazi ciphering device used by the Germans during WWII, carried most of the German armed services classified communications. With the basic appearance of a typewriter, the machine used a series of moving rotors that were set to the same rotor position before transmission. When a key was punched a corresponding letter would appear on a lighted, battery-powered panel. A receiving operator would key the ciphered letter into his machine and have it converted into the original letter. The breaking of the code was called the Ultra Secret. 235. Klein, Mina and Arthur. Hitler’s Hangups, Dutton Press, 1976, pp. 8-9. 236. Fest, Joachim. Hitler. Vintage, New York, 1975, p. 22. 237. Kubicek, August. The Young Hitler I Knew, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1955.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra race.” Wagner’s dictum that Jews are the plastic demon of the decline of mankind also appealed to Hitler. “I am especially happy to say that I can attribute my later rise to these modest provincial performances.”

VIENNA AND WORLD WAR I Hitler spent the years of 1907-1913 in Vienna, years that were full of “hardship and misery...the saddest period of my life.” He spent his late teens and early twenties as a day laborer, post-card painter, and self-educator. It was here that his eyes were “opened to two menaces...Marxism and Jewry.”238 For many months he roamed the city, aimlessly drawing, painting, and reading, partially supported by funds from an orphan’s pension he was awarded upon the death of his mother. He spent several years in a “home for men,” but of all the many people who met him there, few could recall him later on. Living in the Viennese flophouses hardened Hitler’s heart. Vienna was a center of European culture, but the influx of immigrants had diluted the German style of the city; Vienna was a combination of great wealth and pitiful poverty. While Hitler was in Vienna, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia mobilized its troops, and Germany declared war on Russia, then France. Hitler was thrilled; the war was a place where he could vent his years of frustration and hatred. “I fell to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being allowed to live at this time.” His stay in Vienna had turned him against his own home country. Austria was a conglomerate of races and the Hapsburg government stirred no patriotism in him. He petitioned the King of Bavaria to allow him entry into the German army, and he was accepted. During the war Hitler served as a messenger, rose to the rank of corporal and earned six medals, including the first and second-class Iron Cross. At one time he served in trenches directly opposite those held by the battalion commanded by future British Prime Minister Churchill.239 He survived the horrendous carnage of the Somme, as did the British author J.R.R. Tolkien. (Tolkien said of the war, “by 1918 all but one of my close friends was dead.” What Tolkien experienced and witnessed in the trenches and battlefields eventually provided

238. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1971, p. 21. 239. Jannen, William. The Lions of July, Presido, Novato, Ca., 1996, p. 12.

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Peculiar Liaisons material that went into The Book of Lost Worlds, the foundation of The Lord of the Rings, one of the most read pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.240) On July 29, 1918 American soldiers advanced on a regiment of German soldiers at the French village of Seringer. Among the Americans was William J. Donovan, who would be wounded three times, win the Medal of honor, and later head the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II. Donovan would be responsible for some of the most imaginative ways of disrupting the Nazi war efforts. One of the German soldiers who valiantly fought in the retreat was Corporal Hitler. On August 4, he was awarded the Iron Cross first class, the citation noting “personal bravery and general merit.” The officer who made the recommendation and pinned the medal on Hitler was Capt. Hugh Guttman, a Jew. Guttman was jailed more than once for stating that he had pinned the medal on Hitler; Guttman eventually emigrated to the United States.241 On the night of October 13, 1918 Hitler was hit by a mustard gas attack. While Hitler was in a hospital, recovering from the gas and temporary blindness, he learned of Germany’s defeat. It was there that he felt the most stinging rejection of his life. After recovering his sight from the gas attack, Hitler stayed in the army and was assigned to “educational” duties, which meant spying on political parties and secret societies that could cause trouble for the government. Hitler investigated a small group called the German Workers’ Party on September 16, 1919. He joined the party, which met in a beer hall called Alte Rosenbad in Munich, and became its leader when he found that his wild, hoarse voice matched with his impassioned political rhetoric could elicit a following of political admirers. Hitler described the first time he sat with the group in his autobiography Mein Kampf: “The tavern in which the meeting was to take place was the Alte Rosenbad...a very run-down place...in the dim light of a grimy gas lamp four young people sat at a table...Terrible! Terrible! This was club life of the worst manner and sort. Was I to join this organization?”242 The group was founded by the Thule Society, which was made up of post-war upper class Bavarians. Thule was a mythical north Atlantic island, in the same legendary tradition of Lemuria and Atlantis, from which came the first Nordic civilization. Some members believed 240. See Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War — The Threshold of Middle-Earth, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston/ New York, 2003. 241. Martin, Gilbert. A History of the Twentieth Century, Harper Collins, New York, 1977, v. 1., p. 506. 242. Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Fawcett, New York, 1992, p. 63.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra they were descendents of the early Nordic civilization. He changed the party name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), attached the symbol of a swastika, and a greeting of “heil!” for its leader. An inner circle of the Thule Society within Berlin, called the Vril Society, or Luminous Lodge, was also in close contact with the Golden Dawn, the previously mentioned English group created in 1888, dedicated to ritual magic and linked to mysterious, ancient German rituals.

HITLER AND THE JEWISH PROSTITUTE Years later, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, produced Hitler’s medical record from the time he was hospitalized for the gas attack. The report noted that various symptoms of syphilis were already present, which may have intensified the hallucinations and blindness associated with the gassing. Several authors and psychiatrists have investigated Hitler’s sex life. He has been associated with bizarre perversions that may have been fabricated by his political enemies, but it does seem certain that he had numerous female acquaintances, including his niece, some of whom were found dead of apparent suicides after having a relationship with him.243 Hitler’s friend Putzi Hanfstaengl said that a Jewish prostitute infected Hitler with syphilis during 1908 in Vienna, a claim disputed by numerous authors including Brigitte Hamann (Hitler’s Vienna), who wrote that Hitler was not in Vienna at the time and that a syphilis test in 1940 had a negative result.244 In 1936, Hitler hired a personal doctor. This private physician was known as a specialist in syphilis and reported seeing specific symptoms of syphilis in Hitler, specifically skin lesions and gastric crises. Curiously, Hitler wrote thirteen pages on syphilis in his autobiography Mein Kampf, claiming it was a scourge of Germany that had to be destroyed (though he later told his lawyer Hans Frank that he regretted writing about it). Hitler’s obsession with the purity of the German race, and his possible infection with syphilis, takes on new meaning 243. Cauthorne, Nigel. The Sex Lives of the Great Dictators, Prion, London, 1996, p. 97. 244. Hamann, Brigitte. Hitler’s Vienna, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1999, p. 193. In Das Ende des Hitler Mythos (The End of the Hitler Myth), 1947, author Josef Greiner claims to have known Hitler in Vienna in 1907-8, but Hamann writes that Hitler was in Linz at the time. Hamann asserts that Greiner’s book is full of inaccuracies and outrageous claims; he cites a negative result of a Wasermann Test in 1940 that would prove Hitler did not have syphilis.

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Peculiar Liaisons when it is seen that he obsessively wrote and spoke of “Jewish blood poisoning and race poisoning,” and the contamination of “our blood” by the “impure” Jews. Later in his life, Hitler suffered from many ailments that appear to be symptomatic of maladies like syphilis, amphetamine abuse, and Parkinson’s disease: eye trouble, tremors in the limbs, and slurred speech. One of the symptoms of syphilis is acute paranoia: the kind Hitler exhibited at the end of World War II, when he told his friend and Minister of Munitions and Arms Albert Speer to kill all prisoners and order Nazi generals to destroy any land occupied by Germany before the Allies could capture it. Author Deborah Hayden notes that Hitler’s paranoia, most likely fueled by syphilis, was demonstrated in his propensity to shout for hours in anger; he foamed “at the mouth, and rolled on the floor. Some sources say he even chewed on the carpet.” Many men of genius shared the disease, possibly including Beethoven, Schubert, James Joyce, Scott Joplin, van Gogh, Nietzsche.245

MUNICH AND THE BEER HALL PUTSCH — HITLER’S FAILED REVOLT The evening of November 8, 1923, Hitler entered the Burgerbraukeller beer hall where a meeting of 3,000 men were listening to Gustav Kahr, the state commissioner of Bavaria. As 600 of his personal bodyguards, the Sturmabteilung (SA), surrounded the hall and set up a machine gun in the doorway, Hitler jumped on a chair and fired his pistol into the ceiling, announcing, “The national revolution has begun...the Army and police are marching on the city under the swastika banner.” This was first of numerous lies that Hitler used during his political career. Hitler had just started what would eventually be called the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed attempt to take over the German government. At gunpoint, Hitler forced three leaders of the Bavarian government (Kahr, Lossow, Seisser) into a private room and demanded that they join his putsch. They refused. SA members kept the three men at gunpoint while Hitler went back out and announced to the crowd that they had joined his movement to depose the current Bavarian government and replace it with a new Reich. The three men repudiated the coup as soon as they were let go.

245. Hayden, Deborah. Pox — Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis, Basic Books, New York, 2003, pp. 251-302.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra The next day, Hitler led 3,000 members of his Nazi party into the heart of Munich where state police met them. Gunfire was exchanged and several men on both sides were killed or injured; Goering suffered a gunshot to his hip and Hitler dislocated his shoulder when one of his companions pulled him to the pavement. The man marching directly next to Hitler, his political adviser Max von Scheubner-Richter, was killed by the first volley of shots. Only General Erich Ludendorff, the World War I hero and avid Hitler supporter, marched unflinchingly into the Odeonsplatz, the broad square in the center of the city, Hitler and the rest ran away. Two days later Hitler was found hiding in a wardrobe closet in the suburb of Uffing at the house of the Hanfstaengls, who nursed his sore shoulder. He was convicted of treason but served only thirteen months of a five-year sentence. What should have been the end of his political career was actually the beginning. His trial gave him publicity and a pulpit to air his grievances with the German government; he blamed Germany’s woes on the “November criminals” who surrendered at Versailles, and boldly declared himself as “the man who is born to be a dictator.” In the official transcript of the trial, Hitler’s final statement runs fourteen pages and foreshadowed his political style when he stated, “Of all the European nations, the situation of the German nation is perhaps the worst. Militarily, politically, and geographically it is surrounded by rivals; it can prevail only if ruthless power politics becomes its foremost policy priority.”246 During his imprisonment at Landsberg, Hitler dictated a book to his longtime confidant Rudolf Hess. In the book, Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined his past and future dreams for Germany and its need for lebensraum (living space) that he intended to take from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Russia, and Poland. It took him little time to accuse what he believed were the real villains in Germany’s downfall during World War I: the signers of the Treaty of Versailles, Jews, and Marxism. In the preface of the book he describes why it was written: “to destroy the foul legends about my person dished up in the Jewish press.”

246. The Hitler Trial, Trans. Freniere, Karcie, Fandek, v. 3, University Publications of American, 1976, p. 359.

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Peculiar Liaisons THE PROTOCOLS OF ZION — FICTION AS A TERROR TOOL In 1864, a version of what eventually became known as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion appeared in a French book entitled “Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, or the Politics of Machiavelli in the 19th Century by a Contemporary.” The book was a political satire of the Machiavellian empire of Napoleon III. The author, a French lawyer named Maurice Joly, was a member of the Rosicrucians. Joly was eventually jailed 15 months for writing this work. It has long been thought that during the 1890s unknown authors (the Russian Czar’s secret police, the Ochrana, have been frequently cited) rewrote and diverted Joly’s work. The Protocols appeared in Paris as a pamphlet, and the theory says that a Paris agent of the Ochrana created the forgery there in 1896 or 1897. However, a 1999 study of the Protocols by Stepanov and Ruud seems to absolve the Ochrana from authorship.247 (The Ochrana, which means “protection” in Russian, was founded after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 to protect the czar.) The Jews, the Protocols declared, were secretly designing a single government, a new world order that was responsible for plotting the overthrow of the Russian czar. The Protocols also give the appearance of outlining secret plans by which Jews would come to control the world. Their aim was to subjugate all non-Jews by destroying “the importance of the family and its educational value” as well as creating “an intensified centralization of government” — a super government. The Protocols made its way to Japan in 1919, in a translation that painted Jews and Freemasons as dangerous Communist revolutionaries.248 The 1987 offshoot of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, rationalized its terrorist activities such as suicide bombings on the basis of the Protocols, claiming that the most recent conflicts between the Palestinians and the Israelis are the continuation of the struggle between Islam and the evil work of Judaism, a religion that rejected the final prophet Mohammed. The Protocols of Zion has become one of the most important pieces of political disinformation in modern day history. The Protocols were far from the earliest form of anti-Jewish writing. Long before the Middle Ages, Christians taught that Jewish people were possessed of

247. Ruud, Charles and Stepanov, Sergei. Fontanka 16: The Tsar’s Secret Police, McGill-Queen University Press, Montreal, 1999. 248. Ridley, Jasper. The Freemasons, Arcade, New York, 2001, p. 239.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra evil spirits, had been transformed into sons of Satan, and that the Anti-Christ would be a Jew and Jews would be his followers.249 Peter the Hermit, the French leader of the First Crusade, was to murder scores of Jews in Worms, Germany on his way to “liberate” the Holy Land in the eleventh century. The Crusaders’ murders of Jews along the road to the Holy Land were the first pogroms in Europe.250 Distrust for Jews was common in Europe the 1890s, intensified by the fact that industrialization and sweeping social changes meant ruin for many families while others suddenly became wealthy. Houston Stewart Chamberlain capitalized on and provoked the trend with his book Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.251 The book, which sold 100,000 copies by 1914, created a yearning for a Volksgemeinschaft, a common people’s utopia based on the resolution of social class conflict. The volkisch ideology (national/racial attitudes) blamed the Jewish people as the perpetrators of the dangerous, unsettling changes that were occurring in Germany. This ideology was the basis for the philosophy of Bruno Heydrich, who instilled in his son, Reinhard Heydrich, the belief that Jews were a danger to the German society. Heydrich eventually became known as the Butcher of Prague, the head of the Nazi Sicherheitdienst (SD), the intelligence arm of Himmler’s dreaded Schutzstaffel, the SS, Hitler’s “Elite Corp.” Though the Protocols was universally labeled as a farce and a piece of French political satire that was turned into a blatant piece of fiction intended to denigrate Jewish people, Hitler used the work to his benefit. At first, he blamed the loss of the First World War on the military leaders who signed the Treaty of Versailles ending the war. Germany had few ethnic groups that could be targeted to take the blame, but with the help of Chamberlain’s work and the Protocols, Jews were made the scapegoats — the real cause of Germany’s post-war agonies, international shame, and economic hardship. Though Hitler publicly recognized the Protocols as a forgery, he wrote in Mein Kampf that they “are 249. Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide, Serrif, London, 1996, p. 25. See also Parkes, J. The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, The Soncino Press, London, 1934; Trachtenberg, J. The Devil and the Jews, Yale University Press, New Haven/London, 1943. 250. Armstrong, Karen. Holy War, Anchor, New York, 2001, p. 71. 251. Anti-Jewishness came from many sources. Thomas Carlyle, a Scotsman, wrote of German leadership and heroes in his work On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), spent fifteen years writing a six-volume biography of Frederick the Great, which became favorite reading of Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Steinweis, Alan. “Hitler and Carlyle’s ‘Historical Greatness,’” History Today, June 1995, p. 33.

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Peculiar Liaisons genuine after all.” The Protocols, he unabashedly declared, were the true gospel pointing the accusing finger at the real culprits for Germany’s problems: the Jew.252 The Jews were not the only danger; the Freemasons were exposed as another evil by Nazi writers Ludendorff and Dr. Custos. In 1928 and 1934, Ludendorff claimed that the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassin Gavrilo Princip was a Jew and his conspirator Dragutin Dimitrijevic a Freemason with links to lodges in London, Germany, Austria, and Hungary. The Freemasons of Germany sued Ludendorff in 1931 and he was fined 500 marks. Princip was neither a Jew nor a Freemason, nor was Dimitrijevic a Freemason. In 1931, Custos wrote in his book The Freemason, the World Vampire, that the Freemasons were responsible for plotting against Germany, having paid the Serbs L5 million to murder Archduke Ferdinand. Custos falsely claimed that Ferdinand’s assassination occurred on the Freemasons’ summer festival day of June 24 (it was June 28); that the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28 to honor (once again in error) the Freemasons’ festival day; and that Lenin and Trotsky, leaders of the Bolshevik revolution, were Freemason Jews (though Trotsky was a Jew, Lenin was not; and neither was a Freemason).253 The Freemasons have been blamed by various groups for numerous conflicts including the Balkan uprisings of 1912 and 1913, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, assassinations of various world leaders, both world wars, and the infamous Whitechapel murders of London in 1888,254 a unique and early form of urban terror that would be refined in the twentieth century. On April 6, 1941 Hitler went one step further, claiming that the Sarajevo assassination of 1914 was the work of British intelligence service and Hitler’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop eventually renewed the old accusation that the Russians were responsible for Ferdinand’s assassination. In 1797, Abbe Barruel, a French cleric, wrote a five-volume work, Memoire Pour Servir a l’histoire du Jacobinisme, tracing the causes of the French Revolution and a conspiracy to control the world through the Bavarian Illuminati and Freemasonry, as well as the medieval Order of the Templars. The Templars were an 252. The Jew, he wrote in Mein Kampf, was responsible for “nine-tenths of all obscene literature, of artistic claptrap, and theatrical foolishness...” 253. Ridley, Jasper. The Freemasons, Arcade, New York, 2001, p. 231. 254. The Whitechapel murders are recognized as one of the first serial killings in a major city and the dawning of contemporary urban terror in peace time. Ridley, Jasper. The Freemasons, Arcade, New York, 2001, pp. 280-2.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra order of Christian knights who were established to protect travelers to the Holy Land after Godfrey of Bouillon’s successful Crusade to Jerusalem, which had “not really been exterminated in 1314 but had survived as a secret society, pledged to abolish all monarchies...and found a world-republic under its control.” Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at Ingolstadt University, formed the Bavarian Illuminati in 1776. This secret society held that man was not wicked but that religion, the state, and bad examples perverted him. When reason replaced religion, man’s problems would be solved. Hitler twisted Weishaupt’s writing, to say: “Behold our secret. Remember that the end justifies the means and that the wise ought to take all means to do good which the wicked take to do evil.”

HITLER AND HENRY FORD As Antony C. Sutton wrote in his book Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Henry Ford is something of an enigma; his influence on the Western world is complicated and at times strange and sad. It is common knowledge that Ford revolutionized the world of transportation and industry with his mass production of Ford automobiles. What is not as well known is his fervent hatred for Jews (a hatred shared by fellow super-financier J.P. Morgan) and Ford’s financial and political backing of Adolf Hitler. Ford created the assembly line to produce automobiles and thus revolutionized industrial production. The assembly line deemphasized individual human creativity and emphasized quick assembly by a machine with the help of humans performing machine-like, repetitive tasks. Ford saw people in capitalist terms, as labor — the dehumanization that Marx had railed against in his 1880s writings that inspired the Bolshevik revolution. Hitler believed in a master race and set out to engage them in his bid to control Europe, and then the world; and neither he nor Ford believed that Jews had a place in the master race or the new assembly-line human. In 1920, Henry Ford distributed a series of 81 articles in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which focused on the “corruption” brought by Jews into American life. When “fighting filth,” one of the articles professed, the “fight carries you straight to the Jewish camp.” The filth referred to was the American cinema. The articles were reprinted in Germany and were widely read. In the same year Ford began financing Adolf Hitler’s little known anti-Jew nationalist movement in Munich. Ford’s funds (reported to be as much as $70,000) helped

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Peculiar Liaisons finance Hitler’s failed Bavarian rebellion. During Hitler’s trial it was discovered that Ford’s associates had had contact with Dietrich Eckart while trying to sell Germany tractors. Eckart had asked for financial support and got it. For four days following Hitler’s release from Landsberg prison, he stayed at the home of a wealthy friend where he received a new copy of Mein Leben und Werk (My Life and Work) by Henry Ford, a book he would come to revere. In 1928, Ford merged his assets with I.G. Farben, the German chemical cartel, which further strengthened the Nazi cause. In the 1930s, Ford built the Soviet Union’s first modern automobile plan at Gorki. The same plant later built trucks that were sent to Vietnam in support of the Viet Cong against the Americans during the 1960s. A Ford associate and fellow racist probably wrote the articles based on the infamous Protocols of Zion. Ford eventually published the articles in a book entitled The International Jew. Daniel Levitas (The Terrorist Next Door) describes The International Jew as an American version of The Protocols of Zion. Its central theme was the assertion that Jews were undermining the Christian social structure of America and that Jews had created Bolshevism. Ford’s book sold more than a half a million copies and was translated into 16 languages. Hitler hung Ford’s picture on his wall and wrote in Mein Kampf that Ford was a great man who had confronted Jewish power; he cited Ford’s book extensively. Some of Ford’s early quotes seem to be straight out of Hitler’s mouth: “The international financiers are behind all war. They are what is called the International Jew — German Jews, French Jews, English Jews, American Jews...the Jew is a threat.” Hitler told a Detroit News reporter that he regarded “Henry Ford as my inspiration.”255 Ford supported the Nazis to the verge of treason. Ford may have feared Jews as competition to his business. He peddled racism as a tool to defeat a business enemy. He said the motion picture industry and the music and liquor business were groups that were controlled by Jews. Of the American film industry he wrote, “Americans every day place themselves voluntarily within range of a Jewish life, love, and labor...there are two families in this world, and on one the darkness dwells.” Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a Nazi citation reserved for foreign men of distinction. It was presented to Ford on his 75th birthday in his Dearborn office. Jewish leaders immediately expressed concern, which led Ford to say that his acceptance of the medal did not mean he had sym255. Levitas, Daniel, The Terrorist Next Door, Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 2002, pp. 28-9.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra pathy for Nazism and that he was repulsed by anything that bred hatred. The medal was also given to the head of IBM (who returned it) and American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, who was haunted all his life by his pre-war pro Nazi statements. Ford never returned the medal, though Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes criticized its acceptance publicly. 256

STAUFFENBERG AND THE MYSTICAL POET STEFAN GEORGE The mentor and mystical poet Stefan George was reputed to be a “German” W.B. Yeats or T.S. Eliot; he was revered as a prophet by an elite group of intellectuals dedicated to his teachings and poetry. 257 Claus and his brothers were introduced to George when Claus was sixteen. After an interview with the Stauffenbergs’ mother, Grafin Karoline, the brothers were placed under George’s tutelage. They read and discussed philosophy, literature, and aesthetic theory. Stauffenberg later named his movement against Hitler “Secret Germany,” a direct borrowing from Stefan George’s poem Geheimes Deutschland (“Secret” or “Hidden Germany”). In 1893, George had become associated with a small cultural school called the “Cosmics,” but he was repulsed by the increasing vitriol of anti-Jewish speeches and talk of “pure blood,” and eventually left the group. Hitler’s National Socialism also revolted George. He taught the Greek concept that “the body is God.” The essence of the new elite man would be built on the nobility of the mind, not aristocratic birth, with an emphasis on readiness to serve and assume responsibility with a capacity of devotion and self-sacrifice. George taught his students that every fruitful and liberating thought had originated in secret circles and that obligations would come along that they would be asked to act upon individually.258 Der Sturmer, the anti-Jewish journal edited by Julius Streicher (empowered by Hitler as the Gauletier of Nuremberg and later executed at Nuremberg), wrote that Stefan George’s poetry resembled “Jewish Dadaism” and that George’s real name was Heinrich Abeles, suggesting that he was Jewish. In March of 1934, Stauffenberg defended his mentor and showed his first signs of 256. Cronen, Isaac. Confronting Fear, Thunder’s Mouth, New York, 2002, pp. 417-18. 257. Baigent, Michael and Leigh, Richard. Secret Germany, Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler, Penguin, London, 1994, p. 110. 258. Jost, Dominik, Stefan George und Seine Elite, Speer-Verlag, Zurich, 1949, p. 71.

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Peculiar Liaisons anti-Nazi sentiments when he wrote to the Propaganda Ministry objecting to Der Sturmer’s comments. As Stauffenberg grew into adulthood, he rarely met with his mentor, but “Stauffenberg’s natural predisposition to action was no doubt sharpened by George,” writes biographer Kramerz. “George merely confirmed and reinforced the characteristics Stauffenberg already possessed.”259 Hitler had the Protocols of Zion and his view of Weishaupt’s edits of the Bavarian Illuminati to inspire him; Stauffenberg had Stefan George’s concept of the new elite man.

THE THIRD REICH’S PROPHET — THE JEWISH CLAIRVOYANT Hitler was surrounded by sycophants and a Danish self-proclaimed clairvoyant, Erik Jan Hanussen, who hid the fact that he was Jewish. On March 25, 1932, Hanussen published in his own weekly newspaper (Jan Hanussen’s Berliner Wochenschau) the headline, “Hanussen in France Predicts Hitler’s Future.” Hanussen correctly predicted that in a year Hitler would be appointed Reichschancellor. Hanussen’s reputation was boosted when he correctly predicted in May of 1932 the death of Czechoslovakian Prince Leo Lobkowicz in a Berlin auto race. Hitler made note of Hanussen’s powers and made plans to meet him. Hitler’s disastrous putsch and imprisonment had made him the target of jokes and jibes by journalists throughout Germany. Count von Helldorf was one of Hitler’s top SA men in Berlin. He led the first attack on Jews in September of 1931. As a racist, sadist, and connoisseur of the black arts, Helldorf became a follower of Hanussen, who guided Helldorf and other Nazis in bizarre rituals that included a celebration on one of Hanussen’s yachts of the Hindu love-goddess Sarawati. Hanussen became entranced with Helldorf’s power and went as far as to help Helldorf pay off some of his gambling debts. Goering borrowed large amounts of money from Hanussen and became another devotee, until one of Hanussen’s séances predicted a rise of Nazi power followed by a quick demise. However, Helldorf remained loyal, still oblivious to the fact that Hanussen was Jewish, and he provided Hanussen with SA bodyguards and a chauffeur. In June of 1932, Count von Helldorf introduced Hanussen to Hitler. Hanussen and Hitler met numerous times in the next two years. One meeting 259. Kramerz, Joachim. Stauffenberg, MacMillan, New York, 1967, p. 34.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra allegedly took place at the Hotel Kaiserhof, where a nervous Hitler watched Hanussen fall into a trance and then predicted Hitler’s meteoric rise to the highest position in Germany. Hitler was thrilled and told him that he would help him establish an Aryan “University of the Occult.” However, not all Nazis were enthralled. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels may have felt slighted by Hitler’s attention to Hanussen. Goebbels had collected a file on Hanussen and his numerous connections with Jews. Both Goering and Helldorf were deep in debt to Hanussen. On March 24, 1933 the Nazis arrested him; his body was found in a field outside Berlin. He had been shot three times in the head.260 Count von Helldorf eventually became part of the Black Orchestra.

NAZIS, THE OCCULT, AND REVISIONIST ARCHAEOLOGY — ROSENBERG, ECKART, AND HIMMLER In 1917, Alfred Rosenberg, an architect from Estonia who flirted with the idea of Bolshevism during his stay in Moscow, brought the Protocols to Berlin and to the attention of Dietrich Eckart. Alfred Rosenberg reissued the Protocols in Germany (Protokolle der Weisen von Zion) and eventually Nazi authorities recommended the use of the Protocols in schools. Hitler appointed Rosenberg the Nazi party’s official “philosopher.” William Shirer described Rosenberg as a dolt and proclaimed his 700-page tome, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930, “a ludicrous concoction for his half-baked ideas on Nordic supremacy.” It was a bestseller, but was so convoluted and poorly written that even Hitler admitted that he was unable to read through it.261 Eckart was twenty-one years older than Hitler; he was a poet, a playwright, a drunk, a morphine addict, a self-proclaimed “anti-Semite,” and an occasional resident of mental hospitals. Eckart’s lack of success in the art world paralleled Hitler’s failures; and both eventually blamed their woes on Jews and Marxists. Eckart was responsible for creating publications like Auf Gut Deutsch and Volkische Beobachter, which officially trumpeted the rallying cry of the Nazi movement. Eckart helped introduce Hitler to post-war Munich society, grooming him as a German savior. A dialogue between the two was published in 260. Gordon, Mel. Erik Jan Hanussen — Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant, Feral House, Los Angeles, 2001. 261. Shirer, William. The Nightmare Years, Little Brown and Co., Boston, MA. 1984, p. 180.

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Peculiar Liaisons 1923, which reflected their common belief that Jews were endowed with occult powers that deflected man from his natural path. Trevor Ravenscroft reports that Eckart told his followers that it was his destiny to prepare the way for the Anti-Christ, who would lead the Aryan race to glory. Eckart decided Hitler was the Anti-Christ when Hitler told him Providence had spared him from death in World War I.262 In 1923, shortly before his death, Eckart said, “Follow Hitler! He will dance, but it will be to my tune….” Unlikely admirers of Hitler, at least at the beginning of his political career, were Irish writer George Bernard Shaw and the American writer Gertrude Stein, who at one time believed Hitler should receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Hitler’s association with the occult and with drugs have been the subject of numerous studies. First is the Thule Group’s link to black magic and their eventual creation of the German Worker’s Party. Certainly his drug intake (prescribed by his personal physician) has been clearly documented; the number of drugs he was taking by injection, towards the end of his life, is staggering.263 A personal library found hidden in a mine at Berchtesgaden after the war proved that he was interested and read extensively on the subject of the occult.264 Hitler, correctly or incorrectly, has been linked to numerous secret societies, medieval black magic, Pan-Germanic mysticism, sexual perversion, clairvoyance, reincarnation, use of psychedelic drugs, and a longing to control the power of the sacred Christian relic, the Spear of Longinus (the spear that allegedly was thrust into Jesus by a Roman Centurion; legend says that whoever controls the spear will rule the “destiny” of the world).265 Ravenscroft theorized that Hitler was obsessed with the Spear and its occult power, though many of Ravenscroft’s speculations have been discredited. 266 His fantastic claims include Hitler’s introduction to the occult by a Viennese occult book store owner, Pretzsche,

262. Ravenscroft, Trevor. The Spear of Destiny, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1973, p. 92. 263. Heston, Leonard. The Medical Casebook of Adolf Hitler, First Cooper Square Press, New York, 2000. 264. Levenda, Peter. Unholy Alliance, Avon, New York, 1995, p. 56. 265. Ravenscroft, Trevor. The Spear of Destiny, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1973; Levenda, Peter. Unholy Alliance, Avon, New York, 1995; Anderson, Ken. Hitler and the Occult, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 1995; Suster, Gerald. Hitler: The Occult Messiah, St. Martin’s, New York, 1981; Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Occult Roots of Nazism, New York University Press, New York, 1992. Ravenscroft writes that Hitler had a fascination with controlling the spear. 266. See Levenda, Peter. Unholy Alliance, Avon, New York, 1995, and Wyden, Peter. The Hitler Virus — The Insidious Legacy of Adolf Hitler, Arcade, New York, 2001.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra who accelerated Hitler’s occult development through the use of peyote, which Pretzsche learned of as an apothecary assistant in Mexico City.267 Hitler in fact was never clearly associated with an occult group, though many of his followers (Rosenberg, Hess, Eckart, Himmler) were active in such groups. Hitler ridiculed occult groups publicly but seems to have sought their advice in private. Surely, he was aware of Himmler’s SS expeditions to Provence to look for the Holy Grail268 and the 1938-9 expedition to Lhasa, Tibet by SS Haptsturmfuhrer Ernst Schafer in search for the origin of the Aryans. 269 Himmler believed that the Germanic Nordic race did not evolve but had descended from the heavens and eventually settled on Atlantis, then founded a great civilization in Central Asia; the theory seems to have been inspired by the occult writings of Madame Blavatsky.270 Himmler also believed he was the literal incarnation of the tenth century German Emperor Henry I and envisioned a subterranean quarter of a German castle where Nazi rituals would be held among twelve urns that held the ashes of SS martyrs. Himmler sought reasons to expand the Nazi cult into other countries by showing that Germans had actually ruled most of Europe for centuries. Nazi philosophy proposed that the Germanic culture was responsible for all major intellectual and technological achievement in Western civilization. Hitler spoke of the Greeks as Germans who had developed their prized ancient culture in the south of Europe. Hans Reinerth’s 1941 expedition to Greece claimed they had discovered proof that Germanic tribes had migrated to Greece in Neolithic times. The belief that Germanic influence had spread throughout Europe and indeed Asia provided a rationale to the planned genocide of Slavic people, who were considered mere squatters on German lands. The Slavs of the Balkans, for instance, would have to be relocated or exterminated to allow true Germans the lebensraum that Hitler so passionately 267. See Ravenscroft’s Spear of Destiny and Goodrich-Clarke, Nicholas. Black Sun, New York University Press, New York, 2002. 268. Buechner, Howard. Emerald Cup — Ark of Gold , The Quest of SS Lt. Otto Rahn of the Third Reich, Thunderbird, Metairie, La, 1991. A fanciful tracing of sacred Christian relics from their mysterious, celestial birth to their alleged Antarctic burial by SS officers. 269. Hale, Christopher. Himmler’s Crusades, The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2003, Hoboken, New Jersey. 270. Blavatsky wrote The Secret Doctrine, a book that traced the Aryans back to the Atlanteans, Lumerians, Hyperboreans, and eventually the Self-born of the Imperishable Sacred Land. Her outrageous theories found a following in New York and Paris and became the basis for several occult movements within Europe that inspired people like Himmler to believe that the German people were direct descendents of ancient enlightened people of the ancient past.

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Peculiar Liaisons called for. As early as 1919, Gustav Kossinna, a German linguist and historian, published an article, “The German Ostmark: Home Territory of the German,” which supported the claim that Germans had developed the lands of Poland and Czechoslovakia.271

THE BALKAN HOLOCAUST — HITLER, STALIN, AND THE ROMANIAN DICTATORS Until the spring of 1941, the Balkan region had stayed out of the blood bath between the Axis Powers and the Allies. However, Hitler, who was by then Fuhrer, was eager to attack Russia and that meant that the Balkans would have to be subjugated. Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania had signed the Axis Tripartite pact and Albania had been quickly conquered by Mussolini’s Axis troops. Hitler wanted to keep the Allies out of Yugoslavia, from where Allied bombers could easily reach the Romanian oil fields that would eventually be tapped to provide a third of the fuel for the Nazi war machine. Hitler offered Yugoslavia control of Salonika, Greece if they joined the Tripartite Pact, effectively making them part of the Axis Powers (Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, and Emperor Hirohito’s Imperial Japan); Britain, in response, offered the Italian peninsula of Istria272 as a bargaining chip. Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, the seventeen-year-old son of the assassinated King Alexander, agreed to the Pact; the alternative was an attack by Hitler’s Wehrmacht and possibly his ally Mussolini, not to mention the SS troops that had made such a bloody mark on Poland. However, other people had interests at stake, too. To deny Axis control of the Balkans, British agents worked secretly in Belgrade to encourage a takeover of the Yugoslavian government by anti-Nazi Yugoslavian military officers. Hitler was outraged over the Belgrade coup and took it as a personal insult. He flew into what William Shirer called “one of the wildest rages of his entire life” and ordered a blitzkrieg (Operation Punishment) in Serbia on March 27, 1941, which was “probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler’s career,” because it postponed the attack on Russia, Operation Barbarossa, by several weeks.273 This diversion to attack a small Balkan country,

271. Arnold, Bettina. “The Past as Propaganda,” Archaelogy, July/August, 1992, p. 32. 272. The peninsula of Istria lies south of the city of Trieste in what are now Slovenia and Croatia. During the time when Britain offered it as a bargaining chip, it was part of Mussolini’s Italian domain.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra which had been the bane of Turks for centuries, now would help bring Nazi Germany to its knees. Nicholas von Below, a Luftwaffe adjutant to Hitler, wrote in his memoirs that Hitler believed Serbia and Slovenia had never been pro-German. He attacked Yugoslavia with the intent of dismantling the state. The attack on the upper Balkans would be coupled with Operation Maurita, an attack on Greece.274 By mid-April the Nazi Wehrmacht had swept through Yugoslavia and the Balkans were over run by 24 German-Austrian divisions. There was not sufficient manpower to keep a large contingent of troops in the Balkans, so Hitler sent the bulk of his soldiers back to the Russian front (many went on to the awaiting disaster at Stalingrad, the following year). He left a handful of Nazi officials to govern the region. The battle of Stalingrad remains one of the most decisive and bloody battles in history. In a six-month period in 1942 and 1943, the Soviet and German armies fought in and around the Russian city of Stalingrad. Hitler had captured Romania’s oil and now he planned to add to it by securing a major city in the oilrich area of the Caucasus Mountains. Whereas the German government had drawn up an armistice with the Bolsheviks in 1917 and quit its drive to Moscow, Hitler was determined to make Stalingrad the first step in the destruction of the Soviet government. In the battle, 147,200 Germans were killed and 46,700 Soviets. Of the 5.5 million Russian soldiers captured by the Nazis during the war, three-quarters were captured in 1941. Four million of those 5.5 million men died by the end of the war. At the end of the six-month battle, the Soviets encircled 20 German and two Romanian divisions, as well as large numbers of individual and specialist units, a total of approximately 330,000 men. Of that total, 91,000 were able to march out of the area but the rest died of starvation or exposure in the bitter cold. The German survivors were sent to the BeketovkaKrasnoarmeysk, where 50,000 died of typhus, the same disease that claimed the life of many prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, including the German Jew and teenage diarist Anne Frank. Several thousand more died marching to work camps in Central Asia. The last of the surviving members of the Nazis of Stalingrad were returned to Germany in 1955; they numbered 5,000. Hitler was

273. Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Fawcett, New York, 1992, pp. 10801. 274. Von Below, Nicholas. At Hitler’s Side — The Memoirs of Hitler’s Luftwaffe Adjuntant, Greenhill Books, London, 2001, p. 91.

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Peculiar Liaisons quoted as saying at a luncheon in 1943 that it was the duty of the men at Stalingrad to be dead. Yugoslavia was cut into nine separate units. The Nazis allowed the Croatian Nationalists to hunt down the enemies of the Nazi regime. Ante Pavelic, a Croatian nationalist lawyer who had helped plot the assassination of Serbian King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934, formed the Ustasha, a Roman Catholic group, which set out to round up communists, gypsies, political dissidents, and Jews as well as the hated Serbs, who were Orthodox Christians. In some cases Serbs would be spared if they converted to Roman Catholicism. However, the Nuremberg Tribunal described the Ustasha’s promise of a mass conversion for Serbs in the town of Glina, 65 kilometers southeast of Zagreb, Croatia, in which 250 men, women, and children were locked in a Serbian Orthodox church and clubbed to death by Ustasha operatives. In the spirit of Dachau and Treblinka, the Nazis encouraged the construction of concentration camps, which the Ustasha ran with great efficiency. The Croat attack on the Serbs was so brutal that it shocked the German military representative in Zagreb, General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau. Several of these camps, like Jasenovac and Laborgrad, were just outside of Zagreb. Thousands of enemies of the Nazis and the Ustasha died there. Ustasha administrator Vjekoslav Luboric moved hundreds of typhus-infected inmates (from Stara Gradiska to Djakovo in one instance) to camps that had been disease free in order to spread the disease. How many died in these camps is unknown but the number could easily be in the hundreds of thousands; the Jasenovac camp was reported to have had 500,000 to 650,000 deaths. Postwar communist president Tito reported that 1.7 million Yugoslavians were killed in the war.275 In May of 1945, Nazi troops and their anti-communist Balkan sympathizers (Cetniks, Ustasha, Slovenian White Guards, Croatian Home Guards, and German Volksdeutsche) were executed by Tito’s communist forces. It has been estimated that 30,000 to 200,000 were killed.276

275. Glenny, Misha. The Balkans, Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999, Viking, New York, 2000, pp. 485-506. 276. Hupchick, Dennis P. The Balkans: from Contstantinople to Communism, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, 2002, p. 373.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra STAUFFENBERG AND OLBRICHT SET THEIR RESOLVE In 1940, Stauffenberg began working in the Organizational Department of the High Command of the German Army. He has been called charismatic, handsome, and a born leader by those with whom he worked.Stauffenberg was assigned to the Russian front where he witnessed the brutality of the Schutzstaffel (SS) firsthand: the execution of Bolshevik commissars per Hitler’s orders, and the slaughter of Jews, Russians, and POWs behind the lines as well as the disaster at Stalingrad. Stauffenberg concluded that the leader was out of control and had to be stopped. While in Russia, he met Tresckow and Schlabrendorff, who gradually persuaded Stauffenberg to join the growing movement to oust Hitler’s regime. As soon as the Stalingrad disaster was concluded, he asked to be transferred and was sent to Tunisia with the 10th Panzer Division. On April 7, 1943, Stauffenberg was a passenger in a car that drove over a mine and subsequently was attacked by Allied aircraft. He lost his left eye, right hand, half of his left hand, and part of his leg. Like Hitler during the First World War, he was temporarily blinded, but recovered. While convalescing in the hospital, he told his wife, “I feel I must do something now to save Germany. We General Staff officers must all accept our share of the responsibility.” The turning point in German resistance to Hitler came that September, when Stauffenberg was transferred to a staff post in Berlin. He returned to active duty as a Lt. Colonel and a chief of Staff to General Olbricht at the General Army Office. Olbricht introduced Stauffenberg to others who were part of a conspiracy to kill Hitler, including Himmler, and Goering, under the codename “Valkyrie.” The plot was cleverly disguised within an operation that had been approved by Hitler in 1942. In order to protect the Reich from internal plots or enemy commando raids, preparations were made to allow the mobilization of an emergency army in the event that communications were cut between Hitler and his “home” army. The orders were sealed in envelopes, only to be opened upon the receipt of the message “Internal disturbances.” Stauffenberg, Olbricht, and Tresckow helped write the secret supplementary orders.277 Stauffenberg was quickly promoted to full colonel, a status that gave him access to high-level meetings attended by Hitler and his staff. He worked closely with many generals who were in on the conspiracy: Stieff, head of the Organi277. Kramerz, Joachim. Stauffenberg, MacMillan, New York, 1967, pp. 134-5.

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Peculiar Liaisons zation Branch of OKH; Wagner, First Quartermaster General of the Army; Has, chief of the Berlin Kommandantur who could furnish troops for taking over Berlin; and Rommel, who wished to have Hitler put on trial instead of assassinated, which might make him a martyr.

SS COMMANDO OTTO SKORZENY, A SEARCH FOR HOLY RELICS, AND PLOTS OF EXECUTIVE ACTION Hitler’s crimes took on the form of individual kidnapping and assassinations. Mussolini had secretly plotted against Hitler in 1938, following Hitler’s successful invasion of Austria. Mussolini asked the Vatican to excommunicate Hitler, which would humiliate him before the German public; but the Vatican never acted and Mussolini eventually made a reluctant alliance with the Nazi leader.278 In 1943, the Allies successfully invaded Sicily, and Mussolini was overthrown and held captive in Italy at a mountain-top hotel at Gran Sasso. With few allies in the world, Hitler ordered an Austrian SS commando, Otto Skorzeny, to rescue Mussolini. In the first of several celebrated operations, Skorzeny kidnapped an Italian general and flew him and his men into the mountain with gliders. Using the kidnapped general as a human shield, Skorzeny was able to load Mussolini into an aircraft that had landed after the assault. Mussolini was sent to a grateful Hitler. After his spectacular success, Skorzeny was allegedly tasked with kidnapping Marshal Peteria, the Head of State of Vichy France; DeGaulle (who was in London); and Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, but these missions were never executed for one reason or another. One sensational mission was supposedly assigned to him in February of 1944 by the occult-obsessed Himmler. He had already assigned various German missions into the south of France in hopes of finding holy relics, and now he wanted Skorzeny to find the so-called Treasure of Montsegu outside of Languedoc. Whether Skorzeny found anything is uncertain but numerous tales suggest that he did find a treasure that had been hidden in the mountains by Knights Templars centuries earlier. The booty was rumored to be nothing less than the Treasure of Solomon, which contained gold and the Holy Grail.279 Skorzeny’s name has been linked to the CIA, 278. “Mussolini Sought Hitler Ex-Communication,” The Denver Post, September 27, 2003, p. 14. 279. Buechner, Howard. Emerald Cup, Ark of Gold — The Quest of SS Lt. Otto Rahn of the Third Reich, Thunderbird Press, Metairie, Louisiana, 1991, pp. 189-190.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra Latin American death squads, global illegal arms traders, and assassination plots targeting DeGaulle and Castro.280 Another of Skorzeny’s operations (Operation Griffin) was to penetrate the Allies’ front lines during the Battle of the Bulge with some 2000 English-speaking Nazi soldiers dressed in Allied uniforms. Some of Skorzeny’s men were captured and spread unfounded rumors concerning an assassination threat on Eisenhower; similar threats were made against Patton.281 Skorzeny would survive the war, avoid prosecution, and become a bodyguard for Eva Peron in Argentina and an adviser to Gamal Abdul Nasser, dictator of Egypt. In the 1950s, he set up “ratlines” or safe routes known as the ODESSA282 network that allowed Nazis safe passage to South America, South Africa, Egypt, and Indonesia. During his missions he is known to have carried a copy of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom as a source of inspiration. Within the ODESSA network Skorzeny supposedly employed ex-SS member Helmut Naujocks, the leader of Operation Himmler (aka the Gleiwitz Deception), the deception that Hitler used to launch the invasion of Poland. Skorzeny’s ODESSA was allegedly supported by British and American intelligence services in hopes that Nazis could help in the fight against the Soviets. General Reinhard Gehlen, the chief of Nazi intelligence in the east and linked to Skorzeny’s ODESSA, had buried microfilm of Nazi intelligence archives throughout the Austrian Alps. He used the archives, which contained valuable information on the Soviets, as a bargaining chip to ensure his survival after the war. American intelligence services allowed Gehlen to employ fellow Nazis after the war in an effort to gain more Soviet intelligence under the cover name of South German Industrial Development Organization. Hitler ordered SD agent Walter Schellenberg to kidnap the Duke of Windsor in a plot that was nearly pulled off, in France. Emboldened by Skorzeny’s success in rescuing Mussolini, Hitler ordered Skorzeny to attempt to 280. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Caroll and Graf, 1992, p. 129. 281. General George S. Patton, Jr., died in a Heidelberg, Germany hospital December 21, 1945 due to complications of a broken neck that he sustained eleven days earlier in an automobile accident on Highway 38 near Mannheim, Germany. Immediately after his death rumors of foul play and conspiracy surrounded the circumstances of his accident. Craig, John S. “The Plot to Kill Patton,” Back Channels, Spring, 1993, p. 13. 282. ODESSA — Organisation der Entlassenen SS-Angehorigen, Organization for the Release of Former SS members and has also been known as The Organization, Nazi International, International Fascista, Kamaradenwerk. A related organization, the alleged Die Spinne (The Spider), supposedly was developed to help establish Nazi colonies worldwide.

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Peculiar Liaisons assassinate Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in Tehran in 1943. The plot to kill the “Big Three,” Operation Long Jump, included Nazi spy Elyeza Bazna, the Albanian known as “Cicero,”283 who transmitted key data from Ankara, Turkey concerning the Tehran conference. Skorzeny, who accepted every mission he was tasked with as a SS commando, considered the intelligence coming out of Tehran to be inadequate and did not believe such an ambitious set of assassinations could be accomplished. Indeed, the Soviets quickly uncovered the plot and neutralized several of the important players. Inspired by Hitler’s plan to kidnap the Duke of Windsor, Schellenberg secretly plotted to kidnap Pope Pius XII. However, Admiral Canaris tipped off Vatican security; the information came back to Schellenberg, who stopped the plot just as secretly as he had initiated it. Heydrich was convinced that the Catholic Church and its pope were hatching plots against Hitler’s Germany. Two of the most famous plots against Hitler were the bombs planted in a Munich beer hall and bombs disguised as cognac bottles284 that were placed on his plane. To commemorate the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler spoke to an audience of several hundred in Munich on November 8, 1939. A bomb was planted in a pillar behind the podium. The bomb was planted by a carpenter, George Elser, an ex-inmate of Dachau, who had been imprisoned as a member of a communist organization, the Red Front Fighters League. The explosion left eight dead and over sixty injured; one of the injured was the father of Eva Braun, who was Hitler’s lover since 1932. However, Hitler had left the room early to take his private train, which was named Amerika and sometimes known as the Fuhrerzug, out of Munich. There has been speculation that Heinrich Himmler knew of the plot and possibly helped organize it.

WOLFSSCHANZE Claus von Stauffenberg had been prepared to kill Hitler at two earlier meetings, one on July 11 at Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Eagle’s Nest at Ber-

283. Bazna provided the Nazis a large amount of information from British Ambassador Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen in Ankara, Turkey. He served as the ambassador’s valet and photographed secret documents in the possession of the ambassador. 284. In March of 1944, Tresckow and Schlabrendorff had constructed a bomb that looked like a bottle of brandy. The bomb was designed to explode while the plane was in mid-air, but the detonation device failed.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra chtesgaden, and one at Rastenburg on July 13, 1944. The colonel was unable to complete the task because Himmler and Goering did not attend these meetings and the co-conspirators insisted that the bomb kill them, as well. Each time Stauffenberg traveled to these high-level meetings, he carried a British-made bomb wrapped in shirts and carried in a briefcase. The bomb had been made for the French Resistance by the British intelligence agency, Special Operations Executive (SOE), and was confiscated in Paris by the Gestapo. On July 20, another meeting would be held, at the Fuhrerhauptquartier (Wolfsschanze — Wolf’s Lair) in East Prussia, Rastenburg, a heavily wooded compound of fortified buildings. The highest Nazi officials to attend the meeting were Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Ribbentrop, Heusinger, Jodl, and Keitel. Stauffenberg and his aid Lt. Colonel von Haeften flew from Berlin and landed at Rastenburg at 10:15 a.m., making the three-hour trip in a Ju-52 trimotor transport plane loaned to Stauffenberg by one of the conspirators. Both men carried bombs in their briefcases. Though security was very thorough, neither man’s cases was searched during the 10-mile motor trip into the Wolf’s Lair. The coup could not succeed without the inside help of General Erich Fellgiebel and his aid Arntz, who were responsible for cutting all communication to and from the Fuhrerhauptquartier as soon as the bomb was detonated. Mussolini would arrive at Rastenburg at 2:30 that afternoon. The Fuhrer wanted to conduct the meeting before he met Mussolini, so the 1:00 p.m. appointment was moved to 12:30 p.m. Keitel met with Stauffenberg before the meeting and insisted Stauffenberg brief him on his report. On their way to the map room, where the meeting was to be held, Stauffenberg claimed he had forgotten his cap and belt and told Keitel that he must retrieve them from the room where they had just met. Stauffenberg returned to the room and quickly opened his briefcase, handled a pair of tongs with the only three fingers he had, and broke an acid capsule. The acid would eat through the wires and detonate the bomb in ten minutes. However, repairs were being made to the underground bunker where meetings were normally conducted, so the meeting was moved above ground to a bunker with windows, and due to the summer heat they were open. When Stauffenberg hurried into the conference room, Hitler, eighteen officers, two stenographers, and three assistants surrounded a long, oak table full of maps. Himmler and Goering were not in the room. General Heusinger, Chief of Operations and Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, was in the middle of delivering a melancholy report on the Russian front. Stauffenberg took a seat

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Peculiar Liaisons between General Korten and Colonel Brandt, a few feet from Hitler. He placed the briefcase under the table, leaning it against the inside of a sturdy oak support, just six feet from Hitler’s legs. A few seconds later Colonel Brandt found the briefcase under his feet, so he moved it behind the heavy oak support, an act which may have saved Hitler’s life. Ironically, Brandt had also handled another bomb intended for Hitler — the cognac bottles that didn’t explode. As Hitler and his staff closely studied the maps, Stauffenberg left the room, but before he did he whispered to Brandt, “I must go and telephone. Keep an eye on my briefcase, it has secret papers in it.” As Heusinger concluded his report, the bomb exploded at 12:42 p.m. Stauffenberg and General Fellgiebel saw the explosion and it appeared that no one could have survived the ferocity of the blast. Staff officer Herbert Buchs stood in the room and watched “an explosion, a bright yellow flash that forced everyone down. It was total chaos.”285 Confident that Hitler was dead and the coup could begin, Stauffenberg left for his plane, sure that Fellgiebel would cut communications. The bomb shattered the huge table and injured almost everyone in the room; it killed a stenographer, two generals, and a colonel. At first it appeared that Hitler suffered only minor injuries, which included burns to his head when his hair caught on fire; his adjutant von Below wrote in his memoirs that he later realized that Hitler had been more seriously injured, with nerve damage to his left arm and a loss of hearing. Hitler believed a British Mosquito, which could elude radar due to its unique wooden construction, had dropped a bomb. Jodl suspected a bomb planted by construction workers. The failure of the bomb to complete its job may in part be attributed to the windows, which allowed the force to dissipate; the impact would have been far stronger in the underground bunker. Another theory, advanced by Stauffenberg biographer Peter Hoffmann, suggests that Stauffenberg may not have got the wiring right due to his damaged hands. When Himmler arrived, he immediately suspected Stauffenberg and departed to Berlin to begin his investigation.

285. Steinhof, Johannes; Pechel, Peter; Showalter, Dennis. Voices From The Third Reich, an Oral History, Regnery Gateway, Washington, D.C., 1989, p. 376.

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5. The Dirge of the Black Orchestra THE AFTERMATH When Stauffenberg arrived in Berlin there was little evidence that a coup was underway. Fellgiebel was able to cut communication at the Wolf’s Lair and confuse matters, but no one was totally convinced in Berlin that Hitler was dead. The leaders of Valkyrie, Generals Olbricht, Beck, and Fromm, were not sure whether they should continue with the plot. Their hesitation resulted in their arrest. Colonel Otto Skorzeny and a band of armed men secured the War Office in Berlin, putting a halt “to a wave of executions so that suspects could be tortured into naming others and exposing the extent of the plot before they were sent to the gallows.” Hitler told him, “You, Skorzeny, saved the Third Reich.” Major Otto Ernst Remer quickly ended any hopes of the Black Orchestra taking control of Berlin and Germany. Hitler promoted him to Maj. General and assigned him to be his personal bodyguard. The Fuhrer was alive, and upon receiving that news Tresckow committed suicide at the Russian front. In a speech after the bombing Hitler pompously derided the plot by saying it was “a crime that has no equal in German history.” Schlabrendorff was put on trial but escaped execution when American troops freed him on May 4, 1945 from prison at Niederdorf. In the following days, weeks, and months, Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Fromm, Canaris, Count von Helldorf, and 5,000 others were executed. Four of Stauffenberg’s children were sent to a detention camp for children called Bad Sachsa, while a fifth was born in detention. Though Hitler was never able to prove that his star General Rommel was involved with the conspirators, two months later Rommel was forced to commit suicide by cyanide. Rommel’s death was a blow to Germany’s defense; he was Germany’s greatest general. Herbert Buchs described Hitler after the bombing as sick “with a kind of hepatitis.”286 Soon after the bombing, Hitler began planning the disastrous Ardennes offensive. In hopes of taking the port city of Antwerp, in a bold move not unlike T.E. Lawrence’s assault of Aqaba by land in August of 1917, Hitler made a commitment of over 200,000 men that cost the lives of tens of thousands of Allied and German soldiers during December, 1944. Hitler abandoned the Third Reich on the afternoon of April 30, 1945, either by escape, murder,287 or most likely suicide by prussic acid and/or gunshot.288 The nine months he lived after the Black Orchestra’s botched assassination 286. Ibid..

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Peculiar Liaisons attempt undoubtedly cost several million more lives. Adolf Hitler left Germany with 3.5 million Third Reich soldiers dead and 3.8 million civilians dead.289 Some estimates of deaths world-wide associated with World War II figure 20 million Russians killed, with another 22 million Allied deaths and a possible 60 million killed in all theaters of the war.290

287. Thomas, Hugh. The Murder of Adolf Hitler, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1996. Thomas contends the charred remains of two bodies found outside the Berlin bunker by the Russians were not Hitler and Eva Braun. The male body was missing a foot and “next to him was the body, also burned, of a woman wrapped in one of Eva Braun’s dresses...the woman had died of shrapnel wounds to the chest, a capsule containing poison had been placed in her mouth and forcibly broken; her jaw was then closed.” 288. McKale, Donald M. Hitler, The Survival Myth, Stein and Day, New York, 1981. McKale suggests that Hitler had a valet prepare two loaded pistols that were never used. Author Hugh Thomas, a medical doctor who has investigated the deaths of Hess, Himmler, and Hitler, notes that Russian archives show that there was no gunshot evidence or trace of cyanide on the body supposedly identified as Hitler’s. Thomas, Hugh. The Strange Death of Heinrich Himmler, St. Martin’s, New York, 2002, p. 119. 289. Allied planes bombed 131 German cities and towns. Six hundred thousand German civilians were killed by bombings and 7.5 million Germans were left homeless. 290. One estimate of World War II dead is as follows: USSR more than 13,000,000 military and 7,000,000 civilian; China 3,500,000 and 10,000,000; Germany 3,500,000 and 3,800,000; Poland 120,000 and 5,300,000; Japan 1,700,000 and 380,000; Yugoslavia 300,000 and 1,300,000; Romania 200,000 and 465,000; France 250,000 and 360,000; British Empire and Commonwealth 452,000 and 60,000; Italy 330,000 and 80,000; Hungary 120,000 and 280,000; and Czechoslovakia 10,000 and 330,000. The US, which had no significant civilian losses, sustained 292,131 battle deaths and 115,187 deaths from other causes. Microsoft Encarta 1997.

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6. THE DARK SECRETS OF NAZI INTELLIGENCE ADMIRAL CANARIS AND GENERAL REINHARD HEYDRICH In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. — Winston Churchill, Tehran Conference, 1943 Insanity in individuals is something rare — but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886 Secret policing — that is, governments’ surveillance of their own subjects, as distinct from espionage, which concentrates on governments’ surveillance of others’ subjects — remains a topic about which almost everybody knows a little and almost nobody knows a lot. — Robert J. Stove, The Sleeping Eye — Secret Police and Their Victims, 2003

They were two of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, the little Admiral and the Wayward Cadet. They shared common naval experience and a common goal: to solely control Nazi intelligence bureaus. One was the head of the German military intelligence bureau, Abwehr,291 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the other, General Reinhard Heydrich, the head of Reichssicherheit291. The German intelligence section of the German Ministry of Defense was created shortly after World War I; it became a larger, more powerful organization during the Nazi administration under Admiral Wilhelm Canarais. Canaris created four divisions that included administration, espionage, counter-espionage, and contact with discontented members of minority groups in foreign countries.

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Peculiar Liaisons shauptamt (Third Reich’s Central Security office, RSHA), largely responsible for organizing the murder of at least three million people. One was rumored to be a double agent and the other to have Jewish ancestry.

THE LITTLE ADMIRAL AND THE FOX’S LAIR Wilhelm Canaris was born in Aplerbeck, Germany in 1887 and claimed an ancestral link to Konstantin Kanaris,292 a hero of the Greek war of independence in 1823. He served at sea during World War I. In 1916, he organized the sabotage of French installations in Morocco, and entered the US and planted bombs, carried in a violin case, in New York arms factories. He escaped back to Germany with a Chilean passport under the alias of Reed Rosas. In 1942, Canaris sent two teams of saboteurs to the United States in Operation Pastorius (named after the first German immigrant to America). Canaris undoubtedly hoped for the same kind of success he had in 1916, but the saboteurs were captured and six of the eight were executed.293 In 1922, at age 35, he became First Lieutenant of the training cruiser Berlin. There he met a slender, blue-eyed naval cadet — Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was an accomplished violinist, like Canaris’s wife Erika. Heydrich soon became a regular guest for Sunday musical parties where he and Erika entertained guests with selections from Haydn and Mozart. Canaris eventually captained the battleship Schlesien and was described by his commander Admiral Bastian as a model officer, multilingual, with sterling character and great intellectual gifts. In 1935, he became the head of German military intelligence services, the Abwehr (an abbreviation for Abwehrabteilung). In this post, Canaris became increasingly dissatisfied with the methods and goals of the Nazi government and became involved in anti-Nazi conspiracies after 1938. Allen Dulles, chief of the OSS during the war, described Canaris as “an extraordinary man and a leader of genius.” Biographer Brissaud wrote that he was “the man with a thousand faces. Some have seen him as an anti-Nazi nationalist; others as an anti-Communist patriot opposed less to Hitler’s aims than to 292. Kanaris was a Greek admiral whose Greek ships destroyed the Turkish squadron of Kara Ali at Chios and liberated Greece from Ottoman rule. Brown, Anthony Cave. Bodyguard of Lies, Harper Row, New York, 1975, p. 142. 293. Cohen, Gary. “The Keystone Kommandos,” Atlantic Monthly, February 2001.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence his methods...an old fox, a master of the double game, servant of Hitler and conspirator against him . . .” As mysterious as he was, there appear to be few episodes in the “international scene between 1935 and 1944 without the silhouette of the little white-haired Admiral appearing somewhere in the corner of the picture.”294 As head of the Abwehr, Canaris provided British intelligence with information that aided the Allies’ victory. He also contributed to the defense of Switzerland and may have been responsible for the fact that Hitler never attacked the country. Hans Gisevius, Vice Consul to Switzerland during the war and a man who held numerous posts within the Abwehr and Gestapo, said Canaris was “a man craftier than Himmler and Heydrich put together.”295 The Abwehr, located at 72-76 Tirpitz Ufer in Berlin, was also known as the Fuchsbau, the Fox’s Lair, where a mixture of successful and failed intelligence work shaped the progress of the European theatre of war in the Thirties and Forties. Some of its successes before the beginning of the Second World War were spectacular: stealing US technical data concerning Dr. Robert Goddard’s research with rocketry (1931), which the Nazis used effectively in the dreaded V1 and V-2 rockets; and stealing the blueprints (1937) of the Norden Bombsight, the gyrostabilized technology that was the most advanced form of bomb sighting in the world. In 1939, an American visiting Hamburg was approached by the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo — Secret State Police of the Reich’s Main Security Office — RSHA), was blackmailed into becoming an Abwehr agent, and was posted in New York. But William Sebold betrayed the Abwehr and in June of 1941 the FBI was able to arrest 37 Abwehr agents, virtually destroying the Abwehr’s network within New York. This loss of intelligence, along with disinformation Sebold was able to produce, left a distinctive gap in the Nazis’ knowledge of American technical advances during the early Forties. Operation Sea Lion, Hitler’s plan to invade Britain, needed intelligence from the Abwehr. Canaris instituted Operation Lena, an all-out assault on British secrets. Then the British managed to break the German code machine, the Enigma. Many Abwehr spies were captured when they parachuted into Britain or came ashore from U-boats. The importance of cracking Enigma was not clear to the public until 1974, when it was revealed by F.W. Winterbotham in The Ultra Secret. Winterbotham was a member of the English air force and head of the air section of

294. Brissaud, Andre. Canaris, Grosset/Dunlop, New York, 1974, p. 4. 295. Gisevius, Hans. To the Bitter End — An Insider’s Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler, 1933-44, DeCapo Press, New York, 1998, p. 187.

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Peculiar Liaisons MI6. John Keegan wrote that breaking the Enigma and Japanese codes in the Pacific Theater was crucial to any “understanding of the conduct of World War II.” Without knowledge of the importance of these unciphered codes, “it would be impossible to write the war’s history...all history of the war written before 1974, when the Ultra Secret was revealed for the first time, is flawed by reason of that gap.” 296 The British threatened the spies with two options: be executed, or become a double agent. This idea was developed by MI-8C (German intelligence wireless monitoring) code-breaker Hugh Trevor-Roper and two young MI5 (British Security Service) recruits, Dick White and J.C. Masterman. The double agents came under the direction of the XX Committee (aka The Twenty Committee of the Double Cross Committee) and became one of the great success stories for British intelligence during the war.297 And though the Nazis poured enormous energy and money into their intelligence services, with hundreds of spies in the Western Mediterranean, they were still unable to alert Canaris of the Allies attack in North Africa in 1942 nor were any of the spies throughout Britain and Europe able to uncover information about the Normandy invasion.

THE IRON HAND’S INTRODUCTION TO THE SS The Nazi conspiracy to eradicate Jews and other enemies of the Third Reich from Europe before and during World War II was engineered and executed by the Nazi party’s “defense echelon,” the Schutzstaffeln, more commonly known as the infamous SS. Heinrich Himmler, a name synonymous with the brutality of Hitler’s dictatorship, directed the SS as Reichsfuhrer, but a man not as well known, Reinhard Heydrich, was the chief architect of many attacks on the enemies of the regime. British intelligence and the Czechoslovakia Free Resistance developed an elaborate plan to remove Heydrich from office permanently. His dedication to Nazi ideology and Hitler was absolute. Himmler recognized Heydrich as a born intelligence officer. Himmler’s aide Kersten thought of Heydrich as a living database, whose brain held all the intelligence threads and had the ability to weave them together. 296. Keegan, John. Intelligence in War — Knowledge of the Enemy From Napoleon to Al-Qaeda, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003, p. 322. 297. Volkman, Ernest. Espionage — The Greatest Spy Stories of the 20th Century, John Wiley and Sons, United States, 1995, p. 43.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence Heydrich had a tendency to collect nicknames. Even as a young man he was chided by classmates for his high falsetto voice and was given the name “billy goat.” Later, as rumors spread that his father was Jewish, he was called “die Hebbe.” As he rose in power in the SS, he was more accurately branded the “Blond Beast” and “Hangman Heydrich.” Hitler admired his idealistic Nazi persona and ruthless manner, giving him the pet name of “The Iron Man.” Along with the attack on Poland and the Final Solution, Heydrich had a major hand in operations like The Night of the Long Knives and Kristallnacht. He gained a reputation as the most ruthless, cold-blooded Nazi in the Third Reich, directly or indirectly responsible for murdering three million people. His death in May 1942 may have saved millions of lives, but the commandos who ended his reign paid a terrible price, as did thousands of other men, women, and children. Heydrich was born in 1904 and raised in Dresden by cultivated, musicloving parents. All his life he drove himself to excel in everything he pursued. He was a superb fencer, horseman, and pilot, and could move his audience to tears when he played the violin. At the age of fifteen he took an interest in the Nazi party’s racial theories. His father Bruno had taught him that Jews were an evil race, not to be trusted, and responsible for many of Germany’s problems — a philosophy that was popular among many German people in the 1890s. After a short stint in the German Navy, he was shocked to be dishonorably discharged, thus losing any chance of becoming a military officer. An ex-girlfriend had complained to her father, a naval officer, that Heydrich had jilted her; he had planned to marry another woman. A council of naval officers found his conduct unbecoming and discharged him, which today seems disproportionately harsh. Through a family friend he met Reichsfuhrer Himmler, and made a good impression. In June of 1931, Heydrich visited Himmler’s house and was asked to draft a plan for a new Nazi intelligence organization. Having no idea of how an intelligence service should be run, outside of impressions from spy novels and stories, he made some notes off the top of his head. After reading what Heydrich had written in twenty minutes, Himmler offered to bring him into the SS. He saw that Heydrich’s treacherous nature would make him the perfect head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party intelligence service. It would be only one of many offices Heydrich would head with deadly efficiency. Soon Heydrich answered only to Himmler. Heydrich began his career “intelligence man” in humble surroundings — a shared office, a kitchen table, and a borrowed typewriter. His surveillance work began in Munich and gradually spread through Germany and eventually all of

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Peculiar Liaisons Nazi-occupied Europe. By manning his surveillance posts with engineers, lawyers, professors, and other professionals as well as former military officers, Heydrich created an efficient and diverse network of spies. Himmler rewarded him with a steady series of promotions. Months before Hitler came to power, in January of 1933, he had a broad network in place. His first covert operations in the SS were with Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. They conspired against certain members of Hitler’s first security force, the Sturmabteilung (SA, also known as the Brown Shirts), which ended in the murder of many SA officers including Ernst Rohm, the head of the SA and an early devotee of the Third Reich who fell out of Hitler’s favor. Heydrich ordered his henchmen to hunt down the SA officers throughout Germany and in a matter of days he had most of them shot for treason. Hitler named the purge of Rohm and his security officers “The Night of the Long Knives.”

THE BARBAROUS FANATIC In 1934, Canaris met Heydrich again, at a Berlin restaurant under friendly circumstances. Though Heydrich had already placed people into two categories: those who had to be handled carefully until he had gained enough power to control them, and those who had to be destroyed immediately. Canaris fit into the first category, though Heydrich’s ambition was to limit the power of German military intelligence and security with the hope of placing it all under the power of the SS. Canaris soon found that the talented cadet of the Berlin was now a formidable challenge to his own survival. It was Heydrich who was to be feared in the SS, not Himmler. In a diary Canaris wrote, “Heydrich is a barbarous fanatic with whom it will be very difficult to collaborate in a frank and loyal manner,” while Heydrich considered Canaris the “little admiral” who was “an old fox to be treated with great caution.”298 In 1936, a Russian double agent for Heydrich’s SD and the Soviet NKVD299 (Soviet Secret police and predecessor to the KGB) reported to Heydrich of plans within the Russian army for a violent overthrow of Stalin. The agent was a former Russian general, Nikolai Skoblin, husband of one of the most famous Russian singers of her time, Nadezhda Plevitskaya. The chief conspirator was 298. Brissaud, Andre. Canaris, Grosset/Dunlop, New York, 1974, pp.21-22. 299. The NKVD (Narodnij Kommisariat Vnutrennih Del) was also known as the People’s Commisariat for Interior Affairs and has been compared to the Nazi Gestapo.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence allegedly Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who not only wished Stalin out of office, but also had privately discussed plans with Western powers for a “preventive war” against the re-arming German Reich. Heydrich presented information concerning the plot to Hitler. Heydrich believed the information to be true but it was not as complete as he would have liked, so he added fictitious material to incriminate the generals Skoblin said would overthrow Stalin. Hitler was forced to either help Tukhachevsky in his alleged plot against Stalin, or back Stalin and create an alliance — even if it lasted only a few months. Walter Schellenberg wrote that this decision “to back Stalin instead of Tukhachevsky and the generals determined the whole course of German policy until 1941 and can be rightly regarded as one of the most fateful decisions of our time.”300 Heydrich had phony documents drawn up to incriminate Tukhachevsky and made sure they were in Skoblin’s hands. He employed Alfred Helmut Naujocks, an engraver-forger and street-brawler who had studied at Kiel University, joined the SS in 1931 and worked with Heydrich as early as 1934. Heydrich asked Canaris for Abwehr documents on Tukhachevsky and other officers of the Russian high command to help create the most authentic looking documents possible. Canaris would not comply, and fearing that someone would tip off Tukhachevsky, Hitler ordered that the General Staff not be allowed any information concerning Heydrich’s plot. Because Canaris would not help, Heydrich ordered his agents to break into Abwehr offices and raid the file cabinets. In June of 1937 Tukhachevsky and his alleged conspirators were shot for collaborating with powers hostile to Russia. It has been suggested by historians that Stalin intended to purge many of the officers from the Red Army for being too independent — long before he learned of the faked documents. However, it is also argued that the documents were final proof that he needed to take action against numerous officers he no longer trusted. In the next few months 37,000 Russian officers were executed: half of the officers of the Red Army, which included all ten four-star generals, and 48 out of 55 corps commanders (lieutenant-generals). Whether Skoblin was working for or against Stalin has been argued for many years. However, there is recent and compelling evidence that Skoblin was working for Stalin and had Heydrich draw up final, convincing proof, though it was all faked, that Stalin’s high command was working against 300. Schellenberg, Walter. The Labyrinth, Memoirs of Walter Schellenberg, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1956, p.26.

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Peculiar Liaisons him. Igor Cornelissen’s study of Soviet documents in the late 1980s confirms that Skoblin was an agent for the NKVD.301 Undoubtedly Heydrich’s work on the forgeries impressed Hitler. Heydrich eagerly applied his talent to forging documents that were incriminating to his countrymen, as well. To make sure that Colonel General Freiherr Winner von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army in 1938, was not able to rise to the post of Minister of War, Heydrich and Himmler faked a document that reported Fritsch as a homosexual. The Soviets would have their revenge on Nazi intelligence. During the war, numerous spies provided the Red Army with information that aided in the outcome of battles as important as Stalingrad. “Werther” was the code name for a Nazi traitor who provided classified information concerning the Nazi Oberkommando der Werhmacht (OKW), the supreme command of the German army. The command personnel included Generals Keitel and Jodl as well as Hitler and his personal secretary, Martin Bormann. Though “Werther” may have been nothing more than a collection of Nazi data from several sources coded under a single name, the possibility of a single super traitor is real.302 Louis Kilzer contends that Bormann was the source of information that was passed to German journalist and Soviet spy Rudolf Rossler. Rossler, code-named Lucy, received large payments for collecting quantities of information from Werther and passing it along to the Soviets.303 In 1940, Stalin feared not only the Nazis but also a possible threat to his position as head of the Soviets by the exiled Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was the cofounder of the Soviet state, with Lenin, and was called the father of the Red Army. Throughout the 1930s NKVD agents roamed through Western Europe and assassinated ex-Communists who had criticized Stalin. Trotsky had taken refuge in Mexico City, where he lived in a fortified compound. On May 24, 1940, twenty armed NKVD agents attacked the compound but Trotsky survived. That August, an acquaintance known to him as Jacques Mornard came into his study

301. Laqueur, Walter. “New Light on a Murky Affair,” Encounter, March 1990, v. 74, n. 2, p.33 (2). Laqueur cites Igor Corneliseen’s book De GPOe op de Overtoom (Amsterdam, 1989). There is more evidence that Stalin had been planning to launch an attack against the Red Army leaders many weeks before Naujocks forged the documents showing complicity between the Russian high command and the Germans. 302. Read, Anthony and Fisher, Daniel. Operation Lucy, Coward, McCann and Geogegan, New York, 1990. 303. Kilzer, Louis. Hitler’s Traitor, Presidio Press, Novato, Ca., 2000.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence under the pretense of working on an article on Napoleon. The “journalist” was actually NKVD agent Jamie Ramon Mercader (aka Jacque Vendendreschd), who attacked Trotsky with an ice ax; Trotsky died of the injuries. Mercader was immediately apprehended, spent seventeen years in the Juarez Penitentiary in Mexico City, was released and went to Prague to work as a journalist. Shortly after his release he was honored by the Kremlin with the “Order of the Soviet Union” for his assassination of Trotsky.304

SALON KITTY To tease more secrets out of his fellow Nazi officers, Heydrich created a high-class bordello in the fashionable west end of Berlin. “Salon Kitty” had nine bedrooms with concealed microphones. After the war, the head mistress, Madame Kitty, maintained that some of the working girls were society women who volunteered their time, thinking they were doing their country a service. Heydrich supposedly visited the salon more than once, frightening the girls with his cruelty. The salon was under the control of Heydrich’s agent Walter Schellenberg, who never told Foreign Minister Ribbentrop about it.305 One of the guests at Salon Kitty was Mussolini’s Foreign Minister and sonin-law, Galeazzo Ciano, who held the Italian post from June 1936 to February 1943. At one time an avid advocate of Hitler’s regime, Ciano turned against Hitler and Mussolini. On July 25, 1943 Ciano was involved in a vote against Mussolini’s government. He was arrested by the Nazis, tried for treason, and executed in January of 1944. Ciano had kept a diary that spelled out his anti-Nazi sentiment. The Gestapo stole parts of it but eventually it was recovered and published.306 Schellenberg describes Salon Kitty in his autobiography The Labyrinth; he said it had double walls, and microphones that were connected by automatic transmission to tape recorders. Three or four of Schellenberg’s men were put in charge of the taping. Schellenberg found Heydrich had only one weakness: “his ungovernable sexual appetite. To this he would surrender himself without inhibition or caution. But in the end he always regained sufficient mastery over himself to prevent serious repercussions.”307 304. West, Rebecca. Survivors in Mexico, Yale University Press, London, 2003. 305. Deacon, Richard. Spyclopedia, MacDonald, London, 1987, pp. 234-5. 306. Ciano, Galeazzo. Ciano Diaries, 1939-1943 — The Complete Unabridged, ed. Hugh Gibson, Doubleday and Co., Garden City, New York, 1946.

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Peculiar Liaisons Heydrich’s passion for sex was matched by the thrill he experienced while flying planes. While on vacation during the 1941 invasion of Russia, Heydrich was piloting a plane that was shot down behind enemy lines; SS troops rescued him.

CANARIS AND OPERATION SCHULUNG Only a few months after Hitler had appointed Canaris as head of the Abwehr, Canaris presented him with a document, in French, procured by one of his agents. Canaris’s actions would help propel Germany into the war. Hitler read it on February 11, 1936. Marked top secret, it was a transcript of a meeting between French and Soviet officials. The document reported that the two nations had agreed to join Czechoslovakian forces to attack Germany and end Hitler’s regime. Hitler dismissed Canaris and called for General Von Blomberg to execute Operation Schulung (“exercise”). The re-entry of the German army into the demilitarized Rhineland was disguised as a military exercise. The Rhineland had been declared a neutral zone by seven European powers in 1925; Germany was not to deploy any military force. This precaution was intended to forestall any possible German military build up. Hitler’s plan to march troops into the area would illustrate to Germany and the world that the German army would no longer abide by the 1925 agreement. Canaris’s agents provided Hitler with a rationale to re-establish the Rhineland as a part of Germany, no longer neutral: they came up with an exact replica of an order mobilizing thirteen French divisions along the border of France and Germany. On March 7, 1936 Hitler announced to an adoring audience at the Reichstag that German troops were marching across the Rhine bridges back into the land that was rightfully Germany’s. Canaris’s Abwehr had given Hitler courage to find more ground to conquer. The admiral’s prestige grew in the eyes of Hitler and that enhanced stature would last throughout most of the war. In December of 1937, Canaris met with the previous chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Patzig, Chief of Naval Personnel. Canaris vented his frustration over the

307. Schellenberg, Walter. The Labyrinth, Memoirs of Walter Schellenberg, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1956, p.14.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence plot to kill so many Russian officers. His fear and rivalry toward Himmler and Heydrich were at an all time high. Patzig offered to help Canaris find another position within the government but he told Patzig he could not resign, for “after me would come Heydrich.” The war was several months away but Canaris already understood the damage Heydrich could do if he were to take full control of the Abwehr. As dangerous as it was, Canaris stayed on as head of the Abwehr.

KRISTALLNACHT AND THE JEWISH PROBLEM In 1936, Heydrich upgraded his police from mere jailers of anti-Nazi prisoners to agents of Hitler’s will, gradually developing the murderous SS shock troops. SS troops would administer a variety of edicts established by Heydrich, including an order that forbade Jews to hoist the Nazi swastika flag. Though the Nazi regime had established a firm foothold on the German political scene, Heydrich wrote “that the Jew was still not to be trusted and that the Nazi party would need years of bitter struggle to drive back the enemy finally in all fields, to destroy him and to make Germany secure, in its blood and its spirit.”308 On November 7, 1938 a seventeen-year-old German Jewish refugee shot and killed an undersecretary of the German embassy in Paris, Ernst von Rath, to avenge the deportation of his father and other German Jews to Poland. The assassination of von Rath gave Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels the opportunity to prove to the Fuhrer that he could deal with the Jewish problem. Goebbels issued orders to the SS that “spontaneous” demonstrations throughout Germany were to be “organized and executed.” The real organizer of the “spontaneous” demonstrations, which became known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” Kristallnacht, was the thirty-four-year-old Reinhard Heydrich. On November 10, Heydrich sent teletypes to SS commanders demanding that “synagogues are to be burned...business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not looted...as many Jews, especially the rich ones, are to be arrested.” Goebbels was quoted as saying, “That’s my trade. Hatred. It takes you a long way further than any other emotion.” Almost 200 synagogues were destroyed, 20,000 Jews arrested, and hundreds killed. Eventually Heydrich required Jewish leaders to produce for the SS a list of seventy families a day that would be deported from Germany. 308. Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide, London, Serrif, 1996, p. 223.

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Peculiar Liaisons THE GLEIWITZ DECEPTION — ATTACK ON POLAND The horrors of World War II began with Hitler’s Blitzkrieg of Poland at 4:45 a.m. on September 1, 1939, when the Nazi Luftwaffe attacked the grounded Polish Air Force. The plans for the attack had been made as early as that June under the code name Fall Weiss. The incorporation of a strip of German land, known as the Danzig Corridor, into Poland as part of the Treaty of Versailles outraged Hitler. He considered the land to be rightfully part of Germany, and he intended to take it back just as he had Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia. Hitler had reclaimed the Rhineland; now, it was time to take the Corridor. Hitler had told his commanders, “I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war — never mind whether it is plausible or not...In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters but victory.” A faked attack on a small German town’s radio station may seem trivial enough to warrant only a footnote in history, but the operation was a model of multi-tiered politics and propaganda. Heydrich ordered Alfred Naujocks to simulate an attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz, near the German-Polish border, making it appear that the attack was only the beginning of a large assault by the Polish Army on Germany. The attack was code named Operation Himmler and was also known as Operation Canned Goods. Naujocks’s orders from Heydrich came on August 10, 1939. He took command of several SS troops and contacted Heinrich Mueller, head of the Gestapo, on August 25. Mueller promised to supply several dead men dressed in Polish Army uniforms; this ruse would help convince the world press that the Poles were in fact attacking Gleiwitz. Mueller went to a German concentration camp and selected twelve or thirteen men, whom Naujocks later characterized as “condemned criminals.” Heydrich supplied a doctor who administered fatal injections, and then Mueller had them put into Polish uniforms and machinegunned to make it appear that they had died at the hands of German patriots defending the Fatherland. The dead men were to be delivered to Naujocks, like so many “canned goods.” At 8 p.m., August 31, 1939, while a million and a half German soldiers waited to attack Poland, Naujocks and his troops surrounded the radio station. With them was a Polish-speaking SS agent. The SS troops easily took control of the station and from the broadcast booth the Polish-speaking agent told listeners that Germany was now in the hands of the Polish Army, and that it was time for the Poles to attack Germany. The broadcast ended with revolver shots

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence and a loud cry of “Long live Poland.” Less than ten hours later began the greatest war the world had ever known. Only days after the September 1 attack on Poland, SS troops began a wholesale slaughter of Polish political leaders, intellectuals, Catholic priests, and Jews. By September 14 reports of atrocities had reached Canaris’s Abwehr desk. Disgusted by the initial reports, he established a secret task force to collect more information. He risked being accused of treason when he secretly passed along the reports to all of the Wehrmacht’s commanding generals as well as Pope Pius XII, MI6, and the French intelligence agency in Paris. Those agencies and institutions did little to stop the atrocities but six years later the reports resurfaced and were important in incriminating the participating SS officers. It has been estimated that Heydrich was responsible for the deaths of 50,000 to 100,000 Poles by the end of 1939; they were executed by beatings, the gallows, beheadings, and burning, and yet the hardest years of the war were still to come. In June of 1940, the Nazis had quickly seized France, and a possible solution to the so-called Jewish problem presented itself. For many years Europe had openly discussed the creation of a Jewish homeland. One of the possible sites was the French-controlled island of Madagascar, now under Nazi occupation. Heydrich considered the emigration of Jews to the Nazi-occupied Madagascar as a “long-term” solution, better than the many other “short-term” plans that were constantly being considered or implemented: relegating Jews to ghettos or sending them to slave labor camps or concentration camps, or loading them onto ships and sinking them — a favorite idea of Hitler’s but never executed, probably because it would be so expensive.

WANNSEE CONFERENCE AND INTERPOL With the capture of Paris in May 1940, another tool was added to Heydrich’s arsenal. The international police organization, INTERPOL, was based in Paris. It contained files on thousands of citizens of various European countries. Heydrich used the files to search for Jews in Europe. Canaris had indirectly helped Heydrich obtain these files. In 1938, his Abwehr had planted an agent in the French ambassador’s office in Hamburg. He obtained a list of French spies working within the Third Reich. Canaris filed the document and later used it when Hitler attacked Poland. Now, the Abwehr was rounding up spies throughout Europe. When the German army entered Paris, there were few

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Peculiar Liaisons French agents in Germany.309 The Nazis confiscated the files of the French intelligence agency, which were later confiscated by the Russians and held for many years before being returned. Though Jews had been killed by the thousands in various ways and locations before the war and in its early stages, Hitler officially ordered Goering to start the systematic extermination of Jews on July 31, 1941. How this was to be accomplished, no one dared to think — except Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Office, the SS organization charged with executing the “final solution.” In a written order Goering told Heydrich to make “all necessary preparation with regard to organization and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution to the Jewish problem.” Though Goering’s directive from Hitler went to Heydrich in July, Heydrich seems to be the first to use the term “final solution,” and clearly spelled out its full meaning early in 1941. When Hitler attacked Russia and quickly conquered Russian land, a new problem arose for the Nazis. Like the Jews and the many other “undesirables” of Europe, the communists and Russian Jews would have to be dealt with. Written orders from Hitler were always rare, but not from Heydrich. In April 1941, just a few weeks after the assault on Russia, Heydrich ordered the execution of all “communist professional politicians in general...and other radical elements...Jews in Party and state posts.” In reality, all Russian Jews were to be executed. Heydrich wanted a special SS group called the Einsatzgruppen to decide on the spot who lived or died, according to their interpretation of who was a Jew or how dangerous a person might be to the Nazi cause.310 At a conference of sixteen Nazis at the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, the subject of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was broached. Adolf Eichmann prepared the minutes with a group of stenographers seated in a corner of the room. Thirty copies were made after the conference, and number 16 survived the war; marked “Secret Reich matter — Top Secret,” it was found in March 1947, stored in a German Foreign Office folder.311

309. Farago, Ladislas. The Game of the Foxes, McKay, New York, 1971, pp. 87-88. 310. Though the Nazi upper echelon of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, and Heydrich all enthusiastically endorsed the radical extermination of Jews from Europe and Russia, many SD and Gestapo officers found the SS killing machine repugnant and did nothing to perpetuate it. 311. Roseman, Mark. The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution, A Reconsideration, Metropolitan, New York, 2002.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence The purpose of the Wannsee conference has puzzled historians, since the mass murder of Soviet Jews had begun six months before. Mark Roseman has called the minutes the “Rosetta stone of Nazi murder,” as the notes enable historians to decipher or read much of what was going on. One of the aims of the conference was to define who was to be treated as a Jew, what was to be done with partial Jews, and what would be done with German Jews. In November, Himmler and Heydrich had discussed the transportation of German Jews without consideration of extermination. The Wannsee conference changed that position. Heydrich suggested that the “Jewish problem” could be resolved by working them to death building roads in Russia for the German army. Anyone hardy enough to survive could always be executed. Heydrich also proposed that mixed marriages be annulled so that the Jewish spouses could be sent to concentration camps, and “part” Jews would be sterilized. “Half-breeds of the first degree,” he told the conference, “in view of the final solution of the Jewish question, are to be treated in exactly the same way as full Jews.” A few exceptions might be made, but such half-breeds in Germany were to be sterilized as a condition of their exemption from deportation. Heydrich was satisfied with the outcome of the conference because “no reservations were expressed” concerning the projected slaughter of millions of people. On February 26, he would write that Wannsee had “happily settled the basic outlines for the practical implementation of the final solution of the Jewish question.” Where did Heydrich get his ideas? “All I know,” said Adolf Eichmann during interrogation before his trial in Israel and subsequent execution, May 31, 1962, “is that Heydrich said to me, ‘The Fuhrer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.’” Eichmann testified that at the end of the conference attendees relaxed over a glass of cognac. 312 During the first stages of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, the Nazis attacked the town of Brest-Litovsk and carried out one of their first Jewish pogroms in Russia. The city lay just west of the border between Russia and German-occupied Poland. During the first few weeks of Operation Barbarossa 15% of the Jewish population were murdered, and thirteen and a half months of harsh deprivation followed. On October 15 and 16 of 1942, nearly the entire Jewish population, estimated at 30,000, including slave laborers, was murdered. One of the survivors, Menachem Begin, who saw his entire family murdered, became Israel’s prime minister in 1977.313 312. Eichmann, Adolf. Eichmann Interrogated, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Berlin, 1983.

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Peculiar Liaisons HEYDRICH’S SECRET In June 1941, when Russia was invaded, the relationship between Canaris and Heydrich visibly cooled. It was obvious that Heydrich’s ambition to control all of the Nazi intelligence services, as well as his secret desire to succeed Hitler, meant that neither could trust each other. Both men had been keeping dossiers on each other. Heydrich had accumulated data about the Abwehr through his agent Walter Schellenberg and Canaris had inherited Heydrich’s dossier from his predecessor Patzig. The Heydrich dossier documented a strong possibility that Heydrich had Jewish parentage. “The way we are behaving, things are certain to come to a bad end. It was complete madness to have taken up this Jewish question,” Heydrich told Schellenberg in a personal conversation. Schellenberg’s response to this curious admission was that it was likely that Heydrich was thinking of his own Jewish parentage. Heydrich had indeed gone to court three times between 1935 and 1937 to disprove his Jewish ancestry. The dossier that the Abwehr had compiled on Heydrich contained verbatim records of the court cases and the fact that Heydrich had had his mother’s tombstone altered. A defendant in one of the cases was to testify concerning Heydrich’s ancestry but disappeared. Whether Canaris ever divulged the contents of the Heydrich dossier to Hitler is not known. Hitler never confronted Heydrich with any suspicions. Due to their mutual suspicion, Heydrich and Canaris requested to have Schellenberg present any time they met, until the end of their relationship.

THE DACHAU SPY In October of 1941, Heydrich conceived a scheme to discredit Canaris and the Abwehr in his quest to control all of the Nazi intelligence organizations. In October of 1941, Canaris was assigned a task from Keitel: find a Jewish spy to work for the Abwehr. The Abwehr needed an agent with the ability to blend into the citizenry of the Middle East and report on reinforcements the British would use against Rommel and Africa. They found the perfect spy: Paul Fackenheim, a World War I hero, a Jewish inmate at Dachau, with multi-lingual talents and, naturally, an interest in leaving the death camp. 313. Armstrong, Karen. Holy War, Anchor, New York, 2001, p. 106.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence Fackenheim was released from the camp, trained, and parachuted into the countryside outside of Haifa. However, even before he could melt into the Haifa scenery, Fackenheim heard English-speaking men in the dark. He thought that his mission had been leaked to the British — and it had been. Heydrich and his SD had tipped them off, telling them that a Nazi general, Erich Koch, would be parachuted outside of Haifa for a sabotage mission. The next morning Fackenheim turned himself into a British military headquarters. The British did not believe his story. After a quick trial, Fackenheim was found guilty of being a spy and sentenced to death by firing squad. Incredibly, a local woman testified that she had known Fackenheim and his parents in Germany, and saved him. Fackenheim sat out the rest of the war in a British internment camp, while Heydrich was able to embarrass Canaris’s Abwehr by intentionally botching the mission. 314

MAX THE SUPER SPY Just before World War II, Richard Kauder, a Hungarian Jew who lived in Vienna, created the intelligence network “Max.” Loftus and Aarons called the breaking of the Enigma machine by British intelligence “a minor achievement in comparison.”315 Kauder was employed by Canaris and was lauded by Nazis as one of the most valuable German agents against the Soviets. Generals Guderian and Gehlen substantiated the claim, as did Walter Schellenberg. Only the highest echelon of Nazi intelligence knew the Hungarian Jew who was providing such critical information. Max provided a constant flow of verified information concerning the Soviets’ secret battle plans. The Max intelligence was so accurate that Canaris was able to convince German generals to ignore Hitler’s edict that Jews could not work for German intelligence.316 But, Max was deceiving the Germans. Though many scholars believe that Max’s work was done exclusively by Richard Kauder, there is much evidence that shows Max was in fact a group of agents controlled by Kauder. These agents were Communist Jews who were able to provide information from inside Stalin’s 314. Bar-Zohar, Michael. Arrows of the Almighty, MacMillan, New York, 1985. 315. Aarons, Mark and Loftus, Jack. The Secret War Against the Jews, St. Martins, New York, 1994, p. 135. 316. Ibid., p. 136.

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Peculiar Liaisons war rooms. Max’s real goal was to lull the Nazis into believing that everything that came from him was correct. When the time was right, the agents lured the Nazis into traps with false information that led in part to the disaster at Stalingrad, and the subsequent battle at Kursk, July 5, 1943,317 where the Russians defeated a half million German soldiers and seventeen panzer divisions. Max’s final blow against the Nazis was leading them to believe the Soviets were on the brink of collapse in 1944, though they were really preparing themselves for the final decisive push into Germany.

SABOTAGING THE SABOTEURS In an episode that would be a model of Canaris’s two-faced actions within the Nazi war machine, an American passenger plane was saved from being exploded over the Atlantic by Field Marshal Keitel. Throughout the war Lisbon had become a center for espionage. Abwehr spies watched the comings and goings of all the passengers of the twenty-seat Pan-American Clipper, the amphibious plane that made three New York round trips weekly from Lisbon. Field Marshal Keitel was concerned about the possible entrance and exit of British and American spies from Europe through the Clipper. At his orders, Canaris had Abwehr agents smuggle bombs aboard the Clipper; Canaris knew that Walter Schellenberg was watching his every move and was ready to report any dereliction of duty to Heydrich. But, having second thoughts about the bombs, Canaris sent two of his most loyal agents to retrieve them just hours before the Clipper left for New York. The plane landed safely.318 Hitler made a similar request to destroy a plane in mid-flight. In the mid1930s Hitler ordered the Abwehr to bomb a British courier plane that flew twice a week between Scotland and Sweden carrying diplomatic documents and antiNazi propaganda in the form of film, magazines, and newspapers. Canaris stopped the operation, stating that the Abwehr, “unlike Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst, is not a murder organization.”

317. Hitler launched his last great offensive of the war against the Russians, known as Operation Citadel or the Kursk battle, in an area east of Kiev. After the disaster at Stalingrad, Hitler was still able to throw 500,000 soldiers against a million Russians. 318. Breuer, William B. Undercover Tales of World War II, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1999, pp. 112-14.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence In 1943 Hitler ordered Canaris through Keitel to assassinate the French Army Commander in Chief, General Weygand. Hitler was concerned that Weygand would help the British build bases to launch an assault on the continent. Again Canaris refused, as he did when he was charged in the execution of the French prisoner General Henri Honore Giraud after his escape from German captivity. Canaris helped Giraud leave occupied France in November of 1942 by having him smuggled aboard the submarine S.S. Seraph in Operation Kingpin.319

THE CZECHS STRIKE BACK On September 27, 1941 Heydrich was promoted to SS General and took the position of Protector in Bohemia and Moravia, while keeping his position as Chief of Reich Security. This position was essentially the equivalent of governor over Czechoslovakia. At the request of the Czech government-in-exile, the Allies’ Joint Intelligence Committee authorized an assassination mission. Everyone involved in the plan knew that going after one of the most powerful men in the Nazi regime would invoke a terrible retaliation. MI6 head Menzies thought the risk was worth taking. If Heydrich were eliminated, Admiral Canaris, head of the German Army intelligence and a member of the Black Orchestra, could retain his position and continue to secretly plot against Hitler. There were many British intelligence agents who wished to move against Canaris, as well, but Menzies knew that he would be more valuable alive than dead. Two Czech resistance fighters, Jans Kubis and Joseph Gabcik, were trained in England to fly to Prague and kill Heydrich. The operation was known as “Anthropoids.” A team of commandos, including Kubis and Gabcik, parachuted into the small village of Nehvizdy, Czechoslovakia just outside of Prague on December 28, 1941.320 They landed eighty miles off target and only twelve miles from Prague, where they luckily linked up with resistance fighters. Gabcik had been trained by the British to assemble and disassemble a Sten gun quickly. In his Prague hideout he continued to practice the efficient assembly and disassembly of the automatic weapon. Kubis had another weapon provided by the 319. Blandford, Edmund. SS Intelligence — The Nazi Secret Service, Airlife Publishing, Shrewbury, England, 2000, p. 235. 320. MacDonald, Callum, The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer, Reinhard Heydrich, Free Press, New York, 1999, Appendix 2.

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Peculiar Liaisons British — a disassembled bomb. Both of the men’s weapons would be concealed in a briefcase along with cyanide pills in case they were caught. Kubis and Gabcik became familiar with resistance workers within Hradcany Castle where Heydrich had established an office. In May of 1942 they learned that Heydrich was planning to leave Prague for a long time, possibly not to return. Having been preparing the operation for five months, Kubis and Gabcik decided to conclude it quickly. Albert Speer had visited Heydrich at Prague and commented on the general’s lack of security. Heydrich wore a bullet-proof vest but moved through the city unprotected in his convertible with only his driver as a security agent. When Speer asked Heydrich if he were concerned, Heydrich smiled and replied, “My Czechs won’t do anything to me.” As Kubis and Gabcik plotted a way to get to him, Himmler, Canaris, and Heydrich met at the Hradcany Castle to sign directives that would reduce the Abwehr’s authority and make it subordinate to the SD. This did not eliminate the Abwehr, as Heydrich had wished; he was ready to propose to Hitler that the SD take over all the Abwehr functions, not just technical espionage, but at least this was a start. Himmler ordered Heydrich to prepare a move to France, to hunt down the undesirable elements, communists, socialists and especially the maquis, the French Resistance that would eventually be so crucial in the success of Operation Overlord, the D-Day assault on the Normandy beaches in June of 1944.321 Heydrich packed his bags and prepared to leave. The conspirators monitored his actions closely. On May 23 a watchmaker, Josef Novotny, was called into Heydrich’s office to repair an antique clock. He noticed a document on Heydrich’s desk that detailed his complete schedule for May 27, including his departure from Prague that afternoon. While Heydrich was out of the office, Novotny took the paper from the desk, crumpled it, and threw it in a wastebasket. When he left Heydrich’s office he had another resistance worker empty the wastebasket, and soon the paper was in Kubis and Gabcik’s hands. On the morning of May 27, 1942 Kubis and Gabcik positioned themselves beside a road in the district of Prague called Liben. They had biked to their chosen spot with their bomb-filled briefcases and the automatic Sten gun. They positioned themselves after a curve in the road where Heydrich’s car would be forced to decelerate. Gabcik hid his gun under his raincoat. Four other confed321. Johnson, David Allan. Righteous Deception, Praeger, Westport, Ct., 2001, p. 41.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence erates were on hand: two gunmen were positioned at another part of the road, and a man with a mirror who would signal when the car was about to arrive, and Gabcik’s girlfriend, Rela Fafek. Fafek was to drive a car along the road, ahead of Heydrich’s chauffeurdriven limousine. It was a pleasant day and the top was down on the car. If Heydrich was unescorted by SS troops, as usual, she would wear a hat and the attack would go forward. At 10:30 a.m. Fafek appeared, and she drove around the curve in the road wearing a hat. Gabcik stepped into the road and raised his gun. The gun jammed, either from grass stuck in the breech or Gabcik’s forgetting to release the safety. Kubis threw a bomb near the car just as Heydrich and his chauffeur shot Gabcik with pistols. The bomb exploded next to the car, driving bits of metal and horse hair from the upholstery of the car into Heydrich’s back. Heydrich stumbled from the car and collapsed. Both Gabcik and Kubis were injured from bullets and the effects of the explosion, but they were able to escape. Heydrich’s injuries were thought at first to be minor, but the explosion had broken his back and he died several days later. The SS publicly displayed the briefcases and bicycles of the assassins, demanding to know where they had come from. One hundred thousand crowns were offered for the capture of the perpetrators. Eventually the sum was raised to ten million crowns, a stunning sum, equal to well over half a million dollars. Karel Caruda, who was one of the paratroopers and original commandos of the mission, gave in and informed the SS that the resistance fighters were hiding in a Prague church. He was awarded half of the reward money; after the war he was tried by a Czech court and hanged for treason.

NAZI REPRISAL Immediately following Heydrich’s funeral, Hitler ordered reprisals for the assassination. He told Heydrich’s assistant Lt. General Karl H. Frank (Head of Gestapo in Czechoslovakia) to execute 10,000 Czechs. However, Frank argued that this would play into the hands of their enemies, who would say that the actions of the Czech Resistance reflected the will of the entire Czech nation. Hitler reluctantly conceded the point but nevertheless ordered the SS to execute 1331 Czechs, including 201 women.

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Peculiar Liaisons Kubis and Gabcik and scores of other resistance fighters were hiding in the Karl Borromaeus Church. The SS surrounded the church, and tried to smoke them out of the basement. They fought for several hours, and tried in vain to escape from the basement into a nearby sewer line. All 120 men in the church were killed or committed suicide. The SS was never completely sure that the two assassins were in the church. To avenge the loss of their leader, the SS then had 3000 Jews removed from the Theresienstadt ghetto and shipped to concentration camps where they were immediately murdered. Himmler arrested 500 of the few remaining Jews in Berlin on the day of Heydrich’s attack and had 152 executed on the day Heydrich died. Himmler must have felt a close affinity for Heydrich; he kept among his most prized personal effects a silver-framed photograph of Heydrich’s funeral. It was found after the war in a salt mine near the village of Bad Gastein, south of Salzburg and Berchtesgaden, where Himmler had carefully stored and protected with booby-traps almost the entire library of Vienna, weapons, and personal material like the Heydrich photo.

LIDICE Not to be outdone by Himmler, Hitler focussed his wrath on the mining village of Lidice outside Prague, a town that was accused (wrongly) of sheltering the conspirators. Hitler ordered his SS to kill all the occupants of the village and destroy all the buildings. This was only the beginning; he destroyed a string of villages throughout Eastern Europe in the following months for a variety of reasons. Lt. General Frank carried out the orders; his actions labeled him as the Butcher of Lidice. Frank’s gardener was a British espionage agent322 who had the opportunity to kill Frank, but the Lt. General survived the war — only to be executed as a war criminal. On the night of June 9, 1942 ten truckloads of SS troops gathered the citizens of Lidice and grouped them by age and sex. The next day all men and boys over sixteen were shut up in the mayor of Lidice’s barns and stables. From dawn

322. Lt. Richard Pinder of the British Army was parachuted into France in late 1942 to train the French Resistance in sabotage but was arrested by the Germans and assigned to Frank as a gardener. Breuer, William. Deceptions of World War II, John Wiley and Sons, 2001, pp. 108-110.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence until late afternoon, 172 men and boys, and seven women, were herded into a garden and shot in groups of ten. The town was burned and dynamited. Of the nearly 200 remaining women, most were transported to concentration camps, where many died. Four were pregnant and were taken to hospitals in Prague where their newborn infants were killed. The mothers were sent to the Ravensbrueck, the infamous “woman’s” concentration camp 56 miles north of Berlin that housed up to 100,000 prisoners during its tenure. Of the ninety children of Lidice, most were sent to the Gneisenau camp, where they died of ill treatment. A very few were taken into German homes and raised under German names. It is believed that only three children survived, and one, Jaroslav Tichy, who was six years old on the day his father was shot, was taken into a German home because of his “German looks” — blond hair and blue eyes. He was the only Lidice child to be re-united with a parent. In 1965 he wrote, “Only in 1947 the Czech authorities traced me and so I returned home two years after the war. . . Nothing is left of our village but the plains and grass. It was sad when I went over the meadow. Up there our school used to be, and further ahead was the village square, and the church and our houses. All that has disappeared. My mother and I met again. She recognized me by three scars which I had from childhood on my breast.” Eventually the SS found the names of the core members of the plot. Anyone who was thought to be part of the resistance or to have any connection to the paratroopers, even if only to the extent of having a similar name, were taken into SS custody. Sometimes, distant relatives of members of the resistance were shot. Others underwent the misery of the infamous Theresienstadt prison, north of Prague, the same place where Archduke Ferdinand’s assassin Gavrilo Princip was imprisoned and died in 1918.

THE END OF CANARIS’S ROLE IN THE Abwehr After Heydrich’s death, Himmler ran the RSHA for a while; then he appointed Ernst Kaltenbrunner to head the organization. Kaltenbrunner elevated Walter Schellenberg to be chief of Department VI. Kaltenbrunner, who bore scars on his face from sword duels, was a striking figure at nearly seven feet tall, and he had earned a doctorate in law. Schellenberg noted that Hitler had lost confidence in Canaris after the Abwehr’s failure to foresee the Allies’ surprise landing in North Africa in late 1942. In January of 1944, an anti-Nazi Abwehr

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Peculiar Liaisons agent, Dr. Erich Vemehren, defected to the British from his post in Istanbul. According to David Allan Johnson, Canaris’s most blatant deception took place in January of 1944 when he informed military officers that there was no possibility of an Allied amphibious attack on Italy — precisely at the time when the Allies were approaching Anzio.323 This gross error discredited German intelligence with top military officers, especially Fieldmarschall von Rundstedt, commander of the West, who eventually came to ignore intelligence from Canaris. In February of 1944, Hitler called Canaris into his office and demanded a report on the Russian front. Canaris, in the company of Himmler, reported the gloomy news and Hitler exploded. He overturned a table and grabbed Canaris by the lapels. “Are you telling me that I am going to lose this war?” A few days later, Canaris was relieved of his post as head of the Abwehr and given an economic post in the government. However, he had made his mark by passing along information from double agents like Dusko Popov (Tricycle) and Juan Pujol Garcia (Garbo). Both agents exaggerated the Allied military force, leading Hitler to believe that two invasions of the continent were possible; this provides a possible reason for his keeping the Fifteenth Army at Calais when the invasion actually materialized at Normandy. Garbo, who, like Himmler, was a poultry farmer before the war, was so convincing as a double agent that he was recommended for an Iron Cross by the Nazis and also was eventually made a Member of the British Empire (MBE). A similar honor was bestowed on Popov.

CANARIS AND KIM PHILBY Why Canaris never fully succeeded in persuading British intelligence to give him their full support is not entirely clear, but the British double agent Kim Philby may have had at least a partial hand in the affair. Harold “Kim” Philby is the foremost turncoat agent the British has ever produced for the Soviets. Named after the Indian boy-spy “Kim,” of Kipling stories, Philby was raised under the tutelage of his father, St. John Philby, who acted as a British intelligence agent under the auspices of a traveling English civil servant. Having spent most of his youth in various parts of India and the Middle East, Philby may have thought of himself as a cosmopolitan with no allegiance to any one country. He married an

323. Johnson, David Allan. Righteous Deception — German Officers Against Hitler, Praeger, London, 2001, p. ix.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence Austrian communist and was employed by the British intelligence, in the counter-espionage section, just after the fall of France. He provided intelligence to his Soviet controlling officer, Anatoli Lebedev. The Soviets were not interested in a Germany without Hitler. A Germany without Hitler could too easily create a dangerous bond between Germany, Britain and America, a powerful alliance that would outweigh the Soviets dramatically. Philby was aware of Canaris’s plots against Hitler and his knowledge was passed along to the Soviets. Philby, like Heydrich, wanted desperately to remove Canaris from office. He devised an assassination plot for Stewart Menzies to carry out against Canaris while he was in Spain. Though Menzies never followed up, that was only one of many maneuvers by Philby to alienate Germany’s anti-Hitler plotters from the Allies’ intelligence groups.324 The last journalist to interview Philby, Phillip Knightley, wrote in his work Master Spy that Philby subverted a plan to work with the anti-Hitlerians when a detailed 1942 report by Hugh Trevor-Roper was presented inside the intelligence community that suggested the possibility of using a non-Hitlerian Germany and British forces against the Communist Soviets. “The German antiNazis,” wrote Knightley, “did not want to stop the war against Russia. They wanted to eliminate Hitler, make peace with the Allies, and then complete the invasion of the Soviet Union in which they stood on the brink of success.”325 Philby was also involved in an investigation and propaganda operation involving what he thought was the fake death of Heinrich Himmler.326

324. Kross, Peter. The Encyclopedia of World War II Spies, Barricade, Fort Lee, N.J., 2001, p. 274. Numerous writers have considered the possibility that Canaris arranged meetings with MI6 Chief Menzies and OSS Chief William “Will Bill” Donovan. Heinz Hoehne, author of a detailed study of Canaris, wrote that a former Abwehr officer F. Jusur von Einem claimed to have attended a meeting of Canaris, Donovan, and Menzies in Spain during the summer of 1943. A Thread of Deceit, Espionage Myths of World War II, Random House, New York, 1985, pp. 35-38. 325. Knightley, Phillip. Master Spy, Knopf, New York, 1989, p. 108. 326. Thomas, Hugh. The Strange Death of Heinrich Himmler, St. Martins, New York, 2001. Himmler was captured May 22, 1945 by British officer Chaim Weizman (a future president of Israel) and committed suicide by biting on a cyanide capsule while under investigation. Why Philby was so concerned about the possibility of Himmler’s survival has never been fully understood. Thomas also wrote a book that questioned whether the person who flew to Scotland and was eventually imprisoned in the Tower of London and sentenced to life at Spandau prison in Berlin was the real Rudolf Hess (The Murder of Rudolf Hess).

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Peculiar Liaisons CANARIS AND THE BLACK ORCHESTRA The SS assault against political opponents of the Nazi Party, and what Hitler called the Untermenschen (subhumans), took a psychological toll on some of the officers who undertook the grisly tasks. Even Arthur Nebe, the only SS officer who had volunteered his services in the slaughter of Russian Jews and other undesirables, eventually became part of the Black Orchestra. On July 21, after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler, Himmler began arresting hundreds of suspects. The arrests included some of the biggest names in the Nazi Party: Rommel, Schulenberg, Fromm, Popitz, and Canaris’s assistant Oster. Hans Oster worked as a high official in the counter-espionage division of the Abwehr. He had worked closely with Lt. Fabian von Schlabendorff in plotting against Hitler’s regime. Schlabendorff would write that both he and Oster had “long been working secretly against Hitler” and that Canaris “provided a protective covering for Oster and allowed him free rein in his scheming.” 327 On July 23, an SS car drove to Carnaris’s villa in Schlachtensee. Walter Schellenberg stepped out of the car and arrested Canaris. Canaris and others languished in Gestapo jails as Kaltenbrunner and Schellenberg ordered full investigations into their backgrounds. Though his wife burned Canaris’s personal diary, the Gestapo was able to recover numerous incriminating papers. The depth of the plotting against Hitler stunned Kaltenbrunner and created a visible tension within the Gestapo. Soon Kaltenbrunner began turning on his own men, even accusing Schellenberg of being a British agent.328 Kaltenbrunner would eventually appear in the Nuremberg docket, where he denied any criminal action on his part. He was found guilty of ordering the execution of fifteen AngloAmerican soldiers who parachuted into Czechoslovakia in January of 1945 only to be captured, sent to Mauthausen concentration camp and hanged, an episode that would have made Kaltenbrunner’s predecessor proud.329 After an Allied aerial bomb hit the Reich Security Office in February of 1945, Canaris and the others were transferred to concentration camps. At Flossenburg on April 9, 1945, with Allied troops only miles away, Canaris was hanged with an iron collar, which did not deliver death for a horrific half hour. Sensing the importance of what Canaris had done for the allies, major Nazi 327. Schlabrendorff, Fabian von. “Our Two Tries to Kill Hitler,” Saturday Evening Post, July 20, 1946, p. 16. 328. Colvin, Ian. Master Spy, McGraw Hill, New York, 1951, p. 244. 329. Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Fawcett, New York, 1992, p. 1246.

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6. The Dark Secrets of Nazi Intelligence figures took swipes at the “little Admiral.” At the Nuremberg Trial, Doenitz claimed he was an officer “who inspired little trust. He was quite different from all the others. We said of him that he had seven souls.” Jodl said at the trial that the Abwehr under Canaris’s direction was a “nest of traitors [and] had served the enemy for years.” Skorzeny devoted a chapter to him in his autobiography, noting his importance and begrudgingly giving him credit for deceiving the Third Reich on numerous occasions, especially in July of 1940 when he passed information to Keitel claiming that British military strength was greater than it really was. This deception played a large part in dissuading Hitler from launching Operation SeaLion, the assault on Britain.330 Ernst Baron von Weizsacker, the State Secretary of the German Foreign Ministry and an occasional member of the conspiracy, wrote, “Whether he had Greek blood I do not know; but at all events, he passed for a cunning Odysseus. This much even Hitler must have recognized; otherwise, he would have hardly entrusted his whole military intelligence to a sailor.”331

THE END FOR CANARIS The death of the “first soldier” of the Nazi army ended the Nazi era in Europe. Seeing that Nazi Germany was doomed to failure, Schellenberg eventually traveled to Stockholm, and though he tried to initiate peace negotiations with the British, he was arrested in June 1945. He testified at Nuremberg against other Nazis, including Kaltenbrunner, which saved him from execution. He was sentenced to six years in prison and wrote his memoirs, The Labyrinth. He served two years, was released, and died in Turin, Italy in 1952. One of Canaris’s biographers, Ian Colvin, wrote “the truth about Admiral Canaris and his friends is emerging slowly everywhere. Our generation is perhaps not fully capable of grasping the ethical motives of such a man. Later, when these matters can be treated with less prejudice, when conceptions of treason and high treason are clearer, when the sneers of contemporaries are stilled, the historians will see the picture in better perspective.” 332

330. Skorzeny, Otto. My Commando Operations — The Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Daring Commando, Schiffer Military History, Altgen, Pa., 1995, pp. 41-63. 331. Brown, Anthony Cave. Bodyguard of Lies, Harper Row, New York, 1975, p. 141. 332. Colvin, Ian. Master Spy, McGraw Hill, New York, 1951, p. 263.

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Peculiar Liaisons On April 10, 1945, Hitler gave orders to destroy documentation created by General Jodl’s office, the Gestapo archives in Berlin, and the files of the Abwehr in Zossen. However, only a small portion was destroyed.333 With all of this documentation researchers have been continually drawing a clearer picture of the Nazi intelligences agencies and those that administered them. Only a few miles from the Czechoslovakian border a memorial tablet was set at Flossenburg Concentration Camp in 1965. It reads, “Admiral Wilhelm Canaris: without sentence and without reason murdered by the National Socialist government.”

333. The volume of captured German documents concerning the war is staggering: over 17,000 microfilm rolls comprising over 18 million pages of documents, a stunning figure considering that the American Civil War’s documents comprise a little over 2,000 rolls.

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7. THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK LEE H. OSWALD AND DAVID FERRIE “I’m a patsy!” — Lee Harvey Oswald, November 22, 1963, Dallas, Texas

On November 22, 1963 at 12:30 p.m., US President John Kennedy’s midnight-blue Lincoln convertible limousine entered a grassy park area called Dealey Plaza on its way through the streets of Dallas, Texas to the city’s Trade Mart for a luncheon. The Kennedy administration had hoped that a motorcade would evoke a demonstration of the president’s popularity in a city that he lost in the 1960 presidential election. As Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connolly, and their wives waved to well wishers, rifle shots cracked through the air. Both the president and the governor were hit. The president was fatally injured; the governor survived his wounds. Kennedy was the fourth American president to be assassinated. If Oswald really killed Kennedy, and if he was acting on his own, the four assassins of American presidents were inspired by four quite different political leanings: one was a Democrat, one a Republican, one an anarchist, and one, as best we can tell, a Communist.334

334. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the fourth American president to be victim of assassination, preceded by Abraham Lincoln in 1865 (Booth, a southern Democrat), James A. Garfield in 1881 (Cuiteau, a Republican), and William McKinley in 1901 (Czolgosz, anarchist).

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Peculiar Liaisons The source and number of shots fired has been argued for decades. The official investigating body of the assassination, The Warren Commission employed a full-time staff of 28 people for ten months and produced a tenmillion-word, 26-volume study based on 26,550 interviews, but even so, they failed or were unable to interview a number of important witnesses. They concluded that there were three shots fired at the motorcade. The Commission stated that whether the shot that hit Kennedy in the neck was the first or the second could not be determined.335 They also concluded that all those shots were fired from an Italian carbine operated by twenty-four-year-old Lee H. Oswald, of Dallas. From the first moment, the public has feared a conspiracy in the assassination. Gov. Connally screamed, “They’re trying to kill us all,” as the limousine picked up speed on its way to Parkland Hospital. Conspiracy theories have run the gamut, implicating the Soviets, Cuban intelligence, the CIA, FBI, Cuban exiles, French hitmen, the Mafia, LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, Texas oilmen, the Dallas Police Department, various US military intelligence agencies, and the Freemasons.336 The Zapruder film, an 8-millimeter home movie shot by a parade by-stander named Abraham Zapruder, clearly documented the final head shot to the president; it may be the most closely scrutinized piece of film in history. Numerous scholars believe the government tampered with it to eradicate any documentation of a conspiracy. Selected frames from the film were published in Life magazine in reverse order, giving a misleading impression of what took place — where the gun shots came from and in what order, with all the subsequent implications for the investigation. A 1975 congressional investigation produced several controversial acoustic studies of a Dallas police recording of Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting337 which has led many to believe that there were four shots from two locations in the plaza; in spite of this, the official story remains that Oswald was the sole suspect. The Warren Commission and supporters of the Commission’s findings have described the accused assassin, Lee H. Oswald, as a loner and a Marxist

335. WC, p. 110. “three shots were fired; it follows that one shot probably missed the car and its occupants. The evidence is inconclusive as to whether it was the first, second, or third shot which missed.” 336. Goldberg, Robert A. Enemies Within — The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America, Yale University Press, New Haven, Ct., 2001, pp. 105-149. 337. Thomas, D.B. “Echo correlation analysis and the acoustic evidence in the Kennedy assassination revisited,” Scientific and Justice, v. 41, n. 1, 2001, pp. 21-32; HSCA Proceedings v. 8, p. 116; HSCA Final Report, p. 95.

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7. The Assassination of JFK who had inadequate social skills and a miserable marriage. However, he had numerous ties with organizations and individuals linked with the activities of both pro-communists and anti-communists, Cuban exiles, right-wing groups, and the Mafia. One of the most intriguing of these relationships was with the brilliant misfit David William Ferrie of New Orleans.

LINCOLN, FERDINAND, AND KENNEDY The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth is also riddled with mystery. Booth was a famous Shakespearean actor who had planned to kidnap Lincoln at one time and eventually shot the president with a pistol in Ford’s Theater in Washington D.C. only days after General Robert E. Lee’s famous surrender at Appomattox. Conspirators alleged to have aided Booth were executed. Booth wrote in his diary the day before the murder, “I can never repent it, though we hated to kill: Our country owed all her trouble to him and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.” Booth, like fellow murderer Jesse James, has been loosely linked to The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC), a mysterious secret society that Warren Getler called the “most powerful subversive organization ever to operate within the US.” The KGC has been accused of planning the first salvos against Fort Sumter in April of 1861 that started the American Civil War and of plotting to overthrow both the Mexican government and the post-Civil War federal government. Booth allegedly took the vows of the KGC in a room of a castle in Baltimore where portraits of Jefferson Davis (once president of the Confederate South) and Stephen Douglas (one-time leader of the Illinois Democratic Party) hung. Like the Black Hand and other secret societies, the KGC used a mysterious ceremony to shore up the resolve of its members. In Booth’s case, he was fighting “Yankee domination” and vowed to “risk all to help Southern Independence.”338 There are certain similarities between the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 and US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Both men were traveling in a southern region where they were unpopular; both were accompanied by their wives when they were shot; both were in open, state338. Getler, Warren and Brewer, Bob. Shadow of the Sentinel, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2003, pp. 15, 66-69. The Knights of the Golden Circle were a secret order of Southern sympathizers throughout the north and south that plotted a resurrection of violence against the United State’s Federal government.

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Peculiar Liaisons of-the-art automobiles and accompanied by the local governor (also similar to King Alexander of Yugoslavia’s death in 1934); their deaths were quick, and were orchestrated by several people and possibly several organizations working in concert; in some cases the existence of so many conflicting stories, the impenetrable inconsistencies in witnesses’ testimony and peculiarities in the government follow-up seem to suggest that government figures were involved. Ferdinand’s death has throughout the years been clearly linked to a radical organization, the Serbian Black Hand. Though Ferdinand’s death has been at the very least indirectly linked to the detonation of the First World War, Kennedy’s death did not set off such a great cataclysm — though one was feared. Still, it is possible the Vietnam War may not have been escalated if the president had lived to serve out his term of office. Howard Jones (Death of a Generation — How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War) wrote, “the only person in the Kennedy administration who consistently opposed the commitment of US combat forces was the president.”339 In the days immediately after the assassination there were real fears that this might be the first shot in another world war, a horror that was expressed to President Johnson by Secretary of State Dean Rusk. US military forces were brought to an alert status of DEFCON3 on the afternoon of the assassination.340 The assassination shocked the world and led German journalist Ulrike Meinhof, who would later become part of a radical terror group in Germany, to write: “The grief fades, the emptiness remains. The man the nations of the world believed would make peace is dead...we must not go backwards but find other, alternative ways . . .” Just as the investigating bodies of the Serbian government studied the relationships of assassin Gavrilo Princip, the life and relations of Lee Oswald, Kennedy’s alleged assassin, have been fodder for endless research and speculation.341 Though Princip’s motive for killing Ferdinand was clearly stated, Oswald’s motive has never been clear. Princip’s actions were part of a conspiracy of the secret society, the Black Hand, guided by a Serbian government official, Dragutin Dimitrijevic with the possibility of help from other sources like the 339. Jones, Howard. Death of a Generation — How the Assassinaton of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 2003, p. 1. 340. O’Leary, Brad and Seymour, L.E. Triangle of Death — The Shocking Truth About the Role of South Vietnam and the French Mafia in the Assassination of JFK, WND Books, Nashville, Tennessee, 2003, p. 200. 341. Mantik, David W. Murder in Dealey Plaza, “Paradoxes of the JFK Assassination: The Zapruder Film Controversy,” ed. Fezter, James, Catfeet Press, Chicago, 2000, p. 325.

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7. The Assassination of JFK Bolsheviks and Czarist Russia. Did Oswald have a similar relationship with a mentor who guided him to action, or was he an agent of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an organization that allegedly consisted of only one person — Oswald?

OSWALD’S CURIOUS ACQUAINTANCES Who did Oswald know? He had few friends. A domineering mother raised him after his father died two months before his birth in 1939. He spent ages three through five at the Evangelical Lutheran Bethlehem Orphan Asylum (also called the Bethlehem Children’s Home) because his mother was unable to care for him. A 1993 interview of one of the boys who was at the institution at the same time as Oswald showed a two-year stay that had a detrimental effect on Oswald. Allen Campbell described the institution as a “house of horrors” where children were fed water and four-day-old bread, and the boys, including four-year-old Oswald, watched from a crawl space above the room as a priest sexually assaulted the older girls. The girls, afraid of being killed, asked the boys to watch. “I know it affected all of us tremendously,” said Campbell. “We would go into a state of depression for days and days after.”342 Oswald’s family circumstances appear to offer some parallels to those examples of infamy with whom he was eventually equated: Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremmer, Charles Manson, and Theodore Kaczynski all grew up fatherless. During his childhood and teens he, his stepfather Edwin Ekdahl, mother, and brother moved many times. He joined the Marines and made such an impression on one of his fellow Marines, Kerry Thornley, that Thornley wrote a novel (The Idle Warriors), months before the assassination — with Oswald as the basis for the main character.343 After his stint in the Marines and his defection to Russia, Oswald returned to the United States disenchanted with both Russia and his birthplace the US. Marina Prusakov was encouraged by her uncle Ilya to attend a trade union dance at the Palace of Culture in Minsk in mid-March 1961. It was there that the pretty nineteen-year-old met Oswald. A mere six weeks later they were married. 342. Russo, Gus. Live by the Sword, Bancroft Press, Baltimore, 1998, pp. 87-88. 343. Thornley describes the novel The Idle Warriors as a story that “centers around the gradual moral disintegration of a marine who, at last, defects to Russia.” Thornley, Kerry W. Oswald, New Classics, Chicago, Il., 1965, p. 45.

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Peculiar Liaisons Whether this whirlwind romance was true love or some kind of arrangement has been a source of wonder to many writers. Marina’s uncle was Colonel Ilya Prusakov, a member of the Soviet internal security agency, MVD, the same Soviet agency that supposedly provided living expenses for defectors like Oswald. A CIA document declassified in 1976 and dated December 1963 stated that a CIA agent was informed by a Soviet consul general at a Soviet embassy that Oswald was “sent to USSR and married Soviet girl under CIA instructions.”344 This set of queer circumstances has led to the speculation that the CIA was interested in getting Ilya Prusakov to defect, though he never did. Lucienne Goldberg, who later became a literary agent and exposed US President Bill Clinton’s problems by befriending and tape recording Monica Lewinsky, is the only person to have interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Soviet Union.345 George deMohrenschildt was an unlikely character to link up with Oswald. DeMohrenschildt, a suave and sophisticated businessman with acquaintances in the CIA and a variety of intelligence services, was Russian born. His father was of German descent, though George obscured the fact by changing his name from “Von” to “De.” It was the Russian background that supposedly brought the deMohrenschildts together with the Oswalds. DeMohrenschildt told interviewer Jay Edward Epstein that he was asked to learn as much as he could about Oswald and his stay in Russia for his friend J. Walter Moore, a member of the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division.346 DeMohrenschildt said, “Lee Harvey Oswald was smart as hell. They make a moron out of him...ahead of his time...a kind of a hippie...too good in his knowledge of the Russian language not to have been instructed by someone. And I will tell you this — I am sure he did not shoot the president.” 347 On the other hand, when deMohrenschildt learned that the president had been shot on November 22, 1963, the first thing he asked was if the suspect’s name were Lee Oswald, claiming that his question was based on a subconscious hunch because he knew Oswald had a gun.348 DeMohrenschildt allegedly had ties with German, French, and Polish intelligence services as well as friendships with right-wing oilmen. In 1941 he had 344. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, 1992, p. 218. 345. Mahl, Tom. Espionage’s Most Wanted, Brassey’s, Washington, D.C., 2003, p. 86. 346. Hinckle, Warren and Turner, William. Deadly Secrets — The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the JFK Assassination, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 1992, p. 238. 347. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, 1992, p. 278. 348. Hinckle, Warren and Turner, William. Deadly Secrets — The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the JFK Assassination, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 1992, p. 238.

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7. The Assassination of JFK established a relationship with a distant cousin, Baron Konstantin von Maydell, in hopes of creating documentary films. Maydell at the time was the senior resident agent of the Nazi military intelligence service, Abwehr, and spent the rest of the war years interned in North Dakota under a cloud of suspicion. DeMohrenschildt had intelligence and oil relationships with George H.W. Bush in the early 1960s; Bush’s address and his company Zapata Petroleum are cited in one of DeMohrenschildt’s notebooks.349 In the mid-seventies deMohrenschildt began to suffer extreme bronchitis and paranoia. In 1976, he wrote an unpublished manuscript on Oswald entitled Patsy! I Am a Patsy!, based on remarks Oswald made to newsmen on the evening of November 22, 1963 at a Dallas police station. The night he completed it he tried, unsuccessfully, to commit suicide by swallowing tranquilizers. In 1977, following an interview with Epstein, deMohrenschildt shot himself. Epstein believed deMohrenschildt was despondent over the possibility of being forced to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), an opinion shared by HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi, the man who left his card at the house where deMohrenschildt was staying only hours before deMohrenschildt killed himself.350 Along with deMohrenschildt, Oswald has been linked to the Korean War hero, military intelligence officer (1955-59), CIA contract agent (1962-63), and alleged double agent Richard Nagell who had himself arrested in an El Paso, Texas bank robbery on September 20, 1963.351 Nagell told police officer Jim Bundren, “I’m glad you caught me. I really don’t want to be in Dallas.” He didn’t elaborate at the time but later revealed he had met Oswald in Mexico City and in Texas, and sent a registered letter in September of 1963 to J. Edgar Hoover (which was never acknowledged), claiming that there was a plot to kill President Kennedy that involved Oswald,352 and that while assigned to penetrate Soviet intelligence by the CIA, he was ordered by the Soviets to assassinate Oswald before he could murder Kennedy. Though the Warren Commission never mentions Nagell, he was the main topic of a two-hour interview with 349. Aarons, Mark and Loftus, Jack. The Secret War Against the Jews, St. Martins, New York, 1994, p. 369. 350. Russo, Gus. Live by the Sword, Bancroft Press, Baltimore, 1998, pp. 87-91. 351. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, 1992, pp. 43-45. 352. Kelin, John. “Richard Case Nagell: 1930-1995,” Fair Play, Jan.-Feb. 1996. Jim Garrison investigators interviewed David Kroman, a prisoner of Leavenworth Penitentiary and an acquaintance of Richard Case Nagell. The investigators reported that Nagell told Kroman that a right-wing extremist group financed by H.L. Hunt and some Batista sympathizers had plotted to assassinate Kennedy in Dec. of 1962.

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Peculiar Liaisons Marina Oswald by the Secret Service. 353 There are numerous connections between Oswald and Nagell,354 none being more significant than Nagell’s claim that he was asked by the CIA to investigate Oswald and an anti-Castro organization called Alpha 66. 355 Nagell told Dick Russell that he was assigned by Soviet intelligence to monitor an assassination plot to kill JFK. The source of the plot was never revealed but the Soviets wanted him to monitor Oswald, as well. The Soviets had nothing to gain by the death of JFK, and they had much to lose if an ex-citizen of the U.S.S.R. were to be linked with such a plot. This fear, Nagell believed, was the reason that the KGB had ordered him to kill Oswald. This led Nagell to remove himself from the web, and get himself into custody before he could be implicated further.356 Nagell’s claims are still considered unreliable by many researchers. Nagell went through harrowing events in his life: wounded three times in battle, two military plane crashes where he was the only survivor, and espionage work in various theaters both domestic and foreign. He and Oswald shared many experiences: both were from broken homes, had done military service, were interested in Marxism, apparently worked with American and Soviet intelligence, and are revealed through psychiatric analyses to have potentially unstable minds; and both were linked to the assassination of the president. Other acquaintances were Jerry Patrick Hemming, a mercenary soldier involved in anti-Castro activities; he was questioned by the FBI concerning a Johnson 30.06 rifle that is said to have been found in Dealey Plaza after the JFK assassination. Hemming claimed he met Oswald in Los Angeles, where Oswald told him he was a radar operator who was “helping the Cubans out with everything he knew.” 357 David Atlee Phillips, aka Maurice Bishop, a CIA agent involved in anti-Castro activities, was seen speaking with Oswald just weeks 353. Twyman, Noel. Bloody Treason, Laurel, Rancho Santa Fe, Ca., 1997, p. 607. 354. Ibid., pp. 612-3. Twyman provides a brief synopsis of “parallels” between Nagell and Oswald, such as a similar alias Hidell/Hidel; connections with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the US; owning miniature spy cameras; visiting Mexico City at the same time; having connections with the FBI and CIA and possible double agent status, to name just a few. 355. Ibid., p. 613. Alpha 66 carried out a series of attacks on Soviet ships in Cuban ports in March of 1963. JFK quickly disassociated himself and the government from the actions, which came on the heels of the Cuban missile crisis, though members of the group gave the impression in a Washington press conference that they had official backing. 356. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, 1992, p. 699. 357. Newman, John. Oswald and the CIA, Carroll and Graff, 1995, p. 104.

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7. The Assassination of JFK before the assassination, though Phillips denied meeting Oswald.358 A certain “Mr. Hunt” was the recipient of a November 8, 1963 hand-written letter linked to Oswald, who supposedly wrote, “I would like information concerding [sic] my position. I am asking only for information...we discuss the matter fully before steps are taken...“ 359 Then there is David Ferrie, Oswald’s Civil Air Patrol instructor, who claimed he never knew Oswald. Ferrie has been linked to the CIA and to New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw (the only man put on trial for complicity in the assassination of the president); he worked for the known antiKennedy Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello, and allegedly was engaged in group conversations in which he vehemently advocated the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

FERRIE AND THE NEFARIOUS David Ferrie’s life before and after the assassination is full of mystery and puzzling behavior. Cuban exiles christened him the “master of intrigue.” Jim Garrison, New Orleans D.A. during the Sixties, called him a key figure in the assassination of the president and “one of history’s most important individuals.” Garrison’s theory that Ferrie was part of a four-man assassination team that included Clay Shaw and Oswald was mentioned in a March 2, 1967 White House phone conversation between Governor John Connally and President Johnson.360 Robert Morrow, a CIA contract employee from 1959 to 1964, claims he worked with Ferrie on many CIA covert operations and believes that Ferrie was the “mastermind” behind the assassination.361 Raymond Broshears, who claimed he was a roommate of Ferrie’s, declared that Ferrie confided details to him concerning Ferrie’s role in the assassination. A former Ferrie associate, Jack Martin, contended that Ferrie was part of a plot to kill the president — only to withdraw his assertions and say that he was only imagining things. The Secret Service showed an almost immediate interest in Ferrie following the assassination. Ferrie’s activities and enigmatic behavior became a subject of concern for the 1978 House Select Committee’s investigation 358. Summers, Anthony, Conspiracy, Paragon, New York, 1989, pp. 504-6. See also Fonzi, Gaeton. The Last Investigation, Thunder’s Mouth, 1993. 359. Twyman, Noel. Bloody Treason, Laurel, Rancho Santa Fe, Ca., 1997, pp. 555-6. The letter was sent to investigator Penn Jones, Jr. from Mexico City in August of 1975 with a note in Spanish saying that another copy had been sent to the FBI.

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Peculiar Liaisons of the assassination, citing “several parallels in the lives of the two [Oswald and Ferrie]…: complex personality and political beliefs; difficulty in achieving normal social adjustment; and a pattern of visiting the same locality at the same time, and engaging in similar activities.”362 At the time of the assassination, Ferrie was a forty-five-year-old New Orleans resident. He possessed assorted talents and eccentricities. He was a pilot, having learned to fly in Cleveland at Sky Tech Inc. from 1942-45. He was a senior pilot with Eastern Airlines, until he was fired for homosexual activity on the job. He was also a hypnotist, accomplished pianist, a researcher of the origins of cancer, amateur psychologist, and a victim of a rare disease, alopecia, which made him lose his body hair. He listed his name in the telephone directory as Dr. Ferrie by right of a doctorate degree in psychology from an unaccredited school, Phoenix University of Bari, Italy. He was anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy, and antiCommunist; Ferrie was also a bishop of the Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America. His odd lifestyle was embellished by an equally odd appearance, featuring a red toupee and false eyebrows. Investigator and Harrison Livingstone met Ferrie and remembered him as “an intense and sinister, cynical, disgusting, disheveled individual who was excited at the prospect of preying upon the vulnerable, the helpless, and the innocent.” 360. Connally reported to President Johnson that Garrison believed Khrushchev and Kennedy made a deal after the 1962 missile crisis to allow Castro to stay in power. As the theory goes, six months later Robert Kennedy ordered the CIA to send assassination squads to Cuba to kill Castro but they failed and Castro sent four-man teams into the US to get JFK. In a March 2, 1967 conversation with Johnson, Governor Connally said: “Garrison has information that would prove that there were four assassination [teams]...assassins in the United States, sent here by [Fidel] Castro, or Castro’s people. [Sent] not by Castro himself, but one of his lieutenants...One of the teams was composed of Lee Harvey Oswald; this fella [Clay] Shaw, that has just been arrested in New Orleans yesterday; and the [deceased] man [David] Ferrie; plus one other man. They were teams of four. And there were two other teams that I know nothing about.” Connally gleaned much of this information from a WINS radio report in New York and a journalist, Paul Smith. Holland, Max. “The Assassination Tapes,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 2004, p. 87. 361. Robert Morrow’s 1992 book First Hand Knowledge details several CIA missions in which Ferrie acted as a pilot for several of Morrow’s covert operations in Cuba. Ferrie also served as an assistant to Morrow when he was instructed by the CIA to purchase weapons in Europe. Morrow candidly declares that Ferrie was the “brains” behind Shaw and Marcello’s various operations, and that Ferrie was the central planner of the assassination. 362. HSCA v. X, p. 394.

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7. The Assassination of JFK Ferrie had not always been anti-Castro. In the Fifties he flew guns to Castro’s rebel forces as they fought Bastista’s army in the Sierra Maestra. In August 1959, Miami custom agents who believed he was involved in gun smuggling put him under surveillance.363 After a twenty-six-hour surveillance and background investigation, Custom agents notified FAA officials that Ferrie was “not involved in any nefarious acts of wrongdoing.” In 1961, he flew bombing missions over Cuba and sometimes made daring landings to retrieve anti-Castro resistance fighters. When Castro announced his intentions to become a Communist, and aligned his political philosophy with Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, Ferrie turned against him. The development of communism in Cuba, and Kennedy’s inability to do anything about it, drove Ferrie to become a vociferous opponent of the president. He turned against Kennedy during the Bay of Pigs debacle, though in 1960 he had voted for Kennedy and was proud that a Catholic could win the presidency. His July 1961 speech before the New Orleans chapter of the Military Order of World Wars was cut off when he became too critical of Kennedy.364 Ferrie became a member of the anti-Castro Cuban Revolutionary Front, an organization financed by New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos “The Little Man” Marcello and organized by Sergio Arcacha Smith. By late April 1961 the Cuban Revolutionary Front became the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC). An FBI report from that month indicated that Marcello had contributed funds to Smith’s anti-Castro organization in exchange for promises of concessions in Cuba after Castro’s overthrow. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) stated that, based on the evidence available to it, anti-Castro Cuban groups were not involved in the assassination but that did not “preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.”365 The HSCA investigated the most violent and frustrated anti-Castro groups and their leaders, selecting from more than 100 Cuban exile organizations in existence in November 1963.366 363. Ibid., p. 109. 364. JFK document 014904. 365. HSCA Report, Section IC3. 366. Groups investigated by the HSCA included Alpha 66, the Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE), Commandos L, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), the Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE), the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), which included the Frente Revolucinario Democratico (FRD), the Junta del Gobiemo de Cuba en el Exilio (JGCE), the 30th of November, the International Penetration Forces (InterPen), the Revolutionary Recovery Movement (MRR), and the Ejercito Invasor Cubano (EIC).

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Peculiar Liaisons SERGIO ARCACHA SMITH, GUY BANISTER, AND THE CREATION OF LEGENDS Ferrie worked extensively with Sergio Arcacha Smith in counter-revolutionary activities. Ferrie had even built two miniature submarines, which he planned to use in an attack on Havana Harbor.367 He was questioned by the FBI on August 22, 1961 concerning the submarines and stated that he was “working with, and assisting, the Cuban Revolutionary Front, which is under the leadership of Sergio Arcacha Smith, 207 Balter Building, New Orleans, Louisiana, off and on since November 1960.” 368 In an interview with Gus Russo, Smith declared Ferrie a wonderful man, “who truly wanted to help our cause. He was a gentleman. He loved to play with my children. He was a good Catholic who only wanted to help. He wanted to fly into Havana harbor and bomb the refineries. Ferrie had an idea to make two-man submarines [built from the tanks of B-47 wings], to go in, and just blow [the refineries] up. We actually made two of them, but we were prevented from using them.”369 The HSCA discovered370 that in the summer of 1963, Ferrie became involved with Smith, Gordon Novel, and Layton Martens and others associated with New Orleans private investigator Guy Banister in a raid on a munitions dump in Houma, Louisiana, owned by the Schlumberger Company. The men took the stolen munitions to Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street. Novel claimed that the raid was not an illegal act but had been arranged by the CIA as part of Operation Mongoose, an official operation against Cuba developed by the National Security Council with the blessing of JFK in November of 1961. In a suit against Playboy, for having published Jim Garrison’s claim that Novel was with the CIA, Novel testified that Guy Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith worked under CIA operative David Atlee Phillips. Novel in the same testimony admitted that he had known Clay Shaw since 1959. Ferrie befriended Layton Martens through the Civil Air Patrol. Ferrie recruited him to work for the CRC as a fundraiser. Martens carried a letter from

367. The HSCA reported that the FAA, vo. 5 Attachment QQ document listed the submarines as being found “in Ferrie’s house.” 368. FBI 62-109060-4344, 62-109060-4535; CIA 1363-501. 369. Smith asked Eastern Airlines to give Ferrie a leave with pay for full-time work for the CRC. The request was denied, but Ferrie’s vacation in April 1961 coincided with the Bay of Pigs invasion. HSCA v. X, p. 109. The HSCA was unable to find out whether Ferrie had any role in the invasion. 370. HSCA v. X, p. 109.

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7. The Assassination of JFK Robert Kennedy that stated, “These persons are acting legitimately on behalf of the US government. Please extend to them any courtesy that you can in good faith.” Eventually, the letter was stolen from him; he believed Ferrie had taken it, thinking that Martens was too young to carry such an important document. Martens clearly believed that Ferrie was working for Robert Kennedy as a fundraiser “for the refugee assimilation here in New Orleans.”371 Martens, in a 1998 interview with Gus Russo, shed some light on Ferrie’s relationship with New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison. “For years, Ferrie had been trying to put Garrison in jail. Dave had helped Guy Banister compile ‘the bomb’ on Garrison. Garrison never forgave him for it.” The “bomb” was a thick file of allegedly incriminating evidence against Garrison that Ferrie kept in a briefcase. According to Martens, on November 25, 1963, Ray Comstock of Garrison’s office entered Ferrie’s apartment without a search warrant and removed the “bomb” file.372 HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi investigated a possible link between CIA operative David Atlee Phillips and Oswald. It is Fonzi’s belief that Phillips and another CIA man, Maurice Bishop, are the same person. An ex-accountant, Antonio Veciana, worked as a Cuban freedom fighter with the anti-Castro Cuban exile group Alpha 66 and was involved with CIA operations through Maurice Bishop. Veciana told Fonzi that he had seen Bishop talking to Oswald in the lobby of a Dallas office building in late August or early September of 1963. Though Oswald was residing in Louisiana at that time, Fonzi believes there are specific periods of time when Oswald’s whereabouts are unknown, specifically September 6–9, 1963. In March, 1962, Ferrie began work as a private investigator for G. Wray Gill, Marcello’s New Orleans attorney. This arrangement continued through 1963. Ferrie worked extensively for Marcello and Guy Banister, an anti-Communist ex-FBI agent whose office at 544 Camp Street (also known as 531 Lafayette) in New Orleans was also the home to a variety of right-wing and antiCastro organizations. It has been suggested by Weberman and Canfield that CIA agent E. Howard Hunt helped Sergio Arcacha Smith link up with Banister.373 Mark Lane also linked Hunt to a plot to assassinate JFK and Hunt sued him for it. Hunt won, but the decision was reversed in a 1985 trial. Banister had a 371. Interview with Layten Martens by Gus Russo. Gus Russo, Live by the Sword, Bancroft Press, Baltimore, 1998, p. 330. 372. Ibid., p. 330. 373. Weberman and Canfield. Coup d’etat in America, Quick American Archives, 1992, p. 36.

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Peculiar Liaisons colorful professional past that included involvement in the capture and killing of John Dillinger and work with Naval Intelligence. He conducted background investigations of CRC members for Smith. Gerry Patrick Hemming, a gun for hire, identified Banister as the man who, in September 1962, offered him a contract to assassinate JFK.374 Banister died of a heart attack in the summer of 1964. The HSCA reviewed his files and found Oswald’s name linked to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Guy’s brother Ross, a Louisiana State policeman, said that Guy “had mentioned seeing Oswald hand out Fair Play for Cuba literature on one occasion.” Ross Banister theorized that Oswald had stamped the 544 Camp St. on his literature to embarrass his brother.375 Ferrie worked with Banister at the same time he was employed with Gill. Ferrie, Banister, and Oswald all frequented the Mancuso Restaurant on the first floor of 544 Camp St, and may have met there.376 Part-time private investigator Daniel L. Lewis told Garrison that he was drinking coffee with Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts when a Cuban exile, Carlos Quiroga, who was involved in the Cuban Revolutionary Front, walked in with a man he introduced as Leon Oswald. A few days later Lewis said he entered Banister’s office and stumbled onto a meeting between Banister, Ferrie, Quiroga, Leon Oswald and another person.377 Though the owner of the building at 544 Camp St., Sam Newman, told the HSCA that he had not rented office space to Oswald,378 former Banister undercover worker Dan Campbell told Jim DiEugenio in a 1994 interview that Oswald was assigned an office in the summer of 1963 at 544 Camp St.379 Guy Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts told Anthony Summers that at least once Oswald and Ferrie went together to a Cuban exile training camp near New Orleans for rifle practice, though her credibility has rightly been questioned.380 In February of 1967, a New Orleans policeman claimed he had stopped Oswald and Ferrie in a car together near the military training grounds of Lake Pontchartrain early one morning in the fall of 1963 (it would have to have been 374. November in Dallas Conference, November 23, 1996, The Hemming Panel. 375. HSCA v. XIII, p. 491. 376. Deposition of Adrian T. Alba, May 5, 1978, HSCA p. 19 (JFK Document 0099641). 377. James, Rosemary and Wardlaw, Jack. Plot or Politics?, Pelican Publ., 1967, p. 49. 378. HSCA v. XIII, p. 466. 379. Peterson, Roger. “Declassified,” American History, July 1, 1996, p. 54. 380. According to Roberts, Banister told her directly that Oswald was working with their office. This information was obtained by Summers only when he paid her for an interview related to a television documentary. Roberts told Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, that she didn’t tell Summers “all the truth.”

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7. The Assassination of JFK early fall, because Oswald spent most of that season in Dallas). One of the men identified himself as Oswald, but the police officer was not clear on how the other man identified himself. Since then he has identified the other man as Ferrie. Though the officer took the men to headquarters, they were released due to insufficient evidence of any wrongdoing.381 Cuban intelligence chief General Fabian Escalante told Claudia Furiati that, “in New Orleans, in April and May 1963, Oswald’s primary activity in the Banister unit was as Ferrie’s assistant in the traffic of weapons for Pontchartrain. Banister also realized that Oswald was the perfect person to set up a pro-Castro front.”382 If Banister had any kind of “business” relations with Oswald or Ferrie, the purpose of a relation begs some questions: Why would an anti-Castro ex-FBI agent work directly with (1) Oswald, a Soviet defector who had supported proCastro activities, and (2) Ferrie, a rabidly anti-Castro self-styled investigator with links to a major Mafia figure (Marcello)? Were Oswald’s activities designed to create a specific intelligence persona, or “legend”?

CIVIL AIR PATROL Though Ferrie officially denied knowing Oswald, it is widely believed that he met him far before their alleged liaison at Camp Street. Both Ferrie and Oswald were members of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol in 1955. Ferrie was asked to leave the air patrol just before Oswald joined, but apparently he remained close to the members of the organization. A former schoolmate claimed that he, Oswald, and Ferrie all worked in the Civil Air Patrol. Edward Voebel told the Secret Service, “when he joined the CAP, Capt. Dave Ferrie, a former pilot or copilot for Delta or Eastern Airlines, was the commander.” 383 Several other members of the Civil Air Patrol also said that Oswald and Ferrie were in the organization at the same time. A photo taken by John Ciravolo in the summer of 1955 at a Civil Air Patrol picnic shows Ferrie and Oswald together.384 Roy McCoy, a former member of the same CAP, called the FBI on 381. HSCA 180-10090-10315. 382. Furiati, Claudia. ZR Rifle — The Plot to Kill Kennedy and Castro, Ocean, 1994, pp. 148-9. 383. CE 3119, p. 771, Secret Service report 00-2-34,030. Voebel also claimed, with no additional substantiation, that he spotted Ferrie on television in a Dallas crowd only hours after the assassination in Dallas. Joesten, Joachim. The Garrison Inquiry: Truth or Consquences, Dawnay, London, 1967. 384. Groden, Robert. The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald, Penguin Studio, 1995, p. 76.

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Peculiar Liaisons November 27, 1963 and told agents about a phone call his wife received from Ferrie on that day. Ferrie was “seeking information about Oswald and photographs of Oswald to show that he was not acquainted with Oswald.”385 Another CAP member, Jerry Paradis, told the HSCA, “Oswald and Ferrie were in the unit together. I know they were because I was there. I specifically remember Oswald. I can remember him clearly, and Ferrie was heading the unit then. I’m not saying that they may have been there together, it is a certainty.”386

JACK MARTIN’S ACCUSATIONS Ferrie’s name was first tied to the Kennedy assassination during an FBI interview between agent Jerry P. Stein and New Orleans private investigator Jack S. Martin, on November 25, 1963. Martin told the FBI that Ferrie had a relationship with the accused assassin Oswald. This certainly must have been unwelcome news to the FBI. The day before, the only suspect in the case had been murdered — and now there were others to investigate. Martin’s claims seemed in equal parts disturbing and outrageous. He claimed that Ferrie had instructed Oswald in the use of a rifle; he may have hypnotized Oswald and ordered him to shoot the president; he had seen rifles like the one Oswald supposedly killed the president with in Ferrie’s apartment; and Ferrie was in Texas on the day of the shooting, acting as Oswald’s getaway pilot — an allegation that proved to be false. 387 In 1978, Martin told the HSCA that on the afternoon of November 22, 1963 he was having drinks with Guy Banister when their discussion began to revolve around long distance phone calls and politics. The two returned to Banister’s infamous 544 Camp St. office, where they came to blows after Martin’s off-hand 385. FBI file # 89-69. 386. In 1954 Oswald joined the Civil Air Patrol. In an interview with Look magazine in 1967, Oswald’s brother Robert told a reporter, “According to Lee’s own later statement, 1954 was the year when he first became interested in communism...I can’t help wondering whether it might have been Ferrie who introduced Lee to communist ideas. I realize that I have nothing solid on which to base such a speculation, except the timing.” 387. Martin’s claim that Ferrie was in Texas was found to be false. Ferrie’s Stinson Voyager airplane was found to be inoperable. An FAA document showed that Martin believed that Ferrie’s airplane was airworthy as of July 1963, or that Ferrie had access to a Stinson. Martin retracted his allegations concerning Ferrie in a statement to the Secret Service. HSCA v. X, p. 115.

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7. The Assassination of JFK remark, “What are you going to do, kill me like you all did Kennedy?” Banister became furious and beat Martin with a pistol. Martin called the New Orleans police but later declined to press charges. At approximately 3:30 p.m. on November 22, only two hours after the assassination, Ferrie rushed to Oswald’s former landlady, Mrs. Jessie Garner, in New Orleans and asked if she knew anything about a library card with his name on it that Oswald might have used. Ferrie then rushed to an ex-neighbor of Oswald’s and again asked if she knew anything about the card, but again he got no answer.388 If Ferrie never had any contact with Oswald, why would he be so concerned; and unless the media quickly published or broadcast Oswald’s exact New Orleans address, how would he have known where Oswald had lived? Ferrie seems to have been afraid the authorities would find out about their friendship and he may have wanted to destroy something else among Oswald’s effects that would show they knew each other. As John Canal writes, Ferrie probably made up the “innocent sounding” library card story because he couldn’t ask Garner to allow him to search Oswald’s room “for anything that had to do with exiles or CIA-Mafia assassination plots.”389 However, the library card story would come back to haunt Ferrie. Canal proposes that the story was passed on to the New Orleans police. Immediately following the “search” for the bogus library card, Ferrie made a phone call to Houston to reserve a room at the Alamotel, a motel owned by Carlos Marcello. When asked why he took the trip to Houston, Ferrie told federal authorities that he and two male companions drove all night on November 22, 1963, 350 miles, through a fierce thunderstorm to Houston to go goose hunting in Texas. The purpose of the trip was “rest and relaxation.”390 He also claimed the trip was designed to gather information on how to run an ice skating rink, a business he wished to open in New Orleans. On November 23, Ferrie visited the Winterland Skating Rink managed by Chuck Rolland. But Rolland told authorities he never spoke to Ferrie about the skating rink business. All Ferrie did, said Rolland, was make and receive phone calls for hours, at a pay phone. Records from the motels Ferrie used during this trip show two calls to radio stations WSHO and WDSH in New Orleans and a collect call to the Town and Country Motel, Marcello’s New Orleans headquarters.391 Was this visit to Houston the 388. HSCA v. XII, p. 456. 389. Canal, John. Silencing the Lone Assassination, Paragon, St. Paul, MN, 2001, p. 93. 390. HSCA v. XII, p. 451. 391. Ibid., p. 455.

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Peculiar Liaisons first leg of a trip to Dallas designed to eliminate Oswald, on Marcello’s orders, or was he supposed to act as a getaway pilot, was it an innocent recreational trip, or something else?392 A teletype from the New Orleans FBI office to FBI headquarters informed Director Hoover that Carlos Marcello’s attorney G. Wray Gill had notified Ferrie about the library card. An inventory of Oswald’s personal property by the Dallas P.D. shows no record of a library card. On the evening of November 23, 1963, Ferrie drove to Galveston, stayed the night, and returned to New Orleans the next day. Noel Twyman suggests that there may be a possible connection between Ferrie and Oswald’s assassin Jack Ruby, through Ferrie’s trip to Galveston after the ice-skating rink episode. He writes that Ferrie was in Galveston the same time that Ruby called (11:44 p.m. November 23) his friend Breck Wall at Thomas McKenna’s house. Twyman does not elaborate on why Wall and McKenna would be involved, but he sets forth a theory that Ferrie could have passed the word from Marcello through Wall that Ruby was to eliminate Oswald.393 Why was Martin accusing Ferrie?394 As previously mentioned, Banister might have been trying to create a suspicious persona for Ferrie, but it should also be noted that Ferrie had physically thrown Martin out of Gill’s office in May of 1963, so that Martin may have harbored a grudge against Ferrie. A Secret Service report concluded that “information furnished by Jack S. Martin to the effect that David William Ferrie associated with Lee Harvey Oswald at New Orleans and trained Oswald in the use of a rifle” was “without foundation.” The report further stated that Martin had the appearance of an alcoholic, and had a reputation of furnishing incorrect information to law enforcement officers. Additionally, Martin told the FBI that his information about Ferrie and Oswald 392. Garrison believed the ice rink acted as a message center for Ferrie; his objective at the ice rink has never been revealed. However, Al Beauboeuf, a former roller skating champion, believed that investing in an ice skating rink could be profitable. For three weeks before the assassination, they had discussed the trip. Beauboeuf passed a lie detector on this issue in May of 1967. James, Rosemary and Ward, Jack. Plot or Politics, Pelican Publishing, 1967, p. 44. 393. Twyman, Noel. Bloody Treason, Laurel, 1997, p. 275. 394. Investigator Mike Sylwester suggests that framing Ferrie would implicate Marcello, an act that would only benefit other possible conspirators. The FBI questioned Gill about how he learned that Ferrie’s card had been found in Oswald’s wallet, but Gill replied that he could not recall who told him the “rumor.” “The Kennedy Contract: A Review,” The Fourth Decade, November 1993, v. 1 no. 1, p. 25. Davis, John H. The Kennedy Contract, McGraw Hill, 1992, pp. 113-114.

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7. The Assassination of JFK was “a figment of his imagination and that he had made up the story after reading the newspapers and watching television.”395 Peter Dale Scott has developed a theory concerning the manipulation of not only Oswald, but Ferrie as well. Scott contends that Martin’s false accusations against Ferrie were orchestrated by Banister to set up a legend that would help camouflage what was going on. “Ferrie was most probably in the same position as Oswald: an employee of a private investigation, who at some point was hired, probably unwittingly, to create a record or ‘legend’ falsely linking himself to the assassination.”396

THE MANY FACES OF WILLIE O’KEEFE Oliver Stone’s film JFK created a fictional character, Willie O’Keefe, to tell the many stories of four real people: Perry Russo, Raymond Broshears, Dave Logan, and William Morris. Logan and Morris provided stories linking Shaw and Ferrie together, but under closer investigation their stories have been found fictional.397 Raymond Broshears, who claimed he was an ex-roommate of Ferrie, said that Ferrie had told him that he went to Houston the day after the assassination to await a call from a man who was, allegedly, one of the gunmen. This man was to fly from Dallas to Houston in a twin-engine plane that would take them to Central America and eventually to South Africa, where the US government had no extradition treaty. Ferrie was to serve as a co-pilot for the gunmen and another companion who was purportedly deeply involved in the assassination. The men had code names; the only one Broshears could remember was “Garcia.” Ferrie said he never received the phone call. Ferrie told Broshears that the assassins panicked and tried to fly non-stop to Mexico, but they crashed off the coast of Corpus Christi and perished.

395. Secret Service report 12-13-63, New Orleans Office, Agent Anthony Gerrets, Warren Commission Document 87. 396. Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Berkeley and L.A., University of California Press, 1993. On the day Oswald handed out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans with the address of 544 Camp St. printed on them, Ferrie was leading an anti-Castro demonstration a few blocks away. 397. Reitzes, David. “Who is ‘Willie O’Keefe’?,” http://www.jfk-online.com/ jfk100okeefe.html

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Peculiar Liaisons Broshears told Dick Russell in 1975 that Ferrie believed Kennedy was a Communist. Ferrie had told him that he knew Oswald and that he felt Oswald did not shoot the president. Ferrie thought that Oswald believed he was working for Castro, but in reality he was a pawn in an anti-Castro conspiracy. The plotters wanted to make the assassination look like it was a communist conspiracy. In 1963, Ferrie told Broshears that four people would shoot from different angles. Later in 1964 he said one fired from a sewer opening, another from the grassy knoll, and one from behind the motorcade. Funding for the plot came from Marcello, Ferrie told Broshears, and Clay Shaw knew many things about the plot but did not engineer it. Broshears may have never been a roommate of Ferrie; none of Ferrie’s friends remembers Broshears; and his truthfulness has been questioned in every detail. Garrison realized that the information Logan, Morris, and Broshears provided concerning Ferrie could not be substantiated and he refused to have them testify at Clay Shaw’s trial. However, it was a different story with Russo. In September 1963, Perry Raymond Russo, a New Orleans insurance agent, attended a party at Ferrie’s apartment. In an interview with a Garrison aide, Assistant DA of Baton Rouge Andrew Sciambra, in February 1967, Russo detailed how, after the party broke up, a group of anti-Castro Cubans began talking of the possibilities of assassinating Fidel Castro. Ferrie introduced Russo to a tall, distinguished-looking white-haired man named Clem Bertrand; Garrison believed that was an alias of Clay Shaw. Whether Russo really encountered Shaw became the subject of an acute controversy during Garrison’s trial of Clay Shaw. Ferrie also introduced Russo to a bearded man named Leon, whom Ferrie said was a real nut about guns. The conversation eventually drifted to the subject of Kennedy’s inability to control the communists in Cuba. Ferrie dramatically took the floor and discussed the possibility of killing Castro; he illustrated his points by showing a map of Cuba, where the assassination team could land, and the routes to and from Havana. Sciambra quoted Russo as saying, “Ferrie became obsessed with the idea that an assassination could be carried out in the US....He was the kind of person who could successfully plan an assassination...He was the key to the availability of [an] exit as he could jump into any plane under the sun and fly it out of the country to a place that would not extradite, such as Cuba or Brazil.” Russo also recognized a picture of Sergio Arcacha Smith when Sciambra presented it to him; Russo’s brother Steve recognized Smith as being associated with Ferrie.

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7. The Assassination of JFK Russo spoke of Ferrie’s weird weekly black masses where he wore a black toga, worshipped with a chalice of animal blood, induced friends into hypnotic trances, and called himself a priest of the “American Eastern Catholic Orthodox Church.” Russo additionally claimed that Ferrie tried to hypnotize him. Russo said Ferrie at one time spoke of killing Kennedy and blaming it on Castro, to give anti-Castro activists an excuse to invade Cuba. An assassination followed by an invasion would achieve two of Ferrie’s goals — the demise of Castro and Kennedy — and open Cuba to free enterprise. He believed Kennedy could be killed by a triangulation of rifle fire. Ferrie elaborated, saying that two shooters would create diversionary shots and the third shooter would make the kill.398 In interviews with authors Patricia Lambert and Gerald Posner during the 1990s, Russo confessed that he thought Shaw was completely innocent of any complicity in the assassination, that Garrison should have never prosecuted Shaw, and that if he were on the Shaw jury he would have voted for Shaw’s acquittal.

CLAY SHAW Shaw categorically denied ever knowing or meeting Oswald or Ferrie during his testimony at his trial in New Orleans. He did admit to knowing Ferrie’s roommate, Layton Martens, but denied knowing that Martens was acquainted with Ferrie. Nicholas and Matilda Tadin testified to the contrary at his trial. The Tadins knew Ferrie as a flight instructor for their teenage son. In the summer of 1964, they saw Ferrie and Shaw exit from a hangar at Lakefront Airport in New Orleans. Nicholas Tadin quoted Ferrie as saying that Shaw was a friend of his and that he was in charge of the International Trade Mart. Shaw’s attorney questioned the Tadins’ testimony, but it was never proven false. Another report that Shaw and Ferrie may have known each other came from a HSCA report claiming that Ferrie had flown a “high official” of Freeport Sulphur Co. (possibly Robert Kennedy’s friend, former Senator Paul Douglas) to Cuba along with Clay Shaw.399 It is well known that Oswald used the alias of A.J. Hidell and that Clay Shaw, the subject of Jim Garrison’s New Orleans investigation into the assassi-

398. Interview with Perry Raymond Russo at the Mercy Hospital on February 27, 1967 by Andrew Sciambra.

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Peculiar Liaisons nation, may have used an alias of Lambert. House Select Committee on Assassinations records released in 1993 revealed a flight plan (HSCA RG 233) dated April 8, 1963, that names the pilot as “Ferrie,” flying three passengers: Hidell, Lambert, and Diaz, from New Orleans to Garland, Texas. This would appear to be a very important document linking Ferrie, the known alias of Oswald (Hidell), and the alleged alias of Shaw (Lambert), though it was never mentioned in the Shaw trial. On November 8, 1978 the HSCA asked Garrison whether the document came from his files, and Garrison said that he believed it did. The only other comment he had about the flight plan was that it “looked quite credible” but that he and his investigators were unable to determine if it was genuine. Though Shaw and Ferrie denied knowing each other, two photos taken in 1949 show both men together at two different social gatherings.400 The HSCA disclosed that Shaw and Ferrie flew to Montreal in the fall of 1963. The HSCA speculated that Ferrie and Shaw were there to meet Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, who was a board member of Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). Bloomfield was allegedly a close confidant of J. Edgar Hoover, the principal recruiter for the FBI’s Division Five counterintelligence section, and a confidant of the Canadian William Stephenson, “the Man Called Intrepid,” the man thought to be responsible for recruiting Mafia hitmen to eliminate German spies during World War II. CMC was an international trade organization centered in Rome; it was a CIA front organization used for international secret spying and a classified information communications conduit among countries where the CIA operated.401 Vernon Bundy, a self confessed heroin addict, testified at the Shaw trial that he saw Shaw meet Oswald along Lake Pontchartrain one day in June 1963 — while Bundy was shooting heroin. In testimony only two weeks after Shaw’s arrest Bundy described “Oswald” as a “real junkie,” and said his name was “Pete.”402 Bundy’s testimony provided some interesting observations: that Shaw 399. HSCA, Outside Contact Report, July 6, 1978. A March 1967 FBI report cited Jim Garrison’s investigation that “a group of Cuban refugees training near Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, presumably during the period Oswald resided in New Orleans...these Cubans reportedly had been ‘left in the lurch’ and had become angry at everyone...some of these Cubans attended a meeting in the apartment of David William Ferrie. One of the Cubans was named Diaz...also present at the meeting were Clay Bertrand, aka Clay Shaw...” FBI report 62-109060. 400. Groden, Robert. The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald, Penguin Studio, 1995, p. 18. 401. HSCA, JFK Record Number 157-10005-10276.

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7. The Assassination of JFK gave Oswald money; Oswald said, “What am I gonna tell her?”; a Fair Play for Cuba leaflet fell from Oswald’s pants as he stuffed the money into his pocket; Shaw had a twisted walk (due to a bad back, Shaw did walk with a halting gait); Shaw arrived at the lake in a black limousine, which sounded similar to the limousine witnessed in Clinton, Louisiana during the voter registration incident, yet to be presented, where witnesses claimed to have seen Shaw with Oswald and Ferrie in August and September of 1963. An affidavit accompanying the HSCA RG 233 document claims that Georgian Edward J. Girnus stated in 1967 that one of Clay Shaw’s aliases was Lambert. Girnus told Assistant District Attorney James Alcock that he had met with Clay Shaw and Oswald in New Orleans during April 1963 to discuss the purchase of guns. Shaw told Girnus that he knew people who wanted to buy guns.403 After Shaw made a phone call, Oswald and an unknown man entered the office to discuss the deal. Girnus also said he saw Shaw and Oswald at a party held at an old colonial house he thought was owned by Shaw. Alvin Beauboeuf, one of Ferrie’s friends who accompanied him on the mysterious Houston ice rink trip, claimed Garrison investigators offered him $3000 and a job with an airline if he agreed to further link Shaw with Ferrie. Fred Lemanns, owner of a New Orleans Turkish bath, alleged that Garrison had offered to finance a private club for him if he would sign a statement maintaining he had known Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand and that Shaw and Oswald visited his establishment.404 The HSCA discovered that the CIA had planted a number of agents on Garrison’s staff. According to Victor Marchetti, CIA director Richard Helms was concerned about Garrison’s investigation and thought that he might open some doors that the CIA would prefer to keep closed.405 Layton Martens told Gus Russo, “Between Morris Brownlee, Al Beauboeuf, and Alan Campbell, one or more of us were at Dave’s apartment practi402. Posner, Gerald. “Garrison Guilty, Another Case Closed,” New York Times, August 6, 1995. As ludicrous as this sounds, Bundy survived cross-examination from Shaw’s attorney Irvin Dymond. Several members of the Garrison camp did not want Bundy to testify, but Garrison insisted. 403. HSCA, RG 233. 404. Kirkwood, James. American Grotesque, Harper, 1968, p. 175. 405. Fonzi, Gaeton. The Last Investigation, Thunder’s, 1993, pp. 239, 375. Richard Helms, CIA director in 1967, wrote in his 2003 autobiography that from 1948 to 1956 Shaw offered information to the Domestic Contacts Service (DCS), a division of the CIA. The DCS offered no compensation for information from informants and took only voluntary information from American travelers, usually businessmen.

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Peculiar Liaisons cally every night that year [1963]. None of us ever heard any talk of killing Kennedy, none of us ever saw Clay Shaw, and none of us remember a Perry Russo....I know that Garrison actually paid Russo $5,000. He offered $10,000 to Al Beauboeuf.” Garrison said to Martens, at a meeting at Garrison’s house, “Here’s what I want you to say: you saw Ferrie and Oswald. If you play along, you can have money, a good job, cars . . .” Beauboeuf’s attorney secretly taped one of Garrison’s staff offering him a bribe.406

GENERAL WALKER, NIXON, AND COLONEL RIVERA On April 1, 1963, Oswald was fired from his position from Jaggars-ChilesStovall as a photo developer. While he had been working there, Oswald used the equipment to develop photos Marina had taken of him in their backyard as he held the socialist newspaper The Militant and his infamous Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. One of these photos appeared on the cover of Life magazine after the assassination. On April 10, he told Marina he had been fired. He wrote a note, listing eleven items to help Marina if he was “alive and taken prisoner.” Marina read the note and became concerned when Lee was still away from the house until a little before midnight. When he did get home, Marina testified to the Warren Commission, he told her he had taken a shot at General Edwin Walker, and then buried the rifle.407 Walker was a Korean War hero who had been forced to retire due to his radical rightwing comments concerning the government. Indeed, at 9:10 p.m. that night, someone had fired a rifle into a window narrowly missing Walker. The bullet fragment was too mangled to be traced to any weapon. Whether Oswald did it, and whether he acted alone or with someone else, are open questions.408 On April 21, Oswald dressed in a suit and placed a pistol in his pocket. He told Marina that former vice-president Richard Nixon was in town and hinted that he was going to try to find him. Horrified, Marina would not allow him to leave the house; at one point during the day she barricaded Lee in a bathroom until he promised not to go out.409 At least, that is one of the stories she told; her 406. Russo, Gus. Live By the Sword, Bancroft Press, Baltimore, p. 411. 407. WC v. IX, p. 317. 408. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, New York, 2003, revised edition, pp. 206-7. 409. Posner, Gerald. Case Closed, Random House, New York, 1993, p. 120.

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7. The Assassination of JFK testimony in the long run appears to have been full of inconsistencies and her credibility is subject to doubt. Sometime during the same month a curious encounter between Dr. Adele Edisen and Dr. Jose Rivera eerily portended the fates of Oswald and Kennedy.410 Edisen and Rivera met each other at a professional meeting in Washington D.C. Rivera introduced himself as a science administrator with the National Institute of Neurological Diseases, and made it clear that he had worked with hypnosis and LSD during his career. Edisen noted that Rivera was addressed by an acquaintance as Colonel Rivera. Polite conversation brought out the fact that Edisen lived in New Orleans, where Rivera had taught at Loyola University. When Rivera mentioned knowing a Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans, Edisen assumed that Oswald was a professional colleague. Curiously, within the same context, Rivera encouraged Edisen, whenever he might be in Dallas, to visit Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club in Dallas. Then Rivera asked Edisen to do him a favor: to contact Lee Oswald, whom he claimed to have taught at Loyola University. Rivera wanted to know when Oswald planned to leave New Orleans. He told Edisen to call Oswald and tell him to “kill the chief.” Then Rivera cryptically added, without elaborating, that “we” are playing a joke on him. He also said that Oswald was not what he seemed, and that after “it’s over” in November someone would kill Oswald. When Edisen asked for more details, Rivera refused. Upon returning to New Orleans, Edisen called the phone number that Rivera had provided. First, he spoke to Marina Oswald, who claimed she did not know a Jose Rivera. Edisen called later and spoke to a man who identified himself as Lee Harvey Oswald; he also said he did not know Rivera. After the assassination, Edisen was determined to tell the FBI the full details of his strange encounter with “Colonel” Rivera. On November 24, 1963, he traveled to Washington to speak with agent Rice and gave him Rivera’s phone number. Rice said nothing about Edisen’s story other than to assure him that Rivera was harmless. The FBI has since told Edisen that they have no record of Edisen’s meeting with Rice on November 24, 1963.411

410. Turner, K.S. “From April To November and Back Again,” The Third Decade v. 8, n. 1, pp. 1-5, November 1991. 411. Kelly, William E. “A New Oswald Witness Goes Public,” September, 1999. http:// www.pir.org/edisen.html.

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Peculiar Liaisons FERRIE, CANCER, AND DR. SHERMAN A medical treatise on cancer was found in Ferrie’s apartment after his death. It has been speculated that Ferrie wrote the document, but recent research has questioned this theory. Ferrie was interested in cancer, but why he had such a fervent interest in the subject is unknown. Also in his apartment were laboratory mice that he supposedly used in experiments related to cancer. He had established a laboratory over his garage, where he claimed to have lost his hair due to experimentation with radiation, a chemical explosion, and cancer research experiments.412 Ed Haslam’s book Mary, Ferrie, and the Monkey Virus investigates Ferrie’s potential link to the mysterious murder of a brilliant orthopedic surgeon and cancer researcher Dr. Mary Sherman. Haslam believes that Sherman was involved in secret research into the possibility that polio vaccines were carcinogenic and would eventually cause cancer in those who were vaccinated. The vaccines were being promoted by the National Institute of Health (NIH), an organization of which Jose Rivera was a member. Haslam speculates that Sherman was engaged in research to find a way to counteract the carcinogenic effect of the vaccine, but she was stabbed to death and then her body was partially burned. Sherman’s death has remained a mystery. Haslam writes that there is reason to believe that someone murdered Sherman, stole some of her papers, and tried to cover up the murder with a fire. The medical treatise on cancer that was found in Ferrie’s apartment had no name associated with it, but it is Haslam’s contention that an extremely knowledgeable person in the field wrote the paper in 1956, and not Ferrie. Polio vaccines were in those days manufactured with polio viruses grown on the kidneys of monkeys. In 1959, Bernice Eddy found that cancer-causing monkey viruses had been found in the polio vaccines. When the NIH found out about Eddy’s research, her professional career was finished. A US Congressional inquiry was made into Eddy’s allegations, but nothing came of the investigation.413 Haslam reminds us of evidence that suggests that the AIDS virus is caused by a monkey virus that mutated sometime before 1969. Haslam speculates that this kind of virus could most probably have been created in a laboratory that 412. HSCA v. XII, p. 401. 413. Haslam, Edward T. Mary, Ferrie, and the Monkey Virus, Wordsworth, 1995.

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7. The Assassination of JFK benefited from a high level of medical knowledge, funding, and equipment — and was possibly intended for use as a biological weapon.

MARCELLO, OSWALD, AND DEALEY PLAZA During his public war on organized crime, Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, deported crime boss Carlos Marcello. On April 6, 1961 Marcello was whisked away in a plane and dumped on a Guatemalan beach. Two months later Marcello found his way back into the country, possibly piloted by David Ferrie.414 Marcello vowed to get even. In September 1962, private investigator Ed Becker met with Ferrie’s boss, Carlos Marcello. He hoped to obtain funds from Marcello for an oil venture. During a whiskey-laced conversation at Marcello’s country estate in Louisiana, Becker mentioned the deportation. Marcello angrily announced that Robert Kennedy “would be taken care of.” However, he hinted that it would be done in a roundabout manner. He declared that to kill a dog, “you don’t cut off the tail, but the head.” The head would be the president, and the plan would include finding a nut to take the blame, “the way they do it in Sicily.”415 On November 9–10 and 16–17, the two weekends prior to the assassination, Ferrie was working with Carlos Marcello at Marcello’s remote farmhouse known as Churchill Farms. When asked about these meetings Ferrie told the FBI that they met to “map out a strategy for Marcello’s trial,” The United States v. Carlos Marcello. An FBI report of April 1961 indicated Marcello offered Sergio Arcacha Smith a deal whereby Marcello would make a substantial donation to his anti-Castro movement in return for concessions in Cuba after Castro’s ouster. Carlos Quiroga, the Cuban involved in the Cuban Revolutionary Front and seen at Mancuso’s by David Lewis, said Ferrie lent Sergio Arcacha Smith money when he needed it for his family. This generosity occurred just after Ferrie lost his job with Eastern airlines.416 On the day of the assassination Ferrie 414. HSCA v. X, p. 112. 415. Marcello employed Oswald’s uncle Charles Murret as a bookmaker in the New Orleans gambling world. In the 1970s the FBI wiretapped many of Marcello’s phone conversations. However, the FBI has refused to release 161 reels of tape containing these conversations. An FBI informant, Joe Hauser, who claimed he made several of these recordings, told author John H. Davis that Marcello spoke of involvement in the assassination and that he personally knew Oswald. 416. HSCA v. XII, p. 442.

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Peculiar Liaisons was in a courtroom with Carlos Marcello. Marcello was found innocent of all charges brought against him by Robert Kennedy. Jim Garrison, a friend of C. Wray Gill, decided to check the records of telephone calls made from Gill’s office during November 1963. He found that the records were missing, and that Ferrie had had access to them. Gill told Garrison that Ferrie had made numerous long distance phone calls from Gill’s office in 1962 and 1963. During questioning by New Orleans D.A. assistant Herman Kohlman and Secret Service Agent John Rice, Ferrie denied that he had been in Dallas in the past eight to ten years. However, a close investigation of Gill’s phone records by Canadian researcher Peter Whitmey shows that Ferrie had made several visits to Dallas; numerous phones calls from the Dallas and Forth Worth area were charged to his account.417 Phone records show Ferrie called Dallas from New Orleans as late as August 10, 1963; called New Orleans from Fort Worth on September 10, 1963; and called New Orleans from Houston November 17, 1963 (a call that appeared on a December billing). Clearly, Ferrie had lied about his visits to Dallas. Minutes after the assassination an investigation of the Dal-Tex Building, situated at Elm and Houston Streets overlooking Dealey Plaza, turned up a man named Eugene Brading. Brading had recently had his name changed to Jim Braden. An elevator man had noticed a suspicious person using the freight elevator, and he called the police. The police questioned Braden who said he had taken the elevator to the third floor to find a telephone. The police released Braden, not knowing his real identity. Eugene Brading was a convicted felon, a thief and embezzler with alleged ties to the supposedly Mafioso-related Smalldone family of Denver. Braden had stayed at the Cabana Motel in Dallas the night before. The Campisi brothers, Joe and Sam, who had close relationships with Jack Ruby and Carlos Marcello, owned the Cabana. Joe Campisi had played golf and visited the racetrack with the Marcello brothers on several occasions. In 1978, Campisi proudly told congressional investigators that he sent hundreds of pounds of sausage to Marcello each Christmas. Ruby had visited the Cabana’s Egyptian Lounge the night before the shooting, had met with a Chicago businessman named Lawrence Meyers, and made several phone calls, some as late as 2:30 a.m. on the day of the assassination. Early on the day of the assassination, Braden had checked in with parole officers at a Dallas federal courthouse. He 417. Whitmey, Peter R. “Did David Ferrie Lie to the Secret Service?” The Fourth Decade, January 1996, v. 3, no. 2, pp. 5-9.

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7. The Assassination of JFK gave his New Orleans address as the same building and floor where David Ferrie kept an office. Despite many efforts to link Brading to a conspiracy, no one has succeeded in making a credible case. Brading testified in front of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, professing his innocence. Other FBI investigations at this time focused on New Orleans. The more agents investigated Ferrie’s life, the more links they found with Oswald. The relationship surely caused some suspicion in the FBI because they knew Ferrie had a verifiable relationship with Carlos Marcello.418 Just when the investigation was yielding clearer links between all of these individuals, Director Hoover abruptly closed it — on December 6, 1963, only two weeks after the assassination. None of the information the FBI collected concerning Ferrie was ever presented to the Warren Commission. David Belin, a former Warren Commission counsel, wrote a book in 1988, Final Disclosure, in which he defended the Warren Commission’s findings that Oswald was the sole gunman. Belin never mentions David Ferrie. On June 9, 1988, an FBI document (CR137A-5467-69) was released that outlined testimony from an unknown man concerning Marcello and his interest in the Kennedys. The document, which was heavily edited, read in part, “Marcello was talking about the Kennedys. He told me and my friend about a meeting with Oswald. He had been introduced to Oswald by a man named Ferris [sic — a typo referring to Ferrie?], who was Marcello’s pilot. He said that the [meeting] had taken place in his brother’s restaurant [La Louisiane Restaurant]...He said that Ruby was a homo son of a bitch but good to have around to report to him what was happening in town...He flew into a rage...and said, “Yea, I had the little son of a bitch killed, and I would do it again. . .”419

WHISPERS OF PLOTS On February 13, 1964, Canadian Richard Giesbrecht unwittingly overheard a conversation between two men in the Horizon Room of the Winnipeg

418. On November 26, 1963 a Georgian businessman, Gene Summer, told the FBI that he was sure he saw Oswald accept money from a man he believed was the owner of the Town and Country restaurant in Louisiana. 419. O’Leary, Brad and Seymour, L.E. Triangle of Death — The Shocking Truth About the Role of South Vietnam and the French Mafia in the Assassination of JFK, WND Books, Nashville, Tennessee, 2003, p. 179.

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Peculiar Liaisons International Airport. Giesbrecht noticed that one of the men had “the oddest hair and eyebrows I’d ever seen.” He later told the FBI that he was certain that the man was David Ferrie. Ferrie’s companion was approximately the same age as him, late forties, wore a hearing aid and spoke with a Latin accent. Giesbrecht heard Ferrie tell his companion that he was concerned about how much Oswald had told his wife about the plot to kill Kennedy. They spoke of the Warren Commission investigation and discussed a man called “Isaacs” and his relationship with Oswald, and wondered why he had gotten involved with someone so “psycho” as Oswald. One of the men lamented the fact that Isaacs had been caught on television film sometime during the Dallas motorcade. Ferrie said that “they” had more money than ever. Then Giesbrecht caught a snippet of a conversation relating to a meeting that was to take place in March in Missouri, since there had been no meeting since November of 1963. Giesbrecht immediately contacted the FBI, through his attorney. He gave details of the conversation, and after seeing a picture of Ferrie asserted that Ferrie was the man he had seen and heard at the Winnipeg airport. After questioning Giesbrecht and telling him that his information was important and was “the break we’ve been waiting for,” the FBI contacted him several months later and told him to forget about the matter — because it was too serious. They cited the fact that he was a Canadian and there would be nothing the FBI could do for him if he needed protection. In a 1969 interview, Giesbrecht told writer Paris Flammonde that he was 100% certain the man he saw at the Winnipeg Airport was David Ferrie. Jim Garrison spoke to Giesbrecht about testifying at the Shaw trial. Giesbrecht claimed that he was threatened with harm to his family, and notified Garrison that he would not come to New Orleans and testify.420 The FBI interviewed two “Isaacs” who could possibly have a connection to the case. In March 1964, Martin Isaacs, a social worker in New York City, was interviewed about his involvement with the Oswalds when they first arrived in the US from Russia. They also interviewed Charles R. Isaacs, in January 1964, because his place of employment was listed in Jack Ruby’s notebook. The FBI reports claim that Martin Isaacs had no knowledge of anything that had transpired at the Winnipeg Airport. The report on Charles Isaacs added little to the case, other than the fact that Mrs. Isaacs had worked for Ruby as a wardrobe designer.421 Another Isaacs to consider is Harold R. Isaacs, supposedly an ex420. Whitmey, Peter R. “The Winnipeg Airport Incidents,” The Fourth Decade, November 1995, v.3 no. 1, p. 23.

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7. The Assassination of JFK Newsweek magazine editor who was the subject of a suppressed Warren commission document. Research conducted by Dick Russell found that Harold Isaacs was involved with leftist newspapers in Shanghai and knew Oswald’s cousin Marilyn Murret. In 1963 he was a research associate at MIT. He was acquainted with Agnes Smedley, who was accused by “US Military Intelligence” of having “been a member of a Soviet spy ring.”422 Another source found ties between Isaacs and CIA agent Gary Underhill, who was apparently murdered when he threatened to expose US intelligence agencies as the source of the assassination.423 However, the source of the Underhill information is documented only through the highly controversial work of William Torbitt (a pseudonym for a Texas lawyer David Copeland), whose Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal (aka The Torbitt Document) is a book-length study of the assassination focusing on numerous clandestine organizations allegedly involved in the assassination.424 It is supported by questionable documentation.425 No one has firmly tied Oswald with any “Isaacs” or any communist spy ring. In November 1993, a woman contacted Peter Whitmey and told him that on November 18 or 19 of 1963 she went to the Winnipeg Airport to retrieve a package. While waiting in the Horizon Room, she overheard a conversation between three men. One of them said that someone was going to be killed in Dallas that coming Friday. She never told any authorities about what she heard

421. Ibid. 422. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, 1992, pp. 120-1. 423. Torbitt, William. Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal, www.parapscope.com/articles/1196/torbitt.htm 424. On March 4, 1967, three days after Clay Shaw was arrested for complicity in the assassination of JFK, an Italian newspaper with strong communist ties, Il Paese Sera, reported that Clay Shaw was one of the directors of the Rome World Trade Centre, an organization that was run by the CIA to undermine communism. The CIA had admitted that Shaw was a contact for the agency’s Domestic Contact Service during the 1950s. The Torbitt document, which has been called one of the most important “underground” documents in assassination literature filled with a dizzying array of conspirators, secret societies, government agencies, and business conglomerations. In Torbitt’s version of the assassination the planning and supervision came from Division Five of the FBI, a supposedly small department focusing on espionage and counter-espionage, developed with the blessing of Hoover and run by his associate William Sullivan. 425. To remove any doubt about the credibility of this work, it has been published under the title of NASA, Nazis and JFK — The Torbitt document and the JFK Assassination, a book that “links Area 51, Operation Paperclip, NASA, JFK and others...”

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Peculiar Liaisons and claims that she never knew about Giesbrecht’s similar experience in February of 1964.426 In February 2003, Dick Russell documented a similar story concerning Ferrie and another overheard conversation concerning a plot against the president. Art Escarze, a Cuban exile who once served as a bodyguard for the Cuban exile leader Antonio de Varona, told Russell he worked against Castro’s regime for the CIA in the Sixties. In one mission, Escarze and associates investigated a group of seven men in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. At a restaurant, Escarze observed three men who wore Cuban military dress, and one man who was remarkably ugly, “ …lot of red hair, and he walked funny. I don’t know if he was gay or not. But I heard his name. They called him Mr. Ferrie.” Escarze later identified another young man (“normal looking, short hair”) as Oswald. Escarze heard the group talking about killing Kennedy; Oswald was to shoot and draw attention while “two other people would also be shooting,” and then someone was saying that the best place to do it would be “ … where there is a lot of people.” Escarze wrote a report on the incident and turned it in to a CIA contact. Russell showed Escarze a photograph of Richard Nagell but Escarze could not identify him as one in the group. Escarze believes that the plotters were working for Castro but Russell points out that the CIA could easily have set up such a bizarre encounter, possibly in the hopes of linking Castro to a plot after the assassination. “Could it have been more obvious?” writes Russell. “Three men in Cuban military garb...bringing up Castro’s name...being overheard. Escarze’s crew, already fervently anti-Castro, would have been only too pleased to fall victim to such a ploy.”427

FERRIE THE SUSPECT In February of 1967, New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison announced that he was reopening the investigation into the president’s assassination. Garrison’s announcement came the day after John Roselli, a Mafia figure with ties to various mafioso bosses throughout the country, told Chief Justice Earl Warren through his attorney that he had been involved in several CIA attempts to assas426. Whitmey, Peter R. “The Winnipeg Airport Incidents,” The Fourth Decade, November 1995, v.3 no. 1, pp. 24-25. 427. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, New York, 2003, revised edition, pp. 266-8.

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7. The Assassination of JFK sinate Fidel Castro. Roselli claimed that in retaliation Castro’s agents, in conjunction with the Mafia, planned the murder of the president. In February 1967, Garrison announced that David Ferrie was one of his chief suspects. He placed him in protective custody, accompanied by a bodyguard, in a New Orleans hotel. Ferrie publicly scoffed at Garrison’s allegations, telling journalists that “I have been pegged as the getaway pilot in an elaborate plot to kill Kennedy” and that it was “fruitless to look for an accomplice of Oswald.” On February 12, 1968, Garrison accused Oswald’s Marine acquaintance, Kerry Thornley, of perjuring himself in testimony concerning the assassination. Thornley, author of the novel The Idle Warriors, had based his main character on Oswald. Garrison read the novel and claimed that Thornley was part of a plot to create a false impression of Oswald, which was designed to frame him for the murder. Thornley, in his 1991 reprint of The Idle Warriors, claimed he had met Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and possibly Gordon Novel, all before November 22, 1963. Thornley is not clear on the specifics of why he met the men but hints that the meetings were innocent and coincidental.428 In 1995, Lou Ivon, an investigator for Garrison told JFK researcher William Davy that he had spoken to Ferrie on February 18, 1967 while he was in protective custody in the Fountainbleau Hotel in New Orleans. Ferrie had complained to Garrison and his investigators that he feared for his life. Ferrie told Ivon that he had been a contract employee of the CIA, he knew Shaw and Oswald, and he hated Kennedy.429 Ferrie went as far as to say that he, Oswald, Banister, and Shaw all worked for the CIA.430 On February 21, Ferrie was inexplicably released from protective custody before he had completed his testimony; he returned to his apartment. Ferrie was found dead the next day. Two typed notes were left that suggested suicide. The first began, “To leave this life, to me, is a sweet prospect.” For several paragraphs he rambled on about crime in America and the incompetence 428. Thornley, Kerry. The Idle Warriors, Illuminet Press, Avondale Estates, Ga., 1991, pp. vii — viii. 429. Peterson, Roger S. “Declassified,” American History, July 1, 1996, p. 54. 430. A CIA colleague told executive Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA Victor Marchetti that “Ferrie had been a contract agent to the Agency in the early Sixties and had been involved in some of the Cuban activities.” Marchetti was convinced that Ferrie was a CIA contract officer and involved in various criminal activities. Marchetti told author Anthony Summers “he observed consternation on the part of then CIA Director Richard Helms and other senior officials when Ferrie’s name was first publicly linked with the assassination in 1967.”

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Peculiar Liaisons of the American government. The second note was brief and declared that, “when you read this I will be quite dead and no answer will be possible.” New Orleans Metro Crime Commission director, Aaron Kohn, believed that Ferrie had been murdered. The New Orleans coroner officially reported that the cause of death was natural: a cerebral hemorrhage. The coroner officially listed the death as due to “rupture of berry aneurysm circle of Willis south massive left subdural hematoma and subarachnoid hemorrhage, and secondary pontine hemorrhages.” In Ferrie’s final interview with journalist George Lardner in the early morning hours of February 22, 1967, he denied knowing Oswald or traveling to Cuba at any time.431 During his investigation, Garrison found that before the assassination Ferrie had deposited over $7,000 in his bank account, and after the assassination someone purchased Ferrie a gasoline-station franchise. Ferrie also secured a job with Marcello-based United Air Taxi Corporation and later worked for a few years for Marcello associate Jacob Nastasi’s air cargo service firm. Marcello testified that he paid Ferrie $7,000 for Ferrie’s paralegal work in November of 1963. Though Ferrie had several interesting connections to the assassination, Garrison never linked any of Ferrie’s activities to Marcello.432

SHAW, FERRIE, AND OSWALD The House Select Committee investigated reports of Oswald being seen in Clinton, Louisiana in August-September of 1963. These reports were not available to the Warren Commission, though one witness (Reeves Morgan) said he notified the FBI when he recognized Oswald from news photographs right after the assassination. Gerald Posner claims there is no record of such a call. Garrison was the first to bring the Clinton sightings to the public in 1967. The synthesis of the testimony of six witnesses contributed to an account that placed 431. On the day of Ferrie’s death, Eladio del Valle was bludgeoned and shot to death by unknown assailants. Del Valle was an ex-city councilman from Havana during the Batista regime and worked in military intelligence. He was associated with Florida Mafia boss Santos Trafficante. Del Valle and Ferrie were members of the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front, an organization devoted to overthrowing Castro. 432. Garrison never publicly recognized any Mafia presence in New Orleans. Authors John H. Davis, Philip Melanson, attorney Frank Ragano, and Victor Marchetti, mercenary Gerry Hemming, and many investigators have stated that Garrison’s investigation was designed to protect Carlos Marcello from being linked to the assassination.

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7. The Assassination of JFK Oswald in “Jackson, La., seeking employment at East Louisiana State Hospital...on advice that his job would depend on his becoming a registered voter, Oswald went to Clinton for that purpose...he referred to himself as ‘Oswald,’ and he produced his Marine Corps discharge papers as identification. Some of the witnesses said that Oswald was accompanied by two older men whom they identified as Ferrie and Shaw.” 433 Several witnesses recognized Shaw as the driver of a limousine with Ferrie, who wore a rumpled wig and painted eyebrows, sitting next to Shaw and Oswald in the back. Witness Corey Collins stated in an affidavit that he identified Clay Shaw as the man “who was sitting behind the wheel of a black Cadillac,” the same car that held “Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie.” Collins testified in court that Shaw was the man he saw in the car. However, it is also possible that Banister may have been the elderly, white-haired driver. Banister suspected that CORE (Congress on Racial Equality), the organization that arranged the voter registration, was a Communist strategy established to destroy the US.434 Having an admitted Communist like Oswald as part of the registration may have been part of a plot to infiltrate and discredit CORE, an opinion shared by researchers Anthony Summers and Philip Melanson but not by Gerald Posner and Armand Moss.435 Posner mentions that Garrison’s investigators interviewed more than 300 people in Clinton and neighboring Jackson, an amazing 20 percent of the entire local population. Garrison’s investigators produced only six witnesses. The initial statements of these witnesses, according to Posner, were confused and only after coaching was Garrison’s staff able to produce a consistent story. Posner also questions the timing of the visit. He questions that the visit was before September 24, the date Oswald left New Orleans for good; but this is based only on a comment by Ed McGehee, the Jackson town barber, who claimed to have cut Oswald’s hair when the temperature was cool. One witness, Jim Alcock, was sure that the visit occurred in late August or early September, clearly before the September 24 cut-off date. The registrar of voters, Henry Palmer, testified at the Garrison trial that a man attempted to register to vote using a US Navy ID card with the name of Lee H. Oswald and a New Orleans address. 433. HSCA Report, Section IC3, “Anti-Castro Cuban Groups may have been Involved.” 434. Mailer, Norman. Oswald’s Tale — An American Mystery, Random House, 1995, p. 620. 435. Moss, Armand. Disinformation, Misinformation, and the “Conspiracy” to Kill JFK Exposed, Archon, Armand, Connecticut, 1987, p. 116.

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Peculiar Liaisons Why would Oswald be seeking employment at East Louisiana State Hosin Jackson, Louisiana? A theory set forth by Jean Davison, author of Oswald’s Game, focuses on the possibility that Banister and/or Ferrie were seeking psychiatric records for a client (Smith? Marcello?). Even if Ferrie knew very little about Oswald, he would deny knowing him if Oswald were asked to illegally obtain mental health records. Davison proposes an interesting theory based on the fact that an expensive miniature hi-tech Minox “spy” camera437 was found in Oswald’s personal effects at the Paine house. Years before, in April 1953, the CIA had begun research in mind control with the authorization of director Allen Dulles. Proposed by Richard Helms and managed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the project was given the name of MK-ULTRA and eventually went beyond mind control into the development of deadly toxins. Marrs asserts that one of two CIA field stations involved with MK-ULTRA was in Atsugi, Japan, where Oswald served as a Marine radar operator and has been alleged to have been involved in undercover operations. The station held large quantities of LSD and other mind-altering substances.438 Shaw and Ferrie’s relationships with leaders of right-wing organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, John Birch Society, The Constitution Party, and the Minutemen439 have led to speculation by William Holden that the meeting of these men in Clinton was a calculated right-wing scheme to link Oswald and his “legend” as a communist sympathizer with “the Civil Rights Movement and perhaps other leftist groups … such as the American Civil Liberties, Fair Play for pital436

436. HSCA p. IV, p. 483. 437. The Minox may have been owned by Oswald or by his friends, the Paines, at whose house he was staying. Hewett, Caroll. “The Paines’ Participation in the Minox Camera Charade,” Probe, Nov.-Dec., 1996 v. 4, n. 1. 438. Marrs, Jim. Crossfire, Carroll and Graf, New York, 1989, p. 186. Irvin Dymond, the New Orleans defense attorney representing Shaw in 1967, told Posner that the Clinton testimony was a “pack of lies. What the motive of the Clinton witnesses is I do not know, but it is clearly and demonstrably false.” HSCA investigator, Gaeton Fonzi, wrote that the HSCA “found several very credible witnesses who saw Oswald during August 21-September 17 in Clinton, La. with Ferrie,” and though the HSCA could not determine what Oswald was doing in Clinton “there was no doubt he was there.” Fonzi, Gaeton. The Last Investigation, New York, Thunder’s Mouth, 1993, pp. 240-241. 439. The Minutemen in the 1960s were a clandestine combat militia headed by Robert DePugh, which held daily drills for its 25,000 members. The drills consisted of weapons training and guerilla warfare tactics under the motto of “Action Now” and the call for the “assassination of dangerous Communists.” Hepburn, James. Farewell America — The Plot to Kill JFK, Penmarin Books, 2002, New York, 2003.

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7. The Assassination of JFK Cuba Committee and possibly the New Orleans Committee for Peaceful Alternatives.”440 Shaw’s superior at the Trade Mart was Lloyd Cobb, a wealthy rightwing extremist, whose brother Alvin was a KKK member. Alvin Cobb has been linked to Banister.441 Ferrie was twice seen at Lakefront Airport in New Orleans with California Minuteman Eugene Bradley.442 After Ruby’s arrest in the killing of Oswald, a white envelope with the phone number of Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, was found in Ruby’s clothes.443 Ferrie told Julian Buznedo, an associate of Sergio Arcacha Smith, that he was “working with some wealthy people from the John Birch Society who are helping at the refugee camps.”444 Ruby was carrying $7,000 three hours after the assassination and had $2,000 on him after his arrest. An additional $10,000 was found in the trunk of his car.445

RIGHT-WING FOREKNOWLEDGE? A right-wing association with the assassination takes on more significance in consideration of the comments of Joseph Milteer and the actions of H.L. Hunt, the Texas oil baron. Milteer was a wealthy Georgian and leader of a right-wing organization called National States Rights Party. An FBI informer taped a conversation on November 9, 1963, in which Milteer spoke of an assassination plot to kill Kennedy from a window with a high-powered rifle.446 After the assassi440. Holden, William. “New Evidence Regarding Oswald’s Activities in Clinton, Louisiana,” The Fourth Decade, November 1996, v. 4, no. 1, pp. 5 - 18. 441. Ibid., p. 11. 442. Ibid., p. 18. 443. CE 2286. Author William Holden reports that a Garrison employee, Tom Bethel, determined that the phone number was Welch’s. 444. Russo, Gus, Live by the Sword, Bancroft Press, Baltimore, 1998, p. 187. 445. Canal, John. Silencing the Lone Assassination, Paragon, St. Paul, MN, 2001, p. 89. Canal asserts that Ruby may have received this money from either a down payment to hit Oswald or from his share of a gun smuggling operation at a National Guard Armory in Terrell, Texas on November 19, 1963. Gun smuggler Robert McKeown testified in front of the HSCA that he had been contacted by Ruby for a letter of introduction to Castro. McKeown also claims a visit from Oswald and a man named Hernandez who was looking for Savage automatic rifles. Dallas attorney Carl Jarnagin wrote a letter to the FBI November 23, 1963 claiming he overheard a conversation between Ruby and Oswald concerning a hit on Governor John Connally in October of 1963. Hinckle, Warren and Turner, William. Deadly Secrets — The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the JFK Assassination, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 1992, p. 245.

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Peculiar Liaisons nation Milteer described himself as part of an “international underground” that used Oswald as a dupe to put blame on the Communists. Dick Russell (The Man Who Knew Too Much) wonders how H.L. Hunt fits in. He cites the following: H.L. Hunt funded American paramilitary and East European émigré groups; his possible connection with the previously mentioned “Dear Mr. Hunt” letter; visits of Jack Ruby and Eugene Brading to Hunt’s office shortly before the assassination; two former employees of Hunt who alleged that the Hunts purchased the original copy of the Zapruder film; a Hunt employee who was sent to Dallas to check security surrounding Oswald the night before he was shot; Jack Ruby drove an employee to the Hunt offices sometime around November 20, 1963; H.L. Hunt received a visit from Marina Oswald after the assassination.447 On November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination, Milteer told Somersett that there was a communist conspiracy by Jews to overthrow the United States. On November 24, he supposedly made a speech at Columbia, South Carolina where he declared to Christians that the Jews had killed Christ and Kennedy, and now his organization was going to kill Jews. Milteer has been described as an Evangelical Christian who believed that the Jews were needed to establish a Jewish state, because only after that would Jesus return to earth. (The world would end with most of the Jews killed and only a few survivors converting to Christianity.)

RUBY AND FERRIE On September 24, 1963, Ferrie allegedly made a phone call to a Chicago apartment building where Jean West (aka Jean Aase) resided. Whether the phone call was received by Ms. West is unknown, to this day. Ms. West had been at the Cabana Motel with Lawrence Meyers on the night of the assassination, along with Jack Ruby, who left early to return to his club to count the night’s receipts. The Cabana Motel was the same place where Eugene Brading had stayed. Investigator Peter Whitmey interviewed Ms. West in 1993. He reported that she claimed that the fifteen-minute phone call on September 24, 1963 was between Ferrie and Meyers but in a follow-up interview in 1998 with Whitmey, West asserted that she had not known Meyers until a few weeks

446. FBI report in National Archives number 180-10123-10039. 447. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, 1992, pp. 706-7.

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7. The Assassination of JFK before the assassination.448 Meyers testified in front of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he never knew Ferrie; and Jean West never testified. Whitmey also discovered that Ferrie had made phone calls from Dallas on January 21 and 29, 1963, though the significance of these calls has never been understood — other than proving that Ferrie lied to the Secret Service when he told them he had not been in Dallas for “eight to ten years.”449 Garrison and numerous other investigators have found the Chicago phone call suspicious; but despite more thorough investigation of the phone call, no significance has been found for the links between West, Ruby, Meyers, and Brading.450 Though there may not be any important connection between the owners and visitors to the Cabana Motel on November 21, 1963, it remains a strange coincidence that Mafioso-linked Eugene Brading stayed at the motel owned by the Campisi brothers, who had significant relationships with Ruby and Carlos Marcello. Additionally, Marcello had a significant relationship with David Ferrie, who may have made a phone call to Lawrence Meyers, another customer of the Cabana that night. Ferrie was known to use an alias of “Ferris” on occasions. The Warren Commission reported the fact that Jack Ruby’s address book contained the name of “Ferris.”451 No other link between Ferrie and Ruby has ever been conclusively established. Beverly Oliver, in her book Nightmare in Dallas, wrote that Ferrie was a visitor to the Carousel Club in 1963 when she was employed there by Ruby as a dancer. She describes Ferrie as a shifty-eyed, creepy-looking man who could speak several languages and engaged in a boasting match with Ruby. She also maintains that Ferrie offered $50,000 to Larry Ronco, Oliver’s friend and fellow employee at the Carousel, to kill Castro. Ms. Oliver, the self-proclaimed “Babushka Lady” 452 of Dealey Plaza, makes other assertions which include seeing Oswald at the Carousel, and having her film of the assassination confiscated by FBI agents, never to be returned. The HSCA wrote that Oliver’s story was troubling but contained several contradictions of established fact. 448. Whitmey, Peter R. “The Winnipeg Airport Incidents,” The Fourth Decade, November 1995, v.3 no. 1, p. 23. 449. Whitmey, Peter.”Did Ferrie Lie to the F.B.I,” The Fourth Decade, v. 3, n. 2, p.8. 450. Reitzes, Dave. “Phone Factoid: Tortured Connection, http://mcadamsn.posc.mu.edu/ factoid.htm 451. WC v. 14, p. 58. 452. An unidentified woman appeared in the Zapruder film wearing a scarf on her head and so was referred to as the Babushka Lady. Supposedly, federal authorities were unable to locate her for interviews for the Warren Commission.

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Peculiar Liaisons Oliver’s lack of credibility is only matched by Judyth Vary Baker who claims she was Oswald’s mistress during his brief stay in New Orleans in 1963, an assertion that has been rejected by numerous researchers and major network news organizations.453

HYPNOSIS AND THE ASSASSIN OF THE SIXTIES On December 2, 1963, Gene Barnes, an NBC cameraman, made the following statement to the FBI: “Barnes said Bob Mulholland, NBC News, Chicago, talked in Dallas to one Fairy, [sic] a narcotics addict now out on bail on a sodomy charge in Dallas. Fairy said that Oswald had been under hypnosis from a man doing a mind-reading act at Ruby’s ‘Carousel.’ Fairy was said to be a private investigator and the owner of an airplane who took young boys on flights ‘just for kicks.’”454 Mulholland later said that he had been quoted incorrectly and that he had heard FBI agents mention Ferrie’s name as a possible link to Oswald. 455 Mind control and hypnosis have appeared several times in conjunction with Oswald. Along with Mulholland’s story, Jack Martin and Richard Nagell456 claim that Ferrie hypnotized Oswald; Landry was hypnotized by Ferrie; the mysterious Rivera who casually mentioned his expertise of hypnosis in the same conversation mentioning Oswald; and J. Edgar Hoover’s testimony to the Warren Commission that “information came to me indicating that there is an espionage training school outside Minsk — I don’t know whether it is true — and that Oswald was trained at that school to come back to this country to become what they call a ‘sleeper,’...a man who will remain dormant for three or four years and in case of international hostilities rise up and be used.”457 The 1967 book Were We Controlled? explored the possibility that Oswald had been implanted with electronic devices designed to aid in mind control. Oswald did have an operation in Minsk at the end of March of 1961.458 453. Baker’s claims include Oswald’s affiliation with Dr. Mary Sherman, Clay Shaw, Ferrie, Guy Banister, plots to kill Castro with injected cancer, Jack Ruby, infiltration of anti-Kennedy assassination teams, David Atlee Phillips, Bobby Baker, and Billy Sol Estes. The Men Who Killed Kennedy, “The Love Affair,” (Nigel Turner Production, 2003). 454. CE 2038. 455. Noyes, Peter. Legacy of Doubt, Pinnacle Books, New York, 1973, pp. 117-118. 456. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, 1992, p. 671. 457. WC v. 5, p. 105.

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7. The Assassination of JFK Martin Luther King’s accused assassin, James Earl Ray, was also interested in hypnosis. When he was arrested in London, his bags contained the book SelfHypnotism: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living. Four months before King was shot, Ray met with Reverend Xavier von Koss, the head of the International Society of Hypnosis in Los Angeles. Koss tested Ray for susceptibility to hypnosis but claimed he “quickly encountered very strong subconscious resistance.” Robert Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan told authorities he did not remember shooting him. A psychiatrist hired by Sirhan’s defense attorney, Dr. Bernard Diamond, was convinced that Sirhan had prior experience with hypnosis. Sirhan told biographer Robert Blair Kaiser that he had visited the Philosophical Research Center of Manley Palmer Hill, a hypnosis research center in southern California. Sirhan repetitively wrote in his diary, “RFK must die” followed by “practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, Mind Control, Mind Control, Mind Control.”459 Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, has been quoted as telling one of his confederates to “slowdown” in his eagerness to plan several bombings in New York in 1993. “The one who killed Kennedy [Sirhan?] was trained for three years,” he told follower Emad Salem.460 In March 1973, Black September terrorists seized the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan and demanded the release of Sirhan, sixty Palestinian guerrillas from Jordanian jails and Baader-Meinhof Gang members jailed in West Germany. (No one was released.) Though Oswald’s motive for assassinating Kennedy may remain forever a mystery, it has been speculated that film and fiction stories he may have seen or read could have added to his motivation or incentive. He checked out of a Dallas library the book From Russia with Love; the plot features a psychotic killer who 458. On March 30, 1961, Oswald was admitted to the Third Clinical Hospital’s Ear, Nose, and Throat Division in Minsk for an adenoid operation. Author Lincoln Lawrence (a pseudonym) advances the fantastic theory in Were We Controlled that Oswald was implanted with a miniaturized radio receiver “which would produce a muscular reaction in his cerebral region.” Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, 1992, p. 675. Lawrence, Lincoln. Were We Controlled, University Books, New Hyde Park, New York, 1967. 459. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, 1992, pp. 678-9. 460. Mylroie, Laurie. Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War Against America, AEI Press, Washington, D.C., 2001, p. 189 cited in Government’s Memorandum of Law in Opposition to Defendant’s PreTrial Motions (Phase 1), p. 30, US v. Omar Abdul Rahman, et al. Omar’s comment was allegedly made to one of Omar’s follower’s in 1993 when the follower was too hasty in his eagerness to bomb the U.N., a US Federal building, and the World Trade Center.

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Peculiar Liaisons defected to Russia and became a state-sponsored assassin. John Luken has produced a complete study on the films, their connections, and their plots that could have been possible influences.461 Luken introduces the strong possibility that Oswald saw The Manchurian Candidate and We Were Strangers, in which political assassins are the primary characters; We Were Strangers (1949) depicts a heroic American assassin trying to aid the Cuban people. Luken makes a powerful argument that these films could have been an influence in Oswald’s actions. Luken also makes a strong case that Oswald saw We Were Strangers twice and identified with the leftist martyr hero. He may also have identified with Lawrence Harvey’s character in The Manchurian Candidate, (1962) who was an army veteran returned to the US from behind enemy lines in the Korean War. The brainwashed veteran is controlled by his mother to kill a liberal politician. These films were shown in theaters and on television when Oswald had recently returned from the Soviet Union, where he had become disenchanted with the Russian life.

THE FRENCH CONNECTIONS Stephen J. Rivelle examined a possible connection between the Corsican Mafia and the assassination. Rivelle’s findings pointed to a Mafia hit called into Marseille, France by Carlos Marcello and possibly other American Mafia figures. To hide the trail, according to Rivelle, three French hitmen were used in the murder.462 The CIA knew within hours of the event that a French assassin was in Dallas on the day of the assassination; but this fact was never brought to the attention of the Warren Commission nor has it been fully investigated by scholars. A CIA document (632-796, located by researcher Mary Farrell) shows that unspecified US Judicial Department officials, for unspecified reasons, expelled a “Jean Souetre aka Michel Roux or Michel Mertz” from the United States sometime on November 24. The document states that Souetre was in Fort Worth the morning of November 22 (as was JFK) and in Dallas during the afternoon and he was expelled to either Mexico of Canada.463 Jean Rene Souetre was a deserter of the French Army and an activist in the French OAS (Organi461. Luken, John. Oswald’s Trigger Films — The Manchurian Candidate, We Were Strangers, Suddenly, Falcon Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2000. 462. Rivele, Stephen J. Kennedy: la conspiracion de la Mafia, Ediciones, Barcelona, Spain, 1988.

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7. The Assassination of JFK sation de l’Armee Secrete). OAS has been described as a right-wing extremist group that opposes President Charles de Gaulle’s granting Algeria independence from French rule. The OAS has a reputation for terror acts (including an assassination attempt on Jean Paul Sartre in 1961) and links to the French Mafia, especially organized crime in the Marseille area. However, authors O’Leary and Seymour (Triangle of Death) believe that a Michel Mertz was using Souetre’s name as a cover. Interviews by US officials and other journalists seem to have cleared Souetre, who claims that Michel Mertz, another shadowy figure supposedly ten years older than Souetre and involved in Mafia activity in France, was using Souetre’s name in order to create an apparent link to the assassination. It is not at all clear who the Souetre, Mertz, or Roux referred to in the CIA report really are, which means that these leads are, once again, unresolvable dead-ends. The Russians, who had every reason to try to clear Oswald of any connection to the assassination, lest they be implicated, lent credence to the “French” and Mafia theory. Colonel Pavlotsy, the highest ranking officer in the KGB’s investigative unit, said in an interview that a KGB investigation showed that Kennedy was killed by a hit team of French and South Vietnamese agents. “Our group found that the Corsicans hired French hitman Michel Mertz, sometimes known as Jean Rene Souetre, to carry out the assassination with the cooperation of the American Mafia bosses.”464 Farewell America — The Plot to Kill JFK, one of many mysterious studies of the assassination and the innumerable conspiracy theories around it, appears to be a deliberate piece of disinformation. The original publisher has admitted that the author “James Hepburn” was fictitious and the true authors were in part French intelligence sources; Andre Ducret (DeGaulle’s Secret Service director); Interpol; and Phillippe Vasjoly, a French petroleum agent for the United States. Printed in 1968, in several languages, this work was allegedly suppressed from wide circulation in the United States with the help of Hoover’s FBI. The book incriminates a conglomeration of conspirators called “The Committee”; this group collectively comprised a host of Kennedy haters that included the usual roll call: the CIA, 463. O’Leary, Brad and Seymour, L.E. Triangle of Death — The Shocking Truth About the Role of South Vietnam and the French Mafia in the Assassination of JFK, WND Books, Nashville, Tennessee, 2003, p. 192 (CIA doc # 632-796). 464. Interview with KGB Colonel Ilya S. Pavlotsy, on video The Secret KGB/JFK Assassination Files, Associated Television, 1998, cited in O’Leary, Brad and Seymour, L.E. Triangle of Death — The Shocking Truth About the Role of South Vietnam and the French Mafia in the Assassination of JFK, WND Books, Nashville, Tennessee, 2003, p. 155.

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Peculiar Liaisons anti-Cuban mercenaries, and right-wing oil industry leaders. The Committee, they say, planned every aspect of the assassination, hiring four gunmen, and getting Oswald hired at the book depository and set up as a fall guy. Whether Oswald was a patsy, as he claimed, or not, Farewell America asserts that Ferrie, as a right-wing Minuteman and CIA agent, was expected to help set up Oswald as a patsy while a real CIA Minuteman commando actually did the killing. “Oswald was probably told that he had been chosen to participate in a new anti-communist operation together with Ferrie and several other agents.” Oswald would be led to believe that the attack was designed to influence public opinion against the Communists. How much Oswald knew is never clearly presented nor why he would be party to a scheme that left him, after the assassination, walking alone in the suburbs of Dallas with just a few dollars in his wallet.465

LOOKING BACK On December 13, 1963, less than a month after the murder, the singer/songwriter Bob Dylan delivered an acceptance speech in New York in recognition of his work in civil rights issues. Renowned for his frank and poetic view of life, Dylan shocked the audience when he said “that the man who shot President Kennedy...I’ve got to admit that I saw some of myself in him. I’ve got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt in me.”466 Where does Oswald fit in the world of assassins, if indeed he was a lone assassin or a conspirator? Like Princip, his real motives are a mystery. The Warren Commission declared him a “lone nut,” though assassins historically have had some motive whether they were the treacherous senators in Caesar’s times, John W. Booth, or even the self-proclaimed “anarchist” Leon Czolgosz, assassin of US President McKinley. Czolgosz was inspired by the assassination of Italy’s King Humbert I by an anarchist. Princip was inspired by the failed Serbian assassin Bogdan Zerajic and was supported by the Serbian radical organization The Black Hand. Did Oswald draw inspiration and support from any creed or organization, and if so, which one(s)? Ferrie was associated with a number of anti-Kennedy figures and men directly investigated in the assassination: Oswald, Shaw, Marcello, Smith, Ban465. Hepburn, James. Farewell America — The Plot to Kill JFK, Penmarin Books, 2002, New York, 2003, p. 321. (Originally published as L’ Amerique Brule). 466. Fetherling, George. The Book of the Assassins, Wiley, New York, 2001, p. 276.

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7. The Assassination of JFK ister, and anti-Castro figures, all of whom had different possible motives for harming the president. Ferrie contradicted himself about his relationship with Oswald and there is solid evidence that Ferrie lied about knowing Shaw. Strangely, he admitted to Lou Ivon, only days before his death, that he was acquainted with Oswald, Shaw, and Banister and that all were working with the CIA. He was photographed with Oswald and was seen with Oswald on more than one occasion by numerous witnesses. Then, in his last interview, only hours before his death, Ferrie denied that he knew Oswald. It is a similar story with Shaw: Ferrie was supposedly photographed more than once with Shaw, and was seen with Shaw on several occasions, though Ferrie and Shaw both denied any relationship. Ferrie worked directly with Marcello and Banister. Both Marcello and Banister have been quoted at least once saying that they wished to get rid of the president in a violent manner, a threat that also has been attributed to Ferrie more than once. Ferrie was associated with Sergio Arcacha Smith, who was identified as a figure who may have been plotting the death of the president. Ferrie also lied about being in Dallas in 1963, and the accuracy of his comment to journalist Lardner that he had never been in Cuba can also be questioned. His actions directly after the assassination are bizarre: a frantic and inexplicable trip to a Houston ice rink where he spent hours on a pay phone. Other associations like Ruby are puzzling, though Ruby and Ferrie had a common acquaintance in Lawrence Meyers, and Ruby’s address book contained the word “Ferris,” possibly linking him with Ferrie. In Ferrie’s defense, many questions exist concerning the methods used by individuals who have presented information about him and others. Testimonies from Bundy, Beauboeuf, Russo, Lemanns, among others were established by means of hypnosis, sodium pentothal, and possibly bribery (and threats). It is very clear that either Garrison’s investigators were using bribery to elicit testimony, or someone (the CIA plants mentioned by Marchetti?) was trying to make it appear that they were. No material evidence proves that Ferrie was involved with any aspect of the assassination and in fact many such accusations have been found to be false. However, his personal and professional associations, and his history of clandestine activity, will always make him suspicious. The HSCA concluded that the Oswald-Ferrie relationship was significant.467 Is it possible that David Ferrie could have associations with pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups, Communists and right-wing associations, the CIA, FBI, and the Mafia, and a seemingly

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Peculiar Liaisons endless number of others, let alone the officially recognized assassin Oswald, and yet have nothing to do with the death of Kennedy, a man whom he despised?

467. “David Ferrie’s experience with the underground activities of the Cuban exile movement and as a private investigator for Carlos Marcello and Guy Banister might have made him a good candidate to participate in a conspiracy plot. He may not have known what was to be the outcome of his actions, but once the assassination had been successfully completed and his own name cleared, Ferrie would have had no reason to reveal his knowledge of the plot. Further, fear for his life may have prevented him from doing so.” HSCA, v. X, p. 515.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Chapter 1. Audoin-Rouzeau, Stephane, Becker, Annette. 14-18 Understanding the Great War, Farrar, Strause, and Giroux, New York, 2002. Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Awakening to International Human Rights, Harper Collins, New York, 2003. Cantor, Norman F. Antiquity – The Civilization of the Ancient World, Harper Collins, New York, 2003. Dedijer, Vladimir. The Road to Sarajevo, Simon Shuster, New York, 1966. Devoss, David. “Searching for Gavrilo Princip,” Smithsonian, August, 2000, p. 42. Di Giovanni, Janine. Madness Visible -- A Memoir of War, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003. Erickson, Edward, J. Ordered to Die – A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War, Greenwood Press, London, 2001. Fay, Sidney, The Origins of World War I, MacMillan, New York, 1928. Geiss, Imanuel, July 1914, Norton, New York, 1914. Gerolymatos, Andre. The Balkan Wars – Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twelfth Century and Beyond, Basic Books, New York, 2002. Glenny, Misha. The Balkans, Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999, Viking, New York, 2000. Hupchick, Dennis. The Balkans – From Constantinople to Communism, Palgrave, New York, 2002. Judah, Tim. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, New Haven, Yale University, 1998.

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Peculiar Liaisons Kaplan, Robert. Balkan Ghosts, A Journey Through History, St. Martins, New York, 1993. Keegan, John. The First World War, Knopf, New York, 1999. Mackenzie, David. Apis: The Congenial Conspirator, The Life of Col. Dragutin Dimitrijevic, East European Monographs, Boulder, Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1989. Mackenzie, David. The Black Hand on Trial, Salonika 1917, East European Monographs, Boulder, Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1998. Mackenzie, David. The Exoneration of the “Black Hand,” 1917 -53, East European Monographs, Boulder, Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1998. Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible – A History of Anarchism, Harper Collins, London, 1992. Mayer, Arno J. The Furies – The Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2000. McCullough, Edward. How the First World War Began, The Triple Entente and the Coming of the Great War of 1914-18, Black Rose Books, Tonawanda, New York, 1999. Owen, David. Hidden Secrets, Firefly, Toronto, Ontario, 2000. Rauchway, Eric. Murdering McKinley -- The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America, Hill and Wang, New York, 2003. Remak, Joachim. Sarajevo – The Story of a Political Murder, Criterion Books, New York, 1959. Starvianos, L.S. The Balkans Since 1453, New York University Press, Washington Square, New York, 2000. Strachan, Hew, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of the 1st World War, Oxford, 1998. Tilley, Edwin H. The Loud Echo of Thunder, Pageant Press, New York, 1969. West, Rebecca. Black Lamb, Grey Falcon – A Journey Through Yugoslavia, Penguin, New York, 1994. Chapter 2. Ainsworth, John. “Sidney Reilly’s Reports from Southern Russia, December 1918 – March 1919,” Europe-Asia Studies, December 1998, v. 50, i. 8, p. 1447(2). Bennett, Richard M. Espionage – an Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets, Virgin Books, London, 2002. Bentley, Toni. Sisters of Salome, Yale University Press, London/NewHaven, 2002. Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Iron Maze: The Western Secret Service and the Bolsheviks, Macmillan, London, 1998. Coulson, Thomas. Mata Hari – Courtesan and Spy, Blue Ribbon, New York, 1930. Dukes, Paul. The Story of “ST-25” – Adventure and Romance in the Secret Intelligence Service in Red Russia, Northumberland Press, Gateshead Upon Tyne, Great Britain, 1938.

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Selected Bibliography Cowen, Ida and Gunther Irene. A Spy for Freedom – The Story of Sarah Aaronson, Loestar, New York, 1984. Deacon, Richard. Spyclopedia, Silver Arrow, London, 1987. Freund, Gerald. Unholy Alliance, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1957. Howe, Russell Warren. Mata Hari – The True Story, Dodd, Mead and Co., New York, 1986. James, William. The Eyes of the Navy – A Biographical Study of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, Methuen and Co. Ltd., London, 1956. Judd, Alan. The Quest for C – Sir Mansfield Cumming and The Founding of the British Secret Service, Harper Collins, 1999. Keegan, John. The First World War, Knopf, New York, 1999. Kettle, Michael. Sidney Reilly: The True Story, St. Martin’s, New York, 1983. Kettle, Michael, The True Story of the World’s Greatest Spy, Sidney Reilly, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1983. Kurland, Michael and Robertson, Linda. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Unsolved Mysteries, Alpha Books, New York, 2000. Lockhart, Robin Bruce. Reilly: Ace of Spies, Penguin, Harmondsworth, England, 1967. Lockhart, Robin Bruce. Reilly: The First Man, Penguin, New York, 1987. Mahoney, M.H. Women in Espionage – A Biographical Dictionary, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California, 1993. McCormick, Donald. The Master Book of Spies, Franklin Watts, New York, 1976. McKenna, Marthe. I Was a Spy, Robert McBride and Co. New York, 1934 McKenna, Marthe. Spies I Knew, Robert McBride and Co, New York, 1934. Ostrovsky, Erika. Eye of Dawn – The Rise and Fall of Mata Hari, Macmillan, New York, 1978. Reilly, Pepita. The Adventures of Sidney Reilly, Britain’s Master Spy, Mathews and Marrot, London, 1931. Ryder, Rowland. Edith Cavell, Stein and Day, New York, 1975. Shepherd-Brooke, Gordon. Iron Maze – The Western Secret Services and the Bolsheviks, MacMillan, London, 1998. Spence, Richard. Trust No One – The Secret World of Sidney Reilly, Feral House, Los Angeles, California, 2002. Stove, Robert J. The Sleeping Eye – Secret Police and Their Victims, Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2003. Van der Rhoer, Edward. Master Spy: A True Story of Allied Espionage in Bolshevik Russia, Scribner’s, New York, 1981. Voynich, E.L. The Gadfly, Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1897. Waagenaar, Sam. Mata Hari – A Biography, Appleton Century, New York, 1965. Wheeler-Bennett. Brest-Litovsk – The Forgotten Peace, March 1918, Norton, New York, 1971.

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Peculiar Liaisons Chapter 3. Aarons, Mark and Loftus, Jack. The Secret War Against the Jews, St. Martins, New York, 1994. Aldington, Richard. Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, Collins, London, 1955. Breuer, William. Unexplained Mysteries of World War II, “Dead Spy Put to Work,” J. Wiley, New York, 1974, p. 204 (Large Print Ed.). Capstick, Peter H. Warrior, The Legend of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, St. Martin Press, New York, 1998. Cocker, Mark. Richard Meinertzhagen, Soldier, Scientist and Spy, Mandarin Paperbacks, London, 1990. Cruikshank, Charles. Deception in World War II, Oxford, New York, 1979. Fleming, Peter. Operation Sea Lion, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1957. Fowler, Charles A. and Nesbit, Robert F. “Tactical Deception in Air-Land Warfare,” Journal of Electronic Defense, June 1995, v. 18, n. 6, p. 37. Gardner, Brian, Allenby of Arabia, Coward-McCann, New York, 1966. Gerard, Philip. Secret Soldiers. Dutton, New York, 2002. Gonzalez-Gerth, Migeul. T.E.L., Richard Aldington, and the Death of Heroes, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, 1994. Graves, Robert. Lawrence and the Arabs, Paragon, New York, 1991. Hodson, Joel C. Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture – the Making of a Transatlantic Legend, Greenwood, Westport/London, 1995. Kross, Peter. The Encyclopedia of World War II Spies, Barricade, Fort Lee, N.J., 2001. Latimer, Jon. Deception in War – The Art of the Bluff, the Value of Deceit, and the Most Thrilling Episode of Cunning in Military History, from the Trojan Horse to the Gulf War, Woodstock, New York, 2001. Lawrence, T.E. Letters of T. E. Lawrence, Doubleday and Co., Norton, New York, 1989. Lawrence, T.E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, A Triumph, First Anchor, New York, 1991. Lockman, J. N. Meinertzhagen’s Diary Ruse, Cornerstone Publications Inc., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1995. Lord, John. Duty, Honor, Empire – The Life and Times of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Random House, New York, 1970. Mack, John E. A Prince of Our Disorder – The Life of T.E. Lawrence, Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1976. Meinertzhagen, Richard. Army Diary, 1899-1926, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1960, pp. 216219. Meinertzhagen, Richard. Middle East Diary, Cresset Press, London, 1959. Meinertzhagen, Richard. Diary of a Black Sheep, Oliver and Boyd, London, 1964.

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Selected Bibliography Montagu, Ewen. Beyond Top Secret Ultra, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc., New York, 1977. Montagu, Ewen. The Man Who Never Was, J.P. Lippincott, Philadelphia and New York, 1954. Mousa, Suleiman. T.E. Lawrence, An Arab View, Oxford University Press, London, 1967. Secrets of the Century, World War II in the Shadows, Time Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 2000. Wallach, Jane. Desert Queen, Anchor, New York, 1991. Wilson, Jeremy. Lawrence of Arabia, Sutton Publishing, Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1998. Weintraub, Stanley. Private Shaw and Public Shaw – A Duel Portrait of Lawrence of Arabia and G.B.S., George Brazillier, New York, 1963. Chapter 4. Cox, James A. “Tokyo Bombed! Doolittle do’od It,” Smithsonian, June 1992, v. 23, n. 3, p. 112. Dahl, Per F. Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia, 1999. Gallagher, Tom. Assault in Norway: Sabotaging the Nazi Nuclear Bomb, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1975. Glines, Caroll V. The Doolittle Raid, Orion Books, New York, 1988. Glines, Carroll V. Four Came Home, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1980. Glines, Carroll V. Jimmy Doolittle, Master of the Calculated Risk, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1972. Goudsmit, Samuel A., Alsos, American Institute of Physics, Woodbury, New York, 1996. Haukelid, Knut. Skis Against the Atom, North American Heritage Press, Minot, N.D., 1989. Hyde, Harford Montgomery. The Atom Bomb Spies, Atheneum, New York, 1980. Kaufman, Louis and Fitzgerald, Barbara. Moe Berg -- Athlete, Scholar, Spy, Little, Brown and Co., Boston, MA, 1974. Kurzman, Dan, Blood and Water – Sabotaging Hitler's Bomb, Henry Holt and Co. New York, 1997. Lowell, Thomas and Jablonski, Edward, Doolittle, A Biography, Garden City, New York, 1976. Mann, Carl. Lightning in the Sky; the Story of Jimmy Doolittle, McBride Co., New York, 1943. Nelson, Craig. The First Heroes – The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid – America’s First World War II Victory, Viking, New York, 2002. Skorzeny, Otto. My Commando Operations – The Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Daring Commando, Schiffer Military History, Altgen, Pennsylvania, 1995. Stevenson, William. A Man Called Intrepid, Macmillan, New York, 1976.

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Peculiar Liaisons Chapter 5. Anderson, Ken. Hitler and the Occult, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 1995. Baigent, Michael and Leigh, Richard. Secret Germany, Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler, Penguin, London, 1994. Brown, Anthony Cave. Bodyguard of Lies, Harper Row, New York, 1975. Bullock, Allan. Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, Harper Row, New York, 1962. Fest, Joachim. Hitler, Vintage, New York, 1975. Galante, Pierre. Operation Valkyrie, The German General’s Plot Against Hitler, Harper Row, New York, 1982. Hanser, Richard. Putsch! How Hitler Made Revolution, Peter Wyden Inc., New York, 1971. Hanser, Richard. A Noble Treason – The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler, Putnam and Sons, New York, 1979. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf, Munich, 1925. Hitler, Adolf. Hitler’s Secret Book, Grove, New York, 1961. Heiden, Konrad. The Fuhrer, Carroll and Graf, New York, 1944. Jones, Sydney. Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913, Stein/Day, New York, 1982. Jukes, Geoffrey. Stalingrad – The Turning Point (Ballantine’s Illustrated History of World War II, Ballantine Books, New York/Toronto, 1968. Kaplan, David E. and Marshall, Andrew. The Cult at the End of the World: The Terrifying Story of the Aum Doomsday Cult from the Subways of Tokyo to the Nuclear Arsenals of Russia, Crown Publishers Inc., New York, 1996. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris, Norton, New York, 1998. Kramerz, Joachim. Stauffenberg, MacMillan, New York, 1967. Langer, Walter C. The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report, Basic Books Inc. New York, London, 1972. Levenda, Peter. Unholy Alliance, Avon, New York, 1995. Mangold, Tom and Goldberg, Jeff. Plague Wars – A True Story of Biological Warfare, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999. McKale, Donald. Hitler’s Shadow War – The Holocaust and World War II, Cooper Square, New York, 2003. Payne, Robert, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, Dorsett, New York, 1973. Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Fawcett, New York, 1950. Skorzeny, Otto. My Commando Operations – The Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Daring Commando, Schiffer Military History, Altgen, Pennsylvania., 1995. Toland, John, Adolf Hitler, Anchor, New York, 1975.

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Selected Bibliography Chapter 6. Brissaud, Andre. Canaris, Grosset/Dunlop, New York, 1974. Brown, Anthony Cave. Bodyguard of Lies, Harper Row, New York, 1975. Colvin, Ian. Master Spy, McGraw Hill, New York, 1951. Deacon, Richard. Spyclopedia, Silver Arrow, London, 1987. Deschner, Gunther. Reinhard Heydrich, Stein and Day, New York, 1977. Dorrill, Stephen. MI6, Free Press, New York, 2000. Farago, Ladislas. The Game of the Foxes, McKay, New York, 1971. MacDonald, Callum. The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, The Free Press, New York, 1989. Roseman, Mark. The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution, A Reconsideration, Metropolitan, New York, 2002. Schellenberg, Walter. The Labyrinth, Memoirs of Walter Schellenberg, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1956. Chapter 7. Canal, John. Silencing the Lone Assassin, The Murders of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald, Paragon, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2000. Davis, John H. The Kennedy Contract, McGraw Hill, 1992. Fonzi, Gaeton. The Last Investigation, Thunder's Press, 1993. Goldberg, Robert A. Enemies Within - The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 2001. "Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy," appendix to Hearings Before the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, 95th Congress [HSCA Report]. Washington, DC: GPO, 1979. Also 12 volumes of testimony and exhibits. James, Rosemary and Wardlaw, Jack. Plot or Politics, Pelican Publishing, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1967. Kirkwood, James. American Grotesque, Harper Row, New York, 1968. Mantik, David W. Murder in Dealey Plaza, "Paradoxes of the JFK Assassination: The Zapruder Film Controversy," ed. Fetzer, James, Catfeet Press, Chicago, 2000. O'Leary, Brad and Seymour, L.E. Triangle of Death - The Shocking Truth About the Role of South Vietnam and the French Mafia in the Assassination of JFK, WND Books, Nashville, Tennessee, 2003. Russell, Dick. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll and Graf, 1992.

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Peculiar Liaisons Russo, Gus. Live by the Sword, Bancroft Press, Baltimore, 1998. Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993. Summers, Anthony, Conspiracy, Paragon, New York, 1989. Twyman, Noel. Bloody Treason, Laurel, Rancho Santa Fe, California, 1997.

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